Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [57]
The letters—on pale-blue stationery in blue pen, or on heavy lapis correspondence cards embossed with a white scallop (and one black-and-white postcard of Pierrot)—I kept tied with a red ribbon in a shoe box. The last arrived a month and a half before she died, before I flew back from Los Angeles to attend her funeral Mass at St. Ignatius Loyola—police barricades outside the baroque church and a slew of perfect white flowers blanketing her coffin.
“I hope all goes well,” she wrote in the last letter in her artful, tended script.
And whenever she called—there would be her voice, more like music than speech, and I would feel a small thrill, like the kind you get from a cloak-and-dagger crush you want always to stay secret.
In the spring of 1991, five months after it had ended with John, I came home to a message on my answering machine. Excited and flustered, as though an idea had just come to her, she said, “I think I have someone to help you with your career. Call me, bye … It’s Jackie.”
The truth was, I didn’t know what to call her. She was more than Jackie by then, more than John’s mother, more than Mrs. Onassis. But there had never been a word for it, never the right word. I thought back to that first summer—how we’d gone from wary shyness, to approval, to enjoyment. And now I just missed her.
I remembered how she giggled when she ate ice cream in August and how her walk at times had a kind of slow swagger. I remembered a party early on when I’d failed to greet her as soon as we arrived. She had been standing by the windows in her living room with what I thought of as Important New York People, and I didn’t want to interrupt. But a few days later, in the limo on the way to see a play for John’s birthday, she made sure to correct me. Maurice, Caroline, and Ed were there as well, but she did it so gracefully, marking her displeasure in such a way that no one else knew, and I never made the mistake again.
And there was a windy ride one summer on Mr. Tempelsman’s boat. I was alone with her on the back deck; we were on our way to pick up John, who was spearfishing off Gay Head. The whole way, she told me stories, the ones I wanted—not of the White House, but of her adventures in Greece and India and of the balls and parties she’d gone to in Newport and Southampton before she was married, when she was a girl in New York.
I smiled, thinking of a spring evening a year later, when I’d run into her at the theater, a production of Macbeth with Christopher Plummer and Glenda Jackson. John was studying for finals that night, and I went alone. Afterward, she and Mr. Tempelsman offered me a lift in their Town Car, and when we passed the marquee for Speed-the-Plow, she lit up. Had I seen it? I hadn’t. The play, she said, was good, but Madonna was terrible. She drew out the last word, each sparkling ounce of syllable brimming with glee. The tabloids had been rife with stories about them that spring, stories he scoffed at. I leaned closer. “I think you should go,” his mother said, smiling. “I think you should go next week—and have John take you. And go backstage!”
I remembered also how she always made a point of complimenting me—my hair or some detail of what I wore. At first, because of who she was, it stunned me. But what may have been good manners or the desire to nurture confidence in a young woman became for me a lesson in feminine grace and the poise of acceptance. She required that. And I learned, in the end, to simply thank her.
I replayed the message before I called her back, listening once more to the glide of her voice. Then I dialed the office number. It was the first time we’d spoken since Christmas, since I was no longer her son’s girlfriend, and if I expected awkwardness, there was none. We caught up. We spoke of other things.
Then she explained why she had called. There was someone she thought I should meet, an author who was also a producer. Should she give him my number? Yes, that would be fine, Mrs. Onassis, I said, and thanked her.
“Oh,” she said, stopping me, and for a rich