The Importance of Being Kennedy (4 page)

The Ericksons’ cook said it was the talk of the neighborhood that Mr. K was probably in jail or on the run from somebody he’d scalped, but Fidelma was likely nearer the mark. She said, “There’ll be a chorus girl at the bottom of this. And can you blame the man? Herself and her card files, they’d take the shine off anybody’s day.”

Whether there was a girl in the picture that time I never knew, but he’d certainly been in Florida and come back with a spring in his step and two sets of tropical whites to be taken to the dry cleaner.

“Palm Beach is quite a place,” he said. “The weather’s perfect and if you stand in the lobby of the Royal Poinciana, sooner or later everybody who’s anybody’ll walk by.”

He didn’t seem fazed to have come home to an empty house.

He said Mrs. K was taking a well-earned rest and would soon be back, but the days went by and there was no sign of her. The weekly nurse arrived to get things ready for the birth and we had everything she needed except the expectant mother. Mr. K was all smiles and sunshine with us, but I heard him on the telephone, giving out to His Honor.

“Did you put her up to this?” he said. “You must be encouraging her, Fitz. She’s not an effing child anymore. She has responsibilities. She has three children here keep asking for her.”

Which wasn’t true at all. They never asked for her.

He said, “Now you listen to me. Tell her she has to come home right now. Whatever it is she wants, she can have. More help. A new car. She can go on trips. I don’t effing care, just send her home before there’s any more talk. Tell her Jack’s not well.”

Jack was hot and cranky, wanted to sleep all the time but couldn’t settle. When Herself turned up in the Mayor’s limousine, brought home like the Queen of Sheba, he wouldn’t even get off the daybed to give her a kiss. Then the rash came in and he got hotter yet so that even the sponge baths didn’t help. It was the scarlet fever. Dr. Good said the best thing, as there was a new baby due any minute, was for him to be nursed at the hospital. Fidelma was sent to sit with him, although I know he cried for me and that fair broke my heart. It brought back to me the time when Nellie had the measles, tossing and turning on her cot, with a blanket nailed across the window because the least bit of light hurt her eyes. We’d all had the measles. It didn’t occur to us Nellie wouldn’t get over it. Ursie and Dada were sitting with her when she slipped away. Me and Deirdre were out on the back step playing five stones and we heard Dada start keening.

Deirdre said, “I think the angel came for our Nellie.” And she just carried on playing. Mrs. Donnelly crossed the road later on, to help wash Nellie and make her tidy and we waked her the whole night before they put the lid on her box. God, I willed her and willed her till I thought I’d bust to open her eyes and stop playacting. It was just Mr. Donnelly helped Dada carry her casket up to the graveyard. I suppose she weighed no more than a wren.

Kathleen Agnes was born on February 20, 1920. She had blue eyes and the Kennedy ginger hair, and she was born with no difficulties at all, which was just as well, because everybody’s mind was on poor wee Jack. Mr. K got up even earlier in the morning, so he could get through with his business and then take a turn at Jack’s bedside to relieve Fidelma. He was very good like that, for a man.

He said, “Damn it, Nora. The little feller just lies there and there’s not a thing I can do to help him. It’s more than I can stand. I’m used to being able to fix things for my family.”

I said, “I’m sure it comforts him to see your face. And you can always say a prayer for him. God’s help is nearer than the door.”

“Is that right?” he said. “Well, praying is more Mrs. Kennedy’s department.”

Mrs. Kennedy had been promised anything at all she wanted if she’d only come home and do her wifely duty, and when she got up from her childbed she wrung the pips out of that promise. First she got a shiny new Packard sedan and her own personal driver. She picked out Danny Walsh from all the men who applied, and it must have been more on account of his height and his wide shoulders than his personal qualities. He was a bigger gossip even than Fidelma Clery and he’d a foul mouth on him when Herself wasn’t within earshot. Then, after the car and the driver were settled, she went for a rest cure. Fidelma was up to Poland Springs with Jack, for his recuperation. She could easily have gone with them and given the child some attention, but she went down to Virginia instead, to the Greenbrier resort, just her and her sister Agnes and a pile of novelettes.

I thought, You’re a queer fish, no mistake. Blessed with another bonny baby and the first thing you do is go away from her.

It was all I could do not to sit in the rocking chair all day with one or other of them in my arms. But not Mrs. K.

“And when I get back from Virginia,” she said, “we’ll be moving house. This place is far too small for us now.”

