The Importance of Being Kennedy

by Laurie Graham

  A cablegram arrived just as they were cutting Hope’s austerity wedding cake. It was from Mr. K. It said,

  My Darling Kick, Remember you are still and always will be tops with me. Love, Dad.

  There was a separate one arrived from Herself, but Joe tucked it in his pocket and let it slip his mind until after they’d left for the honeymoon. Then he showed it to me.

  Heartbroken, it said.

  You have been wrongly influenced. Mother.

  Seven little words that took all the joy out of the day. Oh I wished Rose Kennedy ill when I read that wire, though I’d never have said so to Joseph Patrick. He’d really done his level best, for Kick and for his Mammy and Daddy.

  I said, “It’s early days. Maybe she’ll come round.”

  Joe said, “Yeah. Maybe. And at least she didn’t manage to get the Town Hall struck by lightning.”

  Lord Billy had ten days’ compassionate leave, so they went down to Compton Place, to where it all started that weekend back in ’38. And not only for Kick and her Lord Billy. That was the first time I met Walter too, studying me in his rear mirror as he drove us from Eastbourne station.

  I said, “Remember when we came down for the horse racing? She was worried about how to carry on if she met Their Graces, when to curtsey and all that, and now she’s on the way to being a Grace herself.”

  He said, “I do remember. Not as much as I remember her lady’s maid, mind. She was a cracker. I wonder what ever became of her.”

  Walter had grown fond of Kick, never mind what he thought of the rest of her family. He called her “my lady” when it was time for us to wave them off to catch their train. Oh and how she covered me with kisses.

  She said, “I’m so happy I could burst. And you know, after Billy’s gone back to camp, I’m going to write to Mother again. I think she just needs time to get used to the idea. I think she’ll rather like having a trainee Duchess in the family, don’t you? It’ll be a kind of talking point. And once she realizes nothing else has changed, that I still say my prayers and everything, I think she’ll come round. God is good, Nora. He won’t punish me for marrying Billy, and I’m sure Mother will dote on our babies, as long as they’re baptized Christians.”

  Mrs. Kennedy dote on Protestant grandbabies! Well, God may be good but still, no sense in dancing in a small boat.

  27

  The Beginning of the End

  We knew something was up. The last week of May the military were all on the move, heading out of London. Rainbow Corner was nearly deserted. There was so little for me to do there, I took in a pile of Walter’s socks to mend. Everything was quiet but not a nice kind of quiet. They’d warned us we might have to clear the lounges and the canteen ready to set up hospital cots, to be prepared for a flood of casualties, though it never came to that. I walked home down the Haymarket and Pall Mall one evening and it was like being in a ghost town. I didn’t see a single uniform. It was the night before D-day, except we didn’t know it at the time.

  Kick was down in Hampshire, billeted at an inn so as to be near where Lord Billy was stationed. She’d heard from all her pals when they read about the wedding, and Nancy Tenney even asked her if she’d turned Episcopalian enough to be godmother to her baby girl, but from Mrs. K and the rest of the family she heard not a thing. I knew Euny and Pat wouldn’t dare write, not as long as Herself held out, but Jack was down at Palm Beach recuperating from the operation on his back, and Lem Billings was there to keep him company, invalided out with shrapnel in his legs. It wouldn’t have hurt the pair of them to drop her a line and wish her well. Young Joe was the only one to really stand by her.

  I said, “You did the right thing.”

  “You reckon?” he said. “Well, I hope so. Mother’s still steaming and I’m not exactly in Dad’s best books. First I drop Law School, then I connive with the Devonshire Prods. So there goes the first Catholic presidency. I’ll be lucky to get elected borough councilor now. Maybe I’ll go into the movies instead.”

  He could have done. He was the handsomest of my Kennedys by far. Jack and Bobby were too scraggy and Teddy was like a suet dumpling.

  Joe’s tour of duty was nearly over, but he was very smitten with a girl he’d met, so he wanted to stay on. Patricia. He showed me her picture. She was older than him, married, with children. There was a lot of that went on in the war. Lonely women.

  He said, “Don’t look at me that way, Nora. Her marriage wasn’t happy even before she met me.”

