Jackie and Me(13)

Jackie more than she would have guessed to see it devolving into a joke. But where was she to put her umbrage? Surely she couldn’t call up the Congressman on his office line—not with the memory of her own weasel words still fresh. The little job with Vogue. She had all but prophesied her own doom, and if you were to ask me why Jackie kept her distance from the Congressman in the months ahead, I would say it was because she didn’t want to admit to him that she had cut and run.

SIX

W ell, being new to the Kennedys, she didn’t yet know

that they can cut and run, too. I say this from experience. My Manhattan sofa used to be known as Hyannisport

West because, on any given morning, you’d find a young

Kennedy sleeping there. Bobby Junior, most of the time, but sometimes his brother David would come along, or Chris Lawford. Nobody ever made them sleep on the sofa—there’s a perfectly usable guest room—but after scampering to their various boroughs, they always came back looking for

the nearest horizontal surface, and, once they were asleep, they were the most prone specimens you’ve ever seen. My housekeeper Sheila used to dust around them as if they were houseplants.



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These days, the axis lies empty more often than not, and

I do find myself missing—oh, the tangle of them, I suppose.

Elbows and knees jutting up where you least expected them.

The profundity of their slumber, and behind it, a pure sort of trust, for they grasped at some unconscious level that they were well and truly safe, and this assurance extended

to their parents, who would know, wherever they were in the world, that Uncle Lem was on the watch. Even today, if Ethel wants to know where one of her kids is, I’m the first one she calls.

In short, I am of use, and what better purpose could there

be for my golden years? Oh, I can look back with pride on

various professional achievements—I am known in certain

circles, for example, as the Father of Fizzies—but it seems to me when all the noise of the marketplace has died away, when the last rat has run its race, it’s the human connection that lingers most. Indeed, as the days dwindle down, I find myself curiously wishing I had more humans to connect with. Sometimes I’ll even read those silly gossip columnists on Page Six just to see what the Kennedy boys are up to.

Of course, it’s silly to argue I’m alone. Eunice calls practically every day. My friend Raul calls, too, on occasion, until he remembers why he’s mad at me. And, of course, I have my Dalmatian, light of my life. Really, if you were to ask me the thing I regret most these days, it’s that, with the bursitis and asthma and querulous ticker, I can’t walk Ptolly as much as I’d like. But if a day is feeling slacker than it should, I will sometimes force myself out of doors, even invent an errand if need be.

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LOUIS BAYARD


Most days, though, my exercise is delving into the

archives. I’ve made a whole scrapbook, for instance, devoted to Jackie’s Washington career. Which began as just an entry-level position with the Times-Herald. Was there anyone less qualified to be a secretary? She disconnected calls and lost messages and, because she couldn’t bear asking people to repeat themselves, misspelled names and botched phone

numbers. But her resilient good cheer also endeared her a

little to the managing editor, and she built that patiently into a rapport, so that, when a position opened up, she lunged for it with a velocity that surprised her.

“You want to be the Inquiring Photografer?” her editor

asked. “Do you even know how to use a camera?”

Not yet, she told him, but she would. And if, after a

month, she proved to be a bad fit, he could fire her with no hard feelings. “And besides,” she said, “you don’t want me handling your phones anymore.”

So, for the sum of forty dollars and fifty cents a week,

she got to harvest the opinions of Washington’s populace.

Every day, rain or shine, she strolled the streets with a five-pound Graflex Speed Graphic, sidling up to pedestrians and asking the kinds of anodyne questions that would cause no

one alarm. “Are beauty operators and barbers entitled to

tips?” “If you were put in solitary confinement and could

take only one book, what would it be?” “Would you rather

make a lot of money or have a lot of friends?” “Should men

wear wedding rings?”

Introverted by nature, she found it a challenge to but—

tonhole strangers, but it was her unfeigned shyness that



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disarmed their suspicion and allowed her to reproduce words and images, hot and steaming, for the next day’s paper. Her feet ached from walking six days a week; she ran through heels and gloves faster than she could replace them; on a

couple of occasions, the darkroom fumes nearly overpow—

ered her. But she persevered and, every two weeks, deposited an utterly exotic paycheck in her savings account. She even talked of renting a pied-à-terre in town to cut down on her commute. And whenever she began to suspect that her work was at heart trivial, she tossed in, out of nowhere, a question of more substance. “How should health care for the aged be provided?” “If you secretly found out you had married a