The Importance of Being Kennedy
The Importance of Being Kennedy
Laurie Graham
A brilliant new novel by Laurie Graham set in wartime London, which follows Kick Kennedy, sister of future US President JFK, as she takes London society by storm.Nora Brennan is a country girl from Westmeath. When she lands herself a position as nursery maid to a family in Brookline, Massachusetts, she little thinks it will place her at the heart of American history. But it's the Kennedy family. In 1917 Joseph Kennedy is on his way to his first million and he has plans to found a dynasty and ensure that his baby son, Joe Junior, will be the first Catholic President of the United States.As nursemaid to all nine Kennedy children, Nora witnesses every moment, public and private. She sees the boys coached at their father's knee to believe everything they'll ever want in life can be bought. She sees the girls trained by their mother to be good Catholic wives. World War II changes everything.At the outbreak of war the Kennedys are living the high life in London, where Joseph Kennedy is the American ambassador. His reaction is to send the entire household back across the Atlantic to safety, but Nora, surprised by midlife love, chooses to stay in England and do her bit. Separated from her Kennedys by an ocean she nevertheless remains the warm, approachable sun around which the older children orbit: Joe, Jack, Rosemary, and in particular Kick, who throws the first spanner in the Kennedy works by marrying an English Protestant.Laurie Graham's poignant new novel views the Kennedys from below stairs, with the humour and candour that only an ex-nursemaid dare employ.
LAURIE GRAHAM
THE IMPORTANCE OF
BEING KENNEDY
To Jeremy Magorian,
Venice's own Mrs Thrale
Table of Contents
Prelude (#ube112f17-9c02-5641-98b3-b9e8869bbc1d)
Chapter 1 - Accidentally, Through The Keyhole (#uc7254081-2f08-5f8d-8507-5e0ef678e859)
Chapter 2 - The Right Kind Of Family (#udef6e581-79b9-5996-b2b3-a82044060335)
Chapter 3 - The Trouble With Blood Fitzwilliam (#u0124b359-c6a0-58c1-9ce9-89f98f328b3e)
Chapter 4 - A Perfect Little Doll (#u3b791788-8967-5463-980a-dcc02c521f82)
Chapter 5 - A Washer And A Dryer And Separate Beds (#u95d09143-2b23-5f9e-bf17-133793512a6c)
Chapter 6 - Two-Toilet Irish (#u2eec1a0c-8f94-50bc-8ae4-77ebf1ebd031)
Chapter 7 - Three Categories Of Feeble-Mindedness (#ue1a675bd-f559-5d60-9e31-f76fdbd72359)
Chapter 8 - Learning The Ways Of The Enemy (#uc531d754-ce06-5189-9ca0-19061591ab41)
Chapter 9 - Another Little Blessing (#ubb1ae2b5-4a07-5591-9588-5f6027351352)
Chapter 10 - Kennedys Everywhere, Like A Rash (#u57a2af07-8e09-5a7d-bb2f-4bd384b27daa)
Chapter 11 - The Sacred Duties Of A Wife (#uf4673936-6aae-58f1-91b7-64ad9cf2bb3e)
Chapter 12 - No Crybabies, No Losers (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 - An Anniversary Trip For One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 - Something In The Blood (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 - The Queen Of Bronxville, The Queen Of England And Walter Stallybrass (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 - The Fox Supervises The Henhouse And Mr Chamberlain Goes To Munich (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 - Other People's Babies (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 - Our Pope (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 - The Season At The End Of The World (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 - Keeping Going With A Cheery Smile (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 - Future Prospects Unknown (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 - Everything By The Book (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 - An Insult Of A Cake (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 - A Broken Doll (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 - Girl On A Bicycle (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 - A Trainee Duchess (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 - The Beginning Of The End (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 - A Real Winner, With A Bit Of Grooming (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 - A Kennedy Poodle (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 - Perpetual Light (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 - The Latest Thing For Diseases Of The Mind (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 - The Official Black Sheep (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 - The Irish Card (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 - Mr Congressman Kennedy (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 - A Day Of Tears (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Laurie Graham (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PRELUDE (#u6543cfbe-7142-58a4-929b-9e7a41911528)
I happened to be in London in January 1970 when I got a call from my office to say my Aunt Nora had died. We were just finishing up the photo shoot for a big piece on platform shoes for Sassy! magazine so I was able to get away to Derbyshire in time for her funeral. Darling Aunt Nora, who'd started life three to a bed in Ballynagore, had a duke and a duchess at her Requiem Mass. If Aunt Ursie had lived to hear that she'd have popped her corset bones.
I didn't really start getting to know Aunt Nora till she ferreted me out in Saks Formal Wear in 1947 and stood me lunch. She had a nifty figure and beautiful skin for a woman in her fifties. She was wearing a tweed suit, I remember, petrol blue, fully lined, with a great corded buttonhole detail. Old-fashioned but very classy.
She said, ‘It's one of the perks of working for a lady who keeps up with trends. When the rest of the world won't be seen dead in a garment it can always be passed along to the help.’
We hit it off right away. She'd been a hazy, absent relation when I was a kid. She did visit, but too rarely for me to know her.
‘Your Aunt Nora is with the Kennedys,’ Mom used to say, and as we had another aunt who was a nun in Africa I also pictured Aunt Nora in a grass skirt and the Kennedys as some kind of ferocious tribe. In a sense I suppose I wasn't so very wrong.
Aunt Nora was a blast. I relished the letters that came each year with her Christmas card, her annual report on life as a gardener's wife on the great Chatsworth estate of the Duke of Devonshire. ‘Another twelve months of 'tater peelings,’ as she called it.
She outlived four of the nine Kennedy babies she'd raised. When Jack was killed in 1963 she wrote me that she had not watched the funeral. She said, Stallybrass was glued to the telly all afternoon but I walked to Hassop and prayed the rosary till it was over. I don't care for the telly myself. They tell you the same thing over and over. Walter loves his cowboy shows and I'll sit with him for company, but I turn my chair round the other way and get on with my knitting. Anyway, Jack's dying didn't shock me the way it shocked the rest of the world. I kept the death watch over Jack Kennedy more times than the sands are numbered and I could have swung for him once or twice too, little devil that he was. But my heart does go out to Mrs Kennedy. This is surely too much even for that tough little nut to endure.
Bobby Kennedy's death and old Joe Kennedy's, she hardly mentioned. Her own health was failing by then, though I didn't realize it. As her beloved Walter put it, ‘Nora were never one to skryke about her aches and pains.’ I asked him if she'd believed there was a gypsy curse on the Kennedys. There had been a lot of stories about that, after Jack and Bobby's deaths.
‘Nay, lad,’ he said. ‘In fact it got on her pippin when folk brought that up. Nora always reckoned old man Kennedy didn't need any gypsy curse to bring him calamities. He brought them on himself, the way he thought he could buy the world, the way he pushed them lads into the spotlight. Pride goeth before a fall, that were her opinion.’
I said, ‘I wish Aunt Nora had written about her Kennedy years. She must have had some stories.’
He said, ‘But she did write about them. That first cottage we had at Edinsor, she sat at the kitchen table and wrote everything down in exercise books. She called it her “Memoirs,” said she were only doing it to stop herself going round the bend with nothing to look at only sheep and trees. She liked the city best, you know, Nora? She liked busyness. She only endured all this beautiful countryside for me, God bless her. Should you like to see her writings some time? If my memory serves, they're in the back of her tallboy.’ So Aunt Nora's notebooks, with multiplication tables printed on the back cover and that old-lady smell of mothballs and dried lavender, came into my possession. This is her story.
Ramon N. Mulcahy, New York, 1972
ACCIDENTALLY, THROUGH THE KEYHOLE (#u6543cfbe-7142-58a4-929b-9e7a41911528)
Herself came to the house at Smith Square. It was April 1948. She was meant to be going directly to Paris for gown fittings but then she announced she was coming to London first, to visit with Kick. Landed on us with all her bags and baggage as if it was the Ritz we were running. Now I've seen Mrs Kennedy walk away when her own child lay sick in bed, turn her back on him sooner than delay a shopping trip, so we knew she wasn't coming for the pleasure of it. There was trouble on the agenda.
Walter had to have the car at the aerodrome by eight o'clock. Too early for Kick to get herself out of bed and go with him.
I said, ‘I'd have thought you'd make the effort. Go and meet her, get off on the right foot.’
‘No fear,’ she said. ‘Talk about being trapped in a confined space. It could feel like a very long drive.’
I was worried Mrs K would start quizzing Walter about what had been going on, if she had him to herself. I said, ‘Just act dumb.’
‘Nora,’ he said, ‘I don't need to act. When you've been driving gentry for thirty-five years dumb comes natural.’
It was about eleven when they arrived. She looked as smart as a brass button, as usual. You'd never have guessed she'd been on an airplane all night. She walked right past me in the hallway, unsnapped the fox head on her stole, handed it to Delia and made straight for the drawing room still wearing her little hat, one of those round chocolate-box affairs with a bit of net veiling that came down over her brow.
‘Kaaaaathleeen,’ she started. ‘We are going to have a very serious talk.’
I don't care how many elocution lessons she's taken, she still has a voice on her that would clip a thorn bush. And it was something to see how that girl crumbled the minute she saw her mammy. She was like a naughty child who knew she'd be getting the strap.
It was all about Blood Fitzwilliam. It had finally dawned on Mrs K that Kick wasn't as worried as she might have been about her money being cut off, so she'd come in person to threaten her with the everlasting fires of hell. The lovebirds were in the country when the cablegram came, seeing his horses put through their paces on Newmarket Heath, but Kick came hurrying back to town as soon as she heard her mammy was coming. She knew she was in hot water.
She said, ‘Mother can have my room. The guest room's too small for her. Give my room an extra spit and polish. I want everything to be perfect.’
I said, ‘Then you'd better get yourself round to Farm Street and see Father D'Arcy because the first thing she'll want to know is, have you been to confession? What bedroom we put her in will be the least of it.’
She gave me one of her monkey faces. And that room of hers needed more than spit and polish. I've done my best with those children over the years but there's not a one of them ever learned to hang up a jacket.
I said, ‘What will we do about dinners? Will you have company in while she's here?’
She said, ‘If you mean Blood, no. He's going to make himself scarce. Maybe I'll invite Sissy though. Mother thinks Sissy sets the perfect example. Or maybe we should have tray suppers and I'll read aloud from Lives of the Saints. I just want to stop her ranting till Daddy's met Blood. He'll talk her round. I think Blood and Daddy'll really get on.’
I didn't. No more than a pair of turkey cocks could be left in the same pen. Mr K liked people he could order around and so did Lord Fitzwilliam. And as for anybody talking Herself round, the very idea was nonsense. There was only ever going to be one thing that would satisfy her, and that was for Kick to go home and marry a nice Catholic boy, if one could be found who'd overlook her history. I knew Kick would put up a fight but I was sure her mammy would win the day and that'd be the end of that. Blood Fitzwilliam would be given his marching orders, Smith Square would be let go and so would we.
Well, then it started. All you could hear was Mrs K's voice.
‘Look at me when I'm talking to you, Kathleen.’
‘Perfect purity and self-control, that's what you were taught at Sacred Heart.’
‘After everything that's been done for you, Kathleen Kennedy. Every advantage in life you've been given.’
The few bits I didn't manage to hear accidentally through the keyhole I could guess. Promises of hellfire and damnation. The threat of being cut off, not just from her daddy's deep pockets. From the holy sacraments as well. As long as her mammy was calling her ‘Kathleen’ I knew there had been no progress. They'd had no lunch, not even a glass of soda taken in, and it got well past the time when Mrs K usually takes her afternoon rest. Then things fell quiet. Herself came out from the drawing room and told Delia she was going upstairs to nap and wasn't to be disturbed till five o'clock. Kick was asleep in an armchair when I went in, curled up in her stocking feet with a little sodden hanky balled up on her lap. Round One had gone to Mother.
Then it was my turn.
Delia said, ‘She's rung for a glass of milk, Nora, to be taken up by you, most particular. Thank God. She frightens the bejaysus out of me.’
There she lay, waiting for me, in those old pink napping pyjamas she's had for a hundred years and frownies stuck all over her forehead, to smooth out any lines the morning's shenanigans had brought on. She was a sight. You wouldn't have known her for that bandbox little body that had walked in from the limousine.
‘Nora, dear heart,’ she said. Patted the bed for me to sit down like we were old pals. ‘What a to-do. Now, I need you to help me.’
So it was ‘Nora dear heart’, for the time being. But I've been long enough around Mrs K to know you can be a ‘dear heart’ one minute and on the bus with your valise and no references the next.
She said, ‘This is a very grave situation. Kathleen still talks of marrying this person. Did you know? Has she talked to you about her plans?’
I said, ‘As far as I know Lord Fitzwilliam didn't get his divorce yet.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘that's something. I wonder how it's being arranged? I wonder whether the wife could be persuaded to keep him? What do we know about her? Would she be interested in money?’
I said, ‘I believe she has money.’
She said, ‘I'm sure she could use more. It isn't just the marriage, though that must be prevented at all costs. But talk can be very damaging too. I'm normally very attentive to these things, but I'm so far away, and then I was busy with Jack's campaign. It's difficult to manage these things from the other side of the world. You might have said something, Nora. You might have dropped me a little note. You've been treated very generously over the years. Allowed back on the payroll after an act of great disloyalty. I'd have thought at the very least you'd have had Kathleen's well-being at heart.’
I said, ‘I thought Jack would have told you. He heard all about it when he was here last summer. I don't see how it was my place.’
‘Jack's in office now,’ she said. ‘He's far too busy, though I'm sure he would have mentioned it if his health had been better. He came back from London with a tired liver. I had to find him a doctor and then get him back on his feet. It's all been such a worry. And now this. If I'd known when she arrived at Palm Beach what she'd come to tell us, I'd have had Archie Spellman down to speak with her immediately. She wouldn't have dared defy a cardinal.’
There was a lot I could have said. I didn't like Lord Fitzwilliam, ‘Blood’ as his pals called him, and I was certain Kick could have done better for herself, but I know there's no reasoning with the love-struck. It was my opinion that if we left well alone it might not come to a marrying. For one thing he didn't seem in any great hurry to get his divorce. In fact there were quite a number of people who said he wasn't serious about getting one. Why would he go to the expense of lawyers when his wife didn't seem to care who he saw or what he did? And they'd houses enough never to have to see one another. Obby Fitzwilliam was known to be a very devil for the drink but she had money, and a drunken old bird in the hand might be worth a lot more to him than a Kennedy cut off without a cent. I thought if he dragged his heels Kick might tire of waiting for him, or that someone else would come along and catch her eye. Sure, half of London was in love with her. But I didn't tell Herself any of that. I didn't approve of what Kick was doing but that didn't mean I had to do Mrs K's dirty work for her.
I said, ‘I'd just like to see her happy. She's had enough sadness for such a youngster.’
Mrs K said, ‘We've all had sadness. And if it's happiness she wants she won't find it by breaking every rule she was raised by. Associating with a married man. That's not a path to happiness. And he's a Protestant. A married Protestant! I can hardly think of anything worse. It's her duty to set a good example, Nora, particularly now Jack's in Congress. We're all in the public eye, just as we were when we were Ambassador. What if Catholic girls start saying, ‘Look at Kathleen Kennedy. She does as she pleases, so we'll do the same.’
I said, ‘If she's here in London I don't see how girls in America will even know what she's doing. If they're interested in anybody it'll surely be Euny and Pat and Jean. And I don't see how it affects Jack. A congressman isn't like a monsignor, and just as well. Jack's no saint himself.’
‘Jack doesn't need to be a saint,’ she said. ‘Boys are different. They have to be men of the world to get ahead. But women set the moral tone.’
I said, ‘Well, Kick's twenty-eight years old and a widow and a Ladyship, so I can hardly presume to catechise her now.’
‘Of course you can,’ she said. ‘That's precisely what you can do. It's never too late. You disappoint me greatly, Nora.’
Then she closed her eyes, which is always her way of saying the conversation is over. That neat little foldaway face.
Four days we had of it. Threats and lectures and tears, and all the time I knew Kick was clinging to one silly thing her daddy had said on the telephone. That if it could be shown Blood Fitzwilliam had never been baptised, then his marriage to Lady Obby wouldn't count and he'd be free to take instruction and marry Kick in a proper Catholic church. It was all moonshine of course. The Fitzwilliams weren't the kind of family that would have overlooked baptising their son and heir, but it was typical of Mr Kennedy to dream up something like that, ducking and diving under the regulations until he found a wee hole to slip through.
I'll say this for him, though. He just wanted his girl to be happy. He knew nothing she did was likely to harm Jack's prospects, nor Bobby's, nor Teddy's. He'd see to that. The boys were his affair and whatever happened, whatever trouble they got into or talk there might be about the family, he'd keep things on track for them.
Kick cried and begged, but when it really came down to it she didn't care what her mammy did. She absolutely would not promise to give up Fitzwilliam. So Mrs Kennedy had Delia pack her bags for the onward journey to Paris and the car was ordered to take her to the aerodrome. It was an ugly leave-taking.
She said, ‘I won't stay another night in this house. You've fallen into bad company, Kathleen, and I rue the day we ever brought you to England. The Mothers at Sacred Heart laid out your path but you've deviated from it, and so deliberately too. No one can ever excuse you; no one can say you weren't taught right from wrong. Well, if you really refuse to acknowledge your errors I shall see to it you at least don't ruin your sisters with your carrying-on. They'll have nothing more to do with you. Don't telephone because they won't accept your calls and don't send letters because I shall have them burned. There's nothing more to be said until you're ready to repent.’
I was just standing there like an article of furniture, holding that horrible wrap with the fox head dangling over my arm. It seemed to me I didn't have a lot left to lose.
I said, ‘I never heard such a cruel thing. A girl needs her family, and the bigger the muddle she's in, the more she needs them, and sure weren't you the one always taught them to put family before everything else?’
‘Nora Brennan,’ she said, ‘you should have been let go years ago. I wouldn't have kept you on, married in a town hall. Well, now we see what an influence you've been. Now we see it clear. I'll pray for your soul, Kathleen. I can't do more. Until you mend your ways I will not see you. You'll be dead to me.’
She said it flat, with that darling girl standing right there. How does it sit with her now, I wonder, seeing the way things turned out? How many times has she wished she could take back those terrible words? Anyone might say a thing in anger, then wish it unsaid, but Rose Kennedy isn't anyone. I've been around her long enough to know. For a woman who's a Gold Star mother she has a heart as hard as the hob of hell.
THE RIGHT KIND OF FAMILY (#u6543cfbe-7142-58a4-929b-9e7a41911528)
I came to work for the Kennedys in the spring of 1917. I'd been five years in America by then, come over to be with my two sisters. Marimichael Donnelly from across the lane was on the same sailing as me. They waked us two nights together before we left, with whiskey drummed up from somewhere by the Donnelly boys, telling us what a grand future the both of us had and then weeping and clinging on to us to keep us at home. We'd neither of us been out of Westmeath before. I'd never appreciated that sky and water could stretch so far, and I know they say the world's like an apple and doesn't have an edge a ship can tumble over, but I've never understood how they know. I was braced for the end all the way, till I saw the roofs of East Boston.
Marimichael had a sister who'd gone ahead too. That was how we did it in those days. The oldest one went, then she'd send the fare for the next and so on, till everyone was settled. It was the only thing to do. The factories were starting up around Tullamore so the demand for hand-knitting was dropping off and there was no other way to make a living.
We were six in our family, one boy and five girls, except Nellie was in the graveyard, dead with the measles and only four years old. Ursie's the oldest. She left for Boston in 1909. Took a correspondence course in bookkeeping and taught herself the Pitman shorthand and she was off. She got work in the office of Holkum, Holkum and Jauncey, and to hear her she ended up practically running the place.
Ursie always had ideas. Writing paper without lines was one of her things, not that there was a lot of letter writing went on in our house, but she said lined paper was common, and she used to have a fit if ever Mammy put the milk can on the table instead of the china pitcher. After she got to America and started earning she'd send us marvellous things, not only money. Caramels and hatpins and silk stockings, and a beautiful handbag for Mammy one Christmas, real leather from Jordan Marsh, with a big, gilt snap. Dear God, we had everyone from Ballynagore come in to view that handbag. We should have charged to see it.
She must have had some courage to go off like that, not knowing a living soul in America. When they were handing out gumption I reckon Ursie got Edmond's share. He's hardly been further than the foot of the stairs.
Margaret went out to join Ursie in 1910 and I cried myself sick. Ursie wasn't the kind of sister you missed, except like an aching tooth after it's been pulled, but Margaret had always been my pal. We'd shared a bed, even. When Mammy and Deirdre went to wave her off on the bus I couldn't bear to go with them. I was convinced I'd never see her again. She kept saying, ‘You will too. I'll send for you and then you'll send for Deirdre.’
But Deirdre could never have gone to America. She had a sweet nature and the voice of an angel but she was the kind of girl that would easily be taken advantage of. She used to get confused enough in Tullamore market so she'd have been lost in a minute in Boston. Anyway, Father Hughes said a girl like Deirdre would likely be blessed with a vocation, so we all prayed for that and our prayers were answered. She went to the Maryknoll Sisters, and then to Africa to teach little black children about our Risen Lord, which left just me at home and Mammy and my brother Edmond.
Ursie kept writing that I should still think of going to America. Mother won't stand in your way, she wrote. She didn't call her ‘Mammy’ any more, since she worked for Holkum, Holkum and Jauncey. She'll be a lot happier knowing you're making something of yourself. She has Edmond to take care of her.
