Jackie and Me(14)

former Communist, what would you do?”

Things were advancing on another front, too. Another

John had entered the picture.

John Grinnel Wetmore Husted Junior (Johnny to his

friends). She met him at a Valentine’s Day dance in New

York. He was a Yale graduate, and he was—this was

important to her back then—tall. He was handsome, too, in

a birthright sort of way, seething with follicles. His sisters went to Miss Porter’s with Jackie; his father was a partner in Brown Shipley; his mother was a Harkness, with all the promise of deferred wealth that name carried. He himself

(Jackie was dismayed to learn) was a stockbroker, but his

conversation, while limited, was conducted with gusto, and

his smile had an impregnable, because unexamined, cheer,

and though he was her senior by several years, he stared at her as woundedly as a prep-school virgin. For a girl who had 48





LOUIS BAYARD


not yet taken her final exams at George Washington, the

dawning sense of her own power was in itself erotic.

She and Johnny talked by phone, exchanged letters, and

whenever he flew down to Florida to see his mother, he

made a point of stopping in Washington on the way back

up. Their first date was at a dancing class, where he was

the right mix of suave and awkward. He was tickled pink

to learn about her job and begged to know when he might

tag along. After some hesitation, she suggested a Saturday

in October—and regretted it from the first moment, for it

was one thing to have a young stockbroker clumsily tailing

you through Washington’s streets, it was another to let him catch up. “You won’t have this to do much longer,” he’d say.

“My mother likes her hobbies, too,” he’d say. By the end of the day, she was more exhausted than usual, and she realized it was because she’d been running the whole time. She had nothing left for him but a squeeze of the hand, a pair of lips grazing off his cheek. He called her all the same as soon as he got home and demanded to know when she would come see him in New York.

She stalled—stalled for many weeks because she grasped

that she would be more vulnerable on his terrain, all the

more so for having lately vacated it. But he kept pressing, by letter and by phone. Her mother pressed, too, and even her father, so that her going there began to take on the certainty of an Old Testament prophesy. In the second weekend of January, Johnny met her in the bowels of Grand Central

with a box of roses. He had the good sense to wear a camel

coat and a white cashmere scarf, wrapped and tied with



JACKIE & ME

49

that perfect balance of care and indifference. He took her

to Ciro’s for drinks and dinner, then to the late show of a Broadway movie, then to a nightclub to hear an alto saxo-phonist. At some point, it occurred to her that this was their first real date. They capped off the evening with a short walk through the chill of Palisades Park (she was glad to have brought her squirrel muff) then a cab to the Polo Bar in the Westbury Hotel, where, in lieu of making a move, he merely grinned and said, “How about it?”

“How about what?”

“I guess . . .” He plunged a hand into his coat. “I guess I figured if you came all this way to see me, I should come a ways, too.”

Out it came, in a hinged box. A single white sapphire

and a single diamond. Jackie’s mind went to work at once,

parsing the symbolism. The sapphire for tradition? The diamond for prosperity? Not gaudy but aspirational, was that

it? Then she heard him say: “It’s my mother’s.”

They were to be married in June.

He was a type she was already familiar with. He read the

Herald Tribune for news, the Daily News for sports, the Journal for everything else. He played squash to win. He said things like “hotter than Hades” and “goddamn Reds,”

but, although he’d voted for Dewey, he would tell you after a couple of martinis that he was really a radical. His objective in life was a square brick edifice in Norwalk, where the tires of his Buick convertible would crunch on blue gravel and 50





LOUIS BAYARD


where the wife—she would be “the wife”—would have the

cushions waiting in his armchair and the whiskey-and-soda

on the side table, along with the evening ration of five cigarettes, laid out like caterpillars.

Yet, as an individual, he was scarcely to be known. Each

time she saw him, he seemed no more familiar than the

last. The ring was a larger puzzle. After getting it resized for her finger, she wore it from dawn to dusk—slept with it, even—expecting it to transform her by the sheer weight of it against her skin, yet she could go hours without knowing it was there, only to be astonished all over again by the glint of it in a lamp or a window. My ring, she thought, but no amount of vocalization made it real.

It didn’t help that Mrs. Auchincloss herself, after warmly

approving the match, seemed now to be cooling by half

degrees. “Darling, you’ll have to trust me,” she said. “You could do worse.” As if to quiet her own qualms, Janet began clipping and saving articles from Woman’s Day and Ladies’ Home Journal. “Matrimony: The Keystone to a Full Life.” “A Successful Wife Is a Career in Itself.” “Help Him Understand Why He Needs You.” But Johnny had already come to that conclusion, and weren’t the vast majority of