But Mother was also the tender index-card archivist of the small moments, the letters, notes, and remarks that were the lifeblood of our family. "Having barrels of fun," I once cable-grammed her from the Riviera. "Send money for more barrels." She kept that one, and hundreds like it.
Through all of this, the house on Marchant Avenue in Hyannis Port was the Kennedys' safe harbor. My father liked to say that "home holds no fear for me." We understood what he meant. We knew that we could always always come home, that we could make mistakes, get defeated, but when all was said and done, we would be respected and appreciated at home. Dad himself had no fear because he knew in his heart that he was working hard for the family; he was doing everything he possibly could to show us how to lead constructive lives. But at the end of the day, it was up to each of us to carry out what he'd taught us. This was the abiding philosophy at the Cape house. And so it remains today for Vicki and myself, and everyone in the family who comes to stay with us.
We were just incredibly close, all of us, through all our younger years and after. And even though the Cape house was our base, and you'd think we would be restless to get away from it now and then, explore other places, that was not the case. Our whole lives were centered in this one place. We didn't really go out to other places to play. We didn't go off to other kinds of events. It was all here, all here: all the playing, all the enjoyment, all the fun.
For me, it still is. And always shall be.
The original structure was built in 1902 and known then as the Malcolm Cottage. My father rented it in 1926, while his growing family still lived in Brookline, Massachusetts. Dad bought the cottage and enlarged it two years later, as a summer retreat. My own earliest memories of "home" revolve around the house in Bronxville, New York, where I lived most of the time in my early years; but in 1941, Dad closed the Bronxville house down. In the decades that followed, as fate and fortune scattered us to far-flung cities and ports of call, it was the Hyannis Port house, paradoxically, that grew in its stature as our center.
It was the place from where I strode proudly on summer days into the surrounding neighborhood of graceful houses, with their pitched cedar roofs and shutters and gardens bursting with flowers, to pursue my career as a wage earner. I delivered newspapers and sweated and struggled behind those old manual lawn mowers to supplement my allowance of ten cents a week, eventually raised to a quarter.
It was the place where we could and did play practical jokes on one another, and on our dear mother, who was always a most satisfying victim. My favorite running prank was to find a pair of Jack's shoes, the dirtier the better, and place them smack dab on the polished top of Mother's grand piano. This would drive her absolutely crazy. She'd always come in and spot the shoes as if it were for the first time, and start in on Jack--didn't he know where to put his shoes? Didn't he know the piano was not the place for them? This joke, and Mother's clockwork response, continued while Jack was president, Bobby was attorney general, and I was a senator.
Even Jack's presidency didn't buy him much slack around the Cape house. Not many weeks after his inauguration, he was a bit fatigued as he joined the rest of us for our usual weekend at Hyannis Port. He slept in late on Sunday morning in his old first-floor bedroom--until he heard the footsteps of our father ascending the stairs after the eleven o'clock mass at St. Francis Xavier Church. Realizing that he was just seconds from being caught and scolded for missing mass, the president of the United States threw himself out of bed, yanked on a pair of pants, sneaked out of the door, hightailed it toward the garage, and scrambled over our neighbor Rodger Currie's fence to safety.
Just a few final random memories, now, of life in that sanctuary in those sweet summers before the war:
In the evening before dinner we'd gather in the living room, where my mother would play the piano. She played with great delicacy and finesse. She'd come downstairs at 6:30 and seat herself at the keyboard, and she'd play until the family had formed. Then she'd stop and the conversation would begin.
Once in a while Jack would drift into the room from vigorous games out of doors after changing into a clean shirt, an absolute requirement in my parents' home. When a lull softened the general din, he might nod to Mother, and then begin to sing, alone, to her accompaniment. My brother had a fine voice--a fact that very few people know. One of his favorite tunes was "September Song." Jack could imitate the gravelly voice of Walter Huston, who'd made it famous on Broadway, and still project the ballad's aching tenderness.
And the days dwindle down
To a precious few
September
November...
