by Kathy McKeon
“Madam, I think you need to know about something,” I began. “I just found John locked in his room. There’s a chain on the outside of the door, and I’m worried it isn’t safe. What if there was a fire?” My fear was genuine. I knew there was no fire escape in John’s room. I knew where every fire escape was in that apartment.
A rare frown crossed Madam’s face, and she immediately headed for her son’s room as I followed her.
“Oh, we’ll take care of that,” she said firmly when I showed her what I was talking about. “Thank you for spotting this, Kathy. You were smart to come to me.” Her irritation gave way to a sigh that sounded more sad than anything. “I know she’s getting on in years and needs to rest,” she lamented, “but I’m not sure what to do.” I felt a surge of pride that she was confiding such a thing in me and had acknowledged my sound judgment. Like we were on the same level, adult to adult. For once I didn’t feel like the awkward, uncertain girl among the grown-ups.
The handyman was back at the door with his screwdriver in a matter of minutes, dismantling the lock. Maud never had a clue that I was the tipster, and if there had been any reprimand, the rest of the staff never knew. I started making it a habit to scoop up John and take him to the park to play in the afternoon, or at least out for a walk with Shannon while Maud dozed. He was fun company, and I even started meeting other Irish girls my age at the playground, watching their own young charges.
Working for the Kennedys was my first—and only, it would turn out—experience in being part of a household staff, and if I’d been anything but Irish, I doubt I would’ve survived a week. But petty jealousies, deep grudges, and bitter feuds are practically cultural traditions where I come from. When you have a bunch of Irish together, we all want to be better than one another. We’re clannish and driven. The feuds were ongoing and the alliances ever shifting at 1040. Being so young, I was presumed easy to manipulate, but my youth also made the others all the more determined to keep me in my place. I was such an awkward girl, it was natural to assume I wouldn’t stick up for myself. But one advantage of being a middle child in a large family is learning how to blend back into the sidelines quickly so you never get blamed for the trouble, even if you stirred it up in the first place. I was the absolute queen of the poker face, and anything but innocent.
The kitchen was usually where the staff wars were played out—an ideal battleground, since Madam’s quarters were on the opposite side of the apartment. The players and the issues would change around, but the motivation behind all the fights remained the same: Everyone wanted to be at the top of the ladder, and the only way to claim that spot or hold on to it was to put your boot in someone else’s face. It didn’t take long for me to land in the grumpy old cook’s crosshairs.
“You know what happened to those pork chops?” she questioned me, peering into the fridge the day after Madam had hosted a dinner party. I didn’t need an invitation to enjoy a dinner party. Dinner parties meant leftovers, and both Shannon and I knew exactly what had happened to the pork chops in question. When you start explaining or lying is when you get caught out, I reasoned. I’d rather be considered dumb and get the pork chop. I pretended I hadn’t heard Bea and waltzed off to wash Madam’s unmentionables. Bras, underwear, and panty hose had to be laundered by hand each day. Bea was onto me, and I needed some quiet time to contemplate my counteroffensive.
“You’re drinking too much coffee, and it’s too expensive,” came Bea’s next challenge. I hadn’t asked for Taster’s Choice, but having discovered it in the pantry, I sure did like it, and last I checked, we weren’t in occupied France. Neither Madam nor Nancy Tuckerman had mentioned any coffee-rationing program. Madam herself preferred tea; the instant coffee was for the staff anyway.
“You’re coming down a brand,” Bea decreed. “I’m not buying that for you anymore.”
Room and board was part of our compensation, and Bea didn’t control everything that went into our mouths, even if she was preparing staff meals. If I wanted a cup of coffee, or to fix myself a sandwich for lunch, I was well within the commonly understood boundaries of acceptable behavior. Snitching leftovers was more of a gray area. But I figured the cook wasn’t going to reheat them to serve again to Madam, and Bea wasn’t my boss, so why not?
