Dad, early in his career (1926)
Photographer Unknown. Kennedy Family Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.
In 1914, Mother would marry Dad, who was equally independent and strong-willed and shared her disregard for social barriers and her determination to rise above them. The young couple bought their first home at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, about a twenty-five minute trolley ride from the center of Boston. It was an old clapboard house with nine rooms. There Joe, Jack, Rosemary, and Kick were born. Once the quarters grew too small, the family moved to 131 Naples Road, a few blocks away, in time to welcome Eunice, Pat, and Bobby.
But it nagged at Dad that by growing up in Boston, his children might face the same obstacles and high-handedness from the establishment that he and Mother had encountered. “Boston was no place to bring up Irish Catholic children,” Dad once told a newspaper reporter. He wanted us to have a carefree childhood where we would feel unencumbered and accepted. So Dad went in search of a second home, a summer home, where we would feel accepted no matter what our roots, no matter where we came from. Dad traveled south all the way to Cape Cod until he reached Hyannis Port. There he found the white house by the sea.
“If you want your children to come home, buy a house by the sea,” Dad would later say. He was speaking from experience. Wherever we lived as a family, wherever we ventured, down the street to the village or across the ocean to Europe, the nine of us always came back to the sea, which was Hyannis Port.
There were other notable homes in our childhood. For me, second only to Hyannis Port was the house in Bronxville. The year before I was born, Dad’s work demanded that he spend a great deal of his time in New York City, away from Mother and his sons and daughters. This was not an ideal situation for a man who adored his family, which, by then, had seven children under the age of eleven. Dad could not stand being away for long, and Mother needed his input and help. So in 1927 they decided to move the family closer to Manhattan. After some looking around, they settled on a small village just north of the city, in Westchester County, called Bronxville.
Pat and Teddy (Bronxville, 1934)
John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. Kennedy Family Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.
Teddy, Bobby, and me dressed as pirates on Halloween (Bronxville, 1934)
John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. Kennedy Family Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.
The home they found on Pondfield Road was large enough to hold the entire family. Anchored by soaring pillars out front, the Bronxville house had six acres of sweeping, wooded grounds that were perfect for exploring on fall afternoons, with a steep hill for sledding when the snow eventually came. We had enough bedrooms for everyone, with each one opening onto a wide second-floor balcony.
Bronxville is where our family spent the fall and winter months for more than a dozen years. It is also the house where Teddy and I first lived as infants, though we were born far away. As much as Mother loved New York, she was still a New Englander through and through, and she entrusted the delivery of her babies to only one obstetrician, Dr. Frederick Good of Boston. So when the time came for me to arrive into the world, in 1928, and for Teddy to arrive four years later, Mother left New York and traveled the two hundred miles to St. Margaret’s Hospital in Boston to deliver us there. Then, after the specified period of recuperation, back to Bronxville we came.
Bronxville was the home where I learned to walk and from which I first went off to school. It was the scene of many family celebrations, including that most miraculous of holidays—Christmas! Mother once described Christmas as “the greatest event in our house,” and she and Dad made it so. The entire family came home to Bronxville from our various boarding schools to a house full of activity. Dad would choose the largest Christmas tree he could find and set it up in the sunroom. It was then our job to drape it with tinsel and our colorful collection of ornaments. Construction paper and crayon creations we made for Mother hung side by side with the delicate, sparkling glass bulbs that she had received as gifts. Surreptitious gift wrapping took place in every corner of the house. “It’s the prettiest tree yet!” Dad declared each year, as the presents began to pile up beneath it.
No matter how young we were, we liked giving gifts to one another. We might draw a picture and place it in a frame we had made from cardboard. Or we would head off to the five-and-dime store with Mother to find a little book, a set of pencils, or a toy car that Teddy or Bobby or Pat might like. Mother emphasized that it was the sentiment, not the size of the gift or price that mattered. She also made sure we understood that we were to be grateful for everything we received.
On Christmas Eve, Mother took her place at the piano in Bronxville and accompanied us through our most beloved carols: “Deck the Halls,” “Silent Night,” “Away in the Manger.” At the top of our lungs, off-key and on, we sang, over and over again, verse after verse. Then, just before the smallest of us headed up to bed, she would gather us around the crèche and tell us the Christmas story. “This is the reason we are celebrating tonight,” she explained. Her gentle voice spoke of the poor couple setting off toward Bethlehem more than a thousand years before, finding no place to sleep but a manger. With words, she painted a picture of the shepherds, late at night, looking up to see a blazing, yet welcoming, star that guided them across the fields to the humble stable. There, with Mother at the crèche, we felt warm, loved, and happy.
Christmas morning started with early Mass for all. We crammed into the pews in our wool coats. I wedged in between Eunice and Kick and itched for Mass to end so I could race back to the house and see what Santa Claus had delivered. The prayers seemed so much longer on Christmas morning. The priest moved so much more slowly. Didn’t he have gifts to open, too?