Edmond was supposed to be the head of the house. Dada had the Irish disease and after we lost Nellie he just turned his face to the wall and died.
Mammy used to say, ‘Edmond's a thinker. He doesn't rush into things. And did you ever see such a fine head of hair on a man?’
Well, that part was true. I believe it acted like a goose-feather comforter. It kept his noddle so warm and cosy his brain fell asleep.
I don't know whether I would have gone and left Mammy in his care, but anyway, as things turned out it was Mammy who left us. She'd a growth under her left bosom that had eaten her away inside and she'd been too shy to say anything until it was too late.
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘I've had a good life. I've had my span.’
But she'd only had forty-seven years and she could have had more if she hadn't been such a muggins about taking off her vest in front of the doctor. She died in the autumn of 1911 and before the year was out Edmond took off his thinking cap and announced he was marrying the Clavin widow from Horseleap and bringing her to our home. So my mind was made up for me. I couldn't have stayed in the house with that woman. She'd a face would turn fresh milk. Margaret sent me the fare and I was on my way.
Marimichael went into a cotton mill when we got to Boston, same as her sister, and Margaret could have got me a start at the grocer's where she worked, but Ursie had bigger ideas.
She said, ‘You've a brain in your head, Nora. Use it. Nursing would be suitable. The uniforms are very attractive.’
But I liked the idea of going into service, somewhere where I'd have my own room.
I said, ‘If I'm going to wipe BTMs and mop up dribble I'd as soon do it for a nice sweet little baby as somebody who smells of sickness or some grouchy old feller. I'll go for a nurserymaid.’
‘Just be sure it's the right kind of family,’ she said. ‘A doctor, or a lawyer, like Mr Jauncey. Cultured, professional people. There are people who have money to run a full staff but no breeding. You don't want to end up with a family like that.’
I got a start with the Griffin family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to look after Loveday who was three and the baby who was on the way, Arthur. Ursie seemed to think they were good enough for me, even if they were a bit modern. Dr Griffin was a scientist at the university but he thought nothing of pushing the bassinet out on a weekend. There was only me, a housemaid, a woman who came in on Mondays to do the laundry and a man who helped with the garden. Mrs Griffin did all the cooking and I had every Sunday off and one night a week. I used to meet Margaret at a soda fountain and she'd give out to me about Ursie while we watched the boys go by. That's where we met Jimmy Swords and Frankie Mulcahy.
It's a funny thing about boys. They go around in pairs and if one of them is good-looking the other's sure to be a poor specimen. That was Frankie. He always looked like he'd lost a dollar and found a cent, but Margaret fell for him, and Jimmy was keen on me. The only problem with Jimmy and Frankie was they worked as fish porters. They were always washed and shaved and dressed in a nice clean collar and tie when we saw them, but there was still that smell. You can never get rid of it. Jimmy seemed steady though. We never quarrelled, and the Griffins liked him because he used to bring oysters for them or a lobster, when he came to walk me out.
I had my nursery and my own room up under the roof and I had my beau. I was very suited, but then Dr Griffin said he was moving to a different university, in California, and I had to decide whether to go with them. Ursie thought I should.
She said, ‘You've made a good start, Nora, now build on it. The Griffins think highly of you and you mustn't flit from position to position. It doesn't inspire confidence.’
But Jimmy didn't want me to go.
He said, ‘I'm putting money by. Stay in Boston and we'll get married. Next year.’
So the Griffins went off to California and I applied for a new position, in Beals Street, Brookline. The Kennedy family. They had a little one just walking, Joseph Patrick, and another one on the way.
I had to go to the house to be interviewed and inspected by Mrs Kennedy. She's only a year or two older than me and people say she has the secret of eternal youth. To look at us now you'd think I could give her a few years, but that first day I met her she seemed quite the little matron. First thing she told me was how she had to be most particular about the help she employed, because of her position.
She said, ‘My husband is president of a bank.’
The house was nothing to shout about and neither was the money they were offering.
She said, ‘And I expect you recognise me.’
But I didn't know her from Atty Hayes's donkey. She laughed.
She said, ‘You're a newcomer. If you were Boston-born you'd know my face from the dailies. I'm Mayor Fitzgerald's daughter.’
Well, you couldn't be in Boston five minutes without hearing of him, so that satisfied her. She rattled on, perched at her bureau like a neat little bird, telling me all about her travels and the big names she'd met. She even had tea brought in, and I still didn't know if I had the job or not.
‘I was my father's right-hand woman,’ she said. ‘My mother didn't have the nerves for public life so I went everywhere with him. But now of course I'm too busy running my own home. Mr Kennedy works very long hours in business.’
And that was the truth. I was there three weeks before I properly met him. He'd get home late and leave again early. He was a tall carrot-top of a man with a tombstone smile and ice-blue eyes. He came up to the nursery one Saturday morning and started throwing Joseph Patrick up in the air to make him squeal.
He said, ‘I'm Joe Kennedy. You have everything you need? Anything you need, tell Mrs Kennedy. Money's no object. And make sure this boy of mine eats his greens. I have big plans for him.’
Mrs K gave me a book to read the day I arrived, on how a nursery should be run. Everything was to be done by the clock. When the new baby came she was going to nurse it, but between feeds there was to be no picking it up or rocking the cradle. If it cried, it cried. And little Joseph Patrick wasn't to be played with, except for half an hour of nursery rhymes and physical training in the afternoon. He'd to learn to entertain himself with toys, and the only time he was allowed to snuggle on my lap was for his bedtime story.
She said, ‘Too much petting makes a child fussy and it's a very hard habit to break.’
‘Yes, Mrs Kennedy,’ I said. And I did try to follow her rules but it didn't seem a natural way to raise a child. Well, she didn't have to know everything that went on in my nursery. I had my routines and she had hers. She'd walk to St Aidan's every morning to early Mass, and then she'd do the marketing and write letters till lunchtime. Always a chicken sandwich and a glass of milk. In the afternoon she'd take a nap, and then have her hair done or go to the dressmaker's and once a week Mayor Fitzgerald would come to tea. The way Mrs K talked him up, ‘His Honour this, His Honour that,’ it was like expecting the President himself. It was such a let-down the first time I saw him. He was just a crafty-looking old knacker riding round in a limousine car, but Mrs K thought the sun shone out of her daddy's fundament.
Sometimes on a Friday night Mr K would have some people in for bridge, business gentlemen and their wives, but otherwise she didn't see a soul. Her mammy never visited, nor her sisters, and the neighbours on Beals Street kept to themselves.
The Ericksons' maid said, ‘She thinks she's the cat's pyjamas, your missis, but nobody round here's impressed.’
We knew war was coming. It seemed to have nothing to do with us back in 1914, but we could feel it just around the corner by the start of 1917. Mrs K said it was a terrible unsettled time to be bringing a new baby into the world but at least Mr Kennedy wouldn't have to go away to fight. She said he was too old, but he wasn't. He was twenty-nine, same as Jimmy Swords.
Jimmy and Frankie Mulcahy both volunteered. There were a lot of the Irish who wouldn't, not wanting to take sides with the English, not even against that terrible Kaiser, but Jimmy said, ‘I'm an American now and Americans are going to fight so I'm with them.’
Not Mr Kennedy though. All of a sudden he got a management position at the Schwab shipyard in Quincy, reserved occupation, and when they drafted him anyway he went to a tribunal to appeal and he won. Mrs K said they'd made an error when they tried to draft him because he was engaged in vital war work, but that was only because Mayor Fitzgerald had pulled strings to get him in at the shipyard. Whichever way you cut it, Joe Kennedy was a draft-dodger. But that's water under the bridge. God knows, we've had another war since then and what he got away with in 1917 he's paid for in buckets since.
Jimmy went off to a training camp, but the doctors failed Frankie because of his chest and he was sent to a uniform factory in Pennsylvania, as a machinist. Margaret thought we should have married them before they went, but Jimmy never offered it and I had my mind on my nursery. Mrs Kennedy was very near her time.
A weekly nurse was hired and Mr K moved into the guest room so we could get the big bedroom ready. All the little trinket boxes and hairbrushes had to be cleared off the dressing table, and the rugs lifted and the floor washed down with carbolic acid and boiling water, for reasons of hygiene, the nurse said. It made you wonder how the human race ever got to be such a thriving concern.
Mrs K came along to the nursery still in her bathrobe that morning. She said she'd had a few pains in the night but she hadn't wanted to say anything till Mr K had gone off to business.
‘This is woman's work,’ she said. ‘Now we'll get on with it. We'll have this baby delivered and everything tidied away by the time he comes home.’
I took Joseph Patrick to the park and played with him on the teeter-totter and by the time he'd had his soup and laid down for his nap the doctor had been sent for.
I'd never seen a baby born. When Mrs Griffin had baby Arthur she went to the nursing home so they could give her the twilight sleep and then she had two weeks of lying-in before she brought him home. I knew the facts of life and I'd seen plenty of sows dropping their piglets but it was hard to relate that to Mrs Kennedy. I'd heard it said that women screamed and cursed and that there was blood and worse, but she'd hardly a hair out of place. She just lay there with the ether inhaler over her face and Dr Good fetched the forceps out of his bag and fairly dragged the poor mite into the world. John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Though, as I recall, he was hardly ever called John. He was Jack right from the start.
The nurse told Mrs K she had another boy but she was too doped for it to register or even to hold him, so he was given to me to put in the crib. And it was a grand thing, to cradle him in my arms and see his surprised little face and his tiny fingers weaving in the air, to wonder what life had in store for him. I was the first to hold the next three Kennedy babies and every time it gave me that nice, funny feeling, like someone slipped a piece of velvet inside my tummy.
But by the time Mr Kennedy came home from business, Herself was wide awake, washed and powdered and sitting up in a new satin bed jacket. Then His Honour the Mayor turned up, with Mrs Fitzgerald, who I'd never seen before, and a bouquet of carnations. They came to the nursery to take a look at Jack but they didn't seem very interested in him. He'd been given Fitzgerald for one of his names so I'd have expected them to be thrilled.
His Honour said, ‘He'll do, for a spare. Now let me see my best boy.’
And I had to go contrary to all Mrs Kennedy's instructions and wake Joseph Patrick from his bed, to be petted and made overexcited by his grandpa.
‘See this fine feller?’ he said. ‘This fine feller is going to be President of the United States.’
It's a funny thing, there was never any love lost between Mayor Fitzgerald and Mr Kennedy but that's one thing they always agreed on. Joseph Patrick was going to be President.
THE TROUBLE WITH BLOOD FITZWILLIAM (#ulink_72cbb92a-d501-5119-a45b-97869b6a050c)
But I was saying about 1948. The minute her mammy was on her way to the aerodrome Kick got the shine back in her eyes.
She said, ‘That was pretty gruesome. Daddy'll fix everything. He can probably get us a special dispensation from Rome.’
I said, ‘The Holy Father won't change the rules, not even for a Kennedy.’
She said, ‘This Holy Father might. He's practically part of the family.’
Part of the family my eye. He paid a call once, that's all, long ago, when we were in Bronxville, and that was only because Mr Roosevelt couldn't think what else to do with a visiting cardinal all afternoon, only send him to Mrs Kennedy for a cup of tea.
She said, ‘And we had a private audience. He gave me a rosary.’
I said, ‘I know. I was there. And so was Fidelma Clery He gave us all rosaries. He gets them wholesale, I'm sure. But that doesn't mean he hands out dispensations so a man can have two wives.’
She got into such a paddy.
She said, ‘Why doesn't anyone understand? Blood married Obby in one of their churches, so as far as our church is concerned he's never been married. Anyway, the Holy Father can change anything he wants to. Especially if Daddy sends him a big fat cheque for a new altar or something.’
There were cablegrams flying back and forth all that week and then Blood Fitzwilliam turned up, like the bad penny. He was back in town and expecting to take her to lunch. When you're in service you notice that the ones who're too grand to give you a ‘Good day’ are not necessarily the ones with the biggest estates or kings in their family tree. Just a middling rip like Fitzwilliam can be full enough of himself to ignore the help.
As soon as she heard his voice, Kick was ready to grab her pocketbook and go.
I said, ‘Didn't you tell me Lady Ginny was calling for you?’
‘Oh Lord,’ she said. ‘Well, she's late. Just tell her something came up, would you? She'll understand.’
He'd picked up the telephone without so much as a by-your-leave, putting through a call to his club, tapping a cigarette on his silver case. Kick was watching me watching him.
She said, ‘Darling, no smoking in the hall. Nora's got her fierce face on.’
‘Sweetie,’ he said, ‘who pays Nora's wages?’
It was four o'clock when she came home, pink and silly from champagne wine.
She said, ‘Blood's going to take me down to Nice for a vacation, next month. Such bliss. We're going to stay with his friends at their villa, and then by the time we come back Daddy will be in Paris, so we'll be able to stop off and see him. It's all worked out perfectly. We can have a big powwow about asking the Pope and things, without Mother being there to have a fit, and Daddy and Blood can get to know one another.’
I said, ‘Angel girl, will you listen to yourself? All this talk about marrying. Is the man divorced from his lawful wedded wife?’
‘He soon will be,’ she said. ‘He just has to see the lawyers. Then it won't take long. Obby's going to cooperate. You know they haven't had a real marriage for years.’
I said, ‘And what about his child? Where does she fit in to a divorce?’
She said, ‘She'll be fine. I expect we'll live at Coolatin when we're not in London, and she'll be able to come to visit us and keep a pony there and everything. I'm sure she's an absolute sweetheart, and I'll bet she'd love to have some little brothers and sisters. I'm going to have dozens of babies for you to look after, Nora, and we'll all live happily ever after. Blood will charm Mother off her feet, and Pat and Jean'll come over for the hunting. We might even be able to have poor Rosie to stay.’
Ah yes. Poor Rosie. Well, there was a name she knew better than to bring up with her daddy if she wanted to get him on her side. We never mentioned Rosie any more, except below stairs.
A PERFECT LITTLE DOLL (#ulink_67bd7c9f-8acb-5d2b-9628-33c8fba680b0)
Rose Marie was born in the September of 1918. It was a darker time even than when Jack arrived. We didn't only have the war still dragging on and our men far from home, we had the influenza too, and that was on our very doorstep. We hardly left the house. There was such a scare on that Herself didn't even go to Mass. Cook went out in a gauze mask to do the marketing and the laundrywoman was told not to come, for the duration, because she was in and out of different houses all the time. There was no telling what germs she might carry with her. Mr K slept on an army cot at the shipyard most nights sooner than risk bringing the infection home. Some people said the docks were where it had started.
No one we knew in Brookline got sick, but the Ericksons' gardener reckoned there was a four-week wait for funerals in Boston, there were so many bodies to bury, and after it was over I heard that Marimichael Donnelly had been one of them, ironing sheets in the afternoon and dead by midnight. Three little ones left without a mammy. To think she left Ballynagore to finish up like that. She was strong as an ox, Marimichael, but that was the thing about the influenza. It carried off the strong and didn't touch the babies and the old folks.
Before Rosie was born Mrs Kennedy decided she needed an extra nurserymaid. She hired Fidelma Clery. Flame-red hair and terrible, crooked little teeth. I was glad of the help. Young Jack caught every cough and cold that was going, and Joseph Patrick had the very devil in him, always climbing into trouble and tormenting Jack and taking his toys.
‘Why is he still a baby?’ he used to ask. ‘When will he be big enough to fight me?’
His Honour was the one who encouraged fighting, play-boxing with him, showing him how to put up his little dukes.
Mrs K gave Fidelma the gospel on nursery routines to read, but I know she never opened it. Fidelma was a bit hazy when it came to reading. Every time she told the story of the Gingerbread Man it ended different. But she had enough common sense to get by and the first time Joseph Patrick gave her any trouble she picked him up, hollering and kicking, and carried him to his room like a roll of linoleum.
The weekly nurse came a few days before the baby was due and Mrs K started her pains right on time, same as she did everything else. Everything was going along nicely and I quite thought we'd be cleared away by teatime with the baby safe in her crib, but when it came time to send for the doctor he couldn't be reached. He'd been called away to somebody with complications, and you couldn't send for any other doctor. They were all run off their feet with influenza cases
I said, ‘It hardly matters. It's her third child. She knows what to do.’
The nurse said, ‘That's not the point. I can't let her have it. If the doctor isn't here when it's born he won't get his fee and then I'll be for it.’
It seemed to me you couldn't do much to stop a baby if it was ready to come, but she was the nurse and I was only there to help. So we tied Mrs K's knees together with a scarf and the nurse instructed her that whatever she did she mustn't bear down when she got one of her urges. She was a model patient. I never heard her cry out once. And that's how we kept Rose Marie from being born until Dr Good arrived, bounding up the stairs with his ether mask.
I loved all my Kennedy babies for their different funny little ways but Rosie was the real beauty among them. She'd a mop of black hair and big green eyes and she was so contented. She'd lie in her crib for hours smiling at the world and playing with any little toy you gave her. Not like Jack, always crying. Not like Joe, always looking for trouble.
If I'd been Mrs K I'd have been up in the nursery gazing at Rosie all day long. She was like a perfect little doll and Herself loves dolls. Sure she has a whole room full of them at Hyannis, all in their glass cases. But she didn't trouble us much in the nursery. She preferred to be down at her bureau, clipping out articles on how children should be raised and making lists of things that had to be seen to. Timetables, charts for their weight, charts for their teeth.
Joseph Patrick was forever asking why did I live with them.
‘Don't you have a mother and a daddy?’ he used to say. ‘This is my house. But when I go to school I guess you can still stay here. You can look after Rosie.’
I wasn't sure I would be staying because me and Jimmy Swords were sort of engaged. Frankie Mulcahy was back from Pennsylvania and Margaret wanted us to name the day as soon as Jimmy came home from Flanders. A double wedding at Most Holy Redeemer and then to Mazzucca for ice-cream sundaes. She had it all planned. But Jimmy didn't come back in a marrying frame of mind.
He said, ‘Why bother? Bringing more kids into the world. Cannon fodder for another war. Factory fodder for the bosses. It's all shite.’
He'd got in with a lot of socialists in his battalion, putting the world to rights while they were waiting to be sent up the line to fight the Boche.
I said, ‘I thought we'd won this war so there won't ever be another one. And what'd happen if everybody had your attitude? There'd be no more babies. Nobody to look after you when you're in your bath chair.’
He said, ‘I'm not going to be in a bath chair. I'll put a bullet in my brain sooner. And I'm not getting married. It's nothing personal, Nora. You can keep the ring.’
Silly beggar. He'd never given me a ring.
I did wonder, had he met someone else, somebody prettier. One of those French mam'zelles. Mammy always said it was a good thing I had my health and strength because my face would never make my fortune. I wasn't exactly heartbroken over Jimmy but I did stop looking in the mirror for a while. Looking in the mirror could make a girl lose heart.
Ursie said, ‘Never mind. You're better off staying single. You've a nice little job and a roof over your head and that's more than Margaret will ever have. Frankie Mulcahy isn't fit to mind a canary, never mind a wife and family. There'll be a baby every year and never enough money to pay the electric. You'll see. She'll be broken down and worn out. So don't break your heart over Jimmy Swords. You've had a lucky escape.’
Margaret didn't have a baby every year though. Nothing happened on that front for a long time. And as for Jimmy, I don't know that Ursie was right. He was a good man. It was just that the war had chewed him up and spat him out, bitter and twisted. When Ursie said these things you always had to keep in mind that she was probably a disappointed woman, on the quiet. She worshipped her Mr Jauncey and yet all he ever did was say, ‘Take a letter, Miss Brennan.’
Poor Ursie and her little two-cup teapot.
Rosie sat up at six months, same as Jack did, but she wasn't interested in walking or talking. She was happy just to sit and watch the world go by. Mrs K said we were to stimulate her more, talk to her, and pull her up onto her feet to give her the idea of walking.
Fidelma said, ‘There's not a thing wrong with her. She only seems quiet because you're used to the boys racketing about. If you ask me we should be thankful. She never gives us a minute's trouble.’
Mrs K said, ‘I didn't ask you, Fidelma. And I want particular attention paid to Rose Marie's activities. We can't have her falling behind.’
Well, Rosie got up and walked when she was good and ready, and she talked too. She just didn't put herself out. If you threw her a ball she'd pick it up and look at it, but it never occurred to her to throw it back. And when Mr K came up to the nursery he didn't seem to know what to do with her. The boys would clamber all over him begging to be tickled to death. Rosie would just sit smiling at him, holding back.
Later on Mrs K made quite a project of Rosie, tutoring her for hours on end to try and get her up to the mark with her reading and writing, but in those early days Joseph Patrick was her big project.
‘He's the foundation stone,’ she said. ‘If the oldest child is brought along correctly, the others will follow suit.’
Everything she did was in aid of Joseph Patrick growing up the brightest scholar and a champion sportsman and a Light of Christ altar boy. She took him to the Franklin Park Zoo one afternoon to set the scene and tell him about the poor Christian martyrs, but when he came home all he did was keep springing out at Jack and Rosie, playing at killer lions. Well, he was only four.
She kept up with all the new books that were brought out too, and fetched them from the lending library to read to them, but when I was left to read them a story they always wanted their old favourite, about Billy Whiskers the Goat. It had been given them by their Aunt Loretta Kennedy and they loved that book, but Herself thought it was a dreadful story for children. She said it encouraged naughtiness instead of obedience and she threw it in the trash can. Fidelma slipped out the back and rescued it. It had a wee bit of bacon grease on the cover but we kept it for a special secret treat when Mother was out shopping.
