Page 16 of Jackie

We come to the corner where he will go right and I’ll go left.

“I’ll call you,” he says.

I expect him to turn then and leave—that’s what he usually does—but he doesn’t.

“So the Fourth,” he says. “Okay, Jackie?” He looks down at me. That face. Those eyes. He touches my cheek, a gentle quick gesture, and in that gentleness something new, incendiary.

July 1952

I don’t fit in. I feel it the moment I close the car door behind me. Aware—too aware—of my frosted hair, sundress, the sandals with gold straps that wrap my calves. On the lawn, a squall of sun-tanned gods in tennis whites stop their football game to look at me. My fingers tighten on the weekend bag in my hand. Behind them, the rambling white clapboard house, trimmed hedges, a tennis court, a circular drive, and the sweep of a wraparound porch, the lawn giving way to the flat blue calm of the sea.

Jack is walking toward me, that ambling lanky walk; the others watch. Bobby, their brother Teddy, and the sisters, burnished faces and long legs. One stands with a hand on her hip. I met her once. Jean.

“Hey, Jackie,” Jack says, “it’s you.”

My smile feels like cardboard.

Then his mother, Rose, is there, telling him to take my bag into the house and up to the sewing room. She steers me toward the front door, through the hall, the sunroom, and the living room with its recessed window seats, fireplaces, framed photographs, and miles of English chintz.

“The house was quite small at first,” she says, a laryngeal scratch to her voice, “but we kept having children, kept adding on rooms, widening the windows and so forth.”

Jack has come down; he shuffles behind us, restless, and his mother finally tells him to go out to play with the others since that’s clearly what he wants to do.

“I left them short a man,” he says.

His mother laughs.

“Come with me, Jackie,” says Jack.

“I’ll be out soon.”

—

It’s Bobby who meets me when I walk outside. A sinking pressure in my chest as I realize they expect me to play. Football. I try. I run where they tell me to run. I drop the ball twice. They bounce me around, team to team, position to position—it’s like being swept in a tidal wave. Finally I claim a sore ankle. Only Bobby looks genuinely disappointed.

“I’ll just take a short break,” I say.

Sitting on the porch steps, I light a cigarette as they tumble over one another on the lawn in their white cartwheeling chaos, flashing sneakers, their rah-rah shouts and grass-stained knees.

Just watching them wore me out, I’ll tell Lee later. I lean back into the step to feel the edge of the tread digging into the small of my back, grounding me. The louder they get, the more boisterous and competitive, the quieter I go inside.

“Come back in the game, Jackie,” Bobby calls. Teddy grabs the football from him. Bobby knocks him in the chest. The screen door opens behind me. I turn.

“No, please don’t get up,” Joe Kennedy says, but I’m already on my feet. Here he is—the ambassador, the patriarch, the Judas of Wall Street. The man of legendary ambition who made a fortune selling shares on the eve of the stock-market crash. There’s something about him I like, something easy and kind. His eyes dance behind the round wire-rim glasses. He wears golf clothes, the collar loose.

“You’re the one Jack brought,” he says.

“I drove, actually.”

I smile and he smiles back. I sit down on the steps. He sits beside me.

“Did you enjoy your golf?” I ask.

“Damn hot.” He looks out at the lawn. “Who’s winning?”

“I couldn’t begin to tell you.” He seems surprised I’d be that frank. “I’d love to hear about the work you did in film,” I say. “Jack’s told me you have a cinema downstairs, where you screened your movies. Hollywood’s a world apart, isn’t it? Or is it? Tell me.”

He smiles at me, like he knows I might be playing him a bit. But he likes that, as I expected he might, and I can see he’s decided, perhaps then and there, that we’ll be friends.

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