Jackie and Me(79)
turns on you and the man on the street is more intrigued by your opinion than his, and the girl at Miss Porter’s who once wrote you off as fatally callow sends you a bouquet of orchids with the inscription, belle dame sans merci,
and the Kalorama hostesses who never thought or knew to
include you now insist their garden parties would wither and die and be swallowed by the earth without the solar power of your face.
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Invited up to the Cape for the last weekend of June, she
found to her surprise an entire photo crew from Life magazine waiting. The results are ripely hilarious (for, of course, I’ve kept the issue). Jackie running with a football, Jackie playing softball—she hated both sports—and, in maybe the most startling juxtaposition, sitting barelegged between Jean and Eunice, the three of them chattering away like the swim team at a Poconos camp. If you consider what fascinates people about today’s Jackie—the sense, I mean, of a deeply guarded personality blossoming under the pressure of a camera lens into something deeply suggestive—that mystery
is nowhere to be found here. The Jackie of twenty-three is all in. Her smile crackles, her hair flies away with every cross-breeze. In one photo, she leans back on the veranda rail, leg extended like a chorine’s, her face perfectly framed in the shadow of her straw hat, and the Atlantic nothing more than a black-and-white scrim at her back. Crowing, by the looks of it, and which of us shall blame her? In the words of Life, she’d gone and nabbed “the handsomest young member of the U.S. Senate.”
But what I come back to is the magazine’s cover photo:
Jack and Jackie “alone together” on the Honey Fitz. She’s holding on for dear life to something—the boat’s mast, probably. Her hair is blowing straight toward the sky, and
her face is refulgent with joy. I linger on this image because it seems to me that whatever reservations she was feeling that summer, they weren’t about him.
Then you look at Jack. Knees drawn to his chest, eyes
cutting rather sheepishly her way, hair unusually matted
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(somebody must have forced headwear on him) and the smile
a little matted, too. A deliberated set of enamel. “Senator Kennedy Goes A-Courting” is how the sans-serif headline reads, but who’s courting and who’s being courted? Did he
taste, via that premeditated photo shoot, some of the camera-ready charisma that his fiancée would impart to a nation and a world? Did she, as a result, leave feeling more squarely positioned in his heart? Or, conversely, did she grasp even more the imbalance built into loving him?
By the time that issue of Life hit the newsstands, he was back in the hospital. A recurrence of the old wartime malaria, it was put out. We had long since been banned from speaking the disease’s actual name, not even to his fiancée, who kept reasonably planning trips to Jack’s bedside, with chocolates and cold compresses and lullabies. One by one, the family telephoned her, begging her to keep her distance. Jack needed his rest, that’s what Mr. Kennedy said, and what would be less restful than a pretty lady in the room? Mrs. Kennedy
said that a boy wanted to be strong for his girl. Even Ethel got into the act. “Jackie,” she said, “it’s tiresome. Trust me.”
This was the most revealing response of all for it implied
that Jack’s hospital stays were so chronic by now as to be
banal, and indeed, to those of us who’d known him all our
lives, even last rites were a little déjà vu. No one was more bored by the whole fire drill than he was, and nothing would have filled him with greater horror than Jackie swooping in with her silent-movie eyes. By way of forestalling that
moment, Jack took the unusual step of calling her regularly from Georgetown Hospital. “No, dear, I’m just waiting it
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out. Thank God for books,” he quickly added. “They’re all the company a boy needs.” The voice was still vigorous, the manner ironic. By the sound of him, he wasn’t ill at all.
Yet there was something about being so conspicuously
kept away that kindled in her an opposing reaction. She was certain now that a mystery lay harbored inside Georgetown Hospital, and she would begin by going at its softest point.
“Lem,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to send Jack some
flowers, but I don’t know which room he’s in.”
“Oh, just leave them at the front desk.”
“I don’t dare! Someone might walk off with them.”
So, with a room number in hand, she showed up one
Sunday afternoon, bearing an actual bouquet—marigolds
and snapdragons—and ascending the rear staircase to better conceal herself. She actually trembled a little, reaching for the door. What if the whole clan were there? As it turned out, there was only Jack and Mrs. Lincoln, in quiet conference. At sight of her, they were utterly silent. Then, in answer to an invisible signal, Mrs. Lincoln packed up her manila file folders and trooped out.
“I’ll have to speak to someone about the security,” said
Jack.
“You really should.”
Most of the room’s surfaces were occupied by other bouquets, in various states of decay, so she left her own flowers, still in their wrapping, on the bedside table, then retreated to the chair furthest from the bed, a modular number with a brown-leather cushion that seemed to sigh beneath her.