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‘Of course you can,’ she said. ‘That's precisely what you can do. It's never too late. You disappoint me greatly, Nora.’
Then she closed her eyes, which is always her way of saying the conversation is over. That neat little foldaway face.
Four days we had of it. Threats and lectures and tears, and all the time I knew Kick was clinging to one silly thing her daddy had said on the telephone. That if it could be shown Blood Fitzwilliam had never been baptised, then his marriage to Lady Obby wouldn't count and he'd be free to take instruction and marry Kick in a proper Catholic church. It was all moonshine of course. The Fitzwilliams weren't the kind of family that would have overlooked baptising their son and heir, but it was typical of Mr Kennedy to dream up something like that, ducking and diving under the regulations until he found a wee hole to slip through.
I'll say this for him, though. He just wanted his girl to be happy. He knew nothing she did was likely to harm Jack's prospects, nor Bobby's, nor Teddy's. He'd see to that. The boys were his affair and whatever happened, whatever trouble they got into or talk there might be about the family, he'd keep things on track for them.
Kick cried and begged, but when it really came down to it she didn't care what her mammy did. She absolutely would not promise to give up Fitzwilliam. So Mrs Kennedy had Delia pack her bags for the onward journey to Paris and the car was ordered to take her to the aerodrome. It was an ugly leave-taking.
She said, ‘I won't stay another night in this house. You've fallen into bad company, Kathleen, and I rue the day we ever brought you to England. The Mothers at Sacred Heart laid out your path but you've deviated from it, and so deliberately too. No one can ever excuse you; no one can say you weren't taught right from wrong. Well, if you really refuse to acknowledge your errors I shall see to it you at least don't ruin your sisters with your carrying-on. They'll have nothing more to do with you. Don't telephone because they won't accept your calls and don't send letters because I shall have them burned. There's nothing more to be said until you're ready to repent.’
I was just standing there like an article of furniture, holding that horrible wrap with the fox head dangling over my arm. It seemed to me I didn't have a lot left to lose.
I said, ‘I never heard such a cruel thing. A girl needs her family, and the bigger the muddle she's in, the more she needs them, and sure weren't you the one always taught them to put family before everything else?’
‘Nora Brennan,’ she said, ‘you should have been let go years ago. I wouldn't have kept you on, married in a town hall. Well, now we see what an influence you've been. Now we see it clear. I'll pray for your soul, Kathleen. I can't do more. Until you mend your ways I will not see you. You'll be dead to me.’
She said it flat, with that darling girl standing right there. How does it sit with her now, I wonder, seeing the way things turned out? How many times has she wished she could take back those terrible words? Anyone might say a thing in anger, then wish it unsaid, but Rose Kennedy isn't anyone. I've been around her long enough to know. For a woman who's a Gold Star mother she has a heart as hard as the hob of hell.
THE RIGHT KIND OF FAMILY (#u6543cfbe-7142-58a4-929b-9e7a41911528)
I came to work for the Kennedys in the spring of 1917. I'd been five years in America by then, come over to be with my two sisters. Marimichael Donnelly from across the lane was on the same sailing as me. They waked us two nights together before we left, with whiskey drummed up from somewhere by the Donnelly boys, telling us what a grand future the both of us had and then weeping and clinging on to us to keep us at home. We'd neither of us been out of Westmeath before. I'd never appreciated that sky and water could stretch so far, and I know they say the world's like an apple and doesn't have an edge a ship can tumble over, but I've never understood how they know. I was braced for the end all the way, till I saw the roofs of East Boston.
Marimichael had a sister who'd gone ahead too. That was how we did it in those days. The oldest one went, then she'd send the fare for the next and so on, till everyone was settled. It was the only thing to do. The factories were starting up around Tullamore so the demand for hand-knitting was dropping off and there was no other way to make a living.
We were six in our family, one boy and five girls, except Nellie was in the graveyard, dead with the measles and only four years old. Ursie's the oldest. She left for Boston in 1909. Took a correspondence course in bookkeeping and taught herself the Pitman shorthand and she was off. She got work in the office of Holkum, Holkum and Jauncey, and to hear her she ended up practically running the place.
Ursie always had ideas. Writing paper without lines was one of her things, not that there was a lot of letter writing went on in our house, but she said lined paper was common, and she used to have a fit if ever Mammy put the milk can on the table instead of the china pitcher. After she got to America and started earning she'd send us marvellous things, not only money. Caramels and hatpins and silk stockings, and a beautiful handbag for Mammy one Christmas, real leather from Jordan Marsh, with a big, gilt snap. Dear God, we had everyone from Ballynagore come in to view that handbag. We should have charged to see it.
