Jackie and Me(88)
the organist? Or if a thunderstorm, defying all predictions, shunts a column of rainwater straight at the bride’s tiara?
Every wedding carries within it the seeds of its own destruction, so when I say that this wedding came off, I mean, of course, just barely.
The most foreseeable problem was Black Jack Bouvier.
As I mentioned, he had dried himself out in anticipation.
Lost some weight, bought a custom cutaway that fit him,
relatives said, like a suit of light. But whatever resolve he
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carried from his latest sanatorium didn’t carry him all the way to church. That morning, in the slow-melting shadows of his Viking Hotel room, he began once more to drink.
Relations were dispatched to fetch him. One of them,
arriving just before ten, found Black Jack still up to the task: gait slow but steady, speech thick but coherent. The problem was his son-in-law and drinking companion, Michael Canfield, who had been at work for some hours, plying
Black Jack with champagne and highballs—the kind of
room-service fount that every recovering drinker dreads and longs for. As Black Jack’s relations struggled to get him into his garters and dress shirt, Michael kept pouring, and Black Jack began to reel. Half an hour later, Janet Auchincloss phoned to tell them that, if her ex-husband were to show his face at church in his current condition, he would be barred at the door—a humiliation broadcast to the world by every waiting news outlet.
She was more than happy to carry the news to her daughter. “Darling, it’s for the best. We can’t have him stumbling down the aisle, can we? Not when Hughdie’s perfectly willing to step up. Now, don’t worry, we’ll tell the reporters he has the flu, there won’t be a whiff of scandal. I mean, it’s not the first time we’ve covered for him, is it?”
Jackie saw it another way. She knew that the rancor her
mother felt toward her father was as unquenchable as the
Maccabean lantern, and she knew without being told that
Janet Auchincloss had sent Michael Canfield to that hotel
room with a specific mission and, in so doing, had claimed
her crowning revenge. Later that morning, a photographer
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would capture Jackie walking toward St. Mary’s on her
stepfather’s arm. Hughdie is glancing rather anxiously in her direction, but Jackie is looking straight ahead toward the brownstone lancet arches with an expression of coldest fury.
Murder in her soul.
A coda of sorts. When the service had concluded, and I
was ushering out my rows of guests, I paused to gaze upon a gentleman in the back row. Unusually swarthy by Newport standards, with an Indian-head-penny profile that looked
both strange and suddenly familiar. Black Jack Bouvier. He
made it to the church after all.
So, yes, things go awry at a wedding because they must,
and it’s the wedding itself that contains it all. An Episcopalian rector once told me that, back in the sixties, a progressive couple convinced him to open his nave for an entirely free-form wedding. No liturgy, no hymns, no exchange of vows or rings, certainly no homily. The bride and the bridegroom would gather with friends and family and do whatever the spirit moved them to do. Within an hour, fights were breaking out, glasses were hurled, scandals were dragged from the closet, uncles and aunts were weighing in with words and fists, and the two people who were supposed to be uniting
their destinies were sitting exhausted in opposite corners of the church, like prizefighters waiting for their cutmen.
What I take this to mean is that the wedding ritual
channels love’s turbulence into love’s performance, and it’s the performance that saves us, and this is precisely why
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wedding receptions, lacking the same liturgical scaffolding, are so much more open to disaster. I speak from experience. On September 12, 1953, I walked into the reception at Hammersmith Farm and came out a different man.
Not too long ago, I looked at some old home-movie foot—
age of the event, sat through the usual lurches and swish pans until the camera swung its way toward me and then stared at myself, as if from the bottom of an aquarium. Good-time
Lem, grinning to beat the band. The same amiable creature
may be found in the photo album, lounging with Jack and
the other groomsmen against a split-rail fence. Yet, when
I consult my own memory of that day, all I remember is
despair dragging at my heels. A psychologist to whom I later (briefly, unwisely) consigned myself told me that my symp-toms that day were those of a panic attack. I will admit that I perspired a lot and reached for my inhaler more times than I’d done in the previous month, but, based on my own experience, it was closer to a bad acid trip. Without benefit of hallucinogens, I was able to lift the skin off everything, and the news wasn’t good. I had outstayed my welcome. I wasn’t just losing my best friend, I was losing the safe passage he’d afforded me all these years, the passport to the enchanted realm that was never really mine. All of it gone! The news
came from the lawyer-novelist in the pale linen suit and tor-toise-shell spectacles, from the plump singing-group alum-nus in the rumpled pink shirt and plaid bow tie, the fashion editor in the salmon dress and dark veiled hat, the sunburnt girl in the sleeveless, backless dress straightening her boyfriend’s fresh-pressed necktie. Every arm was waving me 314