Jack 1939

by Francine Mathews

  “No. I haven’t.”

  Jack got the distinct impression that Catherine Colt found him as repulsive as a slug. She’d edged her chair away, and kept her eyes firmly on her plate. In different circumstances the girl’s undisguised dislike might have piqued his interest—but not tonight. He had other game to hunt. He was hoping for what Robbie called Something Worse. He craned his head around the vast dining room, but Something Worse was not to be found.

  When Catherine scurried off before dessert, pleading a headache, the man to her left—a German in his thirties—caught Jack’s eye.

  “You won’t see the Fair Diana tonight,” he said. “Seasickness. She’s a martyr to it. Probably lying in her cabin with a compress on her head and her maid at her feet.”

  The Fair Diana. It was a deliberate play on her last name, one the German probably hadn’t invented; but his English was good enough to halt Jack’s darting mind.

  “You know the lady,” he said.

  “Very well indeed.”

  There’s some as don’t hold with her politics. She’s one of them Fascists.

  “I don’t believe we’ve met.” Jack held out his hand.

  “Willi Dobler.” The German was dark and anything but Teutonic; a poor representative of the Aryan ideal. His clothes, however, had obviously been tailored in London; and he held his cigarette like a work of art. “You’re the second son. Jack Kennedy.”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  Again, the faint smile that failed to reach Dobler’s eyes. “We met at an embassy party last summer, but you wouldn’t remember. I am with the German delegation in London, and your father . . . is so good as to meet with us, from time to time. I am also a little acquainted with your brother Joe.”

  Of course, Joe. He was done with Harvard, footloose and fancy-free, and he’d been working as Father’s secretary in London for the past few months.

  “He is . . . an uncomplicated young man, yes?”

  Jack glanced at Dobler. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  The diplomat shrugged. “The quintessential American. That is to say . . . not very complex in his observations or ideas. A black-and-white thinker, in fact.”

  “Joe would think quintessential American is a compliment.” A waiter set a cup of coffee before him; Jack reached for a spoon. “But that’s not how you intended it, is it?”

  The hand holding the cigarette waved dismissively; a faint trail of smoke arabesqued in the candlelight. “You must forgive my appalling habit of summing up every dazzling star I meet. It’s a habit acquired on the job.”

  “Which is?”

  “Third political secretary.”

  Jack took a sip of coffee, bitter and dark. He unwrapped a cube of sugar and watched it float for an instant on the surface before sinking endwise, like the Titanic. Dobler was a diplomat; he’d just been to the United States. What if he’d carried a trunkful of deutschmarks with him?—And distributed them quietly in exchange for the right votes?

  “I suppose you’re a member of the Nazi Party,” he said.

  Dobler inclined his head. “It would be difficult—or should I say impossible?—to be anything else at the moment.”

  “If you want to work for the government. There must be other things you could do.”

  “But I quite like government work!” Dobler protested. “I was bred to it; my father was a diplomat before me. I joined the Party, yes. That doesn’t mean I agree with everything they say.”

  “No,” Jack mused. “You just have to push the Aryan Ideal. Look earnest and apologetic when somebody mentions the nasty Jew-bashing that’s going on back home. And say ‘Hiya Hitler’ whenever you walk through your boss’s door. That seems a fair trade for a few years in London.”

  “Have you been to Germany?” Dobler inhaled deeply, and allowed a thin trail of smoke to drift from his nostrils.

  “Yes,” Jack said drily. “Two summers ago. Before you gentlemen wandered into other people’s backyards and claimed them for the Fatherland. I’ll admit that your economy’s thriving—jackboot production is way up—but I found the average Fritz less than welcoming. Apparently you regard the Irish as a mongrel race. I took it a little personally.”

  Dobler’s lips compressed. “You have no idea how I regard much of anything, Herr Kennedy,” he said. “I haven’t told you.”

  There was a brief silence; Jack’s eyes dropped to his cup. “Fair enough.”

  “It’s not easy being German right now.” Dobler stubbed out his Dunhill with precise and elegant fingers. “One is forced to choose one’s battles. To live in the gray area of life. Unlike, for example, your brother.”

