Jackie and Me(50)

line. From behind came a stampeding of feet and a bestial

grunt. Turning, she found Eunice, teeth bared to the gum—

line. A second later, she lay stunned in the grass.

“You’re not hurt,” said Eunice, drawing her to her feet.

It would later occur to Jackie that every Kennedy child must have grown up hearing those same words. She herself had been thrown from horses in her brief time on Earth, but,

in each case, the pain had been mitigated by the knowledge

that no active malice lay behind it. When, a few plays later, she was tackled in almost exactly the same way by Pat, she 178





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chose to embroider her contusions into an injured ankle

and make a mincing exit toward the porch where, though

she drew out her rattan chair to within a few feet of him,

Mr. Kennedy scarcely acknowledged her. It was his wife—

emerging shortly after, dressed for church and carting a

pitcher of lemonade—who beamed at her as though they

were Coliseum ladies watching the gladiators.

“How fast these boys are,” said Mrs. Kennedy.

The next day, she was back to her usual cool self, bidding

farewell to Jackie with an outstretched hand. The Kennedy

girls, at least, were grudgingly polite and expressed the hope that they might see her sometime in Washington, and Mr.

Kennedy clasped her in a brief, close embrace. The whole

business passed in smiles and lightly cocked heads and soft waves, and Jackie had the decency to wait until she was on the homeward-bound train before asking: “Why do you like

them so much?”

I told her then that, to appreciate the Kennedys as I did,

you would have had to be an impoverished Wasp from

Pittsburgh with a widowed mother fluttering like a moth

against her shrinking circumstances. I’d grown up around

horsehair furniture and auctioned-off leather-bound sets,

and my youth, it seemed to me now, was an arrangement in

black and gray, whereas the Kennedys were the full ultraviolet spectrum. Rancor and laughter and sailing into the wind.

It didn’t matter how well you played a particular game—

there would always be another—so long as you played in

earnest and raged at the outcome. I can’t explain it exactly,



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179

but the world just seemed to accelerate around them, and if you somehow found the capacity to keep up with them, it didn’t matter how hard you were working to do it because

they rewarded you by acting as if you’d been there the whole time. My mother always used to say we have two families, the one we’re born to and the one we find. Well, I mean, to find such a family—I thought I’d hit the taproot.

That was not a feeling Jackie could share. To make sense

of her three days and two nights with the Kennedys, she

had to come at them like Margaret Mead in a pith helmet. Observe, she noted, the savages in their littoral clime.

Charging from room to room, falling over each other like

gorillas. Observe in particular how much of their humor

centers on people coming to harm. With what hilarity do

they speak of young Jack crashing his bicycle into young

Joe’s and coming away with twenty-one stitches. Of young

Bobby, in response to the dinner bell, colliding with the

glass partition between living and dining room. Of young

Lem, for that matter, scalded within an inch of his life by the Kennedy shower. Wasn’t that a hoot? Even the oft-repeated lore of Mr. Kennedy selling all his shares just days before the stock market crash depends for its pungency on the millions who didn’t. One must conclude that this tribal culture admits of only winners and losers.

By the time she got back to Washington, Jackie had

decided that the Kennedys were not to be surmounted, only

sidestepped, held at bay, if she were to have access to one particular Kennedy. And this Kennedy had only grown in appeal now that his interest in her had ceased to be

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speculative and now that he was set alongside his family.

She couldn’t help noticing that, during the whole ridiculous family football match, he, alone of the three sons, had never been tackled. Looking back, of course, she could see this was a tacit acknowledgment of his medical status, but at the time, she felt it as a gesture of fealty, and she assumed there would come a time when the same fealty might be extended to her.

And even if it weren’t, what should she care if she could

have the man himself? He was calling more frequently from

the road—in the early evening, when he was still relatively fresh—and on those infrequent occasions when he came down to Washington to put the squeeze on donors, he made

a point of asking her to dinner. (Mrs. Lincoln handled the

reservations.) Depending on their respective schedules, dinner might lead to another kind of squeeze. On the way out of The Colony, say, he might curl his arm around her waist, then very gradually tighten. The taxi would take them back to the Times-Herald offices where her own car waited, and there might follow another squeeze, another kiss or two.

Then she would drive back to Merrywood, only a little