Page 17 of Jackie

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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.

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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.”

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