The Kennedy Debutante

by Kerri Maher

  Inside the house, Kick pulled Billy’s warm jacket tighter around her. The place had been shuttered for months and felt very drafty. Paintings of former dukes and duchesses by the likes of Van Dyck and Reynolds and Gainsborough loomed over her head, and large white tarps covered who knew what excellent specimens of Tudor or baroque or Georgian furniture and sculpture. Kick could see why reopening and decorating the estate was such a consuming project for Billy’s mother.

  Billy and Andrew struck up a game of tag in the main hall, as they must have done when they were small. As their shouts echoed through the dim halls, Kick and Debo found themselves standing beneath a portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, painted by Thomas Gainsborough.

  “She was married to a William Cavendish,” said Debo, scrutinizing the painting.

  “She was a great beauty, it would appear,” said Kick. “Though they always are in these portraits, aren’t they? Then you read in some history book that she was one of the least desired women of her age.”

  “Not Georgiana,” said Debo. “She was the real thing. But she had a terrible time of it. Her husband was a complete philanderer and hypocrite. He made her life miserable when she finally took a lover of her own, even after she’d done her duty and produced another William Cavendish.”

  “Typical man,” said Kick, knowing with a pang that even her father would be unforgiving if her mother were to stray. She was less sure about Jack. Joe Jr. would most certainly uphold the double standard. And she couldn’t help but wonder about Billy—this was his heritage, after all. It was well-known that his father had had the same mistress for years, and there wasn’t so much as a whisper that his mother might also have a lover.

  “I hope we’ve come further along since Georgiana,” said Debo.

  “You mean that in this advanced day and age, men don’t cheat, or that men who do cheat are more likely to allow their wives the same liberties?”

  Debo looked with surprise at Kick. “Both, I suppose. Though I prefer the former to the latter. Do you think I’m foolish?”

  Kick linked her arm through Debo’s, and they both looked back up at the duchess. “I wish I knew,” she said.

  The boys panted back over to them, and the tour continued. As she oohed and aahed over the enormous rooms and their partially covered elegance, Kick couldn’t shake the image of Georgiana staring down at her from her elevated position on the wall. What I wouldn’t give to know what you know, thought Kick.

  When the sun began to set, Billy took her hand and squeezed it. For the first time, she stood on her tiptoes and kissed him instead of waiting for him to lean in to her. “Thank you for showing me Chatsworth.”

  “Wait till you see it unveiled, with all the dustcovers gone,” he said.

  “I can’t wait,” she said, and she knew that despite all her questions and doubts, it was true.

  CHAPTER 11

  London glowed with fall beauty. Orange leaves fell from the trees and swirled around the sidewalks before diving into the Thames. Back were the hot water bottles toasting her sheets, the steaming cups of tea and crackling fires that welcomed her inside from a windy day. And since the sky darkened before five, falling like a sapphire curtain on the trenches and gas mask posters, it was easier to ignore the signs of war that spoiled the streets and parks as she went about her business with charity events and work at St. Mary’s, attempting to fill her time as productively as possible with Billy back at Cambridge.

  Her father had been in a sulky state ever since his unpopular speech on Trafalgar Day, about how the dictator countries and democratic countries ought to be able to coexist. Plus, Joe and Father O’Flaherty had petitioned Roosevelt and Chamberlain for higher caps on refugees without luck. Joe was uncharacteristically silent at breakfast and rarely present at their few family dinners. Kick didn’t dare ask him about his recent misfortunes and risk unleashing his wrath—not just as he was developing some respect for and renewing his interest in her without the boys around. Jack was back at Harvard and Joe Jr. was working with Ambassador Bill Bullitt in Paris.

  Her father’s mood proved to be a harbinger of more bad news.

  On November 10, when she read in the paper about the slaughter of the Jews in Germany and Austria, all that broken glass on the street, almost one hundred killed and thirty thousand forced out of their homes and sent God only knew where, with Hitler speaking ominously about the Jewish “problem,” Kick felt sick to her stomach. Kristallnacht, they called it. Forgoing her usual careful preparations for the day, she dressed quickly and headed outside, where workers were grimly stacking sandbags in front of whitewashed town houses and pasting fresh posters for air-raid shelters on lampposts. If St. Mary’s and the comfort of Father O’Flaherty had been closer, she would have gone there, but her need for immediate prayer steered her to nearby Brompton Oratory.

  The pews were full of people, mostly women with gray hair, bent over their clasped hands. Blessing herself with holy water, Kick surveyed the cavernous nave and tried to figure out where to slip in. Amid the scarves and felt cloches, she spotted a smart black hat with a peacock feather atop a very slim figure in a fine black coat. It was her mother, whose gloved fingers were interlaced with a pearl rosary.

  Part of Kick wanted to kneel down next to her mother and pray side by side, but another, stronger part of her wanted to be alone to pray for things her mother seemed to care nothing about—Rudi, Billy, her life here in England. She excused herself quietly to the strangers who occupied the last pew as she moved to a seat in a far corner. Kneeling, she took out her own onyx rosary, closed her eyes, and began to pray. She tried to focus on the meaning of every word and phrase, just as the nuns had taught her, to make sure her pleas were as pure and potent as possible. Behind the memorized words, her mind reeled the plea Show me my path over and over again.

