by Kathy McKeon
“Oh, but this is your home!” she cried. “You’re welcome to bring your friends back here.”
And do what? I thought bitterly. My friends don’t want to come here and sit in my little flowered room.
Madam had no choice but to let the matter drop. I was still sleeping most nights in the pink field of posies anyway. Nothing had really changed for her. I was still Jackie’s girl. But I could tell that this glimpse of my ever-so-slight independence had come as a shock. And she wasn’t happy about it. Certainty was her security blanket, it was how she kept her big, busy life running smoothly. And certainty required control. She was more possessive than dictatorial, though. People who worked for her tended to stay for years and, like Provi, would then stay on call for years more even after quitting or retiring. Madam took these professional relationships very personally and, more often than not, returned the loyalty we gave her tenfold.
The new governess, Marta, proved a delightful breath of fresh air. She had spent her childhood in Italy before ending up in France caring for a diplomat’s children, and she’d even studied acting in Paris for a while. Right away she got the children busy working on a special Christmas play for their mother. Marta was such a perfect fit that the revolving nanny-door was finally shut for good, which was a great relief for me. Having her in place meant Seamus and I could enjoy a courtship that was as close to normal as I was likely to get. Shopping for a gift that Christmas, I splurged on a gold watch that set me back nearly three paychecks, and had his name engraved on the back. Seamus presented me with a clock radio so I could listen to music on my trip back to Greece with the family over the holidays. Maybe not as romantic a gift as I might have liked, but I couldn’t fault him for the practicality, even if all it picked up on the Christina was static.
By the following spring, though, Seamus and I were starting to wander into jewelry stores on Madison Avenue to “just look” at engagement rings.
And soon enough, Madam landed on the perfect way to keep a short leash on me that summer in the Cape:
She invited Seamus to move in.
Seamus would come up on his own for a weekend now or a few days at a time, just like the year before, renting a room in town. The more time he spent at the compound, the more quickly he blended into the backstage life of a Kennedy summer, making himself useful wherever he happened to be. Seamus was learning the building trade back in the city. If a drain plugged up or a door hinge or some other small thing needed quick repair, Seamus would often pitch in and get it done—easier than waiting on old Wilmer or his young helper, Arthur, who turned into a bumbling, nervous wreck whenever Madam was around anyway. What really cinched the deal between Seamus and the Kennedys, though, was sports.
While still a teenager in Ireland, Seamus had gotten himself noticed as a rising star in the soccer leagues. He was strong as an ox, thanks to his daily training regimen, and he had earned a reputation for playing hard and taking no prisoners. His iron muscles weren’t sculpted in any gym, though: They came from menial labor.
Every day, Seamus would ride his bicycle to work, his office being a mountain in County Leitrim, where he grew up. He would pedal halfway up, then hide his bike in some bushes and climb the rest of the way by foot, lugging a backpack filled with food and water to the peak. There, tons of peat moss lay spread out and drying in the sun. His job was to haul the turf to the side of the dirt road to be loaded onto a wagon drawn by either horse or tractor and taken back down the mountain to be burned as fuel. Turf was the Irish version of coal, used to heat the thousands of homes too old or too poor to have electricity or gas furnaces. Opponents on the soccer field would try to get under Seamus’s skin by taunting him about his low-class job on the bog, only to find out the hard way how fierce his pride was.
At the Cape, Seamus had flashbacks to the bog-taunters when he noticed John getting bullied by his older cousins during the free-for-all football games on the lawn. John was still a few years away from the growth spurt that would transform him from scrawny to strapping practically overnight. Until then, John was the easiest one to make or break the family code of honor: Kennedys don’t cry.
There were always adults as well as kids playing in the football matches—Secret Service men, suck-up Sandy, even former pro football star Roosevelt Grier when he was a houseguest. John had taken a liking to Seamus and asked him to come be on his team one day when a game was starting up. Seamus had never played American football, much less touch football, and had no idea what the rules were, but he agreed to jump in the match anyway.