Bea ordered the groceries, though, and considered them hers to dole out. I was still packing on the weight, which put Bea on red alert. She started counting the Yodels and Hostess Cupcakes in the pantry, and concluded—not incorrectly—that John and Caroline didn’t devour that many that quickly. When the groceries were delivered, Bea made a big show of putting the goodies into a separate bag and taking them to her room for safekeeping. “Keep your paws off these,” she warned.
“Bea, I wouldn’t eat it when you slept with it,” I shot back in self-defense.
My brazen incursions into her territory didn’t let up, though, and I felt safe in the assumption that it was just me and the mice in the pantry after-hours, with no witnesses to ever prove I was even in there. Late one night, I crept into the kitchen to forage around for a snack and bumped smack into a shadowy figure in the dark. Both of us shrieked.
“Oh, it’s you!” Madam laughed with relief. “I was just looking for some ice cream!”
I was glad she had caught me on my way in instead of on my way out—at least I was empty-handed. I took the opportunity to change the subject so she wouldn’t begin to wonder what I was doing there in the first place at that hour.
“Did you know we have a roach problem, Madam?” I said.
She looked like she didn’t know what I meant. I wasn’t sure whether it was my accent or her unfamiliarity with the world of vermin.
“Watch,” I said. “You’ll see them when I turn on the pantry light.”
I opened the pantry door and flicked on the switch. Sure enough, several cockroaches skittered across the floor for cover. Madam recoiled in horror.
“How do we get rid of them?” she asked.
“Well, it’s the cook’s problem,” I helpfully explained. “An exterminator should probably be called in.”
“I see. That’s a good idea. Will you tell Bea first thing tomorrow?”
“It’d be better if you did that in person, Madam,” I demurred.
Bea wasn’t the only one always on the lookout for ways to put me in my place. Madam had only moved into 1040 a few months before I was hired, but May, the waitress, had been there first and considered herself therefore closest to Madam. May was in her forties and was not at all pleased that a young upstart like me had just landed Provi’s job as personal assistant, which afforded me more status and power in the servant pecking order. I spent most of my day in direct contact with Madam, which meant I picked up more about what was going on in the household than the kitchen staff did. I relished the chance to rub that in their faces now and then as payback for being dismissed so often for my youth. If I got Madam’s suitcases down and put them on the guest room bed, everyone’s antennae instantly went up: They knew that meant a trip was afoot, and that I would know when and where, since I did the packing. I always needed a decent head start on that, since every sleeve, pant leg, and pocket had to be stuffed with packing paper to minimize wrinkling.
As soon as the suitcases appeared, May would start following me around, fishing for information. Where was Madam going, when was she leaving, how long was she going to be gone? Was it a weekend of horseback riding at her country home in Peapack, New Jersey, or a week abroad to see her sister in London? It wasn’t idle curiosity: The staff staying behind knew they’d have it easy for a while, and having exact dates gave the sneakier ones a chance to plan some unauthorized days off if they knew the coast was clear. Madam was hardly as naive as they thought, though, and would compile lists of extra chores that needed doing while she was away. She loved writing out instructions, making lists, and dashing off thoughtful little thank-you notes for a job well done, whether she was gushing over a particular soup the cook served at a luncheon or letting a floris
t know how beautiful she found a particular bouquet. If she had a pen in her hand, or a book, she didn’t need anything else for hours. It was my job each morning to make the rounds handing out her directives to the rest of the staff.
“You’ll know soon enough,” I teased May whenever she badgered me about Madam’s itinerary. She was putting me in a bad spot anyway: I was supposed to be discreet, not the town crier. Unlike Bea, May was sometimes nice, and we went back and forth between being almost-friends and sworn enemies. I would just get to liking her, though, and she’d go and find some new way to insult me, like telling the guy who delivered the dry cleaning that she’d go get the chamber maid for him. I was furious when I overheard that jab.
“May, who’s the chamber maid?” I demanded.
“You are,” she said dismissively.
“You’re just a dishwasher, you old Irish biddy,” I fired back.
