by Kathy McKeon
As summer rolled around, Mrs. C announced that I would be taking the boys to the house she had rented in the Hamptons while she stayed in the city. We were to spend our days poolside at her beach club, where we could eat both lunch and dinner, putting it on her running tab. A taxi would pick us up at ten o’clock each morning and bring us home at five. Did I have a swimsuit?
“No, ma’am,” I answered. Ireland is wet enough as it is; swimming pools are about as common there as saunas in the Amazon. Coming to America, I had packed a Christmas ornament with a glow-in-the-dark baby Jesus and a raw chicken in my solitary suitcase, and even if I’d had more room, a swimsuit wouldn’t have made the cut.
“We’ll have to get you one,” Mrs. C decided. Off we went to a shop clearly meant for women Mrs. C’s age, not mine. She pawed through the racks as I searched in vain for something even remotely my style or appropriate for someone of my generation.
“Here,” Mrs. C said, holding out a hideous floral number with an old-lady skirt around the bottom.
“Oh, no, I don’t think that will fit,” I protested.
“Just try it on,” Mrs. C insisted. This outing had been her idea, not mine, but already she was losing patience.
I went into the dressing room and pulled on the awful bathing suit. Sports Illustrated had published its first annual Swimsuit Issue just a couple of months earlier, with a gorgeous young model in a scandalous white bikini on the cover. Department stores and catalogs were full of cute two-piece suits in the bold patterns and neon colors heralding the “mod” look from London. I loved to window-shop with Briege as we put together our fantasy wardrobes full of Twiggy-inspired miniskirts and cute baby doll dresses. My fantasy self looked nothing like the dowdy matron staring back at me in the dressing room mirror. The flounce just added insult to injury. I wanted to burst into tears. I had put on more than forty pounds since coming to America—stress, boredom, and mayo–Wonder Bread sandwiches will do that to you—and I was going to look like a sack of potatoes no matter what I tried on. I was disgusted with myself and felt that I didn’t deserve anything pretty, so I put up no protest when Mrs. C told the salesgirl to ring it up. And guess what? I had to pay for it, too. It wasn’t anywhere near as cheap as it looked!
Even though I was putting in more hours for no extra pay, the Hamptons felt like a secret vacation. True, Mrs. C was never around, which made me in charge of the boys around the clock and all weekend, too, with no day off, but Scotty and Paul were fun company, and they never gave me a bit of trouble. I was more like a fun big sister than a babysitter. We ordered hot dogs and hamburgers at the pool for lunch every day, and ate dinner at the country club restaurant when we weren’t down at the beach for one of the club’s big sunset barbecues. No more weeping in my room over mayo sandwiches. A new indulgence soon replaced my Wonder Bread habit, though, thanks to the old farmer next door.
“Ever seen one of these?” he had asked me one day, hoisting what looked like an overinflated cucumber of sorts. I shook my head dubiously.
“It’s a watermelon. You gotta try this,” he urged, beckoning me to follow him inside. He set the mutant cucumber on the cutting board and split it open with a big knife, exposing the red fruit inside. I bit into the wedge he offered, then devoured it greedily. Heaven. I had just tasted heaven. Beaming, the neighbor gave me the rest of the melon and I took it home and went into Wonder Bread mode, eating the entire thing that day. My belly ached all night. I spent the rest of the season gorging on watermelon. Between all the sugary fruit, and the daily cheeseburgers with fries I ate while lazing around the pool all day, the calories piled up.
I’d left Ireland a lively, athletic girl with the kind of legs boys always noticed, and now here I was, hardly six months later, trapped not only in a lumpy body I no longer recognized but in a life I didn’t like much more. Something was going to have to change, and soon.
