Jackie and Me(40)

on my knees. I did the same when he transferred from the

Gothic spires of Princeton to the sterile climes of Peter Bent



JACKIE & ME

143

Brigham Hospital. By then, I’d seen him in and out of so

many clinics and wards he told me I should write his biography and subtitle it A Medical History.

It alters your sense of scale watching someone go through

that. I remember friends asking me during the war if I was

worried about Jack cruising in the Solomons. “No more than

usual,” I’d say. He and I used to have these very calm, reasoned discussions about the best way to go. Freezing? Slow.

Hanging? Uncertain. Drowning, wet. Poison, messy. “Death

by boredom,” I once suggested. “You mean Congress,” he

said.

The point is he never, never once, became morbid. “Eat,

drink and make love,” he once wrote me, “as tomorrow or

next week we attend my funeral.” So when he got himself

elected to Congress, I truly believe he thought of that as his endgame, and I believe I agreed with him, and it was this particular dappling that lay over my summer with Jackie.

“You know what?” she said one afternoon. “I may not

have been his first, but I’ll be his last.”

“Yes,” I said. “I think you will.”

EIGHTEEN

S he enjoyed hearing me talk about Jack so much

because it created the illusion of his being there. For,

in truth, she saw even less of him that summer than I did.

Even when the House was in session, his campaign followed

him back to Washington. She held out hope for a lunch date

in the House dining room, but weeks went by without so

much as a phone call, and every inquiry she lodged with

Mrs. Lincoln was met with “I’ll be sure to tell him.” It was the same feeling that had enveloped her at the Bartletts’.

She was to take her place in a vast sisterhood, lapping up

whatever spoonful of attention dribbled down. Hadn’t she

resisted that role then?



JACKIE & ME

145

There was a night late in June when we were sitting on the

Washington Roof, drinking mint juleps in frosted chrome

cups. The air was tight and sultry, and Jackie was smoking

like a condemned killer—four Newports in quick succession, each one jabbed like a shiv into the eye of the ashtray.

I did my best to keep the chatter going, but in retrospect, I can see that whatever came out of my mouth just added to the pressure building inside her.

“Lem,” she said. “Do you think I’m pathetic?”

“Of course not.”

“Are you sure? I mean, if you were waiting for some boy to call you all the time and he never did, wouldn’t you qual-ify as some kind of sucker?”

“Well.” I felt a light prickle in my face. “Not if he was

running for the United States Senate.”

“Put that aside . . .”

“But you can’t, darling! He’s a public figure, and that

means he has to take care.”

“Of what?”

“Reputation. Not just his, of course, but yours. I mean, Jack is a gentleman, he doesn’t want your picture snapped by some cheap photographer or your name . . . bandied about in gossip rags.”

She was quiet. Then came her smile, as quiet.

“Don’t think poorly of me, Lem, but I’d love to be bandied. No, it’s true, I’d settle for being an anonymous brunette in Earl Wilson’s column, because at least I’d be in the same room, wouldn’t I? Do you know the other night, I was 146





LOUIS BAYARD


wondering if I knew anybody at NBC who could smuggle

me onto the set of Meet the Press. Just to see him, I mean.

That’s what I mean by pathetic.”

“Oh,” I said. “I know it’s hard. The political life, it’s hard on everyone.”

She was silent a longer while, a lip of ash forming at the

end of her cig.

“Would you tell me, Lem?”

“Tell you what?”

“If it was time to give up.”

I hadn’t been drinking so much that Jack’s words didn’t

come right back to me. We want her to feel like she can stay the course, Lem.

It was the closest thing to a mission I’d been given, but so many weeks had passed that I couldn’t honestly say in that moment what the course was or how anyone could be kept

on it. For some seconds I dithered only to fall back on the simplest response.

“Don’t give up.”

“Why?”

I moved closer and, in a tone wavering between reassurance and mock-reassurance, said, “They also serve who only

stand and wait.”

A single blue vein welled from her forehead.

“You mean I’m to be a servant?”

Well, I tried to explain as best I could, as I try to explain it now. When I use the word service, I don’t mean obedient or lesser. I mean simply recognizing the world as it is. The vast majority of us are destined for the plains. We troop