by Kathy McKeon
Provi’s Dominican roots and high standards made her a fairly decent cook and the absolute queen of daiquiri-making. She insisted on buying the best rum, dozens of fresh limes that had to be squeezed by hand, plus five-pound bags of sugar. She’d make them good and strong—one of Provi’s daiquiris, and I’d be loaded. She’d opted for a gin and tonic this particular evening. As she opened the oven door to check on the fish, I saw most of her drink slosh into the roasting pan, and had to wonder if it was anywhere near as potent as her daiquiris. She closed the door again, apparently not noticing the 100-proof marinade.
We sat down to dinner, with John insisting I take the seat at the head of the table, the one that had always been Madam’s, back when I was Jackie’s girl.
It was the day of Princess Diana’s funeral in London, and talk turned to the horrid paparazzi who were accused of causing the accident that killed her. Carolyn, who had seemed shy and reserved until then, opened up. She had gotten into some well-publicized fights with the photographers who chased her as she walked the streets of Manhattan, even kicking one. She felt besieged. John was clearly worried about his high-strung bride.
“Kath, tell Carolyn how Mom used to handle them,” he prompted me. Provi jumped in to answer first, but John cut her off.
“No, wait, I want to hear from Kathy,” he said.
“When she was up here, she’d leave the gate smiling, give them one good picture, and they’d let her go,” I remembered.
“No!” Carolyn nearly shouted. “I hate those bastards! I’d rather just scream and curse at them.”
“That’s exactly what they want you to do,” I argued. “They’ll get great pictures.”
She described how she had gotten chased down the sidewalk by a wolf pack of photographers, and ducked into a building to escape them. They cornered her by the elevator as she frantically pushed the button.
“They were grunting and groaning and pushing each other. They were almost on top of me,” she recounted. “It was just awful. I can’t take it!”
John interjected.
“You gotta just take it easy,” he insisted. “Relax.”
Deemed the Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine before he married, John had endured not only the photographers pursuing him, but love-struck female fans as well. He was practically a Beatle. But he had grown up in the fishbowl, and he knew how to navigate it. He didn’t go out of his way to be rude to the press, especially now that he was one of them, having founded his own monthly magazine, George.
I told Carolyn how Madam perfected the art of not responding to Ron Galella when he stalked her. “She knew if she kept the same blank expression on her face, he wouldn’t have a picture to sell,” I explained. “They all need something different. That’s why they yell things and try to scare you. They want a reaction. They want to get a picture showing you angry or scared.”
Galella had trailed the family on their travels as well. In the Cape, he rented a motorboat and came terrifyingly close to Madam while she was swimming one time. Seamus suspected the paparazzi were holing up in a neighboring house, which gave them a view over the compound privacy fence so they could see when Madam was pulling out in the new green BMW she’d bought herself after losing her Secret Service detail and driver. It was her first car, and Seamus had asked her why she hadn’t gotten a Mercedes. Weren’t they supposed to be the best, after all?
“Oh, Seamus, they’re for old people,” she’d pouted.
She was flying into Logan Airport in Boston one rainy night and Seamus had agreed to pick her up. As he started to leave and pulled the BMW up to the gate at the compound, it mysteriously opened. Seamus was surprised to see Jim, the guy who rented a nearby house each season, standing there in the pouring rain, holding the gate open for him. Jim came up to the driver’s window and was equally surprised to see Seamus, not Madam, behind the wheel. He’d wanted to know where Seamus was going, and Seamus had said he was off to the airport to get Mrs. Onassis. Jim immediately offered to go instead. Seamus’s antennae went up.
“No, no, she’s expecting me,” he said.
“I’ll go with you, keep you company!” Jim suggested. Again, Seamus declined politely. The weird incident bothered him the whole way to Logan, and it hit him that he’d seen a light in Jim’s attic as he pulled out.
On the drive home from the airport, Madam had been in a chatty mood.
“Seamus, I was with Frank Sinatra last evening, and I never saw anyone put away so much vodka,” she volunteered. They talked the rest of the way to Hyannis, and Seamus told Madam about the weird encounter with Jim.
“If you had brought that man with you, I never would’ve talked to you again, Seamus!” Madam said with an exaggerated shudder. “He gives me the willies.”
“He’s renting his attic to the paparazzi,” Seamus theorized. That could explain the keen interest in Madam’s comings and goings. The next morning, I came downstairs with a black wig I’d found stashed in some closet, left over from Halloween or one of the kids’ plays or something. I had a pair of Madam’s big round sunglasses in my other hand. I found Seamus and Madam in the kitchen and suggested we send Seamus out in disguise to take the paparazzi on a wild goose chase. “Poor Seamus!” Madam laughed.
I recounted the whole tale to John and Carolyn over dinner that night, of paparazzi nesting like raccoons in the neighbor’s attic. John was aghast that a friendly neighbor might have betrayed his mom.
“So that’s how they always knew when she was going out!” he said.
Carolyn listened, but I doubted I had helped her much. We finished up dinner, and John soothed Provi’s ruffled feathers by complimenting her cooking.