After the armistice, Mr K had gone back to his own business. Import and export, according to Mrs Kennedy, and finance. He was always up early. He'd do his morning exercises and then look in on the nursery on his way down to breakfast, showered and suited and ready for the off. Sometimes we'd only see him on Monday morning and then he'd be gone all week, busy with meetings in the city.
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 (#ulink_9ac95a4a-3be2-5e90-8019-ea448b28c59a)
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 (#ulink_680d765e-b923-50a2-a0c7-f3664fb6b9eb)
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.’
‘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.’
Rudolph 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's 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 neighbours 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.
THREE CATEGORIES OF FEEBLE-MINDEDNESS (#ulink_c902fd35-ed49-5574-a771-0fe229821f56)
Baby Patricia was born in May of 1924 but she was a month old before her daddy even saw her. We all went to meet him off the train from New York. Rosie with a painting she'd done for him, Joe tormenting Jack in the back of the car, arms and legs flying, and Kick and Euny hanging out of the window like a pair of ragamuffins shouting, ‘Daddy! We got another sister!’
Rosie was being tutored at home at that time. They'd tried her at the Edward Devotion where the boys went and they'd tried her at the parish school but she couldn't keep up. She got top marks for good behaviour and effort and a special mention for her dancing, but it was too much for her. She'd toil home on her chubby little legs, dragging behind the bassinet, hardly able to keep her eyes open, school fatigued her so.
Mrs K did a lot of reading up about slow children and then she took her to see a special doctor in New Jersey, the big expert, Dr Henry Herbert Goddard. She came back wearing her tough-nut face, the one I've seen on her a thousand times, when any other woman would break down and cry.
She said, ‘It isn't good news, Nora, but I'm determined we can beat this. We just have to make greater efforts with Rosie.’
She had it all written down, what this Dr Goddard had said. Three categories of feeble-mindedness. Idiots, who were the worst, then imbeciles and then morons. As far as he could estimate Rosie was only a moron.
Mrs K said, ‘At least she's in the top category. Dr Goddard says idiots have to wear diapers all their lives.’
Well, I had my Rosie out of diapers before she was two.
She said, ‘The problem is this, morons are harder to care for because they look so normal. As they grow up they have to be watched every minute or they get into all kinds of difficulties. Do you see what I mean?’
I didn't see what she meant at all.
I said, ‘I know she's the sunniest child I ever looked after.’
‘Precisely,’ she said. ‘She's amiable and eager to please and when she's older men will take advantage.’
I said, ‘Well, that's a long way down the road. She's only six.’
‘But something to think about nonetheless,’ she said. ‘We have to keep her safe from men, Nora, because she must never have babies.’
I couldn't see why. She was just grand with Euny and baby Pat. And if Herself was anything to go by too much brains and education only made for a restless mother.
She said, ‘We have to develop what little gifts she has.’
I said, ‘She has the gift of contentment and that's no small thing. It's like a monkey house upstairs when they come in from school but Rosie'll sit in a corner and play for hours making a tea party with the dolly cups and saucers.’
She said, ‘I know, dear heart, I know. She's a good girl. But I'm determined to get her reading and writing, whatever Dr Goddard says. Perseverance pays dividends. And you're very good with her, Nora. I don't know what we'd do without you.’
Fidelma said, ‘She said that? You should have asked her for a raise.’
But Mrs K didn't give raises, only job security, and variety, because those Kennedy children were like a box of Candy Allsorts. Young Joe was tall and strong, like his daddy, and Pat looked likely to turn out the same way. Kick was thicker set but she had Mr K's freckles, same as Jack did. Euny was the one that most favoured Mrs K, especially when she smiled. Not that that happened so often. She was as skinny as a string bean, wouldn't eat, couldn't sleep. Euny just lived on her nerves.
And Rosie was the beauty. She had milky skin and lovely dimpled arms you could just have taken a bite out of.
‘Fat,’ Mrs K called it. ‘We must watch Rosie's line or she'll end up looking like a tubby little peasant.’
Mrs K kept herself as trim as a candle and she expected everybody else to do the same. The children were weighed regular as clockwork and Rosie was the only one who ever got a black mark. Jack had to have extra malt and cod liver oil, to build him up, and Euny got extra bread and potatoes to try and put a bit of flesh on her, but many a time Rosie had her rations cut, to try and slim her down. I didn't approve of it, myself. I like to see a child enjoying her food, not corrected just for the way God made her.
I had all the girls in matching outfits. They looked a picture, lined up ready to go to Mass on Sunday morning. Wool coats with bonnets and muffs for the cold weather and cotton print dresses in the summer, with white ankle socks and Mary Janes. But when we went to the seashore they wore any old rags, just shorts and vests, first up, best dressed, and they ran around barefoot, brown as tinkers.
When I first worked for the Kennedys we'd go to a different place every year, but once we'd tried Hyannis we took the same cottage there every year.
Mrs K's driver said, ‘Know why we're going to Hyannis again? Because Your Man was turned down for the Country Club at Cohasset.’
I said, ‘And how would you know a thing like that?’
‘Because Herself told me,’ he said, ‘when I was driving her into town. She said it was because the Cohasset doesn't take Catholics but if you ask me it's more likely they'd heard about him running whiskey. And do you know why he got in at Hyannis? Because they're not so toffee-nosed down there. They saw the colour of his money and didn't bother to enquire where he got it.’
I said, ‘So they're no more particular than you are, Danny Walsh.’
‘No, well,’ he said. ‘I'm only saying.’
You have to be very careful with hired help. I wouldn't want servants if they were giving them away with Oxydol.
LEARNING THE WAYS OF THE ENEMY (#ulink_3ec90637-3454-5158-ba29-f69741cf1142)
Bobby was born eighteen months after Pat. He was another one looked like a skinned rabbit, same as Jack. We thought he'd be the last.
Fidelma said, ‘She'll tie a knot in her hanky now. Sure, she only kept going to get another boy.’
I thought so too. She was tired of it all by then, even though she had me and Fidelma in the nursery and all the help she wanted in the house. Poor Bobby. He loved to be allowed up to her room, to sit on her bed and watch her get dressed for dinner, but there were times when I thought she'd forgotten she'd ever had him. Rosie was the only one in the family who petted him.
Kick was at St Aidan's, in first grade, and Euny was just starting in the kindergarten. Joe and Jack were day boys at Nobles down in Dedham. Herself would have liked them all taught by the sisters but Mr K said the boys had to go to a top-drawer school and start mixing with Protestants.
He said, ‘When you intend to go places it's never too early to study the competition and learn the ways of the enemy.’
There was talk though that we might leave Boston altogether. Mr K was doing more and more with the moving-picture business, on the train once a month to Hollywood, California. Danny Walsh said it was quite on the cards that we'd be shifting there, getting a house on the same street as all the movie stars.
He kept saying, ‘That'll give Brookline something to think about.’
As if Brookline gave two cents about the Kennedys. The children were at the age when they should have been having friends round to play but the neighbours were very stand-offish.
Mrs K always said they didn't need other children because they had each other but it didn't seem natural to me. That's why I loved going to Hyannis for the summer. Every blessed minute didn't have to be regimented when we were there.
As long as they worked hard at their sailing lessons and their swimming they were left to run free the rest of the time and they did mix with other children, Kick especially. The first thing she'd do when we got to the cottage was race round to see if Nancy Tenney was at home, and Rosie'd tag along with her. Mrs Tenney might have been a friend for Mrs K too. The Tenneys were a nice family, no airs and graces, but Herself wouldn't socialise. She'd get Danny to run her to early Mass at St Francis Xavier, then she'd be reading in her room or going for her swim, no matter how cold the water. Two or three times a week she'd go to the golf course, but just to play by herself, for the exercise, not for company as Mr K did.
Danny said, ‘And do you know what she does? She slips onto the course at the seventh and plays the same half a dozen holes over and over. She seems to think she's saving money if she's not seen going out from the clubhouse. Worrying about green fees with all the money she's got.’
That was her. Penny-mean. I know for a fact she spent five hundred dollars on her outfit for her sister Agnes's wedding but we were only allowed forty-watt light bulbs in the nursery.
Very often Mr Kennedy would be away a month at a time, but he'd write to the children, and always a proper personal letter to each of them that was old enough to understand, not like Herself, who wrote one letter and sent them each a carbon copy when she went travelling. And then when the word came that he was on his way home you'd have thought the President himself was expected, the children got so excited. They'd all go along to his dressing room, first thing, to watch him shave and tell him everything that had happened while he'd been gone, and then he'd read the funnies with them before they went down to breakfast. ‘Captain Easy’ and ‘Tailspin Tommy’. It was like a holiday for me and Fidelma the mornings Mr K was at home.
He always brought them presents too, when he came home from a trip, but only little things. A scouting knife or a Spaldine ball, or picture postcards of the movie stars. The only extravagance was the time he brought Tom Mix cowboy costumes, with the kerchiefs signed by the great man himself. They were intended for Joe and Jack, and they caused nothing but trouble because Kick helped herself to one of the hats and wouldn't be parted from it. Joe usually behaved nicely around his sisters but he lit into her as though she was some boy in the schoolyard and he wouldn't be pacified till he got his cowboy hat back.
When Mr K had been away he'd want to know about what they'd been up to, chapter and verse. How they'd been getting on in school or at the sailing club if we were up to Hyannis. Joseph Patrick won at everything he turned his hand to and so did Euny. Kick just enjoyed herself. If she won anything it was a happy accident, and Jack was the same. He could never quite be bothered to make that extra effort, even though he knew exactly what his daddy would say.
‘Don't let me hear you bragging about getting second place,’ he'd say. ‘All second place means is you have to try harder. First place is the only thing that counts. You're a Kennedy, remember, and Kennedys are winners!’
That was what they had drummed into them and they'd knock you flying to be first over the finishing line. I used to enjoy a game of checkers until the children got old enough to play. They'd study the board and try to distract you while you made your move, as if their lives depended on beating you. Rosie was the only one who wasn't like that. She didn't have the cunning to put one over on you, and anyway, she didn't really care. To her a game was just a pleasant way to pass half an hour, but naturally she did want to please her daddy. She'd have loved to go running to him, to tell him she'd won at slapjack.
I'd say, ‘For the love of God, let her win, why don't you? Just once in a while?’
‘Why should we?’ they'd say. ‘What's the fun in that?’
‘I'll try harder, Daddy,’ she used to say, when she could get a word in edgewise.
‘Good girl, Rosie,’ he'd say. ‘That's the right attitude.’
He loved her, of course, but you could tell it irked him to see a child of his so slow. Sometimes it took her a while to think what she was going to say and he didn't have the patience to wait while she got her words out.
When Mrs K took her up to her room to make her practise her letters he'd say, ‘I don't know where you find the patience, Rosa darling.’
He always called Herself ‘Rosa darling’.
She'd come down on a Sunday morning, wearing one of her new rigs, ‘Looking a million dollars, Rosa darling,’ he'd say, and then he'd run off to make one more phone call before we went to Mass.
I never saw him take her hand though or ruffle her hair. She'd hang on his arm, gazing up at him, but he didn't pay her a lot of attention and neither did the children. When they sat down to dinner he was the one they listened to.
‘Dad said this, Dad thinks that,’ was all you'd hear.
I said to Jack one time, ‘And what did your mammy have to say on the subject?’
‘Mother?’ he said, as if I'd asked him what was the cat's opinion. ‘Mother doesn't know about world events.’
Everything about Joe Kennedy was lickety-split. You could practically hear the wheels turning in his brain. He'd be out on his deck exercising with his Indian clubs and he'd have a faraway look in his eye. Then as soon as he finished he'd be on the telephone, barking out the day's orders to Joey Timilty or Eddie Moore. Timilty was Mr K's fixer, according to Danny Walsh. Always carried a big fat roll of dollar bills. Eddie Moore was different, a kind of general manager and allowed to sit in on a lot of the meetings and phone calls.
But Gabe Nolan drove Mr K and he reckoned there was only one person who knew everything Joe Kennedy was up to and that was Joe Kennedy himself.
Gabe said, ‘He's like a shark, cruising around on his own. He goes in fast, makes his kill, and he's gone before they know what hit them. And all his money's spread around. If anybody goes looking for an office with J. P. Kennedy on the shingle or a bank account they'll be disappointed because there ain't any such thing.’
But Eddie Moore was on the payroll, and Mrs Moore was expected to be on call too, in case Herself got the urge to go down to Sulphur Springs for the waters and we had any catastrophes in the nursery. It was through Mrs Moore we first got wind of the move.
She said, ‘How will you feel about leaving Boston, Nora? You'll miss your sisters, I'm sure.’
Fidelma said, ‘Is it Hollywood we're going to? Are we going next door to any fillum stars?’
She said, ‘No, no, not Hollywood. That's not a fit place to raise children. You're going to New York. My husband's down there right now looking for a suitable property.’
Fidelma had been to New York. She'd travelled there with the first family she worked for.
She said, ‘You'll love it, Nora. There's railways rumbling in the sky and railways rattling under your feet and eateries that stay open all night and shows with tunes you can sing. Not like this dead-alive hole. Still, I wish we could have gone to Hollywood. I might have got myself discovered.’
Mrs Moore was right, up to a point. There was one sister I was sorry to leave.
Margaret was expecting again. I'd have liked to be around to give her a hand, and there was little Val too. I loved to go and see him on my day off. Three's a grand age. Old enough to walk and not break your arms any more, and too young to break your heart.
Me and Margaret were always good pals. Edmond hung around with the Donnelly boys, used to go fishing with them and rabbiting. Ursie preferred her own company, and Deirdre was away with the fairies. The wind would whine in the chimney and she'd say, ‘Do you hear the angels singing?’ And if you got out the checkerboard to give her a game she'd say, ‘Budge over, Nora. Saint Bridget wants to sit there.’
They say she's happy in Africa, love her. Maybe they all hear angel voices over there.
Ursie said, ‘New York is a wonderful opportunity for you. I'll give you a list of museums you must go to. You see, you're drawing the dividend of loyalty. Your Kennedys can't manage without you. Just like me and Mr Jauncey.’
Ursie and her Mr Jauncey. He was all she ever talked about. How she kept his appointment book and remembered every little thing for him, even his wife's birthday. How he was the most respected lawyer in Boston and trusted her to see all his papers.
‘I'm privy to all kinds of delicate things,’ she used to say, ‘but of course I'd never speak of them.’
Margaret'd say, ‘Oh go on, Ursie, it won't go no further than these four walls. Tell us about one of his murders.’
‘Mr Jauncey,’ she'd say, ‘is not that kind of lawyer. Mr Jauncey is corporate.’
She was first at her desk every morning and the last to leave at night. She said he called her his ‘office treasure’.
Margaret said, ‘Has he ever asked you to be any other kind of treasure?’
‘Don't be coarse, Margaret,’ she said. ‘Mr Jauncey is a member of the Harvard Club.’
She coloured up though, so I reckon Margaret had touched a nerve.
I said, ‘No, but you must like him. What if Mrs Jauncey was to pass away? What if he made you an offer? You know all his little ways. How many sugars he takes. Or do you like being an old maid?’
She said, ‘Mr Jauncey doesn't take sugar. And I'm certainly not an old maid. I'm a personal and private secretary, I'm a member of the altar guild, and I get a very generous bonus at Christmas.’
Well, but what does a Christmas bonus buy you when you've to go home to a boiled-egg dinner for one?
Margaret said, ‘You're a fine one to talk about old maids, Nora Brennan. Thirty-four and you spend your nights off playing Wincey Spider with my Val. You ought to be over Jimmy Swords by now.’
I was over Jimmy Swords the minute I saw how hard his eyes had turned.
I said, ‘I get offers.’
I did too. There was the Dawsons' driver, in Naples Road. There was Mitch, who taught the boys sailing up at Hyannis. I had my moments. But I had my seven Kennedys to consider too. I wasn't going to get silly in the head over some man and throw all that away.
ANOTHER LITTLE BLESSING (#ulink_f24ce457-75e9-5d73-a73f-870ae38b17ff)
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 theatre 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 neighbours you never saw because they went everywhere by motor car. 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 Mr K always 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 motor car 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 cosy at the Piper's Kilt saloon and forget to bring you home.
They were busy days anyway, and I liked that. We had a thousand things 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 Honour 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 to stop her nibbling. 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. When she was like that I could sit on the bed and chat with her and for five minutes I'd forget what a slave-driver she could be.
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.’
It was the truth. I wasn't buttering her up.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I put in a great deal of work to keep my looks. These things have to be worked at.’
That was Mrs K. Just as you were warming to her she'd say something that reminded you she wasn't any old girl-next-door.
She said, ‘Men have it so much easier. They go out to business, but when they come home everything else has been done for them. We women have to be wives and mothers and careful home-makers. 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.’
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. Fidelma and Gertie Ambler who cooked for us 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. Miss Swanson will be in town with her children. It'd be a nice thing to do. Invite some neighbours' 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 Pattie 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. But if her old man happens to be at home he only stays five minutes and he doesn't come out whistling and checking his fly. 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 Mrs K, not even the day he brought Miss Swanson to the Halloween party.
Gertie Ambler was scandalised.
‘The poor creature,’ she kept saying. ‘Having her nose rubbed in his goings-on.’
Fidelma thought the arrangement quite suited her.
‘Eight babies,’ she said. ‘She's wore out. And the old bugger's only forty. Sure somebody has to scratch his itch. So long as he keeps paying the dressmakers' bills I don't think Herself'll complain.’
But I thought it was a terrible thing him bringing Miss Swanson into the house and showing her off to his children. And still Mrs K held her head high.
It was only when she came up to the nursery at bedtime that I saw her wobble.
Kick said, ‘Miss Swanson said we must call her Aunt Gloria. Wasn't that nice of her? Don't you think she's beautiful?’
I caught Mrs K's eye and I'll swear I saw a tear, until she blinked it away. I hadn't intended to catch her off guard with her shame. It bothered me all that night, as if I'd been the cause of it. And I'll bet Joe Kennedy never lost a wink of sleep.
I'd always thought Gloria Swanson looked a fright in her photographs, with all that blacking around her eyes, so it had been 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'd looked a prim little body beside Miss Swanson.
They'd 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. There was tittle-tattling in the kitchen, of course. 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 warm 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 Malcolm Cottage, which 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 recognise 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 favourite.
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 did everything I could to get the poor child a proper name. She could at least have named him Desmond for Dada, but her head is full of picture-palace nonsense and Frankie Mulcahy daren't say a peep to contradict her. I hope there'll be no more after this one. Two is surely enough for anyone in this day and age, especially for A FISH PORTER WITH ASTHMA. 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. I thought I'd meet somebody, but in my line of work you don't get a lot of time for meeting somebodies. And now I look back, I had the best of both worlds. I had more of their little smiles and kisses than ever Herself did, and none of her aches and pains.
Ursie's letter went on.
I mailed Deirdre a box of initialled handkerchiefs from Federated. Whether they'll ever reach her I don't know. They'll probably end up in a mud hut somewhere, but it's the thought that counts. Mr Jauncey is visiting with his in-laws in Nashua.
Every year Ursie sends handkerchiefs, and if I know Deirdre, she gives them away. I bet all her little piccaninnies are wiping their 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 ‘did you hear the angels’ smile.
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 making 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, ‘See, Brennan? Happy Families. I'm telling you, they've come to an arrangement about Miss Swanson.’
Mr K was to be gone a month at least. He came up to the nursery to kiss Bobby goodbye, 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 favourite, ‘Sweet Adeline’, putting in all the twiddly bits, but when I looked in on her to say goodnight 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 and that was where Mr Kennedy was heading, and even a new mink jacket couldn't take the sting out of that.
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-humoured 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.
It didn't worry us that Mr and Mrs K were both away from home. In fact we all preferred it. With Mrs K you could never be sure where you stood. Little things bothered her. You could be getting the ‘dear heart’ treatment, hearing how she could have married Sir Thomas Lipton, if she'd played her cards that way, and been a real English Lady, then she'd start going through the trash can and before you knew it you were getting a telling-off because you might have eked one more spoonful of malt extract out of the jar you'd thrown away. Left to ourselves, me and Fidelma could run that nursery blindfolded, and after Jean arrived we had plenty of chances.
Jean Ann was born on Kick's eighth birthday. We were having a little tea party for some of her friends from the day school when we got the telephone call. Mr K was already on his way up to Boston to see the new arrival.
Joseph Patrick said, ‘Nora, do you think I'm old enough to be the new baby's godfather? I think I am.’
He was a hard one to fathom. I'd had to read the riot act only half an hour before, because of his silly rough-housing, nearly pulling Jack's arm from its socket, and then there he was, talking about standing godfather to his new sister. And he did it too. Mr and Mrs K thought it was a wonderful idea.
Jean Ann was a month old before she was brought home from Boston so Herself had been gone eight weeks complete.
‘Milking it for all she's worth,’ Fidelma said. ‘Well, I suppose it'll be her last time.’
We lined them all up outside the door like a guard of honour for her homecoming and young Joe carried baby Jean in from the car.
Danny Walsh said, ‘Mrs K's done all right out of this. Your Man gave her a diamond bracelet, and when she feels up to it she's going on a trip, anywhere in the world she fancies.’
Gabe Nolan said, ‘But here's the best bit. The lady friend only went and sent her flowers. A great big bouquet of roses that nearly filled the room. How about that for front?’
