Jackie and Me(81)

“Can we just leave it as I’m glad you’re here now? Because

I am,” he said. “I desperately am.”

She smiled a little, gently pushed the arm lamp away to

take the glare out of her eyes.

“You know,” he said, “you can get out of this whole marriage business now.”

“Why would I?”

“Because you’d have to get used to this kind of thing.

And maybe the other side of the thing.”

The other side. She tried in that moment—tried hard—to imagine herself as a widow, in black crepe and veil, jet jewelry, wailing over an open grave, but the figure she conjured didn’t have any face at all, let alone hers.

“Next time you’re here,” she said, “I’ll wear my naughty—

nurse costume.”

“Ooh.” A signal light flared from his eyes. “You look

plenty naughty now. If I could . . .”

He reached a hand in her direction, but she was already

rising from her chair and intercepting it.

“Will you tell them?” she asked.

286





LOUIS BAYARD


“Tell who? You know, this isn’t an infectious kind of disease, we could still—”

“Tell your family.”

“You could nurse me back to health right here and now.”

“I know,” she said, and waited for his eyes to track back

with hers. “But you need to tell them.”

“What?”

“That you told me and it didn’t break me and I didn’t turn tail or get the vapors or whatever they thought might happen.”

He regarded her for a moment.

“I’ll tell them.”

THIRTY-TWO

S he left that hospital, then, with the feeling of having

passed another chivalric test—a sense bolstered by

Mr. Kennedy, who called her that night to commend her for

“cheering up Jack to no end.” Indeed, so buoyant would his

spirits prove that, as soon he was cleared from the hospital, he cast his eyes across the sea. It was the height of summer, and if you were a man who’d escaped another brush with the Reaper—at any rate, if you were Jack—the best way to

celebrate was to charter a yacht in the South of France and sun yourself, sans fiancée, in Cap d’Antibes.

The official explanation was that he was consulting with

the French government on Vietnam policy, but Jack’s folks

didn’t bother keeping up that pretense. Mr. Kennedy assured

288





LOUIS BAYARD


Jackie it would just be a little bachelor party. Mrs. Kennedy said it was something a bridegroom needed to get out of his system. Mrs. Auchincloss could not be so sanguine, and

indeed the impotence to which she’d been reduced by the

wedding planning only intensified the clench of her voice.

“Darling, I’m in such a quandary. What sort of man

goes away by himself two weeks before his wedding? Oh, I

remember! Your father.”

Jackie turned away, but there was no escaping her mother’s croon.

“What a sorority we shall be!”

As luck would have it, Black Jack Bouvier was currently

in the South of France himself. He had checked himself

into another sanatorium—or somebody had done it for

him. Through the intermediary of his son-in-law, Michael

Canfield (who was either in the same facility or prowling

just outside), he assured Jackie that he was drying out faster than Oklahoma and would be ready to squeeze himself into his best evening coat and escort her down the aisle.

If she’d had her father in the same room, she’d have asked

how a man could come to a certain kind of understanding

in a hospital room and then act as if the understanding had never happened. She’d have asked if a conventional marriage was really the kind of straitjacket a real man couldn’t wrig-gle out of fast enough. Wasn’t there something to be said for the man who came home every night, ready to engage

in ritual displays of affection, however tedious? Was there not, in fact, a peculiar loneliness that lay just outside those rituals?



JACKIE & ME

289

Remembering all the scholarly articles she’d translated

on the subject of Indochina, she wondered why Jack hadn’t

at least thought to bring her along to France as interpreter. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that interpretation wasn’t the issue, nor did I have the stomach to pretend that all would be wholesome. Yes, Mr. Kennedy would be going along as chaperone, but the third man in the party was Torby

McDonald, Jack’s old college roommate, who had graduated from being Harvard’s star halfback to Jack’s offensive line, clearing obstructions. So I made the same noises as the Kennedys. Just a few days. He’ll come back right as rain, raring to go.

But, at the same time, I figured she would crave some

diversion of her own, so I suggested a place neither of us had been to. In those days, the Marshall Hall amusement park was a despondent piece of southern Maryland real estate

sitting directly across the Potomac from Mount Vernon.