Jackie and Me(48)

“Do you know I could sit down right now and write out a

check for ten million dollars?”

I’m sure you could do it standing, she thought, and it was a mark of where she sat in the power relations that she held her tongue.

“Oh,” he went on, “you’ll think I’m boasting, but really,

I’m putting things in perspective. You see, I earned that

money so my children wouldn’t have to. So they could be

free and independent and do what they damn well pleased

with their lives. And here’s the thing, when you have a million-dollar trust fund, you can do what you damn well please with your life.” He gave his cigar a speculative roll.

“Take my boy Jack. He’s many things—good, bad and indifferent—but the thing he is more than anything is set up. He’s lucky that way, and the girl who marries him will be lucky, too, never having to worry about money again. Think of all—all the beauty she’d have at her command.”

Just over Mr. Kennedy’s shoulder, a doll in a red-and-white dirndl was studying her with glassy eyes of the most

piercing blue.



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171

“It sounds like . . .” she began.

“Like what?”

“A business venture, I guess.”

“What’s the difference? You tell me, what’s the difference?

A girl invests poorly, she gets nothing. She invests wisely, she gets a return. Ask your mother if you don’t believe me.”

He had crossed some line, she grasped this, and in a

strange way, it emboldened her to hold his gaze.

“I think my mother—of all people—would say feelings

enter into it, too. If the feelings are bad, money won’t fix it.”

“Only because there’s not enough money. Ask my wife

if you don’t believe me. How many women her age get to

spend every spring in Paris gawking at fashion shows? She

buys anything she damn well pleases, ships it back overseas, and sashays home when she’s good and ready. Another lucky girl, and she knows it, no matter how much she grouses.

What I’m telling you, my dear, is that feelings are the one thing in a marriage that needn’t be rushed.” He paused, and then, in a voice of equivocal blankness, added: “You know, there are a lot of other rooms in this house. I’d be happy to show ’em to you.”

For a few seconds, she could do nothing more than stare.

At last she heard herself say:

“I’m dying to know how the movie ends.”

He took a luxuriant drag of his cigar.

“So am I.”

TWENTY-ONE

S hortly after eleven, she was shown to the last in an

endless row of doors. Opening it, she found a curious mélange of décor: oyster white walls and a hunter green coverlet, a chintz-covered headboard and a wooden icebox, a pair of unengraved victory cups, a badminton racket and,

on the dressing table, a perfume bottle, nearly empty, with a mighty stopper. The bed itself was no wider than the back seat of a car and no more comfortable. She sat, a little dazed, in the cane-bottom chair by the window, smoking a cigarette, only to stub it out when a knock came at the door.

It was Jack, poking his head around the corner. “Comfy?”

he asked, closing the door softly after him.

“Oh, I’m just wondering whose room this is.”



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173

“Nobody’s.”

“So it’s a guest room?”

“Every room is a guest room.”

It was her next lesson in the Kennedy way. No matter

where the family hung its hat—Bronxville, Hyannisport,

Palm Beach—no child had a lock on any room. Depending

on when your boarding school let out, you came back to

whatever space hadn’t been claimed. No point putting up

a picture or squirreling away a stamp collection, not when

you’d have to drag it out again a month later. You simply

joined the nomad caravan. To someone like Jackie, who kept

her room as sealed and curated as the British Museum, the

news landed with a soft horror.

“You mean there’s nothing anywhere that belongs to

you?”

“Oh, sure,” he answered easily. “Books and clothes and

stuff. Scattered about.” Then, not missing a beat: “There’s you, maybe.”

What a shock. To be claimed all over again. The feeling

wasn’t too different from what had rolled through her in that gravel driveway, only there was nowhere to put it. She rose from the chair and, after an interval of uncertainty, seated herself on the bed. He joined her there a moment later. Sat next to her, took her hand and, frowning down, said: “He likes you.”

“Oh,” she said. “That’s nice.”

“It’s what he told me, anyway.”

“Then it must be true. I mean, he speaks his mind, your

father.”

174





LOUIS BAYARD


“It’s his tragic flaw.”

She sat awhile, wondering how long it would take for one

of her flaws to be declared tragic. Perhaps that was just the province of old men.