We all spent a lot of time telling each other what we weren’t. May had had it out with Maud Shaw, too. Since Madam ate with John when she was home, the governess decided at some point that she’d take advantage of the respite and take her meal in her room, and she asked May to bring her a tray. May didn’t like Maud in the first place because she was British, and being treated like her personal servant added all kinds of insult to colonialist injury. May groused about not being room service but delivered the food anyway. It was when Maud left the dirty dishes outside her door that hell broke loose.
“That lazy bitch!” May seethed. “I brought the tray up, and she didn’t bring it back! She just went to the park with the kids and left it there, expecting me to fetch it for her!”
May hated any extra work and was downright diabolical when it came to avoiding it. When Madam added two or three guests to a dinner party she was throwing one evening, May had a meltdown over the prospect of serving extra people. She spent the afternoon grumbling and complaining, then turned on the waterworks just before the guests were to arrive and went to Ma-dam, wailing about how it was too much to ask her to do and she couldn’t possibly manage. Fearing disaster, Madam came to find me.
“Kathy, I’m so sorry,” she apologized, “but May is terribly upset, do you think you could help her serve tonight?”
I agreed because I felt trapped, but I suspected May had an ulterior motive.
“Next time this happens, don’t go to Madam, go to the secretary and say you can’t handle the job,” I told her. “You’re a phony. If you want more money, ask for more money.”
One time, May and Bea were going at it as usual, with May insulting Bea’s native Galway and calling Bea chubby after Bea had yet again set May up to look lazy as a waitress by not telling her when Madam’s food was ready, so it would be half cold by the time May noticed the tray just sitting on the butcher-block island in the kitchen. I was on the sidelines enjoying the drama when May suddenly flung the mug of tea she’d been drinking at Bea, splashing her white uniform. Bea screamed, but it was May who went running to Madam, crying about how mean Bea was.
Madam summoned me after she’d heard the confusing sob story.
“Whose side should I be on?” she wondered.
“If I was you, I’d ignore it,” I answered, pleased that she regarded me as her trustiest source. “They’re picking at each other all the time. They’ll work it out.” She agreed, and I breathed a sigh of relief that I had been able to circumvent further investigation and possible turmoil back in the kitchen. Madam circled back a couple of days later to find out what had happened.
“How are they making out?” she asked.
“Not talking, but they’ll make up,” I reported. And they did. But the truce, as usual, lasted maybe a day, two at most.
With the assassination not yet a year behind her, Madam was still in widow’s black when she went out, and more given to intimate gatherings of friends and family in her red-brocade dining room than big, splashy parties at home. I never saw her crying or outwardly morose, but she never had much of an appetite, and the toll of the horror she had survived was plain to see on her painfully thin frame. Family was never far away, and both her sister, Lee, and various Kennedy in-laws visited frequently. Lee had an apartment a few blocks away, as did Bobby and Ethel Kennedy. Jean Kennedy Smith lived within walking distance, too, and her sons, William and Stephen, were favorite playmates of John. Their Irish governess, Bridey Sullivan, quickly became my best friend, and we spent hours chatting together in Central Park while watching the boys.
Bobby Kennedy had established residency in New York after stepping down as attorney general to launch his 1964 bid to become the state’s Democratic representative in the U.S. Senate. The president’s younger brother visited 1040 regularly, usually showing up once a week to have supper with the family. John and Caroline would run and fling themselves at their uncle as soon as he stepped inside the door, clamoring for his attention. Bobby would toss John into the air and catch him, then get down on the floor to play.
He wasn’t imposing at all for such an important man, I thought. Very skinny and not broad shouldered like the president had been. The first time he saw me, he had asked my name and flashed a big smile when I told him. “We have a Kathleen in our family, too,” he said, referring to his oldest daughter. With eight kids of his own under the age of thirteen, Bobby stepped easily into the role of surrogate father for John and Caroline, and they worshipped him. Madam clearly leaned on him, too. Threatening to tell Uncle Bobby about any misbehavior was like telling the kids Santa Claus was going to find out.
