Jackie and Me(38)

Cooler heads prevailed, and we were only kept over

for Easter vacation. Surely it didn’t hurt that Mr. Kennedy offered to buy some film projectors for the school, although when St. John’s back was turned, he leaned toward Jack and whispered, “If that club had been mine, it wouldn’t have

started with an M.”

In a nutshell, this was the crypto-fascist regime Jack and I were up against, and we didn’t like it one bit and didn’t care who knew. After a while, our housemaster got so sick of our antics that he recommended separating us and sending us down to the younger houses, but film projectors weren’t easy to come by, and so, by hook or by crook, we held fast. I even stayed on for a year after graduation just so Jack could have company in his final year. That’s how tight we were.

Well, I can’t begin to tell you how eagerly Jackie lapped

this stuff up. Jack, of course, had told her nothing of his childhood, and she loved the idea, I think, of capturing him in this larval stage. It was like wrapping her arms around

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him when he wasn’t looking. Tell me, she’d say, about Jack’s electric Victrola. About the semester you both got out of compulsory public speaking by joining the Dramatics Club,

only to spend countless hours as beefeaters and gentlemen of Japan while Gilbert and Sullivan raged on all sides. (It’s why I can still sing the whole Mikado score.) No matter what story I dredged up, Jackie would listen with the deepest attention, like an musicologist tape recording folk songs. What a curious phenomenon, I remember thinking. We stockpile

memories of a person without ever imagining they’ll have

free-market value, only to learn we’ve been squatting on a

golden hoard.

“Oh, my God,” she’d say. “You tried to enlist in the

Foreign Legion? Like Beau Geste? Was that Jack’s idea? . . .

You mean you switched seats while the car was still moving?

How is that even possible?”

Over time, it was true, she began to home in on specific

themes.

“I bet you had lots of girls in your room.”

No, I explained, we didn’t dare. We would have been

expelled.

“But boys used to sneak over to Miss Porter’s all the time.

You’re telling me it didn’t work the other way?”

Oh, I said, there were dances, of course. Olive Cawley

used to come over.

“And what was Olive like?”

Oh, you know. Angular, striking. Like Katharine

Hepburn but more teeth.

“How big were they?”

138





LOUIS BAYARD


How big . . .

“Her teeth.”

I couldn’t say.

“Was she sweet?”

Very.

“Did they ever slip away?”

Her teeth?

“No, Jack and Olive. Did they ever disappear behind a

tree or something?”

If they had disappeared, I wouldn’t have seen them.

I think Jackie had her eyes on Olive because she figured

that was to whom Jack had lost his virginity, but in fact, that story had nothing to do with Olive, and I knew better than to share it. The truth was that Jack and I lost our virginity together. Or that was the plan.

You see, we’d made a pact that we would be initiated by

the same girl. We didn’t care who she was, really, as long as she would take us both. Of course, it doesn’t take much to see what kind of girl will do that for you, and the prospect of that—well, I was still a momma’s boy from Pittsburgh. I didn’t believe in hellfire, but clap? So I wasn’t exactly clam-oring, but just a week or two before Jack’s seventeenth birthday, Rip Horton jumped the gun and lost his at a bordello in Harlem. Dirt cheap, he said. Like falling off a log.

Jack hated to be one-upped, so he declared that he and I

would be heading to that same bordello the next weekend.

I should probably point out that Harlem wasn’t what it is

now. For swells like the Kennedys, it was practically a stroll up the Rialto. Not worth driving the family convertible but

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certainly worth the cab fare from Grand Central. We started the night with a corner peep show, but the real show was the rich young dames in ermine who kept tumbling out of

white limos, dancing over piles of garbage on their way to

Basement Brownie’s. They were in no mood to be pestered

by a pair of prep-school lads, so Jack and I swallowed down shots of schnapps and strode, arm in arm, to the three-story brownstone on 133rd Street.

A toothless old woman was leaning out a second-story

window, and men were shooting craps in the vestibule. We

were convinced Rip Horton had given us the wrong address,

but then a lady in a silk dress came processing down the

carpeted front staircase like an ancient Ziegfeld girl. “Good evening,” she said. “We ask that gentlemen pay in advance.”

After tucking our six dollar bills into her bosom, she led us in measured cadences to the third floor, where we found a row of girls in wooden chairs. They wore silk dresses, too, with spike-heeled patent-leather pumps and red velvet hats, some of them with bird-of-paradise feathers. Jack took his sweet time choosing—walked up and down with his hands