Jackie and Me(20)

the gayest soul I know.”

Would he be gay for her, too? Jackie wondered. The



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longer he remained offstage, the more significant he became.

So clearly was he fixed in her sights that perhaps she failed to see the obstructions she had already cleared, and it was during one of their irregular late-afternoon conversations, the Congressman, casting about for something to say, said: “Could you stand meeting family?”

The word came welling up at her.

“Family? Sorry, you don’t mean your parents?”

There was a soft chuckle.

“I like you too much to do that to you. I was thinking

further down the tree. Bobby, let’s say. Would that be all

right with you?”

“Uh, sure.”

“I’ll get back to you with a date.”

She remembered reading in Emily Post that men were

frightened by presumption in women, even more so if they

had yet to declare themselves. Now, more than ever, was the time to play cool. So, when presented with a possible date in March, she took a certain amount of time in responding— went so far as to invent a conflict that she let fall away—and in the weeks leading up to the event, she confined herself to cheerful practicalities. St. Patrick’s Day weekend, she wondered. Should she wear green? No, that was “stage-Irish.”

Should she just wear something nice? Whatever she liked.

The problem, she soon discovered, was less what to wear

than how to be. Had she posed the dilemma to her mother,

it would have become, with terrifying swiftness, how to succeed. Mrs. Auchincloss would have gazed upon the whole 70





LOUIS BAYARD


ordeal with such a dreadful clarity that the only options left would have been winning or losing.

And what, in the context, did that even mean? The

Congressman had taken her to dinner half a dozen times,

had called her perhaps a dozen more—on his schedule, never

hers. Suppose now she were to meet this family of his, do her pretty little dance, and suppose they had the poor taste to dislike her. What would that mean? All she could say was that she had come to depend on the sound of his voice, the rhythm of his conversation, the way he alternated between

astringent doses of teasing and the barest dab of honey. The buzzing he produced in her skin. Take that away—drag it into the light of a St. Patrick’s Day Massacre at Bobby and Ethel’s—what would be left? Just the indelible feeling of having lost something.

On the Saturday in question, seeking distraction, she drew

out two sheets of smooth Bristol and wrenched open the window, straining to find something she could sketch, but the

river wouldn’t stay still. Two hours before the Congressman was due to arrive, she pulled up her stockings and slipped on a lavender linen dress, bare about the shoulders, applied the Chateau Krigler 12 behind her ear and along her collarbone, then wrapped herself in a shawl. She didn’t bother saying goodbye, and as she waited outside, she smoked six Pall Malls in quick succession, mashing them into the gravel drive just as the beams from the Congressman’s Crestline came scything through the darkness.

The car paused. A bearish figure extricated itself from the front seat. Lem, she soon discovered, though in the darkness

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of the car’s interior, he registered mostly as a voice, high and elfin. Jackie had nearly forgotten he was there until they were crossing Chain Bridge and, for want of anything else to say, she asked the Congressman what color his car was. It was then that Lem piped up with “pomegranate.”

NINE

B obby, if we’re being technical, was the first Kennedy

family member to greet her that night, and I’ve

always considered it an unfortunate accident of timing that the second was Bobby’s wife, who, if we’re to remain technical, wasn’t a Kennedy at all but a Skakel, a rawer, scrappier thing. Ethel in those days was devout as a nun, combative as a Cape buffalo, not above swiping an older sister’s boyfriend (which was how she came to be a Kennedy in the first place), and then, having smuggled her way into the compound, quicker than anyone to bar the gate. I once called her “more Kennedy than thou,” and she glowed as if I’d set a tiara on her head. The night she hosted Jackie, she strolled up to me after dinner and said in a voice she believed to be a murmur:

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“She’s got big feet.”

I confessed I hadn’t noticed.

“Big hands, too.”

I hadn’t noticed those, either, and when I made mention

of Miss Bouvier’s slender hips, Ethel blocked it like a full-back. “Can’t imagine them popping out kids, can you?”

She was vain on the subject. She had already birthed one

child—another in the oven—nine more waiting to be thrust into a godless world, as she surely knew. Ethel’s ovaries could have populated whole nations, and even at this young

age, she was dressing like a matriarch—nautical blouses

and lily-of-the-valley perfume— walking like one, too, with the fetus of Joe the Third pushing her back on her heels.

Imagine her, then, having to watch Jack’s date swan in on

a cloud of chiffon, erect as a centaur. It had to gall a little.