  I said, “And where’s the husband?”

  North Africa, he thought.

  I said, “And what do the children call you? Daddy the Second?”

  He said, “They call me Joe. It’s no problem. They don’t all have the same father anyway. The girl’s from her first marriage.”

  She was nice-looking, but I’m sure he could have done better than steal a fighting man’s wife, and a secondhand one at that.

  I said, “So what’s to be done? Your Mammy’ll be back in the convalescent home if she hears about this.”

  “I’m working on it,” he said. “Main thing is, I want to stay here. I’ve volunteered for another tour of duty.”

  They said we’d made great gains on D-day, that the tide had turned and Jerry was on the run. Well, he might have been on the run, but that didn’t stop him pausing to send those doodlebug rockets to torment us.

  It was a Sunday morning when the first one came to London. I’d just got back from early Mass at Farm Street and Hope had set me scraping carrots for a pie. We didn’t hear a plane because there was no plane, just a big vibration that made the milk pitchers dance on the dresser. Then the two Joans, ATS girls who had a room on the top floor, came thundering down the stairs. They said there was black smoke rising from over by Buckingham Palace. That got Stallybrass out from behind his newspaper.

  He grabbed his helmet and his bike and he was off down the Mall, didn’t even wait for orders. The Joans gave us a running report. Sirens, more smoke, then Lord Melhuish in his shirtsleeves and three more of his ARP men setting off on their bicycles. It was the barracks chapel that had been hit, in Birdcage Walk, packed to the doors with guardsmen and their loved ones, singing the first hymn.

  We didn’t see Walter again till nearly midnight. He came home covered in brick dust and soot, fit to drop, but he couldn’t sleep.

  “The roof fell on them, Nora,” he kept saying over and over. “It’s a bomb with an engine and when it runs out of juice it just glides down and explodes. It brought the roof in on them. What kind of folk bomb churches?”

  I don’t know that they had picked out a church, though. I’m not making excuses for Jerry, but bombs fall where they fall, especially the doodlebugs. But Walter had it in his head that it had been done out of spite.

  “Nay,” he kept saying. “Bombing on a Sunday morning. That’s not decent. That never should be.”

  He cracked me up. He never sets foot in a church.

  The guards’ chapel was the start, pretty much, of the rocket bombs. It didn’t flatten the altar, nor the bishop. He lived to tell the tale. But there were plenty of others not so lucky. One hundred and fifty dead, they reckoned, people at prayer, just minding their business on a beautiful summer morning. They said the rockets flew on their own all the way from France though how they did that nobody could ever explain to me.

  Everybody seemed to know what should be done except Mr. Churchill. Walter said they should send ack-ack units down to Kent and Sussex, to catch the rockets before they crossed the coast and bring them down into the sea, and eventually they did just that, but we took a beating in London first. Five years of war and I’d never had hysterics, but I came close to it the night a doodlebug hit Victoria railway station.

  There were a lot of GIs expected by train and they were shorthanded at the Donut Dugout so I was asked to work a late turn, serving them coffee and smokes. I’d just turned on to Wilton Road when I heard it pop-pop-popping, like a motorbike in the sky. I couldn’t see it. Then the
noise stopped dead, as if a plug had been pulled out, so I guessed what it was.

  Walter had been telling me all week what I had to do if I heard the noise stop.

  “You must take cover, Nora,” he kept saying, “because if the blast doesn’t get you the flying glass will.”

  But my legs wouldn’t carry me. I was frozen to the spot and God knows what would have happened to me, but a big Polish soldier boy pushed me inside the doorway of the Grosvenor Hotel, and then the blast came and blew in all the lobby windows. We stayed crouched down together for a long time. I could smell his breath, like sausage meat. Then we heard people starting to move about in the street again and when I stood up I realized I’d wet my drawers. I thought, well, I can’t work in these all night, so I wriggled them down and kicked them into the doorway of the movie theater. I suppose whoever found them must have thought they were all that was left of somebody. Tragic, mystery drawers.

