The Kennedy Debutante

by Kerri Maher

  She looked over at her father as the priest read jubilantly from Luke, “And the angel said to them, ‘Do not be afraid; for behold, I bring you good news of great joy which will be for all people; for today in the city of David there has been born a savior,’” and saw Joe Sr. brush something off his cheek, just under his glasses. A tear, Kick had to assume. Then he rubbed his lips together, and Kick thought for sure her father was trying to keep from breaking down in front of the congregation.

  This must be his penance. Every time he was reminded of the happiness a child could bring, he would remember his first daughter and the happiness he must have felt when she’d arrived. Her father had lost so much. True, much of it had been his own pigheaded fault. But Kick knew in her heart that her father always did what he thought was right. He’d believed Dr. Freeman could fix Rosemary, just as he’d believed peace was right for England.

  For the first time in weeks, Kick felt the knot in her chest loosen. She took a breath and it filled her lungs fully. Glory to God in the highest. And peace to his people on earth.

  When the whole family had dragged themselves up to their rooms to sleep, Rose knocked quietly on Kick’s door. She’d just put on her nightgown and gotten into bed with a book. A few dry, dull biographies had been her replacement for John’s back rubs since arriving in Florida. Usually, she succeeded in boring herself to sleep, but twice she’d been awake when the sun rose, then nodded off by the pool in the afternoon.

  Still dressed in the red felt suit she’d worn to church, Rose sat on Kick’s bed and said, “Thank you for helping Eunice. It’s the best Christmas present you could have given the family.”

  Kick shrugged, embarrassed. “She’s my sister,” she said. “Of course I want to help.”

  Rose looked away and pressed a hand to her chest, and Kick could tell that her mother was struggling to contain her emotions just as her father had in church. They can’t comfort each other, she thought. How awful.

  Kick listened as the clock in her room ticked, waiting for her mother to respond. At last she stood and looked down at Kick with a sad smile. “I’ll miss you when you’re gone.”

  “I’ll only be in DC,” Kick said, trying to lighten the mood.

  “For now,” Rose said. “Only for now. Someday you’ll be gone, too. I just hope you’ll be as happy as you deserve to be.”

  “Merry Christmas, Mother.”

  “Merry Christmas, Kathleen, and God bless you.”

  CHAPTER 24

  No sooner had 1942 begun than Kick received a cable from Nancy Astor saying,

  THE ENGAGEMENT IS OFF LETTER TO FOLLOW WITH DETAILS PACK YOUR BAGS

  Kick could scarcely stop herself from picking up the phone and calling Debo for insider family intelligence, but the cost would be prohibitive, and she knew her friend was still grieving the loss of her first baby—a boy she and Andrew had named Mark, who’d arrived prematurely in November when she was sick with E. coli. “There’s no joy for me this holiday season. I mope about like a ghost,” Debo had written Kick at the end of the year. Calling her friend to gossip seemed in bad taste, even if she would be asking for vital information pertaining to an outcome both girls wanted.

  Instead she called Carmel Offie and asked if there was any way to pick up their stalled plans for the press visa to London. Her chances now were surely improved, since she was an honest-to-goodness reporter with regular bylines at the Times-Herald, and Frank was about to promote her to arts columnist. Then, toward the end of January, she got to move into Jack’s large apartment at the Dorchester, because he’d been transferred to a desk job in Charleston, South Carolina. The official reason for the move was that the position would be better for his ailing back, but Jack suspected the hand of their father in the sudden move, since the rumors about Inga and Hitler refused to die. “Can’t have his younger son involved with a Fascist if his oldest son’s gonna be president someday,” Jack had remarked wryly over whiskey, cardboard boxes, and suitcases the night before he left.

  “I remember when the plan was for Daddy to be president someday,” Kick replied.

  “Some dreams are like those Fabergé eggs,” he said. “Gorgeous, but just begging to be shattered.”