“This fish is delicious, Provi,” he told her. “The flavors are fantastic.” It was true. The gin and all that lime had made it delectable. The Stones were still playing in the background, the volume lower, but the song was the same. It would finish then start again. I knew it was because John had done what he used to do as a boy with that very record player, adjusting a little pin on the arm so the needle set down in the same groove each time. I remembered with a smile how he’d done the same thing with his favorite song as a six-year-old: “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” He used to make me march around his room in circles with him, the two of us pretending to be soldiers. He tried to teach me how to salute, but I kept messing up because I was left-handed. “No, Kat, like this!” he would say, demonstrating how a real Marine had taught him how to salute the right way. I wondered if he remembered it was for his father’s funeral. What a fine man that little boy had grown up to be. We said our good nights and left.
With John and Carolyn making it their second home, we no longer moved up to the Cape with our family for the summer, but Seamus gave John fatherly advice about the work he was having done and John would ask for estimates and contractor’s bids on his behalf.
“If they see my name, they think they’ve hit the lottery and the price gets jacked up four times what it should be,” John said.
When they last spoke in the summer of 1999, John was eager to get the place in shape before the whole family descended for his cousin Rory’s impending wedding.
A few weeks later, Seamus and I were having our coffee at the kitchen table when his golf partner, Jack, called. It was eight o’clock that Saturday morning, the day of Rory’s wedding.
“What? No, oh no.” Seamus looked across the table at me. “John’s plane is missing.”
I heard the words, but my mind refused to let them settle and take root. Someone had got something wrong. Seamus turned on the TV and the screen instantly filled with the image of John’s handsome face with the words BREAKING NEWS beneath it. The reporter was saying the single-engine plane John was piloting had vanished the night before on a flight from the airport in New Jersey up to the Cape for Rory’s wedding. John, Carolyn, and Carolyn’s sister, Lauren, were aboard. We left the TV on all day, and sat there waiting and waiting for it to not be true.
I called Marta, working now
for Caroline and her family, then Provi, who was summering at the compound with her son Gustavo. We all told each other it would turn out okay, that John was fine.
“They’ll find him,” Marta promised me. “They’ll find him.”
She had to get off the phone, she said. She couldn’t hold up the lines. Provi told me she had dinner ready for John and Carolyn the night before, that Gustavo had left John’s Jeep for him at the airport earlier so it would be there when he landed. I knew without asking that she would keep the uneaten meal neatly wrapped in the refrigerator, waiting for John to show up and say he was starving, what was there to eat?
The news commentators said the weather had turned after John took off, that visibility approaching the Cape had been poor, the sky too black and hazy for an inexperienced pilot. John hadn’t had his license that long and had been sidelined for six weeks. He’d broken his ankle paragliding, and had only gotten the cast off earlier that day. The plan had been to drop Lauren off at Martha’s Vineyard, then continue on to Hyannis. He took off shortly after eight-thirty that night, and should have been there at ten.
On Saturday afternoon, the news reported some piece of luggage bearing Lauren’s ID had washed up on a beach at Martha’s Vineyard. A coast guard admiral delivered a press briefing at the Pentagon, describing all the search efforts under way. They were still very hopeful, he said, that they would find survivors. My imagination concocted innocent little fairy tales to explain the nightmare away.
“You know how John loved pranks,” I reminded Seamus. “I bet he pulled a trick and went someplace else, to a beach party or something, but he doesn’t want them to know because he promised to go to the wedding.” Rory’s ceremony had been postponed, of course.
Seamus and I had moved out from Queens when the children were growing up, buying a house a block from the shore in Rocky Point, Long Island. Seamus was sure the flight path John had taken would have had him flying right past our house. The night would have still been clear and beautiful then. He would have been safe with us.
At Mass on Sunday, we prayed with our congregation for the Kennedy family, and for the Bessettes. The priest left prayer cards and red roses at the back of the church to take on our way out. Later that night, the coast guard admiral was back on TV, announcing that they were shifting their focus from search and rescue to search and recovery, official words to say they had given up hope. The admiral went on to say that there was little chance of survival in the cold New England waters past eighteen hours at most.
“He probably survived, Seamus,” I said. “You know he’s a very good swimmer. He survived and swam to a little island. He loves hanging out in the sea grasses.” I pictured John resting there in his sea grass nest until rescuers arrived and found him.
“No, no, no,” Seamus tried to tell me. A plane going that speed and with that force—no one could survive that.
We left CNN on around the clock, waking up from each fitful night to more footage of searchers in inflatable boats bobbing in the waves, with coast guard helicopters circling overhead. On Tuesday, the plane was found a hundred feet deep, resting on the ocean floor. On the fifth day, the bodies of John, Carolyn, and Lauren were recovered and cremated. Their ashes were scattered at sea the next morning.
“That’s the end of Camelot,” I said.
I woke up convinced I had dreamed it all, or maybe blacked out. It didn’t happen, none of it. It couldn’t happen.