We shifted only a few blocks, to Naples Road. We were still handy for St. Aidan’s, and for Joseph Patrick to go to the Devotion School, and Mr. and Mrs. Moore moved into the Beals Street house, so it stayed in the family, in a manner of speaking. We had all the conveniences at the new house. A motorized washing machine and a hot-air clothes dryer just for the use of the nursery, radiator heating, the latest gas range, and nice big closets for all the toys and coats and boots. The garden was bigger and there was a wide stoop too, so the children could get their fresh air even on rainy days. And there were bedrooms enough for Mrs. K to have her own private accommodations. From the day we moved that’s how they lived. Mr. K had his room and she had hers. She was expecting again though before the year was out.

Fidelma reckoned he had two appointments a year, like the children going to the dentist.

And that was about the size of it. I remember, years later, when Kick used to play with little Nancy Tenney up at Hyannis, she came home from the Tenney house one day scandalized.

“Nora,” she said, “don’t tell anyone, but Mr. and Mrs. Tenney have to sleep in the same bed! Do you think they’re too poor to get a bigger house?”

God love her.

Once Joe started school, there were never enough hours in the day, taking him and bringing him home. We’d push Kick in the bassinet, with Jack walking and Rosie on her tricycle, but she’d forget to pedal and get left way behind. I thought the easiest thing was for me and Fidelma to take turns going to the school and for one of us to stay home with Rosie, but Mrs. K wouldn’t have it.

She said it was for Rosie’s own good that she be made to pedal and not just sit in the nursery like a pudding.

Once a week she’d go to the school herself and quiz the teachers on what Joe had been learning. None of the other mammies did it, but she said she had to know what he was doing in school so she could build on it at home.

“Joe’s exceptionally bright,” she’d say. “He needs more than the average child.”

Well, Joe was forward in some respects, but only because he had it dinned into him night and day that he was the oldest and the others would expect to follow his lead. He was no great student. Euny turned out to be the only scholar in the family. But Joseph Patrick was talked up, no matter what little thing he achieved, and every drawing he did, Mr. K kept in a special folder.

He said, “Anything he brings home from school, Nora, I want to see it. These’ll be of historical interest when he gets to be president.”

Joe brought home more than works of art though. We went through all the diseases that first year he was in school. Measles, whooping cough, the chicken pox. Five minutes and he’d be on the mend, bouncing on his bed and shinning up the drapes, but Jack was laid low by everything. Even if it was just a head cold, Jack would end up with the bronchitis. I didn’t spend many nights in my own bed. Whenever I smell friar’s balsam I think of that winter of 1920, how bone-tired I was, nodding off in the nursery chair, one eye on the steam kettle and the other on little Mr. Congressman Jack Kennedy.

Straight after Christmas Mr. K took off for Florida again, with Mr. Moore for company. They were going on business, but it was the kind of business you could do on a golf course. In those days Herself never went with him.

She used to say, “I’d be bored. There’s no culture in Palm Beach. Some women are content to play canasta and go to the
hairdresser’s, but that’s not my idea of filling each shining hour. I’ve traveled to Europe, you see, Nora. I’ve seen rather more of the world than most.”

She changed her tune about Palm Beach later on, of course. After they bought Gueroda, she never missed a winter, and anyway, whatever this “culture” was she said they didn’t have, I don’t think there was a lot of it occurring on Naples Road either. Ursie said it meant museums and concert halls. Well, there were enough of those in Boston, but Mrs. Kennedy wasn’t a big attender. She stayed in her room, doing her waistline exercises and leafing through the magazines for Paris fashions she could get copied on Boylston Street.

Fidelma used to say if she had half Mrs. Kennedy’s money she’d have been down to New York every week, buying furs and seeing the new shows, not sitting in Brookline, clipping articles out of the
Ladies’ Home Journal
and going round turning off lights.

Eunice was born in the summer of ’21, named for Mrs. Kennedy’s younger sister. The sickly one. Herself didn’t nurse Euny though. From Kick on, the babies had bottles so Mrs. K wouldn’t be tied down. She started traveling, up to Maine or all the way to Colorado, and then when His Honor announced he’d be running for governor, she was off to his campaign rooms three or four days a week, with a real sparkle in her eye. I wouldn’t have voted for him if you’d offered me a big gold watch, but you could see why a lot of people did. He wore a beautiful Crombie overcoat, to remind you he was a man who’d done well for himself, and a beaten-up fedora hat, so as you wouldn’t think he’d grown too grand, and he was a master with the flimflam. He told me the Fitzgeralds were from dear old Westmeath, just like me, but then he told Danny Walsh they were from dear old Limerick.

Danny said, “Fidelma, tell him your name’s Esposito. Let’s see what dear old place the bugger claims he’s from then.”