Fidelma said, ‘See what I mean, Brennan? They're the best of friends, Miss Swanson and Mrs K. They're in cahoots.’
I said, ‘I wouldn't believe everything Gabe Nolan told me. It could have been anybody sent her flowers.’
She said, ‘Will you ask her or will I?’
We went up to the nursery to give Jean her bottle. The nearest I could say, she had a look of Kick about her. Poor Jean. That's how we always talked about her. ‘Like Kick but fairer, and a look of Joseph Patrick about her when she smiles.’
Mrs K said, ‘Now, dear hearts, I'm going to take a little nap, but later on I want to see the weight charts and bring my records up to date.’
Fidelma said, ‘Oh Mrs Kennedy, we heard you got roses after the baby was born. Is it true? Can you really get roses in February?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I did get roses, from Miss Swanson and her husband. It was a great extravagance but such a very kind thought. Of course I received letters and cards from so many of Mr Kennedy's business associates.’
She saw Fidelma's little game.
We went in convoy to Hyannis as soon as school was out, to the ‘cottage’ as Mrs K called it, though it was hardly a cottage any more. Two big new wings had been built on, and garages and an extra floor, with a deck. I was given the first weekend off, to go on up to Boston and see Margaret's new baby and little Rudolph Valentino. They'd already shortened ‘Ramon’ to ‘Ray’, which Ursie said sounded common. She didn't approve of pacifiers either, but then Ursie had never walked the floor all night with a child cutting his first teeth. Margaret wanted to know all about Miss Swanson.
She said, ‘You've done all right for yourself, no mistake. I'm stuck behind Middleton's counter every afternoon, weighing sugar and slicing bacon, and you're rubbing shoulders with film stars.’
Ursie said, ‘Just keep your feet on the ground, Nora. You know we get famous people coming to the office, senior figures from the business world, but I treat everyone the same.’
Margaret said, ‘You kill me, Ursula Brennan. You're not telling me you get anybody to top Gloria Swanson coming into the stuffy old place where you work.’
When Margaret and Ursie saw each other they never stopped picking.
I said, ‘I don't rub shoulders with anyone. There are days I hardly set foot outside the nursery. We've eight of them to see to.’
Margaret said, ‘Eight. Sweet Jesus. Could you not take my two as well? Just slide them in on the quiet? I'll bet they'd never notice.’
Mr K was away in California most of the summer of ’28 but when he did come home he arrived in style. Gabe Nolan would meet him off the train in New York City and drive him out to Queens, to where he kept his latest toy. An airplane that could land on water. It meant he could fly up to the Cape and land right on his own doorstep. The first time he arrived it caused quite a stir. People were running around, thinking a plane had crashed into the sea, but after they found out who it was and what it was they didn't pay any more attention. Hyannis folk were too dignified to get excited about Joe Kennedy and his trappings.
The house renovations were still going on and some of the new bathrooms had still to be finished, but the movie theatre was ready, downstairs in the old furnace room. Danny Walsh was taught how to work the projecting machine and Mr K kept us supplied with new movies, cowboy stories mainly, hot off the press. They'd arrive by special messenger once a week.
Fidelma asked him why it was always cowboys and Indians.
He said, ‘Because they're easy to do. I can make twenty of them for what those fur hondlers spend on one movie and folks are just as happy to watch mine. People in Scranton, Pennsylvania, would watch paint dry, they're so bored.’
Danny reckoned we saw things before they were in the picture palaces even in New York City, and we were all allowed down there to watch because, as Mr K said, he'd never allow a movie to be made in a studio of his that wasn't fit for his family to see, and the help too. Mrs K didn't care much for movies though. She'd sit at the back and after half an hour or so she'd slip out. She was happier pulling on an old pea jacket and going for a walk along the strand.
She said to me once, ‘Movies are so noisy. I don't like all the shooting. Peace and quiet are what I like. That's why I go to first Mass. It's worth getting up early. If you go later other worshippers can be so irritating. I love a room to myself, Nora, and stillness.’
Well, she was in the wrong family for that.
KENNEDYS EVERYWHERE, LIKE A RASH (#ulink_77bd25c2-b7af-5446-be41-623bed5acf0f)
The house in Riverdale was a rental. We knew Mr K had told Eddie Moore to look out for a place to buy and in the spring of 1929 we moved again, to Bronxville, to a villa standing in its own park, Crownlands. I suppose the money was fairly pouring in by then. He owned the companies that were making the movies and he owned the picture houses where they were shown. For all I know he could have owned the celluloid factories and the popcorn machines too. Not that any of the help saw much of the money he was making. You only asked for a raise if you were prepared for a big performance from Herself. To hear her you'd think they were down to their last dime. She should have been on the stage, that one. By the time she was done with her sob story you felt you should maybe offer her a loan yourself.
So it wasn't the money that kept me with the Kennedys. I stayed because I liked the life and I loved the children. Anyway, blessed are the poor. As Mammy used to say, ‘If you want to know God's opinion of money you've only to take a look at them he gives it to.’
People like me and Fidelma and Gertie Ambler who cooked, and Danny and Gabe, we were the lucky ones, because we were permanent staff, kept on whatever the time of year. But the maids and the gardeners at Hyannis had to find something else when the house was closed up for the winter. Mrs K didn't see why she should pay people when she was finished with them for the year.
Crownlands was our grandest house yet. We had beautiful grounds and every convenience, and yet Herself still didn't seem happy. Thwarted, I always thought. She'd had her education and been the toast of Boston, riding with His Honour the Mayor. She had money and a fine family, but there was no joy in her. She could tell you the date of every doctor's visit and she could tell you to the last cent what we were spending on socks or baby bottles, but she didn't have anything to occupy her that would use all her brains and foreign languages. She was more like a head housekeeper than a mother, and she was so restless. She wanted to go back out into the world and make her mark, you could tell, but she'd eight children and her sacred duty hung round her neck like a sack of rocks. Mr K did take her along with him to California one time, which was how she happened to miss Jack and Rosie's first communion, but she never went again.
She said, ‘Mr Kennedy is so busy with meetings all day when he's travelling but I'm not the kind of wife who sits around waiting to be entertained. I shall take a trip to Europe.’
Fidelma said, ‘Do you think we'd ever move, to save Mr Kennedy all the travelling?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I do not. We're not California people.’
Still, he was so tied up there he didn't even come back for the burying of his own father. I'd have thought they could have kept the old feller on ice until Mr K had time to attend, but Mrs K said it wasn't necessary. She said it was time Joseph Patrick learned to represent his daddy on certain occasions and his grandfather's funeral was a very good place to begin. He was bought a new black suit from Alexander's. Only fourteen but he was already a head taller than his mammy, quite the young man when he offered her his arm and walked her to the car. I told Mr K when I saw him.
I said, ‘Young Joe did you proud. And my sister wrote me from Boston. She said there was a very big turnout for the funeral.’
‘So I heard,’ he said. ‘And I wish I could have been there, but I couldn't leave town. It's dog eat dog in the movie business. If you turn your back for five minutes those Jewboys rob you blind.’
Herself went off to Paris, for culture and shopping she said, and she was hardly out the door before Miss Swanson came visiting. I thought it was highly irregular, and Jack didn't like it either. He stayed out in the bay in his sailboat after everybody else had come in, and he had a monkey face on him when it was time to go in to dinner.
I said, ‘What's eating you?’
He said, ‘How come Mother has to go to France just when Dad's come home and we can all be together for a change? What kind of a family is this, anyhow?’
Miss Swanson was very nice. She remembered all the children's names, and she went along to the movie-star club Kick and Rosie and little Nancy Tenney had got up to swap photographs and act out scenes from the movies they'd seen. She climbed the ladder up into the attic over Mr Tenney's garage to say hello to Nancy and sign her autograph book, like a regular aunt might have done. But it still wasn't right that she was in the house when Mrs Kennedy wasn't.
Mr K took her for a ride through town in his Rolls-Royce but according to Gabe Nolan nobody paid them any attention. If people in Hyannis had money, they never flashed it, and most of them wouldn't have walked to the foot of the stairs to see even Tom Mix. Kick was film-star crazy though. That's where all her pocket money went. Rosie used to save hers to send to the missionary nuns and Euny just counted hers and then put it back in her piggy-bank, but Kick's went on movie magazines the minute the money was in her hand, and then she cut them up for photos of Douglas Fairbanks or Miss Greta Garbo to thumbtack to the wall.
Young Joe and Rosie both went away to school that autumn. It had been decided that Rosie would never catch up at the day school so she had to be boarded, at a special place for slow learners. I knew that wouldn't last five minutes. It was out beyond Philadelphia, and it could have been the far side of the moon for all that meant to Rosie. She sat with the map Mrs K had showed her, with her finger on the place, looking and looking at me, to see if I could save her from having to go.
Euny kept saying, ‘You're lucky. I wish I could go away to school.’
But all Rosie wanted was to stay home and help me look after baby Jean.
‘I'll try more hard,’ she said. Well, she managed one term at the school but she came home for Christmas such a wreck even Mrs K hadn't the heart to send her back. She said there were other places that might be more suitable and God knows we worked our way through a long, long list of them before we were done. I could never see why it was such a crime for Rosie to be slow. Apart from Euny they were none of them great scholars and Mr Congressman Jack still can't spell for taffy.
Joseph Patrick went off to Choate School in Connecticut that October. He was raring to get there, although Herself would have liked to see him go to a good Catholic school. She was worried he wouldn't be allowed to go to Mass.
Mr K said, ‘Of course he'll be allowed. I'll make sure of it. The main thing is I want my boy in a school where there's no funny business. You can spend a pile of money and end up with a sissy, but they guarantee there's none of that at Choate.’
It was a top school. The kind top families had sent their boys to for generations. I wondered if they wouldn't look down their noses at a Kennedy, especially if Mr K started throwing his money around and turning up in his gold limousine, but the thing about young Joe was, he was one of those people who expected everybody to like him, and if they didn't he just chose not to notice. And he went right along with whatever his daddy said he must do. Like the first term when he wanted to take horse-riding lessons but it would have meant he couldn't go out for the football team and Mr Kennedy put it to him, the football was more important.
He said, ‘Think of it this way. You can make useful friends playing in a team, and be good enough to win your football letter when you get to Harvard. Horse-riding you can do any old time.’
And when it was explained to him that way he didn't argue. He knew everything he did was part of a plan. First Catholic President of the United States. He'd been hearing it since the day he was born.
Mr K had come home from California in time to drive Joseph Patrick to his new school, and he wasn't going back.
Gabe Nolan said, ‘He's had enough of the Jewboys. He's branching out again. And do you know who his new best pal is? The Governor's boy. Jimmy Roosevelt. They've got a few little deals on the go.’
Mr Franklin Roosevelt was the new Governor of New York.
So we went from never seeing Mr K to having him home every night, and the children loved it. Herself was hardly there because if she wasn't in Paris buying gowns she was sightseeing in New Mexico or off to Maine to take the waters, and I can't say she was greatly missed. She was away the week the markets crashed, visiting with the Fitzgeralds in Boston.
I was bringing the children home from school, pushing Jean in her bassinet. Kick and Euny and wee Pat who'd just started in the first grade. Fidelma was at home with Bobby because he had the croup and I remember telling her I'd seen three limousines turn up driveways, bringing their gentlemen home in the middle of the working day. Very unusual. Then Mr K came in and went directly to his study. He didn't come up to the nursery and he didn't eat dinner that night. All he had was a glass of warm milk. I could hear his great booming voice on the telephone until very late.
It was in all the dailies the next morning, of course, how stocks had fallen and people had been ruined. I didn't understand it then and I still don't. If you've money in the bank, how can it turn worthless overnight? But Danny Walsh took it upon himself to explain it to us. According to him it wasn't actual dollar bills that had gone west, it was other pieces of paper, promises to pay, and notes about who owned what, complicated arrangements that were how men like Joe Kennedy made their fortunes. And lost them.
Danny said, ‘We'll all be let go. Your Man'll be shining shoes by Christmas.’
But as was often the case, Danny Walsh was wrong. There were a lot of ruined men in the neighbourhood but Mr Kennedy wasn't one of them. He'd gotten out of whatever it was had dragged them all under and put his money in safer places.
Fidelma asked him straight. She said, ‘Are we all right, Mr K? Only if you'll be cutting back I'd like to know sooner than later.’
He laughed. He said, ‘Do you think we can't afford you? No, you're still in a job. Stick with Joe Kennedy, see? A blind man could have seen this crash coming. The only ones who lost are the fools who held out for the top dollar.’
But they weren't the only ones who lost. Everybody who depended on them was hurt too. Businesses closed, people were laid off. A lot of the houses in Bronxville and Riverdale were put up for sale, and when they didn't sell they were just closed and shuttered and left empty. You didn't see so many limousines any more. Children were taken out of school, just disappeared without any goodbyes. Sometimes it felt as if we were the only survivors. And Danny Walsh changed his tune.
‘Mr Kennedy's nobody's fool,’ he kept saying. ‘I knew we'd be all right. He'd have sold his own mother if the market was right. Provided we keep on the right side of Herself we've all got jobs for life here.’
A driver, maybe, but nurserymaids lose their usefulness after a few years. I didn't think I'd be with them for much longer. Sometimes, on the way from school, Kick would say, ‘I wonder if there'll be a new baby in the nursery when we get home today?’ Even when she knew her mammy was away to Virginia for a little holiday she'd still say it.
But there wasn't. Not that year, nor the next.
Fidelma said, ‘No, but I reckon we're still pretty safe, Brennan. Now that Herself is gallivanting all the time she needs us more than ever. We've a good few years till Jean's all growed up and there could be a new bunch of them on the way by then. The next generation. They'll keep us in the attic till we're needed for the grandbabies, like they used to do at the big houses back home, remember?’
It was a happy thought. All my Kennedys coming of age, getting married and having ten babies apiece.
I said, ‘Well, bags I get Kick's babies, or Rosie's, if she's allowed any. I'll leave the boys to you.’
I could imagine how it'd be with the boys. They'd all get their wives chosen for them. Little replicas of Herself.
I said, ‘Eight of them. Just think of it. Even if they only have two or three apiece, that's still an awful lot of Kennedys. They'll be everywhere, like a rash.’
Fidelma laughed. ‘Kennedytown,’ she said. ‘The old man'll buy a whole street of houses and even the dogs'll have ginger fur and big white teeth. See if I'm not right.’
THE SACRED DUTIES OF A WIFE (#ulink_e73ab931-b8af-5274-8a81-bfb564e35d23)
They say there were terrible sights to be seen in the city after the stock market tumbled. Businesses boarded up, men in good suits hanging their heads and waiting in line for a bowl of soup. Ursie said it was the same in Boston. Middleton's closed down for one thing, because nobody could settle their accounts, which put Margaret out of work with two young mouths to fill and Frankie Mulcahy's chest not all it should have been.
I send her what I can spare, Ursie wrote, and I hope you'll do the same. Thank goodness you and I had the sense to tie our fortunes to men like Mr Jauncey and Mr Kennedy. Mr Jauncey is as busy as ever with so many liquidations, and we seem to read more and more about your Mr Kennedy. These are the people who will ensure America survives and comes back stronger than ever.
It was true it would have to be some kind of calamity for lawyers not to do well out of it, so Ursie had no worries. But it tickled me to think of Joe Kennedy as a lifeguard, helping to keep America afloat and pull her safe to shore. He watched out for his own, plain and simple, and if your name wasn't Kennedy, he'd have the lifebelt off you before you knew it and sell it to the highest bidder.
We were spared seeing the worst of it out in Bronxville, tucked away in our nice leafy garden. There was nobody panhandling on our street, no breadlines. Mrs K's packages still arrived from Paris, with gowns she didn't have any opportunity to wear, and Gabe Nolan still drove Mr K around in the Rolls-Royce. He'd prospered. He didn't have factories or warehouses full of stock. He just moved around quietly, picking up all those worthless bits of paper. Then he waited for their value to climb back and while he was waiting he took up with Mr Roosevelt, the State Governor. When we went up to Hyannis that summer you'd never have known there was anything wrong in the world. The sun seemed to shine every day and even Herself was in a good humour. There were no more visits from Miss Swanson and Constance Bennett's photo went back up on Kick's bedroom wall. Jimmy Roosevelt and his wife came to stay, and a wonderful singer, Mr Morton Downey, moved into a house just around the corner, so some evenings, instead of the cowboy picture shows, they'd have a little musical soirée. The help all sat with the kitchen door open so we could hear him singing in the parlour.
’Tis the last rose of summer Left blooming alone. All her lovely companions Are faded and gone.
Every day at Hyannis was filled. They all had a tennis lesson in the morning and sailing practice in the afternoon, with special instructors brought in, if there wasn't a regatta for them to race in. There was one called Mitch who came two summers running, big strong shoulders and skin tanned like glove leather. He was pretty sweet on me. He took me out in a sailboat one time and I thought I'd surely die, so after that we just used to go to the dunes after dark. I wonder whatever became of Mitch.
Mr K organised swimming contests for the children too, and running races and games of football, but Mrs K had no part of any of that. She liked to swim, but just gentle paddling about, with Danny Walsh to accompany her. They were a sight to see, walking down to the water's edge together, Herself in a big rubber helmet to save her hair from the salt, and Danny in a woollen swimming costume, legs on him like a grey heron. His job was to bob around close by, in case a big wave swept her off her feet.
Fidelma said, ‘When you answered that advertisement, Danny, I'll bet you never thought the job would mean taking your trousers off.’
He said, ‘Flexibility, Fidelma Clery, that's the answer to survival today. You can't just be a driver. Nor a nurserymaid, so you can wipe that silly smile off your face, Nora Brennan. Think how much more I'm worth to the Kennedys than you are. Driver, swimming companion, projectionist, handyman.’
I didn't care. I still wasn't going into that ocean.
There were all the outdoors activities, but that wasn't all. The older ones were expected to prepare for mealtimes too. Mrs K had a noticeboard nailed up for pieces she clipped out of the newspapers, conversational topics she thought they should know about, so they'd have something to say at the dinner table. It was for the benefit of Joe and Jack mainly, so they could decide what they thought about things and then listen to what their daddy had to say, but Kick and Euny were allowed to join in as well. Not Rosie though. She was excused from conversationalising, and from the sailing lessons.
Mrs K had her up to her room every morning for two hours instead, to try and bring her along with her reading and writing. It was no vacation for Rosie. She'd have liked to sit in the dunes and play with her dollies, I know, but Mrs Kennedy said she'd never improve if she didn't push herself. And when her lessons were over she still didn't get any peace. The others would drag her off to play French cricket and yell at her when she dropped the ball. Eunice was the only one had any patience with her. She'd take her out in her dinghy once in a while and show her how to tack and trim the sails and Rosie would come back with a smile that'd light up a Christmas tree.
‘I've been crewing for Euny,’ she'd say, pleased as punch. ‘She said I did pretty good.’
She was a help with the little ones too. She'd feed Jean for me and push Bobby on the swing. Sometimes he'd get mixed up and call her ‘Mother’. He was a quiet one, Bobby. Always studying the floor, but then he'd up and do something to surprise you. I was sitting on the lawns one time with wee Jean on my lap when he came running up from the strand. He pushed a seashell into my hand, said ‘Love you’ and ran off again, come over all shy. A Scotch bonnet shell. I have it still. And that was the summer he punched Joseph Patrick. Young Joe had taken the book Jack was reading and wouldn't give it back, taunting him with it, so Bobby landed him one with his little fist, and when Joe laughed at him he burst into tears and went and hid.
But he could be a grouch too. Fidelma took to him more than I did. She says he's still the most prayerful of the lot of them, and he did used to screw his eyes up tight when he was saying his rosary at bedtime. You'd have thought that would have endeared him to Herself, being the big churchgoer, but she was starting to feel her wings by the time Bobby came along. And none of them ever got paid the attention Joseph Patrick did.
Things were so sweet between Mr and Mrs K that summer she even had her way over Jack's next school. He'd been intended for Choate, following in young Joe's footsteps, but he was sent to Canterbury instead, a proper Catholic school, right up by Candlewood Lake. He was in and out of the school infirmary all that first term, what with the batterings he took on the football field and his sore throats and stomach aches, so Mr K said we'd all better go to Florida for the Christmas holidays, so Jack could get his strength up. Blue skies and palm trees on Christmas Day. Fidelma swore she'd died and gone to heaven. Ursie reckons Deirdre gets weather like that all the time in Africa.
But Florida didn't do Jack a lot of good. He'd only been back at Canterbury five minutes when he was rushed to the hospital with his appendix, and after his recuperation he never went back. Mr K said he was to have private tutoring at home to make up what he'd missed and then go to Choate in September. He said Mrs K could choose whatever schools she liked for the girls but from now on his boys were going where he decided, to mix with the crème de la crème. That was how Lem Billings ended up part of the family.