  If his affair with Inga was that kind of dream, Jack certainly didn’t treat it that way. Once he left, she was always slipping down to Charleston, though no one was aware of it except Kick and John, who observed, “You Kennedys are just gluttons for punishment.”

  Meanwhile, Kick settled into her new digs with Betty Coxe, the girlfriend of Jack’s friend Chuck Spalding. Betty was a nice girl if a bit aimless—more so than Kick herself, and even Kick had to admit that was something. She was doing a course in the foreign service, but her heart wasn’t in it. Kick was relieved that the other girl’s presence put a damper on what she’d begun to think of as John’s sleep therapy. When Betty was in the apartment, sometimes both girls would get into their nightgowns while John had a nightcap, but the back rub days were over. Until one unusually warm night in late winter, when he up and kissed her on the lips, hard, right at the door to the building.

  Wrenching herself away, she looked at him in disbelief. “John!”

  “I’m sick of this, Kick. We’ve been seeing each other for how long now? Six months? More? A man needs a little encouragement if he’s going to stick around.”

  Panic filled her. She longed to say, Then don’t stick around. But she found she couldn’t. Billy hadn’t yet written to her himself about the end of his engagement. What if it never worked out? She still needed John and the Spaghetti Salons and all the established rhythms of her life in Washington to keep her steady and sane. He’s still seeing other girls, she told herself.

  “All right, John, I’ll try,” she said, and her stomach churned. Leaning up on her tiptoes, she kissed him tenderly on the cheek.

  “Was that so hard?” he asked.

  She did it again just to avoid answering the question out loud.

  At last, a letter from Billy arrived, and she savored every word.

  Dearest Kick,

  I hope it isn’t presumptuous of me to use “dearest,” for I fear I have brutally abused my own affection for you, and yours for me. I cling to the hope that you care for me even a tiny fraction of the amount I still care for you. The engagement to Sally was a terrible mistake. I won’t trouble you with my more morose thoughts on life and death and war and marriage and children, but suffice it to say that the tragedies of Pearl Harbor and my nephew’s premature death wrenched me out of a fog. It wasn’t fair to Sally to embark on a life with her when those days at the end of 1941 made me want to hold you and not her. Even if you and I cannot find a way to be together, perhaps someday I will find someone else who brings me as much pleasure as you once did. If I’m lucky.

  And if I’m lucky, I’ll soon have a chance to stand with my countrymen and punish the Huns for what they have done to us and their own people. Surely the fact that England remains strong in the face of the Blitz and countless other onslaughts proves we are not the decadent people your brother Jack once derided us as. I am glad America will have a chance to prove itself soon as well. It brings me joy that our two countries now stand together in this war, even if you and I cannot.

  With love,

  Billy

  After a few drafts, this time she came up with a reply that felt just honest and brave enough, though she was not at all ready to use the word love yet, not on paper.

  Dearest Billy,

  You are not presumptuous in the slightest. I’ll admit to being disappointed by your engagement to Sally, particularly since I have been putting off my own suitors because the memory of you makes them pale in comparison. There, I’ve said it. I am glad, very glad, of your renewed bachelorhood. I suppose it’s no use our talking about the religion question unless we can first figure out the problem of my being an ocean away.

  But I have news alon
g those lines as well. Kathleen Kennedy is now the byline for the Times-Herald’s arts column! I see all the movies and plays that come out, and since my boss doesn’t want to demote me back to secretary (he has a blonder model now), he doesn’t mind if I sleep in and type my stories at home after I’ve been out late reviewing something for the paper. There’ve been some real humdingers. Wait till you see Carole Lombard and Jack Benny in To Be or Not to Be.

  I have put in motion plans to use my skills on your fair island. I’ve been asking around, and things are looking promising for me to lay my hands on a press visa. What would you say to that? I’d love to see you and Andy, and Debo and Sissy and David and Bertrand and everyone again. I miss everyone every day. A piece of my heart got left behind in 1939, and I fear I shall never be fully happy till I am reunited with it.

