Jackie

Chapter 4

The reception room at Vogue. High ceilings, tall windows, a shiny black floor. Large potted plants mixed in with white wicker furniture. Elegantly coiffed women drift by, carrying notebooks and clipboards. Two young secretaries, slim and graceful, sit behind equally graceful Chippendale desks, kitty-corner to one another. One of them hands me an employment form. I sit down on one of the sofas.

- Permanent address?

I write my mother’s and Hughdie’s address at Merrywood in Virginia. I am only the poor relation, I could scribble in the margin. Yes, we come from once-upon-a-money.

- Spouse? None

- Minor children? None

- Religion? Catholic

- Can you type? Yes

- Take shorthand? No

- Do you own a house? No

- Are you communist? No

- Have you ever joined a group plotting to overthrow the government? Not today

I sign the bottom of the form, hand it back, and return to the sofa to wait.

The managing editor, Carol Phillips, comes out.

“We’re so happy to have you on board, Jackie,” she says. “Your writing’s exceptional. We all agreed. I particularly love the piece about your grandfather, the violets with the rain, the swish of traffic outside. You brought us right into that room.”

She leads me through a maze of offices. I meet the personnel director of Condé Nast, then the art director, who’s laying out portraits by Irving Penn for the July issue.

“I love Penn’s work,” I say, looking over the photographs.

“Any in particular?” Carol asks.

“His Twelve Beauties. His still life with the ace of hearts and the black chess piece knight. His Marlene Dietrich.” I smile. Who wouldn’t love Irving Penn’s Dietrich?

Laid out on the worktable are portraits Penn made of a baker, a fishmonger, lorry washers.

“It’ll be called Small Trades,” the art director says.

Yes, I think. The people we don’t see. There’s a portrait of a young Black man in an oilcloth hat with a cart and a hand-chalked sign: Hot Chestnuts Good for the Brain Try a Bag.

Kennedy would love this.

It startles me. Why would he be there, in my thoughts?

I turn to Carol. “I’m just so thrilled,” I say. “I wish September were tomorrow.”

I take a taxi to my father’s apartment on East 74th. The doorman lets me in. It’s after noon. My father is sprawled sound asleep in navy boxers on the living room couch. A small card table propped open, a plate with a sandwich and a knocked-over glass that’s rolled to the edge. I sit down beside him and stroke his face. His hair is wild, a stiff disarray with leftover oil and God knows what else.

“Daddy, wake up,” I say. “I’m here.”

He rolls toward me, his eyes bloodshot, that doomed movie-star swagger.

“Don’t you have an interview?” he murmurs.

“I already went.”

“My best girl,” he says. “I’ll get dressed and be there soon.”

We go to brunch at Schrafft’s.

“So my Jacks will be back in New York,” he says over eggs Benedict and grits. “Which means she’ll be with me.”

I smile and pick through a side of creamed spinach. He is aging. I can see it in his face—heavy lines around his eyes, deeper creases on his cheeks. I don’t have the heart to tell him how the Vogue office, that high-ceilinged, airless space, unsettled me, everything so perfect and neat, the Chippendale desks, wicker couches, and stylized women.

“Fashion has always been more Lee’s world than mine,” I say.

“You can bend any world to yours,” my father says. “They’ve offered the job, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you accepted?”

“I did.”

He slices his knife through his poached egg; the yolk runs into the hollandaise.

When Lee and I were children, after our parents divorced, our father came for us every Saturday in his sharp black Mercury, the top down. He’d keep his fist on the horn until our mother yelled down at him and we skipped out. There were carriage rides through Central Park and extra scoops of ice cream. Urbane, impeccably dressed, roguish. Autograph seekers would mistake him for Clark Gable. It’s the part in your hair, Daddy, I’d tease him. Arrow-straight. Just like you. That made him roar. He taught us how to flirt. He loved parties and racetracks and girls. An unspectacular athlete and gambler, he sunbathed in his apartment window to keep up his tan. He told us we should not only work hard but be the best. And by the way, he’d add, don’t forget: All men are rats.

“Johnny Husted almost proposed,” I say. My father’s spoon stops en route to his mouth.

“Almost?”

“He was fishing.”

“But you didn’t bite.”

“No.”

“That’s my girl.” He raises his Bloody Mary to me, then drains it. “Is Johnny the one in New York?”

“Yes.”

“Why not, then? Play hard to get, then say yes. You have my blessing, as long as you’ll be in New York.” He smiles at me, his dark eyes shining. “Another drink?”

