Jackie, page 6
“This is your copy,” I say.
“You can keep it if you want.” That little smile.
“Thank you.”
“When I was thirteen,” he says, “I was sick in the hospital for a month. Reading kept me sane. This book and others. My father came every afternoon.”
“What about your mother?”
He shakes his head. “Always in some fashion house in Paris or on her knees in church.” A bitterness in his voice. I can tell he feels ashamed he’d let me see it. He touches the edge of his cuff, folding it back, and I just want to soften his anxiousness.
“The first time I went to England was after the war,” I say. “A few of us managed to get an invitation to Buckingham Palace, a garden party. I rounded up the other girls and we all went down the receiving line twice just to shake Churchill’s hand.”
He laughs.
“Churchill’s always been fascinating to me,” I say, rearranging my french fries. “Dark angel hurled from power, who maneuvered through failure after failure and rose again. It’s a great story.”
Jack tells me he was in London in September 1939 when his father was ambassador to Great Britain. The Germans had bombed Polish airfields and Navy ships in the Baltic. Jack sat in the gallery of Parliament when Churchill defended Britain’s declaration of war.
“My father disagreed with Churchill completely,” he says. “He thought America should keep to its side of the ocean. But I remember what Churchill said that day about how war, in its most noble sense, guards and restores liberty.”
“Then you came home, wrote a book, and a few years later became a hero in the war your father didn’t want.”
He smiles. “I should have stuck with the writing.” There are small cracks, I sometimes sense, in the things he tells me. He tries to always be easy, but the shine of his humor hides a sadness. I want to know what that is, that deeper, more vulnerable side. I want to dig past the brilliant surface to what lies underneath.
Leaving Martin’s, he says, “So, hey, Fourth of July. Why don’t you come to Hyannis Port?”
“On my way to Newport?”
“Come for the weekend. My mother will recite ‘Paul Revere’s Ride.’ ”
“Promise?”
As we walk by a Woolworths, he takes my arm and steers me in. “Come on.”
“What are we doing?”
“I’m going to buy you some jewelry.”
“You are not.”
“Earrings? A bracelet? What is it girls like you like?”
“Anything but a ring.”
He frowns and I laugh.
“You asked,” I say.
He walks past the jewelry counter, the women’s apparel with its bony mannequins, all the way to the photo booth at the back of the store. He digs into his pocket.
“Let me guess,” I say. “No change?”
He pulls out a nickel, a dime, two quarters.
“That was my change from Martin’s,” I say.
He puts the coins in the slot, pulls me into the little booth, and draws the curtain closed, his hands on my waist; I’m half in his lap, the seat too narrow. I can tell he likes that I’m close and that it undoes me a bit to be so close. He likes pushing that edge. The light flashes, a countdown, red light blinking, red light, a long solid green.
“Keep still, Jackie. Smile.”
His hand around my hip. I feel my body shift toward him. I want him to touch me, his face near mine, I can smell his skin, his hair. We stare at that little green light, the tiny orb of lens beneath it. He draws me tighter against him as the machine rumbles, gearing up, a funny jolting sound. It goes still. He leaps up. The photo strip starts to thread out. He puts his body between it and me.
“Jack, let me see.”
He takes the strip, holding it out of my reach.
“Too bad your eyes are closed.”
“In all of them?”
“Yep. No—wait. They’re open here, this last one, but it’s not too good. You won’t like it.”
“Jack, let me see.”
He smiles, the smile that says, You want to see? Then come get it. He starts down the aisle, heading toward the exit. He walks fast, his stride long. I run to catch up. When we reach the street, he shows me the strip.
“My eyes aren’t closed. Those are nice. Really nice. Let me see.”
He tucks them into his pocket. “You saw.”
“Let me keep one.”
“Nope, these are mine.”
“It was my change from lunch.”
