Jackie and Me(46)

Joe Junior was the one who saved me, not from charity

but impatience. “If you ask me,” he said, giving his own napkin a snap, “this new man Lerroux will have no end of trouble with the anarchists and Communists. But, unlike

Roosevelt, he’ll have the benefit of a military unconstrained by democratic traditions.” I was just sifting that through my brain when I heard Jack—sixteen years, a hundred twenty pounds—pipe forth that Lerroux would have an even harder

time contending with the Catalan separatist movement and

might soon have to make politically unsavory allegiances

with the extreme right, as exemplified by Generalissimo

Franco. Bobby and the girls leapt right in. Wasn’t it time, in fact, to let the Catalans attain their long-cherished independence? Had they ever been successfully subjugated over their centuries-long history? And would Lerroux, in order

to forestall his various insurgencies, have to make common

cause with the Spanish Moroccans?

My God, I realized, they’ve all been cramming.

Jack more than any of them! Parrying each thrust. It suddenly made sense that he was the only boy at school who

read the Times. He didn’t want to be found wanting when Joe Senior came swooping in at the end of term with some poser from the back pages. No, Jack knew Joe Junior was reading

those same pages, waiting his turn. Another fifty-meter sprint in the track meet that had shaped their whole lives together.

Well, from then on, in the weeks leading up to any

Kennedy visit, I always made a point of picking up Jack’s dis-carded newspapers and giving them a quick scan—I didn’t want to be caught out again. Jackie did much the same thing,



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and that first night, when she took the proffered seat at Mr.

Kennedy’s right hand, she actually glanced down to see if

any stray facts were peeping out from her corselet. Perhaps out of chivalry, he went a bit gently with her and, though he himself wasn’t literary, confined most of his questions to books. Had she read Witness, by Whittaker Chambers? No, though she hoped it would help its author pay off his legal bills. Had she read The Old Man and the Sea? Why, yes, it only took an hour or two. Did she agree that Hemingway was the greatest writer of his generation? She had a sneak—

ing fondness for Fitzgerald, but maybe that was because he

seemed to enjoy women more.

During the whole interrogation, I could see Jack softly

rubbing her elbow with his thumb. Encouragement or

seduction, I couldn’t be sure, but I think it helped to steel her. It helped, too, that they were in the heart of campaign season, and Mr. Kennedy had only so much energy to devote to people who weren’t Henry Cabot Lodge, and of course,

by now, the larger Kennedy uproar had taken over—all of

it pointing inward. Did anybody have a worse backhand

than Jack? Dear God, if Jean sliced one more ball into the

woods, they’d have to name the forest after her. On and on, a fusillade of insult, wadded-up napkins, dinner rolls lobbed across the table, and in the midst of this Irish picnic, Jackie felt safe enough to give me a veiled wink across the table, which I received with almost as much reassurance as if I myself had been the newcomer.

We were halfway through dessert when Mr. Kennedy

called down the table.

166





LOUIS BAYARD


“Morton?”

He was addressing Morton Downey, a saloon singer from

the twenties and thirties with a body made for radio and an epicene, almost castrato-like tenor that women tended to die for. He married a movie starlet and fathered a litter of kids, but as his listenership declined, he consoled himself with finding an audience of one in Mr. Kennedy, who, for all his pains to leave his heritage behind, liked to surround himself with micks—daily reminders, you might say, of what he’d transcended. Morton was far and away the most illustrious

of—well, let’s call them the lackeys—but that didn’t make

him any less obliging when the command came. Without

another thought, he set down his fork and padded into the

living room, seated himself at Mrs. Kennedy’s Ivers & Pond and called up a swell of damp chords. Then, in a voice of maudlin conviction, he began to sing one of his old hits,

“That’s How I Spell Ireland,” which did indeed require him

to spell the damn thing at excruciating length. E for Eileen and A for angels and on and on. Just when he’d got through that first chorus and you were starting to relax, there followed two more verses, not to mention two reprises of the chorus, and when Morton got to the final line, he lingered

with such ferocity on the penultimate syllable, wove such a nest of melismatic thread around it, that you’d have sworn he’d die before he struck land. It’s no surprise that my eyes cut toward Jackie. The surprise, really, was that she was looking not at me but Jack. Whispering in his ear.

I could tell it was something wicked because of the hic—

cupping motion his chest made, and I remember feeling the



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most curious twinge, as though somebody had pulled up the

ladder to a treehouse. Looking back, though, I can see this was the first time they became coconspirators. I can see, too, why it had to happen. Jackie, casting about for succor, must have realized that I was no less an outsider than she in some ways and could offer only so much protection. If she was going to get out of this kingdom alive, it would need to be under the aegis of the crown prince.