Jackie

Chapter 7

July 1952

I don’t fit in. I feel it the moment I close the car door behind me. Aware—too aware—of my frosted hair, sundress, the sandals with gold straps that wrap my calves. On the lawn, a squall of sun-tanned gods in tennis whites stop their football game to look at me. My fingers tighten on the weekend bag in my hand. Behind them, the rambling white clapboard house, trimmed hedges, a tennis court, a circular drive, and the sweep of a wraparound porch, the lawn giving way to the flat blue calm of the sea.

Jack is walking toward me, that ambling lanky walk; the others watch. Bobby, their brother Teddy, and the sisters, burnished faces and long legs. One stands with a hand on her hip. I met her once. Jean.

“Hey, Jackie,” Jack says, “it’s you.”

My smile feels like cardboard.

Then his mother, Rose, is there, telling him to take my bag into the house and up to the sewing room. She steers me toward the front door, through the hall, the sunroom, and the living room with its recessed window seats, fireplaces, framed photographs, and miles of English chintz.

“The house was quite small at first,” she says, a laryngeal scratch to her voice, “but we kept having children, kept adding on rooms, widening the windows and so forth.”

Jack has come down; he shuffles behind us, restless, and his mother finally tells him to go out to play with the others since that’s clearly what he wants to do.

“I left them short a man,” he says.

His mother laughs.

“Come with me, Jackie,” says Jack.

“I’ll be out soon.”

It’s Bobby who meets me when I walk outside. A sinking pressure in my chest as I realize they expect me to play. Football. I try. I run where they tell me to run. I drop the ball twice. They bounce me around, team to team, position to position—it’s like being swept in a tidal wave. Finally I claim a sore ankle. Only Bobby looks genuinely disappointed.

“I’ll just take a short break,” I say.

Sitting on the porch steps, I light a cigarette as they tumble over one another on the lawn in their white cartwheeling chaos, flashing sneakers, their rah-rah shouts and grass-stained knees.

Just watching them wore me out,I’ll tell Lee later. I lean back into the step to feel the edge of the tread digging into the small of my back, grounding me. The louder they get, the more boisterous and competitive, the quieter I go inside.

“Come back in the game, Jackie,” Bobby calls. Teddy grabs the football from him. Bobby knocks him in the chest. The screen door opens behind me. I turn.

“No, please don’t get up,” Joe Kennedy says, but I’m already on my feet. Here he is—the ambassador, the patriarch, the Judas of Wall Street. The man of legendary ambition who made a fortune selling shares on the eve of the stock-market crash. There’s something about him I like, something easy and kind. His eyes dance behind the round wire-rim glasses. He wears golf clothes, the collar loose.

“You’re the one Jack brought,” he says.

“I drove, actually.”

I smile and he smiles back. I sit down on the steps. He sits beside me.

“Did you enjoy your golf?” I ask.

“Damn hot.” He looks out at the lawn. “Who’s winning?”

“I couldn’t begin to tell you.” He seems surprised I’d be that frank. “I’d love to hear about the work you did in film,” I say. “Jack’s told me you have a cinema downstairs, where you screened your movies. Hollywood’s a world apart, isn’t it? Or is it? Tell me.”

He smiles at me, like he knows I might be playing him a bit. But he likes that, as I expected he might, and I can see he’s decided, perhaps then and there, that we’ll be friends.

The rest of that day is a bustling hotel—other guests arrive, friends and cousins washing in from down the road, football to baseball to tennis to swim. Time slows in the late afternoon. I have an hour alone before dinner. I shut the door of the little guest room and lie down, chaos beading off me, the evening air through the window, the smell of rosewater and starched sheets erasing the staticky rush of the day. My eyes trace the design of wallpaper, a water stain near one eave, a line of dust missed on the bureau. A spider dangles off a silken thread.

