Page 40 of Jackie

Spring 1955

We are back in Washington. I’d hoped things might be better once he recovered enough to return to work, but the more he regains his strength, the more it seems I am alone again.

“What are you thinking?” I ask one morning at breakfast.

“Thinking I’m going to be late,” he says. He picks up his briefcase and limps out the door.

I don’t ask that question again.

—

Lee invites me to London. She and Michael have bought a flat in Belgravia. Lee has styled every inch of it—curtains, rugs, throws, the divan under the window. There’s no clutter. Even the short piles of books are staged according to size and hue.

“It’s exquisite, Lee,” I say. “I’m not sure I should sit down.”

She throws a party the night I arrive. “For you, Jacks,” she says, that gorgeous pixie smile. Half of London, it seems, swings by to see the wife of the young American senator, son of the former ambassador. I can feel them wonder why I’m alone, and I explain we’re meeting Jack in a few weeks, in France, once work lets up and he can get away. We mingle for a while, then whoosh off to another party, then a dinner dance, then late-night drinks. Lee has orchestrated everything. Weekend trips to Hatley Park and a hunt in Northumberland. Parties and dinners and teas.

“You’re trying to turn me into a firefly, Pekes.”

We’re on a train heading back to Victoria Station. Lee sighs. “I drank too much last night.”

“You can’t swing from party to party forever,” I say.

She looks out the window. I remember what Michael remarked to me one day when Lee was out, how he never quite knew whose hat he’d find on the stand in the hall when he got home.

“Did you find a house in Virginia?” she asks.

“We were looking at one I loved, but Jack grumbled about the price. I found another, and he likes it, so we’re moving ahead. I’ve drawn up plans to redo the bathroom and his dressing room, some shoe shelves built so he doesn’t have to bend over.”

“Are you happy, Jacks?” she asks.

I don’t want that question. She is still staring out the train window, her lovely face eclipsed by a worn sadness, and I realize her question isn’t directed at me.

“Are you all right, Pekes?”

“Just trying to figure a few things out.”

The night before, at a party, I watched my sister come alive, back to her radiant coquette self, when Prince Stanislaw Radziwill dropped by. Stas, as he was called, was a Polish prince with a wild saturnine look. I watched my sister metamorphose under Prince Radziwill’s eyes. The Pekes of my childhood, impossibly beautiful, sexy, and spoiled. Radziwill, I learned, fled Poland at the time of the German invasion of his country. He made it over the border to Switzerland and married a Swiss woman. Her money became his, and he poured it in and out of real estate to make more. Within an hour, I realized that what I was watching between my sister and the prince was a practiced dance.

“I love having you here with me,” Lee says now. “Everyone wants to meet you, and I get to show you off. It reminds me of the summer you brought me to Europe. I loved that summer.” Through the window, the fields rush by. “And now we are married,” she says. “Do you miss Jack?”

“He’s always away, it seems, working. I wish we had more time together.”

Lee nods, her face distorted in the window, tones of yellow and gray; her earrings glint like minnows. “I don’t miss Michael at all. The air is so much more alive as soon as I get free.”

—

We leave for France. Jack arrives—it’s almost like meeting a stranger, a tourist in a world where I’m at home. He seems awkward, cardboardish, his Boston twang and rumpled American clothes.

We go to visit his father in Cannes. As the car turns up the drive leading to Joe’s villa, Michael says, “I don’t know why you want to be in politics, Jack, when you could be living in this.”

“What is that?” Lee says, pointing to liveried footmen interspersed among the trees that line the drive. They step forward and bow slightly as we pass.

“Just Dad roughing it again this year,” Jack says. I catch the shame in his voice. He hates the display of wealth. He glances at me, a silent plea for me to say something, anything, to lighten it.

“Topiary footmen,” I say. He smiles.

—

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