Jackie and Me(37)

“Listen now,” he told her. “You’ll want to watch that one.”

But I am was her first thought. It was then that the former heavyweight champion of the world curled his fingers around her arm as far as they would go (boxing) and angled

her away.

“Find yourself a banker,” he said.

She should have listened. For a few months, she did.

How else to explain Johnny Husted?

“But I’ve never met a banker,” she told me, “as attractive

as Jack.”

Having ventured that far, maybe she couldn’t find a way

back, for she said, in a voice almost defeated:

“Can you tell me about him?”

SEVENTEEN

T his is what I told her.

The first time I ever met Jack Kennedy was when

he walked into a Choate yearbook meeting and said, “I want

to go out for the board.”

I can still hear him. Bo-wuhd. It’s hard, though, even for me, to see him as he was then, a hundred pounds wet.

The frailty of him. The knot of his tie was half as wide as his neck. He looked as if he’d just raided his father’s closet.

Any moderate wind could have toppled him, and I remember, in the midst of my amusement, feeling an urge I would

consider nearly parental to gather him up. Not too different, I’m thinking, from how Jackie felt, watching him stroll into the Bartletts’ row house.

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LOUIS BAYARD


At fifteen, Jack’s identity was defined by not being his

older brother, Joe Junior, who was one of the Choate elect.

Star baseball player, a student of electromagnetic intensity, casually strapping, handsome—and, as such boys often are, rather savage, one of the sixth form’s most chilling despots.

There was no avoiding him, whether he was wrapping his

arm around your shoulder or holding you down on the floor

for a paddling. Whereas Jack, you might say, slipped in the side door. An indifferent student, not terribly coveted, too reedy for American sports. I don’t think the majority of the third form could have named him at sight, for all that the family name was known. Yet here he was, striding into the

yearbook office as if—well, as if there were no reason not to.

As if some lark was in the offing.

I’d only been on the board myself for a year, so as the

junior officer, I was tasked with telling him that he’d have to sell fifty dollars’ worth of ads before he could even be considered. “As it happens,” he answered, cool as gin, “I’ve already got sixty-one dollars in commitments from the Hyannis Grocery and Oxford Meat Market. As well as definite interest from JPK Enterprises.”

Now how was I to know that Oxford Meat was where

his family shopped in Palm Beach? Or that JPK Enterprises

was the hub of his dad’s business empire? He wasn’t in any

hurry to offer documentation, he just figured we’d believe

him. So we sent him back into the hall and took a vote,

which surprised me by being six-to-one in his favor. It

surprises me now to recall that mine was the dissenting

vote. Was it just the prospect of some sloppy punk kid, a



JACKIE & ME

135

year younger than me, waltzing in like he already owned

the place?

Naturally, I was the one who had to go out and tell him.

He took the news with perfect aplomb because, of course,

there had never been any doubt in his mind. But there was

nothing smug about him either, and whatever reluctance I

carried into that hallway vanished when he put out his hand and said, “This’ll be swell, Lem.”

I had no idea he even knew my name. He always knew

your name.

What brought us together, what made us the very best of

roommates, was that we both hated Choate. In all its nasty, prudish, brutish, regimented, upwardly aspiring, faux-British faux-Christianity. You weren’t to drink. You weren’t to smoke. You weren’t to swear. You weren’t to talk back or come late to class or doze off in chapel or bring your luggage up at the wrong time or bring it down at the wrong time or keep a sloppy room or leave your room with your shirt

untucked. Whatever tasted of personality was their business to snuff out. One night I was backed up against a fireplace and yelled into tears by our housemaster for making an expression he judged to be “a face.”

Honestly, it wasn’t the rules, it was the rule enforcers.

Worst of them was our headmaster, George St. John, who

once told Mr. Kennedy that if Jack were his son, “I believe I should take him to a gland specialist.” In our final year, St.

John gave a chapel talk about how five percent of Choate

students (don’t think he didn’t give us the eye) were no better than “muckers.” By which he meant the Irish laborers who 136





LOUIS BAYARD


cleaned shit out of rich folks’ stables. The very next day, Jack and I and, oh, Rip Horton and Maury Shea and a few other sixth formers came together to form the Muckers Club. We

had little gold shovels made for twelve bucks apiece by a

Wallingford jeweler, and we talked about bringing horseshit onto the Spring Festivities dance floor, and we must have had a rat in our midst because St. John called us each into his study and told us there was a train leaving somewhere between five and six o’clock and we were to be on it because we were no longer students of Choate.