The Kennedy Debutante

by Kerri Maher

  Kick wasn’t sure whether she believed her sister or not, but the Waldorf was only a few blocks away, so she stalked off in that direction. The traffic was at its midday peak, and she had to wait at every corner for cars and taxis and horse-drawn carriages to make their honking way through the intersection before she could cross. She kept telling herself that this had nothing to do with Billy.

  But when Kick stood in the entrance of her father’s opulent suite with the bright sunshine pouring into the room from the picture windows behind him, making him look for all the world like the angel Gabriel, she knew. His arms like wings were open, and she rushed into them and felt herself enfolded in their embrace just as everything went black.

  * * *

  The accounts of Billy’s relentless bravery and inspiring leadership only made it worse, though her family must have thought it would do the opposite from the way they kept slipping clippings and cables under her locked door. The way he’d slept in trenches with his men, and insisted they drink their rum and whiskey out of glasses, saying, “This is war, men, not the end of the world. Remember your women back home.” The way he’d listened to them talk about their hopes and dreams for after the war, with an earnest nod and a supportive word. The way he’d told them to buck up and march on after they’d lost a quarter of their number in the successful capture of Beverloo, then how the very next day he’d gone on ahead to scout the area for the capture of Heppen, which got him shot in the heart by a sniper. In the heart, Kick kept saying to herself. His heart, his magnificent, tender English heart.

  There she’d been telling her daredevil brother not to do anything stupid—not that any of those entreaties had worked, either—when Billy was practically daring the Germans to shoot him by wearing his white officer’s mackintosh all over France and Belgium. She blamed Churchill for sending the English boys in too soon in 1940 and sowing in them the seeds of revenge, she blamed Charlie White for calling Billy a coward, she blamed God for making her love him, she blamed herself for not marrying him sooner. Maybe if things had been different, if she hadn’t been such a ditherer, the future would have been different. He might have won the election, he might not have gone back to the fighting, she might have gotten pregnant. Might, might, might . . .

  She didn’t want to see anyone. People knocked on her door when they heard her crying again, which was how they knew she wasn’t asleep in the darkened room. Her mother asked if she wanted to go to church. Eunice asked if she could just sit with her awhile. Jack asked if she wanted to forget her troubles. “No!” she shouted, once hurling a pillow at the door for emphasis. When her father asked if there was anything he could do, anyone he could ring for her, she answered “Patsy White,” because she could think of no one else in America who understood and respected what Billy had meant to her, even though she knew her father didn’t like Patsy much.

  Hours later, there was a tentative knock on the door and Patsy’s voice called, “Kick? It’s me.”

  “Is anyone with you?” she asked.

  “No.”

  Kick unlatched the door and let Patsy in. Her old friend was carrying a tray piled high with all kinds of food. It all looked disgusting, even her favorite candy bars.

  Patsy set about opening the curtains, letting in a late-afternoon light that blinded Kick, sending her back to the bed to pull sheets over her eyes. Then she opened a window to let in some fresh air. Kick assumed it smelled wretched in there, but she hardly cared. Her nose was stuffed solid from all the crying.

  Then her friend sat on the bed and put a gentle hand on Kick’s leg. “I can’t even imagine how hurt and angry and sad you must feel. Losing Joe was bad enough, but this . . . it’s too much.”

  Kick sat up and nodded, her face crumpling once more. This time she sobbed into Patsy’s shirt, and took some small comfort in feeling a friend’s arms around her.

  After a while, Patsy said, “John already wants to know if he might have a second chance,” and Kick burst out laughing, though it hurt her ribs, which felt bruised.

  Then Patsy added, “I told him I didn’t think anyone could ever hold a candle to Billy, though.”

  Kick shook her head.

  “What does your heart tell you now, Kick? What would make your burden just a little lighter? I’ll help you with whatever it is.”

  “I want to go home,” Kick said, remembering that when she’d told the duchess she wanted to see her parents after Joe’s death, she had not used the word home. It had been deliberate, just as her use of it now was.

  Pat nodded, and said, “All right.”

