Jackie, page 4
“Yes.”
“And you accepted?”
“I did.”
He slices his knife through his poached egg; the yolk runs into the hollandaise.
When Lee and I were children, after our parents divorced, our father came for us every Saturday in his sharp black Mercury, the top down. He’d keep his fist on the horn until our mother yelled down at him and we skipped out. There were carriage rides through Central Park and extra scoops of ice cream. Urbane, impeccably dressed, roguish. Autograph seekers would mistake him for Clark Gable. It’s the part in your hair, Daddy, I’d tease him. Arrow-straight. Just like you. That made him roar. He taught us how to flirt. He loved parties and racetracks and girls. An unspectacular athlete and gambler, he sunbathed in his apartment window to keep up his tan. He told us we should not only work hard but be the best. And by the way, he’d add, don’t forget: All men are rats.
“Johnny Husted almost proposed,” I say. My father’s spoon stops en route to his mouth.
“Almost?”
“He was fishing.”
“But you didn’t bite.”
“No.”
“That’s my girl.” He raises his Bloody Mary to me, then drains it. “Is Johnny the one in New York?”
“Yes.”
“Why not, then? Play hard to get, then say yes. You have my blessing, as long as you’ll be in New York.” He smiles at me, his dark eyes shining. “Another drink?”
“No.”
“You’ve only had one.”
“I still have half a glass left.”
“There’s a lot to celebrate.” He flags the waiter. “When do you and Lee leave for Europe?”
“The week after next.”
“Your plans for the crossing?”
“Third class on the Queen Elizabeth.”
“Your stepfather can’t spring for first?”
“We’ll ignore the signs and infiltrate.”
He makes a face. I steer the conversation away from the subject of money. “We’ll dock at Southampton, then go to the Savoy. I’ll let Lee have two or three days of dinner dances in London, then I want to buy a little car, a Hillman Minx if I can find one. We’ll drive it all over England and onto the boat train to Paris.”
“Because my girl loves her France.”
“Your Bouvier France.”
“Exactly.” He scoops up a spoonful of grits.
“I want Lee to fall in love with Paris,” I say. “I’m going to take her to all my old haunts.” Dancing at L’Elephant Blanc in Montparnasse, visiting the Luxembourg Gardens and the portrait of my beloved salonista Madame Récamier at the Louvre.
“Don’t forget the Kentucky Club,” my father says.
Dark and smoky, even by day, jazz blaring.
“That’s right,” I say. “Lee’s first existentialist nightclub.”
My father pauses for a moment, then, “You love Paris, don’t you?”
How to explain it? When I lived there for my junior year abroad, it was like living two lives. The city had been shattered by the war. Coffee and sugar were still rationed. Heat was scarce. We could only take one bath a week. I studied bundled up in a coat and gloves. That winter, I boarded with a comtesse who’d been in the Resistance; her husband had died in a labor camp. I’d fly from her apartment in the 16th arrondissement to my classes at Reid Hall. After class, I’d meet my friends at the little café on Rue de l’École. The world had begun to roar back. Jazz spilling from open windows. Fierce debates about postwar politics and the role of philosophy and art. We went to plays in basement theaters and took weekend trips to the south of France on third-class trains. There were free hours in the afternoons when I sat in the Jardin des Tuileries painting copies of the impressionists—Degas, Monet, Manet—that I’d invariably tear up. There were long spring evenings when the daylight just lasted and I walked through the city, that sense of my mind touched by the fire I so often feel in a foreign place—unbound, no family, no social circle with its demands, just a self alone in the world. I’d walk for hours on those evenings, looking down alleyways and narrow streets like I could take a turn down one and step through a doorway into an entirely new life.
“Yes, I love Paris,” I tell my father.
“Don’t love it so much you don’t come back,” he says. “Will you take Lee to Spain?”
“Pamplona.”
He dusts his lips with a napkin. “The running of the bulls.”