  “Joe again.” Jack eased back in his chair. “My brother certainly seems to have seized your fancy.”

  He was deliberately insulting, as though to suggest that Dobler would like to bugger a big, healthy American boy now and then. He waited for the German to react.

  The long fingers ground the cigarette to dust. “Your brother is universally admired in London—he treats the exclusive clubs as his playground, and the daughters of the best families as his private stable—but so far as quality of mind is concerned . . . I understand that you, Jack, are a very different sort of person from Joe.”

  This snare was allowed to drop neatly on the table between them.

  Dobler dusted tobacco from his fingertips.

  Jack turned the saucer of his coffee cup. It bought an instant of time.

  He could stand up now, throw down his napkin, and avoid the German for the rest of the crossing. He could hotly declare that he was Joe Jr.’s twin, thank you very much, and thought and acted as he did in everything. Christ knew he’d spent enough time pretending as much.

  But he could not expose his brother, or the multitude of things that divided them—had always divided them. He could not talk about the punches he’d taken in the gut, the blame he’d shouldered, the scalding misery of being judged less admirable, less successful, less valuable than Joe.

  Or his brother’s corrosive envy: That it was always Jack other people loved.

  So instead he said softly, “Now who in the world would sell you a line of crap like that?”

  “Our mutual friend.” Dobler gave his stillborn smile and rose from the table. “Franklin Roosevelt.”

  EIGHT. TRAVELING TOURIST

  THE CROSSING, as Robbie predicted, was filthy.

  That first night out of New York the wind began to rise, and Jack, who’d had too much coffee and cigarette smoke and dark, wine-scented medallions of veal for his body to handle, curled in agony in his stateroom as the great ship heaved upward, a Coney Island ascent, then plunged ecstatically into the screaming trough of the next wave. He was a blue-water sailor by training and passion, but the Queen Mary was no trim little Wianno bucking whitecaps off the Cape; she was eighty thousand tons of heaving torture. Jack heaved with her. The groans of the riveted hull and the scream of the gale enfolded him in an iron fist. He tried once to stand, and cartwheeled in vertigo. At intervals, the steward Robbie’s face loomed over his, a spoon of hot bouillon in a wavering hand.

  Jack had never crossed the Atlantic in winter before.

  Seventy-five hours after he left New York, he opened his eyes, saw that his cabin had stopped reeling, and said, “Fuck.”

  “Yes, Mr. Jack,” Robbie replied from the service doorway, “it’s no wonder the Good Lord preferred to walk on water. Would you be wanting that deck chair, and a cup of tea?”

  * * *

  HE LAY UNDER HEAVY BLANKETS, feet propped on cushions, while the tea cooled beside him. The neighboring chair cooled, too, without the benefit of Diana Playfair.

  It was early morning, twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, with a weak ball of sun still low on the horizon. Jack’s breath blew in a crystalline cloud; he kept his arms under cover
and stared at the sea. Presently he would drink the tea and ask for some toast with it, which might give him energy enough to work his pocket knife into the flesh of his leg; he hadn’t had a dose of DOCA in three days, and that was too long. But for now, the smell of salt and ice on the clean air was enough. Periodically a man or a woman he did not know would stroll past him on the First Class Promenade Deck, walking a terrier or pushing a child on a trike. They all looked cheerful and well-fed, as though the three-day gale had focused its rage on Jack’s cabin and skipped the rest of the ship.

  “Hey, sailor,” said a languid voice off his starboard side. “Care to give a girl a light?”

  He turned his head and met the green glare of June Minart’s eyes. She was tricked out, head to toe, in fox furs and suede boots; a Cossack hat with a tassel perched rakishly over one eye.

  “Miss Minart,” he said. “Are you a sight for sore eyes! I heard a rumor you were on this tub.”

  “You’ve been hiding in that nasty old stateroom.” She pretended to pout, and glided genteelly toward him. He saw, then, that part of her fur sleeve was in fact a tiny dog huddled close to her breast, ratlike and shivering. A pink bow was tied to its head. Jack was allergic to dogs.