We keep walking. That light electric current between us heightens. I can feel it, we both feel it; he takes my hand, his fingers braid loosely through mine. His index finger runs lightly through the center of my palm, intentional, sensual. I let my body brush against him as we walk.
We come to the corner where he will go right and I’ll go left.
“I’ll call you,” he says.
I expect him to turn then and leave—that’s what he usually does—but he doesn’t.
“So the Fourth,” he says. “Okay, Jackie?” He looks down at me. That face. Those eyes. He touches my cheek, a gentle quick gesture, and in that gentleness something new, incendiary.
July 1952
I don’t fit in. I feel it the moment I close the car door behind me. Aware—too aware—of my frosted hair, sundress, the sandals with gold straps that wrap my calves. On the lawn, a squall of sun-tanned gods in tennis whites stop their football game to look at me. My fingers tighten on the weekend bag in my hand. Behind them, the rambling white clapboard house, trimmed hedges, a tennis court, a circular drive, and the sweep of a wraparound porch, the lawn giving way to the flat blue calm of the sea.
Jack is walking toward me, that ambling lanky walk; the others watch. Bobby, their brother Teddy, and the sisters, burnished faces and long legs. One stands with a hand on her hip. I met her once. Jean.
“Hey, Jackie,” Jack says, “it’s you.”
My smile feels like cardboard.
Then his mother, Rose, is there, telling him to take my bag into the house and up to the sewing room. She steers me toward the front door, through the hall, the sunroom, and the living room with its recessed window seats, fireplaces, framed photographs, and miles of English chintz.
“The house was quite small at first,” she says, a laryngeal scratch to her voice, “but we kept having children, kept adding on rooms, widening the windows and so forth.”
Jack has come down; he shuffles behind us, restless, and his mother finally tells him to go out to play with the others since that’s clearly what he wants to do.
“I left them short a man,” he says.
His mother laughs.
“Come with me, Jackie,” says Jack.
“I’ll be out soon.”
* * *
—
It’s Bobby who meets me when I walk outside. A sinking pressure in my chest as I realize they expect me to play. Football. I try. I run where they tell me to run. I drop the ball twice. They bounce me around, team to team, position to position—it’s like being swept in a tidal wave. Finally I claim a sore ankle. Only Bobby looks genuinely disappointed.
“I’ll just take a short break,” I say.
Sitting on the porch steps, I light a cigarette as they tumble over one another on the lawn in their white cartwheeling chaos, flashing sneakers, their rah-rah shouts and grass-stained knees.
Just watching them wore me out, I’ll tell Lee later. I lean back into the step to feel the edge of the tread digging into the small of my back, grounding me. The louder they get, the more boisterous and competitive, the quieter I go inside.
“Come back in the game, Jackie,” Bobby calls. Teddy grabs the football from him. Bobby knocks him in the chest. The screen door opens behind me. I turn.
“No, please don’t get up,” Joe Kennedy says, but I’m already on my feet. Here he is—the ambassador, the patriarch, the Judas of Wall Street. The man of legendary ambition who made a fortune selling shares on the eve of the stock-market crash. There’s something about him I like, something easy and kind. His eyes dance behind the round wire-rim glasses. He wears golf clothes, the collar loose.
“You’re the one Jack brought,” he says.
“I drove, actually.”
I smile and he smiles back. I sit down on the steps. He sits beside me.
“Did you enjoy your golf?” I ask.
“Damn hot.” He looks out at the lawn. “Who’s winning?”
“I couldn’t begin to tell you.” He seems surprised I’d be that frank. “I’d love to hear about the work you did in film,” I say. “Jack’s told me you have a cinema downstairs, where you screened your movies. Hollywood’s a world apart, isn’t it? Or is it? Tell me.”
He smiles at me, like he knows I might be playing him a bit. But he likes that, as I expected he might, and I can see he’s decided, perhaps then and there, that we’ll be friends.