There was a night when Lee and I were children. It was winter. I must have been about ten. Our parents were still married. We lived in the apartment on Park Avenue. They’d been fighting all fall, doors slammed, vases thrown. I was learning to read their crazy before it struck and learning to pack my own spiky grief away. That winter, for an interim, things had settled. They seemed almost in love again, in a way that might hold. I wanted to trust that hope nudging in. One night, they were going out to hear Eddy Duchin play at the Central Park Casino, and before they left, my mother came in to kiss me good night. Her fur brushed my face, the scent of perfume, the shimmer of her dress as she swept out into the hall where my father waited. He said something that made her laugh. They were happy, I realized. I remember wanting so desperately for that happiness to last.

I dress carefully for dinner. I walk downstairs as the clock chimes seven. The rest of them are already there. They look up from their drinks, an abrupt silence. They’re all in khakis and chino shorts, loafers and slip-ons, twin sets, white oxford shirts.

Jack must see it in my face, the sudden embarrassment; I’m so overdressed. He crosses the room. “Hey, Jackie,” he says gently. “You look so nice. Where do you think you’re going?” I look at him sharply, but he’s smiling, teasing, that conspiratorial smile meant just for me. I laugh then and he takes my hand, and that sharp sense of not fitting in, that hot tiny spark of shame, is brushed away.

Sixteen for dinner that night. Even before the basket of rolls makes one lap around the table, the wild tournament has started, the jokes and comebacks, the stories, the lore. They interrupt, gang up, competing for air and attention—their father’s, each other’s. Who can top whom. Who can be the quickest, wittiest, fiercest, loudest, and most essentially first.

They talk about the latest movies, the newest books. What about the new Inge play, Picnic, at the Music Box? Everyone’s mad about it, haven’t you heard? As the meal continues, more bickering flares. Eunice is still angry about a line call Jean made during tennis, and Teddy and Bobby start arguing: Who’s hoarding the green beans? Save some iced tea for the rest of us, will you? It’s a kind of hazing—whispered glances, barbs exchanged, a bizarre, tenacious bond built as much on loss as love. I’ve heard pieces—the brain-damaged sister, Rosemary, whom no one ever mentions, the sister Kick whom Jack adored, and Joe, Jr., the golden one, who bore the mantle until his plane was blown apart.

Bobby and Teddy are into it now, over the potato salad. Teddy’s mad, red in the face, accusing his older brother of taking more than his share. The whole thing feels so foolish I’m sure it’s an act, until Jack intercedes, offering Teddy his potato salad.

“I haven’t touched it, really, Teddy.” Jack glances at me, nervous. His mouth, I’ve learned, gives him away. It startles me that he’s nervous. Why? Is he afraid—this dawns on me slowly—that I might decide that while they’re exceptionally rich and accomplished, they’re too Irish, too classless, brash, new?

They’re talking now about sailboats and racing. Morton Downey, an old crony of Joe’s, leans across the table. “Have you met Jack’s best girl?”

“Excuse me,” I say.

“The woman he’ll always love above any other.”

I glance at Jack, then Joe. A joke, I see. They all know the punch line. They’re waiting to see how I do.

“Having met Jack’s mother and sisters,” I say, “I’d love to meet any other woman he holds in esteem.”

“She’s a boat,” says Teddy, in a sulk, a trace of something spilled near his breast pocket. Poor Teddy. Bedraggled loser of potato salad. But the rest are borne off on tales of the Victura.

“Latin,” Jean says. “?‘About to conquer.’?”

It can also mean “to live,”I almost say.

Rose and Joe gave Jack the twenty-five-foot Wianno when he turned fifteen. Four years later he sailed it in the Nantucket Sound Star Class Championship and won. It was on the Victura that Jack taught Bobby to sail, Bobby taught Teddy, and so on.

“Then you won the East Coast Collegiate,” Ethel pipes in.

“No, that was Joe,” Jack says.

A tick in the air before the talk moves on.

You don’t get past it, do you? That kind of childhood loss. You don’t ever really leave it behind.

“A penny for your thoughts,” Jack says, his voice near my shoulder.

“But, Jack,” I say, “then they wouldn’t be mine.”