But for all his patter, His Honor didn’t get Governor. There had been gossip about backhanders and womanizing and other things that had happened in the past. I don’t know. He probably wasn’t any worse than the rest of the Boston pols. His grandbabies loved him, that’s for sure, and there were weeks when they saw more of him than they did of their Mammy or their Daddy. He’d take the boys ice-skating in the winter and then to Durgin Park for a baked-bean dinner, and in the summer he’d take them to the Gardens, for a ride on a swan boat, or the whole tribe of us would meet him at Walden Pond, to paddle our feet and fish for perch. Never Mrs. Fitzgerald though. She hardly seemed to leave her house. But you could depend on having a good time if His Honor had organized things. Always a laugh and a song and plenty to eat and drink. It’s funny a man like that should have produced a prim little body like Rose Kennedy.

The children saw Mr. K’s folks most weeks too, driving out to Winthrop after Mass to have Sunday dinner, but I could count on the fingers of one hand the times any of the Kennedys visited with us. All I know is Herself hadn’t an ounce of respect for her in-laws, and all because old Mrs. Kennedy had a tendency to stoutness. They say old Mr. Kennedy was cut from a very different cloth than Mayor Fitzgerald. He didn’t have the blarney. He didn’t find occasion to rub up against nursery maids, unlike His Honor, who was forever playing bumps-a-daisy if Fidelma Clery was to be believed.

I said, “I don’t have any trouble with him.”

“Well, Nora,” she said, “that’s because you don’t have magnificent bosoms.”

Maybe so, but that’s no great loss I’m sure. Mammy always reckoned the world would be a calmer place if women didn’t have so many curves. Anyway, I had my moments. Gabe Nolan, who drove for Mr. K, and Danny Walsh. They were both sweet enough on me. New Year’s, St. Patrick’s, I had my share of getting loved up.

It had been good for Jack to have Joseph Patrick going off to school every morning. It left him cock of the walk for a few hours, with his sisters looking up to him. Once Jack started school, he was back in Joe’s shadow. Mrs. K said it didn’t matter. She said having an older brother who was strong and fast and smart would make Jack push himself all the harder to match him, but that wasn’t how it worked. Jack was a lazy little tyke. He knew he couldn’t beat Joseph Patrick, he knew all he was expected to be was the president’s wee brother, so he hardly tried. Young Joe would pick a fight and they’d be like a pair of terrier dogs for five minutes till he had Jack pinned to the floor. The times I had to separate them, before bones got broken. You could have made two Jacks out of Joe. And Jack would never cry, no matter how much he was hurting. He’d wait till Joe was out of earshot and then say something about him, to raise a laugh from Kick and Rosie.

There was no new baby in ’22. Betty, who came in to do the laundry, reckoned she always knew when romance was in the air,
because Mrs. K would have a silk peignoir laid out on her daybed, and that hadn’t been sighted since before Euny. It seemed as if Herself had shut up shop, and who could blame her. As she said, she’d been blessed with two fine boys and two fine girls, and Rosie.

Rosie was always tagged on at the end.

We’d be getting out of the motor to go in to Mass and Herself would say, “Joe, you take Euny, hold her by the hand. Jack, you take Kick. Nora will bring Rosie.”

“We’re playing at Olympic Games,” Kick would say. “Rosie can watch.”

They sent her to the kindergarten at the Devotion School, but she’d have been happier left at home for another year, playing with her dollies. She couldn’t get the hang of writing her name, nor even of holding the pencil properly. Mrs. K had her up to her room for an hour every day, writing out words for her to copy, but if you ask me, it made her worse. You could have her write out “cat” a hundred times, and by next morning, if you asked her what it said, she’d guess “dog” or “efilant,” as she called it. “Efilant” drove Mrs. K crazy. She thought it was just a sloppy, baby way of speaking, but I don’t think Rosie ever noticed how the rest of the world said “elephant.”

Sure we all have our funny little ways. Fidelma always misses seven when she’s counting. My sister Margaret still talks about “the electric gas lighting.” But funny little ways didn’t amuse Mrs. K.

We didn’t get a new baby in ’23 either. As soon as we were back from vacationing at Cape Cod though, Mrs. K did make an appointment to see Dr. Good, and he told her there’d be a new arrival the following spring. But 1923 was a year of funerals. Mr. K’s mother’s was the first. She’d just faded away with stomach pains, till there was nothing left of her. They said the procession brought the traffic to a halt in Winthrop, the biggest funeral there
in living memory, and it wasn’t for anything the old lady had ever done. They turned out as a mark of respect for old Mr. Kennedy and his loss. Ursie was very impressed. She cut the obituary out of the newspaper and sent a copy to Edmond and one to Deirdre, all the way to Africa.
Nora’s people, Irish but very high up
she wrote on it, in red ink.

