Page 24 of Jackie

“You tell him I said you deserve a raise.”

She glanced at him again, then started to pull on her gloves, nothing eager or self-conscious in the gesture, nothing seductive, but it was strangely erotic because she wasn’t trying.

“Button them,” she said, holding out her wrists. “I hate these new buttons.”

“Then why wear the gloves?”

“If you had green fingernails, you’d wear gloves to the Dancing Class.”

He worked on the buttons. They were pattern-cut and snagged at the loop. She went on chatting about gloves and dowager owls, that catty wit she had that made him want her.

When the gloves were buttoned, she was silent. He glanced up then. She was looking away, her eyes fixed on a tree branch brushed with the last of the light through the window.

“Look how beautiful, Jack,” she said, and in that moment, her voice was hushed and gentle and soft, no game in it, no edge, no play. He wanted to be inside it, inside her, right up against that wonder of her voice.

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.”

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