by Kathy McKeon
Browsing happily through the racks of discounted designer clothes at Loehmann’s, I found myself a form-fitting maroon knit dress, which even garnered praise from Madam about how smart I looked. I never wanted to let go of that dress after that—I wore it until it was threadbare and long out of style. My work uniforms were another story, though: A few sizes too big now, they hung on me like potato sacks, and I asked if it might be all right to order new ones in lavender—my favorite color—instead of white.
“Of course!” Madam said, promptly buying me two—one lavender and another in a pale blush rose. She of all people understood what self-esteem could do for a woman. Keeping herself fit, active, and impeccably groomed had to have helped carry her through the challenges life threw her way, it stood to reason. Without really realizing it, I began to take on those habits myself, much the way a younger sister mirrors the older one she envies and admires.
At the Irish clubs, my newfound confidence and more stylish wardrobe didn’t go unnoticed among the girls gossiping in the ladies’ room.
“Who do you think you are now, Jacqueline Kennedy?” one of them ribbed me good-naturedly.
“Not really, but I’m trying,” I answered honestly. Besides taking some cues from Madam’s closet, I had also adopted some of her mannerisms, like the way she would absently hold her sunglasses in one hand and twirl them by the stem, or wear them on top of her head to push the hair back from her face. Actually, it was more than the gesture I’d borrowed—I’d also picked up a couple pairs of the big, round sunglasses themselves when she threw them out.
The girls at the Irish club weren’t the only ones to notice the new me: I landed myself a boyfriend, too. Pat had a good job delivering oil, and he was a real gentleman, taking me out and treating me to dinners and movies. He was easygoing and fit in well with my sister and friends. Everyone thought he was good marriage material. There was just one drawback, and it was a big one: Pat told me that he could never live in Ireland again. His allergies just couldn’t take the damp. I felt bad for him, but this news was too big a disappointment for me to brush aside. My interest in him swiftly began to fizzle. The whole reason I didn’t date American men, or any of the flirty Italians, was because I had every intention of returning home someday to raise a family of my own. An Irish husband seemed like the best way to guarantee that future. If I fell for an American who didn’t want to uproot himself, I would never get back.
Much as I loved America, I considered it a holding pattern until my “real” life took flight. I was proud to be able to send money home each month, as well as care packages of new Levi’s for my brothers and a nice dress for Mam, but my younger siblings were old enough to hold down jobs of their own now, too, and the situation wasn’t as bleak as it had been when Briege and I were sent abroad. I didn’t have to stay forever. Returning on my own as a single girl was out of the question, however. The ones who did that got branded as failures.
Despite our geographical divide, Pat and I continued to coast along, and my resolve faltered. There was no romantic proposal or anything, but at some point, it was just understood that we were headed toward marriage. Then our general discussions turned into a specific decision, and we set a date a few months down the road. I even reserved the church.
The plans came to a screaming halt when Pat announced that he didn’t believe in engagement rings. He considered them a waste of money.
“Do you think it’s wrong that it matters so much to me?” I asked Bridey. The ring was supposed to be a symbol, and a sparkling diamond—even a small one—showed the world that I was treasured. Pat wasn’t at all a cheapskate, which somehow made his position about the ring all the more hurtful: I felt like he had done his calculating and concluded I wasn’t worth that level of investment. Yet here I was, giving up Ireland for him! Bridey understood what I meant, but her reservations about me marrying Pat had nothing to do with my neglected ring finger. Why would I want to tie myself down at twenty-two? she wanted to know. The more I thought about it, the more I saw how right Bridey was. I called Pat up and told him the wedding was off. He had known I was miffed about the ring but never expected it to blow up this way. Neither had I, frankly. The decision felt right, but I was deeply embarrassed by how I had let my indignation take control of delivering the news to Pat, who called me back later, baffled and angry.
I agreed to meet him for coffee to explain.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it. Hurting him felt awful. “I changed my mind. I’m too young. I have more single life to live.”
