The Kennedy Debutante

by Kerri Maher

“How am I going to meet that man?” Rosemary demanded. “I’m not invited anywhere!”

  “Rosie, darling,” Kick said, trying to adopt something like the soothing tone her father used when his oldest daughter became recalcitrant, “You must focus on your health first. You know how Mother goes away to drink the mineral waters at special spas, and prays to heal herself.”

  “This is a prison, Kathleen,” Rosemary hissed, “not a spa.”

  “I’m sure it’s not as bad as all that,” Kick said, though she knew from experience that it almost certainly was that bad, and hated herself for the dishonest words she’d just spoken.

  “Let’s make a deal,” interjected Jack, tapping Rosemary’s soft white hand with his freckled, knuckly finger. “When I’ve gained ten pounds, and you’ve lost the same number, and if the Jail Warden”—he tilted his head toward the convent to indicate the Mother Superior—“gives her blessing, I’ll take you out for a night on the town. I know plenty of gentlemen who’d be honored to dance with you.”

  Bluffer, Kick thought. No wonder you beat everyone at cards. She realized she was gnawing on her lower lip and stopped.

  But Jack’s deal worked. Rosemary suddenly looked like a child who’d opened exactly the right present on Christmas morning. “You will?” she gushed.

  Jack raised his left hand and put his right over his heart. “I swear.”

  Rosemary gave Kick a petulant so there look that would have been complete had she also stuck out her tongue. Kick just barely kept herself from rolling her eyes. Once again, her brother had saved the day. Mother would be pleased.

  On her way home to change for her own night on the town with Inga and Jack and John, she stopped into a small church in her neighborhood, St. Catherine’s. Though she hadn’t found another parish or priest to compare to St. Mary’s or Father O’Flaherty, she was comforted by the simple wood carvings in St. Catherine’s and the constant flicker of candles lit by other faithful men and women who needed help. That day, she put a dollar in the donation box and lit one herself, then kneeled in the last row and prayed a rosary for her sister. And for her father, so that he might make the right decision.

  Later, as John moved Kick effortlessly among the bamboo and palm trees surrounding the dance floor of the Tahitian, and Inga and Jack became increasingly entranced with each other over another round of rum cocktails, Kick wished she could lose herself the way she once had with Billy. This thought brought the familiar heat to her eyes, and when “Moonlight Serenade” finished, John asked her if everything was all right.

  “I’m just exhausted,” she said, rubbing her eyes as if she were throwing off sleep and not sadness.

  John offered to take her home, but what was waiting for her there? She stayed for another few drinks so that when he did take her home, she could fall into her bed and a deep, dreamless sleep.

  * * *

  John’s sister Patsy White had married Henry Field, a renowned anthropologist who had worked on the Chicago World’s Fair and the excavation of the ancient Mesopotamian city of Kish. He and Patsy had recently moved from Chicago to Washington because President Roosevelt had invited him to be part of a secret research project. All he or his wife could say about it was that it had to do with “migration patterns.” Every Sunday, Patsy and Henry hosted a party in which everyone who was anyone in Washington could drop in for a plate of spaghetti and a glass of rough red wine, all consumed while sitting cross-legged on the oriental rugs that covered the floors of the Fields’ cozy bohemian house, which was crammed full of books and South American pottery and oddly shaped furniture like something called a Thai axe pillow, on which Lord Halifax, the new English ambassador, regularly reclined.

  Kick’s first time there, she and John arrived late because John had been so busy nervously explaining who Henry was, and the others who were likely to be there.

  “You’re being ridiculous, John. I already know Halifax and Jimmy Roosevelt and David Rockefeller and all that lot.”

  “I just want you to feel comfortable.”

  “Don’t you worry about me,” she said, patting him on the shoulder. Nothing could compare to the nerves she’d felt those first months in England when she’d had everything to prove and everything to lose. What could she possibly lose now? “Honestly, I’m more worried about you,” she added. John was a mess, with his hands shaking and a dribble of sweat rolling down his right temple.