She must have had some courage to go off like that, not knowing a living soul in America. When they were handing out gumption I reckon Ursie got Edmond's share. He's hardly been further than the foot of the stairs.
Margaret went out to join Ursie in 1910 and I cried myself sick. Ursie wasn't the kind of sister you missed, except like an aching tooth after it's been pulled, but Margaret had always been my pal. We'd shared a bed, even. When Mammy and Deirdre went to wave her off on the bus I couldn't bear to go with them. I was convinced I'd never see her again. She kept saying, ‘You will too. I'll send for you and then you'll send for Deirdre.’
But Deirdre could never have gone to America. She had a sweet nature and the voice of an angel but she was the kind of girl that would easily be taken advantage of. She used to get confused enough in Tullamore market so she'd have been lost in a minute in Boston. Anyway, Father Hughes said a girl like Deirdre would likely be blessed with a vocation, so we all prayed for that and our prayers were answered. She went to the Maryknoll Sisters, and then to Africa to teach little black children about our Risen Lord, which left just me at home and Mammy and my brother Edmond.
Ursie kept writing that I should still think of going to America. Mother won't stand in your way, she wrote. She didn't call her ‘Mammy’ any more, since she worked for Holkum, Holkum and Jauncey. She'll be a lot happier knowing you're making something of yourself. She has Edmond to take care of her.
Edmond was supposed to be the head of the house. Dada had the Irish disease and after we lost Nellie he just turned his face to the wall and died.
Mammy used to say, ‘Edmond's a thinker. He doesn't rush into things. And did you ever see such a fine head of hair on a man?’
Well, that part was true. I believe it acted like a goose-feather comforter. It kept his noddle so warm and cosy his brain fell asleep.
I don't know whether I would have gone and left Mammy in his care, but anyway, as things turned out it was Mammy who left us. She'd a growth under her left bosom that had eaten her away inside and she'd been too shy to say anything until it was too late.
‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘I've had a good life. I've had my span.’
But she'd only had forty-seven years and she could have had more if she hadn't been such a muggins about taking off her vest in front of the doctor. She died in the autumn of 1911 and before the year was out Edmond took off his thinking cap and announced he was marrying the Clavin widow from Horseleap and bringing her to our home. So my mind was made up for me. I couldn't have stayed in the house with that woman. She'd a face would turn fresh milk. Margaret sent me the fare and I was on my way.
Marimichael went into a cotton mill when we got to Boston, same as her sister, and Margaret could have got me a start at the grocer's where she worked, but Ursie had bigger ideas.
She said, ‘You've a brain in your head, Nora. Use it. Nursing would be suitable. The uniforms are very attractive.’
But I liked the idea of going into service, somewhere where I'd have my own room.
I said, ‘If I'm going to wipe BTMs and mop up dribble I'd as soon do it for a nice sweet little baby as somebody who smells of sickness or some grouchy old feller. I'll go for a nurserymaid.’
‘Just be sure it's the right kind of family,’ she said. ‘A doctor, or a lawyer, like Mr Jauncey. Cultured, professional people. There are people who have money to run a full staff but no breeding. You don't want to end up with a family like that.’
I got a start with the Griffin family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to look after Loveday who was three and the baby who was on the way, Arthur. Ursie seemed to think they were good enough for me, even if they were a bit modern. Dr Griffin was a scientist at the university but he thought nothing of pushing the bassinet out on a weekend. There was only me, a housemaid, a woman who came in on Mondays to do the laundry and a man who helped with the garden. Mrs Griffin did all the cooking and I had every Sunday off and one night a week. I used to meet Margaret at a soda fountain and she'd give out to me about Ursie while we watched the boys go by. That's where we met Jimmy Swords and Frankie Mulcahy.
It's a funny thing about boys. They go around in pairs and if one of them is good-looking the other's sure to be a poor specimen. That was Frankie. He always looked like he'd lost a dollar and found a cent, but Margaret fell for him, and Jimmy was keen on me. The only problem with Jimmy and Frankie was they worked as fish porters. They were always washed and shaved and dressed in a nice clean collar and tie when we saw them, but there was still that smell. You can never get rid of it. Jimmy seemed steady though. We never quarrelled, and the Griffins liked him because he used to bring oysters for them or a lobster, when he came to walk me out.
I had my nursery and my own room up under the roof and I had my beau. I was very suited, but then Dr Griffin said he was moving to a different university, in California, and I had to decide whether to go with them. Ursie thought I should.
