The Importance of Being Kennedy (6 page)

Mr. Kennedy said, “I’ve had it with Boston, Nora. A man can’t do business in this town. Folks here have money but all they do is take it out of the safe-box once a year, count it and then put it back. Well, the hell with it. It’s time for a change.”

We moved to New York in the summer of 1927, but there weren’t any railways rattling under our feet or theater lights like Fidelma Clery had said there’d be. We were out in the country, in a big rented house in Riverdale. If you stood on a chair at my bedroom window you could see over the treetops to the Hudson River. We had lawns and flower beds and neighbors you never saw because they went everywhere by motorcar. I don’t believe anyone in Riverdale ever snubbed us. New York folk were too busy to care what line of business Mr. Kennedy was in or where we went to Mass. But considering how much he was worth, Mr. K seemed to think people were looking down on him. He always had to make the point.

“I wasn’t one of those trust-fund milksops,” he’d say to Joseph
Patrick and young Jack. “Everything I’ve achieved, I’ve done by my own brains and sweat. I started off a poor barkeep’s son.”

“The bollix he did,” Danny Walsh used to say. “His old man had a motorcar when most of the Irish didn’t have shoes.”

For once Danny Walsh had it about right. Old Mr. Kennedy did have a nice house in Winthrop and a respectable reputation. Mayor Fitzgerald might have been the one mentioned in the dailies all the time, but it wasn’t always the kind of mention decent people would be proud of. I never heard any gossip about old Mr. K.

We moved in August, but it was October before I even saw the city. When you had a night off you couldn’t walk out the door and jump aboard a tram like you could in Brookline. I could have been back in Ballynagore for all the entertainment there was in Riverdale. The only thing to do was cadge a ride into Yonkers with Danny Walsh and go to a soda fountain, but the trouble with Danny was he was liable to make himself cozy at the Piper’s Kilt saloon and forget to bring you home.

They were busy days anyway, and I liked that. We had a mountain of jobs to do, getting the children settled and ready for their new schools. And we had Bobby to contend with, the most bad-tempered baby I ever knew. He was born looking peeved and he didn’t improve, scowling out from his stroller with that cross, freckled little face. I’ve never worked out what rubbed him up the wrong way so early in life.

Herself wasn’t much better either. She was expecting Number Eight, so the heat was getting her down and she missed the little bit of company she’d had in Boston. Father Creagh coming to tea. Seeing His Honor every week and hearing all the goings-on among the pols. She kept ringing for me to go to her room and there she’d be on the daybed, making more lists.
Get books on the history of New York suitable for an eleven-year-old. Try Band-Aids on Kick’s fingernails. Ask druggist if Euny is old enough to take
Pepto-Bismol.
She wasn’t even interested in her fashion magazines, she was feeling so swollen and dowdy.

She said, “God’s sent me another little blessing, Nora, but I’m thirty-eight. I’m too old to be having babies.”

She was the same age as our Margaret.

I said, “You look ten years younger than my sister and she’s only having her second.”

She lapped that up.

“Well,” she said, “I put in a great deal of work to keep my looks. These things have to be worked at.”

Of course, my Margaret didn’t have staff and a husband with a million in the bank, but Herself thought she had a pretty hard time of it.

She said, “Men have it so much easier. They go to business, but when they come home everything else has been done for them. We women have to be wives and mothers and careful homemakers. We have to stay young and beautiful and keep our minds lively.

“And somehow we carry it all off. I never bother my husband with anything, you know?

“I deal with everything concerning the household myself. I had a college education. I could have done any number of things with my life, but being a good wife and mother, smoothing the way for a great man, those things are just as important, just as satisfying.”

As I recall, she made that pretty little speech just before the gossip about her great man started buzzing. Mr. K got a new business partner—Miss Gloria Swanson, no less, who’d starred in
Zaza
and
Beyond the Rocks
and
The Untamed Lady
. Fidelma asked him if he could get her Miss Swanson’s picture, autographed.

He said, “I can do better than that. When she comes to visit I’ll ask her to sign it for you personally.”

