Laurie Graham - The Importance of Being Kennedy

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.’

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.