by Kerri Maher
Kick opened her mouth to reply but couldn’t.
“If you love this man, and he returns your affections—and I hope he does, for I can see in your eyes how deeply you care for him,” Father O’Flaherty went on, making his tone as kind as she’d ever heard it, “you will be faced with a difficult choice, between your church and your heart. I don’t envy you that. But I also respect you too much not to tell you the truth.”
“Do you know of the marriage between Ann de Trafford and Derek Parker-Bowles?”
“I do.”
“They didn’t seem to have to choose. She is remaining Catholic, and he is remaining Protestant, and their children will be raised Catholic.”
“True.” Father O’Flaherty nodded. “And that sort of arrangement is a possibility for a couple in their position. However . . .”
“Yes?” she asked eagerly, not sure why his voice had trailed off.
“The de Traffords are an old English family, very established in society. They are recusant Catholics, part of a minority in the nobility who dissented from the Reformation. I have colleagues in the clergy from similar families, and I can tell you that they are treated very differently from Irish Catholics like me.”
“Or me,” Kick added, seeing with depressing clarity where he was heading with this little history lesson. “So you’re saying that Derek’s and Ann’s families were more likely to reach an agreement like that than, say, the son of an important English Protestant family and the daughter of an upstart Catholic American of Irish descent?”
“Very precisely put,” he said grimly.
Kick pursed her ragged lips. “It’s not fair,” she said, knowing she sounded like a petulant child, and not caring.
“It is not,” Father O’Flaherty agreed, and she nearly burst into tears, she was so grateful for his compassion. “Just remember, you have choices.”
“My heart or my church,” she repeated his words, her voice wet and embarrassing. She cleared her throat and went on, “But I should add ‘my heart or my family,’ because my mother is the strictest Catholic I know.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, and again she felt close to tears. At least Father O’Flaherty seemed to think that her choice was a worthy one, not to be dismissed as the fantasy of some deluded girl.
“Thank you,” she told him.
He rose from his chair, patted her hand, and said, “You can talk to me anytime.”
Then he left and the tears came.
* * *
If God was trying to remind her of the power of her own faith, he certainly sent her a strong message in March, when she traveled to Rome with her father and siblings for the coronation of the new pope, which she’d also be writing about for the League of Catholic Women Bulletin in Boston—her first byline! She wasn’t happy to leave Billy behind, but the promise of Italy’s beauty, her article, and the front-row seat she’d have at the coronation were more than adequate compensation.
As a bonus, Jack would be there, too. Just a few weeks before, he’d proposed to Frances Ann Cannon, a Protestant girl he’d been seeing, only to have her parents instruct her to turn him down. Then they sent her on a long cruise to get her as far away as possible from Joe Kennedy’s boy. Jack had been so heartbroken, he’d dropped out of Harvard for a semester and come to London to spend the spring working for their father. Kick kept trying to ask her brother for more details, but the only thing he’d say on the subject was, “Don’t make the same mistake.”
Kick wondered which mistake he meant—falling in love with a Protestant or trying to marry one. She’d already made the first, despite her best attempts not to. But she was determined to make sure that the second, if it came to that, would not be a mistake. Jack always rushed into things without thinking them through. She, at least, was taking plenty of time with Billy. And Father O’Flaherty had faith in her.
Rose, tan and rejuvenated from her travels in Greece, was waiting for her husband and children at their palatial hotel suite in Rome. Jean and Teddy threw themselves into her lap and talked over each other in their bids for her attention. She laughed happily, and hugged and tickled them. It was always the most intimate she ever was with her children—right after a long trip away. Then things would return to normal. The older siblings knew the pattern and, instead of soaking up the short-lived attention, went to the marble table where wrapped gifts were spread out, to try to guess what was inside.
Rose gave Kick an ancient vase. Small but heavy in her hands, it had a dark brown background and creamy maidens in long, rigid dresses with heads bent in reverence.
“Do you like it, Kathleen?” Rose asked Kick with a proud smile. “I went to some trouble with the dealer for it.”
“It’s very pretty, Mother, thank you,” she replied, though she felt no affection for the vase—it wasn’t especially beautiful, and she hadn’t gone on the trip with her mother to give it any meaning. She knew it was meant for her trousseau, to bespeak her worldliness. Someday, she was supposed to place it on a mantel and explain to admiring guests how her shrewd connoisseur of a mother had procured it for her. It was no Vol de Nuit, though its value on paper was much greater.
After gifts, the family descended to the hotel’s well-known restaurant for a seven-course Italian meal. Jack, who sat next to Kick, said to her after the fourth course, a divine pasta dish with mushrooms and cream, “Kill me now,” with a hand on his still-concave belly.
“I want to hear about all of you,” Rose said to her children after regaling them with stories of her travels. She pushed away a barely nibbled plate of tender lamb in glistening amber gravy. “Tell me, Kathleen, how is our next debutante coming along?”
Kick smiled at Eunice and replied, “She’s going to dazzle everyone. Her curtsy is flawless, and she passed the flash card test of Who’s Who in London.”
“Kick’s been a huge help,” gushed Eunice. “I don’t know what I would have done without her.”