“When Gloria Swanson comes to visit” was all we heard around the house after that. Cook and Fidelma and the drivers were all aflutter, and Kick and Rosie too. They were quite fans of Constance Bennett till their Daddy took up with Miss Swanson. After that Constance Bennett was history.

Then he came home one weekend and said, “Nora, I want you to put on a Halloween party. Spooks and witches and all that business. Miss Swanson will be in town with her children. It’d be a nice thing to do. Invite some neighbors’ kids in, fix up some pumpkin lanterns. Boy, that takes me back! That was one of my first ventures. I bought up a whole load of pumpkins one fall, paid my sister Loretta to scrape the flesh out of them, ready-made lanterns, you see? I sold them off a handcart and turned quite a profit.”

We’d never had Halloween parties before, and Mrs. K didn’t really hold with it, but she went along with it that year, as long as nobody dressed up as a demon. Euny and Patty went as leprechauns, I remember, and Kick was a phantom in a sheet, gave Bobby nightmares with all her flapping and wailing.

All the talk in the kitchen was that Mr. K was doing a lot more than putting up money for Miss Swanson’s talking pictures.

Gabe Nolan said, “It’s not talkies they’re making. It’s music. Know what I mean? I drive him round there and the Do Not Disturb sign goes up on her door. I’ve seen it. He’s in and out in half an hour but that can be long enough for the pot to boil. Well, time’s money. But if her old man happens to be at home he only stays five minutes and he doesn’t come out whistling neither. I tell you, it’s in the bag. He’s diddling her.”

If what Gabe said was true, you wouldn’t have known it from watching Herself, not even the day he brought Miss Swanson to the Halloween party.

Cook was scandalized.

“That poor creature,” she kept saying. “Having her nose rubbed in his dirty goings-on.”

It wasn’t like that though. I knew Rose Kennedy well enough to see the arrangement quite suited her. She loved Mr. K, in her own way. He was the big success story and he kept her in style, but she wasn’t so keen on her duties in the bedroom, and who could blame her. Eight babies. She was worn out.

It’s a different thing if you’re single. If a man says, “Come outside, Nora, take a look at the moon,” you can please yourself. But Mrs. K wanted to be a good Catholic wife and Mr. K was only forty. Somebody had to keep scratching his itch.

But I did think it was a terrible thing him bringing Miss Swanson into the house and showing her off to his children. I felt for her over that. But she held her head high. The world could be ending and you’d never know it from Mrs. Kennedy’s face.

I’d always thought Gloria Swanson looked a fright in her photographs, with all that blacking around her eyes, so it was a surprise to see her in the flesh, quite natural-looking and nice. She was wearing diamond ear clips and a sable coat though, every inch the film star. Mrs. K had on a good wool dress and pearls, but the baby was showing well by then. She looked a prim little body beside Miss Swanson.

They had a cup of tea together and then Miss Swanson joined in the apple-bobbing and a game of Nelson’s eye, all very jolly but that didn’t stop the tittle-tattling in the kitchen. I had to tell Fidelma to watch her tongue. I didn’t want the children hearing things.

I said, “There might be nothing more to this than there is to him playing a round of golf with Jimmy Roosevelt. It could be a business arrangement. Just because she’s a woman. Women can be in business.”

Danny Walsh said, “They can too. I wouldn’t mind putting a bit of business her way myself. Did you see the pins on her?”

Miss Swanson had her children with her; the girl was Kick’s age, the boy was a timid little mite, a bit younger than Euny. Our lot were polite to them but that was about as far as it went. The Kennedys never really warmed to outsiders. They had all the playmates they wanted in the family, and sometimes getting them to mix with other children was more trouble than it was worth. Joseph Patrick had come home from school with a fat lip, been in a fight with a boy he’d invited to the Halloween party. The boy said he wasn’t allowed. His parents didn’t think the Kennedys were suitable people. And somebody wrote on the chalkboard that Mr. Kennedy took women to hotel rooms.

He said, “What does that mean?”

I said, “It doesn’t mean anything. People in business like your Daddy go to hotels all the time. There was no need to get into a fight over it.”

“Well,” he said, “he had a smirk on his face so I figured I’d wipe it off for him.”