Summer ended far too quickly, and being back under Mrs. C’s thumb depressed me more than ever. On my Thursdays off, I would get out of the apartment as soon as possible, no matter what the weather. I’d wander the city and browse through all the shops until it was time for Briege and I to take the subway back up to the Bronx for our weekly dinner with Uncle Pat and Aunt Rose. How good it felt to be with family again, to just be myself for a few hours! Going back to Mrs. C’s house filled me with a growing sense of despair. I was a hard worker, and a quick learner, but I was always being scolded for some blunder or other, and my self-esteem was running on empty. When Aunt Rose bought Easter outfits for Briege and me, I felt so pudgy and plain in my powder-blue suit with its old-biddy net hat that I flushed with humiliation when I heard my cousin and her boyfriend chuckling on the subway as we all headed to a nursing home to pay a holiday visit to an elderly auntie. “Are they laughing at us?” I whispered to Briege, who looked smart in her new navy blue suit. “Of course not!” she answered, thrown by the insecurity she could see growing deeper in me by the day. America was supposed to turn us from sheltered little farm girls into confident, modern young women. We were on life’s superhighway now, but I seemed to have shifted dangerously into reverse.
Briege and I had saved up the money we didn’t send back home to Ireland and pooled our meager savings to buy a small record player, which we shared back and forth, carting it across the Upper East Side. I remember one dreary Thursday when I had nowhere to go, and no one to spend the empty day with, and before I knew it, I had worked myself into the worst wave of homesickness I’d felt since leaving Ireland. I moped and wept my way up Park Avenue to see my sister, who was in the middle of serving a big dinner party. “What’re you doing here?!” Briege exclaimed, bustling me down the hallway and shoving me unceremoniously into her tiny bedroom. She felt bad enough to check up on me a few times and smuggle me a leftover dessert as I wallowed in my misery. Flung across her narrow bed, I sniffled and sobbed with self-pity while I played my favorite song over and over again on the record player. “That’s me,” I wailed into the pillow as Kitty Wells sang sadly about “these four walls” closing in on her.
Briege knew I wasn’t happy at Mrs. C’s, but I didn’t tell anyone, not even Aunt Rose, just how miserable I truly was. I did, however, let Aunt Rose know that my one day off a week kept getting shorter and shorter. “What do you mean?” she wanted to know. I explained Mrs. C’s latest method of psychological torture: sleeping in on Thursday mornings. The whole day was supposed to be mine, but with her refusing to rouse herself and come out of her locked bedroom, I had no choice but to feed the boys and walk them to school. Once back at the apartment, I had to wait longer and longer for Mrs. C to come out of her room and give me my paycheck so I could leave. She knew I always took it straight to the bank. It was sometimes well into the afternoon before I could collect the money due me, race out of the apartment, and rush to the teller’s cage to make my deposit before the bank closed at three o’clock.
“She’s playing a game is what she’s doing,” Aunt Rose concluded. “You just need to beat her at it.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?” I wondered. Aunt Rose merely smiled and said she was sure a clever girl like me would think of something.
The answer came to me like a gift from glow-in-the-dark baby Jesus. I didn’t even have to wait long to launch my counterattack. Mrs. C’s social calendar was nice and full that week.
“Kathleen, I’m expecting a gentleman to call around seven-thirty,” she loftily informed me one afternoon. “Show him inside and tell him to make himself at home. Be sure to let me know as soon as he arrives.” With that, she headed to her room to start the leisurely process of getting ready. I knew her routine well by then.
When the doorbell rang, I answered it promptly and greeted her date, showing him into the living room. I dutifully pointed out the bar and urged him to make himself a drink. Then I busied myself folding napkins in the dining room, where I could keep an eye on things. Soon enough, as if on cue, Mrs. C came striding out to make her cocktail.
Naked
.
Too late, she spotted her visitor, shrieked, and streaked back down the hallway. I hightailed it to my room and laughed until my sides hurt. They still went on their date, Mrs. C no doubt giving her suitor an earful about her stupid Irish girl.
That Thursday, Mrs. C remained in her room as usual. I knew she was less likely than ever to make any effort that would allow me to get to the bank on time, much less to enjoy the full day that was supposed to belong to me alone. I came home from walking the boys to school and hurried to my room to change and gather my things. I always tried to be noisy about it, hoping Mrs. C would take the hint and come out. This time, I fairly stomped down the hallway to the front door, opened it, then shut it with a good bang. I tiptoed back to Mrs. C’s bedroom and planted myself right outside her door, which she flung open a minute later. She was surprised to see me glowering at her.
“I thought I heard you leave,” she blustered.
