Jackie and Me(44)

“It’s funny,” she said. “It all reminds me of that Longfellow poem we used to read back in school. The Courtship of Somebody.”

“Miles Standish.”

“That’s the one. Didn’t he send a friend to do all his wooing for him? As I remember, it didn’t end particularly well for him.”

“It ended well for his friend.”

I was gratified to catch her ever so slightly off guard.

“Well now,” she said, studying me over her sunglasses. “I

wonder if you’re a more deep-revolving character than you

let on, Mr. Billings.”

“My intentions are honorable.”

“Only if you mean the most obvious kind.”

“I’ve no other. I’m not wooing your daughter on my

behalf or anybody else’s.”

“Then what are you doing?”

“Enjoying her company.”

“How charmant.” She gave her cigarette one last drag, then dropped it into the grass and mashed it with her boot.

“Tell your Miles Standish: We don’t negotiate with go-betweens. This isn’t the seventeenth century; a gentleman has to show his face. Even if he’s no gentleman.” She leaned in so close that I could smell the remains of coffee on her breath.

“There’s a limit,” she murmured, “to how much social

climbing one family can undertake.”

TWENTY

J ack, no surprise, found the whole thing hilarious.

“Miles Standish? Did she really call me that? Wow,

that’s the first time anybody’s ever accused me of being on the Mayflower. Ooh, but she sounds frosty.”

That very night, I got a call from Mr. Kennedy.

“Listen, Lem. This girl.”

“Girl, sir?”

“This Jackie.”

You might say those two words were what lifted the

whole business to a new level. Never in my adult days had I heard Mr. Kennedy refer to one of Jack’s girls by name.

“Yes, sir.”

“What can you tell me?”



JACKIE & ME

159

Curiously, I glanced over just then and found my mother,

lingering as though by contract, just outside the parlor door.

“Well now,” I said. “She’s very sweet.”

“I’m not asking you if she’s sweet, Lem. I don’t care to

know. What I mean is does she have the wherewithal to be a

political wife. Does she have it in her?”

It amazes me now that I’d never thought to ask the question myself. As I leafed through the span of our Sundays, I couldn’t recall a single political conversation. We were less likely, really, to talk about how Harry Truman might avoid impeachment than how John Garfield came to die in a showgirl’s apartment.

Once, I remember, Jackie volunteered that she had seen Mrs.

Estes Kefauver under a K Street hair dryer, in the grips of a particularly dire permanent. Others might have ventured from there to discussing Senator Kefauver’s crusade against organized crime or his electoral prospects on the national scene.

Jackie and I wondered if the dryer heat was the thing that

turned the faces of senators’ wives into those impermeable

masks captured every night on TV. From there we worked our

way to a theory that Senator Kefauver’s lopsided smile was

caused by tiny swallows dragging up his top lip at the corners.

“Well, sir,” I told Mr. Kennedy, “I would say that Jackie

is a diligent student of the world. She may not have extensive experience in the sphere of politics, but she would undoubt-edly take to it. If for no other reason than that she’s awfully attached to your son.”

“She wouldn’t be the first. Or the last. The thing is, Lem, we can’t afford to pin these particular plans to a shrinking violet. Ethel tells me the girl is whispery.”

160





LOUIS BAYARD


“I would say soft-spoken.”

“There’s also been some question raised as to her breeding potential.”

“Ohh, I couldn’t speak to that, sir. I mean, if it’s any indi-cation, her mother”—once again I glanced at my own mother, still stationed in the doorway—“has borne four children.”

“You raise an excellent point. If she could avoid clap

from the first husband and squeeze sperm out of the second, she has life force. What about other men?”

“Sir?”

“Does this girl have other men in her life?”

“Well, there was a fiancé.”

“He’s nothing to worry about. Any others?”

“Not that I know of but—”

“Does she seem like the type who would?

“Would . . .”

“Take advantage of an opening.”

“I wouldn’t suppose so.”

“Has she ever confessed to being a virgin? Or not?”

“It hasn’t come up, sir.”

Scrambling then toward a safer topic, I landed on:

“She speaks languages, you know. Three or . . . it might

be four.”

There was a pause, then a staccato burst of laughter.