Page 5 of Jackie

The managing editor, Carol Phillips, comes out.

“We’re so happy to have you on board, Jackie,” she says. “Your writing’s exceptional. We all agreed. I particularly love the piece about your grandfather, the violets with the rain, the swish of traffic outside. You brought us right into that room.”

She leads me through a maze of offices. I meet the personnel director of Condé Nast, then the art director, who’s laying out portraits by Irving Penn for the July issue.

“I love Penn’s work,” I say, looking over the photographs.

“Any in particular?” Carol asks.

“His Twelve Beauties. His still life with the ace of hearts and the black chess piece knight. His Marlene Dietrich.” I smile. Who wouldn’t love Irving Penn’s Dietrich?

Laid out on the worktable are portraits Penn made of a baker, a fishmonger, lorry washers.

“It’ll be called Small Trades,” the art director says.

Yes, I think. The people we don’t see. There’s a portrait of a young Black man in an oilcloth hat with a cart and a hand-chalked sign: Hot Chestnuts Good for the Brain Try a Bag.

Kennedy would love this.

It startles me. Why would he be there, in my thoughts?

I turn to Carol. “I’m just so thrilled,” I say. “I wish September were tomorrow.”

—

I take a taxi to my father’s apartment on East 74th. The doorman lets me in. It’s after noon. My father is sprawled sound asleep in navy boxers on the living room couch. A small card table propped open, a plate with a sandwich and a knocked-over glass that’s rolled to the edge. I sit down beside him and stroke his face. His hair is wild, a stiff disarray with leftover oil and God knows what else.

“Daddy, wake up,” I say. “I’m here.”

He rolls toward me, his eyes bloodshot, that doomed movie-star swagger.

“Don’t you have an interview?” he murmurs.

“I already went.”

“My best girl,” he says. “I’ll get dressed and be there soon.”

—

We go to brunch at Schrafft’s.

“So my Jacks will be back in New York,” he says over eggs Benedict and grits. “Which means she’ll be with me.”

I smile and pick through a side of creamed spinach. He is aging. I can see it in his face—heavy lines around his eyes, deeper creases on his cheeks. I don’t have the heart to tell him how the Vogue office, that high-ceilinged, airless space, unsettled me, everything so perfect and neat, the Chippendale desks, wicker couches, and stylized women.

“Fashion has always been more Lee’s world than mine,” I say.

“You can bend any world to yours,” my father says. “They’ve offered the job, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you accepted?”

“I did.”

He slices his knife through his poached egg; the yolk runs into the hollandaise.

When Lee and I were children, after our parents divorced, our father came for us every Saturday in his sharp black Mercury, the top down. He’d keep his fist on the horn until our mother yelled down at him and we skipped out. There were carriage rides through Central Park and extra scoops of ice cream. Urbane, impeccably dressed, roguish. Autograph seekers would mistake him for Clark Gable. It’s the part in your hair, Daddy, I’d tease him. Arrow-straight. Just like you. That made him roar. He taught us how to flirt. He loved parties and racetracks and girls. An unspectacular athlete and gambler, he sunbathed in his apartment window to keep up his tan. He told us we should not only work hard but be the best. And by the way, he’d add, don’t forget: All men are rats.

---