* * *
—
The rest of that day is a bustling hotel—other guests arrive, friends and cousins washing in from down the road, football to baseball to tennis to swim. Time slows in the late afternoon. I have an hour alone before dinner. I shut the door of the little guest room and lie down, chaos beading off me, the evening air through the window, the smell of rosewater and starched sheets erasing the staticky rush of the day. My eyes trace the design of wallpaper, a water stain near one eave, a line of dust missed on the bureau. A spider dangles off a silken thread.
There was a night when Lee and I were children. It was winter. I must have been about ten. Our parents were still married. We lived in the apartment on Park Avenue. They’d been fighting all fall, doors slammed, vases thrown. I was learning to read their crazy before it struck and learning to pack my own spiky grief away. That winter, for an interim, things had settled. They seemed almost in love again, in a way that might hold. I wanted to trust that hope nudging in. One night, they were going out to hear Eddy Duchin play at the Central Park Casino, and before they left, my mother came in to kiss me good night. Her fur brushed my face, the scent of perfume, the shimmer of her dress as she swept out into the hall where my father waited. He said something that made her laugh. They were happy, I realized. I remember wanting so desperately for that happiness to last.
I dress carefully for dinner. I walk downstairs as the clock chimes seven. The rest of them are already there. They look up from their drinks, an abrupt silence. They’re all in khakis and chino shorts, loafers and slip-ons, twin sets, white oxford shirts.
Jack must see it in my face, the sudden embarrassment; I’m so overdressed. He crosses the room. “Hey, Jackie,” he says gently. “You look so nice. Where do you think you’re going?” I look at him sharply, but he’s smiling, teasing, that conspiratorial smile meant just for me. I laugh then and he takes my hand, and that sharp sense of not fitting in, that hot tiny spark of shame, is brushed away.
* * *
—
Sixteen for dinner that night. Even before the basket of rolls makes one lap around the table, the wild tournament has started, the jokes and comebacks, the stories, the lore. They interrupt, gang up, competing for air and attention—their father’s, each other’s. Who can top whom. Who can be the quickest, wittiest, fiercest, loudest, and most essentially first.
They talk about the latest movies, the newest books. What about the new Inge play, Picnic, at the Music Box? Everyone’s mad about it, haven’t you heard? As the meal continues, more bickering flares. Eunice is still angry about a line call Jean made during tennis, and Teddy and Bobby start arguing: Who’s hoarding the green beans? Save some iced tea for the rest of us, will you? It’s a kind of hazing—whispered glances, barbs exchanged, a bizarre, tenacious bond built as much on loss as love. I’ve heard pieces—the brain-damaged sister, Rosemary, whom no one ever mentions, the sister Kick whom Jack adored, and Joe, Jr., the golden one, who bore the mantle until his plane was blown apart.
Bobby and Teddy are into it now, over the potato salad. Teddy’s mad, red in the face, accusing his older brother of taking more than his share. The whole thing feels so foolish I’m sure it’s an act, until Jack intercedes, offering Teddy his potato salad.
“I haven’t touched it, really, Teddy.” Jack glances at me, nervous. His mouth, I’ve learned, gives him away. It startles me that he’s nervous. Why? Is he afraid—this dawns on me slowly—that I might decide that while they’re exceptionally rich and accomplished, they’re too Irish, too classless, brash, new?
They’re talking now about sailboats and racing. Morton Downey, an old crony of Joe’s, leans across the table. “Have you met Jack’s best girl?”
“Excuse me,” I say.
“The woman he’ll always love above any other.”
I glance at Jack, then Joe. A joke, I see. They all know the punch line. They’re waiting to see how I do.
“Having met Jack’s mother and sisters,” I say, “I’d love to meet any other woman he holds in esteem.”
“She’s a boat,” says Teddy, in a sulk, a trace of something spilled near his breast pocket. Poor Teddy. Bedraggled loser of potato salad. But the rest are borne off on tales of the Victura.
“Latin,” Jean says. “ ‘About to conquer.’ ”
It can also mean “to live,” I almost say.