“Because there’s no book I love more than The Sun Also Rises. And nobody lives their life all the way up, except you, Daddy, and the bullfighters.”
He laughs. He calls for the check, flirts with the waitress, then gives her a tip.
“Or should we have one more drink?” he says.
“No more drinks.”
“See, Jacks, if you’re in my city, how easy it will be to keep me in line. What time is your train?”
“I have two hours.”
“Let’s walk in the park.”
“I’d love that.”
He touches his mustache, brushing some invisible thing from one end. “When you and your sister are gone,” he says, “be sure to write to your mother.”
“I know. Or she’ll imagine me dead.”
“Or married to an Italian.”
He laughs at his own joke. There’s often a joke at my mother’s expense tucked in. He excuses himself to go to the “the gents’.” I watch him thread among the tables, the graceful stroll, the light easy on his shoulders; he pauses every so often to greet someone, exchange a few words. I play with the lines of a made-up poem in my head. Lee and I have done it since we were children. I’d start with a line, she’d add one, we’d go back and forth. Sometimes I made little drawings to go along with them. My father has stopped at a table to talk to a couple. His hand rests for a moment on the wife’s shoulder—always the actor, always the player—a brief gallant wave, then he’s off again. He passes the bar, takes a right turn, and disappears.
Oh, we’re not at all what you think we are
We’ve traveler’s checks and a little car
* * *
—
When I lived in France for that college year abroad, my friend Paul de Ganay took me to parties at the home of Louise de Vilmorin, who was once engaged to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In her drawing room, silk coverings sheathed the walls. There were banquettes under each window, long ebony tables, and malachite elephants. The conversation was smart and quick, with currents of French and English, and extraordinary guests. Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, French filmmaker Jean Cocteau.
One night, Paul introduced me to a woman named Pamela Churchill. A horsewoman. We were talking about the shows at Olympia and Bath when she suddenly stopped.
“Did Paul say you live near Washington?” Pamela asked. “You must know the Kennedys.”
“Of them,” I said.
“Kick was my best friend. She died, I’m sure you heard, in a terrible plane wreck. They went into a dive in the Cévennes Mountains. Kick had such life. Everyone loved her.”
I nodded. I hadn’t actually heard this.
“And her brother,” Pamela continued. “Not the oldest who was killed in the war but the next one. Jack. A congressman now. He came to visit Kick once. We all piled into her old station wagon and drove to Ireland to find the original Kennedys. He called me in London one night and said, ‘I think I need a doctor.’ I brought him to Lord Beaverbrook’s doctor, the best I know. Jack was ill for days, you can’t imagine how ill, and I sat by his hospital bed as the life just drifted in and out of him. The doctor said it was something in his constitution and he might not live three years.”
“I don’t know Jack Kennedy,” I told Pamela Churchill that night, which was only partly true. By then I’d met him on the train. I decided that didn’t count. I didn’t want to go into it. There was something about him even then that got under my skin, which I did not have language for.
* * *
—
My father is on his way back. He stops to chat up one of the waitresses. The prettiest one, I’ll tell Lee later, and we’ll laugh about that and roll our eyes—So Black Jack—but it will remind us both of those harder, more ruined spaces in our childhood we don’t like to dwell on.
Oh, we’re not at all what we seem to be…
No one could be wronger, much wronger than he
* * *
—
I stand up; the air in the room feels gauzy, strange, like the reasonable world has begun to dissolve in the heat of the midafternoon.
“Ready, my best girl?”
“Yes,” I say. He takes my arm, and we walk outside into brilliant city sunlight. We cross the avenue, heading north to the park. When he realizes he’s out of cigarettes, I offer him one of mine.
“Too light for me, sweet Jacks. I’ll go buy a pack. Wait for me here. I’ll just be a moment.”
