Page 14 of Jackie

“In a world of money and power, Jackie,” my stepbrother Gore said once, “sex is something you do, like tennis.”

We’d been talking about how badly, and publicly, our parents and stepparents behaved. I realized Gore was inviting me to see how wit might take the edge off pain.

“That may be true, Gore,” I answered. “But it’s quite a bit nicer for everyone if each point of the match isn’t documented in The New York Times.”

Spring 1952

Another May. Another dinner party at the Bartletts’. Peonies bursting from the centerpiece, conversations, laughter. Another warm spring evening spilling through the door propped open to the terrace.

Somehow, though, everything is different. I can feel it. The kaleidoscope has shifted a degree. The design is entirely new.

We’re all at the dinner table. Charley Bartlett is asking for Jack’s opinion on American involvement in Indochina, and I feel a rush of warmth as I listen to Jack talk in his easygoing way about the complexity of the conflict—how it’s the French who best understand the politics of that region they occupied for so long. The United States, he contends, can learn by studying the challenges the French have faced. I just listen; I don’t have to pretend, he’s too interesting not to listen to—those unexpected turns of mind. And somehow simply listening isn’t simple at all but throws the whole room off-kilter, the table and candlesticks, the faceless figures of the other guests, the bread plates and the soup bowls—the room is soaked in that casual magic. Light kicks the rim of a wineglass.

He glances up, a little look that, in that moment, is just forme.

You are a piece of eternity, I think. He leans across the asparagus then and asks if he can take me out next week, dancing at the Blue Room in the Shoreham Hotel.

Desire shreds time. Stuns it. A blink later, dinner is done, chairs pushed back, shaking hands and the after-every-dinner-party routine. A lovely evening. Yes, let’s do it again soon. Where are you spending the summer? Oh, fabulous. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much for having me. A Tommy Dorsey record plays in the background and Martha Bartlett is squeezing my arm, everyone chatting and laughing and moving. I remember then what John White said about Jack Kennedy: a game even you can’t win. I feel a little scowl on my face. I bite my lip to squelch it, then notice Jack watching me across a small free space, three or four others between us, two talking as much to him as to each other, but his eyes are on me, that puzzled look I’ve seen before when he’s met some question he can’t immediately solve. Then the moment is cut, the abstracted look gone, and he smiles—a kind of shy and awkward smile; light breaks across his face like a bolt of sunshine that knocks the room down, and there is no sound then, no music, no voices, no laughter, nothing else, no one else. Even the room is gone and there is only him, with me, in a space that belongs to us alone, that smile like some electric bit of loneliness he thinks I’ll understand. And Ido.

…

For most of that spring, it seems, he’s up in Massachusetts campaigning for the Senate. He’ll call out of the blue, coins tinkling through a pay phone, to tell me he’s coming back into town. He’ll invite me to a party or the movies—once a John Wayne Western (his choice), then an art film (mine). He is bored ten minutes in. He has to get up and walk around, he says, stretch his legs. In late May, I invite him last minute to a dance, and I’m surprised when he says yes. In June, we go to the new Gary Cooper movie, High Noon, with his brother Bobby and Bobby’s wife, Ethel. They met skiing in Mont Tremblant. Then Ethel wrote her college thesis on Jack’s book Why England Slept, which cemented her into the family.

After the movie, Jack invites me to Martin’s for lunch. From his jacket pocket he pulls out a book. John Buchan, Memory Hold-the-Door.

“I brought it for you,” he says.

A torn piece of paper marks a passage about a young soldier killed on the Somme. He would destroy some piece of honest sentiment with a jest, and he had no respect for the sacred places of dull men. I flip a few pages. Another underline. He disliked emotion, not because he felt lightly, but because he felt deeply.

“This is your copy,” I say.

“You can keep it if you want.” That little smile.

“Thank you.”

“When I was thirteen,” he says, “I was sick in the hospital for a month. Reading kept me sane. This book and others. My father came every afternoon.”

“What about your mother?”

He shakes his head. “Always in some fashion house in Paris or on her knees in church.” A bitterness in his voice. I can tell he feels ashamed he’d let me see it. He touches the edge of his cuff, folding it back, and I just want to soften his anxiousness.

“The first time I went to England was after the war,” I say. “A few of us managed to get an invitation to Buckingham Palace, a garden party. I rounded up the other girls and we all went down the receiving line twice just to shake Churchill’s hand.”

He laughs.

“Churchill’s always been fascinating to me,” I say, rearranging my french fries. “Dark angel hurled from power, who maneuvered through failure after failure and rose again. It’s a great story.”

Jack tells me he was in London in September 1939 when his father was ambassador to Great Britain. The Germans had bombed Polish airfields and Navy ships in the Baltic. Jack sat in the gallery of Parliament when Churchill defended Britain’s declaration of war.

“My father disagreed with Churchill completely,” he says. “He thought America should keep to its side of the ocean. But I remember what Churchill said that day about how war, in its most noble sense, guards and restores liberty.”

“Then you came home, wrote a book, and a few years later became a hero in the war your father didn’t want.”

He smiles. “I should have stuck with the writing.” There are small cracks, I sometimes sense, in the things he tells me. He tries to always be easy, but the shine of his humor hides a sadness. I want to know what that is, that deeper, more vulnerable side. I want to dig past the brilliant surface to what lies underneath.

Leaving Martin’s, he says, “So, hey, Fourth of July. Why don’t you come to Hyannis Port?”

“On my way to Newport?”

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