The Kennedy Debutante

by Kerri Maher

  Sissy appeared to be stifling laughter as she said, “Yeeeeesss? It’s not difficult.”

  “I know that!”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  “Every nun I ever had for school is screaming at me in my head.”

  “Oh, that,” said Sissy, waving her hand. “That will pass.”

  “Even if the kisses are . . .”

  “Excellent?”

  “Better.”

  “Well, the nuns in my head eventually shut up. And I had quite a few items on my guilty conscience. While David might appear to be rather an old-fashioned bloke, believe me when I say he is full of surprises.” Sissy snapped her handbag shut as if to punctuate her statement.

  “My, my,” said Kick, suddenly giddy at being part of this hitherto secret league of women who knew about kissing and satin sheets and what it felt like to rebel against their upbringings in this marvelously forbidden way.

  “Listen, Kick,” said Sissy, “of course the nuns tell us not to do things we might enjoy. Look at the life they’ve chosen for themselves.”

  “I doubt my mother would approve, either, and she has nine children.”

  “As long as you know where to draw the line with Billy, I say enjoy yourself.” Sissy paused, then said carefully, “You do . . . know where the line is, don’t you?”

  “Of course!” Kick exclaimed, grateful that Sister Kit, one of the younger, more outspoken nuns at Sacred Heart whom Kick had always suspected of nursing a broken heart, had given some of the girls in her class a clandestine lesson, complete with a tome called Gray’s Anatomy. Some of Kick’s classmates had blanched when it came to the reproductive part, but Sister Kit had been adamant that the girls leave the convent “with some accurate knowledge of your bodies and those of your future husbands. To protect yourselves.” Kick had listened intently, but it was only recently that she’d begun to understand what Sister Kit had meant about protecting herself. Drawing the line.

  “So, you’ve never mentioned David in confession?” Kick pressed, feeling a little shy about asking but needing the answer nonetheless.

  Sissy laughed. “Why should I?”

  “Impure thoughts and all that.”

  “I don’t believe in that nonsense. I believe actions are more important than thoughts.”

  Kick felt this was right, even if it did go against some of the stricter rules she’d been taught. She badly wanted to push her conversation with Sissy further, and ask if she planned to request that David convert to Catholicism. It was already pretty clear that the two of them would marry. But Kick sensed she’d asked enough for one night.

  She linked her arm through Sissy’s and said, “Thank you.”

  Sissy leaned her glossy ebony head against Kick’s auburn one and sympathized, “Poor Kick. We English seem to be corrupting you rather than the other way round.”

  “Who’d have thought?” Kick laughed. Her friend had no idea just how welcome that influence had been.

  * * *

  Right up until she had to leave for the family Christmas in Switzerland, Kick’s days were full of productive engagements. Her name had begun to circulate as a result of the inquiries she’d sent, and now she was invited to hospitals and galleries and schools, and asked to organize book donations for underprivileged children and to speak at benefit luncheons. It gave her a real sense of accomplishment—people were asking for her, Kick Kennedy, without going through her mother first, because they wanted Kick for her own skills and talents.

  Five days before Christmas it snowed, which sent a fizzy happiness through Kick when she met Billy on Bond Street for some shopping. At noon, it felt like dusk with the sky a tumultuous dark gray, but the shops lit up the street, and fluffy white flakes melted on their shoulders and stuck in their eyelashes. They ambled in and out of stores, making purchases for family and friends, their arms becoming heavy with bags containing crisply wrapped little boxes of joy. Late in the afternoon, Billy delivered her home, and even though they had plans to meet later at Ciro’s, she wanted to prolong their afternoon and invited him in for tea. As soon as they’d taken off their coats, she heard the screams.

  Billy looked at her, all concern, and asked, “Is something wrong?”

  Before Kick could answer but not before her heart rose into her throat, Rosemary ran down the stairs in her slip and stockings, red lipstick smeared all over her mouth.