She said, ‘You've made a good start, Nora, now build on it. The Griffins think highly of you and you mustn't flit from position to position. It doesn't inspire confidence.’
But Jimmy didn't want me to go.
He said, ‘I'm putting money by. Stay in Boston and we'll get married. Next year.’
So the Griffins went off to California and I applied for a new position, in Beals Street, Brookline. The Kennedy family. They had a little one just walking, Joseph Patrick, and another one on the way.
I had to go to the house to be interviewed and inspected by Mrs Kennedy. She's only a year or two older than me and people say she has the secret of eternal youth. To look at us now you'd think I could give her a few years, but that first day I met her she seemed quite the little matron. First thing she told me was how she had to be most particular about the help she employed, because of her position.
She said, ‘My husband is president of a bank.’
The house was nothing to shout about and neither was the money they were offering.
She said, ‘And I expect you recognise me.’
But I didn't know her from Atty Hayes's donkey. She laughed.
She said, ‘You're a newcomer. If you were Boston-born you'd know my face from the dailies. I'm Mayor Fitzgerald's daughter.’
Well, you couldn't be in Boston five minutes without hearing of him, so that satisfied her. She rattled on, perched at her bureau like a neat little bird, telling me all about her travels and the big names she'd met. She even had tea brought in, and I still didn't know if I had the job or not.
‘I was my father's right-hand woman,’ she said. ‘My mother didn't have the nerves for public life so I went everywhere with him. But now of course I'm too busy running my own home. Mr Kennedy works very long hours in business.’
And that was the truth. I was there three weeks before I properly met him. He'd get home late and leave again early. He was a tall carrot-top of a man with a tombstone smile and ice-blue eyes. He came up to the nursery one Saturday morning and started throwing Joseph Patrick up in the air to make him squeal.
He said, ‘I'm Joe Kennedy. You have everything you need? Anything you need, tell Mrs Kennedy. Money's no object. And make sure this boy of mine eats his greens. I have big plans for him.’
Mrs K gave me a book to read the day I arrived, on how a nursery should be run. Everything was to be done by the clock. When the new baby came she was going to nurse it, but between feeds there was to be no picking it up or rocking the cradle. If it cried, it cried. And little Joseph Patrick wasn't to be played with, except for half an hour of nursery rhymes and physical training in the afternoon. He'd to learn to entertain himself with toys, and the only time he was allowed to snuggle on my lap was for his bedtime story.
She said, ‘Too much petting makes a child fussy and it's a very hard habit to break.’
‘Yes, Mrs Kennedy,’ I said. And I did try to follow her rules but it didn't seem a natural way to raise a child. Well, she didn't have to know everything that went on in my nursery. I had my routines and she had hers. She'd walk to St Aidan's every morning to early Mass, and then she'd do the marketing and write letters till lunchtime. Always a chicken sandwich and a glass of milk. In the afternoon she'd take a nap, and then have her hair done or go to the dressmaker's and once a week Mayor Fitzgerald would come to tea. The way Mrs K talked him up, ‘His Honour this, His Honour that,’ it was like expecting the President himself. It was such a let-down the first time I saw him. He was just a crafty-looking old knacker riding round in a limousine car, but Mrs K thought the sun shone out of her daddy's fundament.
Sometimes on a Friday night Mr K would have some people in for bridge, business gentlemen and their wives, but otherwise she didn't see a soul. Her mammy never visited, nor her sisters, and the neighbours on Beals Street kept to themselves.
The Ericksons' maid said, ‘She thinks she's the cat's pyjamas, your missis, but nobody round here's impressed.’
We knew war was coming. It seemed to have nothing to do with us back in 1914, but we could feel it just around the corner by the start of 1917. Mrs K said it was a terrible unsettled time to be bringing a new baby into the world but at least Mr Kennedy wouldn't have to go away to fight. She said he was too old, but he wasn't. He was twenty-nine, same as Jimmy Swords.
Jimmy and Frankie Mulcahy both volunteered. There were a lot of the Irish who wouldn't, not wanting to take sides with the English, not even against that terrible Kaiser, but Jimmy said, ‘I'm an American now and Americans are going to fight so I'm with them.’
Not Mr Kennedy though. All of a sudden he got a management position at the Schwab shipyard in Quincy, reserved occupation, and when they drafted him anyway he went to a tribunal to appeal and he won. Mrs K said they'd made an error when they tried to draft him because he was engaged in vital war work, but that was only because Mayor Fitzgerald had pulled strings to get him in at the shipyard. Whichever way you cut it, Joe Kennedy was a draft-dodger. But that's water under the bridge. God knows, we've had another war since then and what he got away with in 1917 he's paid for in buckets since.