Sometimes Jack would sing that song directly to me.
At dinner, we would often sit down to platters heaped with clams and lobsters. We were not assigned seats, but Mother and Dad always sat in the same places. We each had a napkin, and that napkin was expected to last the entire week. If it suffered any stains--which of course is what napkins are designed to do--too bad. One a week. I had two or three important roles in our summer dinners. It was my special task to head down to the shore with two buckets and return with enough salt water to cook the shellfish. Another chore was to bring home fresh water from the pump at the golf course. Two of Dad's mealtime passions were good tomatoes and fresh water. Finally, if our dessert was ice cream, it would be ice cream that I had churned, by turning a handle for about forty-five minutes, over a bucket of ice. I was one of the few fellows who could claim that ice cream made me physically fit!
Our noisy dinner table always bore the foods of the seasons. When the corn was in, we had corn on the cob. And then we had corn pudding, and then we had cornbread. Every meal seemed made of corn. And when the blueberries came in, everything was blueberry: blueberry pie, and blueberry shortcake, and blueberry muffins. The same with the strawberries. And of course the cranberries.
But whatever dishes were set before us, the one "menu" item that never varied was conversation. After grace, ideas and information would start to flow. The spirit was generally upbeat but always informative.
Only rarely did the talk grow heated, and even then it had its comic side. I recall one mealtime when Joe Jr., who had recently traveled in Russia, began to wax enthusiastic over what he'd seen there. Joe was reliably his father's son when it came to economics and politics, but he'd been more than a little naive in his reaction to the way the Soviets described their system. "You know, there's something interesting about that communism over there," he declared to our father. "This idea of 'each according to their need, each according to their ability'..." That was as far as he got. Dad set his knife and fork down. "When you sell your car, and sell your boat, and sell your horse, you can talk to me about that," he exploded at Joe, "but otherwise I don't want to hear any more about it in this house! " And boom! up he got, and out the door he went. The kicker was that as my poor brother sat there openmouthed, my mother said to him, "Joe, you shouldn't upset your father."
After dinner, toward sunset, my father liked to retire to his porch on the second floor and sit in the corner by the window that looks out into the harbor and the lantern that was there. He would read into the late evening. But he'd also keep a lookout for his younger children as we trudged home from one last sail or game of tennis or flashlight tag. If you were "it," and if you shone a flashlight on a hiding child, they were out. Jack continued playing flashlight tag with the younger children as president.
A variation of flashlight tag, which we also played into adulthood, was a game we called Murder. We'd play with all the kids and adults and use the whole house at the Cape. Someone was "it," and if they tagged you, you were dead, but then you became the Murderer. The goal was to hide from the Murderer so that you were the last person not tagged. One night, Congressman Jack Kennedy was the second to last person tagged and he couldn't find the last person, who had crawled in Mother's hat box shelf. That person was Lem Billings, Jack's loyal lifelong friend whom he'd met at Choate. Since they couldn't find him, Jack proposed that
everyone go to a movie. When we all came back two hours later, we found Lem still in that closet, covered with sweat and still waiting to be caught.
As children, we'd have to be home from our games by the time the streetlights came on, and of course as the summer days got shorter the lights came on earlier and earlier. If any of us arrived late, we'd pick up the gaze of Dad's steely blue eyes at about thirty yards, and then whatever excuses we'd invented would melt by the time we got to the door. Dad could see everything that was happening from that chair in that room. Everything in the world, it sometimes seemed.
Down in the basement was a small movie theater, with projector and screen, that Dad had installed. Through his Hollywood connections he could get new movies before they were released to the theaters. We saw the Walt Disney feature cartoons like Dumbo and Snow White. Dad knew Walt Disney, who gave him several of his paintings, renderings of his cartoon characters. For a long time we had those paintings on a wall of our house in McLean, Virginia.
Later we'd watch adventure films: Four Feathers, the 1939 film about a young British officer who has to disprove his reputation as a coward during the invasion of North Africa. I think it is one of the great movies of all time, along with Call of the Wild and Captains Courageous. I loved the latter movie so much, in fact, that when Vicki and I adopted a new puppy recently, we named him Captains Courageous. I loved movies about the sea, and about men at war.