Rose and Joe gave Jack the twenty-five-foot Wianno when he turned fifteen. Four years later he sailed it in the Nantucket Sound Star Class Championship and won. It was on the Victura that Jack taught Bobby to sail, Bobby taught Teddy, and so on.
“Then you won the East Coast Collegiate,” Ethel pipes in.
“No, that was Joe,” Jack says.
A tick in the air before the talk moves on.
You don’t get past it, do you? That kind of childhood loss. You don’t ever really leave it behind.
“A penny for your thoughts,” Jack says, his voice near my shoulder.
“But, Jack,” I say, “then they wouldn’t be mine.”
The room falls silent. The ambassador laughs. “Now, there’s a girl who belongs at my table.”
* * *
—
The next morning, we walk the beach. Thick fog, no wind, just the sound and the dank salt smell of the sea rolling toward us out of the cool white air.
“I love this,” I say. “The sea, the fog. How the lines of things smudge out. We could be anywhere.”
“Well done at dinner last night. You won my father.”
“I wasn’t trying to.”
“And that’s what’s nice.” A bend in his voice as he says it; I feel something deeper in him shift toward me.
Coming back into the house, we pass the little bedroom on the first floor.
“Can we go in?” I ask. “Your mother told me when you were little, this room was yours.”
A child’s quilt on the bed, bookshelves, a bureau. I pick up a photograph.
“That’s me with my dog Dunker. In the Netherlands.”
“You aren’t allergic to dogs in the Netherlands?”
“Always allergic, but I’ll always have dogs. My friend Lem took that picture. Upstairs, there’s another from that same trip. Lem and me at The Hague. I look better in the other one.”
I laugh. His vanity surprises me.
Next to Jack with the dog is an older framed photo, faded by the sun. A close-up of his face, the water abstracted behind him, dusty light. There’s a focused stillness in his eyes. What was he seeing in that moment? Thinking, dreaming, feeling? I want to ask.
“When was this taken, Jack? Do you remember?”
“No.”
He sits on the bed as I kneel by the small bookshelf and run my fingers along the spines. Buchan, Stevenson, Churchill. “Where are your poets?”
“Tennyson’s there. Homer and Byron.”
“Byron, man of loneliness, brooding mystery. What was that epithet? The mad, bad, dangerous to know. Do you think he was?”
“Not as bad as they made him out to be.”
“Thirty-six when he died,” I say.
“Then I’ve got one more year.” He laughs.
“Byron wasn’t one to commit, was he?” I say.
“Why do women always want to pin a man down?”
I feel a heat in my face. “Not all women. Most men are as dull as watching paint dry. Five minutes in, there’s nothing left to discover, and a woman has to just stand there nodding, smiling, bored out of her mind.”
“Are you bored, Jackie?”
“With you?”
A hesitation in his smile then, like part of him wishes he hadn’t asked.
“No,” I say. I glance back at the bookshelf. “There’s Tennyson.”
“That was Kick’s.”
The cover’s worn, spine frayed. “She loved this one.”
“Yes,” he says.
I look at him then, and his eyes are on my face, no game in them for once, just an openness I’ve seen only a few times before, like he might let me in, or even want to.
“When I was growing up,” I say, “on Wednesdays after dancing class, I went to visit my grandfather Bouvier. I had to bring a memorized poem every time I went. Tennyson’s “Ulysses” was one he insisted I learn by heart.”
“Recite it,” he says. “I want to know what you’ve learned by heart.” He lies back on the bed, his legs dangling off, head propped on the pillow, looking at me, and the expression on his face is one I will always remember—complicated, trenchant, with a naked hunger I feel move through me.
A bell rings. Silence. It rings again.
“That’s the lunch bell,” he says. “It’s how she rounds us up.”
“Are we going to go?”
“I think we’ll be late. Pick a book. I want you to read aloud to me.”
“You should read to me,” I say. I pull The Iliad from the shelf.
