Jackie and Me(60)

Yet, even as she reached that conclusion, contrary evidence rushed in. He’d asked her to come, hadn’t he? Surely he’d wanted to give her a glimpse of this life—the life she might one day share—so that she could be sure it suited her.

Oh, it was true he hadn’t come within twenty feet of her

the whole day, but that was a function of logistics, wasn’t it, not feeling? And hadn’t Mrs. Kennedy cast an approving vote, and as the tea party was winding down, wasn’t it Ethel, just a couple of weeks shy of labor, who strolled over and tendered her a not unfriendly nod and made some con-spiratorial joke about Fall River ladies? No, hard as Jackie looked, she couldn’t find any evidence to suggest she didn’t have some role, however obscure.

Bobby arranged for a driver to take her to the Providence

airport, and she had just climbed into the passenger side

and closed the door after her when she saw a figure jogging toward her. It was Jack. He motioned for her to roll down her window, then, after cutting his eyes both ways, leaned

into the car.



JACKIE & ME

213

“Thanks for coming.”

“I was happy to.”

“You’re a good sport,” he said, and kissed her.

Circumstances didn’t allow for more than a peck.

Decoding it, however, would be the work of days, because

it tasted so different from earlier ones. Was it simply a good sport’s reward? Or was it something more affirmative, more domestic? Painstakingly she rolled back the reel to the point just before he leaned into the car, the peculiar sheen in his eyes. He wasn’t just saying goodbye, he was studying her.

And, in that instant, it seemed to her, making a decision.

She thought now of all those besotted women guzzling

Mrs. Kennedy’s tea or swelling the ranks of campaign rallies, longing in the recesses of their hearts for the gift that Jack had so casually and (it seemed to her) conclusively bestowed on her. She had it in her to pity them. She had it in her, too, to relish the fact that she had, in her own way, been elected. “Just think,” she told herself more than once. “He could have had anyone. Anyone at all.”

TWENTY-FIVE

A ny hope of attending Jack’s Election Night party

was scotched when her editor insisted that she stay

in Washington to report on a local Eisenhower event. But

even as she was putting her story to bed, she was following the teletype machines for returns from Massachusetts,

and when she saw that Jack had won by a margin of seventy thousand votes—roughly the same number as the

women who had flocked to Mrs. Kennedy’s tea parties—

Jackie permitted herself three cigarettes in quick succession and a tumbler of the peach schnapps that she kept in

her desk, Front Page–style, for special occasions. The next night, she called me in Baltimore, badgering for details.

How many people were at the Bellevue? When did Lodge



JACKIE & ME

215

put in the call? What were the first words out of Jack’s

mouth?

I told her as much as I could remember. Coke bottles and

martini glasses, TV sets on fruit boxes, an endless fugue

of ringing telephones. Bobby, with a pencil tucked behind

each ear, dashing from one precinct map to the next. An old guy in a green hat, stomping out ballpark-organ chords on a piano, and every half hour, a barbershop quartet, recruited from Brookline to croon the campaign theme song: He’s your kind of man/So do all that you can/And vote for Kennedy!

“What did the sisters wear? Not those flared skirts with

the vote for kennedy embroidery?”

“The same.”

“Ethel, too?”

“She couldn’t come. The doctors said it was too soon

after the baby.”

“As though that would stop her. I’m surprised she didn’t

get a dispensation from Archbishop Cushing. What about

Mr. Kennedy?”

Ah, that was a subject all its own. After years of self-appointed exile, the patriarch chose that particular evening to stroll back into the light of the cameras. Who could blame him? All those months of strategizing, all that outflow.

Checks sent to the right people, meaningful phone calls to

Senator McCarthy and the Boston Post. The TV, the radio, the handbills, the phone banks. He’d shouldered it all in manful silence so that now, surrounded by the family he’d so rigorously molded, by the son he’d so monastically served, he might exult.

216





LOUIS BAYARD


“By God!” he shouted. “We did it!”

And was she part of that we? She had spent no more than twelve hours on the hustings, but she held out hope that, in some intangible way, she had buoyed the candidate. Like those political wives in the newspaper morgue, she had

backed the right man. Someone who had risen from segregated origins to the most exclusive club of all. It filled her with a kind of hush, contemplating his whole arc, and watching hers bend toward it. “Senator Kennedy,” she

would whisper when nobody was in earshot. “Senator and

Mrs. Kennedy.”

She never knew if Jack had tried to reach her on Election

Night—he wouldn’t have found her if he’d tried—but he did