Jackie and Me(92)

cleaning a glass.

“Her name,” she said at last. “It was going to be Arabella.”

“That’s lovely.”

“I hadn’t really told anyone. Not even Jack.”

“Well, I’m sure he’d—”

“Oh, and Bobby spoke to the priest. The Church . . . oh,

she’s—she’s baptized by intent.”

“Ah.”

“So she’ll be fine.”



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Being a cradle Episcopalian, I was slow getting there.

Arabella’s parents had intended to baptize her, so Arabella’s soul could vault straight from limbo to heaven. It was in times like these I recalled how hard the old faith gripped.

“Have you talked to him?” she asked.

“Not since he left.”

And with that the message that had been balled up in me

since leaving Baltimore came unballed.

“Darling, I hope you won’t believe anything you’ve read

in the columns.”

She regarded me with the deepest placidity. “What have

I read in the columns?”

“Oh, that he’s—I’m not even going to dignify it.”

“‘Floating Mediterranean love nest.’”

I sat up a little straighter. “That’s one.”

“Mummy keeps me up to date.”

“Of course it’s all untrue.”

“Of course.”

I peered a little harder into those vacant eyes, which were looking less vacant by the second.

“If you want my opinion,” I said.

“Yes?”

“I have to believe he’s grieving just as hard as you are

right now.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve seen it. With Kick, Joe Junior. When he’s

hit hard like this, he doesn’t gnash his teeth or pull his hair, he gets quiet. He turns inward. But, of course, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t feel it, dreadfully.”

326





LOUIS BAYARD


“Why can’t he feel it here?”

I tucked one finger into my shirt collar, then another.

“Jackie, there’s something that helps me sometimes in

thinking about Jack. Now, I would never tell him this to his face, but I happen to think he’s a great man, and the world asks a lot of its great men. When I think about that convention, for instance, what he was able to do. I mean, a lot of people can lose a shot at the vice presidency, but how many can rise above that and still come out ahead? I watched it on TV, like everyone else, and I was still in awe. The willpower, the nerve it took to accomplish that.”

“What are you saying, Lem?”

“Just that when one finds a man who’s capable of such

things—as you and I both have—one cuts him allowances,

that’s all. One gives him his rein because this is somebody above the common, and all the old rules, they don’t necessarily apply.”

Rules. I suppose I was thinking in that moment of all

the times he’d referred to me out loud as the walking ape

man or Pithecanthropus erectus or needled me for my bad breath or my bad lungs or my poor eyesight. Narrated my circumstances, like a Grimm brother, for the surrounding

guests. “Ladies and gentlemen, there was a boy named Lem,

and his mother always sewed his name into his socks so they wouldn’t get lost, and to this day, she sews his name into his socks. So they will never be lost. Show us your socks,

Lem.”

That kind of thing. But, as I was making the case to

Jackie, I noticed two circles seeping through her hospital



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smock, exactly where her nipples were, and slowly enlarg—

ing. Not blood, as I first thought, but milk.

I turned my gaze toward the casement windows. Imagined

I had never even set foot in this room, but her voice stole after me.

“You really do love him, don’t you, Lem? I wish he loved

us half as much.”

She reached then for my hand. Gripped it with surprising

force between both of hers.

“Lem, do you remember that scenario you once sketched

out for me? I believe I was floating toward a waterfall.”

“Yes.”

“Only it didn’t matter because there was someone on

the shore who was watching out for me the whole time and

making sure nothing happened. Do you remember, Lem?”

“Yes.”

“There was a lesson, and it was hiding there the whole

time. Nobody’s watching, Lem. Nobody at all.”

“Dear one,” I said, and leaned in with an intensity that

was matched by her recoil. Thus, we beheld each other.

I don’t think it’s too much to say that, in that moment,

I was face-to-face with a new Jackie, forged from the ruins of the old one. Everyone who has lived in America in the years intervening has seen that face. Under a pillbox hat, at a state funeral, on a Mediterranean island, at a gala, in the glare of some paparazzo. I passed it just the other day in the East Village and recognized it as something wounded into impermeability. I wish I could feel some pride of ownership, but mostly I just feel it staring back at me.