by Kathy McKeon
“Where are you two going on your honeymoon?” she asked.
“Someplace warm,” Seamus daydreamed aloud. I wondered what lottery he’d won and not told me about. At the rate we were burning through our budget, he could scratch tropical paradise off his list unless Coney Island had palm trees and hula girls.
“You should go to Barbados!” Madam exclaimed. “I have a friend there who runs a resort. Let me book it for you as my gift.”
We were floored. Nancy Tuckerman swiftly followed through on the offer, making all the arrangements. Everything was being taken care of, from our flights and the gorgeous villa to our meals and even a rented dune buggy to tool around the island.
Meanwhile our RSVPs were pouring in, and even with our free honeymoon and all the things from Madam’s warehouse, we were still anxious about being able to afford our own reception. We’d invited 125 guests. In our circle of servants, laborers, street cops, and firemen, the custom was to bring envelopes of cash as a wedding present to pay for your meal at the reception. It may not have won any of us the Nobel Prize for Etiquette, but the tradition allowed us to celebrate with all our friends. It was a gamble whether the cash gifts would cover the catering bill.
I had decided to take off the two weeks leading up to the wedding to finish getting everything ready, and on my last night of work, Mr. Onassis summoned me to the dining room, where the family was finishing dinner together. He handed me a cream envelope with a fresh blue cornflower pressed in the corner. I thanked him and went to put it in my pocket.
“Could you open and read it, please?” he asked.
I tore open the card and started to read but stumbled over the words. I’d never been a great reader, and I couldn’t make out his handwriting.
“I’ll help you,” Caroline offered, getting up from her chair. She took the note and read it aloud. Mr. Onassis was wishing me well, and said he looked forward to meeting the gentleman lucky enough to marry me, and how lucky I was to have a carpenter as a husband, because I would always have a nice home and someone who was handy at fixing things. Did I know Saint Joseph was a carpenter? he went on.
“Do you know what my first job was?” he asked. “I was a busboy cleaning tables. You always have to start from the bottom up to make something of yourself.”
There was a check inside the cornflower envelope, too. I was stunned when I saw the amount. It was for one thousand dollars. His generosity blew me away. This was ten times the annual bonus I had always looked forward to from Madam at Christmastime!
John and Caroline had each written me little notes, too, wishing me a happy wedding.
I was at home opening more RSVPs not long after that night when several fluttered out of one envelope.
“Seamus, they’re coming.” I was in shock.
“Oh my God, what do we do now?” He knew exactly who “they” were. I fanned out the response cards:
Jacqueline and Aristotle Onassis
John Kennedy
Caroline Kennedy
We decided not to tell anybody. If we did and they didn’t show, we’d look like foolish braggarts. And if they were coming, we didn’t want word to leak out ahead of time, or the Astoria Manor would get overrun with paparazzi and crowds of looky-loos. Madam had always attracted photographers and people who wanted to catch a glimpse of her, but since marrying Onassis, she couldn’t even step out of 1040 to get into a cab without the risk of being mobbed on the sidewalk. She had lost Secret Service protection when she remarried. John and Caroline would keep their Secret Service details until they were sixteen. We’d invited a bunch of them to the wedding—Mugsy, Jack Walsh, and a couple others. The staff from 1040 was invited, too, except for Bea. I did end up confiding about Madam’s RSVP to one other guest, the disgraced cook, Annemarie. I had told Madam about Annemarie’s private cooking school, and Madam had seemed sincere when she said, “Good for her, I hope she does well.” But Annemarie was still too scared to come to the wedding, though she did send a nice Crock-Pot.
When we filled out our seating charts, we left a choice table near ours empty. As the big day drew closer, I kept dodging questions from the hotel’s manager about who to put down for that table. I bought time by putting Nancy Tuckerman, Provi and her son Gustavo, plus my cousin John and his wife, Mary, there, but there were still four unassigned seats.