  “Kick!” she exclaimed, running over to her sister, oblivious to the fact that a young man was standing right there as well. Her eyes never fell on him once, so focused was she on Kick. “You have to save me from Mother! She’s trying to put me in the closet.”

  Kick took hold of Rosemary’s shoulders and tried to find her sister’s eyes with her own, but they were shut tight. “Rosemary,” she said as soothingly as she could, “Rosemary, darling, look at me. Look at me.”

  When her sister didn’t look at her but instead moaned and shivered and clenched her fists, Kick glanced upstairs. Her mother was nowhere in sight, though Jean and Teddy peered out from behind a bedroom door. Kick couldn’t imagine Rosemary was telling the truth about Rose threatening to put her in the closet that night, since their mother stopped using that particular punishment right around each child’s tenth year, but something had set Rosemary off. And Kick was mortified that this detail of her childhood had been spoken aloud in Billy’s presence—though his expression was only one of brow-knitted worry, not surprise or disgust.

  Turning away from him, Kick tried putting her arm around Rosemary’s waist, but Rosemary twisted violently away, shouting “No!” and struck out with her clenched hand. Kick ducked, and her sister’s fist nearly missed her right temple.

  Count to ten. One, two, three . . . Oh, I don’t have time for that now! Kick mustered all her compassion and composure to squelch the anger now boiling in her own body, and said, “Let’s just sit down together. On the couch. You’re shivering. Let’s get a blanket and play fort. Hide from Mother.” She tried to sound enticing, make it a game like they used to play, the kind that had once reliably snapped Rosemary out of any bad mood.

  “You can’t trap me, either! No! You’re never around anymore! Why are you here now if it’s not to help her?” Rosemary howled and slumped to the floor.

  Then Billy, like a statue made magically animate, knelt before Rosemary and held out his hand. Speaking in the most soothing low tones, he said, “Rosemary? Do you remember me? I’m Billy Hartington, and we danced together several times last season. You’re a wonderful dancer. May I help you back up to your room now?”

  Rosemary lifted her wet eyes to Billy and searched his face—for what, Kick wasn’t sure. Recognition? Trust? Whatever it was, she must have found it, because she put her hand in his, just as she did with their father.

  Billy used his other hand to help lift Rosemary off the floor, and Kick hurried to lead them upstairs to Rosemary’s room, which was in complete disarray, the bedsheets and duvet on the floor, shoes and stockings and girdles and skirts and blouses everywhere. Billy tried to step on the patches of carpet and successfully led Rosemary to sit on her bed. Kick followed.

  Then Rosemary looked up at Billy and said, “Will we dance again?”

  “Of course.” Billy smiled.

  Rosemary lay down on her bed and curled into a ball, and Kick tucked some sheets gently around her. Then she and Billy left the room, closing the door quietly behind them.

  Back down in the foyer, she said, “I’m so, so sorry you had to see that.” She was so angry at her sister right now—she’d probably single-handedly ruined her relationship with Billy. Her chest felt tight, her breath short.

  “I had no idea,” he replied, his voice steady.

  “Few people do,” Kick said.

  “I mean, I heard she’d tripped at the ceremony, but . . .”

  “No one really understands what’s wrong with her.
And my parents . . .” Ignore it? Don’t help? It was so hard to explain, the way they loved and doted on their eldest daughter, protecting her in some ways but also pushing her to be just like the rest of them. Kick’s head hurt. All the joy of the day had drained out of her.

  “You know,” said Billy, “two of the queen’s nieces are hidden away somewhere because of . . . difficulties.”

  Kick nodded. “I’ve heard that. But Mother and Daddy like to pretend that Rosemary’s fine.”

  “I’m sorry, Kick,” he said, and he reached forward to lace his fingers between hers. Her heart sped up—was it possible he wasn’t leaving? That he’d helped her sister and now wanted to help her?

  “Don’t be,” she said, sniffling back the threatening tears. “I am very grateful for your help today, but I’m just . . . sorry you saw it.”

  “Don’t be,” he said, echoing her. All she wanted was to dissolve into him, to feel his strength and height and make them her own. She felt cracked and fragile, as if those truths that Wickham had referred to were beginning to leak out.