  Knowing that she would soon be back in England buoyed Kick. Patsy and her father made phone calls and sent cables while she finally took a long bath and choked down a small apple and some bread with a creamy, salty butter. She hadn’t had butter in months, and this little pat must have cost a fortune, but her parents had obviously decided it was worth its weight in gold if Kick would eat it.

  “It’s all set,” her father told her that evening. “You’ll leave in two days for Quebec, and a British plane will fly you to London. Tonight we dine at the Ritz, then Charlie Parker is supposed to be playing at Minton’s later, and I’m sure I can get us in.”

  A night out was the last thing she wanted, but she didn’t see any choice now that she’d emerged. She’d come back to help her family because of Joe, and that tour of duty wasn’t yet over. If Billy could push onward after losing so many men, she could go to dinner with her family. Buck up, she told herself. With the help of some makeup and a glitzy dress, she took Patsy’s arm and headed out into the bright lights of Manhattan. Everyone engaged her in conversation, Jack and Eunice and the friends her father had invited along, but no one mentioned Billy, and she didn’t bring him up, either.

  The next morning, her mother came to her after breakfast dressed in a fine red suit with brown kid gloves and a hat with black feathers and netting. Kick picked at the eggs and toast that were delivered to her room while Patsy showered. On top of the grief, she was also hungover after the whiskey and smoke at Minton’s.

  Her mother perched on one of the other chairs, and said, “Come to mass with me, Kathleen. You’ll be able to receive Communion again, and that will be such a balm on your soul. I’m sure of it. The church helped me so much after Joe’s death.”

  “I can’t, Mother,” Kick said, a sob rising into her throat and nearly choking her. “I still feel married to Billy. It wouldn’t be right.”

  Rose pressed her red lips into a thin line and studied her daughter. Kick’s heart was exhausted from the effort it had put forth in the last few days, but still it tightened as she stood her ground.

  “I want to, Mother, believe me,” Kick said, hoping to soften the stony look on Rose’s face with a plea for understanding, “and I will. Just . . . not now.”

  Patsy burst into the room wearing a bathrobe, toweling off her hair and saying, “Mmmm, breakfast. I’m famished.”

  She stopped cold, seeing Kick and her mother sitting in silence, and whispered, “I’m so sorry,” and turned to go back to the bedroom.

  Rose stood and put out her hand, and said, “No, Patsy, have some breakfast. There’s no reason for me to stay.”

  And she left.

  Rose’s last words to Kick before she left on the plane for Quebec were “Don’t wait too long.”

  * * *

  Billy’s final letter to her, written five days before he was killed, might have crossed paths with her own letter to him over the ocean that separated them. She received it weeks after he’d written it, though, since it had gone to her Cape address, then was forwarded to New York, then back across the Atlantic to Churchdale Hall. He wrote of “the permanent lump in my throat,” and how he longed for her to be there with him because it was “an experience which few can have and which I would love to share with you.” Just as she’d written to him about wishing he was with her in New York. H
is was clearly the finer wish. And now she wished more than anything that his had been granted, even if it had landed her in the mud of Belgium. At least she would have been by his side.

  This posthumous letter slayed her the way Joe Jr.’s had their father, and she understood in the very marrow of her bones his outburst that the best of everything was over now.

  Billy’s parents and sisters, and Debo and Marie and Sissy and Nancy Astor, were one with her in their sorrow. They knew what an excellent man Billy had been, and how much he and Kick had loved each other. They also understood, as her own family couldn’t, what Kick had given up to be his—things she couldn’t simply pick back up again, like gloves left at a party. She spent hour upon hour with them, usually not even speaking. Sometimes crying together, sometimes reading one of Billy’s books aloud or quietly in companionable silence, sometimes riding horses or sharing a cup of his favorite ale. The frenetic energy of Hyannis Port was a distant memory, and she was relieved.

  One idle Wednesday in October she took the train down to Crastock Farm and saw Pat Wilson for the first time since before Joe’s death. The ride was soothing, shuttling her through the brick outskirts of the city, then into verdant pastures with their quintessential hedgerows and stone cottages, the ones that had withstood centuries of wreck and repair.

