The Importance of Being Kennedy

Herself used to say, ‘I sleep so lightly. My husband doesn't like to come in late and disturb the whole house. When you're in business, you see, you have to be prepared to put in long hours.’

Fidelma reckoned it was showgirls he was busy with, though at the time he didn't seem the type to me. He didn't smoke and he never took drink.

She'd say, ‘Sure, the clean-living ones are the worst. There's one thing none of them can go without and I don't think Your Man gets much of that at home, do you? Only when she's ready to get knocked up again. Do you think she puts him on her schedule? Joe's yearly treat? No wonder he works late.’

She liked him back then. We all did. He was fair and friendly and you could see the children were the light of his life.

Whatever it was that kept him in town so much, he was certainly making money. Anything that took Mrs K's fancy she could have. We were the first house on Beals Street to get an electric carpet beater, and a phonograph. I don't know that Mrs K got much joy from it though. She reckoned she was the musical one in her family and Mr Kennedy bought her a grand piano but you hardly ever saw her sit and pick out a tune. Fidelma was the one who sang to the babies. Mrs K never had friends around for tea or went visiting with the neighbours. If she saw them in the street, a crisp ‘Good day’ was all she ever gave them. I suppose she knew they looked down their noses at her. Brookline people didn't like flashiness. When they saw a big new icebox being carried up the steps, they thought it was a sign you had more money than sense.

The only company she had was Father Creagh from St Aidan's, and Mr and Mrs Moore who sometimes came for bridge on a weekend. They were an older couple. Eddie Moore worked for Mr K. He was his right-hand man, and a sort of friend too. If Mr K trusted anyone to know about his business affairs it was Eddie Moore. And Mrs Moore was a kind, motherly sort, quite happy to chat to Herself about the baby's new tooth. But really they were his friends, not hers.

Fidelma said to Mrs K once, ‘You know, Mrs Erickson gives tea parties and the nursemaids are all invited too, with the babies, so the children can mix and have company. Shouldn't you like to do that, Mrs Kennedy?’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I would not. My children have each other for company and I'm far too busy for tea parties.’

But the busyness was all created out of nothing. She set herself a schedule the same as she did for the babies. She had a time for reading the newspapers, clipping out stories, and underlining things with her fountain pen. ‘Conversational topics’ she called them. Then she had a regular time for doing her exercises, to get her waistline back in trim if she'd just had a baby, or just a brisk walk to post her letters, if she was expecting again and not allowed any bending and stretching.

She wrote a lot of letters, though I don't know who to, and she read French literature too, to improve her mind. And there was her hour in the nursery every day, bending my ear. She loved to talk about when she'd been her daddy's First Lady, the places she'd been, the people she'd met.

‘Did I ever tell you about the time His Honour and I had luncheon with President Taft?’ she'd say. ‘The President said I was the prettiest face he'd seen since he entered the White House. He had me sit right next to him.’

And if she heard Fidelma humming a waltz, ‘Oh Fidelma, dear heart,’ she'd say, ‘you quite take me back to Vienna. Did I ever tell you about my trip to Europe with His Honour? We were treated like royalty. Receptions, balls. I had so many beaux. I could have married a count or a lord. I could have had my pick.’

Well, those days were over. She'd taken her pick and she had a model house and a nursery full of bonny babies to show for it, but I don't know how much pleasure it brought her. She never sat by the fire with a little one on her lap, just to enjoy the lisping and the softness of them.

Fidelma used to say, ‘She's a sad creature. I could feel sorry for her if only I didn't.’

By the time Rosie had her first birthday Herself was expecting again, due in February, but then just after Christmas something happened.

Mr K was gone ten days straight, not even home for Sunday dinner he had so much business to attend to and Herself was getting more and more quarrelsome, coming up to the nursery, wanting everything in the hot press refolded, picking over the layette and finding fault. Then two suitcases appeared in the downstairs hall and His Honour's car came to fetch her.

She said, ‘I'm going to visit with my family. The babies will have to stay here though. My sister's very sick so we mustn't take any risks.’

And off she went. Mrs Moore came round that evening and every other evening, checking that we hadn't burned the place to the ground.

I said, ‘When will she be back?’

She said, ‘Mrs Kennedy's gone for a little vacation but you can call me at any hour. My husband is in contact with Mr Kennedy.’

Fidelma said, ‘This is some family. He's left her, and now she's left us. Let's go down and see what's in the liquor cabinet.’

The Ericksons' cook said it was the talk of the neighbourhood 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 Rolodex, 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 anybody 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 mother-to-be. Mr K was all smiles and sunshine with us, but I heard him on the telephone, giving out to His Honour.

‘Did you put her up to this?’ he said. ‘You must be encouraging her, Fitz. She's not an effing child any more. 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. It brought back to me the time when our 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 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 and one of his boys who helped Dada carry her 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.’

A WASHER AND A DRYER AND SEPARATE BEDS

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 so 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 only shifted 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 motorised 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 scandalised.

‘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's 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 chickenpox. 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 travelled 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 in Naples Road neither. 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 up 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 travelling, up to Maine or all the way to Colorado, and then when His Honour 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 fell for him. 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 Honour didn't get Governor. There had been gossip about backhanders and womanising 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 grand-babies 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 Honour had organised things. Always a laugh and a song and plenty to eat and drink. 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. Old Mrs Kennedy had a tendency to stoutness and that was something Mrs K had no patience with. And then, old Mr Kennedy was well known in East Boston, a ward boss for the Democrats, but he was cut from a very different cloth to Mayor Fitzgerald. He didn't have the blarney. He didn't find occasion to rub up against nurserymaids, unlike His Honour, who was forever playing bumpsadaisy 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 and Danny Walsh were both sweet enough on me. New Year's, St Patrick's, I had my share of getting loved up.

TWO-TOILET IRISH

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. He knew he couldn't beat Joseph Patrick, 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. Wisecracks were Jack's only hope of getting even with Joseph Patrick.

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 she fell for 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. And Rosie, you go with Nora.’

‘We're playing at Olympic Games,’ Kick would say. ‘And 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. She'd the patience of a saint for anything like that, but if you ask me it didn't help Rosie. 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, and my sister Margaret still talks about ‘the electric gas lighting’.

We didn't get a new baby in ’23 either, though as soon as we were back from vacationing at Cape Cod Mrs K did make an appointment to see Dr Good and he told her there'd be a new arrival the following spring. We'd plenty of funerals in 1923 though. 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 not 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 had had palpitations for years but she picked her moment. Well, she 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.

I said to Margaret, ‘You'll be in clover, having the place to yourselves all of a sudden.’

They'd made do with two rooms in Mrs Mulcahy's house ever since they got married.

She said, ‘We'll likely take in lodgers. 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.’