by Kathy McKeon
“Come on, it’ll be fun,” I wheedled John. I had never seen baseball until the Kennedys introduced me to it, but I quickly came to look forward to the raucous afternoon games as much as John dreaded them. They reminded me of my camogie matches back in Ireland. The governesses, waitresses, and other help cheering from the sidelines were always welcome to join the fun, and my best friend, Bridey, was a natural at it. Bridey could hit the ball like nobody’s business, and she tore around the bases like a true Kennedy, with no apologies for plowing into or right over any adult, child, or excited dog in her way. I was still trying to figure out the game when she egged me on to take a turn at bat one afternoon.
I gripped the wooden club and took a wild swing as the ball came flying at me, surprised when I felt it connect with a solid, satisfying thwack. I stood there admiring my work: The ball flew high and fast over the heads of all the outfielders. “GO!!! GO!!! GO!!!” everyone was yelling. I thought they meant the ones chasing after the ball.
“Wow, you know how to hit it!” Bridey said with admiration.
“Well, I know that part,” I agreed. “But where do I go now?”
Bridey ran me around the bases, and I went down in summer history as the most clueless home run hitter ever. I always wanted to get in the game after that, but if John stayed upstairs, I was stuck inside, too. When he did come out, Sandy couldn’t wait to come looking for Madam after the game. He was a little pushy and would walk straight through the kitchen toward the living room, where Madam could often be found writing letters on her blue seashell stationery or with her face buried in a book. Sandy would launch right in on a play-by-play of the game, making up stories of how good John was at it. “He made the bases,” he would fib, when John had actually spent much of the game making up excuses about why he urgently needed to leave. (His leg hurt, or his stomach, or his toe—it didn’t matter, because no one ever bought it anyway. The only part of dear, sweet John that wasn’t Irish was his pitiful lack of imagination and commitment when it came to lying.)
Madam always listened politely to Sandy’s fibs and thanked him for coming to play with the children. She would come watch the baseball games herself sometimes and knew full well that John was no Mickey Mantle in the making, but she just wanted him to get some fresh air and exercise was all, not a spot in the World Series.
Sandy had plenty of company when it came to locals wanting to weasel their way into Madam’s good graces. Hyannis Port was a little summer beach town that depended on tourism, and the Kennedys were its biggest draw. It was money in the bank for any of the small shops or restaurants in town to boast of some connection to the family. People would send over baskets of goodies for Madam and the kids, like the mouthwatering pies delivered by the three cheeky sisters who owned one local restaurant. Blueberry, raspberry, cherry, blackberry, cranberry—the pies glistened and oozed in a delectable row on the kitchen counter, where Madam spotted them. “Oh, how nice!” she exclaimed in delight. She immediately sent a handwritten thank-you note, and the sisters soon showed up again, this time with all the ingredients to teach the children how to make crepes filled with raspberry jam. Madam came into the kitchen afterward to snag a couple. “It’s so nice of them to do this for us,” she remarked. Another gift of pies followed not long after that.
Then Nancy Tuckerman got a steep bill in the mail.
“Why are we ordering all these pies?” she demanded. The shakedown wasn’t just for the magically reappearing pies, either: It turns out that private crepe lessons cost a pretty penny, too. That was the last we saw of the sisters and their treats.
In town, people generally didn’t make a big deal out of spotting us when we were browsing around in the souvenir shops or heading to the Melody Tent for the children’s matinee on Saturdays, where live performances of shows like Peter Pan or Alice in Wonderland drew a crowd. The Secret Service, dressed in casual summer khakis instead of their usual dark suits, would sit in the row behind John and Caroline. They didn’t make a big scene of it when some excited parent urged other children forward to “go say hello to John-John and Caroline.” (John hated the nickname and no one in his family called him that—it came about when a White House reporter had once overheard the president call out to his toddler son twice in quick succession.) Caroline was bashful but still perfectly mirrored her mum’s poise, replying with a simple yes and polite hello when anyone came up and asked, “Are you really Caroline Kennedy?” John saw everyone as a likely friend, though, and would go right up to strangers and introduce himself if I didn’t stop him.