  When Kick arrived, she and her friend hugged and then shared a quiet lunch in Pat’s kitchen. The children were at school, and there weren’t any other visitors, so the house felt unusually empty, but Pat assured Kick that this was the case only rarely, as she entertained as many houseguests as ever.

  “I find I don’t much like being alone,” said Pat, “so even though it’s not the same as when Joe was here with me, I still want to have people near. Sometimes I even have fun. Joe made me love life again, and I feel it would be a great disservice to him to go back to the way I was before.”

  “I envy you your perspective,” said Kick. Billy’s loss had begun to feel like a numbness in her heart, as if it was in danger of becoming what John White had once described Dr. Freeman’s patients becoming after his surgeries. Oh, Rosie, I miss you, too. How I wish we could eat sweets and laugh again.

  “It’ll come, in time,” said Pat. “It will take you longer. You and Billy weren’t married for long, but you were together for years. Part of each other’s lives and in each other’s blood. That’s not an easy thing to get over.”

  Kick nodded. “Any advice on how?”

  “Well, I have the farm and the children to keep me busy. What can you lay your hands on that might distract you?”

  “Not the work of a marchioness,” she said bitterly. That dream was gone, too. Andrew and Debo were now the Marquess and Marchioness of Hartington. “But,” she went on, “I have an appointment next week with Scroggins, of all people.”

  Pat laughed. “Maybe a little rough treatment will do you good.”

  “I hope so,” said Kick.

  When she stepped into the bar of the Hans Crescent, the first person she laid eyes on was Tim. He saw her, too, and immediately stood up and went to her with a glad smile and a kiss on the cheek.

  “Tim! What are you doing here? I thought you’d left in the summer,” she exclaimed. Seeing him was so unexpected, she smiled—and meant it.

  “Just finished my second tour,” he replied. “So I’m enjoying some R and R at my favorite watering hole. Come on, I’ll get you a drink.”

  By then other men and some of the girls who’d been there since Kick’s time had seen her and were shouting, “Kick!” “Nice to see you!” and even, “Our patron saint is back!” There was a lot of hugging and hand shaking and laughing, and Kick began to feel the tiniest fissure of . . . something . . . warm and good . . . in her heart. Then a girl from Memphis who didn’t know her well because she’d started work just as Kick was getting ready to leave said, starry-eyed, “I heard you got married?”

  Those of the company who knew what had happened stopped talking and laughing to stare coldly at the girl, who winced, suddenly understanding. “She married a hero, is who she married,” said Tim, with a smile at Kick. “She’s got two hero brothers and a hero husband, which is more than most of us will be able to say in our lives.”

  For the first time, this reference to Joe and Billy did not make her want to run from the room in tears.

  She swallowed and said, “Thanks, Tim, but I’m sure everyone here has a story a lot like mine.”

  “I doubt that very much, Kick,” said Tim, handing her the half-pint of ale and clinking his glass to hers.

  After her drink, she and Scroggins decided that the best position for her would be a senior one where she could give high-ranking officers tours of the clubs and the city, since even Scroggins had to admit, “No American knows this ruined place better than you do.”

  Kick stepped out into the cooling twilight. There were still no streetlights as there had been during those enchanted prewar nights when it seemed as though fairies lit her way to adventure. And now, around every corner she was sure she saw Billy’s ghost. But this haunting made London even more itself to her, the capital of her greatest joys and now her greatest sorrow.

  Wrapping her coat more tightly around her body, Kick renewed the promise she’d made in the fall of 1939: she would be here when the lights came back on. And longer, she knew now. Much longer. It would be worth whatever it cost.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Allow me to save you the rush to Google and fill you in on the last four years of Kick’s impossibly short life (or, if you’ve already gone to the Wikipedia page, allow me to elaborate). Kick was indeed in England when the lights came back on, as she made it her permanent home. On that island, far from the expectations of her family, she was able to live freely and be fully herself—and to fall in love again.

