Jackie and Me(29)
“Because my poor brain wouldn’t.”
He stared at the coins on the table, then swept them back
into his pocket. “I don’t have any more cash on me, can you cover the drinks?”
In this respect, I guess, the rich really are different from you and me. Jack was always pestering you to pay for his lunch, tide him over with a loan he’d never pay back. If you were one of his staffers, you might be out of pocket ten bucks by the end of the week with no hope of reimbursement.
“Look,” I said. “If you’re going to send me on a secret
mission, I need to know who my spymaster is.”
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“Christ, Lem.”
“Is it you? Is it the boss man in Hyannis? Who am I
working for? To what end?”
He held his tumbler in his palm, gave it a light oenophile
swirl, then drained it in one pass.
“Dad thinks I can’t get elected if I don’t have a wife.”
“With all due respect, he’s crazy. You’ve been elected
three times.”
“He doesn’t mean the House.”
“There are bachelor senators.”
“He doesn’t mean the Senate, either.”
THIRTEEN
I t’s hard, I know, for today’s younger folks (my friend
Raul, for example) to understand how American politics used to work. They’ve seen a Mephistophelean Quaker, a lusting-in-his-heart peanut farmer, the husband of a divorced ex-dancer, and an actual divorcé stroll into the Oval Office, all without much fuss. How difficult can it be? Thirty years ago, it was nothing but difficult, and the White House was the last thing an Irish Catholic boy could aspire to. If your people had grubbed potatoes from the soil, if one grandfather was a saloon keeper and the other a pol who sang “Sweet Adeline” and made time with a cigarette girl named
Tootles, there were only so many rungs on your ladder.
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That history lesson never quite took with Mr. Kennedy.
Tell him he couldn’t go to Boston Latin or Harvard, he went anyway. Blackball him from a country club, he made his own, exclusive to Kennedys. Tell him he couldn’t run for the land’s highest office, he went after it anyway. Deny him the office on the basis of fascist sympathies, he passed on the dream to his firstborn son. Kill off that son in the war he himself never stopped opposing, he passed it on to the son who lived.
As to what that son wanted, well, that’s where I always ran aground with Jack, trying to imagine his stake in anything, beyond the almost grudging spectatorial interest he took in watching it unfurl. My truest, deepest impressions of him were formed at prep school, and that boy couldn’t have given a shit about being respected or popular or anything.
The one title he coveted, oddly, was Most Likely to Succeed, and strictly to thumb his nose at the headmaster, and he only won because he bought the votes. Growing up in Joe
Junior’s shadow gave him—well, the room, I guess—to compete in the stuff that didn’t much matter and to take himself out of the competition that did, if only to show how little it mattered to him.
So it was always surprising to learn that something,
or someone, mattered. A few nights after I saw him in
Washington, for instance, he phoned me up and said,
“Billings, do you still fit into your suit? Or have you gotten too fat on Mama’s home cooking?”
“The last time my mother cooked was when yours did.”
106
LOUIS BAYARD
“So never. Listen, Jackie wants to go to a fashion show
next Sunday. The—uh . . .” He paused, as if he were translating from Aramaic. “The Elizabeth Arden collection.”
“That’s not fashion, you scurvy bastard, that’s cosmetics.”
“It’s Greek.”
“And you’re out of town, naturally.”
“Even if I weren’t out of town, I’d be out of town.”
“Why does she need an escort?”
“Apparently, she doesn’t want people to know she’s taking notes.”
“Why is she taking notes?”
“I have no idea.”
I told him there had to be somebody a hell of a lot closer
who could step into this breach. Billy Sutton, maybe or Dave Powers . . .
“Dave’s from Charlestown, Lem. And you seriously want Billy Sutton rubbing against Northwest matrons? Anyway, I told her you’d do it. Said you’d dress up nice and purty and be a perfect gentleman.”
“Probably the only gentleman.”
“Aw, Washington’s full of emasculated husbands. Just
don’t embarrass me.”
In fact, on that particular Sunday, the only men on view
in the Shoreham Hotel’s Blue Room were practitioners of the cosmetic arts. Otherwise, the crowd consisted of a hundred ladies in gray silk floral prints, cultured-pearl necklaces and cameo brooches. The hats were enormous, and there was a muff or two, for all that it was seventy degrees outside, and
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enough L’Air du Temps perfume for all of France. In short,
it was a roomful of rock-ribbed Republicans gathered for