  A few days later, Joe Jr. came home from Paris and the atmosphere at home lifted. Bobby and Teddy roughhoused with their older brother and took the football to Hyde Park every chance they got. Eunice and Pat and Jean were full of questions about French films and chocolates and romance in the street. Even Rosemary, who spent virtually all her time at the Montessori school these days, came home and smiled more with her oldest brother around.

  One family dinner to celebrate his return was especially boisterous, with the boys starting a game of throw-the-roll, in which even their father participated, barking tips like a coach from the sidelines—“Raise your elbow, Teddy, there you go!” and “You can throw harder than that, Bob. I’m not raising a sissy”—prompting their mother to shake her head and rub her temples and say, “The things people would think of us if they could see us now,” as crumbs showered down on the silver.

  As the discussion on the younger side of the table devolved into talk of “yucky” English foods like blood sausage, which none of them had actually tasted, Kick listened to the more adult conversation developing on her left.

  “Why don’t you tell the press how you feel?” Joe Jr. asked their father.

  “The damned Jews in the New York papers have already decided how they feel about me,” said their father. “The maliciousness is appalling. There’s no middle ground for them. Unless I side with them and send you and all your friends to a front line that doesn’t even exist yet, they are not going to take my side.”

  “Don’t you think Hitler needs to be stopped?” erupted Kick, letting her fork clatter to her plate. She’d held her tongue too long. And maybe she’d earned enough respect from her father to be able to participate in this conversation now.

  Her brother and father stopped and stared at her. Then her father narrowed his eyes and said, “You’ve been listening to those aristocratic friends of yours too closely.”

  “Isn’t that why you brought me here? To make friends with them?”

  “I brought you here, Kathleen, to help make the family look smart—in all senses of the word. And you’ve don
e a very fine job. But don’t confuse your loyalties.”

  Kick swallowed down the rage—You’re wrong! Stop treating me like I’m ten!—but shook her head in frustration and disbelief. She was still just a girl. Maybe a smart one, capable of helping her dad from time to time, but a girl just the same. If she had been a boy, her father would have asked her to elaborate.

  “If it’s your friend Rudi in Austria you’re worried about, Jack wrote me about him, and he’s on a list to get out,” said her father, his tone a bit softer.

  Kick was surprised to discover that while this news gave her some relief, she was still very angry—at her father, at the whole situation, even at Jack for thinking of this when she hadn’t. “Good,” she said.

  “Would you have me send your precious English friends to war?” her father asked. “Is that what you want, Kathleen? For them all to die in a ditch in Germany?”

  The whole table was quiet, listening for her reply.

  Her eyes felt hot with tears. She blinked them away and swallowed hard.

  “No,” she said firmly. “But letting Hitler just have Austria and Czechoslovakia doesn’t show him much backbone, does it?”

  Joe Jr. whistled, genuinely impressed. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said. “My sister’s turned into a regular firebrand.”

  “If you didn’t know already that Kathleen’s a fighter,” said Rose, her normally shrill voice unusually smooth and low, “then you haven’t been paying attention.”

  Did I hear that correctly? Did Mother just defend me? A fighter . . . she could have said “troublemaker,” but she didn’t. Kick smiled at her mother, who nodded slightly in reply. Eunice’s eyebrows were so high, they practically touched her hairline.

  “I raise all my children to be fighters,” her father said, looking at Kick in a way that said, But enough’s enough. Then, turning to his namesake, he said, “I want to hear more about what you learned in Paris. But later. This dinner table conversation needs brandy,” he said, a knock on Rose’s prohibition on alcohol at family dinners without guests.

  Kick raised her glass of water to salute herself, then drank it down.

  * * *

  “Hello, Kick,” chirped Page Huidekoper from behind her enormous and extremely tidy desk at the embassy. Her glasses had slipped down to the tip of her nose, and when she looked at Kick, she pushed them back up. Chicly dressed in a wide-legged brown pantsuit, Page glanced down at her diary and said, “I’m afraid I didn’t know you were coming in today. And your father is out.”

  “Oh, I know that,” said Kick. “I’m here to see you.”

  “Me?”

  “Do you have time for some lunch? Or even just a cup of tea?”

  Page looked at the diary again and then back up at Kick. “I’d need to be back in forty-five minutes.”

  “Perfect.”

  Page steered them to a nearby café and they ordered egg and cress sandwiches.

  “I need your advice,” said Kick. “You were so helpful the last time, and I’m getting . . . worried about the political situation, and concerned that we Kennedys are going to be shipped home if things get worse. Daddy was already threatening to send us all back to the States two months ago before Munich, and with this recent horror in Germany . . . well, I want to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  “I’m not sure how I can help with that,” said Page.

  “I need to become . . . more independent. And also, if at all possible, more important to my father. So that he won’t want me to leave, and—”

  “So that he’ll see you can take care of yourself,” Page said, completing Kick’s thought.

  “Yes,” Kick said, relieved she’d been fully understood.

  “This doesn’t have anything to do with the Marquess of Hartington, does it?”