  In many ways, she made the same agonizing decision a second time when she chose Peter Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, the 8th Earl Fitzwilliam, as her lover. Like Billy, Peter was a Protestant. Worse, though, he was still married to Olive “Obby” Plunket when he and Kick became involved. When the Kennedys learned of their relationship, and of Peter’s plan to divorce Obby and marry Kick, Rose flew all the way to London to camp out in Kick’s town house and regale her with threats of eternal damnation—to say nothing of a final excommunication from the Kennedy family—should she proceed with her plan.

  Readers of The Kennedy Debutante will not be surprised, I think, that Kick was undeterred by her mother’s pleas. She followed her heart.

  On May 13, 1948—four years and one week after her marriage to Billy—Kick stepped into a plane with Peter en route to Cannes from Paris, having arrived in that city safely from London. The couple had two purposes in France: to take a first holiday together, and also to meet with Kick’s father in the hopes of convincing him to accept her new love. They never made it. Their little plane hit a terrible storm that jostled it horribly in the air and then sent it crashing into the Cévennes mountains, where all four passengers died instantly. Kick was only twenty-eight years old.

  Her family mourned her, of course, but as they did with Rosemary, they relegated Kick’s memory and rebellion to the past. She wasn’t forgotten, however: Some close to Jack said that the lovely Jacqueline Bouvier reminded him of his sister, and Bobby named his first daughter Kathleen Hartington Kennedy. Then Bobby’s namesake RFK Jr. named one of his daughters Kathleen, and that Kathleen goes by the nickname Kick today. That young Kick was recently a guest on an episode of the Smithsonian Channel’s series Million Dollar American Princesses, on which her great-aunt, the original Kick Kennedy, was profiled.

  In fact, it was a TV show something like that one that led me to Kick’s story. At the height of the Downton Abbey frenzy (a show I relished till the end), PBS aired a series called Secrets of the Manor House, and Downton’s Highclere Castle was the marquee estate of the show. Chatsworth got its own episode, devoted to its long history, and a few minu
tes were dedicated to the fact that for a tiny fraction of its five-century life, Kick Kennedy would have someday inherited the house as the Duchess of Devonshire. Instead, Chatsworth fell into the worthy hands of her friend Deborah Mitford, whose long and complicated marriage to Andrew Cavendish allowed her to become one of the most revered duchesses in England, a writer, and a superlative estate mistress. If you visit Chatsworth today and revel in its majesty and preservation, you have Debo to thank.

  Watching “Secrets of Chatsworth,” I became entranced by Kick’s story, but it was a few years until I began researching and writing about her in earnest, and the result is this novel. I read as much as I could about Kick, and for me as a first-time writer of historical fiction, there was just enough material to help me see the shape of her story, while also leaving me plenty of space to imagine how she must have felt about events.

  Serendipitously, I live close to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston, where the knowledgeable librarians helped me find all the material on Kick they had. It was a real treat to be able to hold in my hands the precious few of Kick’s letters, diaries, and scrapbooks that have been preserved. From these, I took a handful of quotes, which have been used in the text of the novel. (See the following section for more details on the quotes.) Most of the letters and telegrams in this novel are fiction. Her diary was not confessional, betraying little of her true feelings about people and events; but to see what and whom she did mention, and with what frequency, was certainly illuminating. Letters are always performances, and I read Kick’s missives to family and friends wondering what play she was staging for them.

  When I first started this novel, the only two people to have written books about Kick were Lynne McTaggart in her 1983 biography, Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times, and Robert DeMaria in his 1999 biographical novel, That Kennedy Girl. I read parts of both of these, though I took the advice of my novelist friends and mentors and read just enough to guide me, but not overly determine my story. Barbara Leaming’s and Paula Byrne’s 2016 biographies of Kick came out when I was nearly finished with my manuscript (Kick Kennedy: The Charmed Life and Tragic Death of the Favorite Kennedy Daughter, and Kick: The True Story of JFK’s Sister and the Heir to Chatsworth, respectively), and I read pieces of Leaming’s uniquely constructed book to check a few facts. I’m thrilled that the fourth Kennedy child has lately been getting the attention she so deserves—and surely would have relished.