Later on, Dad would screen some romantic movies--but at the moment when the lead characters would start holding hands, he'd call out, "Teddy! It's time for you to go to bed!" Jean wasn't much luckier. Just as they got to the embracing and kissing stage, she'd hear that voice of his: "Jean, you've got to go up to bed!"
The cranberry fields are smaller now than they were in 1941--as is every childhood image when seen through a grown-up's eyes. But my favorite boyhood vista from our porch in Hyannis Port has not diminished. This is the shoreline, where the shallow waters of Nantucket Sound lap peacefully, then draw back toward the open sea. Tied up on the beach, in my memory, its flat stern bobbing in the surf, is a little boat.
When I was six, Joe and Jack began teaching me to sail in that little boat. They introduced me to the wind and the tides and the currents, and my life on the sea was under way.
The boats grew larger over my lifetime, and I ventured farther and farther from shore. I sailed alone, I sailed with my own family, I sailed in regattas, I sailed with political leaders and celebrities who were my guests. I've sailed with just about anyone I could get onto the boat with me. I took up painting, first with acrylics and later with oils, to pass time with Jack when he was recuperating from back surgery in the 1950s, and then again while I was recuperating from an injury in the 1960s, and most of my canvases have been of sailing boats, including my cherished antique wooden schooner Mya, and of the sea, and of harbors, safe harbors.
CHAPTER TWO
No Crying in This House
1932-1938
Hyannis Port is my true home, but it was not my first home. At the time of my birth on February 22, 1932, the family spent summers and early autumns in Hyannis Port, and then headed to Bronxville, New York, for winters. The colonnaded house there stood in the village's leafy Sagamore Park neighborhood. Its three stories and twenty rooms occupied a crest of land, its red-tiled roof catching the sun above a thick scattering of tall old trees. We lived there in winter for six years after I was born.
Dad had accumulated most of his fortune by then. He had traded brilliantly in the stock market, and invested with his typical acuity in the still young Hollywood movie industry. In 1928, my father had greatly increased his wealth by buying and consolidating two small movie-related businesses into Radio-Keith-Orpheum--RKO. He'd protected that fortune by phasing out of the market several months before the crash in October of 1929.
The New York suburbs were new territory for the Kennedys. It is Boston, of course, that holds the deep transplanted roots of my family in the New World, on both sides. The Irish famine drove my great-grandfather Patrick across the ocean to the city in the 1840s; and within a decade, Thomas Fitzgerald and several members of his large family made a similar pilgrimage. My parents' marriage in October 1914 united the Boston Kennedys and the Boston Fitzgeralds, and the couple settled in a trim little house on Beals Street in Brookline. The house still stands. It was where Jack, Kathleen, and Rosemary were born--assisted by Dr. Frederick Good, who presided at the births of all of us. (Joe Jr., the first, arrived in a summer house in Hull, Massachusetts, in 1915.) Dad moved the family to a larger house in Brookline, where Eunice, Pat, and Bobby were delivered. The expanding family made an even larger house necessary, and Dad's expanding wealth made it possible. After the move to Bronxville, though, my mother insisted that one bond with her origins remain unbroken: any children still to come would be born in her native city--never mind the intervening two hundred miles. In 1927 she returned to her beloved Boston for the birth of Jean. And in early 1932, at the age of forty-one, my mother returned to Boston again for my birth at St. Margaret's Hospital.
My mother saved many mementos of my birth, as she did for all the children. One of them I still have hanging in my Senate office: a framed card that bears an illustration of the White House. The card apparently accompanied a floral bouquet. Across its surface, in faded ink, is the handwriting of my mother: "Perishable flowers." The card is signed by President Herbert Hoover. There is a stamp mark of postage due, a rather humorous souvenir from the man who presided over the Great Depression.
