Jackie and Me(4)

portraits in Atlantic City. But why aim so low? He might

be a personage—an entry in Who’s Who, though for what I can’t say. He might have inveigled some wretched woman to 12





LOUIS BAYARD


the altar, acquired a child or two, a grandchild. Nothing, as I’ve said, is off the table. My friend Raul has said more than once that, in another life, I should have been an interior dec-orator, a job title I don’t necessarily care for, but I acknowledge that, with all the flipping I’ve done of Baltimore row houses, it amounts to nearly the same thing.

Turning now to me and Jackie, I can stipulate that, right

from the beginning, we shared a spark of fellow feeling, and yet it might have gone nowhere, nowhere at all, if circumstances hadn’t played out the way they had. There was no guarantee that I would ever see Miss Bouvier again after

that night or have cause to remember her as clearly as I do.

As for Jackie herself—well, at that time in her life, any number of opposed destinies were possible—she was just out of college, for Pete’s sake—and she tried them all on, didn’t

she, like gowns. So if I’m to peer into the box and catch the quantum moment when her destiny collides with Jack’s, I have to do it through the eyes of Charlie Bartlett.

Back in ’51, he was the quickly rising, well-liked D.C.

correspondent for the Chattanooga Times. He had recently joined his Lake Shore fortune to the dowry of a U.S. Steel heiress, but he’d always nurtured a bit of a flame for Jackie, for which he assuaged his Catholic conscience by seeking potential husbands for her. Wildly unsuitable, many of

them: a chemist with the Atomic Energy Commission, a

lobbyist for sorghum farmers, an entertainer at children’s

parties. Was it Charlie’s idea of a joke? So when he rang her up in May to invite her to yet another Sunday supper, the lie rose to her lips.



JACKIE & ME

13

“Gee, Charlie, I’ve already got a date that night.”

“When’s he picking you up?”

“Oh, I think—eight or eight-thirty or some such . . .”

“Perfect. You can come by at six and get some drinks and

nibbles, and your beau can pick you up at our place.”

“He’s not my beau, really . . .”

“Of course he isn’t, I haven’t approved him yet. Now

don’t be too late about it because somebody interesting will be there.”

Dear God, she thought. Somebody interesting.

She might still have demurred, but she realized suddenly

that Sunday was also Mother’s Day, and the thought of

spending the whole stretch of it with her mother overrode her misgivings.

“All right,” she conceded. “But I can’t stay long.”

Now, of course, having pretended to have a date, she

would have to procure one. This was perilous for a girl of

that era. She could not actually ask a boy out, she could

merely propose that he join her for an activity in some

region proximate to his with the possibility of there being fun. Jackie phoned this vagueness around to five men before landing on Michael O’Sullivan, a Comp Lit major from George Washington who had never, to her knowledge, made

advances on a girl living or dead. Sensing interest, she at once dispelled the vagueness and instructed him to meet her at 3419 Q Street, Northwest, eight-thirty sharp. A little after six, she was stepping gingerly through the Bartletts’ doorway, scanning the room with dread. The guests, she noticed, were almost entirely female—perhaps the somebody interesting 14





LOUIS BAYARD


had found somewhere more interesting. A half hour later,

there came a rapping of the Bartletts’ knocker. A grin broke out on Charlie’s face. “You took your sweet time,” he called, and with that, the evening’s final guest stepped in.

By this point in American history, he was known to everybody in the room and would have been known to everybody

in the house next door and the one next to that, but the sight of so many eyes bent his way seemed to affect him as an invasion, and his response was to take a half-step back and to yank at the knot of his regimental tie, a gesture that might have registered as man-of-the-people to anyone but Jackie, who saw only the compulsiveness of the tic. Who noticed

moreover the gap between his shirt collar and his neck, the baggy folds that his jacket formed around his shoulders. Her first impulse was not to fawn but to fold her arms around him. There, there.

He paused, retraced the half step he had just retreated

and bestowed on this crowd of friends and strangers the

democratizing smile that was still two years away from the

cover of Life magazine. “Good evening,” he said. “Good evening, friends.”

The room had been conquered in advance. Hands had

extended, lips had parted. Bars of pink sprouted on Martha

Bartlett’s cheeks. A wave of almost nauseous delight climbed through Pat Murray Roche (who had forgotten perhaps that her parents back in Bronxville used to snub the Kennedys

at every turn). As for the party’s other single girl . . . well, Hickey Sumers ditched her cigarette holder and got herself a highball, which she didn’t drink so much as apply, in strict