Jackie and Me(6)

“Good night,” she called to the Congressman.

“Some other time,” he said.

THREE

A s she drifted to sleep that night, the image of him

kept cycling before her, and with each turn, the

maternal feeling ebbed and something more appetitive crept

in. She recalled the unaffected ease with which he’d stood

on the Bartletts’ porch. She imagined that, had she given

him a word of encouragement, he would have crossed the

stretch of ground that stood between them, claimed it step

by step and, for all she knew, claimed her, too, if Michael O’Sullivan hadn’t popped up, vaulted into the driver’s seat and driven her and the Bartletts’ dog to—well, where? That was the question that awaited her the next morning.

Some other time, he’d suggested. Yet Monday morning came and went with no word from him, and as the hours 20





LOUIS BAYARD


passed, she found herself toggling between stoicism and

disappointment before resolving into self-reproach. All the pride she had taken in holding herself apart from those other girls, where was it now? Gone with a May wind. The only consolation was that she hadn’t (as she was briefly tempted to do) telephoned Charlie Bartlett and peppered him with questions. Did he find me amusing? Did he ask for my number? She and her mother disagreed on many things, but on this point they were united. A note of desperation, once uttered, could never be unheard.

Her mother, as was her wont, took it a step further.

“Desperate girls,” said Janet Auchincloss, “lead desperate

lives.” Though it was hard to see how she squared that with her own desperate hours. A creature of her time, Janet had graduated into adulthood with a slim but rigorously managed suite of skills. These included French, horse riding and the echolocation of husbands. In that last department, she had staggered quite badly out of the gate. Husband number

one, Black Jack Bouvier, as his nickname suggested, was a

set of cards upon which no girl should stake all her chips. He was nearing forty, his sexual exploits had passed from gossip into legend, he drank the way monks meditate, and he was hard at work squandering a $750,000 inheritance (for it takes effort to lose money as fast as he did). As for his softly bruited claims of French nobility, he never troubled to document them or even, after a couple of martinis, sustain them.

On the asset side, he was in the Social Register and was

considered one of New York’s top four hundred citizens.

Better still, he looked nothing like the other three hundred



JACKIE & ME

21

ninety-nine. Photographs from his youth show a disquiet—

ing cross between Clark Gable and Hollywood-style bandit,

with eyes of Lake Louise blue and a look of disreputable

masculinity that offsets the dandyish accents of silk handkerchief (blossoming just so from the pocket of his hunting jacket) and brilliantined black hair (parted down the middle with Euclidean precision).

Well, Janet was in those days a creature of the senses. She fell hard, and kept falling—for there was no one to catch her. And when she landed, there was nothing but wreckage.

Money gone, home gone. Pride gone more than anything,

for although marriage may have given Black Jack a pair

of daughters on whom he doted, it caused not the slightest

hiccup in his quest for pussy. Say this about our Janet. She extracted herself from the rubble and, rather than retreat into the divorcée’s genteel exile (in a back bedroom with

a hairpin to keep the bun in place), she made the strategic decision not just to marry again but to set her cap for a Standard Oil heir.

To her exacting eye, Hugh Auchincloss was everything

Black Jack was not: benign and pliable and half-deaf and

functionally impotent, with two lightly crumbling mansions

to his name. This time Janet fell up and, so doing, acquired a passel of stepchildren, who regarded her alternately with banked resentment and naked fear. But even her bitterest rivals would have to confess that she had triumphed against the odds and had done it by keeping her spirits buoyant and her mouth slightly ajar (which, she had learned from practice, men found suggestive) and her eyes on the prize.

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LOUIS BAYARD


In her world, of course, matrimony was the only prize.

There could be no other. So it troubled her single-furrow

mind that her oldest daughter should let her eyes wander and should even, at troubling intervals, fix on some

other life track, not yet clearly visible to anyone. Janet had resigned herself to a certain amount of rebellion, but her daughter’s waywardness had been easier to confine within

the parameters of equestrian events or Miss Porter’s School, which granted girls a certain amount of rein before snapping it back. Jackie, though, had insisted on college and, after two years at Vassar, a year at the Sorbonne, a gesture that went beyond rebellion to affectation. How much French did a girl need? What kind of bridal dowry was Malraux

or Camus? “My daughter l’existentialiste,” grumbled Mrs.

Auchincloss. It was Hughdie, finally, who suggested that

Jackie might need to “get it out of her system,” though he

himself had never felt the need and had only a wary acquaintance with systems. More crucially, he offered to pay.