Every Saturday night, at Mother’s instruction, Kikoo would line us up against the wall to record our heights. She would pull out her long measuring stick and place a discreet pencil mark on the door’s molding, just in line or slightly above the mark from the previous Saturday. Then she would march us over to the scale to record our weights. If we had gone up or down a few pounds, Kikoo took action. The child losing too much weight would get her clucking sympathy, and perhaps an extra helping of mashed potatoes at supper that evening. But the child gaining too much weight elicited no such sympathy at all. “You bold stump!” she would declare, shaking her head as if we had just committed the lowest of mortal sins. No cookies for the rest of the week.
Which was how I ended up in the closet.
That one extra cookie I swiped off the table was too much for Kikoo, and it was too much for Mother. When Kikoo indignantly reported my transgression, Mother had only one punishment that fit the crime.
“You need to spend some time in the closet, Jean,” she said as she took my hand and escorted me up the stairs, through her bedroom, and toward the waiting closet door.
I walked inside and slunk to the floor. Mother turned and left, pulling the door behind her, leaving only one small crack where the light could peek through. That light allowed me to look around at her clothes, hats, and shoes that surrounded me.
I did not want time out. I wanted time with my sisters and brothers, who were playing ball on the lawn outside. I could hear their voices through the open window in Mother’s bedroom. Who was winning the game? Did they just say my name? Do they realize that I’m not there?
Teddy and me in Bronxville (1933)
John F. Kennedy Library Foundation. Kennedy Family Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.
Then . . . SMASH!
Something had happened. There was a sudden scuffling in the bedroom. The closet door opened swiftly—a flash of light—a figure whisked past me, and then all was dark and still again. All except for a small sniffle at the other side of the closet.
I was no longer alone.
I recognized the sound of that sniffle immediately.
“Teddy?” I whispered.
“Who’s that?” came the startled voice of my little brother from across the floor.
“It’s Jean, silly. What are you doing in here?”
“I broke a window with the ball,” he replied. “Mother called me out of the game and put me in here. What are you doing here?”
It was so unlike Mother to have made a mistake like this. But she had. Mother, who never seemed to forget anything, had forgotten that I was already in the closet, and she had put Teddy in here, too. Teddy, my playmate. Teddy, my loyal chum. How perfect! My luck had changed.
We sat in silence for a minute or two as Teddy continued to sniffle and rub tears from his cheeks.
“Teddy?” I finally whispered again. Through the faint light, I saw his head turn in my direction.
Boldly, I stuck my grubby toes into Mother’s new ivory satin shoes. If she had been there to see me handling them that way, she might have collapsed. But we were blissfully on our own.
“Do you think these heels go well with my dungarees?” I asked.
I saw something shine across the closet: Teddy’s eyes. His tears had stopped.
I started popping Mother’s hats on and off the top of my head.
“Do you prefer the red chapeau with the blue feather or the yellow chapeau with the green ribbon?” I asked.
Teddy was moving closer. A smile started taking over his face.
I rolled onto my back to stare at the ceiling. He rolled onto his back too, his head next to mine.
“Teddy,” I said, after a minute or two, “do you think we will ever get out of this closet? Do you think we’ll ever be set free? Or do you think we’ll be like Amelia Earhart, stuck here forever?”
He giggled. It had worked. Teddy was himself again—and that meant he was ready to play.
“Where do you think she is, Jean? Amelia Earhart?” he asked, then continued, without taking a breath: “She must be on a deserted island, don’t you think? Doesn’t she have to be alive? I can’t believe they can’t find her. Don’t you think that’s odd? Maybe she’ll come home, but I’m not so sure. It’s such a mystery, Jeannie. I just love a good mystery!”
So went the rest of our time in the closet. Teddy and I sailed off to a faraway island together, to the bright blue world where Amelia Earhart must have landed, waking on the sand and blinking in the sun, ready to make a new home for herself.
We imagined how afraid she must be so far from home, but also how intrigued at the curiosities around her. We shivered at the strange noises of the jungle. We walked miles down the sandy beach with her looking for traces of life. We made friends with chimpanzees and ate plump berries and coconut.
Lying on our backs, looking around at Mother’s sparkling gowns, we imagined the moon gleaming down on us with a cockeyed smile. On our island, the waves splashed, and the birds cawed. Amelia was content, and so were we.
All too soon, Mother returned.
“Teddy, dear,” she said as she opened the door. Then her eyes fell on me.
“Oh Jean. You’re in here, too”—and she realized in that instant what she had done. A brief spark of recognition passed over her face, but nothing more. Mother was not about to admit her mistake. She knew that if the story got around to the others, she would never live it down.
She looked quickly across the closet, making sure her dresses, hats, and shoes were intact. Satisfied that we had not torn the place apart, she pardoned the criminals.
“Your time is up, you two,” she pronounced. “You can go out and play again.”