“We need to know what to do about table five,” the hotel manager finally insisted a few days before the event.
“Prilly O’Toole and family,” I improvised. (Prilly was the secret code name I’d made up for Madam back when I started at 1040. “Prilly’s coming,” I’d warn my coworkers if they were yukking it up in the kitchen and I knew she was on the move.) One more Irish surname wouldn’t draw any attention on our guest list.
The hotel called back the day before the wedding. The manager was freaking out.
“Why are all the Secret Service agents and police here?” he demanded. “What’s going on?”
“We don’t know,” I said.
“They’re checking out your reception room,” he said.
“You got it all wrong,” I insisted. “It’s not us.”
I told myself the obvious security sweep was just a precaution, that at most Madam would attend the church ceremony in Manhattan, then decide to skip the reception, which was three hours later and a borough away.
Sure enough, she slipped into St. Stephen’s the next morning with the children in time to see me walk down the aisle. I spotted her off to the side in a red dress. The pews were filled with familiar faces not only from my life, but also from the separate life I had shared with her for seven years by then. There was even a staff squabble for old times’ sake on my way back up the aisle after Seamus and I exchanged vows.
“Kathy! Kathy!” I heard someone hiss loudly on my way down the aisle. I recognized Provi’s voice and tried to ignore it. She kept it up until I finally stopped in annoyance.
“What is it, Provi?” I said, smiling through clenched teeth as the rest of the church wondered why I had come to a sudden halt.
“Where’s your bathtub?” Provi demanded. “I couldn’t find the bathtub!”
Bridey and I had loaned her the use of our apartment while she was in town for the wedding. I couldn’t believe she was now interrupting my recessional march to ask me such a ridiculous question.
“You had your breakfast on it, Provi!” I snapped back. How hard was it to miss a tub with a piece of plywood over it in the middle of the kitchen? I could have smacked her with my bouquet of yellow Montauk daisies.
At the Astoria Manor, the wedding party lined up outside the reception hall door for our grand entrance as husband and wife. Briege was my matron of honor, with Marta and Bridey serving as bridesmaids in midnight blue velvet gowns. As we swept through the door, the first thing I saw was John standing right in the middle of the room in front of us, jumping up and down and clapping like crazy. Madam stood nearby with Caroline, smiling and applauding with the rest of the guests. She made her way over to hug me and admire my ring. The solitaire Seamus had given me the Christmas before was now surrounded by a sunburst of smaller diamonds. Mr. Onassis wasn’t feeling well but sent his good wishes, Madam told us.
I was relieved that my friends and relatives were managing to restrain themselves about the celebrities unexpectedly in their midst. Once the music struck up, though, some brazen eejit went up and asked Madam to dance. We’d foolishly assumed everyone would know better, especially since the groom hadn’t done so. Madam tried to beg off, but the guy wouldn’t give up, and finally she went out on the floor with him just as the song was ending. When his minute of glory was over, the clod thanked her and then left her on the dance floor. That was how it worked at the Jaeger Haus and the other Irish dance clubs, where there weren’t tables to walk a lady back to anyway. Madam walked back to her seat, but Seamus’s brother Paddy, figuring the door had been opened now, stepped up to ask her for a dance. She shook her head, and Paddy retreated, but Jack Walsh, sittin
g at the table of off-duty Secret Service agents, signaled for Madam and clued her in on who Paddy was. She was aghast. “Oh, bring him back!” she said. Paddy got his dance.
I looked across the room to see her smile when I had the band play an Irish song I hoped she knew was for her:
Her eyes they shone like diamonds
I thought her the queen of the land
And her hair, it hung over her shoulder
Tied up with a black velvet band.
She pulled me aside as I table-hopped.
“Kath, I have to get out of here,” she apologized. “I don’t want to take all the attention. It’s your day. I’ll wait for the cake.”