“Kathleen was also quite the star at Foyles,” added their father. “I believe the Mail called her speech ‘charming and intelligent.’”
“I have no doubt that it was,” said Rose. “And you’ve kept your figure, too. My, my, but I might have some competition on my hands!” Her mother laughed, but Kick sensed a certain seriousness in her tone, confirmed by Jack’s brief eyebrow raise.
I’m not trying to compete with you, Mother. For heaven’s sake. Though I am the one who made the preparations to get the family to Italy, all while also helping Daddy host two dinners at the embassy. At least her father seemed to appreciate her.
At every site to which her parents herded the family on their tour of Rome, there was evidence of the strength of the Kennedys’ faith, almost as if Rose and Joe were trying to drive home to their errant children who’d lately entangled themselves with Protestants what it really meant to be Catholic. There was the vast stone Colosseum, where the early followers of Christ had succumbed to hungry lions; churches and basilicas dedicated to early martyrs and saints; and of course the sprawling, domed Vatican itself, where Pope Pius XII was crowned in a ceremony awash in so much scarlet, Kick couldn’t help but think of all those bloody beginnings for Catholicism in pagan Rome.
Writing about the coronation proved harder than anything she’d done in a long while. Everything she wrote felt trite and schoolgirlish, as if she were writing a report for the nuns—which she supposed she was, in a way. The Catholic matrons of Boston were devout and exacting, and they expected certain things of anyone with the Kennedy name. And because Kick was half-Kennedy and half-Fitzgerald, anything she wrote would be doubly scrutinized. She tried not to think about them as she wrote three drafts in longhand. By the fourth typed draft, she was feeling braver, finding something that sounded more like her voice. After a long description of the events and the sensation of peace and unity in Christianity that she’d shared with so many millions that day, she concluded
, “The enthusiasm for Christ’s Vicar was mightier, more spontaneous, than any number of ‘Heils’ from a drilled populace. Here there were no commands, issued by authority, for waving and cheering. Here it was only the command of the heart.”
The political message surprised even her as she reread it. But it felt right to position Christianity—not just Catholicism—against the Reich, to pit the command of those in power against the will of those commanded, the multitude who possessed voices of their own and wanted more than anything to use them.
Just a few years before, the man who was then Cardinal Pacelli and now Pope Pius XII had visited the Kennedys’ home in Bronxville. Rose had been so honored that she’d roped off the chair on which he’d rested his derriere, as if the seat belonged in a museum. Somehow she had known the man would become even more holy than he already was. Despite that, Kick’s mother decided to skip the family’s private audience with the new pope in order to keep her fitting with Molyneux in Paris. “I wish I could take you, Kathleen,” she’d said mournfully before kissing her daughter on the cheek the night before her train left for France.
“I’d rather stay,” Kick replied. The only place she’d rather have been was in Scotland, where her friends had gathered for a shooting holiday. But going with her mother on an errand for clothes, instead of meeting the the pope face-to-face? No. She marveled at how her father, who was so proud to be the United States’ representative at the coronation, who’d written so many letters to win this private audience, merely kissed his wife goodbye with a hug and a smile. Was unfettered independence part of the arrangement of their marriage? If it was, then she thought she’d be willing to trade some independence for more . . . passion, more tenderness and devotion.
When Pius laid his knotty, cool hands on her head as she knelt in a quiet tapestried chamber in the Vatican, Kick wanted to feel blessed, to feel the profundity of the moment in her heart. She closed her eyes and willed it to be so. But she couldn’t clear her mind, and found that her dearest wish wasn’t to feel God in her soul but to feel Billy’s arm once more on her shoulder.
* * *
Two days after her family’s meeting with the pope, Hitler moved his troops into the territories of Czechoslovakia that were supposed to be off-limits, effectively sending the Munich agreement up in flames. Joe was on the first train to Paris to meet with Bill Bullitt at the embassy there, have dinner with Rose, and then head back to London. Kick and the rest of the family went straight to England. On her journey, she read all the newspapers she could, even muddling through the French ones. The debate for and against war was more heated than ever. The only thing on which both sides agreed was that Hitler was not to be trusted.
Then, on April 1, Franco declared that the war in Spain was over. Everyone Kick knew other than Teddy, who simply hoped this supposed victory meant his oldest and favorite brother would soon be back in London, sensed that this was a serious blow to democracy in Europe.
Thus, the season of 1939 began under a dark, hazy cloud of uncertainty and mistrust. Her father still worked for peace, though despondently, as he was increasingly referred to as ineffectual and redundant. Roosevelt felt war was inevitable, and Joe suspected he was colluding with Winston Churchill behind his back. Surprisingly, though, despite the general feeling about Kick’s father’s policies, her family was invited to just as many parties and events as last season. When her friends used dirty words like isolationism and spinelessness, they were careful not to apply them to her father specifically but to American policies more generally, which she took to be a sign that they cared about her and her feelings, as much as they did about Debo’s, whom they’d known for years, when they tiptoed around the subject of English Fascism.