  They were quiet together, standing awkwardly with their fingers still intertwined. Until Billy said, “I’ll tell you a secret, too.”

  Kick looked at him with wide eyes. “The Cavendishes have secrets?”

  Billy smirked and said, “More than most families, I’d imagine. And this one should have the dual purpose of also amusing you. Right. Well, my father is a great angler. Loves nothing more than to catch salmon up in Scotland. And he is rather obsessed with tying little flies as bait for his line.” Billy shook his head, as if he couldn’t imagine anything more dull than this hobby of his father’s. “Anyway,” he continued, “the way he likes to test his flies is to lie in a full bathtub pretending he is a salmon, dangling the bait above him in the water. If the bait is appealing, he keeps it. If it’s not, it goes in the bin.”

  “He pretends he’s a salmon?” Kick said.

  Billy nodded. “His poor attire is hardly his only eccentricity.” Kick remembered the duke’s fraying sleeves at Goodwood. So.

  Then she burst out laughing. “Thank you, Billy. I didn’t think anyone could amaze me today, but you just have. The Duke of Devonshire, a fish.”

  “You’re now in on a secret that only the residents of Churchdale Hall know.”

  “I’m honored,” she said, her hand on her heart.

  Billy gently tapped his forehead against hers. “So am I,” he replied.

  After a quick glance to see if anyone was nearby, which they were not, Billy bent down and gave Kick a tender kiss on the lips. “I’ll see you later,” he whispered.

  Before she went upstairs to change, Kick found Rose with a glass of whiskey, slouching at the dining room table. “There you are,” Kick said.

  Her mother raised her red-rimmed eyes to Kick and said, “How dare you bring that boy in unannounced!”

  “We bring friends home all the time, Mother.”

  “You’ve never brought home a boy, a stranger, not without warning.” Her mother laughed, an exhausted, cynical cackle. “The Duke of Devonshire’s son, Kathleen! He has so much more power than you.”

  “If you’d bothered to come out and help your own daughter, Mother, you’d have seen that Billy was the hero just now.”

  “Not after she hit me,” said Rose tightly, touching her left cheek, which Kick could now see was redder than the other one, and not from rouge. Then she noticed the bag of cold peas sitting next to the glass. “I heard the whole thing, of course. Billy was . . . well, he was your knight in shining armor, wasn’t he?”

  Then why can’t you sound happier for me? But there was no point in asking that particular question. Instead Kick asked: “What happened before we got home?”

  Rose shrugged. “What ever happens? I asked her to take a bath, and get ready for a dinner event at the Oratory. She didn’t want to go.”

  “She said you tried to put her in the closet.”

  “I might have reminded her that when my children misbehave, there are consequences.”

  Kick rolled her eyes. “She’s twenty!”

  “Then why doesn’t she act like it?” Rose whispered fiercely. Kick always marveled at this, the way her mother’s love, especially for her precious Rosemary, could transform into revulsion.

  The question hung between them. Neither of them knew the answer, not any more than her doctors and teachers had known.

  “Speaking of misbehaving,” Rose said, straightening her posture, “I heard you canceled a date with Robin Baring the other day?”

  “How on earth did you hear that?” For the first time, Kick didn’t feel guilt at being caught in a lie and a disobedience. Rather, she felt annoyed, like Jack usually sounded in the same position.

  Rose acted as though she hadn’t heard Kick’s question, and instead continued her own interrogation. “Was it to be with Billy?”

  “Yes.” There was no point in lying, not when her mother was so clearly in possession of the facts. And part of her wanted her mother to know the truth, to dare her to react.

  Rose finished the whiskey, set the glass on the table, and left the room. It felt like a small but essential fragment of her soul followed her mother out, leaving Kick feeling unsteady on her own two feet.

