Jackie

Chapter 11

Spring 1953

“I wish it hadn’t rained,” Lee says. Her wedding day, but she isn’t happy. My younger sister, her exquisite body like blown glass, sinks into the vacant seat next to me. “I hate this miserable weather, Jacks. I should have waited until June.”

Our father is dancing with our mother. They spin close to us. He lowers her into a dip, then draws her up, a gallant turn. She catches my eye as he sweeps her away.

“She looks like she’s ready to die,” I say.

“Michael wants to dance,” Lee says, “but I can’t dance while they’re dancing. Daddy acts like he still loves her.”

“He acts. But he was determined to cut a dash for you today. He’s been getting in shape for months. Jogging around the reservoir in that absurd rubber suit.”

She looks at me. “I’m sorry Jack couldn’t come.”

“Senate life. But he invited me to Eunice’s wedding in May.”

I don’t mention to Lee that the city editor at the Times Herald just asked me to cover Queen Elizabeth’s coronation. I almost said no. To go would mean I’d miss Jack’s sister’s wedding. I asked the editor if I could have a few days to think it over.

“It’s a good position Michael’s been offered at the embassy,” Lee says, but her voice is uncertain, like she’s trying to convince herself. “I’ll miss you when we move to London, Jackie.”

“You’ll love it there. You’ll go out every night with interesting people, and you’ll know I feel a splitting envy, bored to tears back here in the swamp.”

“You should absolutely go to the coronation,” says my mother a few days later. We’re down at the barn with the horses. Spring sunlight falls in sheets through the open stable door.

“What about Eunice’s wedding?” I say.

“Jack has plenty of time to find another date, if that’s what he wants.”

“Well, I’m not sure that’s what I want.”

My mother frowns. She doesn’t quite like Jack or trust him. But there are many things my mother doesn’t trust. My wit, for example. Or what she calls my stubborn streak. She made her own mistake once—that’s how she sees it—when she fell headlong for my father. It broke her, then made her cold.

She shifts the bridle now and runs the flat of her hand down the horse’s neck. “Jackie, if you’re really in love with this man, he’ll be more likely to find out how he feels about you if you’re across the ocean doing interesting things rather than trotting back and forth with his lunch.” She adds, “Aileen Bowdoin could go with you.”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

“Just call Jack. Tell him you’re sorry but you’ll have to miss his sister’s wedding. Tell him you’ll see him when you get back.”

In England, pictures of the young Queen Elizabeth are everywhere, pasted on the windows and doors of every house we pass on the boat train between Southampton and London.

I write one short feature piece every afternoon, longhand, and send it off airmail. I write about the American crowds that fill London, about dancing at the 400 Club, its walls lined with velvet. I write about the clambake ball thrown by Perle Mesta of the National Woman’s Party, a highbrow “hostess with the mostest.” I write about Lauren Bacall waltzing with General Omar Bradley, then moving on to a foxtrot with the Marquess of Milford Haven. She is the belle of that ball, her long body poured like water into a strapless lace dress, dancing away with the marquess until her Bogie ambles over in his old white-tie-and-tails, cutting in to steal back his wife.

Aileen Bowdoin and I stay in a friend’s flat in Mayfair. The apartment is unheated, and when it’s cold at night, we fill the bathtub with scalding water to warm our feet. I drag Aileen to bookstores in search of titles I can’t find in the states. Aldous Huxley, books on Churchill, Irish history, two small volumes of British poetry. I’ve brought along an extra suitcase for the books, but by the time we’re packing to leave, it’s full.

“Who on earth are all those books for, Jackie?” Aileen asks as I sit on the lid, working to buckle it closed.

“Hughdie, mostly.”

A knock on the door. I hop up to answer it.

“Telegram for Miss Bouvier,” says the messenger.

I thank him and, closing the door with my hip, open the telegram. I can feel Aileen’s eyes, the quickened silence in the room.

Articles Excellent…But You Are Missed.

I slip the telegram into my pocket.

“Jack again?” Aileen says.

“Yes.”

I stand above that stubborn overfull suitcase. Books, and more books. Books he’ll read for pleasure. Books with ideas that might be useful to him. I’ve started to admit I want to be useful to him, necessary. In that whole suitcase, there’s not one book for anyone else. Not my mother or Hughdie. Not even for my stepbrother Yusha. Only Jack.

