Chapter 10
Fall 1952
He calls me from a pay phone near an oyster bar in Boston. He’s campaigning up there. He asks me to come.
I smile but don’t answer right away. I’m standing in the hall at Merrywood. I’d just come in from riding when the phone rang and I picked it up, his voice on the other end. Hey, Jackie, he’d said, it’s me—like it couldn’t be anyone else. I felt my heart skip.
“I’ve missed seeing you,” he’s saying now, and a part of me wants to ask him then why didn’t he call, but I’m just happy, and the front door is open, and the grass and the drive beyond blaze with autumn sunlight.
“You still there?” he says.
There’s a hum on the line—static—then the operator’s voice is asking for more coins.
“I don’t seem to have another dime,” he says. “Will you come up, though, to Boston?”
“In all those pockets, Jack, not one dime?”
He laughs.
“That’s a yes, then,” he says, “isn’t it?”
He’s on crutches when I meet him in Boston. He mutters something about the hazards of weekend tennis with his sister Eunice. But I can tell the pain is no small thing. He has a folder under his arm.
“Let me take that,” I say.
“I’ve got it. But thanks.” A few steps on, the folder slips. An aide runs after two flyaway sheets. I take the folder and sort the papers back in. We keep walking.
“I’m glad you came,” he says. “I’m sorry. My back hurts like hell.”
We pass through a police barricade. Two men step forward to welcome him, introducing two others. Jack shakes their hands, then pushes the crutches toward an aide and climbs the steps to the dais. He straightens his jacket as he walks to the podium. It’s like he’s stepping through clouds—golden, magnetic. He welcomes the crowd and starts to talk about the duty of a senator to look after his own, to make time for the affairs of his state and the interests of his constituents. He talks as if he knows them all: the textile worker in Lawrence, the Brockton shoemakers, the men who work the Gloucester piers. I can’t take my eyes off him.
Once, as a child in Central Park, I sat with my father on a bench by the water; it was a lovely day, the air warm and soft. I leaned against him and fell asleep, and when I woke up, it was like opening my eyes for the first time. It all felt cogent in that moment—grass, trees, rocks, sky, the still drift of swans on the surface of the pond, the world alive in ways we forget to allow it to be—beautiful, heartrending, impermanent. I closed my eyes again to brace myself against the loss of it. Jacks. My father pushed gently on my shoulder. Wake up, Jacks. Don’t sleep right through this day.
The crowd erupts into a roar.
“Well, I guess I’m a Democrat now,” I say as he steps down. An aide comes forward with the crutches. Jack waves him off.
“You can pretend to hold my arm,” he tells me.
“Don’t lean too much, we’ll both fall over.”
“That’s for another time.” He smiles. I feel the rush of heat to my face. I glance away.
“In exchange for being your cane,” I say, “when you win your Senate seat, I want an interview.”
“We can pretend we’ve never met.”
“We’ve already done that.”
“We can do it again. You can prep me with the questions, so I have good answers.”
“I’ll draft your answers.”
He laughs, but laughing makes him wince. “I hate this kind of pain,” he says.
“The answer to the first question will be something like: And I’m always being taken for a tourist by the cops because I look too young.”
“What’s the question?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“If I win.”
“Oh, you will, Jack. Think of all those ladies’ teas you’ve suffered through.”
“You have to stop,” he says. “Laughing hurts.”
He wins the Senate seat on the fourth of November. By a narrow margin, he defeats the incumbent, Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.
“My first front page in the Times,” he says.
Frank Waldrop sends me off to interview the new senator-elect.
“Well, hello,” Jack says as his secretary walks me in. Others are in the room, but no one I recognize.
“It’s so nice to meet you at last, Senator-Elect,” I say. “Congratulations on your win.”
His eyes are laughing.
“And what can I do for you?” he says. “Miss Bouvier, is it?”
John White drops by the paper the following week.
“I hear things are getting serious between you and Jack Kennedy,” he says.
“John, I could never be serious with someone who’s hardly around but always expects me to be.”
Those words, though, are harder to stand by when news gets out that Jack has asked me to be his date at Eisenhower’s inaugural ball. John White teases me about it in front of Waldrop.
“Not exactly a trip to the movies, Jackie.”
“Jack knows I’m a safe bet,” I say. “I’ll be polite and wear a nice dress.”
But Waldrop doesn’t laugh. “Now, don’t come back next week and tell me you’re engaged.”
“Oh, Mr. Waldrop, didn’t I just go through the work of getting un-engaged?”
John White laughs, but Waldrop studies me. A pen on his desk is out of place by half an inch. I move it back in line.
In the car on our way to Eisenhower’s ball, Jack tells me about a quick weekend trip he took to Palm Beach. Then he asks again if I’ll translate a few French books on Southeast Asian politics for his first Senate speech.
“How many is a few?”
“Six or eight.”
“That’s a few more than a few.”
