Jackie and Me(68)

“Ohh.” I dragged myself up to a seated position. “I’m

awfully busy . . .”

“Lem, don’t you see that the bright side of working for

a paper that’s about to die is that the expense accounts are always the last things to go. Mine needs to be spent before Mr. Hearst leaves us as carrion, and there’s a darling little

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place out in Middleburg called the Red Fox Inn, where we

won’t bump into a soul we know.”

Still I hesitated, until at last she said:

“Fine. I’ll drive.”

In the end, that was a greater sacrifice than I could allow her to make. As we motored into the Virginia countryside that Sunday, the roads thinned into ribbons, the fields rolled away in piles of stubble. The split-rail fences and unvar-nished tobacco farms suggested we were crawling back through history, so that, by the time we pulled up to the Red Fox, its Georgian fieldstone exterior looked positively modern. As did the parchment tavern menu, with its tributes to mountain trout and Brunswick stew.

If Jackie had hoped for anonymity, she had miscalculated.

We were barely seated at our table when a sun-ripened doy—

enne in tweed came trotting over. I learned later she was a friend of Janet Auchincloss’s from the DAR. Judging by the way her eyes swelled at sight of me, she took me to be Jackie’s suitor, and it required all the small talk in our arsenal to send her grudgingly back to her table, where she kept flicking gazes our way and whispering in the ear of her paralytic husband.

“Will she hear me?” wondered Jackie. “If I talk in this

tone?”

“Not sure.”

“So the words nightmarish busybody will never reach her.”

I gave it ten seconds. “Not yet.”

“Then let us carry on.” She held her Scotch and soda in

her hand, softly weighing it. “Have I told you much about

my father?”

242





LOUIS BAYARD


“Some.”

“When he married Mummy, he was practically the same

age Jack is now. I wish you could have seen him. So dark.

There was a girl at Miss Porter’s who came up to me on

Parents’ Day and asked me why I had to kiss that Negro in

full view of everyone.” She started to laugh, let it expire.

“I’m sure Mummy thought she’d hit the jackpot. This exotic

man with the exotic name. Boo-vee- ay. How’s a girl with the last name of Lee supposed to stand up to that? Oh, she was warned, but she figured he’d settle down once he got the ring on his finger. The love of a good woman. He didn’t make it a week. They were crossing the Atlantic for their honeymoon, and one night, he went to Doris Duke’s berth and had himself a swell time. Came back with some cock-and-bull story

about a poker game with the purser. Oh, she believed him

the first time. Maybe. But there were too many other times, and after a while, he didn’t even bother hiding. I should have hated him. Every time a row broke out, I should have taken Mummy’s side, but I always came away thinking she was the unreasonable one. I remember once telling her if she were any kind of wife, he’d never—”

She broke off in a trance of incredulity.

“At ten, Lem. At ten I was saying these things. I suppose I thought if she’d just make—what do they call them, allowances—they’d stay together. That’s what I’d do. Lem,” she said, “do you ever get angry at your mother?”

“Well, no. I mean, not to be nakedly autobiographical,

she’s been through a bit, so I guess I don’t want to be the last straw.”



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“Mummy’s been through a bit, too, and I’m still angry at her every chance I get. I’m angry at her more than I’m anything else in life. It’s like a diet or a prayer regimen. I go to sleep angry, I wake up angry, and what makes it worse is thinking how desperate she must have been at my age.

Hanging on for dear life to this man. But that’s what you’ve helped me to see, Lem, I don’t have to be my mother, Jack doesn’t have to be his father. We don’t have to roll out the same mistakes or—screw Gloria Swanson in the doll room.

We can change, can’t we?” She leaned toward me. “I can change, too. I can be what the Kennedys need me to be.”

“But, darling, you don’t have to—”

“No, they’ve chosen me. God knows why, but they have,

so I have to—I have to choose them back or none of this will work. There’s only one catch, really.”

“Yes?”

“Jack has to choose me, too.”

“But he . . . he already . . .”

“No, I mean for good. For good, Lem. Can you help?”

TWENTY-EIGHT

I t’s funny, when I look at some of her columns from

that spring of ’53, I can’t help thinking she was her

own best advocate. She was talking to him out loud, for

everyone to hear. “Are wives a luxury or a necessity?” she

wanted to know. “Can you give any reasons why a contented

bachelor should marry?” And this shot across the bow on St.