I meet an old friend, Demi Gates, for dinner at a small restaurant. We ran into each other at the post-coronation reception at the American embassy. He had traveled up from Spain to London. Tomorrow he’ll leave for Paris. We order our food and catch each other up on other people’s news. We talk about one summer years ago when we all met in the south of France. Yusha was there, and my friend Solange. There was a nightclub where we used to go dancing.

“Do you remember the violin music?” Demi asks. “Everything was right that summer.”

“It’s Paris I miss,” I say. “Strolling down the Champs-élysées at midnight. Drinking grasshoppers and getting swanky at the Ritz.”

“Then come with me for a few days, Jackie. Before you go back. We’ll hit all the places we used to go: Chez Allard, L’Elephant Blanc.”

“I want to hear about Madrid and your new life,” I say.

He’s started a publishing company, he says, that does comic strips and some advertising. But then he says something else.

“So the talk about you and Jack Kennedy?”

My fork stops.

“He’s a gutter fighter, Jackie. You’re a class act.” He proceeds to drench me in tales of Jack’s womanizing, trying to talk me out of what I keep telling myself I’m not yet even in. I just sit there, peeling back the skin on my fish to separate flesh from the bone.

“You don’t want to be married to a politician, Jackie. You don’t even like politics. It’s a brutal world. Not your kind. There’s no poetry in it, no beauty, no art. Is it the money?”

They will say this forever, I realize. Jack Kennedy has money, so it must be the money I’m after. I could tell them he never carries cash. I’m usually the one who pays for movies, taxis, lunch. I could explain I’m never bored with Jack Kennedy. Never bored of listening to him or wondering what’s turning in that bold, intricate mind. I never get tired of how he looks at me or touches me, how his lips graze my cheek, my neck, the quickening of his breath mixed with mine, those more private and intimate moments of heat, skin, fire.

They will never say this.

I remember that day in the little bedroom when I knelt by the bookshelf and those worn spines: Byron, Tennyson, King Arthur and his knights. Jack just sat on the bed, talking about how those were the books that formed him. Stories of war, persistence, and failure, the getting up again and forging on when he was so ill as a child that he could barely make it from bed to bookshelf and back. Books about freedom and faith and the courage it took to fight on the right side of history.

“What makes that kind of courage, Jackie?” he’d asked me that day.

He is more than what they see. More than his father’s son or heir to his dead brother’s legacy. He wants more. Believes in more.

I can’t tell Demi this now. He won’t hear it.

Through the restaurant window, it is dusk, the sky steeped blue, city lights on the wet streets.

The day I told Jack I was going to London and would miss his sister’s wedding, I ignored my mother’s advice. I didn’t call. I met him at Martin’s and told him there. We sat at the table he’d begun to call “our table.”

“I understand,” he said. “You should go.” But he glanced at me, like he was going to say something else. Then he shrugged. “You’ll be missed.”

“You mean you’ll miss me?” I said gently, almost teasing, and he looked away, pushed a hand through his hair, glanced back at me, his eyes nervous for a moment, uncertain. He smiled.

“Yeah,” he said, “that.” I felt a bolt of warmth shoot through me, always, at that smile.

He is waiting for me when my plane touches down in Boston.

“You again,” he says.

“And you,” I say.

Silence falls between us, shy, a tide of other passengers streaming quickly past, heading to whatever lives they’ve come home to, or on to wherever else they are going, maybe a connecting flight they’re hoping to catch, all these other people, strangers, bound for other destinations.

For us, though, in that moment, everything feels very still and sharp and new.

“Come on, then, Jackie. Let’s go.”

He picks up my bag, takes my hand, and starts striding through the concourse, drawing me along with him, moving smooth and fast as he does sometimes, like his body just needs to keep up with his mind, which has already crossed into some future I’m not yet aware of, and we are like water, moving through all the other bodies in that airport, disparate faces, voices, lives. We reach the door that leads outside. He pauses and turns to me suddenly, an expression on his face I haven’t seen before—a kind of bewilderment, almost fear, but with a tinge of wonder, like a child’s fear.

“Are you okay with that, Jackie? You are, aren’t you?”

So sweet and unexpected—the vulnerability in his voice.

“Okay with what, Jack?”

“Going with me.”

I smile. “You’re where I want to be.”

On June 25, we are in The New York Times.

Senator Kennedy to Marry in Fall

Son of Former Envoy is Fiancé of

Miss Jacqueline Bouvier, Newport Society Girl

I have to resign from the Times Herald. I knew it was coming; perhaps I’d known all along. Jack doesn’t ask me to, which I appreciate, but I bring it up so he won’t have to. We’re at Martin’s. Brunch. Our table. The leaves are full and green on the trees. We order root beer floats. I ask for extra whipped cream.