He laughs, and I look out the window of the car, the glow of cold winter air through the glass. I feel him shift closer to me on the seat, his arm around my shoulder. His breath is warm near my cheek. “At least now,” he says quietly, “I know better than to offer a penny for your thoughts.”
That winter, when he comes back into town, he calls and asks if I’ll bring him a lunch. On my way into work at the paper, I’ll drop off a brown paper bag at his office—sandwiches, chips with a drink, clam chowder in a thermos. He asks me to go with him to pick out some new suits. He’s awkward at the fittings. He always wants the hems too short, and I tell him so. I say it gently, but it still makes him flush, then he smiles, that careless radiant smile. “You’re good for me,” he says.
But there are still long stretches with no phone call at all.
“He may be dating you,” my mother says, “but you’re not the only one he’s carrying on with.”
I sigh, recounting this remark to John White over hamburgers at the Hot Shoppe.
“Go on, John,” I say. “Tell me I’m wasting my time.”
“You’re wasting your time. Does that help?”
“No.”
“What do you like so much about him, Jackie?”
He’s the most interesting man I’ve ever met,I could say. That ferocious mind, the way he’s always asking questions. He’s at once curious and bold and sometimes vulnerable in just that certain way. I don’t say any of this.
“I thought you’d be smarter than to chase a lost cause,” White says.
“That’s an awful thing to say.”
“You told me to talk you out of it. You’re dead set against letting me.” Then he adds, “I should at least tell you, a friend of mine saw him out with Audrey Hepburn in New York last week.”
There is a crack in the Formica of the table, bits of dirt collected inside. I slide my napkin over it. White pushes away what’s left of his hamburger.
“I get it, Jackie,” he says. “I loved Kick, and there were dimensions of her so like Jack. We laughed and argued constantly. Every moment with her was alive. When I heard about the plane crash, my brain couldn’t conceive of a world without her. I was assigned her obituary. I thought I wanted it. But I couldn’t squeeze one decent sentence out. I sat at her old desk, that desk where you sit now, and all I could do was type the word goodbye. Goodbye.”
“I’m sorry, John.”
“You’re set on him, aren’t you?”
“I’m not saying that.”
He leans back in the booth and smiles.
“If this is what you want,” he says, “I’ll give you a hint. When it comes to women, Jack Kennedy likes to be the one to hunt. You know it already. Try that and see where it goes.”
The next time I come home to a message from Jack, I don’t return the call. He calls again, twice, the calls less spaced out. Finally, I call him back.
“I’m so sorry it took me so long,” I say. “How are you?”
We go out more frequently after that: art galleries, museums, parties. We go for dinner at La Salle du Bois, which he immediately contends is too French-fancy.
“We like some fancy,” I say.
“Like what?”
“At Eisenhower’s ball, we decided we like inaugurations.”
He laughs. “That’s different.”
“Inaugurations are fancy, Jack.” This makes him laugh more, and I love the way he looks at me through the laughter, that mix of collusion and desire. We debate who will win what Pulitzer. I invite him to a Fellini film. “Long-haired crap?” he says. I answer, “You only get to judge if you go.” I write him notes on the salient points I’ve culled from those French books on Vietnam so he can weave them into his Senate speeches, which I offer to proof.
One weekend, we meet in New York for lunch with my father. They talk about the stock market, movie stars, sports. Jack sips his drink while my father throws back four, but they order the same steak, cooked the same way. The room is airy. Sunlight filters through the long windows.
They talk about the changing landscape of New York.
“We were on Park Avenue when Jackie was young,” my father says. “Now I’m up in Lenox Hill.”
It pinches my heart, that faint shame in his voice, the vanished wealth he tries to be easy with. My father has always been a man of extravagance, but if he had only a penny left, he’d break it in his teeth and give me half. When I was at boarding school, he’d appear on weekends with armfuls of presents, stockings, magazines. Once a bouquet of fresh gardenias he laid in the snow by my dorm window. He conspired to have my horse stabled near the school so I could take my friends for sleigh rides. In spring, when he came to visit, we’d drive around in his little two-seater. I never tired of feeling that sudden jolt of the car, a burst of untame life, as we hit the open strip of highway. I was the keeper of his secrets. He told me details of his affairs.
“What about that one there, Daddy?” I’d ask at a school event, pointing out one of the mothers.
“No, I haven’t had her.”
“That one, then?”
“That one, yes,” he said.
And I’d laugh. It felt like that was what I was supposed to do.
“Keep her on a horse,” my father tells Jack that day we’re at lunch. “Then you’ll have her in a good mood.”
It takes me aback—that he’d talk about me that way, like he’s giving Jack license to do the same. I almost say something, a cool witty thing to draw a line. But the waiter is there, and their steaks have arrived. My father cuts into his, suave manicured hands deft with the knife, neat thin slices—a more nuanced precision than one might expect. I glance at Jack. He is looking at me. That look. My father pretends not to catch it. I smile and Jack smiles back, that curious incandescent thing about him that makes the edges of the world feel suddenly so bright.