Until the worst happened, even because the worst might happen, Kick was determined to enjoy her second season in English society, for it felt in many ways like a stolen season. Races and dances, dinners and cocktails, charity and church work gave her a sense of purpose, an anchor, as the rest of the world spun wildly, veering ever more out of control. “Do you ever wonder,” Kick asked Debo as they leaned on each other, shoulder to bare shoulder, in a taxi at the end of another late night, “if we ought to be, I don’t know, taking things more seriously with all that’s going on?”
Languidly covering her yawning lips with the crook of her arm, Debo replied, “And how would that charm the Cavendish brothers?”
Kick laughed. “Good point,” she agreed, but inside, her stomach twisted. None of this would last long, but there was nothing she or any of them could do but talk and debate and wring their hands until a decision was made somewhere way above their heads.
In a few quiet moments, she let herself picture her life as Billy’s wife at Chatsworth: it would be much the same busy, full life it was now, though she’d be more of a leader, giving the parties and heading the charity work of her choosing, as she raised her own brood of happy . . . Catholic? Protestant? children. And there the fantasy would end, as she attempted to assemble a picture of her future family on the bright green lawn of the estate, their youngest child in a glowingly white christening gown.
But as spring gave way to summer, Kick began to wonder whether she and Billy would ever speak seriously about their relationship again, as they had last fall in Scotland. She’d felt some urgency to do so after Ann and Derek’s wedding, but then she’d gone to Rome and more time had passed. She hardly felt she could complain, after all—he sought her out, found reasons to kiss her every chance he could, and never took out other girls. But here they were again with war looming, and the very real possibility of having to go back to America before her. Billy and David and Andrew even registered with the army. When she let her mind drift in the wrong direction, it went to violent images, grotesque sounds, a frightening collage from war movies, books, paintings. Gunfire from the air, from the ground. Grenades. Gurgles, blood in the throat. It all seemed suddenly, horribly real. On her knees by her bed, even in the small hours of the morning when she returned after nights of dining and dancing, she prayed for something specific to happen with her and Billy, something to make things plain between them at last.
CHAPTER 14
The July weekend at Blenheim should have rolled out before Kick as a vast expanse of pleasure, all verdant lawn and croquet games, rooms bedecked with flowers and champagne fountains. Both Jack and Joe Jr. would be there, as they’d returned from the continent for the Fourth of July celebrations a few days before, and her parents were likely to be so engrossed in their own intrigues that they wouldn’t pay much attention to her comings and goings. But instead of looking forward to the festivities, Kick was dreading having to tell Billy that she could not attend his huge coming-of-age celebration at Chatsworth in August, since she was due to leave for France in fewer than three weeks.
Ever since her mother had dreamily announced the plan over breakfast the previous week, Kick had been alternately scheming, shouting, praying, and crying to herself. The best solution had come from Debo, who’d offered to let Kick stay with the Mitfords, but when she presented that idea to her father behind the safely closed door of his office, he’d laughed. Laughed! “Kick,” he’d said, “no young woman in her right mind would pass up an opportunity to swim, shop, and sun in unlimited quantities on the French Riviera.”
It was a delicate game she was playing—she didn’t want to give away how much Billy’s party meant to her. So she’d replied, as calmly as she could, “Daddy, I have important commitments here, with the league, and Father O’Flaherty, and I thought I would register to work with the Red Cross as well. I don’t want to let anyone down just to go shopping.”
“This wouldn’t have anything to do with Billy’s party, would it?” Her father leaned forward on his desk.
Kick set her jaw and swallowed. “I’d like to go to that, of course,” she conceded, as to deny it would give the lie to her plan. But she wanted to downplay it. “Everyone is going. It’s to be the culmina
tion of the entire season. Frankly,” she added, “I’m surprised you and Mother don’t want to go.”
“Going to that party would be tantamount to admitting you and Billy will become engaged,” he said.
This idea thrilled her in the deepest, most elemental way. But she laughed off his suggestion. “Hardly, Daddy,” she replied.
“You don’t seem aware enough of the consequences of your actions,” he said. “I’ve been asked on more than one occasion how I feel about my daughter marrying a Protestant.”
“You have?” Kick’s eyes widened. “But we’re not engaged! We haven’t even discussed it. Whoever asked you that couldn’t have known very much about me and Billy.”
“It’s no use pretending, Kick. I may be your father, but I know what love looks like. It’s time to cool things off. You will go to France.”
Kick bit down hard on the inside of her cheek, drawing blood, to squelch her immediate reply—Is that a dare? “If you think it’s best,” she just muttered.
At her next meeting with Father O’Flaherty, the priest listened patiently while she paced and pleaded for guidance in the little office where she usually worked in contented silence.
“The time might have arrived for you to ask Billy how he thinks you both should proceed. What compromises he is willing to make. What compromises you might be willing to make,” he replied.
Kick thought back to Father O’Flaherty’s anecdote about his boyhood friend. If she could strike a bargain with Billy that satisfied her, that felt true to her life and faith in God, she had a feeling this priest would support her when it came time to stand up to her family.
The question was what bargain. What compromises. What would Billy give? It was hard to know what she would give, could give, without knowing first if he returned her affections. Her love.