The teams were always divided into two sides—the Skins and the Shirts. The Skins played bare-chested. Seamus and John were on the Shirts. The Skins, by Seamus’s account later, were rife with cheaters who would deny they’d been tagged, even when Seamus presented the forensic evidence: “Look! My hands are clammy with his sweat!” One particular Kennedy teenager kept pretending John had never touched him, which set John to whining. Seamus pulled him aside. “I know, I see what he’s doing,” Seamus assured him. “Don’t worry about it, just keep playing.” The cheater was locked into Seamus’s radar, though, and the next time he got the ball and took off running, it was Seamus, not John, planted in his path. With no time to put on the brakes, the Skin plowed full bore into Seamus, and both went down hard. The game broke up with the teen, not John, struggling to keep the Kennedy code. Seamus limped back to the house on a twisted ankle. I found him sitting on the counter with his feet in the kitchen sink, which he had filled with cold water in hopes of bringing the swelling down. John was jumping around with excitement over the smackdown.
“Seamus, what do you think you’re doing? You can’t be sticking your feet in Madam’s sink!” I cried. The words had no sooner left my mouth than the kitchen door swung open and Madam herself walked in.
“What’s all the excitement?” she asked as Seamus hurried to pull the plug on his foot spa.
“Mum! You should’ve seen Seamus just now!” John crowed. He proceeded to provide the color commentary of how the avenging Shirt vanquished the enemy Skin, putting on an exaggerated brogue to deliver the closing line over the whimpering cousin:
“I wanted to leave no doubt that you were touched this time!”
We all cracked up at John’s comic reenactment. Seamus’s ankle was turning purple and looking like an overinflated football itself.
“Let me see,” Madam said with the same motherly concern I heard in her voice whenever John or Caroline got a bump or scrape. “Oh, poor thing! He’s all black and blue! Get him some ice!” She retrieved a bag of frozen vegetables from the freezer and applied it to Seamus’s foot as an ice pack. When she left and I was sure she was out of earshot, I asked Seamus which cousin he’d taken out.
“I don’t know his name,” he said.
“What’d he look like?” I asked.
“Big hair and big teeth.”
“Well, that only describes every one of them,” I pointed out.
A few days later, Madam left one of her handwritten notes for me. This one wasn’t asking if there was a dead rat in the pantry, though, or reminding me to make John get his summer reading done. It was telling me that Seamus was welcome to stay at the house whenever he came up to the Cape. It went without saying that she meant in one of the guest rooms, not mine, but there was no need to worry about any hanky-panky. The first time Seamus tapped on my door to wish me good night, he asked if he could have a kiss. I granted permission, but a warning growl from under my bed made it clear that Shannon most definitely had not. If I got up to go to Seamus’s room to kiss him good night instead, Shannon would either follow me to growl at him or stay behind in my room and start baying to wake up the whole house.
The carpentry job Seamus had landed that year was on a big project down in the Financial District, where he was on a crew helping build two skyscrapers side by side. The twin towers of the World Trade Center were going to soar 110 stories into the sky, making them among the tallest on Earth. It felt like Seamus and I were
on the verge of building something grand, too. It all nearly came crashing down in a single weekend all because Madam wanted to go horseback riding.
We were all back in New York. Onassis was in town, but when the weather turned crisp and the leaves started to turn, it was the countryside and her horses that always beckoned Madam. Fall was high season among the socialites in hunt country, when jodhpurs and a red velvet blazer in Peapack replaced Fifth Avenue and Valentino gowns. Madam was making plans to head to New Jersey with the kids for the weekend, letting her husband stay behind to have 1040 to himself. There’d never been any trouble before with this arrangement, but this time Mr. Onassis insisted that Marta stay behind, too. The reason given was that he was having a luncheon and liked her cooking. Marta was, in fact, a very good amateur cook—she enjoyed puttering around in the kitchen and often watched the Christina chefs and sous chefs at work. But Marta was the governess, and the children were going with Madam, so that meant Marta should go with Madam. Hoping to appease her husband, Madam told me to come to Peapack instead, to care for John and Caroline.