The room falls silent. The ambassador laughs. “Now, there’s a girl who belongs at my table.”

The next morning, we walk the beach. Thick fog, no wind, just the sound and the dank salt smell of the sea rolling toward us out of the cool white air.

“I love this,” I say. “The sea, the fog. How the lines of things smudge out. We could be anywhere.”

“Well done at dinner last night. You won my father.”

“I wasn’t trying to.”

“And that’s what’s nice.” A bend in his voice as he says it; I feel something deeper in him shift toward me.

Coming back into the house, we pass the little bedroom on the first floor.

“Can we go in?” I ask. “Your mother told me when you were little, this room was yours.”

A child’s quilt on the bed, bookshelves, a bureau. I pick up a photograph.

“That’s me with my dog Dunker. In the Netherlands.”

“You aren’t allergic to dogs in the Netherlands?”

“Always allergic, but I’ll always have dogs. My friend Lem took that picture. Upstairs, there’s another from that same trip. Lem and me at The Hague. I look better in the other one.”

I laugh. His vanity surprises me.

Next to Jack with the dog is an older framed photo, faded by the sun. A close-up of his face, the water abstracted behind him, dusty light. There’s a focused stillness in his eyes. What was he seeing in that moment? Thinking, dreaming, feeling? I want to ask.

“When was this taken, Jack? Do you remember?”

“No.”

He sits on the bed as I kneel by the small bookshelf and run my fingers along the spines. Buchan, Stevenson, Churchill. “Where are your poets?”

“Tennyson’s there. Homer and Byron.”

“Byron, man of loneliness, brooding mystery. What was that epithet? The mad, bad, dangerous to know. Do you think he was?”

“Not as bad as they made him out to be.”

“Thirty-six when he died,” I say.

“Then I’ve got one more year.” He laughs.

“Byron wasn’t one to commit, was he?” I say.

“Why do women always want to pin a man down?”

I feel a heat in my face. “Not all women. Most men are as dull as watching paint dry. Five minutes in, there’s nothing left to discover, and a woman has to just stand there nodding, smiling, bored out of her mind.”

“Are you bored, Jackie?”

“With you?”

A hesitation in his smile then, like part of him wishes he hadn’t asked.

“No,” I say. I glance back at the bookshelf. “There’s Tennyson.”

“That was Kick’s.”

The cover’s worn, spine frayed. “She loved this one.”

“Yes,” he says.

I look at him then, and his eyes are on my face, no game in them for once, just an openness I’ve seen only a few times before, like he might let me in, or even want to.

“When I was growing up,” I say, “on Wednesdays after dancing class, I went to visit my grandfather Bouvier. I had to bring a memorized poem every time I went. Tennyson’s “Ulysses” was one he insisted I learn by heart.”

“Recite it,” he says. “I want to know what you’ve learned by heart.” He lies back on the bed, his legs dangling off, head propped on the pillow, looking at me, and the expression on his face is one I will always remember—complicated, trenchant, with a naked hunger I feel move through me.

A bell rings. Silence. It rings again.

“That’s the lunch bell,” he says. “It’s how she rounds us up.”

“Are we going to go?”

“I think we’ll be late. Pick a book. I want you to read aloud to me.”

“You should read to me,” I say. I pull The Iliad from the shelf.

“Why that?” he says.

Because Homer’s Troy is the kind of dream that alters us,I could say. That moves and inspires us. Because it’s a vast and tragic myth we can’t quite cage—a story of love, rage, devastating loss, which, at its most intimate, is also a form of desire.

The answer I give is far simpler.

“It’s a story I love,” I say.

That night after dinner, we borrow Morton Downey’s car to drive to a party in Osterville. A 1950 Plymouth, two-door, light blue.

I recognize the landmarks for a while, the little village, the main street leading through it. We turn onto another road, then another, and it’s different. Still the same landscape—shingled houses, beach plum, scrub oak—but at the same time, a place I haven’t been.

