The Importance of Being Kennedy (7 page)

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 roughhousing, 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 honor 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.”

Butter wouldn’t melt.

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 anymore. 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 Rudolf Valentino, who we all called Val. 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 new toy. He’d bought himself an airplane that could land on water, so 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, thought 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 theater 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 watch, 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.

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 asked for a raise only 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 season. No Kennedys, no money.

Crownlands was our grandest house yet. We had beautiful grounds and every convenience, and yet Mrs. K didn’t seem happy. Thwarted, I always thought. She’d had her education and been the toast of Boston, riding on His Honor’s coattails. 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 a friend in the world, nor 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 traveling, 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 traveling?”

“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
started representing 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 Jew boys 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 sailing off 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 piggybank, 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, Joseph Patrick 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 Jew boys. 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.

He 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 neighborhood, 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 anymore. Children were taken out of school, just disappeared without any good-byes. 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 nursery maids 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 mothballs 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.”