Jackie and Me(58)
next month—and I can’t exactly hack my way through the
Colombian bush or gallop across the llanos as I once did with Bobby Junior, but I can still remember and, more to the point, still remind these young people, dear to me all, of the legacy they will one day fulfill. If that doesn’t give a life meaning as it straggles toward its end, if that doesn’t impart a legacy that will endure long after I’ve gone, then I don’t know what could.
TWENTY-FOUR
A ll the same, I find myself lingering in my bathrobe
longer than I should—some days I never take it off.
Some mornings, too, I stay in bed a bit longer than I need
to; I don’t always open the blinds. There are times I’ll hear an amusing joke from Carson, or I’ll read about the two pandas trying to get it on at the National Zoo, and I have
an overwhelming desire to—well, discuss it with someone.
Just the other evening, I had the strongest urge to go see
Alberta Hunter at the Cookery, yet the prospect of getting there—hailing a cab and scaring up a ticket and positioning myself within shouting distance of a men’s room, then somehow beating the rest of the crowd back out to the curb
to scare up another cab—I don’t know, it all seemed quite
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impossible to negotiate. Alone, I mean. Now, I can’t abide
sentimentality in the elderly, but sometimes it catches me by the throat, so I find that traveling back in time is a kind of antihistamine, clearing out all the passages and enabling me to breathe more clearly.
For instance, I can see that, during that summer of ’52,
Jackie and I both passed tests that could, from a certain
angle, be described as chivalric. My reward was a clean
record; hers was an invitation. Upon learning that she was
visiting family in Newport over Labor Day weekend, Jack
spontaneously (or so it seemed) invited her to slide on over to the adjoining Bay State at her convenience and join him on the campaign trail. “Poke your head in” was how he put it,
and she was left to imagine what that meant. Was she to be
introduced in any capacity? Granted pride of place? Would
she be walking at his side or trailing a few steps behind? At this point, of course, she had only the most rudimentary understanding of the political process, but one afternoon,
she descended to the Times-Herald photograph morgue and assembled from the detritus of the past five years a collage of political wives—studied them as she might a spy cipher.
She determined that they all had in common the ability to
sit utterly still, ankles touching and toes turned lightly out.
They also shared the gift of radiating a fathomless peace. I have made the right choice, and so must you. Jackie actually practiced the look herself in her bedroom mirror and found to her surprise that her own heartbeat was dropping, second by second, as though she were lying down to hibernate.
This, she thought, was how she needed to be for Jack.
208
LOUIS BAYARD
To cover herself in the event of any conversations breaking out, she combed the Times-Herald front section and rang up Jack’s office for his position papers “Containing Soviet Expansion” and “Pumping up the Massachusetts
Economy” (the latter of which she fell asleep to while reading on the train). But, not surprisingly, the element that most consumed her was what to wear. She scissored up magazines and catalogs, squinted into shop windows, even asked random women on the street where they’d gotten a belt.
(“Lansburgh’s, did you really? Oh, it’s darling.”) Her goal at first was simply to avoid standing out among the Kennedy sisters and, by extension, Kennedy voters (who were all jumbled together in her head), so she took Ethel as her initial model. Ethel wouldn’t wear velvet, that was too old. No lace or orchids. Pearls, maybe, but graduated. Some kind of jacket. A small red hat, possibly, pinned at a demure angle.
Sensible heels in case there was walking.
As the date approached, she developed a morbid fear of
getting a run or a snag or a roll in her stockings, so she
packed double the usual number, as well as a quantity of
facial tissue in case her lipstick smeared, and when she woke that Sunday, she took the coldest possible bath before climbing into the hired car.
All this had been founded on the idea that she would be
making an impression, good or ill. Yet the barely pubescent aide who greeted her in Swansea merely pointed her in the direction of a charter bus. “You might want to hurry up,
ma’am. Driver doesn’t wait for anybody.” She squeezed into
a seat next to a plump, fervent Teamster wife and reached
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for the nearest window, only to find the latch broken. In
this fashion, she was ferried from Middleborough (League
of Women Voters) to Somerset (Catholic Women’s Club) to
Mattapoisett (VFW potluck). Some sort of food was always
waiting for them, always a little too long out of doors.
Hamburgers and wizened hot dogs, corn still crunching
on the cob, a platter of gray fried clams and, for the many drinkers, kegs of Ballantine IPA and Pabst.
Mr. Kennedy was nowhere to be seen, but Jackie did