Jackie and Me(15)

Jackie’s classmates from Miss Porter’s and Vassar flashing

rings of their own? None of them had put up a fuss, so why

should she?

The larger question was why Jackie, having embarked

on the career she’d fought for, should be entertaining the

very sort of marriage she’d been swearing off since girl—

hood. Lacking a better explanation myself, I fall back on



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the uncomfortable, intractable, confounding, emasculating

explanation of money.

The encompassing explanation, you might say, only how hard it is to pin it down, for it fractures into a million stories.

I’ll go first.

My father died at the height of the Great Depression. In

a single brutal stroke, this left my family without means and forced me to go on scholarship through most of Choate and all of Princeton. Not such a privation, you’ll say, except that, unlike Jack and the rest of my peers, I was conscious at every moment of every day where every penny was flying. I knew that if Uncle Luther didn’t toss a penny or two my way every so often, I wouldn’t have any. That if Jack invited me to Palm Beach for Christmas, I’d have to invite somebody with

a car to take me there or I couldn’t go. That if Jack wanted to meet up at the Stork Club in New York, I’d have to put on a rented suit and thumb for rides on Route One. That if

he failed to invite me to Hyannisport each summer, I’d have nowhere else to go. Not even Pittsburgh, for that was now a walled city.

Jack, of course, had never concerned himself too much

with logistics, his own or anyone else’s. This was the luxury that wealth had given him, so he couldn’t know that largesse is defined by its limits or that those limits can change with the flap of a wing. And if Jackie and I had anything in common, it was simply that we knew what it was like to be without money from a tender age and to be, at the same time, always proximate to money. It was the tinnitus-like buzzing that never left your inner ear. Not yours. Or, to quote Jackie’s

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LOUIS BAYARD


mother as they once gazed across Merrywood’s green prospect: “Don’t get attached, darling.”

Jackie took the hint. Any property that had Auchincloss

on its title could never be hers. So I don’t think I got the wrong impression that first time I saw her, frozen in the high beams of Jack’s car. The sense, I mean, that, in the midst of this vast and unbarricaded estate, she was still an insurgent and, for that reason, could never be free of money like her stepsiblings. (Or Jack, for that matter.) Well, by now she’d been working long enough at the

Times-Herald to grasp how the marketplace worked. If you pulled down forty-two dollars a week, that was the distance between your having something and having nothing. If a stockbroker chose to join his income to yours, the distance became larger, and You could do worse meant only You could find a worse reason for marrying.

In the end, curiously, it did come down to money. Hughdie

made belated inquiries. The Harkness fortune, it seemed,

was not flowing as freely as had been thought, at least not down this particular channel. Johnny Husted, upon direct interrogation, admitted he was pulling down just seventeen

thousand a year. “Dear God,” said Mrs. Auchincloss. “Your

no-good father was earning three times as much, and that

was 1928!” With no small embarrassment, Mrs. Auchincloss

came to see that this prosaic and unpromising young man,

through mere name and connections, had stolen this close

to a prize that should never have been his. She knew better than to deliver the conclusion straight to her daughter but trusted instead to time and distance.



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And still Jackie held on, long after everyone else in her

family had let go. Was it simply the mineral fact of Johnny Husted’s ring? Sometimes, in the middle of the night, she would wake to find it snagging in her hair. There were days, too, when she was raising her Graflex to snap somebody’s picture, and the ring would catch on the camera strap, and

she would be forced to remark on it all over again. It seemed to be somebody else’s ring on somebody else’s hand.

SEVEN

J ackie’s column was being more spoken of now. Even

friends of the Auchinclosses were reading. And, having now established politics as a fit subject, she could take the next logical step of interviewing politicians. It was from here an equally logical step to the Massachusetts congressman who had once followed her out onto the Bartletts’ stoop.

Or was it? She hesitated for many weeks, and when she at

last crossed that bridge, she made the appointment through

his scheduler, Mrs. Lincoln, taking care to spell the last

name (“No, B-o- u . . .”). On the day in question, she showed up at the Cannon House Office Building in new heels and new stockings. Her hair had acquired blond highlights from

a local salon. She would have liked to believe herself a more



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55

sophisticated spectacle than the last time they met, but she would have settled for grown up.

Rather shockingly, he was just as diminished as she

remembered. Had nobody been feeding him? The jacket still