Then Mrs. K’s sister Eunice passed over. It was the tuberculosis. She’d been up and down to a sanatorium for years, so it came as no great surprise and Herself hardly missed a beat. She went to the funeral in the morning and to the dressmaker’s in the afternoon, and I never saw her shed a tear. Me and Fidelma did. We didn’t know the poor creature, but twenty-three is no age, whoever you are.

My brother-in-law Frankie’s mother was the final one, on Christmas Eve, of all days. Mrs. Mulcahy was always the one for the big entrances and exits. The day Margaret and Frankie got married she was twenty minutes late to the church, like she was the blushing bride herself, then she drank so much honey wine at the wedding breakfast she had to be wheeled home on a cart borrowed from the fish market and put to bed. She swore it had happened in error. Every time I saw her she said, “You know, Nora, I’m a total abstainer, so that wedding beverage must have been doctored.”

Mrs. K gave me a half day to go up to Our Lady of Mount Carmel for the Requiem Mass. Margaret and Frankie had always had to make do with two rooms in Mrs. Mulcahy’s house, so I thought they’d be thrilled to have the place to themselves at long last, but Margaret had already decided they’d take in lodgers.

She said, “The money’ll come in handy.”

So they let two rooms to a nice-seeming Italian couple but they didn’t last long. Margaret couldn’t stand the racket they made, shouting and banging doors and clattering pans, and then by the spring Margaret was expecting and she couldn’t stand the smell of all the onions they cooked, so the Italians had to go.

Ursie said, “Well, now you’re in a fine state, Margaret. How are you going to manage the rent on Frankie’s money? Can you depend on his lungs not letting him down?”

Margaret said, “I don’t know. No more than you know if your Mr. Jauncey is going to fall downstairs and break his neck and leave you out of a job. You could drive yourself into the loony bin thinking like that.”

Ursie had got a new laugh since she left Ballynagore. Very quiet and superior, like there was a joke only she got.

They say it’s a hard thing to be the eldest child, but it’s never appeared to give Ursie any trouble. She bossed us when we were playing with our dollies and she bosses us still, putting us straight, or so she thinks. The only one of six to rise to a job with a desk. You’d think it was General Electric she was running. But what’s more important, raising a new generation, rearing children like my Kennedys, who’ll likely amount to something, or watering Mr. Jauncey’s African violet and jumping every time he buzzes his buzzer? I’d not trade with Ursie for a pot of gold.

She said, “You must keep in mind, Margaret, I’m with the firm of Holkum, Holkum and Jauncey, established 1884, so my position is entirely different to yours. I just ask myself why you had to rush into bringing another hungry mouth into the world.”

I said, “She’s hardly rushed. Four years married before she started a baby. Look at my Mrs. Kennedy. She’s the exact same age as Margaret and she’s got number six on the way.”

Ursie said, “Mrs. Kennedy is the wife of a wealthy financier, not a fish porter.”

I said, “Well, this baby won’t go short of fish suppers, and if things go bad, won’t you and me throw in a few dollars? A pair of old maids like us, what else do we have to spend it on? And I think it’s grand we’ll have a little baby in the family. I only wonder you waited as long as you did, Margaret.”

“Oh,” she said, “it wasn’t that I didn’t want a baby, only I could never have done a thing like that with Mother Mulcahy in the next room.”

Rudolf Valentino Mulcahy was born November 1. If he’d been mine I’d have given him a proper name, like John or Michael, but Margaret was crazy for the moving films. She’d have been down to the Diamond nickelodeon every night if she’d had her way, her and all the other women from Maverick Street. I suppose that’s what Mr. K saw coming when he branched out from the medicinal liquors and started buying picture palaces. He seemed to have a nose for where the money would be going next. Gin, racetracks, talking pictures. Joe Kennedy had more schemes than Carter had liver pills. And the new businesses meant we saw even less of him. He’d be gone for weeks on end, to New York City or Miami, Florida, and whenever he was away we were guaranteed to see more of Mayor Fitzgerald.

The Dawsons’ nursemaid down the street used to say, “I see the old crook was visiting again. I suppose that means the young crook’s out of town.”

I ignored her. Making money is no crime.

And when Mr. K did come home he did it in style, collected at the railroad station in his Rolls-Royce motor, with Gabe Nolan in a peaked cap and jodhpurs with a stripe down the side. There was a lot of snickering among the neighbors about Mr. Kennedy’s car but it was nothing but jealousy. All those Fullers and Dawsons and Warrenders thought they were a cut above.

I used to say to Fidelma, “I’ve a mind to go out barefoot today. Wrap myself in an old shawl and give them snoots next door a good dose of the begorrahs, so.”

“Two-toilet Irish,” they called the Kennedys. Well, God may have been an Episcopalian on Naples Road, but it was a Catholic who had the gold Rolls-Royce.