Nancy Tuckerman told us we would need to pick up special passes for John’s memorial service at a school off Park Avenue. When I came out, I was flustered by the clamoring mass of journalists now facing me. Cameras and cameras and cameras, and satellite trucks. Seamus and I kept trying to ask people how to get to St. Thomas More, where the service was being held, until finally a cop who seemed to be in charge of crowd control yelled over the noise to a younger one: “Walk them over!” As he escorted us across the street to point us in the right direction, a cameraman suddenly spotted the telltale white envelope we were clutching with passes to the service, and he started clicking away. Two other TV stations chased us down the block and cornered us, then started fighting over whose interview it was. We dodged them both and entered the church.
The service was funny and tender and beautiful, like the little boy I had watched grow up. Jack Walsh was an usher, and across the aisle I recognized one of the McDonnell boys who had gone with us on that trip to Ireland, a grown man now, tears coursing down his face. We ran into Ethel when it was over.
“We lost a good man today,” Seamus told her.
“Seamus, we don’t know what we lost today,” she replied urgently. “We have no idea.”
At home that night, I pulled out the scrapbooks where I kept all my old pictures and letters from my life with the Kennedys.
I poured a glass of wine and sat on the sofa as I thumbed through the yellowing pages.
There was John at four, taking a ski lesson while his Secret Service agent and I looked on. Jack Walsh was wearing my borrowed gloves.
There was that note from Madam asking whether the bad smell in the pantry was a dead rat, and one telling me she had bought a souvenir fan for me in Spain.
Here was Caroline’s wedding invitation and her handwritten thank-yous for little baby gifts I had sent her when she became a mother. She had sent gifts for my children over the years as well, and her graciousness reminded me so much of her mother. If I brought my children to see her at 1040, Madam could never let us leave without finding some small toy or trinket to give them. She fussed at Marta the time she found us visiting with her in the kitchen. “Why didn’t you tell me Kathy was coming?” She had gone into the pantry to rummage around on the shelves, triumphantly returning with a large ceramic duck for my kids. It was a big gravy boat, actually, wholly unsuitable as a toy but a fine addition to my Thanksgiving table.
Recently, my granddaughter, Keira, was fascinated by it when I lifted its wings to pour giblet gravy from its back. Where did that come from? she wanted to know.
“From this wonderful woman I used to work for,” I said.
“Who was she?”
“I’ll tell you the story someday.”
My life felt full of tender little clues of that other life I once had. I collected colored glass bottles like Madam used to do when we browsed in antique shops up at the Cape. I kept them on a high window ledge where the sun shot prismed light across my living room. I’d won a prize for best costume at our club’s Halloween party when I went as Marge Simpson, and no one guessed that the canary yellow dress I wore with little bows on the shoulders was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’s hand-me-down nightgown.
The good night prayer I had learned as a child in Ireland and taught my children and then my grandchildren was the same one I had taught John and Caroline as they knelt beside their childhood beds. I prayed for the angels to watch over them still.
I turned the pages of the scrapbook and smiled at the snapshots of Marta and Provi and a waitress named Nora who had gotten her nose fixed in hopes of getting Mr. Onassis to hire her as a stewardess for his airline.
There was a long letter from Madam on Olympic stationery, telling me what John and Caroline could and couldn’t do when they arrived home after several weeks in Greece. They could have cousins and friends sleep over at 1040, but no more than four or five, and everyone had to stay out of Madam’s room. The children were to play tennis every day.
They wanted to start flying lessons, she wrote me (I knew that a neighbor at the Cape with a plane and a license had offered), but that was not to happen. If John insisted, I was to tell him he had to wait until his mother got home.
Here we all were on the beach the time the kids buried Shannon in sand up to his head, and there was Madam cantering on a chestnut mare through a green Irish field.
A note from John I found on the kitchen counter at the Cape one morning when he had let himself in by climbing through the laundry room window again. He just wanted me to know he’d come in late and woul
d see me in the morning, and even that simple note, he signed with love.
There were the pictures of them all locked away in my memory as well, of all the everyday moments historians never recorded and cameras never captured since that day I became, no matter how hard I resisted, a part of this family.
Five years passed, then ten, then fifty.
Where were you when it happened, Kath?
The question echoed across the span of my lifetime, and I knew the answer I wished I could tell them all now, as I turned the last page before closing my book of memories.
With you, I would say.
I was always with you.
A young Kathy in Inniskeen, Ireland.
Photo courtesy of author’s collection
Taken on her first trip back to Ireland, in 1966, after beginning her job with Mrs. Kennedy, a young Kathy went with her sister to the spot they used to go to each Easter Sunday.
Photo courtesy of author’s collection
Kathy, back row center, at home in Inniskeen with her camogie teammates at school. Her sister Briege is in the back row on the far left.
Photo courtesy of author’s collection
Kathy on a skiing trip with young John.
Photo courtesy of author’s collection
John and a friend goofing off at bath time.
Photo courtesy of author’s collection
Caroline with her grandfather, Joseph Kennedy.
Photo courtesy of author’s collection
John with his pail exploring the dunes.
Photo courtesy of author’s collection
Young Caroline playing games with friends at a ski lodge in Vail, Colorado.
Photo courtesy of author’s collection