Jimmy went off to a training camp, but the doctors failed Frankie because of his chest and he was sent to a uniform factory in Pennsylvania, as a machinist. Margaret thought we should have married them before they went, but Jimmy never offered it and I had my mind on my nursery. Mrs Kennedy was very near her time.
A weekly nurse was hired and Mr K moved into the guest room so we could get the big bedroom ready. All the little trinket boxes and hairbrushes had to be cleared off the dressing table, and the rugs lifted and the floor washed down with carbolic acid and boiling water, for reasons of hygiene, the nurse said. It made you wonder how the human race ever got to be such a thriving concern.
Mrs K came along to the nursery still in her bathrobe that morning. She said she'd had a few pains in the night but she hadn't wanted to say anything till Mr K had gone off to business.
‘This is woman's work,’ she said. ‘Now we'll get on with it. We'll have this baby delivered and everything tidied away by the time he comes home.’
I took Joseph Patrick to the park and played with him on the teeter-totter and by the time he'd had his soup and laid down for his nap the doctor had been sent for.
I'd never seen a baby born. When Mrs Griffin had baby Arthur she went to the nursing home so they could give her the twilight sleep and then she had two weeks of lying-in before she brought him home. I knew the facts of life and I'd seen plenty of sows dropping their piglets but it was hard to relate that to Mrs Kennedy. I'd heard it said that women screamed and cursed and that there was blood and worse, but she'd hardly a hair out of place. She just lay there with the ether inhaler over her face and Dr Good fetched the forceps out of his bag and fairly dragged the poor mite into the world. John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Though, as I recall, he was hardly ever called John. He was Jack right from the start.
The nurse told Mrs K she had another boy but she was too doped for it to register or even to hold him, so he was given to me to put in the crib. And it was a grand thing, to cradle him in my arms and see his surprised little face and his tiny fingers weaving in the air, to wonder what life had in store for him. I was the first to hold the next three Kennedy babies and every time it gave me that nice, funny feeling, like someone slipped a piece of velvet inside my tummy.
But by the time Mr Kennedy came home from business, Herself was wide awake, washed and powdered and sitting up in a new satin bed jacket. Then His Honour the Mayor turned up, with Mrs Fitzgerald, who I'd never seen before, and a bouquet of carnations. They came to the nursery to take a look at Jack but they didn't seem very interested in him. He'd been given Fitzgerald for one of his names so I'd have expected them to be thrilled.
His Honour said, ‘He'll do, for a spare. Now let me see my best boy.’
And I had to go contrary to all Mrs Kennedy's instructions and wake Joseph Patrick from his bed, to be petted and made overexcited by his grandpa.
‘See this fine feller?’ he said. ‘This fine feller is going to be President of the United States.’
It's a funny thing, there was never any love lost between Mayor Fitzgerald and Mr Kennedy but that's one thing they always agreed on. Joseph Patrick was going to be President.
THE TROUBLE WITH BLOOD FITZWILLIAM (#ulink_72cbb92a-d501-5119-a45b-97869b6a050c)
But I was saying about 1948. The minute her mammy was on her way to the aerodrome Kick got the shine back in her eyes.
She said, ‘That was pretty gruesome. Daddy'll fix everything. He can probably get us a special dispensation from Rome.’
I said, ‘The Holy Father won't change the rules, not even for a Kennedy.’
She said, ‘This Holy Father might. He's practically part of the family.’
Part of the family my eye. He paid a call once, that's all, long ago, when we were in Bronxville, and that was only because Mr Roosevelt couldn't think what else to do with a visiting cardinal all afternoon, only send him to Mrs Kennedy for a cup of tea.
She said, ‘And we had a private audience. He gave me a rosary.’
I said, ‘I know. I was there. And so was Fidelma Clery He gave us all rosaries. He gets them wholesale, I'm sure. But that doesn't mean he hands out dispensations so a man can have two wives.’
She got into such a paddy.
She said, ‘Why doesn't anyone understand? Blood married Obby in one of their churches, so as far as our church is concerned he's never been married. Anyway, the Holy Father can change anything he wants to. Especially if Daddy sends him a big fat cheque for a new altar or something.’
There were cablegrams flying back and forth all that week and then Blood Fitzwilliam turned up, like the bad penny. He was back in town and expecting to take her to lunch. When you're in service you notice that the ones who're too grand to give you a ‘Good day’ are not necessarily the ones with the biggest estates or kings in their family tree. Just a middling rip like Fitzwilliam can be full enough of himself to ignore the help.