Teddy and I rose to our feet and stretched. Then, stepping out of the South Pacific, we walked past Mother and returned to Cape Cod.
5
Faith, Values, and Hard Work
One can’t walk out on a job just because one wants to. Obligations must be fulfilled.
—JOSEPH P. KENNEDY
Mother and Dad made sure we understood that we were not the center of the universe. Rather, we were here to serve a greater good. Our faith, and our relationship with God, was extremely important to our parents. For Mother in particular, faith was the bedrock of her life. She and Dad believed that a strong ethical and spiritual compass was essential to our leading meaningful lives. And as their parents and grandparents had before them, they turned to the Catholic Church and its teachings as our guide for what was right and wrong.
Faith was not an oppressive presence in our house, but it was a constant one, a buttress and a buffer against life’s troubles. From a practical point of view, Mother made certain that we observed all the important rituals, like most Irish-Catholic families in the early days of the twentieth century. We were baptized within days of being born to ensure that we were cleansed of original sin. The sacraments of First Confession, First Holy Communion, and Confirmation followed as we grew.
As little children, before and after meals and right before bed, Mother would take our small hands in hers and guide us in the words that served as the introduction to prayer for the rest of our lives. Placing our fingers first on our foreheads, then on our chests, then to the left shoulder, and then to our right, she had us repeat after her, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.”
Mother taught us all the prayers necessary for a good Catholic upbringing: Hail Mary, Our Father, Hail Holy Queen. We learned to recite the rosary, and she always insisted we had one in our pockets when we traveled. Without fail, we attended Mass every Sunday, on First Fridays, and on the Holy Days of Obligation—the Epiphany on January 6; the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary on August 15, the Immaculate Conception on December 8, and so on. It was against all family and church rules even to think of missing Mass on those designated days. My brothers served as altar boys at our local church. We girls wore veils on our heads and carried prayer books, genufl
ecting in the aisle and then filing into the pews side by side for the solemn Latin service. All other Catholic families we knew were doing the same. It was not unusual.
It would have been easy, in the midst of all this ritual, for Mother and Dad to forget the point of it all. But they made certain that our true religious education remained focused where they felt it needed to be: on faith and service rather than on structure and dogma. A favorite evening lesson of Mother’s was the Beatitudes, taken from the Gospel of St. Matthew. Mother would recite them for us, pausing, for emphasis, at the end of each phrase. It was one clear message, delivered regularly to nine sets of attentive ears.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.
Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.
Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
The lessons of the Beatitudes became the primer for how Mother and Dad felt we should live. They became the guide for how they felt we should treat one another and treat other people. Often after reciting them, Mother would remind us, “These are the people whom He wants you to help.”
She and Dad believed we could serve the world most fully by engaging in what Dad called “good works, good reputation, and hard work.” “Honest effort sometimes is disappointing in its results, but in the long run never misses,” Dad wrote to a teenage Jack. Dad and Mother did not abide idleness nor did they listen to complaining. And we were certainly expected to tread a principled path.
“Without meaning any criticism of your very excellent character,” Dad once wrote to Kick, “I have noted that with you popular opinions are frequently accepted as true opinions. There is nothing particularly wrong in this, it’s safe and you’ve got plenty of company, which you like. But I think you’ll find that the majority are only occasionally well-informed and that your own judgement is frequently better, and will always be more Christian than opinion in mass. So don’t bum rides on other people’s opinions. It’s lazy at best and in some cases much worse.”
It was a pointed warning and typical of the kind Dad delivered when he feared we might veer off course. No doubt he had been observing Kick, his fun-loving daughter, swirling in and out of the house with friends. Each weekend, she piled into a car with girls from school, and their laughter would trail them out the drive. Dad and Kick were immensely close. He admired her knack for instantly drawing people in. Yet he also wanted to remind her to think and act for herself.
I suspect it was because their parents came from so little themselves that Mother and Dad placed such great store in good character and hard work. Mother’s father, John Fitzgerald, had to raise and support his brothers when his Irish immigrant parents died quite suddenly. Luckily his love of the common man and his natural gregariousness led him in the direction of politics, where he achieved enormous success. When he was not holding office, Grandpa was hard at work at the helm of a weekly newspaper he purchased called the Republic.
Mother recalled how Grandpa often left the house in the morning before anyone else was up and would return late, after dinner. Where other men might have collapsed into a chair, he would pace the room, regaling his wife and young children with stories of the people he met on the train or his current fight for the little man in City Hall. To Grandpa, service to others was a joy.
