Jackie and Me(21)

Or a lot, if you go by how often she called the interloper

“Jack- leen.”

“That’s not her name,” Bobby pointed out.

“Oh,” answered Ethel, “I just thought since it rhymes

with queen.” And burst into her usual scream of laughter.

She’d sensed the thing that set Miss Bouvier apart, which

was less a matter of carriage than mystery. With every jan—

gle of bracelet, Jackie declared herself other. It was, when I think about it, an exoticized version of how Jack greeted the world, and, like Jack, she was both half-conscious of and wholly dependent on her effects. The same pipsqueak

voice that was impossible to hear in an open convertible

became the wellspring of her charm in a living room. You

had to lean in if you had any hope of hearing, and once

74





LOUIS BAYARD


you’d done that, you were drawn into the most private of

conspiracies.

When it came to after-dinner games, Ethel was particularly fond of Categories and no more willing to cede ground here than anywhere else. The game actually stopped for three minutes because she insisted that Tung was Mao’s

first name. Like many indifferent students, she stockpiled facts like a quiz-show contestant, and she wrote down her answers before anybody else and then sat with glittering

eyes, waiting for the egg timer to wind down.

“You do write slow,” she told Jackie. “It doesn’t have to be pretty, honey.”

Well, you don’t compete on the Long Island equestri—

enne circuit and rack up national championships by the

time you’re eleven without developing a robust competitive

instinct yourself, so Jackie didn’t set her pencil down until she’d filled every category, and when Ethel challenged her on the word okapi—to be specific, said, “What the hell’s an okapi?”— Jackie answered, dry as you like: “It’s a giraffe native to the Congo.” Light pause. “I can fetch a dictionary.”

Lighter pause. “If you’ve got one.”

By now, she was drinking pretty fluently, one sloe gin

fizz after another. The effect, though, was exclusively in her eyes, which began to soften, then harden. She just about made it through round five before asking where the ladies’

room was.

“This ain’t a restaurant,” said Ethel. “The bathroom’s around the corner.”

“Everything all right?” Jack called (not moving an inch).



JACKIE & ME

75

“Oh, yes . . .”

The game was held on her account for five minutes.

Further than that the hostess would not venture.

“Gee whiz, let’s play without her.”

“Maybe she’s ill,” I said.

“She’s fine.”

But I had glimpsed a note of light affliction in her face as it flashed past, and I thought again of that girl sitting alone in the headlights of Jack’s car. “Maybe I should just check on her,” I suggested.

Ethel was about to retort, but Jack gave me a silent nod.

The bathroom was empty, and after poking my head into

the kitchen and the pantry, I found her on the back patio,

sitting on a garden wall beneath a cedar of Lebanon. It was the first time I’d seen her with a cigarette.

“You know you can do that inside, if you want.”

“I know,” she said, flushing. “It’s just a habit I picked up from my mother. She was always embarrassed to be seen with a cig, so that made me embarrassed, so now we hide it from each other and the whole world and—” She paused.

“That must be about the silliest thing you’ve ever heard.”

I said there were sillier. She nodded absently.

“That Ethel must have played a lot of field hockey,” she

said.

“Sharp elbows, you mean? When the umpire’s not

looking?”

“There is no umpire.”

I felt a light twinge.

“She’s just a little protective,” I suggested.

76





LOUIS BAYARD


“Of whom?”

“Well, the family.”

“They’re not even her family.”

“They are now, they’re the people she loves. Isn’t that how families work?”

Her reply was to flick a hunk of ash onto Ethel’s patio.

“Tell me about your first time,” she said.

“My—”

“With them.”

“The whole family, you mean?”

“I want to compare notes.”

Smiling, I cradled my hands behind my head. “If you

must know, they boiled me like a lobster.”

She clapped her hand over her mouth, but a single laugh

had already broken free.

“I do not lie,” I said.

“I don’t care if you’re lying, I want to hear.”

It was my very first weekend in Hyannis. Summer of ’34,

and I was sweating hard from being stomped into the tennis court—Pat was responsible—so I excused myself and