I was born Edward Moore Kennedy, after my father's longtime personal secretary, confidant, and close family friend. Eddie Moore had been an assistant to three Boston mayors, including John F. "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, my mother's legendary father. My dad cherished Eddie's convivial soul and his immersion in the Boston Irish political culture. This was the same Eddie Moore who rescued Jack, the chocolate frosting thief, from our brother Joe down at the Cape.
When I was confirmed at twelve years old, a saint found his way into my name. We confirmation boys were told that we could keep our own middle names or add a saint's name to the one we already had. The boys ahead of me in the line all had middle names like Michael or John or James. When it came my turn, the bishop asked me mine, and I said, "Moore." He said, "No, your middle name." I said, "It's Moore." The bishop said, "Oh. Thomas More." I didn't want to hold up the line and call any further attention to myself, so I said, "Yes." In that way, my name became Edward Thomas Moore Kennedy. Given that Saint Thomas More is the patron saint of politicians, I'm rather happy to have him in there.
Even as a small boy, I missed the ocean during the months away from Hyannis Port, but the Bronxville house, built around 1920 and sadly torn down in the 1950s, held many pleasures of its own. A curving third-floor balcony rested on top of three Ionic columns, and a smaller balcony below it stretched above the front entrance. Inside, amid the master rooms, were such modern wonders as shower baths, an oil-burning hot water heater, and a number of enclosed porches. The basement held a billiard table, and the garage was big enough for five cars.
The part of the house that most interested me, though, was a large, dimly lit room up on the third floor. Inside it, my brothers presided over an elaborate, always-growing electric train system. Joe Jr. and Jack had begun the collection, with Lionel cars and tracks supplied by Dad. Control shifted to Jack and Bobby as time went on and the routes grew more intricate. When Jack began his travels, Bobby became chief engineer.
My brothers could make you believe that running those trains was a mission of vital importance. But then they could give you that feeling with anything they were up to. They certainly convinced me. As soon as I was old enough to climb the stairs to the train room, I sat for hours watching the action with envy and fascination. I itched to get my own hands on the levers that made those engines race and the signals flash and the whistles shriek. But the train room was my brothers' kingdom, and they were always happy to remind me who was in charge.
Their message stuck. Just a few years ago, well over half a century on, I was visiting the Wyeth family at their home in Brandywine. Jamie Wyeth showed us into the room where his family kept its own model train system. Without warning I was catapulted back across the decades to that third-floor room in Bronxville, and in my memory I could hear Bobby's excited chatter above the sound of his engine and its cars on the track. And we were all startled by a loud voice that shook the Wyeths' room: "DON'T TOUCH THE TRAINS!"
It was me, imitating Bobby.
Bobby's voice, and those of the others in my family, echo through my early memories of Bronxville as they do through the house in Hyannis Port. My father's voice is paramount. He was never abusive, never wounding toward any of his children, but he had a way of letting us know exactly what he expected of us. Once, when I was thirteen or fourteen years old, Dad called me into his room for a chat. I must have done something that prompted the conversation, but I don't remember what it was. But he used phrases so concise and vivid that I can remember them word for word nearly sixty-five years later: "You can have a serious life or a nonserious life, Teddy. I'll still love you whichever choice you make. But if you decide to have a nonserious life, I won't have much time for you. You make up your mind. There are too many children here who are doing things that are interesting for me to do much with you."
I went back to my room with his words replaying in my mind. It didn't take me long to decide which kind of life I wanted to lead.
Another powerful ethic that Dad taught us was to respect the privacy of others and to ignore whatever disrespect of privacy might come our way. I learned this particular lesson at a birthday party for myself in about 1946. My sister Kathleen had organized it, and brought a lot of my friends to the house to play games. At some point in the afternoon I wandered upstairs--to use the bathroom, I think. I passed a bedroom and heard a boy's voice. I looked in and saw Lafay Paige, one of the young party guests, talking on the phone, to one of his parents, I guess. His back was partly turned, and he couldn't see me.
True Compass: A Memoir Page 4