  There was glass underfoot, like gravel, and a bit of dust, but it was business as usual at the canteen. And all through the night, as well as the smell of java, there was a wonderful fragrance in the air, like new-mown hay. It was leaves, an ARP warden told us. The smell of thousands of leaves that had been stripped off the plane trees by the blast.

  I worked my turn, did whatever I was asked, though I don’t think I was much use to anyone that night. I even smoked a cigarette, my first and my last, nasty, choking thing. I’d seen things in the Blitz, and been out in the middle of raids and firestorms, but nothing had frightened me like the doodlebugs. And that one down at Victoria was only the start of it.

  All that summer they tormented us and the casualties were terrible. Lady Melhuish was one of them, who lived just along the street in Carlton Gardens. She was an American lady, but very highly connected. She had an office job in the Wrens and she was just taking a walk along the Aldwych, out on her lunch break, when a rocket hit the Air Ministry. A body fell on her, sucked out of the building by the blast. Walter came home from his rounds with the story.

  “See, Nora,” he said. “You think I make a fuss, but the point is she didn’t take cover. If people had seen what I’ve seen, bits pulled out of the rubble down at Birdcage walk, they’d be more cautious. I had to take charge of rounds tonight. His Lordship came down for the roll call, but he was in no state to do anything else. He held up very well when they lost their boy, but I reckon this has rightly finished him.”

  Young Joe came and paid us a call the first weekend of August and brought Kick with him, Lady Kathleen as everybody was calling her now. Lord Billy’s regiment had been posted overseas, to France she thought, so she’d decided to come back to town and see if the Red Cross could find anything to keep her occupied. She was staying at Cynthia Brough’s in Cheyne Walk. Lady Cynthia was in the Air Transport Auxiliary, gone for days on end flying new Spitfires from the factory line out to the air bases, then having to wait for a ride back. She’d adopted a little terrier dog, but she didn’t like to take him up with her, in case something went wrong and she had to bail out and leave him to perish, so she was glad to have Kick stay at her flat to look after him.

  I quite thought Joe had come to say good-bye. He’d served his turn and he could have gone home.

  But he said, “I’m not going, Nora. I’ve volunteered for a new assignment, so I’ll be staying on.”

  As Kick said, staying on meant he could carry on with his married lady friend too, but it wasn’t only love that was driving him. I knew it still niggled him that he hadn’t sunk any U-boats while wee Jack had got a medal and a hero’s welcome. Kick kept trying to get out of him what his new assignment was, but of course he couldn’t tell us. All he’d say was that it was something big, something that could be the big turning point in the war.

  “It could mean the beginning of the end,” he said. “You’ll hear all about it soon enough.”

  And so we did.

  It was a Sunday afternoon, gray and muggy. Hope was putting up a few jars of carrot jam and Walter was resting his eyes. I was pressing my skirt, ready to work an early-evening turn at Rainbow Corner, when there was a rapping at the front door. We hardly used that entrance anymore. We spent near enough all our time down in the scullery and used the tradesman’s door.

  It was Lady Cynthia, very smart in her dark blue serge and her aviator wings, though I didn’t know her for a minute, she’d had her curls cropped so short.

  “You won’t remember me,” she said. “Cynthia Brough. Is Kick here by any chance?”

  But I hadn’t seen Kick in nearly two weeks.

  She said, “I’ve had U.S. Navy brass on the blower, trying to track her down. Any idea where I’d find her?”

  All I could think was she might have gone down to Compton Place. She liked to spend time with Their Graces when she could, learning all about the family and the estates and everything she’d need to know for when she was Duchess of Devonshire. “Studying graceship,” as she called it.

  Cynthia said, “I’m afraid it must be about her brother. He must be missing or wounded.”

  I don’t imagine they even knew yet up at Hyannis. It was morning there. Herself would have been on her way back from Mass. Jean and Teddy might be out to Osterville for a regatta. Pat and Euny would likely be on the tennis court and Mr. K would be up on his veranda reading the Sundays. I could just picture them. And then any minute that telephone would start ringing.

  I went to St. Patrick’s on Soho Square and lit a candle, but I didn’t learn any more till Tuesday night, when a note was delivered by hand.

  Joe killed, she wrote.

