Jackie and Me(71)

“Don’t be vulgar, Lem, I’m talking about . . .” Her eyes

went quiet. “I don’t know what I’m talking about. Do you

know what I’m talking about?”

By now I was a little too far gone to suggest I didn’t.

“You want to be loved,” I suggested.

“There’s that. Do you know what I’ve decided, Lem? If he

moves on, it won’t kill me. The only way I will be killed is if he doesn’t, and only if I can’t find a way to free myself and—”

“You should leave,” I said.

Her eyelashes made a slow downward sweep.

“How leave? He’s not even mine to leave.”

“I don’t mean leave him, goose. I mean leave. In the—

the intransitive sense of the word. Or . . .” I was feeling the Gibsons. “If you need a direct object, leave the city. The state. The country, if you can manage. Catch the first rocket to the moon.”

“I spy, with my little eye, a girl running away.”

“Tell her she’s running toward. Tell her the farther she roams, the more he will tug back.”

“You sound awfully sure.”

“I am.”

“How can you be?”

“Because that’s what she used to do.”

TWENTY-NINE

W henever I speak of Rose Kennedy in private or public, I make a point of enumerating her virtues, not

the least of which has been her kindness to me through the

years. Indeed, there have been times, I’m touched to report, when she has introduced me to family friends as her fifth son, with just the barest brush of quotation marks. We’ve

always got on, and it’s because I know her as I do that I still enjoy watching America try to figure her out. Watching her image migrate over the past four decades from mother of

champions to Mother of Sorrows—or, if you like, Mary at

the manger to Mary at the cross. Neither extreme captures

the hard, indestructible seed around which she is wrapped.

Biographers have made hay with the index-card file she kept



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for each of her children, the notes she taped to their walls or pinned to their pillows, the mandatory calisthenics at dawn—that whole arsenal of muscular Christianity. They

imagine her unblinking, ever on the spot. But in fact, for

as long as I’ve known her, she was gone as often as here.

Gone sometimes even when she was here. In Jack’s six years

at Choate, she visited precisely once, and that was for Joe Junior’s graduation. Never again did she darken our door, not when Jack was on the verge of being expelled, not when

he lay for days in the infirmary, mysteriously wasting. No, you can’t understand Mrs. Kennedy until you understand that she was a chief executive officer who, in exchange for keeping the family stock high, was rewarded with lengthy annual leave. The place was always Paris, where, depending

on the day or hour, she could be found in the front row of

a fashion house or on her knees at Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

She might be gone for weeks, and Kennedy family lore

has preserved the moment when little Jack snarled, “Gee,

you’re a great mother to go away and leave your children

alone.” Yet, as I burrow back toward that boy, it seems to

me he must have assumed he was the reason. If he’d been

neater, more orderly; if he’d tucked in his shirt or picked up his clothes, declined to pick fights with Joe Junior—maybe then she would have stayed. Mrs. Kennedy’s school of parenting was premised on two suspended possibilities. She

would one day approve of you, and she would never. It was

how you kept children in line in those days.

And we never do outgrow our child-selves, do we? Jack,

as long as I knew him, hated to be abandoned. There were

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evenings he’d make me take the next morning’s train back

to Baltimore because he didn’t want to stare down midnight

alone. And if, God forbid, you left him in anger (which is how Mrs. Kennedy often did), he’d be beside himself until you came back. “Come on, LeMoyne, when’d your skin get

so thin? You know what a blockhead I am.”

I was never above profiting from this, even if it was just

to get him to cover a round of drinks, but, in those days,

Jackie was new enough to his psyche that she couldn’t

quite see what she had to gain from ceding the field. What

tipped it for her was an out-of-the-blue summons from

her editor.

Would she care to cover the royal coronation in London?

The young Americans currently salivating over Lady

Di’s upcoming wedding could never understand, I think,

what a big fucking deal Princess Elizabeth was. Monarch

to a quarter of the world, handsome enough to captivate

the remaining three quarters or give their fantasies room

to run. You couldn’t travel from one end of Manhattan to

the other in those days without finding Lilibet’s face in a window or on a ceremonial plate. Tea towels, lunch boxes.

Americans begged their friends of friends, their second cousins of maiden aunts, for the tiniest spot on the Westminster parade route. Even Mr. Kennedy, with his mountains of capital, couldn’t rout up a single invitation, and here was Jackie, granted the golden triad of travel, room and board.