by Kathy McKeon
John and the kids came hurrying up to meet us.
“Kathy, your kids tried to burn down my house!” John exclaimed.
“No we didn’t!” Shane shouted. “He left the pan on the stove!”
John laughed and admitted that he’d been making hamburgers and left the pan on the burner when he went to take a shower. The smoke alarm had gone off, but that was it. John had a checkered history of combining showering and cooking; his attention deficit disorder tended to sabotage that kind of multitasking. We never let him forget the time he had been fresh out of the shower with a towel around his waist when he fired up the grill to make us hamburgers. He’d turned around and lost his towel, causing Seamus to drily remark, “I thought you were making us hamburgers, John, but it looks like we’re getting wieners instead.”
Seamus summarized the latest burger fiasco with similar Irish humor.
“Well, Kathy,” he announced, “our dog bit Tom Kennedy, our kids almost burned down the president’s house . . . I’d say it’s time we left the Cape!”
Caroline was off and running, building her own life now, and it was John who tended to stay more in touch. A month after Caroline’s wedding, I had the strangest bit of news I needed to share with him. No one else would understand how deeply it had shocked me.
“John, you remember that nurse who took care of you when you had bronchitis, the one who made you that stuffed gingerbread man you loved so much?” I asked the next time I saw him. “She pushed her little boy at you to be friends, but he was too young for you. Robert was his name.”
“Yeah, yeah,” John said. “I remember that! Why?”
“You know who that boy is now?” I asked. John looked puzzled. There was no way he hadn’t seen the news—it was all anyone in New York was talking about, and the story had made headlines all over the world.
“Robert Chambers,” I told him. The nurse’s little boy had grown into the handsome prep-school killer who had strangled a pretty teenager named Jennifer Levin while they had what he termed “rough sex” in Central Park. John shook his head, dumbfounded. There were legions of people inside the Kennedys’ world, but countless more who glanced off the edges, and, like the strange intruder at the Cape, you had to wonder sometimes who—or what—you had actually encountered. John had even been the target of a kidnapping plot when he was twelve by a gang of eight Greeks who were arrested before they could carry out their plan to snatch him while he was on Skorpios. The whole affair was kept quiet until decades later when the FBI unsealed the files.
I had been too close to danger myself since leaving the Kennedys.
Without Madam’s free ticket each summer, my trips back to Ireland dwindled to every other year, when Seamus and I would return with our children. The Troubles had changed things. I had never felt connected to the struggle, though I would see reports of the latest violence in Belfast on the evening news and hear occasional things from my mother or brothers back in Inniskeen. The British troops on the other side of our stretch of bandit country were now removing their trash by helicopter, Mam said, because the IRA had used a garbage truck as a Trojan horse for a three-hundred-pound bomb in one bloody attack. When Seamus and I visited, we still took our customary shortcut between our two hometowns by crisscrossing twice across the northern border. Staying in the south meant a longer trip on a mountainous route with bad roads. Now, though, we would see big scorch marks where a car had been blown up on the road, or the black ruins of a farmhouse on some hill. We would get stopped along our way at checkpoints manned by British soldiers. One summer we had the three kids in the backseat when we were stopped. There’d been a bombing or something, and the British soldiers were not in a good mood. Seamus rolled down his window as a young soldier approached the driver’s side. He looked no more than sixteen. He said something in a Cockney accent Seamus couldn’t understand.
“Excuse me?” Seamus said.
The soldier repeated himself, sounding irate, but also like he had a mouthful of marbles.
“Did you get that, Kath?” Seamus asked me.
“No idea,” I said.
Seamus turned to the kids in the backseat. “Did any of you understand him?”
“No,” they all said. An older officer was standing on the opposite side of the road, and I caught a glimpse of him stifling a grin at Seamus’s brash humor and Marble Mouth’s growing frustration with the cheeky Irishman.
Sometimes Seamus just couldn’t help himself once he got on a roll. He turned back to the waiting soldier.
“Would you mind repeating it again,” he asked, “this time in English?”
In a flash, the machine gun the soldier was carrying was pointed against Seamus’s temple. A fear like none I had ever known flooded every last cell of my body. I don’t know how Seamus managed to keep his own voice so steady and calm.
“Please take the gun away,” he said quietly. “I have three children in the back.”
The officer who’d been trying not to laugh a second ago came striding up.
“Lower your weapon, soldier,” he commanded. The boy obeyed. The officer addressed Seamus:
“He asked where you’re coming from and where you’re going.”
Seamus told him, “Inniskeen to Leitrim.”
“Anything in the boot?”
“Our suitcases.”
“Open the boot.”
“Of course you can open it and take a look,” Seamus offered.