Earlier that afternoon, we all went swimming. I walked up to the house before the others, changed my clothes, towel-dried my hair, and came downstairs.

“Good swim?” Joe said, sitting down with me in one of the porch chairs.

“I love to swim.”

“How far did you go?”

“The second buoy and back.”

“You like open ocean.”

“Any ocean.”

He smiled. Jack and the others were coming up from the shore. I could see them—a laughing, galloping brood.

“And you also like when people underestimate you, don’t you, Jackie?”

“Not at all, Mr. Kennedy. Why on earth would you say a thing like that?”

“You want some music?” Jack asks now. He fiddles with the car radio.

“That song, please,” I say. “The one you just flipped by, about angels dining at the Ritz.” I tuck my legs underneath me. I like the feeling of being away from the house and the chaos, alone with him, heading somewhere, anywhere.

“I think I missed the turn,” he says. A car passes, going the opposite way. Headlamps sweep our car, his face. He is beautiful. Not a word a woman would usually use to describe a man. And yet.

When I lived in Paris for that one year, there were late-spring evenings when the light just lasted. I’d leave the Sorbonne and walk the narrow streets, looking into windows to catch fragments of lives playing out there. I’d walk the Seine, the quays and bridges, toward midnight as the sun kept setting in that strange extended day, and I had the sense that if I could just keep walking, I’d outwalk the light, disappear. I want the same thing now, only with him. To just keep driving, with no ending point or destination. Just to stay with him, moving, in this night car.

“Quiet again,” he says. That little smile, without looking at me. Another turn in the road. “Here we are.”

The clouds are bone-gold shapes passing near the moon. They seem to rush, gauzy, weirdly lit. We head toward the open tent set by the clubhouse; music drifts out, the clink of glasses, laughter. Lanterns are strung along the roof of the tent and woven up the halyards of the boats moored offshore. Paper-bag luminaria mark a path from the tent to the clubhouse stairs.

He drops my hand as a man steps out of the crowd toward us. His cousin Joey.

“Where’ve you been, Jack?”

We are swept into the tent, then apart, knots of people milling through the space. I recognize some from Virginia and New York. Jack moves away, shaking hands, working the crowd. Here is the younger Hatton, pushing his way through to see me, to say hello. And Lila, whom I know from the horse shows, has my arm and is turning me toward a pretty brunette with a pixie cut, who apparently knows Lee and is asking how Lee is and is it true she’s working for Diana Vreeland at Harper’s Bazaar?

“Right now she’s in Rome,” I say, “with her new English beau, Michael Canfield.”

“How serious is it?”

“Well, nothing’s really serious until it is.”

Jack is a short distance away, with a fellow in a gray sports coat. Jack is talking to him but looking at me, the way he does, the way I love, with that little fixed look. His eyes pass over my body, slow, more intentional. I feel my flesh burn.

“Jackie—” Lila’s saying.

A sudden boom as the sky breaks apart, fireworks; an “Oooohhh” erupts from the crowd; we move in a wave toward the dark at the edge of the tent as raw chains of color and light trail down. Rafts of aftersmoke.

He finds me, his mouth near my cheek. “Are you okay?” he says.

“Yes.” I want him near me. I want this.

A Roman candle shoots up, a rising hiss on the ascent. I feel the length of his arm against mine, the touch warm, light.

By the time the fireworks end, a low fog has rolled in, but the high night sky, still, is bright as water. The band starts up, the crowd regathers. A few cars pull away, headlamps stripe the lawn. Jack catches my eye, nods his head to go. We walk in silence toward the car. He takes my hand. The stars are wayward, spinning out there above the fog. I feel like we’re on the edge of that night.

In the car, his hand moves over the shift onto my thigh. In the light off the dash, I see him smile; I can feel what it does to me—that smile, his touch—driving fast down that blue night road. We are less than a mile from the house when he pulls off into the grass and kills the lights.

“Come here,” he says. He holds my face in his hands as he kisses me, his mouth on mine, that electric touch. I feel my skin rise, his fingers drawing the edge of my blouse open.