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Laurie Graham
A brilliant new novel by Laurie Graham set in wartime London, which follows Kick Kennedy, sister of future US President JFK, as she takes London society by storm.Nora Brennan is a country girl from Westmeath. When she lands herself a position as nursery maid to a family in Brookline, Massachusetts, she little thinks it will place her at the heart of American history. But it's the Kennedy family. In 1917 Joseph Kennedy is on his way to his first million and he has plans to found a dynasty and ensure that his baby son, Joe Junior, will be the first Catholic President of the United States.As nursemaid to all nine Kennedy children, Nora witnesses every moment, public and private. She sees the boys coached at their father's knee to believe everything they'll ever want in life can be bought. She sees the girls trained by their mother to be good Catholic wives. World War II changes everything.At the outbreak of war the Kennedys are living the high life in London, where Joseph Kennedy is the American ambassador. His reaction is to send the entire household back across the Atlantic to safety, but Nora, surprised by midlife love, chooses to stay in England and do her bit. Separated from her Kennedys by an ocean she nevertheless remains the warm, approachable sun around which the older children orbit: Joe, Jack, Rosemary, and in particular Kick, who throws the first spanner in the Kennedy works by marrying an English Protestant.Laurie Graham's poignant new novel views the Kennedys from below stairs, with the humour and candour that only an ex-nursemaid dare employ.
LAURIE GRAHAM
THE IMPORTANCE OF
BEING KENNEDY
To Jeremy Magorian,
Venice's own Mrs Thrale
Table of Contents
Prelude (#ube112f17-9c02-5641-98b3-b9e8869bbc1d)
Chapter 1 - Accidentally, Through The Keyhole (#uc7254081-2f08-5f8d-8507-5e0ef678e859)
Chapter 2 - The Right Kind Of Family (#udef6e581-79b9-5996-b2b3-a82044060335)
Chapter 3 - The Trouble With Blood Fitzwilliam (#u0124b359-c6a0-58c1-9ce9-89f98f328b3e)
Chapter 4 - A Perfect Little Doll (#u3b791788-8967-5463-980a-dcc02c521f82)
Chapter 5 - A Washer And A Dryer And Separate Beds (#u95d09143-2b23-5f9e-bf17-133793512a6c)
Chapter 6 - Two-Toilet Irish (#u2eec1a0c-8f94-50bc-8ae4-77ebf1ebd031)
Chapter 7 - Three Categories Of Feeble-Mindedness (#ue1a675bd-f559-5d60-9e31-f76fdbd72359)
Chapter 8 - Learning The Ways Of The Enemy (#uc531d754-ce06-5189-9ca0-19061591ab41)
Chapter 9 - Another Little Blessing (#ubb1ae2b5-4a07-5591-9588-5f6027351352)
Chapter 10 - Kennedys Everywhere, Like A Rash (#u57a2af07-8e09-5a7d-bb2f-4bd384b27daa)
Chapter 11 - The Sacred Duties Of A Wife (#uf4673936-6aae-58f1-91b7-64ad9cf2bb3e)
Chapter 12 - No Crybabies, No Losers (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 - An Anniversary Trip For One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 - Something In The Blood (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 - The Queen Of Bronxville, The Queen Of England And Walter Stallybrass (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 - The Fox Supervises The Henhouse And Mr Chamberlain Goes To Munich (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 - Other People's Babies (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 - Our Pope (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 - The Season At The End Of The World (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 - Keeping Going With A Cheery Smile (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 - Future Prospects Unknown (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 - Everything By The Book (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 - An Insult Of A Cake (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 - A Broken Doll (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 - Girl On A Bicycle (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 - A Trainee Duchess (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 - The Beginning Of The End (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 - A Real Winner, With A Bit Of Grooming (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 - A Kennedy Poodle (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 - Perpetual Light (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 - The Latest Thing For Diseases Of The Mind (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 - The Official Black Sheep (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 - The Irish Card (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 - Mr Congressman Kennedy (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 - A Day Of Tears (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Laurie Graham (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PRELUDE (#u6543cfbe-7142-58a4-929b-9e7a41911528)
I happened to be in London in January 1970 when I got a call from my office to say my Aunt Nora had died. We were just finishing up the photo shoot for a big piece on platform shoes for Sassy! magazine so I was able to get away to Derbyshire in time for her funeral. Darling Aunt Nora, who'd started life three to a bed in Ballynagore, had a duke and a duchess at her Requiem Mass. If Aunt Ursie had lived to hear that she'd have popped her corset bones.
I didn't really start getting to know Aunt Nora till she ferreted me out in Saks Formal Wear in 1947 and stood me lunch. She had a nifty figure and beautiful skin for a woman in her fifties. She was wearing a tweed suit, I remember, petrol blue, fully lined, with a great corded buttonhole detail. Old-fashioned but very classy.
She said, ‘It's one of the perks of working for a lady who keeps up with trends. When the rest of the world won't be seen dead in a garment it can always be passed along to the help.’
We hit it off right away. She'd been a hazy, absent relation when I was a kid. She did visit, but too rarely for me to know her.
‘Your Aunt Nora is with the Kennedys,’ Mom used to say, and as we had another aunt who was a nun in Africa I also pictured Aunt Nora in a grass skirt and the Kennedys as some kind of ferocious tribe. In a sense I suppose I wasn't so very wrong.
Aunt Nora was a blast. I relished the letters that came each year with her Christmas card, her annual report on life as a gardener's wife on the great Chatsworth estate of the Duke of Devonshire. ‘Another twelve months of 'tater peelings,’ as she called it.
She outlived four of the nine Kennedy babies she'd raised. When Jack was killed in 1963 she wrote me that she had not watched the funeral. She said, Stallybrass was glued to the telly all afternoon but I walked to Hassop and prayed the rosary till it was over. I don't care for the telly myself. They tell you the same thing over and over. Walter loves his cowboy shows and I'll sit with him for company, but I turn my chair round the other way and get on with my knitting. Anyway, Jack's dying didn't shock me the way it shocked the rest of the world. I kept the death watch over Jack Kennedy more times than the sands are numbered and I could have swung for him once or twice too, little devil that he was. But my heart does go out to Mrs Kennedy. This is surely too much even for that tough little nut to endure.
Bobby Kennedy's death and old Joe Kennedy's, she hardly mentioned. Her own health was failing by then, though I didn't realize it. As her beloved Walter put it, ‘Nora were never one to skryke about her aches and pains.’ I asked him if she'd believed there was a gypsy curse on the Kennedys. There had been a lot of stories about that, after Jack and Bobby's deaths.
‘Nay, lad,’ he said. ‘In fact it got on her pippin when folk brought that up. Nora always reckoned old man Kennedy didn't need any gypsy curse to bring him calamities. He brought them on himself, the way he thought he could buy the world, the way he pushed them lads into the spotlight. Pride goeth before a fall, that were her opinion.’
I said, ‘I wish Aunt Nora had written about her Kennedy years. She must have had some stories.’
He said, ‘But she did write about them. That first cottage we had at Edinsor, she sat at the kitchen table and wrote everything down in exercise books. She called it her “Memoirs,” said she were only doing it to stop herself going round the bend with nothing to look at only sheep and trees. She liked the city best, you know, Nora? She liked busyness. She only endured all this beautiful countryside for me, God bless her. Should you like to see her writings some time? If my memory serves, they're in the back of her tallboy.’ So Aunt Nora's notebooks, with multiplication tables printed on the back cover and that old-lady smell of mothballs and dried lavender, came into my possession. This is her story.
Ramon N. Mulcahy, New York, 1972
ACCIDENTALLY, THROUGH THE KEYHOLE (#u6543cfbe-7142-58a4-929b-9e7a41911528)
Herself came to the house at Smith Square. It was April 1948. She was meant to be going directly to Paris for gown fittings but then she announced she was coming to London first, to visit with Kick. Landed on us with all her bags and baggage as if it was the Ritz we were running. Now I've seen Mrs Kennedy walk away when her own child lay sick in bed, turn her back on him sooner than delay a shopping trip, so we knew she wasn't coming for the pleasure of it. There was trouble on the agenda.
Walter had to have the car at the aerodrome by eight o'clock. Too early for Kick to get herself out of bed and go with him.
I said, ‘I'd have thought you'd make the effort. Go and meet her, get off on the right foot.’
‘No fear,’ she said. ‘Talk about being trapped in a confined space. It could feel like a very long drive.’
I was worried Mrs K would start quizzing Walter about what had been going on, if she had him to herself. I said, ‘Just act dumb.’
‘Nora,’ he said, ‘I don't need to act. When you've been driving gentry for thirty-five years dumb comes natural.’
It was about eleven when they arrived. She looked as smart as a brass button, as usual. You'd never have guessed she'd been on an airplane all night. She walked right past me in the hallway, unsnapped the fox head on her stole, handed it to Delia and made straight for the drawing room still wearing her little hat, one of those round chocolate-box affairs with a bit of net veiling that came down over her brow.
‘Kaaaaathleeen,’ she started. ‘We are going to have a very serious talk.’
I don't care how many elocution lessons she's taken, she still has a voice on her that would clip a thorn bush. And it was something to see how that girl crumbled the minute she saw her mammy. She was like a naughty child who knew she'd be getting the strap.
It was all about Blood Fitzwilliam. It had finally dawned on Mrs K that Kick wasn't as worried as she might have been about her money being cut off, so she'd come in person to threaten her with the everlasting fires of hell. The lovebirds were in the country when the cablegram came, seeing his horses put through their paces on Newmarket Heath, but Kick came hurrying back to town as soon as she heard her mammy was coming. She knew she was in hot water.
She said, ‘Mother can have my room. The guest room's too small for her. Give my room an extra spit and polish. I want everything to be perfect.’
I said, ‘Then you'd better get yourself round to Farm Street and see Father D'Arcy because the first thing she'll want to know is, have you been to confession? What bedroom we put her in will be the least of it.’
She gave me one of her monkey faces. And that room of hers needed more than spit and polish. I've done my best with those children over the years but there's not a one of them ever learned to hang up a jacket.
I said, ‘What will we do about dinners? Will you have company in while she's here?’
She said, ‘If you mean Blood, no. He's going to make himself scarce. Maybe I'll invite Sissy though. Mother thinks Sissy sets the perfect example. Or maybe we should have tray suppers and I'll read aloud from Lives of the Saints. I just want to stop her ranting till Daddy's met Blood. He'll talk her round. I think Blood and Daddy'll really get on.’
I didn't. No more than a pair of turkey cocks could be left in the same pen. Mr K liked people he could order around and so did Lord Fitzwilliam. And as for anybody talking Herself round, the very idea was nonsense. There was only ever going to be one thing that would satisfy her, and that was for Kick to go home and marry a nice Catholic boy, if one could be found who'd overlook her history. I knew Kick would put up a fight but I was sure her mammy would win the day and that'd be the end of that. Blood Fitzwilliam would be given his marching orders, Smith Square would be let go and so would we.
Well, then it started. All you could hear was Mrs K's voice.
‘Look at me when I'm talking to you, Kathleen.’
‘Perfect purity and self-control, that's what you were taught at Sacred Heart.’
‘After everything that's been done for you, Kathleen Kennedy. Every advantage in life you've been given.’
The few bits I didn't manage to hear accidentally through the keyhole I could guess. Promises of hellfire and damnation. The threat of being cut off, not just from her daddy's deep pockets. From the holy sacraments as well. As long as her mammy was calling her ‘Kathleen’ I knew there had been no progress. They'd had no lunch, not even a glass of soda taken in, and it got well past the time when Mrs K usually takes her afternoon rest. Then things fell quiet. Herself came out from the drawing room and told Delia she was going upstairs to nap and wasn't to be disturbed till five o'clock. Kick was asleep in an armchair when I went in, curled up in her stocking feet with a little sodden hanky balled up on her lap. Round One had gone to Mother.
Then it was my turn.
Delia said, ‘She's rung for a glass of milk, Nora, to be taken up by you, most particular. Thank God. She frightens the bejaysus out of me.’
There she lay, waiting for me, in those old pink napping pyjamas she's had for a hundred years and frownies stuck all over her forehead, to smooth out any lines the morning's shenanigans had brought on. She was a sight. You wouldn't have known her for that bandbox little body that had walked in from the limousine.
‘Nora, dear heart,’ she said. Patted the bed for me to sit down like we were old pals. ‘What a to-do. Now, I need you to help me.’
So it was ‘Nora dear heart’, for the time being. But I've been long enough around Mrs K to know you can be a ‘dear heart’ one minute and on the bus with your valise and no references the next.
She said, ‘This is a very grave situation. Kathleen still talks of marrying this person. Did you know? Has she talked to you about her plans?’
I said, ‘As far as I know Lord Fitzwilliam didn't get his divorce yet.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘that's something. I wonder how it's being arranged? I wonder whether the wife could be persuaded to keep him? What do we know about her? Would she be interested in money?’
I said, ‘I believe she has money.’
She said, ‘I'm sure she could use more. It isn't just the marriage, though that must be prevented at all costs. But talk can be very damaging too. I'm normally very attentive to these things, but I'm so far away, and then I was busy with Jack's campaign. It's difficult to manage these things from the other side of the world. You might have said something, Nora. You might have dropped me a little note. You've been treated very generously over the years. Allowed back on the payroll after an act of great disloyalty. I'd have thought at the very least you'd have had Kathleen's well-being at heart.’
I said, ‘I thought Jack would have told you. He heard all about it when he was here last summer. I don't see how it was my place.’
‘Jack's in office now,’ she said. ‘He's far too busy, though I'm sure he would have mentioned it if his health had been better. He came back from London with a tired liver. I had to find him a doctor and then get him back on his feet. It's all been such a worry. And now this. If I'd known when she arrived at Palm Beach what she'd come to tell us, I'd have had Archie Spellman down to speak with her immediately. She wouldn't have dared defy a cardinal.’
There was a lot I could have said. I didn't like Lord Fitzwilliam, ‘Blood’ as his pals called him, and I was certain Kick could have done better for herself, but I know there's no reasoning with the love-struck. It was my opinion that if we left well alone it might not come to a marrying. For one thing he didn't seem in any great hurry to get his divorce. In fact there were quite a number of people who said he wasn't serious about getting one. Why would he go to the expense of lawyers when his wife didn't seem to care who he saw or what he did? And they'd houses enough never to have to see one another. Obby Fitzwilliam was known to be a very devil for the drink but she had money, and a drunken old bird in the hand might be worth a lot more to him than a Kennedy cut off without a cent. I thought if he dragged his heels Kick might tire of waiting for him, or that someone else would come along and catch her eye. Sure, half of London was in love with her. But I didn't tell Herself any of that. I didn't approve of what Kick was doing but that didn't mean I had to do Mrs K's dirty work for her.
I said, ‘I'd just like to see her happy. She's had enough sadness for such a youngster.’
Mrs K said, ‘We've all had sadness. And if it's happiness she wants she won't find it by breaking every rule she was raised by. Associating with a married man. That's not a path to happiness. And he's a Protestant. A married Protestant! I can hardly think of anything worse. It's her duty to set a good example, Nora, particularly now Jack's in Congress. We're all in the public eye, just as we were when we were Ambassador. What if Catholic girls start saying, ‘Look at Kathleen Kennedy. She does as she pleases, so we'll do the same.’
I said, ‘If she's here in London I don't see how girls in America will even know what she's doing. If they're interested in anybody it'll surely be Euny and Pat and Jean. And I don't see how it affects Jack. A congressman isn't like a monsignor, and just as well. Jack's no saint himself.’
‘Jack doesn't need to be a saint,’ she said. ‘Boys are different. They have to be men of the world to get ahead. But women set the moral tone.’
I said, ‘Well, Kick's twenty-eight years old and a widow and a Ladyship, so I can hardly presume to catechise her now.’
‘Of course you can,’ she said. ‘That's precisely what you can do. It's never too late. You disappoint me greatly, Nora.’
Then she closed her eyes, which is always her way of saying the conversation is over. That neat little foldaway face.
Four days we had of it. Threats and lectures and tears, and all the time I knew Kick was clinging to one silly thing her daddy had said on the telephone. That if it could be shown Blood Fitzwilliam had never been baptised, then his marriage to Lady Obby wouldn't count and he'd be free to take instruction and marry Kick in a proper Catholic church. It was all moonshine of course. The Fitzwilliams weren't the kind of family that would have overlooked baptising their son and heir, but it was typical of Mr Kennedy to dream up something like that, ducking and diving under the regulations until he found a wee hole to slip through.
I'll say this for him, though. He just wanted his girl to be happy. He knew nothing she did was likely to harm Jack's prospects, nor Bobby's, nor Teddy's. He'd see to that. The boys were his affair and whatever happened, whatever trouble they got into or talk there might be about the family, he'd keep things on track for them.
Kick cried and begged, but when it really came down to it she didn't care what her mammy did. She absolutely would not promise to give up Fitzwilliam. So Mrs Kennedy had Delia pack her bags for the onward journey to Paris and the car was ordered to take her to the aerodrome. It was an ugly leave-taking.
She said, ‘I won't stay another night in this house. You've fallen into bad company, Kathleen, and I rue the day we ever brought you to England. The Mothers at Sacred Heart laid out your path but you've deviated from it, and so deliberately too. No one can ever excuse you; no one can say you weren't taught right from wrong. Well, if you really refuse to acknowledge your errors I shall see to it you at least don't ruin your sisters with your carrying-on. They'll have nothing more to do with you. Don't telephone because they won't accept your calls and don't send letters because I shall have them burned. There's nothing more to be said until you're ready to repent.’
I was just standing there like an article of furniture, holding that horrible wrap with the fox head dangling over my arm. It seemed to me I didn't have a lot left to lose.
I said, ‘I never heard such a cruel thing. A girl needs her family, and the bigger the muddle she's in, the more she needs them, and sure weren't you the one always taught them to put family before everything else?’
‘Nora Brennan,’ she said, ‘you should have been let go years ago. I wouldn't have kept you on, married in a town hall. Well, now we see what an influence you've been. Now we see it clear. I'll pray for your soul, Kathleen. I can't do more. Until you mend your ways I will not see you. You'll be dead to me.’
She said it flat, with that darling girl standing right there. How does it sit with her now, I wonder, seeing the way things turned out? How many times has she wished she could take back those terrible words? Anyone might say a thing in anger, then wish it unsaid, but Rose Kennedy isn't anyone. I've been around her long enough to know. For a woman who's a Gold Star mother she has a heart as hard as the hob of hell.
THE RIGHT KIND OF FAMILY (#u6543cfbe-7142-58a4-929b-9e7a41911528)
I came to work for the Kennedys in the spring of 1917. I'd been five years in America by then, come over to be with my two sisters. Marimichael Donnelly from across the lane was on the same sailing as me. They waked us two nights together before we left, with whiskey drummed up from somewhere by the Donnelly boys, telling us what a grand future the both of us had and then weeping and clinging on to us to keep us at home. We'd neither of us been out of Westmeath before. I'd never appreciated that sky and water could stretch so far, and I know they say the world's like an apple and doesn't have an edge a ship can tumble over, but I've never understood how they know. I was braced for the end all the way, till I saw the roofs of East Boston.
Marimichael had a sister who'd gone ahead too. That was how we did it in those days. The oldest one went, then she'd send the fare for the next and so on, till everyone was settled. It was the only thing to do. The factories were starting up around Tullamore so the demand for hand-knitting was dropping off and there was no other way to make a living.
We were six in our family, one boy and five girls, except Nellie was in the graveyard, dead with the measles and only four years old. Ursie's the oldest. She left for Boston in 1909. Took a correspondence course in bookkeeping and taught herself the Pitman shorthand and she was off. She got work in the office of Holkum, Holkum and Jauncey, and to hear her she ended up practically running the place.
Ursie always had ideas. Writing paper without lines was one of her things, not that there was a lot of letter writing went on in our house, but she said lined paper was common, and she used to have a fit if ever Mammy put the milk can on the table instead of the china pitcher. After she got to America and started earning she'd send us marvellous things, not only money. Caramels and hatpins and silk stockings, and a beautiful handbag for Mammy one Christmas, real leather from Jordan Marsh, with a big, gilt snap. Dear God, we had everyone from Ballynagore come in to view that handbag. We should have charged to see it.
She must have had some courage to go off like that, not knowing a living soul in America. When they were handing out gumption I reckon Ursie got Edmond's share. He's hardly been further than the foot of the stairs.
Margaret went out to join Ursie in 1910 and I cried myself sick. Ursie wasn't the kind of sister you missed, except like an aching tooth after it's been pulled, but Margaret had always been my pal. We'd shared a bed, even. When Mammy and Deirdre went to wave her off on the bus I couldn't bear to go with them. I was convinced I'd never see her again. She kept saying, ‘You will too. I'll send for you and then you'll send for Deirdre.’
But Deirdre could never have gone to America. She had a sweet nature and the voice of an angel but she was the kind of girl that would easily be taken advantage of. She used to get confused enough in Tullamore market so she'd have been lost in a minute in Boston. Anyway, Father Hughes said a girl like Deirdre would likely be blessed with a vocation, so we all prayed for that and our prayers were answered. She went to the Maryknoll Sisters, and then to Africa to teach little black children about our Risen Lord, which left just me at home and Mammy and my brother Edmond.
Ursie kept writing that I should still think of going to America. Mother won't stand in your way, she wrote. She didn't call her ‘Mammy’ any more, since she worked for Holkum, Holkum and Jauncey. She'll be a lot happier knowing you're making something of yourself. She has Edmond to take care of her.
Edmond was supposed to be the head of the house. Dada had the Irish disease and after we lost Nellie he just turned his face to the wall and died.
Mammy used to say, ‘Edmond's a thinker. He doesn't rush into things. And did you ever see such a fine head of hair on a man?’
Well, that part was true. I believe it acted like a goose-feather comforter. It kept his noddle so warm and cosy his brain fell asleep.
I don't know whether I would have gone and left Mammy in his care, but anyway, as things turned out it was Mammy who left us. She'd a growth under her left bosom that had eaten her away inside and she'd been too shy to say anything until it was too late.