As soon as she heard his voice, Kick was ready to grab her pocketbook and go.
I said, ‘Didn't you tell me Lady Ginny was calling for you?’
‘Oh Lord,’ she said. ‘Well, she's late. Just tell her something came up, would you? She'll understand.’
He'd picked up the telephone without so much as a by-your-leave, putting through a call to his club, tapping a cigarette on his silver case. Kick was watching me watching him.
She said, ‘Darling, no smoking in the hall. Nora's got her fierce face on.’
‘Sweetie,’ he said, ‘who pays Nora's wages?’
It was four o'clock when she came home, pink and silly from champagne wine.
She said, ‘Blood's going to take me down to Nice for a vacation, next month. Such bliss. We're going to stay with his friends at their villa, and then by the time we come back Daddy will be in Paris, so we'll be able to stop off and see him. It's all worked out perfectly. We can have a big powwow about asking the Pope and things, without Mother being there to have a fit, and Daddy and Blood can get to know one another.’
I said, ‘Angel girl, will you listen to yourself? All this talk about marrying. Is the man divorced from his lawful wedded wife?’
‘He soon will be,’ she said. ‘He just has to see the lawyers. Then it won't take long. Obby's going to cooperate. You know they haven't had a real marriage for years.’
I said, ‘And what about his child? Where does she fit in to a divorce?’
She said, ‘She'll be fine. I expect we'll live at Coolatin when we're not in London, and she'll be able to come to visit us and keep a pony there and everything. I'm sure she's an absolute sweetheart, and I'll bet she'd love to have some little brothers and sisters. I'm going to have dozens of babies for you to look after, Nora, and we'll all live happily ever after. Blood will charm Mother off her feet, and Pat and Jean'll come over for the hunting. We might even be able to have poor Rosie to stay.’
Ah yes. Poor Rosie. Well, there was a name she knew better than to bring up with her daddy if she wanted to get him on her side. We never mentioned Rosie any more, except below stairs.
A PERFECT LITTLE DOLL (#ulink_67bd7c9f-8acb-5d2b-9628-33c8fba680b0)
Rose Marie was born in the September of 1918. It was a darker time even than when Jack arrived. We didn't only have the war still dragging on and our men far from home, we had the influenza too, and that was on our very doorstep. We hardly left the house. There was such a scare on that Herself didn't even go to Mass. Cook went out in a gauze mask to do the marketing and the laundrywoman was told not to come, for the duration, because she was in and out of different houses all the time. There was no telling what germs she might carry with her. Mr K slept on an army cot at the shipyard most nights sooner than risk bringing the infection home. Some people said the docks were where it had started.
No one we knew in Brookline got sick, but the Ericksons' gardener reckoned there was a four-week wait for funerals in Boston, there were so many bodies to bury, and after it was over I heard that Marimichael Donnelly had been one of them, ironing sheets in the afternoon and dead by midnight. Three little ones left without a mammy. To think she left Ballynagore to finish up like that. She was strong as an ox, Marimichael, but that was the thing about the influenza. It carried off the strong and didn't touch the babies and the old folks.
Before Rosie was born Mrs Kennedy decided she needed an extra nurserymaid. She hired Fidelma Clery. Flame-red hair and terrible, crooked little teeth. I was glad of the help. Young Jack caught every cough and cold that was going, and Joseph Patrick had the very devil in him, always climbing into trouble and tormenting Jack and taking his toys.
‘Why is he still a baby?’ he used to ask. ‘When will he be big enough to fight me?’
His Honour was the one who encouraged fighting, play-boxing with him, showing him how to put up his little dukes.
Mrs K gave Fidelma the gospel on nursery routines to read, but I know she never opened it. Fidelma was a bit hazy when it came to reading. Every time she told the story of the Gingerbread Man it ended different. But she had enough common sense to get by and the first time Joseph Patrick gave her any trouble she picked him up, hollering and kicking, and carried him to his room like a roll of linoleum.
The weekly nurse came a few days before the baby was due and Mrs K started her pains right on time, same as she did everything else. Everything was going along nicely and I quite thought we'd be cleared away by teatime with the baby safe in her crib, but when it came time to send for the doctor he couldn't be reached. He'd been called away to somebody with complications, and you couldn't send for any other doctor. They were all run off their feet with influenza cases
I said, ‘It hardly matters. It's her third child. She knows what to do.’
