Page 9 of Jackie

“Do you paint, Congressman?”

He nods, an awkward look. “When I’m laid up,” he says. “Or bored.”

“Are you?”

“Am I?”

“Bored.”

“Right now?” He smiles. “No.”

I’m aware of my hands folded on my bag, the ring on the hand underneath.

“How do you know John White?” he says.

“I’m working at the Times Herald now.”

“I heard that. You’re one of Frank Waldrop’s girls. You like it?”

“Being a reporter seems a ticket out into the world.”

“You have a column, right?”

“You’ve read it?”

“Sure.” But I can tell by how he says it that isn’t quite true.

“You’ve skimmed it once or twice?”

He laughs. “White was their star reporter when my sister worked for Waldrop.”

“Kathleen.”

“Kick.” His eyes shift when he says her name, the grief precise on his face. Then it’s gone. “You must be pretty good if Waldrop gave you a column.”

“The first day I showed up, he peered at me over the rim of his glasses, across that massive desk. I thought he was going to fire me before I started.”

“And I bet when he hired you, he said, ‘Now, don’t come back in a week and tell me you’re engaged.’ That’s what he said to Kick.”

“Actually no. I got, ‘Just remember, Miss Bouvier, your job is to say over and over, “Thank you very much,” and draft an impeccably polite letter when I tell you to curse out a bastard.’ ”

“That’s a good Waldrop,” he says. “So John White still hangs around the paper?”

“Every few days on his way to the State Department, he’ll drop by to sit on the edge of my desk, those wild tattoos snaking out of his shirtsleeves.”

“Make it hard to type?”

I smile. “We go for lunch once a week to the Hot Shoppe and gossip. I love his stories. None about you, Congressman. At least that I can remember.”

A pause, then he says, “I didn’t expect you’d have interest in stories about me.”

It was John White who told me how Jack Kennedy once described a broken-down jeep in the war. That fucking fucker’s fucked.

“He’s that vulgar?” I’d said.

White just shrugged. “That’s straight-up talk in the middle of a war.”

It was also John White who told me the story of Jack and a blond Danish reporter, a former Miss Denmark nicknamed Inga Binga. Inga Arvad was Kick’s roommate, and they were a foursome—Kick and John White, Jack and Inga. Jack was working for Naval Intelligence at the time, and Inga was head over heels for him, but she was married. What’s more, she’d known Goebbels and Göring and had once been invited by Hitler to sit in his private box at the Olympic Games.

---