Jackie and Me(74)

“Those were his final words?”

“I think so . . .”

“Not I love you or . . .”

“Oh, cripes, no.”

“Well,” said Aileen, rallying. “See you when you get back is even better. That means things are moving forward. If you’d said no, there’d be no seeing him again, would there?”

“I suppose not. But what if I didn’t say anything at all?”

“All right, think hard. Did he mention a date? Because if

they don’t give you a date . . .”

Closing her eyes, Jackie reached back through the fog

bank and extracted from it the word . . .

“September!”

“Oh, that’s soon. What about a place?”

Another extraction.

“Newport!”

262





LOUIS BAYARD


“Well now, there you are. September in Newport. A girl

couldn’t ask for better.”

“No,” said Jackie, faintly.

“And best of all, it no longer matters what you said or

forgot to say to him. The train is moving, and you’re on it.”

Again, Jackie’s face must have failed to impart that particular sentiment because Aileen stared back at her.

“Darling, are you quite sure you’re happy about this?”

“Of course I am.”

“You do know there are a million girls out there who’d be

thrilled to be in your shoes.”

“I know. I’d be thrilled to be me, too.”

And then laughed at putting herself in the conditional

tense.

Through all the months of suspension, she had assumed

it would only take a few choice words to right herself. Now the words had come—however clumsily—and she was no more in balance. Why had he even called? Was it simply,

as Lem predicted, a matter of her being absent? Or was

there just a moment in every bachelor’s life when he runs

out of time and space? Flying back across the Atlantic, she imagined him a famished, half-feral animal, pulling hard at his lead and realizing after a sorrowful interval that it has reached its full length. Turning then and, with an air of defeat, saying: “Why not? Don’t you think?”

THIRTY

S he had this much in the way of security: an engagement ring from Van Cleef & Arpels.

Art Deco in styling, with a 2.84-carat square-cut emerald,

a 2.88-carat matching diamond, and tapered baguette-diamond accents. It was Mr. Kennedy who bought it for a price

that hovered, the columnists suggested, around a cool million. Jackie wouldn’t necessarily have blanched at the sum

or the fact that her future father-in-law had chosen the ring.

(Jack hadn’t the slightest interest in jewelry.) She was even ready to accept Mr. Kennedy’s suggestion, warmly put forth, that she should have it photographed for mass consumption, but that was more than Mrs. Auchincloss could abide.

264





LOUIS BAYARD


“Tell that corned-beef parvenu my daughter is not a professional model.”

The message, watered down, was delivered to Jack, who

brought it in even briefer form to the old man.

“Well,” said Mr. Kennedy, “if that’s how they feel.”

Jackie was surprised by how quickly he backed down,

but from my current vantage point, I can see the old man

was just husbanding his energies for the battle that really mattered.

In those days, if you’d been asked to pick a winner between the Auchinclosses and the Kennedys, you’d have fallen back on categories: Wasp assurance vs. immigrant pluck; clipped

vowels vs. broad. What you might not have allowed for was

the value of research. Long before Jack had lobbed his marriage proposal across the Atlantic, Mr. Kennedy, with an

instinct as natural as breathing, had launched an inquiry

into the Auchincloss brokerage. He learned that investments were tanking, that venture capitalists were looking elsewhere, that a founding partner lay near death and that none of the other partners had the cash to buy up his shares.

“No offense,” Mr. Kennedy once told me, “but the worst

thing about you Wasps isn’t that you lack liquidity, it’s that you think it’s beneath you. The less goddamn cash you’ve got, the more you look down on the shanty clowns who do.”

And when you get right down to it, he thought, what’s

a more cash-based enterprise than a wedding? Now, if

Mr. Kennedy had still been the Wall Street corsair of the

1920s, he’d have heaved toward the Auchinclosses at mid—

day and swarmed their forecastle by sundown. In this case,



JACKIE & ME

265

he bided his time until the exact weekend they invited him

to Newport. Jackie would later speak of the chill she felt

watching him step off his private plane with that adolescent, carnivorous grin. Oh, Mummy, she thought.

Not even the shingled twenty-eight-room splendor of

Hammersmith Farm was safe from Mr. Kennedy’s scrutiny.

He cast an eye over every bowed brick, every rotting window, ran a silent tally of servants and rodents and fed everything straight into his mind’s abacus. It would gird him for what lay ahead and, in particular, for Mrs. Auchincloss. Who, in case I haven’t made it clear, was no more on board with a Kennedy son-in-law than she’d been six months before and