“Oh, no, not yet. I’d like my check now, please,” I said firmly, looking her dead in the eye so she’d have no doubt who had won this battle of wits. She got her purse and wrote out my check.
It was the last time she tried to cheat me out of my day off.
I’d been working for Mrs. C for almost ten months when Uncle Pat shared a bit of interesting news: A famous lady was looking for an Irish girl, and we had an inside track for the position, thanks to my cousin Patsy’s husband, Jack, and the Irish police network. Briege was given first dibs, being the older sister, but she quickly declined: She liked where she was, and she preferred waitressing. This position was as a personal maid, with the possibility of some child care duties as well. I was happy to do two jobs to escape my one.
“It’s Jacqueline Kennedy,” Uncle Pat confided. “The president’s widow.”
When I got back to Mrs. C’s after my interview that fateful Thursday and gave her my notice, our farewell scene was perfectly predictable: She ripped me up one side, and down the other.
“Who would hire you?” she demanded with a cruel laugh. “You ruin everything!”
“I’m going to work for Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy,” I informed her. Her eyebrows shot up in surprise, but she wasn’t about to lose momentum when she was on a mean streak.
“Her?” she shrieked. “Who’d work for that one? She’s a horrible woman,” she said, as if she played bridge with the most famous woman in the world every Tuesday and had naked cocktails with her on the weekend. “You’re better off staying with me. You’re making a big mistake. You’re going to regret this.”
I never did.
FIVE
Summers at the Cape
A Kennedy summer could begin only after you greeted Grandma Rose.
It was a ritual every family member followed religiously, so shortly after arriving at Hyannis Port that first glorious season by the sea, I went with John and Caroline as they bounded across the wide lawn to the biggest house in the cluster of white clapboards that make up the celebrated Kennedy compound. Atop a tall flagpole, an American flag snapped and furled in the salt breeze off Nantucket Sound, and I could see a passel of kids already playing down at the beach, their shouts and laughter floating up the hill.
Rose Kennedy was watching the same scene from a chair up on her broad porch, her weathered, patrician face hidden by a big sunhat and clip-on shades over her eyeglasses. Eager for the rare chance to have their grandmother to themselves without the competition of two dozen cousins, John and Caroline scampered up the steps. Rose glanced up from their hugs as I caught up to them.
“Oh, you’re Jackie’s girl,” she said by way of introduction. It was friendly enough, and I took it as a welcome rather than a dismissal.
“Hello, yes, I’m Kathy,” I introduced myself. My brogue was the only cue Rose needed to launch full steam ahead into a discourse about Ireland, half history lesson, half reflections from her visits to the country her own grandparents had emigrated from. They were Limerick people.
My name must’ve gotten lost somewhere in her reverie, because Rose never did use it in all the years she saw me. There were so many governesses, baby nurses, cooks, waitresses, and other staff members descending on the compound—nearly all of us Irish—that keeping names straight would have been vexing, for sure.
Besides, I decided that I liked my new moniker: Jackie’s girl. It reminded all the rest of the help that I worked for the most special one.
Madam became a different person at the Cape, too.
Our house turned out to be the farthest back on the six-acre property, tucked on Irving Avenue behind Bobby and Ethel’s sprawling place, which never was big enough to contain all the children, friends, help, and various guests who were forever spilling out of it. (Ethel even converted a big old playhouse in the garden into cute guest quarters at one point, and the running joke was if you parked your car outside Ethel’s and left it unlocked, she’d have someone sleeping in it that night.) Madam’s home was slightly more modest, not as close to the waterfront as the big house and Bobby and Ethel’s, but with a stunning ocean view from a widow’s walk that could be reached by squeezing up a little ladder hidden behind a door in Caroline’s room. The Secret Service worked out of a trailer close by the gate nearest us—not that the round-the-clock presence of armed federal agents kept Grandma Rose from hectoring us daily about keeping the gate closed. (“Check again!” she would order when we assured her for the umpteenth time that yes, we had closed it, and we’d better be sure about it, because wouldn’t you know she would march over to see for herself.)