  June sank down on the deck chair beside him, a cigarette poised in her gloved hand. He fumbled beneath the blankets and managed to locate his lighter. Another time, he’d have loomed over June, captivated her with a wisecrack and his famous smile, left her with quivering knees and a desperation to see him again—but today he felt too weak to bother. She was good at flirting—she was an artiste of the calculated come-on; and she thrust her round, ripe mouth right into Jack’s face. She clearly expected a kiss.

  He lit her cigarette.

  “Why’d you leave Radcliffe in the middle of term?” he asked.

  “Mother thought I needed to get away. Before the Germans make it impossible to meet anybody in England anymore. She’s hoping your parents will introduce us to the right people in London. That’s why she’s been chasing you so hard.”

  “Ah.” Jack was amused by June’s frankness; he’d come to expect social climbing from the women he met. “I’ll make sure Dad invites you to some parties.”

  “There’s one tonight,” June said brightly as she exhaled, “in the Tourist lounge. A girl I know’s traveling cheap down there. You can pay a steward to let us through.”

  The Minarts specialized in paying stewards. Jack resigned himself to escorting June; if he refused, her mother would go back to New York and tear the Kennedys to shreds. It was a hobby in certain circles, only surpassed by trashing Roosevelt.

  “Cocktails, or later?”

  “Oh, they drink most of the day—but Mother’s all over me like a wet slip until dinner.”

  A wet slip. Really. “Shall we say nine, then?”

  “That’d be swell, Jack.” She ground the cigarette under her heel. “Only don’t call for me at my cabin—or Mother will never let us go. She’ll do something silly, like offer you sherry. Mother’s always silly where men are concerned.”

  “Let’s meet at the head of the Tourist gangway at nine, Miss Minart.”

  “Oh, call me June, won’t you? It’s so much friendlier.” She leaned toward him, her rat of a dog spilling onto the blankets. Jack sneezed.

  * * *

  TOURIST WAS A NICER NAME for what used to be called Third Class. Third Class, on the other hand, was what used to be called Steerage—a word so bitterly associated with impoverished immigration that no shipping line used it anymore.

  The Tourist lounge was dense with smoke. Faces loomed through it like ghastly clowns in a funhouse. Jack was leading June through the murk. She teetered on high heels and he dodged a few bodies as they swayed to a Tommy Dorsey tune. He could feel sweat start up under his dinner jacket, and queasiness from the motion of the ship, more noticeable below the waterline. What had he eaten today? Jack tried not to think of it—or of the swaying bodies and the smell of June’s perfume, which was heavy with jasmine. He hated jasmine. It smelled like death. One of the poker players at the end of the lounge had a cigar. The fumes of tobacco and cheap whiskey mingled with the smell of death. His stomach turned over.

  “Hey, kid,” he muttered, coming to a halt in the middle of the lounge. “D’ya see your friend? ’Cause if not, I’d like to get some air.”

  “Lorna! Lorna Doone!” June squealed, and dropped his hand.

  She rushed in her full flounced skirt toward a girl Jack could barely make out, and there was a lot of hugging and more squealing. The ship rolled and he was thrust suddenly against a stranger—a guy slightly shorter than himself, but ten times more solid, with a chest like a brick wall. He met the man’s cold blue eyes, registered blond hair, a scar bisecting the upper lip—and felt a hand close like a vise on his right arm. And then suddenly he was slugged, an iron hammer in the gut.

  He doubled over, arms clutching his stomach. The vise loosened and he fell to his knees.

  “Jack.”

  He could not stand up. The ship rolled and heaved. He was going to vomit. Right there in the middle of Tourist Class.

  “Jack.”

  He opened his eyes. He was staring at a pair of knife-edged trousers. And he knew that voice.

  “Dobler,” he croaked. “How’s tricks?”

  The diplomat was lifting Jack now and urging him to move. “Please. Call me Willi. You are unwell?”

  “I could use some air.”