Santa brought to us what he was delivering to boys and girls all across America. Each year we received just one special present: a doll, a game, a set of roller skates. It was impossible to contain Bobby’s glee when he finally got the electric train he had been hoping for. It wound its way under the tree and out into the hall. For years to follow, he and Teddy would spend hours playing with that magnificent train upstairs in the crowded attic.
If we were lucky enough to have snow on Christmas, we were soon out the door and into the garage to retrieve our sleds. Soaping up the runners for maximum speed, we careened down the hill outside, again and again and again.
Another big Bronxville moment was the visit of Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli, who came one afternoon for tea. For a devout Catholic family like ours at that time in American history, this was a momentous occasion. As secretary of state for the Vatican, the cardinal had been touring the United States and was visiting President Franklin D. Roosevelt and other dignitaries at the president’s home, Hyde Park, on the Hudson River. Much to my parents’ delight, the American Cardinal Francis Spellman, a friend of our father’s, had arranged for Cardinal Pacelli to stop for a visit at our house on his way back into New York City.
We all stood in a line in the front hallway at the Bronxville house to greet His Eminence, curtseying and bowing and then kissing his ring as Mother had instructed us. Cardinal Pacelli wore long red robes and the trademark magenta skullcap. We were nervous, but he quickly put us at ease with his gentle nature.
The cardinal moved into the living room, where he sat on our sofa. I watched with envy as he took four-year-old Teddy on his knee. We, of course, had no idea at the time that in just three years, Cardinal Pacelli would be elected by the College of Cardinals as Pope Pius XII. By that time, our father would be the U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James and we would be living in London. We traveled to the Vatican in Rome, where, again to my envy, Teddy received his First Holy Communion from the newly elected Pope.
Mother had a plaque made and mounted on the back of the living room sofa to mark the day the future Pope sat there. Once Mother and Dad sold the Bronxville house, they moved the sofa t
o Hyannis Port, where it held a place of honor in that living room, too. Every time a guest came to visit, the first stop on Mother’s tour of the house was the sofa where the future Pope sat.
These were magical years in our family, our together years, those charmed days before the world broke out in war. Whether it was in Bronxville on the autumn break from school or in Hyannis Port during the glorious, languid summer, my brothers, sisters, and I occupied the same space. We ranged in age: At one end of the line were the older boys, Joe and Jack, fearless, forceful teenagers soon bound for college. At the other end was the young gang, Bobby, Teddy, and me, eager to keep up. Wedged in the middle was a staircase of girls, Rosemary, Kick, Eunice, and Pat, who linked the two ends of the chain fast together.
At work on Wall Street and then in Washington, DC, Dad was intensely occupied with economic and international concerns. And we younger children could not avoid overhearing his constant dinnertime conversation with the older boys about the conflict simmering overseas. They debated back and forth about what the next step should be for America. Those of us at the small table did not quite grasp the enormity of the threat that occupied their minds and would so soon occupy our entire nation.
Despite the fun, there were still difficult times, and suffering did come close to home. Most profoundly for our mother, she lost her beloved sister Agnes during that period in our lives. The two of them were close in age and had been inseparable growing up. Mother was Agnes’s only bridesmaid when she married New York lawyer Joseph Gargan in 1929. When she died just seven years later, Mother was devastated.
Yet from that tragedy came a wonderful addition to our household. Mother and Dad welcomed Agnes’s three children, our cousins Mary Jo, Joey, and little Ann, as members of our own family. Their father had a very demanding work schedule, so for the next many summers, our cousins came to stay. The Cape house had plenty of room and activities galore. Mary Jo was close in age to Pat, so they fell right in with each other. Joey matched up with Teddy and became his lifelong pal. Ann was younger than the rest of us, and many years later, when Dad became ill, she became his close companion and caregiver.
Once they arrived for the first summer, the Gargans were a constant presence. Grandpa and Grandma Fitzgerald, who were also their grandparents, frequently visited, and the household was in perpetual motion. Brothers and sisters came and went. Friends joined in from the village or school. We simply added more plates to the table and squeezed in more chairs.
For those few short years under the same roof, before separation and war, our family was together and we were one. These were happy times.
4
Closet Castaways
I looked on child rearing not only as a work of love and duty but as a profession that was fully as interesting and challenging as any honorable profession in the world and one that demanded the best that I could bring to it.
—ROSE FITZGERALD KENNEDY
For each of us, our education began in the nursery. And on days when we were especially naughty, it was reinforced in the closet.
Mother sent us to the closet when she had had enough. In the parental parlance of today, it was where we had our “time out.”
“Jean, do not try that again,” Mother warned one afternoon, spying me near the plate of chocolate chip cookies sitting on the kitchen table. But once she was out of sight, I reached for a cookie anyway—and into the closet I went.
Mother had absolutely no patience for children who did not obey. Since there were nine of us—or twelve when the Gargans came to stay—Mother knew that if even one child bucked up against her, the rest of us would surely follow. The last thing she needed was a herd of unruly bucks racing through the house writing on walls, pulling at curtains, and swiping cookies from plates. She made it clear that we were not allowed to have our own way or contradict her. She made decisions “for our own good.” It was the only way she could keep any sense of order and peace.