When she went to the ladies’ room to powder her nose, though, another bride happened to be just entering her reception in the banquet room next to ours, and the doors opened as Madam passed by on her way back to our party. Before we knew it, all the guests from the other wedding were jostling one another in the hall and pushing on our door to get a look. Security and the Secret Service held them back. Madam gathered the kids and found us again. There was no staying for cake now.
“Kath, sorry, we have to leave,” she said.
I thanked her, my heart full, and let her go.
TEN
Farewell to 1040
Seamus, I soon learned, went into our marriage holding on to a secret.
The night before our wedding, he’d answered a knock on the door and gotten served with an eviction notice. When his elderly landlady had died some months earlier, Seamus had actually negotiated a sweetheart deal to buy the two-family house from her son in California. The day before the papers were to be signed, a missing will was suddenly produced by the distant relative who’d been living in the downstairs unit. Seamus lost out, the building fell into the hands of lawyers, and now the apartment we’d been busily turning into our love nest was going to be put on the market by the trust holding the deed.
The newly married Mr. and Mrs. Seamus McKeon were homeless.
Seamus hadn’t wanted to upset me, so he saved the news until we got back from our dream Thanksgiving honeymoon in Barbados.
“What are we going to do?” I said. This was a disastrous way to start newlywed life. Finding an affordable place to rent in New York was practically a blood sport, it was so competitive. Seamus and his siblings had been clever players in the real estate game, though. The first ones to emigrate had found the roomy Astoria apartment, and it had always been shared or passed along to the next brother or sister as needed, keeping the affordable lease in the family for years. We were paying only $125 a month for three bedrooms plus a living room and dining room, which was a steal, even by 1972 standards. It was going to cost us more than twice that to lease even a cramped one-bedroom now.
“We don’t need to panic yet,” Seamus said. He had done his homework and felt certain that New York’s strict tenant laws were on our side. As long as we kept paying our rent on time, he’d learned, the trust couldn’t just put us out in ninety days, which is how long the notice gave us to vacate. It wasn’t uncommon for eviction fights to drag on for years, and Seamus was adamant: We weren’t going to just cave.
“We can look for a place to buy instead of rent,” he proposed. “Why put ourselves always at the mercy of some landlord or their crooked lawyers?” He was bitter about the way the rug had been pulled out from under him. “I never want to be a tenant again.”
We were both eager to start a family, and the prospect of raising our children-to-be in a house of our own was exciting, I had to admit. I didn’t know anything about mortgages, but I trusted Seamus to figure out what to do, and what we could afford. He had a keen interest in real estate, and he was eager to learn as much about the business end as he was learning about the building trade. My paycheck had inched up to around $100 a week, plus the hundred-dollar bonus Madam put in my Christmas card each year. Seamus earned terrific union wages with his carpentry, though, so maybe we could actually swing this. Whenever the trust pressured us for a moving date, Seamus would just say we were looking for a place and would get out when we found one. Meantime, he was religious about writing a check for the rent each month and making a copy.
I had my own little cat-and-mouse game going on, too.
Now that I was married, I timidly told Madam, I was hoping to keep regular hours. Monday through Friday, eight hours a day, and no more weekends in Peapack, I proposed. Summers at the Cape were still okay, though. I knew Seamus would be welcome to come stay with me on weekends. He was as much a fixture at the compound now as the Irish bunnies.
“I could probably let you go at five,” Madam allowed.
“I’ll still come in early, at eight o’clock,” I countered, “but I have to leave at four.”
“All right, four p.m.,” she agreed, though I could tell she wasn’t happy about it. “I’m not going to take it out of your wages,” she added.
“That’s very sweet of you, Madam,” I replied. “I appreciate that.” I hoped, but did not dare say, that she likewise appreciated all the overtime she’d saved never reimbursing me for all the canceled weekends and days off I’d had to work over the years. Even my normal workdays generally amounted to at least ten hours, plus another couple later in the evening when she got restless and wanted to reorganize a closet or play art gallery.