In addition to his Manhattan apartment, which was close to his campaign headquarters in Midtown, Bobby had leased a twenty-five-room hilltop mansion as a weekend retreat in Glen Cove, on the northern shore of Long Island. It was like having a private hotel, with a built-in swimming pool and lovely manicured lawns with plenty of room for the kids to blow off steam with their cousins. Madam liked Glen Cove for all the woodsy trails where she could go horseback riding, and she rented a modest weekend home near Bobby’s, a one-level fieldstone house with a stream out back where I showed John how to make paper sailboats to race under a small bridge. A couple of weeks after hiring me, Madam decided to give me a test run as governess with a family weekend in the country. I looked forward to the break in my routine. I felt at ease around the children; they were lively but well behaved, though not to the point of being little robots. Madam was going out for the evening the day we arrived, and I would be on my own with John and Caroline for the first time. Maud Shaw had left me a long letter on a sheet torn from a yellow legal pad, outlining specific instructions for the children’s care—to make sure they brushed their teeth, said their prayers, and were in bed by eight o’clock. John was supposed to have a baby aspirin every night, too, to help with his asthma. I had just started to read the governess’s instructions when Caroline snatched the sheet of paper out of my hand.
“You don’t need this!” she announced as she gleefully tore it up. I laughed. I secretly shared her sentiments anyway. It wasn’t in me to be strict the way Maud was, and I liked letting the kids get away with murder when she wasn’t around. To them, I was the fun teenaged babysitter, not a governess. That night, they stayed up well past their bedtime while I gave them piggyback rides, throwing them off giggling into the couch cushions. When I finally got them wound down enough to go to bed, I remembered John’s aspirin and shook out a little pink tablet to give him. I put it down and went to fill a cup with water, not realizing the aspirin was chewable. When I turned back around, the tablet wasn’t there.
“Where’d the aspirin go?” I asked, checking the countertop and the floor.
“It’s gone,” John told me.
“Where is it?”
“It’s in my ear.”
I knelt down and held his head to the side as he squirmed, peering inside his ear. The aspirin had sunk too deep inside for me to reach. I decided to have John lie down and press the ear with the aspirin against a pillow while Caroline and I took turns tapping his other ear in hopes of dislodgi
ng the tablet. No luck, though Caroline thought it was great fun and wanted to keep going. In a panic, I called Madam’s sister-in-law Jean Kennedy Smith, who also had a house nearby.
“Don’t worry,” she told me. “It won’t hurt him. Those tablets dissolve. It’ll melt away.”
Caroline wasn’t worried so much about her little brother’s well-being as she was about Maud Shaw’s potential reaction.
“Don’t tell her anything,” she urged me. I didn’t need any convincing on that front.
Once the children were down for the night, I thought I’d take advantage of my bit of private time by calling my Aunt Rose and Uncle Pat in the Bronx to tell them where I was. There was a phone in the pantry, and I dialed the number. It was just ringing when into the pantry strode one of the Secret Service agents. Jack Walsh was handsome and imposing; with his suit and his gun, he made me think of James Bond. I realized I was using the Secret Service’s phone and immediately panicked. I thrust the receiver at Jack Walsh, who put it to his ear.
“Hello?” he said, sounding very authoritative.
“Hello?” I could hear Uncle Pat saying back.
“Who is this?” the Secret Service agent demanded.
“What do you mean who is this, who are you?” Uncle Pat barked back.
My uncle and the Secret Service agent proceeded to fight over who called who until Jack Walsh hung up, muttering about some idiot in the Bronx. I was mortified and didn’t tell either what had happened.
If Walsh said anything about my phone fumble, or Mrs. Smith told her sister-in-law about the aspirin fiasco, it must not have alarmed Madam, because after Glen Cove, I was in charge of the children whenever Maud Shaw was off. Bobby won his Senate race that fall, and Madam kept her rental in Glen Cove, too. It was a great place for the kids to play with all their cousins on the weekend, and Madam enjoyed riding horses there. It was her solitary pursuit. Ethel was that way with sailing, and Joan Kennedy, Ted’s wife, had the piano. On the surface, at least, Madam struck me as more like her brother-in-law than her sisters-in-law, though.