Spy in a Little Black Dress - By Maxine Kenneth Page 0,13
ask her which one she thought he should seduce. At least Jack Kennedy and I have something in common, she thought.
“But when it comes to marriage,” Charlie informed her, “Jack doesn’t want a girl who’s an ‘experienced voyager,’ as he puts it.”
Jackie smiled. “You mean he wants a virgin?” she asked, recognizing the “experienced voyager” reference from a collection of Lord Byron’s journals and letters. “That’s a quaint way of putting it. I didn’t know Jack was so literary.”
“Oh, he’s as avid a reader as you are, Jackie,” Charlie said. “He plays it down, but he’s as well schooled in the classics as he is in historical and political works. He was very sickly as a child—still has a serious back problem—and was bedridden a lot of the time, so he buried his nose in books.”
Another thing we have in common, Jackie thought, remembering how books became her refuge from unpleasantness when she was growing up. To escape from violent brawls between her drunken father and enraged mother, Jackie would retreat to a room with floor-to-ceiling bookcases and read anything that she could get her hands on—Chekhov, George Bernard Shaw, Byron, and Gone with the Wind, which she had read three times by the age of eleven. It surprised her that Jack Kennedy had also enjoyed a privileged childhood in many ways, but not the rosy one that most people assumed.
“I wouldn’t have guessed Jack was such a lonely bookworm as a boy,” she told Charlie. “He seemed so outgoing and self-confident at the party and had such presence. It was amazing.”
“He’s worked hard to develop that persona, believe me,” Charlie said. “When I first met him in Palm Beach right after the war, we were both shy young navy veterans who came from rich Catholic families and were trying to climb the Mount Everest of WASP high society. Jack’s looks, charm, and spunk have taken him a long way, but the family carried the stigma of being Irish Catholic ‘riffraff.’ That’s why Rose was so obsessed with neatness and propriety. She made her children pass inspection like the toughest drill sergeant in the army.”
Sounds like my mother, Jackie thought. Like Rose, Janet had struggled in vain to gain full acceptance into the higher echelons of the WASP world, even inventing an aristocratic southern lineage for herself to cover the fact that she was the daughter of a rough-hewn businessman. Driven to measure up, Jackie’s mother sought perfection in her Porthault sheets, gourmet meals, and ball gowns. And she would not let Jackie out of the house unless every stitch of her clothes was in perfect shape—the same kind of exacting standards that Jack’s mother had imposed on him and against which he apparently had rebelled. The more Charlie talked about Jack, the more Jackie thought that she and the congressman might be kindred souls.
One thing that the two of them did not have in common was money. Charlie had previously let it slip that when Jack had turned twenty-one, he had begun to receive income from several trust funds that totaled ten million dollars. “Jackie, that’s a million dollars a year,” Charlie had said in awe. That was real money, as Janet liked to call it, especially impressive compared to Jackie’s total inheritance of three thousand dollars from her paternal grandfather and her allowance of fifty dollars a month from her nearly destitute father.
But Jackie didn’t want to talk about Jack’s money. She was more interested in finding out some specifics about his political leanings. It would be terrible if she committed another faux pas like her outspoken attack on Senator Joe McCarthy, not knowing that Jack’s brother Bobby worked with him.
“I’m just wondering, Charlie,” she broached the subject, “do you think Jack will care that my stepfather is such a staunch Republican?”
“Oh no, Jack’s not a wild-eyed liberal,” Charlie said, wiping his lips with his napkin as he finished his meal. “He’s a very pragmatic congressman who knows how to work both sides of the aisle. Jack is a new breed of politician, more flexible and open-minded than the stalwarts, and he’s not as self-serving as his father. I think Jack really cares about people who are less fortunate, not just in our country, but in other parts of the world too. You know, he’ll soon be off to Southeast Asia as part of a seven-week trip around the world. It’s not just a pleasure trip. He wants to get a better understanding of the conflicts that are