Read Online Come to the Edge: A Memoir by Christina Haag - Free Book Online Page A

parties and, as we grew older, markers of how we had changed.
    In 1978, Mrs. Onassis threw a huge bash for John’s and Caroline’s eighteenth and twenty-first birthdays. I had graduated in the spring and was a freshman at Brown University. The party fell on the Sunday after Thanksgiving, just days after the fifteenth anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination. There were cocktails at 1040, and after that 150 guests were invited to Le Club, a private discotheque half a block west of Sutton Place. Photographers and press were camped out in the cold on East Fifty-fifth Street. My mother had lent me her floor-length opera cape, and I felt very grand and grown-up. The black wool stiffened, a creature unto itself, and I ignored the chill that seeped through the arm slits and up the wide skirt to the flimsy silk dress I wore.
    One of the reporters corralled me before I joined the bottleneck at the door. He wore a cotton button-down under his tweed jacket, but he didn’t look cold, and his thin hair was matted. He told me he was an old friend of Jackie’s. There’d been an awful mistake, and his name wasn’t on the guest list and would I please give her his card. He shuffled slightly as he took one out of a leather case and handed it to me.
    “She’ll sort it out—we go way back.” Something caught his attention, and for a moment he looked past me. “Friend of Caroline or John?” he said, turning back. I noted the patrician drawl.
    “John.” He scribbled my name on a small flip-pad.
    “What’s it like inside? How many people?”
    “I’m just on my way in,” I said, edging back.
    “You’ll give her the card, then?” he shouted when I reached the door. “We’re old friends!”
    Past the velvet ropes, I was enveloped by a cocoon of colored light, thumping bass, and the crush of revelers. Unlike in the vast spaces of Xenon or Studio 54, with drag queens on roller skates and columns of strobe and neon lights, the ambience here was exclusive men’s club. Tapestries were hung on dark-paneled walls with moose heads and baronial swords, and in the center there was a small dance floor.
    I pushed through the crowd, looking for my friends. I was ecstatic to be home for Thanksgiving break in the city I loved. The Collegiate boys and the rest of the New York band I had wandered with for three years were there among the family members and celebrities to toast Caroline and John. Some I hadn’t seen since graduation. It would be a warm reunion that night, and although we didn’t know it then, a swan song of sorts. The party was one of the last times we would all be together. Interests and alliances ending, we had begun to scatter, settling in at universities across the country. Some friendships, by chance or effort, would remain; others would fall away. After the first weeks of college and the lonely freedom of being a blank slate, this night was an embrace. Later, on the dance floor, I looked around at the faces of my friends. A skein of shared history bound us, and we were there to celebrate John.
    Before I could reach my friends, I found myself face-to-face with his mother. I’d never spoken to her alone before and was surprised that she was standing by herself. Out of nervousness or because I was faithful to a fault, I began to tell her about the man outside—after all, it was possible that he was her friend. She glanced at the card but didn’t take it. Instead, her voice, suspended in a captivating intake of breath, finally landed with, “Oh … that’s all right. Are you having fun?” Her kindness was such that she brushed aside my naïveté and the obvious fact that she had no idea who the man was, or if she did, his name wasn’t on the list for a reason. Someone else would not have been as generous, and I was put at ease. She quizzed me about college—she wanted to know all about Brown. Did I think John would like it, she asked, her eyes wide. I knew he’d been held back at