He’ll take longer than he’s promised. He always does. He’ll get caught up with something or someone. Eventually he’ll be back, unfazed that so much time has passed. There’s a bench ahead in the shade. I sit down. A man on a bicycle rides by. A woman with a little dog on a leash—pug nose, bright eyes. A breeze moves through the trees. Dry leaves, leftover from last fall, chase one another in circles. It’s something I’ve loved since I was young, how leaves seem to have a free unseen life beyond the pressure of the wind. Sitting on that bench alone in the warm shade, watching those dry leaves circle, I feel my mind settle.
Once, in Europe, I went with some friends to a painter’s studio, in a courtyard off a sleepy street. While the others sat around smoking cigarettes, he made a portrait of me. Rough, abstract. I was long angles and fierce lines. I loved it.
I don’t want that job at Vogue. I’ve known it, haven’t I, for days. Maybe since that night at the Bartletts’ when Jack Kennedy said, “Eight essays to win a prize you’re not sure you want?” He said it with that smile.
I don’t want the job at Vogue with its smart, hard, beautiful women and the men who cage them into glossy prints. And I don’t want a predictable post-debutante life of charity teas and manicured nails. I don’t want to stay stuck for long at Merrywood or even Hammersmith Farm—its soft-boiled heaven so easy to lose yourself to. I don’t want to grow up to fall into bourbon old-fashioneds and half-nibbled codfish balls. I want to be the artist, not just the figure he drew into raw lines. I want to be the painter, the writer, the scholar. I want to devour books, knowledge, art. I want a life soaked in adventure. I want to never be bored.
I decide it then. How I’ll frame it for my mother: At Vogue, Mummy, I’ll say, there are no boys. In that entire office building, not one eligible man. That will terrify her. I’ll stay in Washington for now, and while she shops for a suitable husband for Lee, I will get a job. Something with edge. A position at the CIA, or journalism. Maybe the Times Herald. It isn’t the Post, but it’s known for always having room for smart young women who want to learn on the job and are willing to work a lot for not much. It’s a place to start. I can move into the bedroom that used to belong to my stepbrother Gore, with its view to the river. I can ride and read and write. I can keep dating Johnny Husted, who lives too far away to really matter. I can go to dances and parties when I feel like it and plead a deadline when I don’t. I can start to map the rest of my life. Quietly. No one has to know. To everyone else, it will all look the same on the surface.
The leaves keep swirling. They blow over my feet. Leaf bits and dust wrap like hennaed lace around my ankles.
I don’t want to be the dust or the leaf or the girl or the cog. I want to be the wind that makes them spin.
February 1952
A light flash of recognition when he sees me.
“You again,” he says.
“And you.”
“Must be fate.”
“It’s hard to be a bolt from the blue in this town.”
He is holding a drink. With his free hand, he pushes that mop of hair off his forehead. I’ve heard he spends weekends in Palm Beach. He leaves on Friday, skips out of Congress at two, and flies south for golf, parties, and whatever else a man like Jack Kennedy does.
We’re at John White’s basement apartment on Dumbarton Ave. Ground-level windows set into the walls above our heads, dark panes wet with rain and streetlight. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. The room is filled with smoke and the snap of ice cubes melting in tumblers.
He looks flustered for a moment.
“Weren’t you in Europe?” he says.
“I was, with my sister; now I’m back.”
“You were moving somewhere—New York?”
“I didn’t.”
“I see. You didn’t get that job?”
“I did.”
“You didn’t take it?”
“Do you know who else is coming?” I say.
“Bill Walton.”
“I heard he isn’t writing for The New Republic anymore.”
“Not since he started painting.”
“Do you paint, Congressman?”
He nods, an awkward look. “When I’m laid up,” he says. “Or bored.”
“Are you?”
“Am I?”
“Bored.”
“Right now?” He smiles. “No.”
I’m aware of my hands folded on my bag, the ring on the hand underneath.
“How do you know John White?” he says.
“I’m working at the Times Herald now.”
“I heard that. You’re one of Frank Waldrop’s girls. You like it?”