  With greatest affection,

  Kick

  A week later, she received a telegram:

  WHAT WOULD I SAY SOUNDS GRAND JUST SAY WHEN LOVE BILLY

  Instead of putting it into her scrapbook, Kick set the telegram in the drawer of the bedside table, so she could read it every night before bed. Then, she did what she was least skilled at in all the world: wait. She waited for answers, and she wrote and wrote and wrote for the paper, hoping that something she’d written might get noticed by the right person. She developed a favorite fantasy, in which she was sitting at her desk at the Times-Herald completing another review when the phone rang.

  “Kathleen Kennedy?” an unfamiliar Etonian voice would say.

  “Speaking,” she’d say, palms beginning to sweat in anticipation.

  “This is Tony Wilson of the London Observer, and I just spoke with my old chum Arthur Krock. Seems you’re brave enough to offer your skills in the service of West End theater?”

  “Indeed I am!”

  “Excellent, excellent. Then let’s work out some details . . .”

  Of course, she knew the call wouldn’t go exactly like that, but surely it was close enough. The point was, all her work would finally be getting her somewhere in life. And not just somewhere, but exactly where she wanted to be.

  Her fights with John ratcheted up during those weeks, which she found she relished.

  “Why would you want to go there?” he demanded irritably. She’d just revealed her plan to live and write in England over lunch at Hot Shoppes.

  “Because it’s the only place on earth I’ve ever truly loved.”

  “I thought you weren’t capable of love.”

  “Shows how much you know.”

  “Why would someone like you, made and minted in America, want to go to some sinking island and drink tea?”

  “It’s excellent tea,” she joked. She was determined not to let him get to her.

  “This is just like your religion,” he said. “It’s all nostalgia for some bygone age.”

  “What’s wrong with nostalgia? If that is what it is, and I’m not conceding it is.”

  “If artists were content with nostalgia, we wouldn’t have Picasso. Or Matisse. Or that guy Mondrian I saw on exhibit in New York.”

  “Mondrian?” Kick laughed. She’d seen that exhibit, too, on her last trip to Manhattan. You couldn’t not see it, since everyone was talking about it. “I suppose he’s very forward thinking,” she said, “but I’d rather have a Turner hanging in my home. Or a Van Dyck or a Gainsborough. And anyway, respecting and appreciating the past doesn’t have to keep you from moving into the future, you know.”

  “That could be true, but for many people—you included, I’d argue—nostalgia is much more than a respect for the past. It’s a yearning for things to be the way they were. Like Gone with the Wind.”

  “Oh goodness, not this again.”

  “It was rot, and you know it. All that glorification of slavery. Yessum this and yessum that. Like the negroes weren’t risking their lives to escape Tara. In real life, that is.”

  “I never disputed that,” Kick replied, feeling prickly and thrilled like she often did in debate with John. “I only defended the movie for artistic reasons.”

  “And you are the film critic,” he said sarcastically. “I’m just glad it came out in thirty-nine, before you had a chance to review it in print.”

  “Now, now, no reason to get personal.”

  “But it’s always personal with us, isn’t it?” His face went soft with this question.

  “Partly,” she admitted.

  “Don’t go,” he said, his voice low and hoarse.

  “I’m not gone yet.”

  “I’ll have to find a way to convince you, then.”

  Was it so wrong that she enjoyed his attempts? What if Billy wasn’t waiting for her, pining? Debo’s last letter mentioned Sally still hanging around. At least Kick now had a job on par with Sally’s, so that nagging feeling of being inadequate was less than it had been before; she might not have been breaking codes in some top-secret bunker, but she was helping to shape public opinion about movies and plays. And everyone—private citizens and soldiers alike—were going in droves to those distractions like never before.

