Jackie and Me(91)

The reality was something different. Soon after her honeymoon, Jackie learned that her new husband, far from settling into married life, had simply resumed campaigning. His new national stature required him to travel from Montana to California to Missouri to Texas, wherever there was a stump speech to be made or a donor to be squeezed. His weekends belonged strictly to others, and if, by some miracle, she kept him at home more than two nights in a row, one or both of those nights was given over to a political function.

Even there, she couldn’t feel him to be entirely hers. On

more than one occasion, she saw him funnel his last reserves of energy toward a young woman who couldn’t quite believe her luck. A caterer, a Russian translator: the more insignificant she was in the Washington scheme, the more his interest was piqued. Once, in the middle of a Rock Creek salon, he slipped 322





LOUIS BAYARD


away—just as he’d done at Lee’s wedding—and reemerged as

before with a whisper of foreign scent. Two months later, it happened again; again, a month later. Worse than the unscheduled absences, she found, were the looks that the other wives directed at her while she was waiting for him to come back.

Everyone, it seemed, had heard the rumors of assignations at the Mayflower Hotel, of girls streaming into the Carroll Arms.

Jack was always “in transit” now, and it wasn’t always in the direction of home.

Still, whenever I saw her, she put on a bright face. “Oh, I know,” she told me. “He’s not a typical husband, but I’m not a typical wife, either. The two of us would have been so lonely with the normal kind.”

Yet she was lonely, in those days—like so many other congressional spouses I’ve come across—and it was all the more pronounced for that she was rattling around in a new home, a white-brick Georgian pile called Hickory Hill, where her

only company were servants, whom she didn’t yet grasp how

to manage though she’d grown up entirely around them. She

read voraciously, took a course in American history at the

Georgetown School of Foreign Service, but history was the

last thing Jack wanted to talk about when he came staggering home from his travels, his spinal column so wracked

there was nothing to do but put him to bed.

Wouldn’t it be nice, she thought, to have a child? A child would solve everything.

But that was hard going. She had a miscarriage. The next

year, she got pregnant again. An actual bump was showing

during the ’56 Democratic convention, where Jack lost the



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vice-presidential nomination but still managed to emerge as his party’s heir apparent. His self-awarded consolation prize was to disappear once more to the Mediterranean with (once more) Torby McDonald, as well as his brother Teddy and, come to think of it, George Smathers. Jackie by then was a month away from delivery, but fathers in those days weren’t required to stand by for every pang of labor, and she kissed him goodbye with the usual mingling of melancholy and respite. She would be all right. She would spend the last few weeks of her confinement at Hammersmith Farm. Her mother would see to everything.

A week before the delivery date, Mrs. Auchincloss called

me at work.

“Where is he?” she demanded to know.

“Sorry?”

“The bastard my daughter married.”

“Oh, he’s . . . somewhere off Capri, isn’t he? Elba . . . ?”

“I know all that. The point is he’s not here.”

“No.”

“And it’s stillborn.”

That word lodged somewhere inside the phone receiver.

“I can’t . . . you said . . . ”

“The baby is stillborn.”

“Oh, my God. I’m so sorry.”

“Not half as sorry as he’ll be.”

“Well,” I said, instinctively covering, “perhaps he doesn’t know. It’s awfully hard to reach people when they’re—”

“Oh, he knows. His blessed Bobby told him, but the

Senator doesn’t think there’s any reason to come back.

What’s done is done, he says. That’s a direct quote.”

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Even as I was trolling for another cover, Mrs. Auchincloss

came rounding back.

“She wants to see you.”

Newport Hospital hadn’t bothered moving her out of

the maternity ward—perhaps she hadn’t wanted to—but she

had a private room, at least, a little wonderland of pastel blankets and floral prints, with a high casement window that gave onto the east lawn. When I walked in, she was dozing against the raised headboard, and I was debating whether to wake her when her eyes fluttered open.

“Oh,” she said. “Hello.”

“Hello.”

Gradually reorienting, she gazed about the room, gazed

at her feet, her hands, me.

“It was good of you to come,” she said.

“Of course, darling. I’m so very sorry.”

“Oh, you’re a dear, thanks. I was just going to . . . what

was I . . .”

She waved a hand in front of her eyes, as though she were