  Going home. Darlingest Nora, pray for the soul of the best brother in the world.

  I had a photograph of him, I know I did. It was taken on the strand the first summer we went to Cohasset, Mr. K with Joseph Patrick in one arm and Jack in the other, both in their wee sailor suits. Well, I searched everywhere for that picture the night I heard Joe was dead, but I couldn’t find it. As the family grew, he wasn’t my favorite, but those first few months he was my only Kennedy and such a handsome child. Those were happy days. And when Jack was born Joe didn’t like sharing me. “Mine,” he’d say, and he’d try to push Jack off my lap.

  When a serviceman was killed you got no details. We didn’t hear until after V-day exactly what had happened, but I knew Joseph Patrick well enough to guess. He was the kind of lad who was never satisfied till he was doing the daringest stunt, till he’d given Jack and Bobby and Teddy something crazy to beat. And that was the sum of it. There’d been just a few of them, a select band who’d volunteered for something that hadn’t been tried before, to try and knock out the doodlebug launchers over in France. Flying a bomb was what it amounted to, a Liberator airplane packed with dynamite. They had to fly it so far, to set it on the right track, and then parachute out before it blew up. Except that the first few they tried blew up while the aviators were still inside so there was talk of calling the whole business off. There would have been no dishonor in devolunteering until they’d made it safer, but if you advised Joe against doing a thing it only made him the more determined.

  Kick wrote again when she got home.

  Things are just too awful here. Daddy doesn’t leave his room. Mother’s hardly speaking to me because of Billy and everything. She’s given orders that everyone has to carry on as normal because as you know, Kennedys don’t cry. And now Nancy Tenney’s husband is missing in action and he hasn’t even seen their little baby yet. I’m afraid I AM crying. Seems to me I’m not a hundred percent Kennedy anymore. I’m a Devonshire too and I think Devonshires are allowed a little weep.

  I reckon Rosie’s the lucky one now. She doesn’t even realize all these terrible things are happening. They say Joe’s likely to get the Navy Cross at the very least. Mother’s talking that up but who cares about a stupid medal when we’ve lost Joe.

  I’ll be back to dear old England as soon as I can get on a transport. Have to keep busy or I’ll go crazy.

  When first I heard what Mr. Kenne
dy had had done to Rosie, all I could think was what a monster he’d turned out. He couldn’t stand to be beaten, he wouldn’t have anything stand in the way of his big plans, not even one of his own darling girls, and he thought everything in the world could be fixed by pulling strings and spending dollars. I’d felt sorry then for Mrs. K, because he’d likely waited till she was up to Maine for a rest cure and then sneaked Rosie away to the hospital. Mrs. K might have despaired sometimes of teaching Rosie her letters, but a mother’s love is a mother’s love. That’s what I’d thought. But when I heard how she was after Joe was killed, I changed my mind. Not speaking to her own daughter, when she’d flown across the ocean to be with them and share in their loss. If losing that boy didn’t soften her heart, if it didn’t make her treasure Kick and count her blessings, then what kind of mother was she?

  Walter said we shouldn’t judge people like the Kennedys by our lights.

  He said, “Folk who’ve come up fast the way they have, they’d never have got where they are if they acted sentimental. Empire builders, Nora. They don’t tick the way we do.”

  I said, “That’s the way men think. I’m not talking about Mr. K. I’m talking about Herself. She’s not the empire builder.”

  “If you say so, sweetheart,” he said. “If you say so.”

  And it wasn’t long anyway before another blow fell that made me think Walter might have the measure of Mrs. K better than I did.

  28

  A Real Winner, with a Bit of Grooming

  Mr. Churchill said we might be over the worst, because our boys had flattened most of the places those terrible doodlebugs were launched from, but he spoke too soon. Jerry had something else up his sleeve and we got our first taste of it at the start of September. Walter’s Pig Club had slaughtered Hermann Goering that week and we’d got the head as part of our share, so Hope had made a lovely brawn. We’d just sat down for tea when we heard an explosion, quite far off, and then another sound, like a great thunderclap that shook the whole house and set a load of soot tumbling down the scullery chimney.