Mother was never untucked or untidy. Her hands were always in use, directing, instructing, reading, playing the piano, darning, and jotting down notes for each of us on the index cards in her special file box. When we moved to England in 1938, for Dad to take up his position as U.S. ambassador to the Court of St. James, the British press used her filing system as an example of American ingenuity and efficiency. But Mother always insisted the situation was much simpler than that. The cards helped preserve her sanity and ensure our survival.
Mother also kept up with important events in the news, and she expected us to do the same. Early each morning, after returning from Mass, she sat down in the kitchen with a cup of tea or coffee and the daily newspaper. In Bronxville, she might be reading the New York Times; at Hyannis Port she took the Cape Cod Standard-Times. If she came across an interesting story or tidbit, she clipped it out, pulled a safety pin from her pocket, and attached it to her dress. In this way she was certain to remember to tell us about it when we arrived at the table for breakfast.
We usually wandered, one by one, into the breakfast room to find Mother already there, still reading the newspaper with these clippings pinned up the side of her dress. As we started in on our toast and cereal, Mother would begin to unpin each article. She would read us the contents and then ask our opinions.
“Children, there are enormous dust storms sweeping through the Great Plains. Those poor people are breathing in dust and soot. What would you do if you were in their situation?”
“Stock up on some masks?” Bobby might venture, in between sips of orange juice.
“Or run into the sea?” Teddy would add.
Then Mother would take up another clip:
“Did you know that Eleanor Roosevelt is bringing bunnies to the White House? She sounds like you, Bobby! What do you think she’ll name them, Pat?”
“Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottontail,” Pat answered assuredly.
“And Peter!” I added.
Then another:
“Poor Amelia Earhart is still missing. It’s been weeks. It seems impossible they haven’t found her. Where do you think she could be, children?”
“They say she may have landed on the Polynesian islands,” Jack surmised.
“I have a stamp from there,” Bobby inserted proudly.
“That sounds like it might be fun!” said Teddy.
Our breakfasts were feasts of facts.
Having nine children made Mother supremely practical and efficient. If one of us came down with a contagious illness, it simply made sense to her that the rest of us should come down with it too. Why spend the year cycling child after child through the flu, measles, and chicken pox when we could get it over with in one go? As soon as the doctor stepped from the room of a sibling to report an infectious disease, the rest of us were hustled inside by Mother to play. Within days we all would be scratching or wheezing in unison. It was much more bearable to suffer through it together, and after a week the sickness was out of the house for good.
Of course, Mother did not keep the household moving and all of us educated, fed, and in good health alone. Dad was constantly in the mix, of course, but he was regularly traveling for his work in the financial and film industries, and later as a government official in Washington. So Mother was fortunate enough to recieve assistance from several women who had immigrated to the United States from Ireland to seek work with American families as nurses or nannies. Mother, so conscious of her own great-grandparents’ immigration story, was eager to give these women a place in our home. And they were central to her life and to ours.
These resilient women took charge of diaper changing, bottle washing, pram pushing, ear scrubbing, and meal planning. Women did not have the luxury of disposable diapers or electric clothes dryers in those days. Instead, they had to use cloth diapers, which were washed and dried in the open air before being put back on the baby to be soiled again. There was no jarred baby food, either, so our nurses boiled the vegetables and fruit from scratch and pureed them by hand. They helped corral us every morning outside the
bathroom to file in and brush our teeth. We repeated the same drill every night. Mother often spoke of her enormous gratitude for the assistance our nurses gave her during those early days, when the tasks of keeping nine children and their needs in order could quickly become overwhelming.
Dad also deeply appreciated the help our nurses gave Mother, and insisted that they use his car if they were going out for the evening. Or he would invite them to watch a movie with the family in the small theater he set up in the basement of the house in Hyannis Port. “Take time for a swim today. The water is wonderful,” Dad would tell Keela Cahill, one of our favorite nurses. Or, “Use the symphony tickets this week. I’ll be away.” He wanted to make sure these women were not treated with the same disdain and disrespect that had accosted his ancestors when they arrived in Boston two generations before.
In addition to Miss Cahill, looming large in our life was Katherine “Kikoo” Conboy, a broad Irish woman with dark hair and a round face that was often jolly and sometimes stern, depending on the day’s events. Kikoo was a constant presence in the nursery when Pat, Bobby, Teddy, and I were small. She would pull us in and wrap us in her arms when we were sad or scared. “There, there,” she would say. Kikoo instantly appeared with Mercurochrome and a bandage if we scraped a knee or stubbed a toe. But she also had a strong side and had no patience for nonsense. On the days when we stepped out of line, Kikoo was not one to mess with. She took her job very seriously.
You bold stump!” Kikoo bellowed out the window at Bobby, who seemed always to be doing what she did not want him to do. “Come inside this instant!” she hollered as he dashed around the fence to play ball in the alley with his friends. Miss Cahill once had to stop Kikoo from banging Bobby’s head against the wall to get him to go to sleep. It is still unclear why Kikoo thought banging Bobby’s head would do the trick, but thanks to Miss Cahill, we never actually had to find out if it worked.
The Nine of Us Page 3