  * * *

  Then everything began to turn sour. First, Jack broke it off with Inga: finally and really and officially. The Monday morning after one of her weekend jaunts down to South Carolina, Inga met Kick at the front entry of the Dorchester so they could walk to work; she looked puffy in the face, especially around the eyes.

  “Allergic to all these lovely blooming trees?” Kick had chirped at her friend, not realizing anything was wrong. After all, the cherry and apple blossoms had burst into pink and white life, hovering over multicolored tulips and sunny daffodils all around the city. A number of Patsy’s guests had been complaining of itchy eyes because of the springtime pollens.

  “Jack and I are . . . no longer,” Inga replied, her voice hoarse and damp.

  “Oh, Inga,” Kick sighed, taking a step forward to wrap her arms around her friend.

  But Inga backed up and said, “No, no, not before work. Or I’ll cry again. Let’s talk about the Nazis instead.”

  Kick nodded and obliged. Later that week, Inga had wept and ranted at Kick’s kitchen table close to midnight, after hours of champagne and dancing. “This is where it all began, you know,” Inga said, her eyes pooling as she spoke the words and pointed to the couch. “Though when we met, your brother was too timid to seduce me.”

  Kick considered the implications of this statement. A score of other nights rushed up from her memory to the front of her mind—nights on which she was sure Jack himself had been the seducer. But then, things with Inga had always been different. Perhaps he had been unsure enough of his advantage with this older, glamorous beauty not to make the first move. Maybe he’d been besotted from the beginning. Which made it all the more stunning that he’d broken up with her.

  Unsure how to respond, Kick sat down at the table with Inga and said, “I’m sorry it had to end.”

  “The Kennedy men,” Inga seethed. “I should have known that I would be a passing fancy to your brother.”

  “To be honest,” Kick ventured, “I always figured it was the other way around. I’ve never seen Jack so smitten, and you’ve been married twice, after all. Also, he kept seeing you even after he got transferred.”

  “Your father hadn’t made his point clear enough with the transfer.”

  “His point?”

  “That some women are for fun, and others for marriage.”

  And I know which kind I am, Kick immediately thought with both relief and pride, but also the familiar envy. The freedom Inga enjoyed, to be with whomever she chose, was too often the right of men. Part of Kick wondered what it would be like to be as independent as Inga, and felt indignant that women in general were not allowed to do what they wanted, but most of her was happier being a precious, wrapped little box, waiting to be given to the right man. It would save he
r the kind of acute heartache her friend was suffering right now.

  Not long after that, Kick received a letter from Jack that opened, “After reading the papers, I would advise strongly against any voyages to England to marry any Englishman. For I have come to the reluctant conclusion that it has come time to write the obituary of the British Empire.”

  Oh for crying out loud, Kick thought angrily at the letter. Don’t take your heartache out on me. But a moment later, she swallowed a rising lump in her throat. Jack’s letter droned on about the end of England as she loved it, sounding more and more like their father, who’d been spewing similar nonsense about the end of democracy and greatness in England ever since being forced off the island. With her father, she’d put it down to understandable sour grapes, and blamed Roosevelt and Churchill, who’d gone around him one too many times. How was it possible for Jack to side with their father so soon after that same father had destroyed his happiness with Inga?

  Being a Kennedy always meant keeping your own heart private, revealed to only a few. The rest was a performance. But why should Jack pretend with her, his favorite sister?

  Unless he wasn’t performing anymore.

  CHAPTER 25

  For five glorious days, Kick thought she might be in London by mid-June. She even wrote Billy to tell him. Frank had gotten wind of a research position at the London Times for someone to gather facts and information for the new gossip columnist on staff. But then the position was filled by some other girl, one of the many young society women who’d been cheated out of a debutante ball by the war. Arthur Krock told her father that his contacts said there were too many foreign correspondents in London already, and reporters were being shipped out; no one new was being brought in. While her letter to Billy relaying this terrible news was en route across the ocean, she received a telegram from him: