Jackie and Me(59)

accidentally cross paths with Mrs. Kennedy, in her best

Sunday hat, abstractly extending a gloved sparrow’s hand

to all comers, and, on a lark, Jackie presented herself to the flesh-pressing duo of Pat and Eunice, who had no choice but to smile back. As for Jack, he was simply the grinning apparition who appeared at the very last minute, gathering up the crowd’s noise in the way that a dirigible gathers up helium.

His effect was so global and yet so intimate that Jackie,

at first sight, thrust an arm in his direction, only to find a sea of arms on every side. In the five minutes that had been carved from his schedule, he answered one or two of the crowd’s lightly lobbed questions, told some locally oriented joke, begged them to give Massachusetts the leadership it deserved and then, with the faintest crease of apology on his face, went back into the wings, waving the whole way.

The first two or three times, the electricity of the experience was enough to keep Jackie’s mouth lightly upturned

in case a camera or his gaze was trained in her direction. By early afternoon, she had realized how absurd she was being.

Sometime around two, she was herded into a high-school

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gymnasium in Brockton, empty of students but redolent

of every basketball player and cheerleader who had ever

exhaled there. Jackie sat in the back row of the bleachers as a local marching band worked its way through “El Capitan”

and, in the downpour of humidity, felt her tiny red hat pitching and bobbing beneath her traitorously curling hair.

“Won’t you please welcome . . . the next senator of

Massachusetts!”

As quickly as the Kennedy masses formed that day, they

reformed. Filed into the same bus, assumed the same seats

(God help you if you tried to switch) and reemerged at the

next whistle stop with the same air of wonder. In Quincy,

an aide she had never seen before pointed her toward the

front row, where she sat with a horde of unreconstructed

Fitzgerald cousins and had the satisfaction of hearing one

of them whisper: “She’s a friend of the family.” Her view of Jack’s head there was obstructed and, in Boston, at best tele-scopic. She would later recall this as her first taste of fame’s centrifugal effects, the way in which the unfamous are flung outward, but so gently they have no idea they’re moving.

Yet, as she and the Fitzgeralds filed out shortly after, she felt a gloved hand tap her on the shoulder. “You’re doing just fine, dear,” said Mrs. Kennedy.

She was grateful and baffled in equal measure, for in

truth she had been doing nothing—nothing at all—over and

again.

The day’s true epiphany came in Fall River, where the

Kennedy staff had organized a tea party. This was the

meet-and-greet that had become the key innovation of the



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campaign—in large part, I should say, because it targeted

women, whom strategists had always presumed would vote

the same way as their fathers or husbands. Mrs. Kennedy,

answering to her own instincts, simply mailed out engraved

invitations to all the available women in the area—Democrat or Republican, it didn’t matter—and in startling numbers they came. Milliners, housewives, secretaries, high-school

principals, all in their best hats and frocks, clutching their invitations to their bosoms lest anybody try to bar the door.

They gratefully shook Mrs. Kennedy’s hand. They sipped

from her china, commented on her silver service, nibbled

absently on the cookies. It took the candidate to magnetize them. Sauntering in an hour late—which was to say, right on time—he surveyed the ballroom and, with a twinkle whose warmth, whose heat, could be felt a hundred yards off, said,

“Ladies, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”

There was a brief speech, but the ritual truly came into

focus—cracked open, in effect, to reveal its nuclear core—

with the reception line, into which the ladies of Fall River merged with no urging or instruction. One by one, they passed before the great man, took his hand, felt the soft

splash of his smile, the whole concentrated force of him.

Half of them wanted Jack for a son-in-law, the other half for a husband, but Jackie noticed it was the older women who were more likely to lose themselves in his presence and, for want of words, pounce. Watching it all from an enforced distance, Jackie grew steadily disenchanted, and it was just as she was finally turning away that she realized: The whole spectacle depended on Jack being single.

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Every woman in that ballroom had to go in there thinking she had some kind of chance, however remote, and had

to leave thinking that she and Jack had experienced, in their two-second crossing, a flicker of understanding and that the only way to keep that flicker alive was to pass it along, to friends and family members, until they were all part of the same lambent race of adherents, rushing to their precincts on Election Day, voting Kennedy as if their lives and dreams depended on it because they did. Show them Jack’s girl, and the flicker would have been snuffed out at first sight.

Dear God, she thought. He’d be a fool to marry anyone.