Pat was still furious, but there was nothing to be done. I had expected to feel devastated—a broken engagement should have warranted at least a brief Wonder Bread relapse—but the crying jags, mayo sandwiches, and country music sing-alongs with my pillow never came. Maybe I hadn’t been in love after all. It was scary to think how close I’d just come to making a lifelong commitment to someone out of mere fondness and the fear, maybe, that I would end up alone. I had hung enough pictures in the middle of the night to know that all the riches in the world couldn’t ease that ache.
It was back to the dance floor for me.
Wedding or no, I still yearned to nest. I was desperate to set down stakes on that “real” life I imagined building for myself. Bridey was itchy to escape Kennedy-land once in a while, too, devoted as she was to Jean Kennedy Smith’s two little boys, William and Stephen. We decided to look for an apartment to share. We soon found a one-bedroom flat on East Eighty-first Street just a couple of blocks from the river, making the mayor one of our new neighbors. The beautiful park surrounding Gracie Mansion became a favorite spot for me to get some sun and daydream when I had a free afternoon.
Our apartment was a tiny fifth-floor walkup with a water closet. There was no shower, just a bathtub in the kitchen, but we didn’t mind brushing our teeth in the kitchen sink. We didn’t plan to live there full-time, anyway. All we wanted was a cozy place to relax and have friends over when we could. I would still sleep at 1040 during my workweek for convenience’s sake, and Bridey, as governess, had to spend the night at Mrs. Smith’s as long as she was on duty. We split our $75 monthly rent down the middle, and when Briege began hanging out so much that we threatened to charge her, she ponied up for the utilities instead.
Briege also came in handy with the used sewing machine she had bought, whipping out kitchen curtains and a tablecloth from cheap fabric we got at Woolworth’s. I dug into my savings to buy a double bed for the bedroom, and Bridey provided a couch for the living area. We slapped a piece of plywood over the bathtub and it became our table. Friends would come over to play Parcheesi or 25, Ireland’s national card game. Like bridge, 25 involves lots of rules and lots of math. We would toast pieces of pita bread and butter them to snack on over endless mugs of tea.
I didn’t breathe a word to Madam about getting my own place, and Bridey kept the apartment a secret from Mrs. Smith, too. The whole point of having it was so they couldn’t find us.
Fall and winter with Madam were always filled with lots of little trips. We might have Thanksgiving with Madam’s mother at the Auchincloss estate in Newport, Rhode Island, where I tasted my first roasted chestnut and thought I’d died and gone to heaven, or head off to Colorado for a family-reunion ski vacation while the kids were on Christmas break. Madam took me to Bloomingdale’s and bought me a thick Irish sweater, a puffy black parka, plus matching pants, gloves, scarf, and boots.
Aspen was like no place I could ever have even imagined, as close to an exact opposite of Ireland as could be with its fields of deep white snow, towering Rocky Mountains, and jet-set image. Setting out with our Secret Service detail that first morning in my new winter outfit, I quickly discovered that I was no ski bunny. I was too scared to even get on the ski lift, much less come rocketing back down an icy mountain on two skinny pieces of wood. Fortunately, John was still a beginner at the time, so I was able to hang out on the sidelines watching him take lessons on lower ground. The poor Secret Service man guardin
g him had nothing but a government-issued jacket and no gloves. Since my puffy parka had nice, warm pockets, I loaned the agent my new leather gloves so his trigger finger wouldn’t get frostbite in the event he needed it. (I never did get those gloves back; I guess that was my contribution to national security.)
I was much happier back at our chalet, sipping hot cocoa with marshmallows with the kids or sitting around the big table with everyone for one of the family’s trivia contests. There’d be twenty or more of them. They were all very big on games, and they wouldn’t allow you to sit out. Any sore losers or crybabies were told to go to their rooms. The trivia contests petrified me: I had no idea which states started with the letter C or the names of the world’s biggest mountain or longest bridge. You’d get a poker chip for every answer you got right. Caroline and Courtney always had the biggest stacks, though Bobby was the undisputed king. I’d sit next to Courtney and elbow her as my turn approached. “You’ll be fine, Kat!” she promised, always slipping me the right answer in the nick of time. She and Caroline even knew the answers to more of the questions about Ireland than I did.