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘I've had a good life. I've had my span.’
But she'd only had forty-seven years and she could have had more if she hadn't been such a muggins about taking off her vest in front of the doctor. She died in the autumn of 1911 and before the year was out Edmond took off his thinking cap and announced he was marrying the Clavin widow from Horseleap and bringing her to our home. So my mind was made up for me. I couldn't have stayed in the house with that woman. She'd a face would turn fresh milk. Margaret sent me the fare and I was on my way.
Marimichael went into a cotton mill when we got to Boston, same as her sister, and Margaret could have got me a start at the grocer's where she worked, but Ursie had bigger ideas.
She said, ‘You've a brain in your head, Nora. Use it. Nursing would be suitable. The uniforms are very attractive.’
But I liked the idea of going into service, somewhere where I'd have my own room.
I said, ‘If I'm going to wipe BTMs and mop up dribble I'd as soon do it for a nice sweet little baby as somebody who smells of sickness or some grouchy old feller. I'll go for a nurserymaid.’
‘Just be sure it's the right kind of family,’ she said. ‘A doctor, or a lawyer, like Mr Jauncey. Cultured, professional people. There are people who have money to run a full staff but no breeding. You don't want to end up with a family like that.’
I got a start with the Griffin family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to look after Loveday who was three and the baby who was on the way, Arthur. Ursie seemed to think they were good enough for me, even if they were a bit modern. Dr Griffin was a scientist at the university but he thought nothing of pushing the bassinet out on a weekend. There was only me, a housemaid, a woman who came in on Mondays to do the laundry and a man who helped with the garden. Mrs Griffin did all the cooking and I had every Sunday off and one night a week. I used to meet Margaret at a soda fountain and she'd give out to me about Ursie while we watched the boys go by. That's where we met Jimmy Swords and Frankie Mulcahy.
It's a funny thing about boys. They go around in pairs and if one of them is good-looking the other's sure to be a poor specimen. That was Frankie. He always looked like he'd lost a dollar and found a cent, but Margaret fell for him, and Jimmy was keen on me. The only problem with Jimmy and Frankie was they worked as fish porters. They were always washed and shaved and dressed in a nice clean collar and tie when we saw them, but there was still that smell. You can never get rid of it. Jimmy seemed steady though. We never quarrelled, and the Griffins liked him because he used to bring oysters for them or a lobster, when he came to walk me out.
I had my nursery and my own room up under the roof and I had my beau. I was very suited, but then Dr Griffin said he was moving to a different university, in California, and I had to decide whether to go with them. Ursie thought I should.
She said, ‘You've made a good start, Nora, now build on it. The Griffins think highly of you and you mustn't flit from position to position. It doesn't inspire confidence.’
But Jimmy didn't want me to go.
He said, ‘I'm putting money by. Stay in Boston and we'll get married. Next year.’
So the Griffins went off to California and I applied for a new position, in Beals Street, Brookline. The Kennedy family. They had a little one just walking, Joseph Patrick, and another one on the way.
I had to go to the house to be interviewed and inspected by Mrs Kennedy. She's only a year or two older than me and people say she has the secret of eternal youth. To look at us now you'd think I could give her a few years, but that first day I met her she seemed quite the little matron. First thing she told me was how she had to be most particular about the help she employed, because of her position.
She said, ‘My husband is president of a bank.’
The house was nothing to shout about and neither was the money they were offering.
She said, ‘And I expect you recognise me.’
But I didn't know her from Atty Hayes's donkey. She laughed.
She said, ‘You're a newcomer. If you were Boston-born you'd know my face from the dailies. I'm Mayor Fitzgerald's daughter.’
Well, you couldn't be in Boston five minutes without hearing of him, so that satisfied her. She rattled on, perched at her bureau like a neat little bird, telling me all about her travels and the big names she'd met. She even had tea brought in, and I still didn't know if I had the job or not.
‘I was my father's right-hand woman,’ she said. ‘My mother didn't have the nerves for public life so I went everywhere with him. But now of course I'm too busy running my own home. Mr Kennedy works very long hours in business.’
And that was the truth. I was there three weeks before I properly met him. He'd get home late and leave again early. He was a tall carrot-top of a man with a tombstone smile and ice-blue eyes. He came up to the nursery one Saturday morning and started throwing Joseph Patrick up in the air to make him squeal.
He said, ‘I'm Joe Kennedy. You have everything you need? Anything you need, tell Mrs Kennedy. Money's no object. And make sure this boy of mine eats his greens. I have big plans for him.’
Mrs K gave me a book to read the day I arrived, on how a nursery should be run. Everything was to be done by the clock. When the new baby came she was going to nurse it, but between feeds there was to be no picking it up or rocking the cradle. If it cried, it cried. And little Joseph Patrick wasn't to be played with, except for half an hour of nursery rhymes and physical training in the afternoon. He'd to learn to entertain himself with toys, and the only time he was allowed to snuggle on my lap was for his bedtime story.
She said, ‘Too much petting makes a child fussy and it's a very hard habit to break.’
‘Yes, Mrs Kennedy,’ I said. And I did try to follow her rules but it didn't seem a natural way to raise a child. Well, she didn't have to know everything that went on in my nursery. I had my routines and she had hers. She'd walk to St Aidan's every morning to early Mass, and then she'd do the marketing and write letters till lunchtime. Always a chicken sandwich and a glass of milk. In the afternoon she'd take a nap, and then have her hair done or go to the dressmaker's and once a week Mayor Fitzgerald would come to tea. The way Mrs K talked him up, ‘His Honour this, His Honour that,’ it was like expecting the President himself. It was such a let-down the first time I saw him. He was just a crafty-looking old knacker riding round in a limousine car, but Mrs K thought the sun shone out of her daddy's fundament.
Sometimes on a Friday night Mr K would have some people in for bridge, business gentlemen and their wives, but otherwise she didn't see a soul. Her mammy never visited, nor her sisters, and the neighbours on Beals Street kept to themselves.
The Ericksons' maid said, ‘She thinks she's the cat's pyjamas, your missis, but nobody round here's impressed.’
We knew war was coming. It seemed to have nothing to do with us back in 1914, but we could feel it just around the corner by the start of 1917. Mrs K said it was a terrible unsettled time to be bringing a new baby into the world but at least Mr Kennedy wouldn't have to go away to fight. She said he was too old, but he wasn't. He was twenty-nine, same as Jimmy Swords.
Jimmy and Frankie Mulcahy both volunteered. There were a lot of the Irish who wouldn't, not wanting to take sides with the English, not even against that terrible Kaiser, but Jimmy said, ‘I'm an American now and Americans are going to fight so I'm with them.’
Not Mr Kennedy though. All of a sudden he got a management position at the Schwab shipyard in Quincy, reserved occupation, and when they drafted him anyway he went to a tribunal to appeal and he won. Mrs K said they'd made an error when they tried to draft him because he was engaged in vital war work, but that was only because Mayor Fitzgerald had pulled strings to get him in at the shipyard. Whichever way you cut it, Joe Kennedy was a draft-dodger. But that's water under the bridge. God knows, we've had another war since then and what he got away with in 1917 he's paid for in buckets since.
Jimmy went off to a training camp, but the doctors failed Frankie because of his chest and he was sent to a uniform factory in Pennsylvania, as a machinist. Margaret thought we should have married them before they went, but Jimmy never offered it and I had my mind on my nursery. Mrs Kennedy was very near her time.
A weekly nurse was hired and Mr K moved into the guest room so we could get the big bedroom ready. All the little trinket boxes and hairbrushes had to be cleared off the dressing table, and the rugs lifted and the floor washed down with carbolic acid and boiling water, for reasons of hygiene, the nurse said. It made you wonder how the human race ever got to be such a thriving concern.
Mrs K came along to the nursery still in her bathrobe that morning. She said she'd had a few pains in the night but she hadn't wanted to say anything till Mr K had gone off to business.
‘This is woman's work,’ she said. ‘Now we'll get on with it. We'll have this baby delivered and everything tidied away by the time he comes home.’
I took Joseph Patrick to the park and played with him on the teeter-totter and by the time he'd had his soup and laid down for his nap the doctor had been sent for.
I'd never seen a baby born. When Mrs Griffin had baby Arthur she went to the nursing home so they could give her the twilight sleep and then she had two weeks of lying-in before she brought him home. I knew the facts of life and I'd seen plenty of sows dropping their piglets but it was hard to relate that to Mrs Kennedy. I'd heard it said that women screamed and cursed and that there was blood and worse, but she'd hardly a hair out of place. She just lay there with the ether inhaler over her face and Dr Good fetched the forceps out of his bag and fairly dragged the poor mite into the world. John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Though, as I recall, he was hardly ever called John. He was Jack right from the start.
The nurse told Mrs K she had another boy but she was too doped for it to register or even to hold him, so he was given to me to put in the crib. And it was a grand thing, to cradle him in my arms and see his surprised little face and his tiny fingers weaving in the air, to wonder what life had in store for him. I was the first to hold the next three Kennedy babies and every time it gave me that nice, funny feeling, like someone slipped a piece of velvet inside my tummy.
But by the time Mr Kennedy came home from business, Herself was wide awake, washed and powdered and sitting up in a new satin bed jacket. Then His Honour the Mayor turned up, with Mrs Fitzgerald, who I'd never seen before, and a bouquet of carnations. They came to the nursery to take a look at Jack but they didn't seem very interested in him. He'd been given Fitzgerald for one of his names so I'd have expected them to be thrilled.
His Honour said, ‘He'll do, for a spare. Now let me see my best boy.’
And I had to go contrary to all Mrs Kennedy's instructions and wake Joseph Patrick from his bed, to be petted and made overexcited by his grandpa.
‘See this fine feller?’ he said. ‘This fine feller is going to be President of the United States.’
It's a funny thing, there was never any love lost between Mayor Fitzgerald and Mr Kennedy but that's one thing they always agreed on. Joseph Patrick was going to be President.
THE TROUBLE WITH BLOOD FITZWILLIAM (#ulink_72cbb92a-d501-5119-a45b-97869b6a050c)
But I was saying about 1948. The minute her mammy was on her way to the aerodrome Kick got the shine back in her eyes.
She said, ‘That was pretty gruesome. Daddy'll fix everything. He can probably get us a special dispensation from Rome.’
I said, ‘The Holy Father won't change the rules, not even for a Kennedy.’
She said, ‘This Holy Father might. He's practically part of the family.’
Part of the family my eye. He paid a call once, that's all, long ago, when we were in Bronxville, and that was only because Mr Roosevelt couldn't think what else to do with a visiting cardinal all afternoon, only send him to Mrs Kennedy for a cup of tea.
She said, ‘And we had a private audience. He gave me a rosary.’
I said, ‘I know. I was there. And so was Fidelma Clery He gave us all rosaries. He gets them wholesale, I'm sure. But that doesn't mean he hands out dispensations so a man can have two wives.’
She got into such a paddy.
She said, ‘Why doesn't anyone understand? Blood married Obby in one of their churches, so as far as our church is concerned he's never been married. Anyway, the Holy Father can change anything he wants to. Especially if Daddy sends him a big fat cheque for a new altar or something.’
There were cablegrams flying back and forth all that week and then Blood Fitzwilliam turned up, like the bad penny. He was back in town and expecting to take her to lunch. When you're in service you notice that the ones who're too grand to give you a ‘Good day’ are not necessarily the ones with the biggest estates or kings in their family tree. Just a middling rip like Fitzwilliam can be full enough of himself to ignore the help.
As soon as she heard his voice, Kick was ready to grab her pocketbook and go.
I said, ‘Didn't you tell me Lady Ginny was calling for you?’
‘Oh Lord,’ she said. ‘Well, she's late. Just tell her something came up, would you? She'll understand.’
He'd picked up the telephone without so much as a by-your-leave, putting through a call to his club, tapping a cigarette on his silver case. Kick was watching me watching him.
She said, ‘Darling, no smoking in the hall. Nora's got her fierce face on.’
‘Sweetie,’ he said, ‘who pays Nora's wages?’
It was four o'clock when she came home, pink and silly from champagne wine.
She said, ‘Blood's going to take me down to Nice for a vacation, next month. Such bliss. We're going to stay with his friends at their villa, and then by the time we come back Daddy will be in Paris, so we'll be able to stop off and see him. It's all worked out perfectly. We can have a big powwow about asking the Pope and things, without Mother being there to have a fit, and Daddy and Blood can get to know one another.’
I said, ‘Angel girl, will you listen to yourself? All this talk about marrying. Is the man divorced from his lawful wedded wife?’
‘He soon will be,’ she said. ‘He just has to see the lawyers. Then it won't take long. Obby's going to cooperate. You know they haven't had a real marriage for years.’
I said, ‘And what about his child? Where does she fit in to a divorce?’
She said, ‘She'll be fine. I expect we'll live at Coolatin when we're not in London, and she'll be able to come to visit us and keep a pony there and everything. I'm sure she's an absolute sweetheart, and I'll bet she'd love to have some little brothers and sisters. I'm going to have dozens of babies for you to look after, Nora, and we'll all live happily ever after. Blood will charm Mother off her feet, and Pat and Jean'll come over for the hunting. We might even be able to have poor Rosie to stay.’
Ah yes. Poor Rosie. Well, there was a name she knew better than to bring up with her daddy if she wanted to get him on her side. We never mentioned Rosie any more, except below stairs.
A PERFECT LITTLE DOLL (#ulink_67bd7c9f-8acb-5d2b-9628-33c8fba680b0)
Rose Marie was born in the September of 1918. It was a darker time even than when Jack arrived. We didn't only have the war still dragging on and our men far from home, we had the influenza too, and that was on our very doorstep. We hardly left the house. There was such a scare on that Herself didn't even go to Mass. Cook went out in a gauze mask to do the marketing and the laundrywoman was told not to come, for the duration, because she was in and out of different houses all the time. There was no telling what germs she might carry with her. Mr K slept on an army cot at the shipyard most nights sooner than risk bringing the infection home. Some people said the docks were where it had started.
No one we knew in Brookline got sick, but the Ericksons' gardener reckoned there was a four-week wait for funerals in Boston, there were so many bodies to bury, and after it was over I heard that Marimichael Donnelly had been one of them, ironing sheets in the afternoon and dead by midnight. Three little ones left without a mammy. To think she left Ballynagore to finish up like that. She was strong as an ox, Marimichael, but that was the thing about the influenza. It carried off the strong and didn't touch the babies and the old folks.
Before Rosie was born Mrs Kennedy decided she needed an extra nurserymaid. She hired Fidelma Clery. Flame-red hair and terrible, crooked little teeth. I was glad of the help. Young Jack caught every cough and cold that was going, and Joseph Patrick had the very devil in him, always climbing into trouble and tormenting Jack and taking his toys.
‘Why is he still a baby?’ he used to ask. ‘When will he be big enough to fight me?’
His Honour was the one who encouraged fighting, play-boxing with him, showing him how to put up his little dukes.
Mrs K gave Fidelma the gospel on nursery routines to read, but I know she never opened it. Fidelma was a bit hazy when it came to reading. Every time she told the story of the Gingerbread Man it ended different. But she had enough common sense to get by and the first time Joseph Patrick gave her any trouble she picked him up, hollering and kicking, and carried him to his room like a roll of linoleum.
The weekly nurse came a few days before the baby was due and Mrs K started her pains right on time, same as she did everything else. Everything was going along nicely and I quite thought we'd be cleared away by teatime with the baby safe in her crib, but when it came time to send for the doctor he couldn't be reached. He'd been called away to somebody with complications, and you couldn't send for any other doctor. They were all run off their feet with influenza cases
I said, ‘It hardly matters. It's her third child. She knows what to do.’
The nurse said, ‘That's not the point. I can't let her have it. If the doctor isn't here when it's born he won't get his fee and then I'll be for it.’
It seemed to me you couldn't do much to stop a baby if it was ready to come, but she was the nurse and I was only there to help. So we tied Mrs K's knees together with a scarf and the nurse instructed her that whatever she did she mustn't bear down when she got one of her urges. She was a model patient. I never heard her cry out once. And that's how we kept Rose Marie from being born until Dr Good arrived, bounding up the stairs with his ether mask.
I loved all my Kennedy babies for their different funny little ways but Rosie was the real beauty among them. She'd a mop of black hair and big green eyes and she was so contented. She'd lie in her crib for hours smiling at the world and playing with any little toy you gave her. Not like Jack, always crying. Not like Joe, always looking for trouble.
If I'd been Mrs K I'd have been up in the nursery gazing at Rosie all day long. She was like a perfect little doll and Herself loves dolls. Sure she has a whole room full of them at Hyannis, all in their glass cases. But she didn't trouble us much in the nursery. She preferred to be down at her bureau, clipping out articles on how children should be raised and making lists of things that had to be seen to. Timetables, charts for their weight, charts for their teeth.
Joseph Patrick was forever asking why did I live with them.
‘Don't you have a mother and a daddy?’ he used to say. ‘This is my house. But when I go to school I guess you can still stay here. You can look after Rosie.’
I wasn't sure I would be staying because me and Jimmy Swords were sort of engaged. Frankie Mulcahy was back from Pennsylvania and Margaret wanted us to name the day as soon as Jimmy came home from Flanders. A double wedding at Most Holy Redeemer and then to Mazzucca for ice-cream sundaes. She had it all planned. But Jimmy didn't come back in a marrying frame of mind.
He said, ‘Why bother? Bringing more kids into the world. Cannon fodder for another war. Factory fodder for the bosses. It's all shite.’
He'd got in with a lot of socialists in his battalion, putting the world to rights while they were waiting to be sent up the line to fight the Boche.
I said, ‘I thought we'd won this war so there won't ever be another one. And what'd happen if everybody had your attitude? There'd be no more babies. Nobody to look after you when you're in your bath chair.’
He said, ‘I'm not going to be in a bath chair. I'll put a bullet in my brain sooner. And I'm not getting married. It's nothing personal, Nora. You can keep the ring.’
Silly beggar. He'd never given me a ring.
I did wonder, had he met someone else, somebody prettier. One of those French mam'zelles. Mammy always said it was a good thing I had my health and strength because my face would never make my fortune. I wasn't exactly heartbroken over Jimmy but I did stop looking in the mirror for a while. Looking in the mirror could make a girl lose heart.
Ursie said, ‘Never mind. You're better off staying single. You've a nice little job and a roof over your head and that's more than Margaret will ever have. Frankie Mulcahy isn't fit to mind a canary, never mind a wife and family. There'll be a baby every year and never enough money to pay the electric. You'll see. She'll be broken down and worn out. So don't break your heart over Jimmy Swords. You've had a lucky escape.’
Margaret didn't have a baby every year though. Nothing happened on that front for a long time. And as for Jimmy, I don't know that Ursie was right. He was a good man. It was just that the war had chewed him up and spat him out, bitter and twisted. When Ursie said these things you always had to keep in mind that she was probably a disappointed woman, on the quiet. She worshipped her Mr Jauncey and yet all he ever did was say, ‘Take a letter, Miss Brennan.’
Poor Ursie and her little two-cup teapot.
Rosie sat up at six months, same as Jack did, but she wasn't interested in walking or talking. She was happy just to sit and watch the world go by. Mrs K said we were to stimulate her more, talk to her, and pull her up onto her feet to give her the idea of walking.
Fidelma said, ‘There's not a thing wrong with her. She only seems quiet because you're used to the boys racketing about. If you ask me we should be thankful. She never gives us a minute's trouble.’
Mrs K said, ‘I didn't ask you, Fidelma. And I want particular attention paid to Rose Marie's activities. We can't have her falling behind.’
Well, Rosie got up and walked when she was good and ready, and she talked too. She just didn't put herself out. If you threw her a ball she'd pick it up and look at it, but it never occurred to her to throw it back. And when Mr K came up to the nursery he didn't seem to know what to do with her. The boys would clamber all over him begging to be tickled to death. Rosie would just sit smiling at him, holding back.
Later on Mrs K made quite a project of Rosie, tutoring her for hours on end to try and get her up to the mark with her reading and writing, but in those early days Joseph Patrick was her big project.
‘He's the foundation stone,’ she said. ‘If the oldest child is brought along correctly, the others will follow suit.’
Everything she did was in aid of Joseph Patrick growing up the brightest scholar and a champion sportsman and a Light of Christ altar boy. She took him to the Franklin Park Zoo one afternoon to set the scene and tell him about the poor Christian martyrs, but when he came home all he did was keep springing out at Jack and Rosie, playing at killer lions. Well, he was only four.
She kept up with all the new books that were brought out too, and fetched them from the lending library to read to them, but when I was left to read them a story they always wanted their old favourite, about Billy Whiskers the Goat. It had been given them by their Aunt Loretta Kennedy and they loved that book, but Herself thought it was a dreadful story for children. She said it encouraged naughtiness instead of obedience and she threw it in the trash can. Fidelma slipped out the back and rescued it. It had a wee bit of bacon grease on the cover but we kept it for a special secret treat when Mother was out shopping.
After the armistice, Mr K had gone back to his own business. Import and export, according to Mrs Kennedy, and finance. He was always up early. He'd do his morning exercises and then look in on the nursery on his way down to breakfast, showered and suited and ready for the off. Sometimes we'd only see him on Monday morning and then he'd be gone all week, busy with meetings in the city.
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 (#ulink_9ac95a4a-3be2-5e90-8019-ea448b28c59a)
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 (#ulink_680d765e-b923-50a2-a0c7-f3664fb6b9eb)
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.’
‘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.’