  “I just want it to go well.”

  “I’ll be fine. Let’s go.”

  When they arrived, late because of John’s dithering, about twenty people were there, and most of the spaghetti was gone. “Good thing I’m not hungry,” she sang, though she was actually famished.

  “I’ll make it up to you later,” he whispered.

  She sniffed at him and filled a glass with wine, at which point a parade of people began greeting her.

  Lord Halifax was first, setting his empty plate on an intricately carved side table. “Kathleen! I didn’t realize you were in Washington!”

  “I’ve been hiding,” she said in a conspiratorial voice. Though it wasn’t altogether false. She still hid her fancier clothes at work so that her coworkers wouldn’t think she was a rich girl who couldn’t cut it on the paper. And she hadn’t yet reached out to some of her friends and acquaintances in town because she didn’t want the word to get out too fast. She had a feeling her appearance here would put an end to her anonymity.

  “Well, don’t hide too long,” he said with an appreciative smile. “I saw your father just recently. He seems . . . better.”

  “He is,” Kick agreed. At least he’d gained back a few of the fifteen pounds he’d lost in England before returning home in disgrace; his mood, however, remained morose. Halifax, who’d shifted his politics away from appeasement in 1939, was faring far better than Joe. Churchill must have felt he could rely on him in Washington, unlike Roosevelt, who’d replaced her father with John Winant. The thought set her teeth grinding.

  “I’m sure you’ve gathered that the mood in Washington is with your old chums these days,” Halifax said.

  Had John just flinched at the mention of her English friends? “Yes, well,” she said, “it’s not easy to watch any nation with whom we share a language and so much culture be bombed like England’s been bombed.”

  Halifax frowned. “Indeed,” he said.

  David Rockefeller and then Arthur Krock of the New York Times and the attorney general were next to say hello to Kick, and since John had never met these last two, she introduced them. This annoyed him greatly, much to her delight. At last, Patsy herself broke away from the intense conversation she’d been having with Henry Wallace, Roosevelt’s rumored choice as vice president for his third term as president, to come over and hug her brother and meet Kick. “I’ve seen out of the corner of my eye that I didn’t need to play hostess for you at all, Kathleen. But welcome.”

  “Please, call me Kick,” she told Patsy, a tall woman nearly ten years her senior with short brown hair and a kind, plain face decorated by dangling turquoise earrings and a thick silver choker. “And thank you for having me.”

  “I can’t believe John hasn’t brought you before,” Patsy said in a reprimanding tone with a cocked eyebrow at her brother.

  “Oh, I’m sure he’s been bringing his other women,” Kick joked, but she could see from the way Patsy blushed that she’d hit a nerve. What a relief, she thought. I don’t want him pining uselessly for me. As she eyed him and noted with satisfaction his embarrassment at being called out so easily, she once again regretted that she found him so attractive. Good thing he was also so disagreeable.

  Then Patsy’s husband Henry Field joined them, and the four of them spoke a bit about the increasingly shrill speeches coming out of Charles Lindbergh’s America First Committee.

  “I hardly need articulate how I feel about Lucky Lindy,” said Henry disdainfully. His slightl
y English accent tugged at Kick’s heart. That’s right, she thought, remembering what John had told her. He studied at Oxford.

  “I take it he hasn’t been lucky enough to be invited here?” said Kick.

  Patsy laughed and put a gentle hand on her husband’s arm. “I’ve tried to convince Henry to invite him in the spirit of openness and conversation, but I’m afraid that if Mr. Lindbergh did come, he and Henry would wind up fighting a duel in the garden!”

  “It is a pity a national hero like Charles Lindbergh has gone so far to the right,” Kick said. “He does sound terribly angry when he speaks.”

  “I’m relieved to hear that straight from your mouth,” said Henry.

  “Haven’t you heard? Our former ambassador has no sway over his fourth child, at least in terms of politics. Don’t get her started on religion, though!” John needled.