  There wasn’t much point in lying to Page—not when she was so perceptive, and not when she needed all the facts in order to properly help Kick. “Billy’s part of it,” Kick admitted. “But of course Daddy can’t know that. The other part is how much I love it here. England, London.” She thought of Chatsworth and Blenheim, the races and the Underground, the whole way of life she loved here, and how protective she felt of it—not just for herself but also for her friends and the little island itself. If war did break out, she wanted to stand with her friends for England, and against tyranny. Even if that did mean being part of a war her father was trying to avoid at great personal cost. How ironic, she thought, that in order to stay and do what she wanted to do, she would have to make herself more indispensable to her father than ever.

  “I can understand that,” said Page. Kick could see from her increasingly daring fashion alone that Page had come into herself here just as much as Kick had. Page checked her slim gold watch, then went on: “I have one or two ideas. Since you’ll never be allowed to get a job like mine, you’ll need to find meaningful work in other ways. Work is the key to all this. If you do it well, you’ll prove yourself in many ways.”

  “Like the work at St. Mary’s?”

  “Writing for St. Mary’s is fine, but for your plan to succeed, you need to write something with a byline. Something that makes your father look good and spreads goodwill about the Kennedys.”

  Kick frowned, remembering the impression her honest opinion had made on her father. She told Page, “Do you think that’s wise? I’m not willing to say something in print that I don’t really think just because it flatters Daddy.”

  “Ah yes,” Page said, “I heard something about a disagreement with your father. You thought he wasn’t showing enough backbone?”

  “He told you about that?”

  “No, I heard him tell Mr. Roosevelt on the phone that even his eighteen-year-old daughter and her friends didn’t think America was showing Hitler enough backbone, and that he ought to be more honest with Joe in the future if he wanted America to look more authoritative on this side of the ocean.”

  “He did?” Kick was bewildered. Her father had used something she had said to make a point to the president.

  “Don’t let it go to your head,” said Page, amused. “Let me look into a few possibilities and make a few phone calls. Can you come back on Friday? Your father will be out again that day.”

  “Yes,” said Kick. “And thank you.”

  “In the meantime, start helping out Eunice with her coming-out next year. I know your father likes to see you children be helpful to each other.”

  Kick nodded. Then, emboldened by their little chat, she asked, “What about you? Have you met anyone special here?”

  Page looked down at that gold watch, which she twisted around her left wrist with her right hand. “No,” she said, “no one new.”

  Kick thought she knew what that meant, and though it made her feel squirmy, she appreciated Page’s discretion. Also, it wasn’t like the watch was proof of anything. The Huidekopers had money of their own, after all; it might have been a gift from her parents, like Kick’s own Cartier watch.

  In the following weeks, Kick sent off three letters, and even though each of the jobs was very like the luncheon for the cardinal that her mother had been so eager for Kick to organize months before, the fact that Kick was choosing these herself made them feel different to her. She was especially excited about the one to the League of Catholic Women Bulletin in Boston, asking if they needed a European correspondent—a genius idea, Kick thought, since it would soothe her mother to know Kick was prominently displaying her Catholic identity, and her father would appreciate having the Kennedy name printed sympathetically for once. She sent another to the American Women’s Club in London, asking if they needed assistance with future events; and another to the British Museum, asking if she might help raise funds for any new acquisitions. If Jane Kenyon-Slaney could do it, so could she. Yes, Kick told herself, she’d do well to emulate a girl who’d been raised since birth to be an indispensable woman
in English society, very likely the wife of an important viscount or—dare she think it?—duke.

  CHAPTER 12

  Christmastime, with its twinkling strings of white lights and lush red and green decorations, just barely managed to distract Kick from the halted but still haunting war preparations marring the streets. Billy wore the amethyst cufflinks she’d given him for his twenty-first birthday to every soiree of the holidays. The two of them were becoming expert at stealing kisses all over the city—the dark corner beside the stage entrance at the Café de Paris, in the powder rooms of the finest town houses in London, and behind enormous holiday displays of toys and clothes at Harrods, where she’d also glimpsed a stack of satin sheets, and the memory of Maria Sieber’s bed sent an extra volt of electricity through their embrace.

  She wished all the kissing didn’t weigh so heavily on her conscience, however. There was no way she could lighten the burden by confessing to Father O’Flaherty or any other priest! She couldn’t even admit to herself what was happening between her and Billy, except in French: baisers amoureux was the perfect obfuscating description.

  In the ladies’ lounge at the 400, Sissy observed, “You and Billy certainly seem to be more serious. He hasn’t taken his eyes or hands off you.”

  “Goodness! Can’t keep his hands off me? That sounds so sordid,” Kick laughed.

  “Hardly. Billy is the perfect gentleman. And notoriously shy. He stepped out with a French girl a while back, and she lost patience with him! I wouldn’t be surprised if he hadn’t even kissed you yet.”

  “Well . . .” Kick began, using a coy tone.

  “Oh! Do tell!”

  “I actually have a question about . . . kissing,” said Kick in a hushed voice, seeing an opportunity to at last confess her sins to a Catholic friend, at least.