Rudolph 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's 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 neighbours 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.
THREE CATEGORIES OF FEEBLE-MINDEDNESS (#ulink_c902fd35-ed49-5574-a771-0fe229821f56)
Baby Patricia was born in May of 1924 but she was a month old before her daddy even saw her. We all went to meet him off the train from New York. Rosie with a painting she'd done for him, Joe tormenting Jack in the back of the car, arms and legs flying, and Kick and Euny hanging out of the window like a pair of ragamuffins shouting, ‘Daddy! We got another sister!’
Rosie was being tutored at home at that time. They'd tried her at the Edward Devotion where the boys went and they'd tried her at the parish school but she couldn't keep up. She got top marks for good behaviour and effort and a special mention for her dancing, but it was too much for her. She'd toil home on her chubby little legs, dragging behind the bassinet, hardly able to keep her eyes open, school fatigued her so.
Mrs K did a lot of reading up about slow children and then she took her to see a special doctor in New Jersey, the big expert, Dr Henry Herbert Goddard. She came back wearing her tough-nut face, the one I've seen on her a thousand times, when any other woman would break down and cry.
She said, ‘It isn't good news, Nora, but I'm determined we can beat this. We just have to make greater efforts with Rosie.’
She had it all written down, what this Dr Goddard had said. Three categories of feeble-mindedness. Idiots, who were the worst, then imbeciles and then morons. As far as he could estimate Rosie was only a moron.
Mrs K said, ‘At least she's in the top category. Dr Goddard says idiots have to wear diapers all their lives.’
Well, I had my Rosie out of diapers before she was two.
She said, ‘The problem is this, morons are harder to care for because they look so normal. As they grow up they have to be watched every minute or they get into all kinds of difficulties. Do you see what I mean?’
I didn't see what she meant at all.
I said, ‘I know she's the sunniest child I ever looked after.’
‘Precisely,’ she said. ‘She's amiable and eager to please and when she's older men will take advantage.’
I said, ‘Well, that's a long way down the road. She's only six.’
‘But something to think about nonetheless,’ she said. ‘We have to keep her safe from men, Nora, because she must never have babies.’
I couldn't see why. She was just grand with Euny and baby Pat. And if Herself was anything to go by too much brains and education only made for a restless mother.
She said, ‘We have to develop what little gifts she has.’
I said, ‘She has the gift of contentment and that's no small thing. It's like a monkey house upstairs when they come in from school but Rosie'll sit in a corner and play for hours making a tea party with the dolly cups and saucers.’
She said, ‘I know, dear heart, I know. She's a good girl. But I'm determined to get her reading and writing, whatever Dr Goddard says. Perseverance pays dividends. And you're very good with her, Nora. I don't know what we'd do without you.’
Fidelma said, ‘She said that? You should have asked her for a raise.’
But Mrs K didn't give raises, only job security, and variety, because those Kennedy children were like a box of Candy Allsorts. Young Joe was tall and strong, like his daddy, and Pat looked likely to turn out the same way. Kick was thicker set but she had Mr K's freckles, same as Jack did. Euny was the one that most favoured Mrs K, especially when she smiled. Not that that happened so often. She was as skinny as a string bean, wouldn't eat, couldn't sleep. Euny just lived on her nerves.
And Rosie was the beauty. She had milky skin and lovely dimpled arms you could just have taken a bite out of.
‘Fat,’ Mrs K called it. ‘We must watch Rosie's line or she'll end up looking like a tubby little peasant.’
Mrs K kept herself as trim as a candle and she expected everybody else to do the same. The children were weighed regular as clockwork and Rosie was the only one who ever got a black mark. Jack had to have extra malt and cod liver oil, to build him up, and Euny got extra bread and potatoes to try and put a bit of flesh on her, but many a time Rosie had her rations cut, to try and slim her down. I didn't approve of it, myself. I like to see a child enjoying her food, not corrected just for the way God made her.
I had all the girls in matching outfits. They looked a picture, lined up ready to go to Mass on Sunday morning. Wool coats with bonnets and muffs for the cold weather and cotton print dresses in the summer, with white ankle socks and Mary Janes. But when we went to the seashore they wore any old rags, just shorts and vests, first up, best dressed, and they ran around barefoot, brown as tinkers.
When I first worked for the Kennedys we'd go to a different place every year, but once we'd tried Hyannis we took the same cottage there every year.
Mrs K's driver said, ‘Know why we're going to Hyannis again? Because Your Man was turned down for the Country Club at Cohasset.’
I said, ‘And how would you know a thing like that?’
‘Because Herself told me,’ he said, ‘when I was driving her into town. She said it was because the Cohasset doesn't take Catholics but if you ask me it's more likely they'd heard about him running whiskey. And do you know why he got in at Hyannis? Because they're not so toffee-nosed down there. They saw the colour of his money and didn't bother to enquire where he got it.’
I said, ‘So they're no more particular than you are, Danny Walsh.’
‘No, well,’ he said. ‘I'm only saying.’
You have to be very careful with hired help. I wouldn't want servants if they were giving them away with Oxydol.
LEARNING THE WAYS OF THE ENEMY (#ulink_3ec90637-3454-5158-ba29-f69741cf1142)
Bobby was born eighteen months after Pat. He was another one looked like a skinned rabbit, same as Jack. We thought he'd be the last.
Fidelma said, ‘She'll tie a knot in her hanky now. Sure, she only kept going to get another boy.’
I thought so too. She was tired of it all by then, even though she had me and Fidelma in the nursery and all the help she wanted in the house. Poor Bobby. He loved to be allowed up to her room, to sit on her bed and watch her get dressed for dinner, but there were times when I thought she'd forgotten she'd ever had him. Rosie was the only one in the family who petted him.
Kick was at St Aidan's, in first grade, and Euny was just starting in the kindergarten. Joe and Jack were day boys at Nobles down in Dedham. Herself would have liked them all taught by the sisters but Mr K said the boys had to go to a top-drawer school and start mixing with Protestants.
He said, ‘When you intend to go places it's never too early to study the competition and learn the ways of the enemy.’
There was talk though that we might leave Boston altogether. Mr K was doing more and more with the moving-picture business, on the train once a month to Hollywood, California. Danny Walsh said it was quite on the cards that we'd be shifting there, getting a house on the same street as all the movie stars.
He kept saying, ‘That'll give Brookline something to think about.’
As if Brookline gave two cents about the Kennedys. The children were at the age when they should have been having friends round to play but the neighbours were very stand-offish.
Mrs K always said they didn't need other children because they had each other but it didn't seem natural to me. That's why I loved going to Hyannis for the summer. Every blessed minute didn't have to be regimented when we were there.
As long as they worked hard at their sailing lessons and their swimming they were left to run free the rest of the time and they did mix with other children, Kick especially. The first thing she'd do when we got to the cottage was race round to see if Nancy Tenney was at home, and Rosie'd tag along with her. Mrs Tenney might have been a friend for Mrs K too. The Tenneys were a nice family, no airs and graces, but Herself wouldn't socialise. She'd get Danny to run her to early Mass at St Francis Xavier, then she'd be reading in her room or going for her swim, no matter how cold the water. Two or three times a week she'd go to the golf course, but just to play by herself, for the exercise, not for company as Mr K did.
Danny said, ‘And do you know what she does? She slips onto the course at the seventh and plays the same half a dozen holes over and over. She seems to think she's saving money if she's not seen going out from the clubhouse. Worrying about green fees with all the money she's got.’
That was her. Penny-mean. I know for a fact she spent five hundred dollars on her outfit for her sister Agnes's wedding but we were only allowed forty-watt light bulbs in the nursery.
Very often Mr Kennedy would be away a month at a time, but he'd write to the children, and always a proper personal letter to each of them that was old enough to understand, not like Herself, who wrote one letter and sent them each a carbon copy when she went travelling. And then when the word came that he was on his way home you'd have thought the President himself was expected, the children got so excited. They'd all go along to his dressing room, first thing, to watch him shave and tell him everything that had happened while he'd been gone, and then he'd read the funnies with them before they went down to breakfast. ‘Captain Easy’ and ‘Tailspin Tommy’. It was like a holiday for me and Fidelma the mornings Mr K was at home.
He always brought them presents too, when he came home from a trip, but only little things. A scouting knife or a Spaldine ball, or picture postcards of the movie stars. The only extravagance was the time he brought Tom Mix cowboy costumes, with the kerchiefs signed by the great man himself. They were intended for Joe and Jack, and they caused nothing but trouble because Kick helped herself to one of the hats and wouldn't be parted from it. Joe usually behaved nicely around his sisters but he lit into her as though she was some boy in the schoolyard and he wouldn't be pacified till he got his cowboy hat back.
When Mr K had been away he'd want to know about what they'd been up to, chapter and verse. How they'd been getting on in school or at the sailing club if we were up to Hyannis. Joseph Patrick won at everything he turned his hand to and so did Euny. Kick just enjoyed herself. If she won anything it was a happy accident, and Jack was the same. He could never quite be bothered to make that extra effort, even though he knew exactly what his daddy would say.
‘Don't let me hear you bragging about getting second place,’ he'd say. ‘All second place means is you have to try harder. First place is the only thing that counts. You're a Kennedy, remember, and Kennedys are winners!’
That was what they had drummed into them and they'd knock you flying to be first over the finishing line. I used to enjoy a game of checkers until the children got old enough to play. They'd study the board and try to distract you while you made your move, as if their lives depended on beating you. Rosie was the only one who wasn't like that. She didn't have the cunning to put one over on you, and anyway, she didn't really care. To her a game was just a pleasant way to pass half an hour, but naturally she did want to please her daddy. She'd have loved to go running to him, to tell him she'd won at slapjack.
I'd say, ‘For the love of God, let her win, why don't you? Just once in a while?’
‘Why should we?’ they'd say. ‘What's the fun in that?’
‘I'll try harder, Daddy,’ she used to say, when she could get a word in edgewise.
‘Good girl, Rosie,’ he'd say. ‘That's the right attitude.’
He loved her, of course, but you could tell it irked him to see a child of his so slow. Sometimes it took her a while to think what she was going to say and he didn't have the patience to wait while she got her words out.
When Mrs K took her up to her room to make her practise her letters he'd say, ‘I don't know where you find the patience, Rosa darling.’
He always called Herself ‘Rosa darling’.
She'd come down on a Sunday morning, wearing one of her new rigs, ‘Looking a million dollars, Rosa darling,’ he'd say, and then he'd run off to make one more phone call before we went to Mass.
I never saw him take her hand though or ruffle her hair. She'd hang on his arm, gazing up at him, but he didn't pay her a lot of attention and neither did the children. When they sat down to dinner he was the one they listened to.
‘Dad said this, Dad thinks that,’ was all you'd hear.
I said to Jack one time, ‘And what did your mammy have to say on the subject?’
‘Mother?’ he said, as if I'd asked him what was the cat's opinion. ‘Mother doesn't know about world events.’
Everything about Joe Kennedy was lickety-split. You could practically hear the wheels turning in his brain. He'd be out on his deck exercising with his Indian clubs and he'd have a faraway look in his eye. Then as soon as he finished he'd be on the telephone, barking out the day's orders to Joey Timilty or Eddie Moore. Timilty was Mr K's fixer, according to Danny Walsh. Always carried a big fat roll of dollar bills. Eddie Moore was different, a kind of general manager and allowed to sit in on a lot of the meetings and phone calls.
But Gabe Nolan drove Mr K and he reckoned there was only one person who knew everything Joe Kennedy was up to and that was Joe Kennedy himself.
Gabe said, ‘He's like a shark, cruising around on his own. He goes in fast, makes his kill, and he's gone before they know what hit them. And all his money's spread around. If anybody goes looking for an office with J. P. Kennedy on the shingle or a bank account they'll be disappointed because there ain't any such thing.’
But Eddie Moore was on the payroll, and Mrs Moore was expected to be on call too, in case Herself got the urge to go down to Sulphur Springs for the waters and we had any catastrophes in the nursery. It was through Mrs Moore we first got wind of the move.
She said, ‘How will you feel about leaving Boston, Nora? You'll miss your sisters, I'm sure.’
Fidelma said, ‘Is it Hollywood we're going to? Are we going next door to any fillum stars?’
She said, ‘No, no, not Hollywood. That's not a fit place to raise children. You're going to New York. My husband's down there right now looking for a suitable property.’
Fidelma had been to New York. She'd travelled there with the first family she worked for.
She said, ‘You'll love it, Nora. There's railways rumbling in the sky and railways rattling under your feet and eateries that stay open all night and shows with tunes you can sing. Not like this dead-alive hole. Still, I wish we could have gone to Hollywood. I might have got myself discovered.’
Mrs Moore was right, up to a point. There was one sister I was sorry to leave.
Margaret was expecting again. I'd have liked to be around to give her a hand, and there was little Val too. I loved to go and see him on my day off. Three's a grand age. Old enough to walk and not break your arms any more, and too young to break your heart.
Me and Margaret were always good pals. Edmond hung around with the Donnelly boys, used to go fishing with them and rabbiting. Ursie preferred her own company, and Deirdre was away with the fairies. The wind would whine in the chimney and she'd say, ‘Do you hear the angels singing?’ And if you got out the checkerboard to give her a game she'd say, ‘Budge over, Nora. Saint Bridget wants to sit there.’
They say she's happy in Africa, love her. Maybe they all hear angel voices over there.
Ursie said, ‘New York is a wonderful opportunity for you. I'll give you a list of museums you must go to. You see, you're drawing the dividend of loyalty. Your Kennedys can't manage without you. Just like me and Mr Jauncey.’
Ursie and her Mr Jauncey. He was all she ever talked about. How she kept his appointment book and remembered every little thing for him, even his wife's birthday. How he was the most respected lawyer in Boston and trusted her to see all his papers.
‘I'm privy to all kinds of delicate things,’ she used to say, ‘but of course I'd never speak of them.’
Margaret'd say, ‘Oh go on, Ursie, it won't go no further than these four walls. Tell us about one of his murders.’
‘Mr Jauncey,’ she'd say, ‘is not that kind of lawyer. Mr Jauncey is corporate.’
She was first at her desk every morning and the last to leave at night. She said he called her his ‘office treasure’.
Margaret said, ‘Has he ever asked you to be any other kind of treasure?’
‘Don't be coarse, Margaret,’ she said. ‘Mr Jauncey is a member of the Harvard Club.’
She coloured up though, so I reckon Margaret had touched a nerve.
I said, ‘No, but you must like him. What if Mrs Jauncey was to pass away? What if he made you an offer? You know all his little ways. How many sugars he takes. Or do you like being an old maid?’
She said, ‘Mr Jauncey doesn't take sugar. And I'm certainly not an old maid. I'm a personal and private secretary, I'm a member of the altar guild, and I get a very generous bonus at Christmas.’
Well, but what does a Christmas bonus buy you when you've to go home to a boiled-egg dinner for one?
Margaret said, ‘You're a fine one to talk about old maids, Nora Brennan. Thirty-four and you spend your nights off playing Wincey Spider with my Val. You ought to be over Jimmy Swords by now.’
I was over Jimmy Swords the minute I saw how hard his eyes had turned.
I said, ‘I get offers.’
I did too. There was the Dawsons' driver, in Naples Road. There was Mitch, who taught the boys sailing up at Hyannis. I had my moments. But I had my seven Kennedys to consider too. I wasn't going to get silly in the head over some man and throw all that away.
ANOTHER LITTLE BLESSING (#ulink_f24ce457-75e9-5d73-a73f-870ae38b17ff)
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 theatre 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 neighbours you never saw because they went everywhere by motor car. 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 Mr K always 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 motor car 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 cosy at the Piper's Kilt saloon and forget to bring you home.
They were busy days anyway, and I liked that. We had a thousand things 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 Honour 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 to stop her nibbling. 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. When she was like that I could sit on the bed and chat with her and for five minutes I'd forget what a slave-driver she could be.
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.’
It was the truth. I wasn't buttering her up.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I put in a great deal of work to keep my looks. These things have to be worked at.’
That was Mrs K. Just as you were warming to her she'd say something that reminded you she wasn't any old girl-next-door.
She said, ‘Men have it so much easier. They go out to business, but when they come home everything else has been done for them. We women have to be wives and mothers and careful home-makers. 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.’
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. Fidelma and Gertie Ambler who cooked for us 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. Miss Swanson will be in town with her children. It'd be a nice thing to do. Invite some neighbours' 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 Pattie 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. But if her old man happens to be at home he only stays five minutes and he doesn't come out whistling and checking his fly. 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 Mrs K, not even the day he brought Miss Swanson to the Halloween party.
Gertie Ambler was scandalised.
‘The poor creature,’ she kept saying. ‘Having her nose rubbed in his goings-on.’
Fidelma thought the arrangement quite suited her.
‘Eight babies,’ she said. ‘She's wore out. And the old bugger's only forty. Sure somebody has to scratch his itch. So long as he keeps paying the dressmakers' bills I don't think Herself'll complain.’
But I thought it was a terrible thing him bringing Miss Swanson into the house and showing her off to his children. And still Mrs K held her head high.
It was only when she came up to the nursery at bedtime that I saw her wobble.
Kick said, ‘Miss Swanson said we must call her Aunt Gloria. Wasn't that nice of her? Don't you think she's beautiful?’
I caught Mrs K's eye and I'll swear I saw a tear, until she blinked it away. I hadn't intended to catch her off guard with her shame. It bothered me all that night, as if I'd been the cause of it. And I'll bet Joe Kennedy never lost a wink of sleep.
I'd always thought Gloria Swanson looked a fright in her photographs, with all that blacking around her eyes, so it had been 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'd looked a prim little body beside Miss Swanson.
They'd 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. There was tittle-tattling in the kitchen, of course. 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 warm 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 Malcolm Cottage, which 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 recognise 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 favourite.
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 did everything I could to get the poor child a proper name. She could at least have named him Desmond for Dada, but her head is full of picture-palace nonsense and Frankie Mulcahy daren't say a peep to contradict her. I hope there'll be no more after this one. Two is surely enough for anyone in this day and age, especially for A FISH PORTER WITH ASTHMA. 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. I thought I'd meet somebody, but in my line of work you don't get a lot of time for meeting somebodies. And now I look back, I had the best of both worlds. I had more of their little smiles and kisses than ever Herself did, and none of her aches and pains.
Ursie's letter went on.
I mailed Deirdre a box of initialled handkerchiefs from Federated. Whether they'll ever reach her I don't know. They'll probably end up in a mud hut somewhere, but it's the thought that counts. Mr Jauncey is visiting with his in-laws in Nashua.
Every year Ursie sends handkerchiefs, and if I know Deirdre, she gives them away. I bet all her little piccaninnies are wiping their 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 ‘did you hear the angels’ smile.
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 making 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, ‘See, Brennan? Happy Families. I'm telling you, they've come to an arrangement about Miss Swanson.’
Mr K was to be gone a month at least. He came up to the nursery to kiss Bobby goodbye, 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 favourite, ‘Sweet Adeline’, putting in all the twiddly bits, but when I looked in on her to say goodnight 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 and that was where Mr Kennedy was heading, and even a new mink jacket couldn't take the sting out of that.
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-humoured 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.
It didn't worry us that Mr and Mrs K were both away from home. In fact we all preferred it. With Mrs K you could never be sure where you stood. Little things bothered her. You could be getting the ‘dear heart’ treatment, hearing how she could have married Sir Thomas Lipton, if she'd played her cards that way, and been a real English Lady, then she'd start going through the trash can and before you knew it you were getting a telling-off because you might have eked one more spoonful of malt extract out of the jar you'd thrown away. Left to ourselves, me and Fidelma could run that nursery blindfolded, and after Jean arrived we had plenty of chances.
Jean Ann was born on Kick's eighth birthday. We were having a little tea party for some of her friends from the day school when we got the telephone call. Mr K was already on his way up to Boston to see the new arrival.
Joseph Patrick said, ‘Nora, do you think I'm old enough to be the new baby's godfather? I think I am.’
He was a hard one to fathom. I'd had to read the riot act only half an hour before, because of his silly rough-housing, nearly pulling Jack's arm from its socket, and then there he was, talking about standing godfather to his new sister. And he did it too. Mr and Mrs K thought it was a wonderful idea.
Jean Ann was a month old before she was brought home from Boston so Herself had been gone eight weeks complete.
‘Milking it for all she's worth,’ Fidelma said. ‘Well, I suppose it'll be her last time.’
We lined them all up outside the door like a guard of honour for her homecoming and young Joe carried baby Jean in from the car.
Danny Walsh said, ‘Mrs K's done all right out of this. Your Man gave her a diamond bracelet, and when she feels up to it she's going on a trip, anywhere in the world she fancies.’
Gabe Nolan said, ‘But here's the best bit. The lady friend only went and sent her flowers. A great big bouquet of roses that nearly filled the room. How about that for front?’
Fidelma said, ‘See what I mean, Brennan? They're the best of friends, Miss Swanson and Mrs K. They're in cahoots.’
I said, ‘I wouldn't believe everything Gabe Nolan told me. It could have been anybody sent her flowers.’
She said, ‘Will you ask her or will I?’
We went up to the nursery to give Jean her bottle. The nearest I could say, she had a look of Kick about her. Poor Jean. That's how we always talked about her. ‘Like Kick but fairer, and a look of Joseph Patrick about her when she smiles.’
Mrs K said, ‘Now, dear hearts, I'm going to take a little nap, but later on I want to see the weight charts and bring my records up to date.’