Madam’s house, I came to learn, was unchanged from the days when she and JFK had come to spend summers there as a young couple. But when he became president, the First Family moved to a nearby house on Squaw Island instead, for security reasons. Squaw Island, where Teddy and Joan Kennedy spent the summer, was more isolated, with only one road going to and from the narrow neck of land it was on.
A closet off the living room in the Irving Avenue house still held JFK’s leather golf bag. On a shelf inside was an American flag, which John was in charge of carefully removing each morning to hoist up the flagpole in front of the house, then bring down again at sunset. Even at five, he knew exactly how to fold the flag back up again in triangles. “Don’t let it touch the ground!” he warned me as I helped.
Madam hired a summer waitress and cook, and Provi was invited back to have a holiday with her son Gustavo. We settled happily into our new quarters and old feuds. I was thrilled when my recommendation helped land my cousin Babbsie a seasonal waitress job with Jean Kennedy Smith and her family. Shannon the spaniel came along for the summer, too, and made himself right at home under my bed as usual, which was fine by me until the evening he went out and got sprayed by a skunk.
“Oh my God, what is that smell?” Madam cried as he came running back inside. The two of us hustled him into the bathtub, me holding the wriggling dog down while Madam shampooed him, lathering him up again when the foul odor lingered, the both of us laughing and jumping away as Shannon shook himself, sending droplets of stinky water flying.
“What’re we going to do with him?” Madam cried, still laughing.
“Well, he’s not coming to bed with me, that’s for sure!” I answered.
The stench didn’t go away even after John tied the dog to a tree and tried hosing him down. Shannon reeked for days. I let him out first thing in the morning so he could go visit his friend Freckles at Ethel’s house and air out over there while stealing Freckles’s breakfast. Shannon always got plumper in the summer because he’d go from house to house helping himself to all the other dogs’ food. The Cape was an all-you-can-eat buffet as far as Shannon was concerned.
Attending to Madam’s needs was light duty in Hyannis Port, but I was serving as governess as well. Maud Shaw had abruptly retired just before we left, after going home to England for her brother’s funeral, and Madam wanted me to fill in as governess until a replacement could be hired. There was no extra pay to do so, but minding John and Caroline was easy at t
he compound, where everyone’s help—plus the Secret Service—meant a collective eye was kept on the children as they ran around playing from house to house. There were bikes and golf carts to ride, playhouses, and all manner of sports equipment. The kids all loved being out on the water, swimming, surfing, sailing, fishing, water-skiing.
“We are tied to the ocean,” President Kennedy had once been famously quoted as saying, and nothing at the Cape could be more obvious. John was the exception to that rule. Oh, he loved the water, too, but his true fascination was with airplanes. A small vintage plane was kept out on the lawn for the kids to climb around on—it was green, and maybe left over from World War II, I never knew—and John couldn’t get enough of it. He loved to sit in the pilot’s seat and fiddle with all the levers, making engine noises as he pretended to take off. The rest of the Kennedys may have felt the pull of the sea, but John always belonged to the sky.
Madam made sure the kids’ days were packed with outdoor activities, including tennis, swimming, and water-skiing lessons. Caroline was always in a hurry to get started (“No, Caroline, you have to put the right clothes on for tennis,” Madam would scold when she caught her trying yet again to pull her tennis shorts over her swimsuit.) The swim instructor, a local guy named Sandy, would also come by every afternoon at three o’clock to coach a baseball game with all the kids. Caroline was a tomboy who could hold her own with her competitive cousins, but John always had to be coaxed out of his room, where I would find him hiding out with his comic books.
“John, Sandy’s looking for you,” I would remind him when the baseball game was getting under way.
“I’m not feeling well,” he often said. Truth be told, he was somewhat sickly as a little boy, prone to respiratory trouble, and he was slighter than most of the other boys in the extended family. They homed in on John as the runt of the litter and liked to pick on him the way big brothers do, seeing if they could make him cry. John didn’t like rough-and-tumble sports and wasn’t very good at them as a little guy, but between touch (more like slam) football, baseball games, and water polo matches that involved near-drownings, rough-and-tumble was how this family played. His mother didn’t want him lollygagging around inside all day, and I knew from growing up with so many brothers myself that the only way to toughen up was to just keep throwing yourself back into the fray.
