Jackie and Me(45)
“Can she say no in any of them, Lem?”
“Oh, I’m sure she could, she—”
“Does she have any other degenerate habits? Things that,
once they got into the bloodline, might be hard to get out
again.”
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161
“Well, I would consider her a—a very hard worker, sir, if that’s what you mean. I mean, she writes this column, you know, and it’s not—I mean, she never misses a deadline.”
“I’ve seen the column, Lem.” His voice dropped by
a minor third. “It’s exactly the kind of thing a debutante
would write.”
I bridled a little on her behalf. Maybe because I’d seen her chemical-stained fingernails or because I’d kept the manila envelope of her clippings, which included the issue where she’d made the front page. ( “Which First Lady would you like to have been?” Asked outside of the White House.) “Listen,” he swept on, “we’re having her up to the Cape
for the Fourth. Can we count on you to be there?”
I had, in fact, made plans for the Fourth with Mother,
but he sallied back with:
“We wouldn’t normally ask, but you seem to have gotten
to know this girl better than anybody. I figured you might
interpret her for the rest of us.”
So this was to be my role: Squanto, translating the young
maiden for the Kennedy pilgrims. Whatever misgivings I
entertained went away when Jackie called the next morning.
“My God, they’ve just invited me up for the Fourth. The
whole Irish lot of them. Lem, you’ve got to go, or I’ll die. I’ll actually curl up like a centipede and die.”
“But what can I do?”
There was a moment of incredulous silence.
“You can explain them to me.”
*
162
LOUIS BAYARD
There was no compound in those days, just a white-clap—
board house at 50 Marchant Avenue. To call it a cottage
meant you came from a world where cottages had eleven
bedrooms (four for servants) and nine bathrooms and a sew—
ing room and a packing room and a sunroom and a four-car
garage and an enclosed swimming pool and a tennis court
and a huge wraparound porch with an unoccluded view of
the Atlantic. I once asked Jack why they so rarely went into town. “Why would we?” he answered.
Now Jackie, child of Merrywood and Hammersmith
Farm, didn’t blink at any of this. What she wasn’t prepared for was the relaxed dress code, which, by her standards, meant an opulently skirted champagne-on-caviar silk-taffeta dress. Imagine her dismay when, on the very first night, each Kennedy girl strolled to the table in some variation of Bermuda shorts and Capezios. The last to arrive was Ethel, defiantly casual in a plaid gingham shirt and tennies. She
gave Jackie the full up-and-down and then, in a tone of man-ufactured horror, cried:
“I forgot about the fashion shoot!”
There I was, assuming it was a one-off joke, but Jean at
once broke in with:
“I told you Harper’s Bazaar was coming!”
“Oh, my God, when?”
“Five minutes!”
“I should really change.”
“You should.”
“This very instant.”
“Sooner.”
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163
“What will I wear, though?”
“I’d say your best Pierre Balmain.”
“I didn’t bring it.”
“Are you sure? It’s not all balled up in the bottom of your bassinet?”
By now, Pat and Eunice were joining in from their seats,
offering Ethel couture from their own closets—Chanels,
Balenciagas—and, when that failed, suggesting she duck out
back when the photographer got there, hide under a lobster
net. The whole routine lasted no more than a minute; the
voices never rose above the conversational; the gazes never once swerved Jackie’s way; the intent was unmistakable.
It wasn’t the hazing I’d prepared her for. No, on the train ride up, I’d spoken of my own first dinner with the family, when I had no more status in the world then than Jack’s friend from school. I will never forget when Mr. Kennedy,
not three seconds after sitting down to dinner, gave his napkin a snap, gazed on me with those mild eyes, and said, “I see Barrio has resigned the prime-ministership in Spain. Any thoughts on his successor, Lem?”
The laugh had scaled halfway up my throat before I could
send it back down. Barrio? But when I gazed around that table, every face, from Teddy’s on up, was turned toward mine, and every knife and fork hung suspended. Stunned,
I tried to summon up Spain from the world map—a fat T,
wasn’t it, in Europe’s southwest corner? hugging Portugal
to its bosom?—but nothing about the shape translated into
facts, and my mouth went dry as salt. I cleared my throat
and cleared it again.
164
LOUIS BAYARD