The children had been taught by their mother how to keep their heads down and their faces turned when paparazzi appeared and called out their names to try to get them to look at the cameras. I followed their example, and would also try my best to walk in front of the photographers to block their view, but they knew how to change position fast.
Unwelcome as that attention was, Madam never wanted John and Caroline treated like rare orchids in a greenhouse. They invited playmates over, and Caroline loved having slumber parties with her friends and cousins. Sandy used to bring some townie kids in to join the baseball games, and it wasn’t unusual for the teenaged Kennedys to bring in friends who let younger siblings tag along to the compound for a day of fun. Sometimes Caroline and her favorite cousins, Courtney and Sydney, might set up a little lemonade stand on the road just outside the gates to sell nickel cups to the neighbor kids and their nannies. Not all encounters passersby had with Kennedy kids were so sweet and innocent, though.
The RFK crew were the real ringleaders when it came to mischief, with the four oldest—Kathleen, Joe, Bobby, and David—serving as the musketeers the rest were all too happy to follow. The bigger ones loved to hide up in the trees with water balloons to throw at cars or people going by on the narrow lanes skirting the compound. Kathleen, the eldest, was six years older than Caroline, and with younger siblings who just kept coming (eventually there were ten) she showed all the makings of a terrific general someday. Kathleen was very, very organized. She was the brains behind the water balloon munitions factory, directing the younger ones on the ground to help fill balloons, then ferry them by the bucketful to the older ones up in the branches. One day I caught a bunch of them sneaking up to the widow’s walk at our house with dripping balloon bombs in hand. Our roof was the perfect foxhole for launching surprise balloon attacks on the Secret Service, the doddering gardener, or any other unsuspecting help passing below.
“I know you’re having fun, but I don’t want you up there,” I told the kids.
“We’re sorry,” Caroline said with wide-eyed sincerity. Getting cross with her was impossible, and she knew it would take a lot more than a water balloon for me to tell her mother about any shenanigans.
“Well, don’t do it again,” I warned.
“We won’t,” she promised.
We both knew full well they’d just wait until I took my daily walk down to the beach at four o’clock, then sneak back upstairs again. Sure enough, when I went into Caroline’s room to put away laundry sometime after lunch, I noticed the door to the widow’s walk was ajar. Assuming another water balloon offensive was afoot, I latched the door closed again, figuring it would signal that I was on to them and send the mischievous little army into retreat while I took my customary stroll on the shore with Shannon.
As I walked back up to the house after my beach walk, I heard a voice calling to me from above.
“Kath! Kath! Could you please let me down?”
I looked up and saw Madam, waving to me from the widow’s walk, a towel clutched to her chest. She had been up there sunbathing in her birthday suit when I locked the door! I hurried upstairs to free her, not volunteering that it was me who latched the door on her. She just laughed off her misadventure but had a handyman fix the door’s lock so no one could get trapped up there again.
If she wasn’t out swimming in the sea or jogging along the water’s edge, Madam’s favorite way to enjoy some alone time at the Cape was t
o paint at her easel in the sunroom, her feet bare, hair tied back with an elastic band, no makeup on her face. When it was just her in the evening, she liked to have her dinner in there on a tray. Her social life at the Cape was much less demanding than it was in Manhattan, with all its galas and charities and cultural events. When Madam entertained at the Cape, it was generally just other family members over for dinner—Jean and Stephen Smith, or Joan and Ted Kennedy, or Ethel. (Bobby was usually in Washington during the workweek and came up in time for the Saturday-morning touch-football games on the big lawn.)
Randolph Churchill, the son of the British prime minister, came for the weekend and ate with a cigarette still hanging from his mouth; he chain-smoked so furiously, even the sea breeze through the open windows couldn’t cut through the haze. He coughed something terrible. Sometimes the men who had made up President Kennedy’s inner White House circle, like former defense secretary Robert McNamara, Chuck Spalding, and Arthur Schlesinger, would come for a low-key reunion weekend together with Madam. They would all talk and laugh and smoke late into the night until the old friends drove back to their hotel rooms in town.