“I know Eleanor Roosevelt had her own column,” I say, “but that was different, the focus was different, and she was the president’s wife. I’m sure there were strict orders on what she could and could not say. I can’t imagine the ambassador would appreciate having his, or your, ambitions at odds with anything the Inquiring Camera Girl might want to ask.”

He laughs, then, “Dad did ask if you were going to keep working. But I don’t want you to feel you have to stop.”

“I know,” I say.

Joe summons us to Hyannis Port. A family weekend, he calls it. Once we’re there, he mentions he’s invited a few people from Life magazine to stop by. He says it like he’s explaining why there will be green beans instead of broccoli for dinner.

“They want to do a story on the engagement,” he says.

I say, “You mean you want them to do a story.”

He grins. “Well, there might be a little of that.”

The crew from Life is there the next day. Jack and I are arranged, made up, our clothes styled casual, collars unbuttoned, sneakers barely tied, hair windblown, just enough. They snap photographs of me swinging a baseball bat and running with a football. Someone suggests the sailboat.

“I’m not really dressed for a sail,” I say to the editor.

“We only need you in there for the shot.”

“Of course,” I say, wondering if I’ll ever fit in the corners of this life I play so well. We climb into the boat and set off, Jack at the tiller. I’m beside him, the photographer crammed in the bow, asking me to move closer to Jack and asking Jack to tack, please, so it will look like we’re out in open water. The boat starts to heel; the photographer slides.

“That’ll cockeye the horizon,” I say quietly to Jack.

“Just look happy,” he says. “Almost done.”

An hour later, back on land, they ask him to hold my hand for a series of shots on the lawn.

“Put your arm around her,” the editor says, and he does, but we’re awkward, his arm like a metal hanger draped over my shoulders.

“It feels so fake,” he says under his breath. “I never stand like this. I hate being fake.”

“It’s all fake, Jack.”

He starts to laugh. They snap the picture then.

At the end of the day, after the crew has packed up their tripods and cameras and left, as I’m walking from the kitchen with my book and a glass of water, I overhear Bobby, Jack, and Joe in the sunroom. I hear my name. They’re talking about me like I’m some kind of asset, like I’m the state of Rhode Island. I feel a sharp chill and sit down.

There’s still a chance to get out.

But he’s brilliant. A maverick thinker, and when I am with him, I can feel my edges burn. He’s almost died three times. He is by turns impatient and nonchalant. He has Addison’s disease, recurrent malaria, and a spinal condition. The left side of his body is smaller than the right, shoulder lower, left leg shorter. He’s a clumsy dresser, lanky, that unruly shock of hair. He’s known, too well, for his sexual exploits, every woman smoothing her skirt when he enters a room like the room belongs to him, and—poof!—in seconds, it does.

By twenty-three, he’d published a bestselling book, Why England Slept, about how democracy can fail to perceive fascism rising in its midst; by twenty-six, he was a national war hero; thirty-six now and a senator. He told me once he feels like every minute is a race against the fast-circling arms of a clock. Edna St. Vincent Millay’s candle burning bright: It will not last the night. He’s a chary romantic. A fatalist. Who sees too clearly that fortune, health, and luck can all be erased in an instant.

And he needs me, which he won’t want to admit, but I can feel it when out of nowhere he’ll take my arm, or when he leans in to whisper, I’ll see you soon. In the warmth of his breath, I feel it. Or when we’re in a crowded room and his eyes search me out and he’ll fix me with that little look—the kind of burning extravagant hunger that makes you want to throw your soul right down.

And I love him.

The voices have stopped, I realize, just before Bobby and Jack walk out of the sunroom with Joe. The boys head to the window, talking about how the wind has come up, could be a good afternoon for a sail. But Joe pauses when he sees me sitting there. In his face, the slight calculation. I close the book and smile. He isn’t fooled.

“I’ve been looking into that house for you, Jackie,” he says.

Jack turns around. “What house?”

“There’s a little pink villa in Acapulco your girl wants for her honeymoon. That girl of yours who’s not so na?ve as to give up her thoughts to anyone. She should have what she wants, don’t you agree?” Joe laughs when he says it, the laugh that masters a moment and now is meant to master me. His eyes on my face, I can tell he’s still wondering how much I might have heard and if it matters.

“I do love that pink villa,” I say.