Striking our new deal and sticking to it were two different things, though. When my new quitting time approached, Madam would often try to squeeze an extra hour out of me with a last-minute list of “just a few things” she wanted done. They were always tasks that could just as easily have been taken care of earlier in the day, like sending me to the florist to pick up more hyacinths, which she would then of course want immediately repotted, repeating the drill a week or so later when the blooms wilted. I’d finish that, only to have her send me running back out to the newsstand to pick up the gossip sheets she loved to read. Just when I finally thought I was done and had one foot out the door, she’d buzz me from her bedroom: “I’m going out to dinner tonight, could you get my pocketbook ready?” Before I knew it, it would be five-thirty before I was heading home.
I decided to outfox her by hoarding errands. Anything that needed to be mailed, dropped off, or ordered in some shop or department store could wait until three o’clock, and I just wouldn’t come back afterward. I got home to Seamus on time, even early once in a while.
Madam smelled something fishy and would try to catch me out if she happened to be home as my agreed-upon quitting time drew near.
“Is Kat still here?” she would ask May.
“She’s long gone.” (May was not someone you’d ever want to be arrested with.)
Madam never exploded, but you could see the fire in her eyes and hear the ice in her voice when she was fed up with you.
“Kathleen, I thought we were clear that you would stay until four,” she chastised me, “but I come home at three-thirty and you’re not here.”
“Look at all the chores you have me do, Madam,” I objected. “When you wait until the end of the day to tell me you want me to drop something off at Mrs. Mellon’s and go to Bloomie’s to pick something up for you, that takes time, you know. I have a husband to fix dinner for and laundry I need to do at home.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Kath,” she said, relenting. Maybe she hadn’t realized what she was doing. Not having me at her constant beck and call was new to her, after all. Her resentment showed when she thought I was rushing and not paying close enough attention to her the closer to four it got.
“You know you got a good deal,” she groused. “You should be happy.”
We’d carry on as usual and just have another variation of the same disagreement another time. Even if we tested each other’s patience on occasion, the bond we had formed over the course of nearly a decade held strong, and in our own ways, we were fiercely protective of one another.
Madam’s constant struggles with the paparazzi who hounded her hit a crisis point after she remarried, when the worst of
the lot, Ron Galella, stepped up his harassment and then tried to get Mr. Onassis to pay him to stop. The attempted shakedown came in a crude Christmas greeting showing Mr. Onassis dressed as Santa and Galella sitting in his lap getting wads of cash. There was a picture on the other side of John and Madam crossing Fifth Avenue after their most frightening encounter with Galella. When I used to walk John and Caroline to school, Galella would follow us on the sidewalk, shouting at the kids to try to get their attention, even jumping in front of us and blocking our path while he aimed one of the multiple cameras slung around his neck at their faces. He didn’t seem to mind how anxious or embarrassed they were made by the spectacle he created; if they looked scared or cross, the photo would fetch him a better price.
Madam had taught them to look down or away, and I followed suit. One day when John was nine, Galella pounced out of the bushes at him as he rode his bike home from Central Park with his mother. The fright caused John to swerve and lose control of his bike; he would have gone off the sidewalk into Fifth Avenue traffic if the Secret Service agent close behind hadn’t grabbed him. Galella’s shot from that day served as his Christmas greeting.
Galella was reported to bribe doormen to tip him off when Jackie O was at a certain restaurant or club, then hide behind coatracks to wait. He tried unsuccessfully to buy off Caroline’s tennis instructor, too. He had some kind of a sixth sense for when Madam was going out—day or night, she couldn’t leave 1040 without him waiting right outside to give chase.
When I turned down Madam’s bed for the night, it was my habit to always empty her wastebasket into the trash bin in the laundry room. Madam could go through three legal pads a week making lists and jotting notes to the staff. One time I came back into the laundry and saw a new maid pulling one of the discarded notes from the trash and pocketing it.