“No, you get out and open it.” They thought we might be an ambush, a family of radical suicide bombers from the Republic. Me, who’d gone to one march in the Bronx because friends wanted to join the protesters shouting, “IRA, all the way!” I’d stayed away from any political protests after that; they just weren’t my style. I’d had a pen pal in the North when I was growing up. Her name was Theresa, and she would send me comic books and long letters. I wasn’t much of a correspondent. I sent a short reply once in a while, but Theresa remained devoted for years and years. I was relieved to cut her loose once I moved to America. Seamus wasn’t an activist, either, but he was more knowledgeable about the political history. He had explained the division of Ulster to John one time.
The soldiers cleared us to go on our way, and with our children white-faced in the backseat and Seamus consumed with a silent fury, we carried on.
My children’s summers were defined more by the extended Kennedy family than by our own Irish clan. The years we spent vacationing at the Cape compound in Madam’s borrowed house felt in many ways like a rewind of the summers I’d known with John and Caroline when they were young. Now my kids were begging to take down the strange animal-globe that had topped Caroline’s wedding cake, so they could study all the weird creatures.
Shane, Heather, and Clare played with the next generation of Kennedy cousins, and Shane, just like John, had to learn how to stand up for himself at the mercy of the bigger ones who picked on him. The worst was one of Ethel’s rogue sons, a teenager intent on making Shane cry. The old Kennedy code applied to any child in their circle, related or not. Shane recounted getting thrown into the bushes, shoved against the tall hedge, and taken out in one of the little boats, which the older boy then pretended had run out of gas. When all of that didn’t work, Shane came home shaken one day to say he had been put out of the boat at the break wall and told to swim back. He was all of eight or nine. Of course, the cousins circled back to get him. Shane still wasn’t in tears, but he told me what had happened, and how scary it was. “John got picked on when he was your age, too,” I told my son. I didn’t have to tell him how that turned out, because John was practically a superhero in his eyes. Save for the teenaged bully, the Kennedys folded my three kids seamlessly into the rollicking, extended summer clan of family, friends, and guests, like the inner-city kids Ethel often hosted.
Teddy Kennedy had fallen into the patriarch role since Bobby’s assassination. He wasn’t the same presence as Bobby had been at the Cape, beaten down, maybe, by the murders of his two big brothers, th
en by the Mary Jo Kopechne scandal and the personal and political fallout from that. He and Joan had separated in 1980, and divorced two years later. Much as my enduring image of Bobby was with a football in his hands, Teddy usually appears in my memory with a cocktail in his. One day he came up from the beach and told the kids he’d lost his eyeglasses somewhere in the sand or sea grasses. There would be a prize for whoever found them. My two oldest took off for the beach like they’d been fired from a cannon, and sure enough, they were the ones to come back with the glasses. I found out about all this only after I wondered how it was my children were not only getting themselves ice creams every day at the “Kennedy store,” a short walk from the compound, but were also doling them out to an entourage of little cousins. Teddy’s prize, it turned out, had been ice cream. He had given the children his credit card and forgot to take it back. They had an open ice-cream tab going and were only too happy to share their windfall with anyone who tagged along on their daily run.
“What do you think you’re doing?” I railed at them. “No more!”
“But, Mom,” Clare objected, “we found his glasses!”
Grandma Rose was still going strong, but old Joseph P. Kennedy had died the year after Bobby’s assassination. Ever since, a new member of the family began appearing at the Cape for a week or so each summer. Rosemary was large and placid, in a wheelchair more often than not, it seemed. A nun would accompany her and serve as her caregiver. When Rosemary was coming, word would be sent from Grandma Rose’s house that the swimming pool would be closed for everyone else. She would have the heat turned way up, so the water was like a hot tub, because Rosemary apparently liked it that way. The air inside the glass-roofed pool room would be muggy, with a sharp smell of chlorine. Every day I would see Eunice and Pat or Jean pushing Rosemary’s wheelchair around the compound as they took their sister for her daily walk.
She wasn’t the only forgotten Kennedy relative I caught a brief glimpse of.
Several years after Madam married Onassis, she came to me one day with a list of things to go buy at Gimbels. Mr. Onassis’s chauffeur, George, would take me, she said, and then he would drive me to Long Island to deliver everything to some people there. The list was long, full of bed linens, comforters, towels, and other household items. Mostly things to stay warm.
It took us a few hours to get to the address George had been given. We pulled into an estate of some kind, with a big mansion set deep within an overgrown garden. I scooted through rotting arched trellises sagging with roses that must have been growing there for decades. As we approached the porch, the heady perfume from all the blossoms gave way to the overpowering stench of cat urine. The porch and weedy garden were alive with skinny feral cats. I rang the bell and the door opened a crack. I could see an old woman peering through the chain-lock at George and me.
“Just leave it on the porch,” she said, then closed the door.
We did as she asked and retreated. I looked back and saw another woman watching us from an upstairs window. She looked younger than the first, and wore a scarf or piece of cloth tied close to her head, like Amelia Earhart’s aviator helmet.