When the parents went out for the evening, the nightly all-cousin pillow fight began. It was like indoor touch football with the same amount of running, tackling, shouting, and laughing, plus feathers. So many feathers, it looked like we were inside one of those little souvenir snow globes and someone had given us a ferocious shake. I tried to pull John out of the fray—feathers triggered his asthma, and I was worried he’d have a coughing fit—but he seemed fine, so I let him have his fun.
Beautiful as Aspen was, when it came to family trips, New Jersey was much more my speed. Madam leased a house in Peapack, the heart of hunt country. She loved to spend weekends riding to the hounds with her fellow equestrians or just cantering through the leafy back roads. She boarded her horse at the stables of her good friends Peggy and Murray McDonnell. The McDonnells had a houseful of children for John and Caroline to play with, too.
Peapack was about fifty miles from Manhattan, but it felt five times as far when Mugsy was driving. Going to the Cape was even worse. The other Secret Service guys had warned me to use the restroom first because Mugsy never stopped until he was out of gas, but poor Shannon couldn’t hold it that long, and I’d always end up begging Mugsy to stop so the dog didn’t pee in the backseat. The road trips were made even more insufferable by Mugsy’s smelly cigars and his mistaken belief that we would prefer to hear him singing old Sinatra standards over listening to the radio. If he wasn’t in the mood to torture Frank’s greatest hits, Mugsy would opt for torturing John instead, with an old song called “Arrah Go On I’m Gonna Go Back to Oregon.”
“Pat McCarty, hale and hearty, living in Oregon . . . ,” he’d begin.
“Nooo, Mugsy! Stop!” John would plead from the backseat, knowing that Mugsy not only intended to recite the whole silly song about a cheap Irishman, but also wouldn’t stop repeating it until John correctly recited it himself.
“Heard a lotta talk about the great New Yawk, so he sold his farm when all was calm, and landed on old Broadway.”
“Nooo, pleeeeease!”
The ditty ended with Pat taking a girl into a “swell café”—Mugsy always drew out the swelllll to annoy John even more—and getting sticker shock.
“The waiter brought the card and said ‘what will you have’ to Pat; then Pat looked at the prices and he said ‘I’ll have me hat.’ ”
“C’mon, John, now you say it,” Mugsy would urge. If John messed up a line, Mugsy would make him start all over again, or recite it again himself. Back and forth they’d go, until John clapped his hands over his ears. “Mugsy, if you say it again, I’m going to jump out of the car!” he warned. Caroline would ignore the whole thing, letting whatever book she was reading carry her away to some more interesting place.
The Peapack house was too small to bring a cook—I had to share a room with John as it was—so Madam and I did all the shopping and made the meals. In those close quarters without a houseful of staff, our relationship felt cozier and more familiar. She shed the trappings of her usual pampered life at 1040 with ease, preferring to keep it simple in Peapack. We cooked together—just us and the kids—sticking to things like spaghetti with Ragu from a can, or hot dogs or fish sticks. Madam had a habit of wandering off and forgetting she had something on the stove, though, so there was a good chance a pot would boil over or the noodles would be gummy if one of the kids or I didn’t catch it in time. She could boil an egg all right, but it was probably going to end up hard-boiled. We were more inclined to laugh and eat our mistakes than start all over. Oddly enough, she could make a perfect pot of Irish tea—boiling water poured over double bags and steeped just right so it was nice and strong. (She taught me to save the used bags and cool them in the freezer so she could put them over her eyes after her morning shower, to get rid of puffiness.) I was no Julia Child myself, but I let her play head chef in Peapack. I was reluctant to show any skills in the kitchen at all beyond my radar vision for leftovers in the fridge.
“Never let them see you know how to cook, or that’ll just be one more thing they’ll be expecting you to do,” my sister had wisely advised me when we both started working as live-ins. If you didn’t set boundaries and guard them fiercely, you would just keep giving away more and more of yourself, ’til one day there wasn’t a you left at all.