Fidelma said, ‘Oh Mrs Kennedy, we heard you got roses after the baby was born. Is it true? Can you really get roses in February?’
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I did get roses, from Miss Swanson and her husband. It was a great extravagance but such a very kind thought. Of course I received letters and cards from so many of Mr Kennedy's business associates.’
She saw Fidelma's little game.
We went in convoy to Hyannis as soon as school was out, to the ‘cottage’ as Mrs K called it, though it was hardly a cottage any more. Two big new wings had been built on, and garages and an extra floor, with a deck. I was given the first weekend off, to go on up to Boston and see Margaret's new baby and little Rudolph Valentino. They'd already shortened ‘Ramon’ to ‘Ray’, which Ursie said sounded common. She didn't approve of pacifiers either, but then Ursie had never walked the floor all night with a child cutting his first teeth. Margaret wanted to know all about Miss Swanson.
She said, ‘You've done all right for yourself, no mistake. I'm stuck behind Middleton's counter every afternoon, weighing sugar and slicing bacon, and you're rubbing shoulders with film stars.’
Ursie said, ‘Just keep your feet on the ground, Nora. You know we get famous people coming to the office, senior figures from the business world, but I treat everyone the same.’
Margaret said, ‘You kill me, Ursula Brennan. You're not telling me you get anybody to top Gloria Swanson coming into the stuffy old place where you work.’
When Margaret and Ursie saw each other they never stopped picking.
I said, ‘I don't rub shoulders with anyone. There are days I hardly set foot outside the nursery. We've eight of them to see to.’
Margaret said, ‘Eight. Sweet Jesus. Could you not take my two as well? Just slide them in on the quiet? I'll bet they'd never notice.’
Mr K was away in California most of the summer of ’28 but when he did come home he arrived in style. Gabe Nolan would meet him off the train in New York City and drive him out to Queens, to where he kept his latest toy. An airplane that could land on water. It meant he could fly up to the Cape and land right on his own doorstep. The first time he arrived it caused quite a stir. People were running around, thinking a plane had crashed into the sea, but after they found out who it was and what it was they didn't pay any more attention. Hyannis folk were too dignified to get excited about Joe Kennedy and his trappings.
The house renovations were still going on and some of the new bathrooms had still to be finished, but the movie theatre was ready, downstairs in the old furnace room. Danny Walsh was taught how to work the projecting machine and Mr K kept us supplied with new movies, cowboy stories mainly, hot off the press. They'd arrive by special messenger once a week.
Fidelma asked him why it was always cowboys and Indians.
He said, ‘Because they're easy to do. I can make twenty of them for what those fur hondlers spend on one movie and folks are just as happy to watch mine. People in Scranton, Pennsylvania, would watch paint dry, they're so bored.’
Danny reckoned we saw things before they were in the picture palaces even in New York City, and we were all allowed down there to watch because, as Mr K said, he'd never allow a movie to be made in a studio of his that wasn't fit for his family to see, and the help too. Mrs K didn't care much for movies though. She'd sit at the back and after half an hour or so she'd slip out. She was happier pulling on an old pea jacket and going for a walk along the strand.
She said to me once, ‘Movies are so noisy. I don't like all the shooting. Peace and quiet are what I like. That's why I go to first Mass. It's worth getting up early. If you go later other worshippers can be so irritating. I love a room to myself, Nora, and stillness.’
Well, she was in the wrong family for that.
KENNEDYS EVERYWHERE, LIKE A RASH (#ulink_77bd25c2-b7af-5446-be41-623bed5acf0f)
The house in Riverdale was a rental. We knew Mr K had told Eddie Moore to look out for a place to buy and in the spring of 1929 we moved again, to Bronxville, to a villa standing in its own park, Crownlands. I suppose the money was fairly pouring in by then. He owned the companies that were making the movies and he owned the picture houses where they were shown. For all I know he could have owned the celluloid factories and the popcorn machines too. Not that any of the help saw much of the money he was making. You only asked for a raise if you were prepared for a big performance from Herself. To hear her you'd think they were down to their last dime. She should have been on the stage, that one. By the time she was done with her sob story you felt you should maybe offer her a loan yourself.
So it wasn't the money that kept me with the Kennedys. I stayed because I liked the life and I loved the children. Anyway, blessed are the poor. As Mammy used to say, ‘If you want to know God's opinion of money you've only to take a look at them he gives it to.’
People like me and Fidelma and Gertie Ambler who cooked, and Danny and Gabe, we were the lucky ones, because we were permanent staff, kept on whatever the time of year. But the maids and the gardeners at Hyannis had to find something else when the house was closed up for the winter. Mrs K didn't see why she should pay people when she was finished with them for the year.
Crownlands was our grandest house yet. We had beautiful grounds and every convenience, and yet Herself still didn't seem happy. Thwarted, I always thought. She'd had her education and been the toast of Boston, riding with His Honour the Mayor. She had money and a fine family, but there was no joy in her. She could tell you the date of every doctor's visit and she could tell you to the last cent what we were spending on socks or baby bottles, but she didn't have anything to occupy her that would use all her brains and foreign languages. She was more like a head housekeeper than a mother, and she was so restless. She wanted to go back out into the world and make her mark, you could tell, but she'd eight children and her sacred duty hung round her neck like a sack of rocks. Mr K did take her along with him to California one time, which was how she happened to miss Jack and Rosie's first communion, but she never went again.
She said, ‘Mr Kennedy is so busy with meetings all day when he's travelling but I'm not the kind of wife who sits around waiting to be entertained. I shall take a trip to Europe.’
Fidelma said, ‘Do you think we'd ever move, to save Mr Kennedy all the travelling?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘I do not. We're not California people.’
Still, he was so tied up there he didn't even come back for the burying of his own father. I'd have thought they could have kept the old feller on ice until Mr K had time to attend, but Mrs K said it wasn't necessary. She said it was time Joseph Patrick learned to represent his daddy on certain occasions and his grandfather's funeral was a very good place to begin. He was bought a new black suit from Alexander's. Only fourteen but he was already a head taller than his mammy, quite the young man when he offered her his arm and walked her to the car. I told Mr K when I saw him.
I said, ‘Young Joe did you proud. And my sister wrote me from Boston. She said there was a very big turnout for the funeral.’
‘So I heard,’ he said. ‘And I wish I could have been there, but I couldn't leave town. It's dog eat dog in the movie business. If you turn your back for five minutes those Jewboys rob you blind.’
Herself went off to Paris, for culture and shopping she said, and she was hardly out the door before Miss Swanson came visiting. I thought it was highly irregular, and Jack didn't like it either. He stayed out in the bay in his sailboat after everybody else had come in, and he had a monkey face on him when it was time to go in to dinner.
I said, ‘What's eating you?’
He said, ‘How come Mother has to go to France just when Dad's come home and we can all be together for a change? What kind of a family is this, anyhow?’
Miss Swanson was very nice. She remembered all the children's names, and she went along to the movie-star club Kick and Rosie and little Nancy Tenney had got up to swap photographs and act out scenes from the movies they'd seen. She climbed the ladder up into the attic over Mr Tenney's garage to say hello to Nancy and sign her autograph book, like a regular aunt might have done. But it still wasn't right that she was in the house when Mrs Kennedy wasn't.
Mr K took her for a ride through town in his Rolls-Royce but according to Gabe Nolan nobody paid them any attention. If people in Hyannis had money, they never flashed it, and most of them wouldn't have walked to the foot of the stairs to see even Tom Mix. Kick was film-star crazy though. That's where all her pocket money went. Rosie used to save hers to send to the missionary nuns and Euny just counted hers and then put it back in her piggy-bank, but Kick's went on movie magazines the minute the money was in her hand, and then she cut them up for photos of Douglas Fairbanks or Miss Greta Garbo to thumbtack to the wall.
Young Joe and Rosie both went away to school that autumn. It had been decided that Rosie would never catch up at the day school so she had to be boarded, at a special place for slow learners. I knew that wouldn't last five minutes. It was out beyond Philadelphia, and it could have been the far side of the moon for all that meant to Rosie. She sat with the map Mrs K had showed her, with her finger on the place, looking and looking at me, to see if I could save her from having to go.
Euny kept saying, ‘You're lucky. I wish I could go away to school.’
But all Rosie wanted was to stay home and help me look after baby Jean.
‘I'll try more hard,’ she said. Well, she managed one term at the school but she came home for Christmas such a wreck even Mrs K hadn't the heart to send her back. She said there were other places that might be more suitable and God knows we worked our way through a long, long list of them before we were done. I could never see why it was such a crime for Rosie to be slow. Apart from Euny they were none of them great scholars and Mr Congressman Jack still can't spell for taffy.
Joseph Patrick went off to Choate School in Connecticut that October. He was raring to get there, although Herself would have liked to see him go to a good Catholic school. She was worried he wouldn't be allowed to go to Mass.
Mr K said, ‘Of course he'll be allowed. I'll make sure of it. The main thing is I want my boy in a school where there's no funny business. You can spend a pile of money and end up with a sissy, but they guarantee there's none of that at Choate.’
It was a top school. The kind top families had sent their boys to for generations. I wondered if they wouldn't look down their noses at a Kennedy, especially if Mr K started throwing his money around and turning up in his gold limousine, but the thing about young Joe was, he was one of those people who expected everybody to like him, and if they didn't he just chose not to notice. And he went right along with whatever his daddy said he must do. Like the first term when he wanted to take horse-riding lessons but it would have meant he couldn't go out for the football team and Mr Kennedy put it to him, the football was more important.
He said, ‘Think of it this way. You can make useful friends playing in a team, and be good enough to win your football letter when you get to Harvard. Horse-riding you can do any old time.’
And when it was explained to him that way he didn't argue. He knew everything he did was part of a plan. First Catholic President of the United States. He'd been hearing it since the day he was born.
Mr K had come home from California in time to drive Joseph Patrick to his new school, and he wasn't going back.
Gabe Nolan said, ‘He's had enough of the Jewboys. He's branching out again. And do you know who his new best pal is? The Governor's boy. Jimmy Roosevelt. They've got a few little deals on the go.’
Mr Franklin Roosevelt was the new Governor of New York.
So we went from never seeing Mr K to having him home every night, and the children loved it. Herself was hardly there because if she wasn't in Paris buying gowns she was sightseeing in New Mexico or off to Maine to take the waters, and I can't say she was greatly missed. She was away the week the markets crashed, visiting with the Fitzgeralds in Boston.
I was bringing the children home from school, pushing Jean in her bassinet. Kick and Euny and wee Pat who'd just started in the first grade. Fidelma was at home with Bobby because he had the croup and I remember telling her I'd seen three limousines turn up driveways, bringing their gentlemen home in the middle of the working day. Very unusual. Then Mr K came in and went directly to his study. He didn't come up to the nursery and he didn't eat dinner that night. All he had was a glass of warm milk. I could hear his great booming voice on the telephone until very late.
It was in all the dailies the next morning, of course, how stocks had fallen and people had been ruined. I didn't understand it then and I still don't. If you've money in the bank, how can it turn worthless overnight? But Danny Walsh took it upon himself to explain it to us. According to him it wasn't actual dollar bills that had gone west, it was other pieces of paper, promises to pay, and notes about who owned what, complicated arrangements that were how men like Joe Kennedy made their fortunes. And lost them.
Danny said, ‘We'll all be let go. Your Man'll be shining shoes by Christmas.’
But as was often the case, Danny Walsh was wrong. There were a lot of ruined men in the neighbourhood but Mr Kennedy wasn't one of them. He'd gotten out of whatever it was had dragged them all under and put his money in safer places.
Fidelma asked him straight. She said, ‘Are we all right, Mr K? Only if you'll be cutting back I'd like to know sooner than later.’
He laughed. He said, ‘Do you think we can't afford you? No, you're still in a job. Stick with Joe Kennedy, see? A blind man could have seen this crash coming. The only ones who lost are the fools who held out for the top dollar.’
But they weren't the only ones who lost. Everybody who depended on them was hurt too. Businesses closed, people were laid off. A lot of the houses in Bronxville and Riverdale were put up for sale, and when they didn't sell they were just closed and shuttered and left empty. You didn't see so many limousines any more. Children were taken out of school, just disappeared without any goodbyes. Sometimes it felt as if we were the only survivors. And Danny Walsh changed his tune.
‘Mr Kennedy's nobody's fool,’ he kept saying. ‘I knew we'd be all right. He'd have sold his own mother if the market was right. Provided we keep on the right side of Herself we've all got jobs for life here.’
A driver, maybe, but nurserymaids lose their usefulness after a few years. I didn't think I'd be with them for much longer. Sometimes, on the way from school, Kick would say, ‘I wonder if there'll be a new baby in the nursery when we get home today?’ Even when she knew her mammy was away to Virginia for a little holiday she'd still say it.
But there wasn't. Not that year, nor the next.
Fidelma said, ‘No, but I reckon we're still pretty safe, Brennan. Now that Herself is gallivanting all the time she needs us more than ever. We've a good few years till Jean's all growed up and there could be a new bunch of them on the way by then. The next generation. They'll keep us in the attic till we're needed for the grandbabies, like they used to do at the big houses back home, remember?’
It was a happy thought. All my Kennedys coming of age, getting married and having ten babies apiece.
I said, ‘Well, bags I get Kick's babies, or Rosie's, if she's allowed any. I'll leave the boys to you.’
I could imagine how it'd be with the boys. They'd all get their wives chosen for them. Little replicas of Herself.
I said, ‘Eight of them. Just think of it. Even if they only have two or three apiece, that's still an awful lot of Kennedys. They'll be everywhere, like a rash.’
Fidelma laughed. ‘Kennedytown,’ she said. ‘The old man'll buy a whole street of houses and even the dogs'll have ginger fur and big white teeth. See if I'm not right.’
THE SACRED DUTIES OF A WIFE (#ulink_e73ab931-b8af-5274-8a81-bfb564e35d23)
They say there were terrible sights to be seen in the city after the stock market tumbled. Businesses boarded up, men in good suits hanging their heads and waiting in line for a bowl of soup. Ursie said it was the same in Boston. Middleton's closed down for one thing, because nobody could settle their accounts, which put Margaret out of work with two young mouths to fill and Frankie Mulcahy's chest not all it should have been.
I send her what I can spare, Ursie wrote, and I hope you'll do the same. Thank goodness you and I had the sense to tie our fortunes to men like Mr Jauncey and Mr Kennedy. Mr Jauncey is as busy as ever with so many liquidations, and we seem to read more and more about your Mr Kennedy. These are the people who will ensure America survives and comes back stronger than ever.
It was true it would have to be some kind of calamity for lawyers not to do well out of it, so Ursie had no worries. But it tickled me to think of Joe Kennedy as a lifeguard, helping to keep America afloat and pull her safe to shore. He watched out for his own, plain and simple, and if your name wasn't Kennedy, he'd have the lifebelt off you before you knew it and sell it to the highest bidder.
We were spared seeing the worst of it out in Bronxville, tucked away in our nice leafy garden. There was nobody panhandling on our street, no breadlines. Mrs K's packages still arrived from Paris, with gowns she didn't have any opportunity to wear, and Gabe Nolan still drove Mr K around in the Rolls-Royce. He'd prospered. He didn't have factories or warehouses full of stock. He just moved around quietly, picking up all those worthless bits of paper. Then he waited for their value to climb back and while he was waiting he took up with Mr Roosevelt, the State Governor. When we went up to Hyannis that summer you'd never have known there was anything wrong in the world. The sun seemed to shine every day and even Herself was in a good humour. There were no more visits from Miss Swanson and Constance Bennett's photo went back up on Kick's bedroom wall. Jimmy Roosevelt and his wife came to stay, and a wonderful singer, Mr Morton Downey, moved into a house just around the corner, so some evenings, instead of the cowboy picture shows, they'd have a little musical soirée. The help all sat with the kitchen door open so we could hear him singing in the parlour.
’Tis the last rose of summer Left blooming alone. All her lovely companions Are faded and gone.
Every day at Hyannis was filled. They all had a tennis lesson in the morning and sailing practice in the afternoon, with special instructors brought in, if there wasn't a regatta for them to race in. There was one called Mitch who came two summers running, big strong shoulders and skin tanned like glove leather. He was pretty sweet on me. He took me out in a sailboat one time and I thought I'd surely die, so after that we just used to go to the dunes after dark. I wonder whatever became of Mitch.
Mr K organised swimming contests for the children too, and running races and games of football, but Mrs K had no part of any of that. She liked to swim, but just gentle paddling about, with Danny Walsh to accompany her. They were a sight to see, walking down to the water's edge together, Herself in a big rubber helmet to save her hair from the salt, and Danny in a woollen swimming costume, legs on him like a grey heron. His job was to bob around close by, in case a big wave swept her off her feet.
Fidelma said, ‘When you answered that advertisement, Danny, I'll bet you never thought the job would mean taking your trousers off.’
He said, ‘Flexibility, Fidelma Clery, that's the answer to survival today. You can't just be a driver. Nor a nurserymaid, so you can wipe that silly smile off your face, Nora Brennan. Think how much more I'm worth to the Kennedys than you are. Driver, swimming companion, projectionist, handyman.’
I didn't care. I still wasn't going into that ocean.
There were all the outdoors activities, but that wasn't all. The older ones were expected to prepare for mealtimes too. Mrs K had a noticeboard nailed up for pieces she clipped out of the newspapers, conversational topics she thought they should know about, so they'd have something to say at the dinner table. It was for the benefit of Joe and Jack mainly, so they could decide what they thought about things and then listen to what their daddy had to say, but Kick and Euny were allowed to join in as well. Not Rosie though. She was excused from conversationalising, and from the sailing lessons.
Mrs K had her up to her room every morning for two hours instead, to try and bring her along with her reading and writing. It was no vacation for Rosie. She'd have liked to sit in the dunes and play with her dollies, I know, but Mrs Kennedy said she'd never improve if she didn't push herself. And when her lessons were over she still didn't get any peace. The others would drag her off to play French cricket and yell at her when she dropped the ball. Eunice was the only one had any patience with her. She'd take her out in her dinghy once in a while and show her how to tack and trim the sails and Rosie would come back with a smile that'd light up a Christmas tree.
‘I've been crewing for Euny,’ she'd say, pleased as punch. ‘She said I did pretty good.’
She was a help with the little ones too. She'd feed Jean for me and push Bobby on the swing. Sometimes he'd get mixed up and call her ‘Mother’. He was a quiet one, Bobby. Always studying the floor, but then he'd up and do something to surprise you. I was sitting on the lawns one time with wee Jean on my lap when he came running up from the strand. He pushed a seashell into my hand, said ‘Love you’ and ran off again, come over all shy. A Scotch bonnet shell. I have it still. And that was the summer he punched Joseph Patrick. Young Joe had taken the book Jack was reading and wouldn't give it back, taunting him with it, so Bobby landed him one with his little fist, and when Joe laughed at him he burst into tears and went and hid.
But he could be a grouch too. Fidelma took to him more than I did. She says he's still the most prayerful of the lot of them, and he did used to screw his eyes up tight when he was saying his rosary at bedtime. You'd have thought that would have endeared him to Herself, being the big churchgoer, but she was starting to feel her wings by the time Bobby came along. And none of them ever got paid the attention Joseph Patrick did.
Things were so sweet between Mr and Mrs K that summer she even had her way over Jack's next school. He'd been intended for Choate, following in young Joe's footsteps, but he was sent to Canterbury instead, a proper Catholic school, right up by Candlewood Lake. He was in and out of the school infirmary all that first term, what with the batterings he took on the football field and his sore throats and stomach aches, so Mr K said we'd all better go to Florida for the Christmas holidays, so Jack could get his strength up. Blue skies and palm trees on Christmas Day. Fidelma swore she'd died and gone to heaven. Ursie reckons Deirdre gets weather like that all the time in Africa.
But Florida didn't do Jack a lot of good. He'd only been back at Canterbury five minutes when he was rushed to the hospital with his appendix, and after his recuperation he never went back. Mr K said he was to have private tutoring at home to make up what he'd missed and then go to Choate in September. He said Mrs K could choose whatever schools she liked for the girls but from now on his boys were going where he decided, to mix with the crème de la crème. That was how Lem Billings ended up part of the family.
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Laurie Graham
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: A brilliant new novel by Laurie Graham set in wartime London, which follows Kick Kennedy, sister of future US President JFK, as she takes London society by storm.Nora Brennan is a country girl from Westmeath. When she lands herself a position as nursery maid to a family in Brookline, Massachusetts, she little thinks it will place her at the heart of American history. But it′s the Kennedy family. In 1917 Joseph Kennedy is on his way to his first million and he has plans to found a dynasty and ensure that his baby son, Joe Junior, will be the first Catholic President of the United States.As nursemaid to all nine Kennedy children, Nora witnesses every moment, public and private. She sees the boys coached at their father′s knee to believe everything they′ll ever want in life can be bought. She sees the girls trained by their mother to be good Catholic wives. World War II changes everything.At the outbreak of war the Kennedys are living the high life in London, where Joseph Kennedy is the American ambassador. His reaction is to send the entire household back across the Atlantic to safety, but Nora, surprised by midlife love, chooses to stay in England and do her bit. Separated from her Kennedys by an ocean she nevertheless remains the warm, approachable sun around which the older children orbit: Joe, Jack, Rosemary, and in particular Kick, who throws the first spanner in the Kennedy works by marrying an English Protestant.Laurie Graham′s poignant new novel views the Kennedys from below stairs, with the humour and candour that only an ex-nursemaid dare employ.