“No.”

“You’ve only had one.”

“I still have half a glass left.”

“There’s a lot to celebrate.” He flags the waiter. “When do you and Lee leave for Europe?”

“The week after next.”

“Your plans for the crossing?”

“Third class on the Queen Elizabeth.”

“Your stepfather can’t spring for first?”

“We’ll ignore the signs and infiltrate.”

He makes a face. I steer the conversation away from the subject of money. “We’ll dock at Southampton, then go to the Savoy. I’ll let Lee have two or three days of dinner dances in London, then I want to buy a little car, a Hillman Minx if I can find one. We’ll drive it all over England and onto the boat train to Paris.”

“Because my girl loves her France.”

“Your Bouvier France.”

“Exactly.” He scoops up a spoonful of grits.

“I want Lee to fall in love with Paris,” I say. “I’m going to take her to all my old haunts.” Dancing at L’Elephant Blanc in Montparnasse, visiting the Luxembourg Gardens and the portrait of my beloved salonista Madame Récamier at the Louvre.

“Don’t forget the Kentucky Club,” my father says.

Dark and smoky, even by day, jazz blaring.

“That’s right,” I say. “Lee’s first existentialist nightclub.”

My father pauses for a moment, then, “You love Paris, don’t you?”

How to explain it? When I lived there for my junior year abroad, it was like living two lives. The city had been shattered by the war. Coffee and sugar were still rationed. Heat was scarce. We could only take one bath a week. I studied bundled up in a coat and gloves. That winter, I boarded with a comtesse who’d been in the Resistance; her husband had died in a labor camp. I’d fly from her apartment in the 16th arrondissement to my classes at Reid Hall. After class, I’d meet my friends at the little café on Rue de l’école. The world had begun to roar back. Jazz spilling from open windows. Fierce debates about postwar politics and the role of philosophy and art. We went to plays in basement theaters and took weekend trips to the south of France on third-class trains. There were free hours in the afternoons when I sat in the Jardin des Tuileries painting copies of the impressionists—Degas, Monet, Manet—that I’d invariably tear up. There were long spring evenings when the daylight just lasted and I walked through the city, that sense of my mind touched by the fire I so often feel in a foreign place—unbound, no family, no social circle with its demands, just a self alone in the world. I’d walk for hours on those evenings, looking down alleyways and narrow streets like I could take a turn down one and step through a doorway into an entirely new life.

“Yes, I love Paris,” I tell my father.

“Don’t love it so much you don’t come back,” he says. “Will you take Lee to Spain?”

“Pamplona.”

He dusts his lips with a napkin. “The running of the bulls.”

“Because there’s no book I love more than The Sun Also Rises. And nobody lives their life all the way up, except you, Daddy, and the bullfighters.”

He laughs. He calls for the check, flirts with the waitress, then gives her a tip.

“Or should we have one more drink?” he says.

“No more drinks.”

“See, Jacks, if you’re in my city, how easy it will be to keep me in line. What time is your train?”

“I have two hours.”

“Let’s walk in the park.”

“I’d love that.”

He touches his mustache, brushing some invisible thing from one end. “When you and your sister are gone,” he says, “be sure to write to your mother.”

“I know. Or she’ll imagine me dead.”

“Or married to an Italian.”

He laughs at his own joke. There’s often a joke at my mother’s expense tucked in. He excuses himself to go to the “the gents’.” I watch him thread among the tables, the graceful stroll, the light easy on his shoulders; he pauses every so often to greet someone, exchange a few words. I play with the lines of a made-up poem in my head. Lee and I have done it since we were children. I’d start with a line, she’d add one, we’d go back and forth. Sometimes I made little drawings to go along with them. My father has stopped at a table to talk to a couple. His hand rests for a moment on the wife’s shoulder—always the actor, always the player—a brief gallant wave, then he’s off again. He passes the bar, takes a right turn, and disappears.

Oh, we’re not at all what you think we are

We’ve traveler’s checks and a little car

When I lived in France for that college year abroad, my friend Paul de Ganay took me to parties at the home of Louise de Vilmorin, who was once engaged to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In her drawing room, silk coverings sheathed the walls. There were banquettes under each window, long ebony tables, and malachite elephants. The conversation was smart and quick, with currents of French and English, and extraordinary guests. Rita Hayworth, Orson Welles, French filmmaker Jean Cocteau.

One night, Paul introduced me to a woman named Pamela Churchill. A horsewoman. We were talking about the shows at Olympia and Bath when she suddenly stopped.