In the spring of 1967, Madam came to me with news of a big trip in the works.
“Kath, you’re going to love where we’re going,” she teased, her eyes dancing.
“Where, Madam?” I hoped it was someplace tropical and warm. Hawaii was supposed to be beautiful. Coconuts dropping right off the trees.
“Ireland! We’re going to bring you back where you came from!”
No coconuts and suntan lotion there, but she was right—I was excited. We’d be vacationing with the McDonnell family for six whole weeks. With regular days off and the alternate weekends I was supposed to have, I could squeeze in some good visits with my family. I couldn’t wait to dash off a letter to Mam to let her know.
Very, very excited to be coming home, I wrote, and guess who with?
I’d had my first trip back to Inniskeen just the previous summer, but it had been bittersweet. Dad had died right as I started working for Madam. His heart had given out and he had been buried two weeks before Uncle Pat even broke the news to me. “There’s nothing you could do anyway, and you were starting your new job,” he rationalized. He was right. I wouldn’t have been able to afford airfare back to Ireland, and taking leave right as I was being hired could have given Madam second thoughts about my reliability.
I wept alone in my room after hearing the news, never telling Madam of my loss for fear it would just scrape at her own wound. She had a keen sense for sorrow, though, and she had picked up on mine right away, hovering about and asking if I was happy working for her, assuming that Provi’s high-handedness was at the root of my melancholy. I was thrilled that another trip to Ireland was on the near horizon, and a grand tour, at that. This one would be a happier homecoming, to be sure. Ireland would do both our hearts good.
After stepping off onto the tarmac to cheering crowds at Shannon Airport, we all headed to the Waterford coast aboard a chartered luxury bus with big picture windows that the children excitedly waved from as we rolled through villages whose narrow lanes were lined with well-wishers. What was so familiar to me—cows crossing a cobbled road, spring lambs gamboling in velvet green fields—was new and thrilling to John and Caroline. The Kennedy clan had steeped the kids in their Irish heritage from the time they were babes, and they had grown up hearing the music, folktales, and brogues of the Irish help around them. Caroline wore a green ribbon in her hair every St. Patrick’s Day. At seven, John probably had a better grasp of Irish geography than American, loving to moderate fake debates among Madam’s staff about our heritage.
“Which is better, Monaghan or Sligo?” he would goad May and me as he sat at the kitchen t
able with his cookies and milk after school.
“Monaghan’s farmland is more fertile,” I began.
“Sligo was the home of William Butler Yeats!” May boasted.
“Point to Kathy!” John shouted. Potatoes trumped poets in this game, I was glad to learn.
“But Sligo is so much prettier,” May objected. That was true enough, but I had my pride and wasn’t about to agree.
“Go on, May, they’re still working the fields with donkeys in Sligo,” I scoffed. What I lacked in ammunition, I made up for with typically barbed Irish humor.
“Two points Kathy!” John shouted again, slapping his hand on the table this time for emphasis.
John’s appreciation for Monaghan’s agricultural talents had been reinforced by my great success in showing him how to grow an avocado tree by putting the pit in a glass of water and letting it sprout roots. John was excited when I told him it was time to plant it. We found an empty ceramic pot abandoned in the back hallway after its plant had died, and we commandeered it for our avocado.
“Between you and me, we’ll take care of it,” I told John. We checked it every day. First a shoot came up, then a leaf, than another. John loved watering it, and before long, we had a big, healthy tree. We kept it by the back elevator. One day, I spotted Charley hauling it through the front hallway.
“Where’re you going with that?” I demanded.
“Madam said put it on the front patio out the living room,” he answered.
“No, no, no, Charley! That’s not her plant, that’s my plant—it belongs to me and John,” I explained. Charley put the avocado tree back.
Guests were coming for lunch that day, and Madam wanted to know why Charley hadn’t moved the big plant yet. Charley wasted no time pointing the finger at me.
“I was bringing it and she said it was hers,” he said.