  CHAPTER 13

  Winter passed slowly, in a damp fog of work at St. Mary’s and a few high-profile engagements, like giving her first official public speech at the Foyles bookstore luncheon for children in need. Most of her friends were in a funk about the bad weather, and Billy was back at Cambridge for his last term. Joe Jr. finally made a break for Spain, leaving only a letter to his father saying he had to see the end of the civil war, and that was that.

  At first, Joe Sr. was furious that his oldest son had disobeyed him so thoroughly, but in letters and phone calls, Jack managed to convince him to be proud that his namesake was a crisis hunter who wanted to make his own name. “When he runs for president, you don’t want the Republicans to say he’s only a puppet, do you?” Unsurprisingly, Jack was convincing. Joe began using his term “crisis hunter” when colleagues asked where Joe Jr. had gone.

  Then Rose left for a long holiday in Greece, and Kick was suddenly on her own, making completely independent decisions about how to spend her days and nights. Craving some physical exertion when everyone else seemed content inside, she took long walks through London and explored neighborhoods like Islington, Richmond, and Greenwich, then rewarded herself with a half-pint of ale, wondering if Billy would like it.

  The only truly auspicious moment in those months was the Valentine’s Day wedding of Ann de Trafford and Derek Parker-Bowles. The pair were a few years older than Kick and her friends, and their wedding was the first of their set. It was even more important for being between Ann, a Catholic, and Derek, a Protestant. The ceremony was a grand affair at Brompton Oratory, and it was well-known that Derek had agreed to let their children be raised Catholic. Since Derek was a cousin—not a first cousin, but still a relation—of Billy’s, and the Cavendish family attended the wedding in good cheer, the whole frothy affair gave Kick hope for the future. Until she overhead Lady Astor, who never could tone down her feelings about the Catholic Church regardless of her fond feelings for individual Catholics like Kick or Joe, saying, “Well, at least the de Traffords are a good English family, even if they are papists. But still, I wish Derek hadn’t capitulated. How can England survive if it moves backward to the ways before Henry the Eighth?”

  Instantly, the effervescence of the day fizzled, and Kick once again felt her profound disadvantage in this country she illogically continued to love. Why should I love it here so much if I am not wholly welcome? She wondered whether England—and Billy—was somehow for her what Marlene Dietrich was for Jack: a nearly impossible challenge. The problem was, she’d been raised to tackle impossible challenges. She found them irresistible.

  A few da
ys later, she must have seemed especially mopey at St. Mary’s, because Father O’Flaherty asked what was wrong.

  “A man,” she blurted out. “Well, he’s not a man, like you or my father. He’s close to my age. He just turned twenty-one.” She looked for signs that Father O’Flaherty might already know whom she was talking about, but he maintained his open expression, betraying nothing.

  “But he’s not Catholic,” she said.

  “Church of England?” Father clarified.

  “Yes.”

  “I assume, because you have such fond feelings for him, that he is a good and kind young man.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Have you discussed the possibility of him converting to Catholicism?”

  “No.” She shook her head. “I’m not . . . we’re not . . . neither of us has made any promises or declarations. Yet. But I sense that we might, soon.”

  “I see,” the priest said, and his face took on a grave expression. “Then perhaps he might convert.”

  Kick looked down at her hands and admitted the truth at last. “I doubt it, Father.”

  “Would you consider converting to Anglicanism?”

  Kick jerked up her head and looked at Father O’Flaherty in dumbfounded surprise. “Wouldn’t that damn me to hell forever?”

  “The archbishop of Canterbury certainly wouldn’t think so.”

  Was she really hearing this from a Catholic priest?

  “In school,” Father O’Flaherty went on, “one of my closest friends was Protestant. He and I used to have endless debates about religion, and none of them ended our friendship. When I finished at the seminary, he took me to lunch and gave me an excellent bottle of whiskey. I’m the godfather of his first child. I don’t tell many people this, but I refuse to believe he is going to hell because of his faith. He is a good Christian man. In fact, he’s been helping your father and me petition families and schools we wouldn’t otherwise have access to, to accept Jewish children. Jewish children. I don’t want anyone to suffer, in this life or the next.”