The Importance of Being Kennedy. Laurie Graham
her waistline exercises and leafing through the magazines for Paris fashions she could get copied on Boylston Street.
Fidelma used to say if she had half Mrs Kennedy's money she'd have been up to New York every week, buying furs and seeing the new shows, not sitting in Brookline, clipping articles out of the Ladies' Home Journal and going round turning off lights.
Eunice was born in the summer of ’21, named for Mrs Kennedy's younger sister. The sickly one. Herself didn't nurse Euny though. From Kick on, the babies had bottles so Mrs K wouldn't be tied down. She started travelling, up to Maine or all the way to Colorado, and then when His Honour announced he'd be running for Governor, she was off to his campaign rooms three or four days a week, with a real sparkle in her eye. I wouldn't have voted for him if you'd offered me a big gold watch but you could see why a lot of people fell for him. He wore a beautiful Crombie overcoat, to remind you he was a man who'd done well for himself, and a beaten-up fedora hat, so as you wouldn't think he'd grown too grand, and he was a master with the flimflam. He told me the Fitzgeralds were from dear old Westmeath, just like me, but then he told Danny Walsh they were from dear old Limerick.
Danny said, ‘Fidelma, tell him your name's Esposito. Let's see what dear old place the bugger claims he's from then.’
But for all his patter His Honour didn't get Governor. There had been gossip about backhanders and womanising and other things that had happened in the past. I don't know. He probably wasn't any worse than the rest of the Boston pols. His grand-babies loved him, that's for sure, and there were weeks when they saw more of him than they did of their mammy or their daddy. He'd take the boys ice skating in the winter and then to Durgin Park for a baked bean dinner, and in the summer he'd take them to the Gardens, for a ride on a swan boat, or the whole tribe of us would meet him at Walden Pond, to paddle our feet and fish for perch. Never Mrs Fitzgerald though. She hardly seemed to leave her house. But you could depend on having a good time if His Honour had organised things. Always a laugh and a song and plenty to eat and drink. The children saw Mr K's folks most weeks too, driving out to Winthrop after Mass to have Sunday dinner, but I could count on the fingers of one hand the times any of the Kennedys visited with us. All I know is Herself hadn't an ounce of respect for her in-laws. Old Mrs Kennedy had a tendency to stoutness and that was something Mrs K had no patience with. And then, old Mr Kennedy was well known in East Boston, a ward boss for the Democrats, but he was cut from a very different cloth to Mayor Fitzgerald. He didn't have the blarney. He didn't find occasion to rub up against nurserymaids, unlike His Honour, who was forever playing bumpsadaisy if Fidelma Clery was to be believed.
I said, ‘I don't have any trouble with him.’
‘Well, Nora,’ she said, ‘that's because you don't have magnificent bosoms.’
Maybe so, but that's no great loss, I'm sure. Mammy always reckoned the world would be a calmer place if women didn't have so many curves. Anyway, I had my moments. Gabe Nolan and Danny Walsh were both sweet enough on me. New Year's, St Patrick's, I had my share of getting loved up.
It had been good for Jack to have Joseph Patrick going off to school every morning. It left him cock of the walk for a few hours, with his sisters looking up to him. Once Jack started school he was back in Joe's shadow. Mrs K said it didn't matter. She said having an older brother who was strong and fast and smart would make Jack push himself all the harder to match him, but that wasn't how it worked. He knew he couldn't beat Joseph Patrick, so he hardly tried. Young Joe would pick a fight and they'd be like a pair of terrier dogs for five minutes till he had Jack pinned to the floor. The times I had to separate them, before bones got broken. You could have made two Jacks out of Joe. And Jack would never cry, no matter how much he was hurting. He'd wait till Joe was out of earshot and then say something about him, to raise a laugh from Kick and Rosie. Wisecracks were Jack's only hope of getting even with Joseph Patrick.
There was no new baby in ’22. Betty who came in to do the laundry reckoned she always knew when romance was in the air because Mrs K would have a silk peignoir laid out on her daybed, and that hadn't been sighted since before she fell for Euny It seemed as if Herself had shut up shop, and who could blame her. As she said, she'd been blessed with two fine boys and two fine girls, and Rosie.
Rosie was always tagged on at the end.
We'd be getting out of the motor to go in to Mass and Herself would say, ‘Joe, you take Euny, hold her by the hand. Jack, you take Kick. And Rosie, you go with Nora.’
‘We're playing at Olympic Games,’ Kick would say. ‘And Rosie can watch.’
They sent her to the kindergarten at the Devotion School but she'd have been happier left at home for another year, playing with her dollies. She couldn't get the hang of writing her name, nor even of holding the pencil properly. Mrs K had her up to her room for an hour every day, writing out words for her to copy. She'd the patience of a saint for anything like that, but if you ask me it didn't help Rosie. You could have her write out ‘cat’ a hundred times and by next morning if you asked her what it said she'd guess ‘dog’ or ‘efilant’ as she called it. ‘Efilant’ drove Mrs K crazy. She thought it was just a sloppy, baby way of speaking, but I don't think Rosie ever noticed how the rest of the world said ‘elephant’.
Sure, we all have our funny little ways. Fidelma always misses seven when she's counting, and my sister Margaret still talks about ‘the electric gas lighting’.
We didn't get a new baby in ’23 either, though as soon as we were back from vacationing at Cape Cod Mrs K did make an appointment to see Dr Good and he told her there'd be a new arrival the following spring. We'd plenty of funerals in 1923 though. Mr K's mother's was the first. She'd just faded away with stomach pains, till there was nothing left of her. They said the procession brought the traffic to a halt in Winthrop, the biggest funeral there in living memory and not for anything the old lady had ever done. They turned out as a mark of respect for old Mr Kennedy and his loss. Ursie was very impressed. She cut the obituary out of the newspaper and sent a copy to Edmond and one to Deirdre, all the way to Africa. Nora's people, Irish but very high up, she wrote on it, in red ink.
Then Mrs K's sister Eunice passed over. It was the tuberculosis. She'd been up and down to a sanatorium for years so it came as no great surprise and Herself hardly missed a beat. She went to the funeral in the morning and to the dressmaker's in the afternoon, and I never saw her shed a tear. Me and Fidelma did. We didn't know the poor creature but twenty-three is no age whoever you are.
My brother-in-law Frankie's mother was the final one, on Christmas Eve of all days. Mrs Mulcahy had had palpitations for years but she picked her moment. Well, she was always the one for the big entrances and exits. The day Margaret and Frankie got married she was twenty minutes late to the church, like she was the blushing bride herself, then she drank so much honey wine at the wedding breakfast she had to be wheeled home on a cart borrowed from the fish market and put to bed. She swore it had happened in error. Every time I saw her she said, ‘You know, Nora, I'm a total abstainer so that wedding beverage must have been doctored.’
Mrs K gave me a half-day to go up to Our Lady of Mount Carmel for the Requiem Mass.
I said to Margaret, ‘You'll be in clover, having the place to yourselves all of a sudden.’
They'd made do with two rooms in Mrs Mulcahy's house ever since they got married.
She said, ‘We'll likely take in lodgers. The money'll come in handy.’
So they let two rooms to a nice-seeming Italian couple but they didn't last long. Margaret couldn't stand the racket they made, shouting and banging doors and clattering pans, and then by the spring Margaret was expecting and she couldn't stand the smell of all the onions they cooked, so the Italians had to go.
Ursie said, ‘Well, now you're in a fine state, Margaret. How are you going to manage the rent on Frankie's money? Can you depend on his lungs not letting him down?’
Margaret said, ‘I don't know.