In the Drink by Kate Christensen Page B

born in a row house. Nothing ever would. If she’d grown up as the daughter of a rich, aristocratic family, she might have learned graciousness and forbearance, but marrying into one had made her vulnerable and narrow.
    I’d learned soon after I’d come to work for her that Jackie’s origins were nearly as obscure as my own. She was born in Englewood, New Jersey, in 1925. Her given name, bestowed on her by a mother who was clearly burdened with a romantic nature, was Genevieve Ursula, but her nickname was courtesy of her father, Jack Timmins, who had obviously hoped for a son. As a girl, Jackie Timmins wore saddle shoes and lipstick and a parochial school uniform, read romance novels, drank sodas at the drugstore counter with her girlfriends, sang along with the Andrews Sisters and Lemmon Brothers on the radio and prayed for the brave boys overseas, none of whom was her boyfriend. She left high school the summer after her junior year to pursue a secretarial career in Manhattan, and in those years seemed to be headed for a marriage to a Wall Street trader or a doctor, which would have been a big step up from her Jersey row-house origins. But just after she turned twenty-one, Giancarlo del Castellano came riding up on a white horse and radically altered this destiny.
    He was thirty-two, from an aristocratic Milanese family who owned vast pieces of Northern Italy. He had just been appointed to a diplomatic post in Paris and was looking for a wife, the one accoutrement he lacked for professional success. He met Jackie at a party in Manhattan given by the president of the company that had just hired her. She was Catholic, virginal, dewy-eyed, demure and, with the help of a low-cut dress and an upswept hairdo, a knockout. She was exactly what he needed. He danced with her all night, then married herthree months later and carried her off to a life of almost absurd wealth and glamour.
    Jackie reminisced to me about that life with a half-incredulous insistence: the flocks of uniformed servants, polished marble stairways, the fantastic, excessive dinner parties; the bullfights and horse races, where they sat in the best boxes. “Everywhere we went, they treated us like royalty,” she told me. “And we were, Claudia. It’s not like America over there; they’re very class-conscious, very traditional, and they respect their upper classes, they don’t try to pretend everyone’s the same. You had to remember every minute that people were watching you. Even the servants; they saw everything and gossiped with each other. I was young and used to taking care of myself, I didn’t want all those women fussing around all the time. It was hard for me at the beginning. Having everything done for you is not as easy as you might think.”
    I could see how it wouldn’t be easy at all. It would have made me extremely nervous to have someone like me walk in off the street and take over the most intimate details of my life. I wouldn’t have wanted a stranger in my house all day, watching everything I said and did. But the more I knew about her, the better I could do my job; she had to entrust me with complete access to her files, her bank accounts, her closets and medicine chest and telephone book. I had permission to forge her signature on her checks when I paid her bills. I wrote my own paychecks. She gave me a set of keys to her apartment so I could come and go as necessary when she was out of town. I had the run of the place.
    Conversely, the less she knew about me, the better for both of us. I tried not to reveal anything about my life outside her apartment, to manifest only the qualities she needed to project onto me. To this end, I modeled myself after the personal secretariesI’d seen on Masterpiece Theatre , bespectacled girls who blended into the background until their mistresses needed them to take a letter or reserve them a berth on the Orient Express. Whenever she asked a direct question about my life—did I have a boyfriend,