Jackie and Me(7)
The year in Paris went by with no great incident; no
disastrous attachments were formed, at least not to Mrs.
Auchincloss’s knowledge; and each week, Jackie, in a semblance of gratitude, mailed back a postcard (“Camus asked
me out for tea”) or a whimsically illustrated letter. In sharp contrast were the blocks of Vieux Lille cheese that a Parisian fromagerie delivered to Merrywood every month and that emerged from their Air France cartons smelling like vengeance itself. The cheese could neither be eaten nor decoded, but if this was the worst Mrs. Auchincloss had to put up with, she would call herself fortunate; and when Jackie,
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upon her return, declared she would finish out her final year at George Washington University—the very opposite of the Sorbonne, a reluctantly desegregating commuter college
that would cause no suitor discomfort—Mrs. Auchincloss
chose to see that as accommodation and waited out the final months of Jackie’s senior year the way one waits for a bal-loon to give up its last reserves of air. When her daughter was ready to do business, she would be there.
But what business did Jackie have in mind? She was a
creature bending both toward and away from matrimony.
Her high school yearbook photo, for instance, was a study in maidenly abstraction with rills of brunette tresses designed to make some poor fool lose his head. (By then, one or two had.) But if you let your eyes travel to the accompanying
text, you find that her devoutest ambition was “not to be
a housewife.” It was this innate instability that made her
maddening to somebody like Mrs. Auchincloss, for whom
matrimony was an institution so sacred she’d gone at it twice to get it right. She knew that, in the vast majority of cases, life granted to each girl a remorselessly shrinking interval in which to close the deal, and as she looked about, she couldn’t help seeing how many girls, Jackie’s age or younger, had grabbed in a single nervy jump the summer place at Watch
Hill, the life membership at Indian Harbor, the ski chalet at Canandaigua, the charge accounts at Tripler’s, Brooks’s and Abercrombie’s. To be sure, their husbands drank too much and, over time, acquired “directorships” that kept them very late in the city, but it was assumed that any wife would happily go to bed alone if it was on D. Porthault sheets and that 24
LOUIS BAYARD
the very softness of the sheets came from the hard terms that had secured them and from the knowledge they could never be taken away. What girl could wish for anything else?
In reply, Jackie might have told her about Cressida.
She was a girl Jackie first encountered during a subscrip—
tion ball at the Biltmore. Slight, bony, grotto-pale, edging dangerously past twenty-one, with straight black hair and a quality of barely sheathed rage. She sat alone on a couch in the ladies’ room, smoking Raleighs, while the other girls clipped and curled themselves like terriers. When the time for dancing came, she took one turn with her brother, another with a step-cousin, then vanished down a circular stairway.
It was only when the evening was winding down that Jackie
stumbled across her in the Biltmore bar, reading by the light of a revolving pyramid of vodka bottles.
“Are you going to sit here all night?” Jackie asked.
“Why shouldn’t I?”
When the other girls spoke of Cressida, it was in tones of
reflexive pity. Poor thing. No money of her own. Couldn’t
afford a coming out. Sits in her grandfather’s library all day.
Won’t go to college or even secretarial school. The most consistent critique was that she didn’t care. About her plain face (anyway, she wore no lipstick) or her blighted financial hopes or her borrowed evening dress, or the incontestable fact of her unpopularity. But the boredom that so enveloped her in social settings suggested she was beyond judgment’s reach. It was as if, having anatomized the limits of her world, she was now, with every silent passing second, plotting her escape, like a convict taking a gnawed spoon to the cell wall.
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Jackie made a point of saying hello whenever their paths
crossed, and if the greeting was returned, she might venture a conversation on some book she’d read or a news item in the Herald Tribune. Cressida neither resisted nor joined in; she simply waited for the overture to die a natural death.
You don’t understand, Jackie wanted to say. I’m not like the others. Only she knew that, in all essentials, she was, and that, on that day when America’s proletariat had finally shaken off its chains and come swarming over the Madison Avenue barricades, it would be Cressida, still smoking her
Raleighs, who would mark Jackie out for the long knives.
“You’ll want that one. Debutante of the Year, 1947.”
The wonder was that Jackie couldn’t just dismiss her as all her friends had. Quite to the contrary, she carried a little bit of Cressida into the world with her. Whenever she felt herself working a little too hard for a man’s approval—batting her eyelashes at some soused lacrosse player or pretending to a trust lawyer in a serge suit that she had no idea who Albert Schweitzer was—she felt the fork-prick of that old reproach.
And when, seemingly on impulse, she left the lacrosse player or trust lawyer standing by the punch bowl, she imagined Cressida grudgingly dispensing a line of approval.