Herself got a new mink jacket for Christmas, picked it out herself from Jacoby’s showroom in Manhattan, and when Christmas Day dawned, Mr. K had another surprise for her. He’d bought the cottage we’d rented the last two summers at Hyannis, so it would be theirs to go to every year. He was having it renovated and rooms added. He said we should hardly recognize it the next time we went up there. Mrs. K was thrilled. Of all the places they’ve lived, I believe it’s still her favorite.

I got a letter from Ursie the first week of the New Year, to say Margaret had another baby boy, Ramon Novarro Mulcahy, mother and child doing well.

She wrote,

I’m certain Margaret didn’t need advice from Ursie on how to stop having babies, and I was glad she’d got the two. More than the rest of us looked like having anyway. Edmond’s Widow Clavin was too long in the tooth, Deirdre was a Bride of Christ, and Ursie had her old-maid dreams about Mr. Jauncey. As for me, well, there was a time. But now I think of it, I’ve had the best of both worlds. I’ve had more of their little smiles and kisses than ever Herself has, and none of her aches and pains.

Ursie’s letter went on.

Every year Ursie sends handkerchiefs and if I know Deirdre, she gives them away. I bet all her little pickaninnies are wiping their wee schnozzes on hankies from Federated. I try to picture Deirdre getting older. The last picture we got she was tubbier and wearing spectacles, but she hadn’t a line on her face. Still that big, shining smile. “Did you hear the angels last night, Nora?”

Directly after the New Year, Mr. K was off on his travels, to Florida first, to play a few useful rounds of golf, he said, and then to California. The children hated to see him leave. The house felt different when he was at home. Kick and Rosie loved mak
ing up little dances to perform for him, and the boys liked to get him playing spit or concentration. That last evening, before he left for the train station, Herself even dusted off the pianoforte and played “Silent Night.” Me and Fidelma sat on the stairs and listened.

She said, “Happy families, Brennan. Fair brings a tear to your eye, doesn’t it?”

Mr. K was to be gone a month at least. He came up to the nursery to kiss Bobby good-bye, only Bobby wouldn’t be kissed.

He said, “Nora, I may not be around much but my children are everything to me. If ever there’s a problem, if ever there’s anything you think I should know about, especially when Mrs. Kennedy goes away to have the baby, you can ask Eddie Moore to call me. I don’t care what time of day it is. He always knows where I can be reached.”

I said, “They like to get your little letters.”

“And I like writing them,” he said. “Regular correspondence is a good habit for a child to learn. It’s been such a swell Christmas. I really hate to go, but when you’re in business you can’t turn your back for a minute. You have to be on the spot and on your toes.”

After he left I heard Mrs. K back at the pianoforte. She was playing Mayor Fitzgerald’s favorite, “Sweet Adeline,” putting in all the twiddly bits, but when I looked in on her to say good night, her face was grim enough to stop a Waterbury clock. It was common knowledge, written up in the dailies, that Miss Swanson was down at Palm Beach too, and even a new mink jacket couldn’t take the sting out of that. Rose Kennedy loved her husband. She just didn’t care for all that pushing and grunting.

Danny Walsh drove her up to Boston the next week, to a nursing home, to get ready for her lying-in. There were to be no more home births. She said, “I can’t get the rest I need with children running up and down the stairs, and it’s not good for the baby to
have a mother with jangled nerves. If there are any problems you must call Mrs. Moore.”

Mary Moore was very good-humored about taking over when Mrs. K was away. She even came down when Joseph Patrick made his first Communion, because neither his Mammy nor his Daddy could be there. But I didn’t have to call upon her while Mrs. K was away to the baby hospital. Even Jack managed not to get sick, and we had a grand time. I gave Rosie a holiday from learning her letters and she helped me with Bobby and Pat, and when the others came in from school I left them in peace to play their own games. There were none of Mother’s Quizzes to study up for. Joe was thirteen by then, so he thought he was too old for milk and cookies by the nursery fire. He liked to be out of doors, throwing snowballs at tin cans or polishing his ice slide. But Jack didn’t care for the cold. He’d have his head in an adventure book or play a game of Chutes and Ladders with Kick and Euny.