  Kick looked with exaggerated sympathy at Patsy. “Has he always been like this?”

  Patsy leaned forward and said in a low tone, “He used to be much worse.” And the two women laughed.

  John spoke remarkably little that afternoon, but he kept his eyes uncomfortably on Kick the whole time. When the two of them were alone again, she said, “I feel rather like I’m under a microscope, or taking a test.”

  “Don’t be absurd.”

  “Is it absurd to think that the most vociferous person I know would be quiet here, where talking is prized, unless he had a better project in mind?”

  “And what would that better project be?” he said in an amused tone.

  “Making sure I’m presentable. Which is patently ridiculous, since I should be subjecting you to that test.”

  “Yes, I’m beginning to see that,” he grumbled, draining the last of his glass. “Don’t I owe you some food? Want to get out of here?”

  “Oh, I’m way past hunger now,” she said with a smile. “At some point, words replace food for me.”

  But the party was winding down anyway. As guests began drifting off into the chilled air, Kick and John shook hands and exchanged continental kisses with Patsy and Henry.

  “Next time,” said Patsy warmly, “feel free to bring whomever you like.”

  “Except Unlucky Lindy,” Kick quipped.

  “Or anyone you haven’t cleared with me first,” added John.

  “Don’t listen to him,” said Patsy with a wave of her hand.

  The following weekend, Kick invited Jack and Inga without “clearing” it with John, and thoroughly enjoyed the annoyed look he threw her from across the crowded living room when her brother arrived with the Danish beauty queen, both smelling fresh from a bath. Kick lifted her full plate of spaghetti at John. Cheers.

  Kick began calling Patsy’s weekly event the Spaghetti Salon, and she looked forward to it like nothing else in her Washington life. Despite Halifax and Henry’s Oxford-educated inflections, everything else about the gatherings was profoundly American, which had the effect of helping her forget Billy and all the rest. Unlike Rose and most of the English hostesses she’d observed, who believed in executing the smallest details with painstaking correctness, Patsy was casual but no less effective. The spaghetti she served every Sunday was genius. It was delicious, but it didn’t get in the way. Not only did her guests understand from her simple menu that the gathering was more for serious talk than for cuisine or posturing about cuisine or any other trappings of setting, the fact that it was easy to prepare (or so Patsy said—Kick was still having trouble with omelets, which so many women claimed were easy to make) freed Patsy to tend to other things. She didn’t have a full staff of servants, and so this was essential. “If I was making boeuf bourguignon,” she told Kick, “or slicing endless tomatoes for a fresh salad, I’d never have time to read all the newspapers before my guests arrived.” Also, the fact that she did actually make the spaghetti on her chef’s day off lent that personal touch that hostesses were always nattering on about.

  Kick sat down to write Debo a letter about it, to explain how happy she was in her new life, but she couldn’t quite wrap words around these almost-truths without the sense that she was betraying her old friends. Which was ridiculous. Billy was the one who’d betrayed her.

  Instead she began a letter to Father O’Flaherty, who was in France working in an orphanage for children whose parents had been dragged away before their eyes. She inquired after his work and told him about the Times-Herald and the Fields. For a few minutes as her pen glided over the paper, she fooled herself into believing that she and the priest were still fighting the same fight, that what she was doing mattered at all.

  CHAPTER 21

  Once word got out that Kick was in town, the invitations for luncheons and teas and cocktail parties started pouring in. Her life began to feel a little bit like it had in London, full of events and similar sets of people mixing and remixing for common ends. Except that instead of the purpose of it all being society and the traditional pursuit of leisure and charity, the purpose of it all in Washington was politics. Instead of attending a benefit for something cultural like the British Museum or Royal Albert Hall, Kick attended dinners and dances raising money for candidates and their causes, like farmworkers’ rights or the Women’s Army Corps. Even when an event was raising money for the Smithsonian or the National Symphony Orchestra, it was hosted by a senator or congressman and his wife, and there was always a speech before the dessert course.