She seemed happy those nights, revisiting Camelot for a few lovely hours.
Madam also took special delight in visiting back and forth with her dear friend Bunny Mellon, who owned a spectacular mansion a short drive away. The Mellons were the richest of the rich, famous for their art collections and the Thoroughbred racehorses they bred in Virginia. Horses, fine art, and design were passions Madam shared with her friends, and Mrs. Mellon was the one Madam had turned to for help in restoring the White House. She was pressed into duty as a landscape designer, too, when President Kennedy had her reconfigure the famous Rose Garden. When Madam moved to New York after the assassination, Mrs. Mellon added her touch to Madam’s apartment at 1040: “Charley, go easy on those rugs, they’re Bunny Mellon’s,” I once overheard Madam tell the cleaning man as he ran the vacuum across the beautiful silk antique carpets in the dining room.
Mrs. Mellon was very ladylike and soft-spoken. She was quite tall and slim, and wore her hair in a fashionable but understated pageboy. When Mrs. Mellon was coming for lunch, Madam would go into a near-tizzy: Everything needed to be just right, even in the laid-back atmosphere at the Cape. “Kath, make sure the cushions are right on the chaise, that the zippers are to the back!” she’d fuss. In the kitchen, she would hover over the cook: What kind of soup was being served? Something with some green in it, she fretted, maybe some parsley or leek, or what about asparagus, was there any good asparagus?
You’d never guess Bunny Mellon was a billionaire the way she breezed through the kitchen door, chattering away, her arms full of flowers. Yellow sunflowers were her favorite offering.
“Kathy, come here, I want to show you how to cut these,” she told me the first time she appeared with a bouquet at the Cape. “I need a sharp knife.” I watched as she cut off the bottoms of each stem on the slant. “You don’t go straight across,” she explained. “They’ll last much longer this way. Now you have to put an aspirin into the vase with the water.”
I enjoyed arranging flowers and had a knack for doing the kind of loose, natural bouquets Madam fancied, but the surgery and aftercare Mrs. Mellon prescribed for the sunflowers were too much trouble for such big and raggedy-looking flowers, I thought.
On top of that, I’d have to listen to the cook go on and on about “ruining” a kitchen knife on the fat, fibrous stems. The blame would fall squarely on me, never Mrs. Mellon, who easily won over even the grouchiest of cooks with her sweet manner, always coming back to the kitchen the way she did to sing the praises of whatever soup she’d enjoyed for lunch. I liked Mrs. Mellon a great deal, but holy cow did I hate those sunflowers!
Flowers grew outside all the houses in the compound, of course, but the gardens varied in size and glory. Grandma Rose’s was the most abundant, which was no surprise, since it took more plants to landscape around the big house. Ethel boasted the splashiest colors with her orange and magenta lilies, whose middles left yellow pollen all over the countertops. Madam had the most beautiful garden, though, since she had gone to the trouble of putting in a separate patch away from the house strictly for flowers. Mrs. Mellon had provided the cottage-style design, laying out what to plant and where. I would go out every morning to snip some lilies of the valley to place on Madam’s breakfast tray. She loved their sweet, delicate fragrance.
Even though Madam grew plenty of her own fresh flowers, Grandma Rose would still summon me to her garden outside the big house.
“Send Jackie’s girl over, I want her to cut some flowers for Jackie,” she would tell whoever answered the pantry phone. Off I’d trot, shears in hand, and there would be Grandma Rose, waiting with hands on her hips in her flower garden to instruct me, stem by stem, which ones to cut. She wanted to make sure her daughter-in-law got only the nicest blooms. I don’t know if she ever discovered that someone else was after the same thing.
Late at night, I knew, one of Jean Kennedy Smith’s waitresses would sneak into Grandma’s garden with a flashlight and scissors to snip some choice flowers for Mrs. Smith’s house. She was very good at it and might have made a top-notch cat burglar if she’d taken her career in another direction. Since she was a friend of mine, I kept her secret, even after the Secret Service told me they’d spotted her swiping Madam’s flowers as well. I didn’t think it was anything worth creating a fuss over. Besides, I was hoping she would take the sunflowers I suspected Mrs. Mellon had planted in a back row: I had noticed the stalks growing ever taller and was dreading the attention they’d require once they bloomed. With no flowers to show, they looked like weeds poking up around the prettier plants surrounding them.
