Jackie and Me(49)

“Are you glad you came?” Jack asked.

“Of course. Are you?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

Her eyes grazed toward the window. “Did you wonder if

I wouldn’t?”

“I guess I didn’t . . . one way or the other . . . ”

Something had lodged in him, she couldn’t say what. She

could only wait for it to jar loose.

“Did he make moves on you?” he asked at last.

“No,” she answered. “I . . . no . . .”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.”

The scene in the doll room flashed once more upon her.

From that nightmarish swirl of unblinking eyes, a single

question fought itself clear.

“Who’s Gloria?”

There was, about his mouth, just the lightest tightening.

“He mentioned her?”

“Oh, yes.”

“In a euphemistic way or—”

“Not a bit.”

“Huh.” Jack glanced away. His mouth relaxed into a half

grin. “Well, geez, you’ve seen Sunset Boulevard, haven’t you?”

She stared at him. “Gloria Swanson?”



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“The same.”

“That . . . crazy old silent-movie queen with the turban?”

“Well, she wasn’t old then, this was twenty-five years ago. As for crazy, well, she was crazy for Dad, I guess. At least that’s where her career went.”

“And he brought her here?”

“Sure.”

“Your mother didn’t object?”

“Why would she?”

Jackie took a moment to imagine Mrs. Kennedy and

Norma Desmond, in matching turbans, staring at each other

across the dinner table.

“I even caught them at it once,” Jack said.

“Who?”

“Dad and Gloria.”

“You caught them? Where?”

“On the boat.”

She peered into his face, trying to turn back the years,

the better to warm to this child who had wandered into the

wrong cabin. But it was as if he had fixed himself against

her exact purpose, for the old grin slid down and, when she raised a hand in the direction of his cheek, he deftly intercepted it.

“It was very educational,” he declared. He held her hand

for a while longer, then softly kissed each finger. “What

symmetrical digits,” he purred.

Then, abruptly, he stood and turned away, but not before

she had glimpsed the mound pressing against his khakis.

The thought landed with a brute force: What would Gloria

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LOUIS BAYARD


do? Would she have beckoned him to her bed? Drawn him in, again and again, shrieking Olé at such volume the servants would come running? In the end, somewhat to her own disappointment, she could only be herself, sitting there on the edge of the bed in a kind of melting suspension.

“Lock the door, now,” he said. “Lock the door, my little

princess.”

And just as she was beginning to glow at that epithet, he

said:

“Try not to play on Lem’s team tomorrow.”

team, she echoed. Tomorrow. Was it to be another round of Charades? Or Categories with Ethel? In fact, it was something worse. It was football.

Touch football, officially, though for the men, it was

something closer to semi-tackle. The kind of enterprise in

which Teddy could disembowel Bobby and Bobby could

respond in kind. Ethel, being well along in pregnancy, was

spared physical violence but not her husband’s outrage when she dropped a pass. “It was right in your goddamn hands!

Western Union couldn’t have delivered it better!”

Jackie had spent most of her life blessedly ignorant of

the game, but she knew enough of its rules to know they

were being flouted from the first hike. Once the ball was in motion, whoever owned it could pass or lateral to anyone else anywhere on the field. Fumbles made not the least bit

of difference, and it was left to Mr. Kennedy, surveying the proceedings from the porch, to intervene periodically with a finger whistle.



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“Ball goes to Team Jack!” he might call down, at which

Team Bobby would launch into a counteroffensive of lawyerly arguments and masculine shaming. The only one who

stayed out of it, really, was Lem. He had found, through years of trial and error, the one thing he did well, which was rushing the quarterback. “One Mississippi, two Mississippi!”

Then he’d charge toward the nearest Kennedy, waving his

arms like an enraged bear. Once the ball had been lofted

past him, he might in a general way make in its direction,

but no one was more relieved when the line of scrimmage,

after some debate, was reasserted and he might once again

go charging forth.

Jackie, for her part, sought comfort at the perimeter. If

Jack instructed her to go ten yards down the field and make a buttonhook, she didn’t stop to ask what a buttonhook was, she merely went jogging in the general direction of the ocean. Once, to her great surprise, the ball actually landed in her arms. She stared at as if it were a foundling, then began running toward what she perceived to be the goal