“Did Paul say you live near Washington?” Pamela asked. “You must know the Kennedys.”

“Of them,” I said.

“Kick was my best friend. She died, I’m sure you heard, in a terrible plane wreck. They went into a dive in the Cévennes Mountains. Kick had such life. Everyone loved her.”

I nodded. I hadn’t actually heard this.

“And her brother,” Pamela continued. “Not the oldest who was killed in the war but the next one. Jack. A congressman now. He came to visit Kick once. We all piled into her old station wagon and drove to Ireland to find the original Kennedys. He called me in London one night and said, ‘I think I need a doctor.’ I brought him to Lord Beaverbrook’s doctor, the best I know. Jack was ill for days, you can’t imagine how ill, and I sat by his hospital bed as the life just drifted in and out of him. The doctor said it was something in his constitution and he might not live three years.”

“I don’t know Jack Kennedy,” I told Pamela Churchill that night, which was only partly true. By then I’d met him on the train. I decided that didn’t count. I didn’t want to go into it. There was something about him even then that got under my skin, which I did not have language for.

My father is on his way back. He stops to chat up one of the waitresses. The prettiest one, I’ll tell Lee later, and we’ll laugh about that and roll our eyes—So Black Jack—but it will remind us both of those harder, more ruined spaces in our childhood we don’t like to dwell on.

Oh, we’re not at all what we seem to be…

No one could be wronger, much wronger than he

I stand up; the air in the room feels gauzy, strange, like the reasonable world has begun to dissolve in the heat of the midafternoon.

“Ready, my best girl?”

“Yes,” I say. He takes my arm, and we walk outside into brilliant city sunlight. We cross the avenue, heading north to the park. When he realizes he’s out of cigarettes, I offer him one of mine.

“Too light for me, sweet Jacks. I’ll go buy a pack. Wait for me here. I’ll just be a moment.”

He’ll take longer than he’s promised. He always does. He’ll get caught up with something or someone. Eventually he’ll be back, unfazed that so much time has passed. There’s a bench ahead in the shade. I sit down. A man on a bicycle rides by. A woman with a little dog on a leash—pug nose, bright eyes. A breeze moves through the trees. Dry leaves, leftover from last fall, chase one another in circles. It’s something I’ve loved since I was young, how leaves seem to have a free unseen life beyond the pressure of the wind. Sitting on that bench alone in the warm shade, watching those dry leaves circle, I feel my mind settle.

Once, in Europe, I went with some friends to a painter’s studio, in a courtyard off a sleepy street. While the others sat around smoking cigarettes, he made a portrait of me. Rough, abstract. I was long angles and fierce lines. I loved it.

I don’t want that job at Vogue. I’ve known it, haven’t I, for days. Maybe since that night at the Bartletts’ when Jack Kennedy said, “Eight essays to win a prize you’re not sure you want?” He said it with that smile.

I don’t want the job at Vogue with its smart, hard, beautiful women and the men who cage them into glossy prints. And I don’t want a predictable post-debutante life of charity teas and manicured nails. I don’t want to stay stuck for long at Merrywood or even Hammersmith Farm—its soft-boiled heaven so easy to lose yourself to. I don’t want to grow up to fall into bourbon old-fashioneds and half-nibbled codfish balls. I want to be the artist, not just the figure he drew into raw lines. I want to be the painter, the writer, the scholar. I want to devour books, knowledge, art. I want a life soaked in adventure. I want to never be bored.

I decide it then. How I’ll frame it for my mother: At Vogue, Mummy, I’ll say, there are no boys. In that entire office building, not one eligible man. That will terrify her. I’ll stay in Washington for now, and while she shops for a suitable husband for Lee, I will get a job. Something with edge. A position at the CIA, or journalism. Maybe the Times Herald. It isn’t the Post, but it’s known for always having room for smart young women who want to learn on the job and are willing to work a lot for not much. It’s a place to start. I can move into the bedroom that used to belong to my stepbrother Gore, with its view to the river. I can ride and read and write. I can keep dating Johnny Husted, who lives too far away to really matter. I can go to dances and parties when I feel like it and plead a deadline when I don’t. I can start to map the rest of my life. Quietly. No one has to know. To everyone else, it will all look the same on the surface.

The leaves keep swirling. They blow over my feet. Leaf bits and dust wrap like hennaed lace around my ankles.

I don’t want to be the dust or the leaf or the girl or the cog. I want to be the wind that makes them spin.