  There was the sense, everywhere, that war was inevitable. That it was only a matter of time before the butter and sugar that Americans still enjoyed in abundance would soon become scarce, and the rationing and state-imposed spending coupons that had become commonplace in England were upon them. Some of the drinking and dancing had an undercurrent of desperation that was markedly different from the defeatism among her friends in 1939. Perhaps it was due to the different national characters of the English and Americans, but while the English had an attitude of pursuing life as usual—parties included—in the face of great adversity, of keeping to traditions because they were a source of strength, Americans were animated more by fear, a profound dread of hardship that made them want to soak up every liquid ounce of pleasure while there was still time.

  “Do you get the feeling that people are girding themselves for the worst?” Kick asked Jack one afternoon at the Chevy Chase Club. Two-thirds of the room was drunk already, and the other third was on its way. Inga was fetching their first cocktails, and John was at home and cranky, working on an overdue article. Joe Sr. was also at the club, but he’d shown up with a blond woman not much older than Kick, and she’d known immediately it was not a good time to bring up Rosemary. She hated seeing her father appear places with other women, something he’d begun doing more frequently lately. Kick was perfecting her what woman? expression. More card games.

  “Of course they are,” Jack replied, squinting his eyes at the fire. His skin was still brown from the summer, and Kick wondered if he sat out in the daytime sun to make up for the fact that his body refused to put on any weight. She wondered what voluptuous Inga thought of Jack’s protruding ribs. “Roosevelt’s just looking for an excuse to send our men over to help your friends.”

  “Why is it always my friends? You made friends in England, too,” Kick pointed out.

  “True enough. David and I saw eye to eye, and I can see us staying friends a long time. But no one like Lem or Torby.” LeMoyne Billings and Torbert Macdonald had been friends of Jack’s for as long as Kick could remember; their friendship was a high bar.

  Kick rubbed her lips together. “Does Inga make you want to stay here in DC?”

  He didn’t answer right away and instead closed his eyes. Then, dreamily, he said, “Yeah, she does.” Kick had never seen him distracted, even a little dopey, over a woman before. She wondered if he’d been like this with Frances Ann Cannon, and if he had been, did that mean Inga would receive his next proposal? Assuming she ever divorced Paul Fejos.
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  “What about you and John White?” Jack asked, smirking now. “Has he helped you forget the great Billy Hartington?”

  “Ha ha,” Kick said.

  “Well, for two years, you’ve been moping around criticizing everything because it doesn’t compare to your precious London, and since you met John, you’ve been more your feisty self,” he observed.

  “I still don’t feel like myself,” said Kick, wishing Inga would rescue her from this conversation with those drinks.

  “Maybe not, but people can change. Maybe you’re growing up, little sister. Figuring out that life isn’t one big party.”

  “It’s not?” she asked, gesturing at the crowd around them at that very moment.

  “This isn’t a party,” said Jack with a laugh. “It’s a serious meeting of heads of state.”

  “Oh, right, of course; how could I miss that?”

  “Listen, Kick, all I’m saying is that to me you seem more yourself. You’re going out, talking to people, living in the present. That’s good. Keep it up.”

  “I’ll take that under advisement.”

  “For what it’s worth, though? Don’t get too serious about John.”

  “You must know that such a warning is likely to drive me straight into his arms,” she said.

  “Go ahead and go into his arms, but don’t let him in here,” he warned, tapping his chest with his index finger.

  “Why not?” Kick asked.

  “Because he’s not just not Catholic, sis; he’s anti-Catholic. He’d give Mom a heart attack. And . . .” His voice trailed off.

  “What?”

  Reluctantly, Jack added, “I just don’t think he’s good enough for you in the long term. He’s fine for a good time, but he’s no son-in-law for Dad and Mom.”

  “Is Inga a better daughter-in-law?”

  Jack shrugged noncommittally. “The thought hadn’t even occurred to me,” he said, just as Inga sashayed over in her orange dress and red shoes, with three cold cocktails.