“Being a reporter seems a ticket out into the world.”
“You have a column, right?”
“You’ve read it?”
“Sure.” But I can tell by how he says it that isn’t quite true.
“You’ve skimmed it once or twice?”
He laughs. “White was their star reporter when my sister worked for Waldrop.”
“Kathleen.”
“Kick.” His eyes shift when he says her name, the grief precise on his face. Then it’s gone. “You must be pretty good if Waldrop gave you a column.”
“The first day I showed up, he peered at me over the rim of his glasses, across that massive desk. I thought he was going to fire me before I started.”
“And I bet when he hired you, he said, ‘Now, don’t come back in a week and tell me you’re engaged.’ That’s what he said to Kick.”
“Actually no. I got, ‘Just remember, Miss Bouvier, your job is to say over and over, “Thank you very much,” and draft an impeccably polite letter when I tell you to curse out a bastard.’ ”
“That’s a good Waldrop,” he says. “So John White still hangs around the paper?”
“Every few days on his way to the State Department, he’ll drop by to sit on the edge of my desk, those wild tattoos snaking out of his shirtsleeves.”
“Make it hard to type?”
I smile. “We go for lunch once a week to the Hot Shoppe and gossip. I love his stories. None about you, Congressman. At least that I can remember.”
A pause, then he says, “I didn’t expect you’d have interest in stories about me.”
It was John White who told me how Jack Kennedy once described a broken-down jeep in the war. That fucking fucker’s fucked.
“He’s that vulgar?” I’d said.
White just shrugged. “That’s straight-up talk in the middle of a war.”
It was also John White who told me the story of Jack and a blond Danish reporter, a former Miss Denmark nicknamed Inga Binga. Inga Arvad was Kick’s roommate, and they were a foursome—Kick and John White, Jack and Inga. Jack was working for Naval Intelligence at the time, and Inga was head over heels for him, but she was married. What’s more, she’d known Goebbels and Göring and had once been invited by Hitler to sit in his private box at the Olympic Games.
“Heavens,” I said, “how did it end?” And John White told me that when a photo of Inga with Hitler surfaced at the FBI, Joe stepped in and got Jack transferred to a desk job in South Carolina. Lovely Inga was heartbroken. She got a divorce, tossed herself at Hollywood, and married a millionaire cowboy.
* * *
—
“I think we should keep up the pretense,” Jack Kennedy is saying now.
“Of?”
“Meeting again for the first time.”
To keep me a novelty. New.
John White is at my elbow. He takes my glass of water and hands me a glass of wine. “I’m sure it’s not the best you’ve had, Jackie, but it’s the best I’ve got.” He looks at Jack. “Whatever you’re angling for, pal, you missed your chance. She’s fallen into the sad trap of a diamond ring. Yale fellow, right, Jackie? Works on Wall Street?”
“Johnny Husted.”
“I’m entirely thrown over,” White says.
“Well, congratulations,” Kennedy says. “So how long will you keep working at the paper?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Won’t you quit now that you’re engaged?”
“Why would I?”
“Most girls would.”
“I like journalism. Just because a woman chooses to marry doesn’t mean she has to hang her life up on a coat hook. Weren’t you a journalist once, Congressman?”
“It was fun. But I didn’t have the leverage I wanted. In politics, I can get things done.”
“You like history.”
“I do.”
“News today is tomorrow’s history. You know what words can do.”
“Look how well I’ve taught her,” White says.
I’m annoyed with them both for their presumption. Kennedy is looking at me, though, a raw electric light in his eyes. I just stare back. There’s no reason, anymore, to be discreet. I can do what I want. Say what I want. Be as scathing as I want. I’m marrying someone else. Oddly, that was my first thought when Johnny Husted offered me his mother’s ring at the Carlyle: It was out of the blue and exactly what I swore I didn’t want, but it suddenly occurred to me that if the marriage question was neatly settled, to a perfectly respectable catch, I might not be more trapped but free.