Dad’s father had similar roots, and the same outlook. I did not know my grandfather P.J., because he died before I was born. Still, I often heard Dad speak with tremendous pride about his father and what he had achieved. When P.J. was a very young child in East Boston, he saw his own father die, nearly penniless. His mother, Bridget, opened a shop where P.J. worked running errands and making deliveries along the docks, to support her and his three siblings. Because of their desperate circumstances, P.J. never finished elementary school. He saved enough not only to support his family, but to help his neighbors with loans. He also became involved in politics and pursued and held elected office, though, unlike Grandpa Fitzgerald, he preferred to stay behind the scenes.
P.J. was Dad’s role model for how to persevere in business while also being a good man. When Dad entered the workforce himself, he followed in his father’s footsteps. A young man with a steely, determined air about him, Dad struck out into life to succeed. Even at eight years old, he was a go-getter. He loved to read and was very excited when the Larkin Soap Company announced it would award a beautiful oak bookcase to the person who gathered the most tickets enclosed in its products. His sister, our aunt Loretta Connelly, told us that Dad sold soap to everyone he knew and then asked if he could have the ticket inside. He organized a team of friends to span out across East Boston and do the same. It was no surprise when Larkin awarded the bookcase to a young Joe Kennedy.
Even as a child, Dad was never not working. He sold newspapers to the workers on the docks in East Boston and candies and peanuts to passengers on the boats. He was one of the few Irish-Catholic boys to be admitted to Harvard College at that time in history, and he excelled there. His industrious spirit ever on display, Dad partnered with a school friend to buy a bus that they used to shuttle students to and from school, earning quite a healthy sum to support their education. Clearly drawn to economics and finance, after he graduated in 1912, Dad took his first job as a state bank examiner. A year later, in 1913, during the time he was seriously courting Mother, he was called upon by his father to help save the Columbia Trust Company, a bank that P.J. had helped found and that was the target of a takeover. After a very public battle, Columbia Trust remained independent and Dad was chosen as its leader, becoming the youngest bank president in the nation at the age of twenty-five.
Dad continued his steep rise in business, making shrewd and, what some considered at the time, risky investments in finance, publishing, and film. He had a well-earned reputation for being a tough, skillful negotiator. It was a reputation I suspect he enjoyed. Yet he was enormously bighearted and openhanded in a way that few people would ever imagine and others would never acknowledge. Ever loyal and devoted to the Christian Brothers who educated him beginning at the age of six, Dad continued to quietly support them for decades. Scores of friends and strangers reported to us similar acts of kindness over the years. Like his father before him, Dad worked behind the scenes.
Dad at work
© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS.
“What interests me is that he has done so many generous things for so many people without wanting such acts to be known,” Dad’s friend Carroll Rosenbloom once recalled.
I suspect Dad’s generosity grew from his desire to always remain self-aware and self-effacing. He was an example to us that no matter what good fortune came our way, it should not be accompanied by pride. On his desk, Dad kept a poem, “The Indispensable Man,” by Saxon White Kessinger, which served as his reminder to himself of his place in the world:
Sometime when you’re feeling important
Sometime when your ego’s in bloom
Sometime when you take it for granted
You’re the best qualified in the room
Sometime when you feel that your going
Would leave an unfillable hole
Just follow these simple instructions
And see how they humble your soul;
Take a bucket and fill it with water
Put your hand in it, up to the wrist
Pull it out . . . and the hole that’s remaining
Is a measure of how you’ll be missed.
Dad’s business was constant and exhausting. It often called him far away from home. We missed him terribly every
time he was away, and sent him letters and telegrams telling him so: “Dear Daddy: I hope you come home soon. I think of you every night. I want to kiss you,” wrote a five-year-old Pat. He missed us right back, and wrote constant letters with news from his travels and questions about our lives at home.
“I hope the skating turns out to be lots of fun and I will be anxious to hear just what happened to you,” he wrote Rosemary. “Be sure to wear a big pillow where you sit down so that when you sit on the ice (as I know you will) you won’t get too black and blue.”
Every time Dad arrived back home, he gave each of us a huge embrace and a kiss on the cheek. He flooded us with affection, even as we grew and went away to college. Less confident young men might have been embarrassed to see their Dad striding toward them across campus, smile wide and arms extended. But Joe and Jack just hugged him right back.
“He wasn’t around as much as some fathers, but . . . he made his children feel that they were the most important things in the world to him,” Jack later said. Dad was not a bystander in our lives. He was our champion and defender. He was there urging us on from the sidelines of our games and from the shores of our races. “After you have done the best you can,” he told us, “then the hell with it.” But if we had not pushed ourselves to the limit, he told us so, and firmly. It was not easy to take but always essential to hear.
Mother often reminded us how much Dad loved us and that he showed his love by working so hard to ensure our security and future. She, in the meantime, ensured that the household ran efficiently and that every penny Dad earned was spent wisely. She never wanted us to take money for granted, and she didn’t, either.
“I grew up with the idea that one should be careful with money, that none should be spent without good and sufficient reason—tangible and intangible—to justify each expense,” Mother later wrote.
The Nine of Us Page 4