“Wilmer, when are those things going to bud?” I asked the ancient, half-blind gardener, who had no idea and couldn’t have cared less. Wilmer spent much of his day picking up piles of dog poop and grumbling about all the Kennedy pets that ran free across the property.
One afternoon I happened to glance out the kitchen window and noticed a few teenaged cousins outside lurking by Madam’s flower patch. The Secret Service guys sometimes came out of the trailer to toss a football or baseball around with them, so I thought nothing of it. Day after day, though, the kids kept coming back to the same spot, and they seemed to be pointing and looking at something in Madam’s garden. Something was up, but I wasn’t sure what. I went to investigate after the kids wandered off one afternoon but didn’t see any evidence that they’d been back there sneaking beers or cigarettes or anything like that. The flowers hadn’t been trampled, and the blasted, unblooming sunflowers were as big and healthy as ever, though there were little white buds on them now.
That’s when it hit me. I went to find Jack Dempsey, the retired Cape police chief who often hung out at the Secret Service trailer.
“Jack, could you come take a look at something?” I asked. He followed me to the flower patch and, before I could even ask, confirmed my suspicions about the mystery stalks with a single glance.
“It’s marijuana,” he said. “How did it get here, do you know?”
“Well, I don’t think the gardeners planted it,” I replied.
“I have to tell Mrs. Kennedy,” Dempsey said. He headed around the back of the house, toward the kitchen door. I knew Madam was out front on her porch, though, and hurried that way to head the police chief off at the pass. Better to prepare her for the news to come than give Dempsey the satisfaction of her initial reaction, whatever it was going to be.
“Madam, we just found marijuana growing in the flower patch,” I breathlessly reported.
“Are you kidding me?” she said, her face registering disbelief. “Oh my God, this can’t get out. What should we do?”
“Well, Jack Dempsey is in the kitchen and wants to talk to you,” I told her.
She went to find him, and he took her outside to see for herself.
“What should we do about this?” she wondered again.
“
Just ignore it, we’ll pull it,” Dempsey said. He and the Secret Service men ripped them up that afternoon. When I told Madam it had been taken care of, she nodded her approval. “Good,” she said, reiterating her biggest concern: “I don’t want this to get out.” John and Caroline were much too young to have had any role in it, and while we all had a pretty good idea which cousins did, there was no confrontation, and no one got in any trouble.
Madam’s house was by far the quietest in the compound, the one the other Kennedy mothers were most likely to seek out for a little break from the usual summer chaos. Joan liked to come play the grand piano, even though it was perpetually out of tune. Grandma would drop by before dinner, rosary in hand, to ask if Jackie would take a walk with her. “Oh no. Don’t tell me she’s here,” Madam might say, sighing in resignation when I interrupted her painting or letter writing to say Rose was waiting, but she would dutifully get her own beads, and the two women would walk the perimeter of the compound until all sixty-plus prayers had been said. Rose went to Mass every morning, too, and would sometimes call to say she wanted Madam and the children to join her.
Grandma was constantly calling with messages to relay to Madam—tell Jackie so-and-so is on television tonight and she should watch—or detailed instructions about something she wanted done for her, and once she’d told you something, she’d want you to repeat it back to her. When I was over at the big house and Grandma got going, I’d start backing away down the path toward home until I got far enough that she couldn’t shout loud enough for me to hear. She was strict and wanted things done exactly her way. She could ask five times what time the movie was starting in her basement theater that week, even though she was the one who mandated it begin at eight o’clock every single Friday. It wasn’t senility—she was sharper than most of us, like a Jeopardy! champion the way she was always preparing history, geography, and current-event questions for everyone to answer at family dinners, or taking news clippings to discuss with her grandkids when they went for walks together. The hectoring about what we would be doing and at precisely what time had more to do with Rose always needing to somehow pin down the future. What she couldn’t control had cost her so much already.