A week or so later, George and I were sent back with pajamas, bathrobes, and groceries for the odd women in the derelict mansion. We brought cat food this time, too. Once again, the big one told us to leave it on the porch. I never saw them again until Seamus was poking around on his computer one day not long ago and happened upon a documentary called Grey Gardens, about an eccentric aunt and cousin of Madam’s who had been discovered living in squalor at a crumbling Long Island estate.
“My God, that’s the place I was with the overgrown roses!” I cried when I saw the pictures. I recognized the images of the old woman and the younger one in the window—mother and daughter, it turned out. Madam had never explained who they were or what had happened, and it was too late to ask now.
I still saw Madam every so often, and we were in regular contact by phone about the Cape house, but it had probably been a year or more since I’d last seen her when I picked up the newspaper and read that she had cancer. There was a paparazzi shot of her in the park. She looked terribly thin and frail. I immediately dialed 1040. Marta picked up.
It was bad, she told me, and Madam was in the hospital. “But you won’t believe who’s here!” she added. John came on the line.
“Hi, Kathy,” he said. “It’s so nice of you to think of my mom.” I asked how she was doing, and he told me it didn’t look good. “She’s very, very ill.”
We talked for a few minutes, and I hung up, heartsick. I bought a get-well card and mailed it to her with my prayers.
One of Madam’s blue note cards arrived in the mail. On it was a typewritten message thanking me for my lovely card.
“I think of you and Seamus and your children often,” it said, “and hope we can all get together before long.”
The last two words, handwritten, were her last to me.
Much love.
She died two weeks later. I called Nancy Tuckerman, who told me I could come at two-thirty the next afternoon for the viewing. John was busy on his computer in the dining room but came out to greet us warmly. Caroline was at home with her children; there were three of them now, the oldest the same age she had been when I first met her.
Madam’s coffin was in the living room, draped with the floral bedspread she’d had as long as I knew her.
I remembered my first weeks as Jackie’s girl, and how I had put that same bedspread away on a high shelf in the linen closet, not noticing it was up against the light.
I found myself looking now for the small hole I had singed in one of the flowers, not quite knowing why I wanted to know if it was still there. Proof of me? Of that bumbling Irish farm girl, dropped so improbably into such a life, such a special life.
TWELVE
The End of Camelot
The stereo was blasting “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” a sure sign that John was in the house when Seamus and I walked up the familiar path to the house at the Cape. John had been playing that same Rolling Stones record for a good quarter century—the song was his all-time favorite. How was it even possible that John was now thirty-eight years old? He had called Seamus earlier in the week to ask if Seamus could come give him some advice about renovations on the house. He and his wife, Carolyn, were spending more time there, and the place desperately needed some updating to suit a modern young couple. The big burn mark a hot pan had left on the Formica countertop in the kitchen when John was little had been hidden by a cutting board for decades, and that was just for starters.
“I’ll fly you up,” John offered.
“No, no, Kathy and I’ll just drive up for the weekend,” Seamus had said.
I hadn’t met Carolyn before, though of course I’d seen pictures of her all over the magazines and tabloids. She was tall and willowy and very pretty, but in a different way from the other girls John had romanced over the years. Carolyn was harder to read, mysterious in a way. Her skin was almost as white and translucent as fine porcelain. She was chic in beige shorts and a short-sleeved black cashmere sweater, with a cardigan tied at her waist. She was holding a fluffy tuxedo cat and kissing him as he shed all over her expensive sweater. She’d just arrived herself, she explained, and she hadn’t seen her cat in a whole week.
She and John were about to celebrate their first anniversary, but that cat seemed to be getting more affection than he was.
They’d stolen away to a tiny island in Georgia for the small ceremony to elude the paparazzi, who now pursued her with even more fervor than they had Madam.
Provi was in the kitchen, too, serving as cook for the evening and fixing us a nice fresh fish for dinner. She came to sit with Carolyn and me out on the porch, and we all chitchatted while John and Seamus were off discussing the work John was contemplating for the house.
“What’re they planning to do?” Carolyn asked idly, still cuddling her spoiled cat.
“New windows,” Provi a
nswered.
Seamus later told me John had confided how hurt he was by Carolyn’s disinterest in the remodeling, which John had tackled with enthusiasm. The challenge of preserving history while refreshing the home wasn’t unlike what his mother had famously done for the White House during the family’s few years there, though obviously the Cape house was far smaller and far more personal.
“I wish my wife was interested in what I’m doing,” John told Seamus. Carolyn never came up to offer her input. “Isn’t that strange?” he asked. I found it odd, too. You could tell with one glance at her, even on a lazy weekend at home, that Carolyn had flawless taste and a great sense of style. John and Seamus had worked their way around the windows and were within earshot when Seamus’s voice drifted out to the porch.
“I think this would be a great job for Carolyn,” he was saying.
“I don’t know if that’s Carolyn’s thing,” John could be heard replying. “We’ll work on that.”
Carolyn roused herself from the porch seat. “I think I better get involved in this,” she announced. I had the impression she meant it was time to quash any notion of roping her in, not encourage it. We all headed to the kitchen.