Jackie and Me(64)

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be spread in every newspaper across every breakfast table.

Between the grapefruit and the soft-boiled egg. ‘Who’s that girl with Kennedy?’ ‘Can she be as pretty as all that?’ Oh, I just wish I could be there.”

There was a longish pause on her end.

“Where are you going to be, Lem?”

I pointed out that I didn’t rank quite as high as Jack and

would be spending Inaugural Eve with the Maryland dele—

gation ball. “Never mind,” I said. “I’d just be the mastodon in the flashbulbs. Your editors would crop me out on first sight.”

“Oh, but listen. Jack’s throwing a cocktail party, and you

have to be there.”

“Well,” I said. “If you want.”

“Of course I do! Ethel will be there, for cripes sake, and

one of the actual sisters, I can’t remember which. It’s too much family for a girl to face alone.”

Something complicated was detonating in my chest

as I promised her I would come. A sense of my own double-agentry, I guess. But on the appointed evening, I showed up at Jack’s Georgetown row house in my black tie and tails, demanding to know where the pigs-in-blanket were

and laughing harder than anyone at Billy Sutton’s Nixon

impression and kissing Ethel on both cheeks and asking her

in my least filtered voice when she’d stop popping out babies.

(“Never,” she said, and meant it.) I sang along to the South Pacific LP, and when the host himself failed to appear— late, even to his own party—I started a chant among the

guests. “We want a senator/ Not a progenitor!” The volume

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mounted to such an intensity that Jack pretty much had to

come trooping down the stairs, still not quite dressed. It was left to me to tie his damn bow tie.

I brazened it out, in other words, but when Jackie

arrived—later, even, than Jack—I faltered a little. She’d been on her feet since seven that morning, interviewing the guests in the reviewing stands. Strands of confetti had gathered at the back of her head, and she was still trying to scrape ele-phant dung off the bottom of her shoe, but she traveled to the nearest powder room and took off her traveling worsted suit and emerged ten minutes later a proper vision in

gold-webbed Siamese silk with a deep-pleated three-quarter—

length skirt.

I would have commended her for the world to hear, but

somebody else was moving her way. Ethel’s older brother,

George Skakel Junior. Who, upon the untimely death of

George Skakel Senior, in a plane crash, became president of Great Lakes Carbon until his own untimely death in a plane crash eleven years later. And who, up to the exact point of his incineration, was the vilest offshoot of the Kennedy tree I’ve ever encountered, and I’ve met every twig. This was the same George who, during his sister’s wedding to Bobby, aimed a kick at my backside that sent me sprawling across

the aisle of St. Mary’s. He found the whole coup de theatre so amusing that, whenever he saw me afterward, he would tell it to me all over again as if I hadn’t experienced it frame by frame.

It’s a fact of life that, when you’re a kid of a certain sen-sitivity, you encounter your Georges. They’re handsome in a

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way that crumbles at the first breath of mortality, and even at fifteen, they’re going to fat, a prospect that seems to fuel all the terror they visit on others. You think you’ll leave them behind if you grow up fast enough but, against expectations, they follow you through your days. Into the foxholes, the ambulances, the lawns, the beach resorts. Adding jowls

like trophies. Here, then, was George Skakel Junior, getting drunker on Glen Grant whiskey and (now that Jackie had given him the most lightly chilled of shoulders) scouting the room for prey.

“Hey, Lem, my wife’s looking for a powder puff. Maybe

you’ll do?” “Hey, Lem, I heard you helped make Mamie’s

dress for her. No? You mean you kept it for yourself?” “Jesus, Lem, that’s the highest goddamn voice I’ve ever heard on a man. Do you even hear yourself? No, seriously, if it goes any higher, only dogs will hear it.” Always—always—I was the first to laugh because that was the signal that everybody else could, and their corporate sound was as much a relief to me as it was to them. Nobody’s harmed.

As I recall, the only one not laughing was Jackie, who looked merely solemn, and I wonder if it was to escape her gaze that I finally slipped upstairs. All the way to Jack’s bedroom, which, in those days, looked as if its occupant had been recently kidnapped. You’d find the underwear drawer

still open and a shirt still on its hanger, waiting for an owner, and a food-spotted necktie dropped somewhere between the closet and the door, Jack himself long gone.

Yet, on the rare occasions I was left alone in his house,

I found myself wandering toward this very room—possibly

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because it reminded me of our school days. I’d seat myself—

just as I was doing now—on the edge of his bed and inhale