  A dense crowd of churning bodies, the heat, the promiscuous smells. He managed to let go of his gut, shuffling in a half crouch toward the cooler air of the passage, breathing heavily. Pain shafted through his abdomen to his lungs. He was propelled up the gangway to the Second Class Promenade Deck and hung on the rail. He hated his bitch of a body.

  He was desperately and wrenchingly sick over the side of the ship.

  Bitter cold, sharp as glass. The brine wash of the salt sea, far below the canyon wall of the Queen Mary. His entire digestive tract felt like it was being tossed over the side and he was probably puking blood. He should have gotten the DOCA into his leg sooner. Damn the Atlantic in February—

  “How old are you, then?” she asked. “Seventeen? Eighteen?”

  He pulled his head up from the rail.

  Not Dobler, but Diana Playfair, standing tall as a French tulip in a sheer silk gown the color and texture of champagne. There were black velvet bows looped in the champagne and the black jet of her hair fell like a curtain on her porcelain brow. Her arms were bare and the skin was shuddering with cold. He ought to do something about that. It wasn’t right that she was freezing because somebody’d slugged him in the gut.

  He fished a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his mouth.

  “Willi’s gone for a glass of water. I said I’d stay.”

  “Willi got the better of that deal.”

  “He usually does.” She was hugging herself now, her beautiful shoulders hunched in the frigid air. “He said you’re one of Ambassador Kennedy’s boys. What do they call you?”

  “Jack.”

  “I’m Diana Playfair.”

  “I know.” He shrugged out of his dinner jacket and draped it carefully over her shoulders. “I made a point of learning your name after I lit your cigarette.”

  “What cigarette?” Her fingers lifted his lapel, her shoulders relaxing a trifle in the jacket’s warmth.

  “The one you smoked as we pulled out of New York. In a pencil skirt and a swan of a hat.”

  “Ah. The Promenade Deck.” The memory pleased her. Probably because she’d walked away from him so coolly.

  “I had to know the name of something that beautiful. Before it vanished forever.”

  Arrested, she ran her eyes over his thin frame, the stark white of his dress shirt against the blackened sea. “Exactly how old are you,
Jack Kennedy?”

  He smiled crookedly. “Older than I look.”

  NINE. THE WARNING

  THEY CARRIED HIM OFF to Diana’s stateroom and watched while he swallowed a couple of aspirins with a snifter of brandy.

  “You were punched?” Diana repeated. “By a complete stranger? The man must have been drunk.”

  She sank into a chair and crossed her legs. The champagne gown was slit to the thigh. Her pumps were black velvet. In between was a sleek expanse of skin.

  “Don’t ask.” He dragged his eyes from Diana and set his brandy glass carefully on a table. The stateroom was far more feminine than his—a dressing gown was spread across the turned-down berth, a pair of gilt slippers perched beneath it. An elusive scent teased the air; the scent of Diana’s skin, as he remembered her standing in darkness.

  “What were you two doing down in Tourist anyway?”

  She shrugged. “Looking for a bit of fun.”

  “And found me.” His mouth twisted. “I’m grateful to you both. You turned up right before that joker decided to finish the job. I don’t suppose you got a look at his face?”

  Diana’s gaze drifted from Jack to Dobler, who was leaning against the cabin door smoking pensively. The German sighed and slid into the remaining armchair. Jack waited while he arranged himself, his cigarette, the crease in his trousers. Then Dobler said, “I may have. Describe him, if you please.”

  Jack closed his eyes. The brandy was settling badly in his stomach. “He was shorter than I am, but about twice my weight. Not,” he admitted, “that that’s difficult. Chest like steel, a fist like a pile driver.”

  “Coloring? Features? . . . Nationality?”

  Jack’s eyes flickered open. Dobler’s arm was bent upward at the elbow, the smoke from his Dunhill masking his face.

  “You sound like a cop, Willi. Next you’ll be asking for my driver’s license.”

  “Was he blond? Brown-eyed? An Italian tough?”

  “—Blue,” Jack said sharply. “His eyes were blue and cold as ice. And yes, he was blond. Very . . . Aryan.”