“But I’m not the governess,” I anxiously reminded her. I was supposed to be off that night, and Seamus had bought us tickets to a Johnny Cash concert. They’d cost him forty dollars apiece.
It didn’t matter. Onassis wouldn’t budge, and Madam’s plans mattered more than mine. Seamus was still on the Trade Center construction site when we left that afternoon, and I couldn’t reach him until just a couple of hours before the concert. He was furious. Why hadn’t I just said no? Had I even stopped to consider him? We’d been planning this night for a long time, it was too late to get a refund on the tickets, why did I wait until now to tell him? Was it always going to be like this, playing second fiddle to the whims of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis? That wasn’t the way he wanted to live his life, and if it was how I planned to spend the rest of mine, I was going to have to do it without him.
“I’m sorry, I can’t help it,” I kept blubbering as he ranted on the other end of the phone line. I was beside myself. I’d never heard Seamus so angry. He was dead serious. We were breaking up. Was he expecting me to choose between my livelihood and my love life? I was in an impossible position. I sobbed even louder.
Suddenly Madam was beside me in the hallway, gesturing for me to hand her the phone. Crying and unable to get a word in edgewise with Seamus anyway, I gave it to her.
“Seamus? It’s me,” she said in her breathiest voice. “Please, it’s all my fault. I’m so sorry! It wasn’t Kathy’s fault at all, she didn’t know until the last minute.”
I could only imagine how dumbfounded Seamus must have been as he mumbled some polite reassurances and ended the conversation as quickly as he could. He went to the concert alone, the seat next to him empty.
We patched things up, but a line had been drawn—Jackie’s girl, or Seamus’s?—and sooner or later, I knew, I would have to make a difficult choice. I loved them both, in much different ways, but if I ever wanted to have a family of my own, I would have to loosen the ties to this powerful one that had claimed me six years before.
As 1970 drew to a close and Christmas approached, my sister and girlfriends all began speculating that this was the year I would get the diamond ring. It had to be. I felt a tingle of anticipation and allowed myself to fantasize about Seamus handing me a telltale little square box from the jeweler. I had just turned twenty-six, and if I was ever going to have a husband and family of my own, it had better happen soon.
The box Seamus handed me on Christmas Eve was large and flat. Something bulky and heavy was inside. I pasted a false smile on my face as I unwrapped it. Seamus hovered over me, grinning like the village eejit. He was proud of himself, whatever it was. This was going to be the plastic clock radio all over again, I could feel it. I broke the seal over the delicate tissue paper inside the too-big box and pulled out a raincoat. Not just any raincoat—a gorgeous cream-colored designer raincoat Seamus had seen me try on and fall in love with one afternoon when we were browsing through the racks at Bergdorf Goodman for fun. It was an extravagant gift, and I knew it had cost Seamus dearly. I thanked him, trying my hardest not to burst into tears of disappointment.
“Put it on, let’s see,” he urged me.
I pulled my arms through the sleeves and looked for the belt to cinch my waist. It wasn’t in the box.
“Seamus, didn’t it come with a belt?” I asked.
“Oh, right,” he said. “The saleslady put it in the pocket so it wouldn’t get lost.”
The coat was so stiff and heavy, I hadn’t even felt it. I pulled out the belt, rolled up in a tight ball. It unfurled to reveal a tiny square box at its core.
Inside was my engagement ring.
NINE
Madam’s RSVP
Who’d marry you? I feel sorry for him!”
Not even vinegary old Bea could burst my bubble as everyone gathered round to admire the diamond flashing from my ring finger. Madam’s face had lit up with genuine joy for me when I shared my big news, and of course she said all the right things, but her smile had just as quickly faded as the full impact of me getting married hit her. My position was a live-in job. I’d kept my engagement a secret for a full month at 1040 because I was worried she’d start looking right away for someone to replace me.
“Oh, we’re going to lose you,” she said.
“No, Madam, I’m going to stay working for a couple of years,” I said. I was hoping we could work around the full-live-in status.
“I’m so glad,” Madam said with obvious relief. “Seamus is a great guy,” she added.
Obviously I would be living full-time with my husband once we tied the knot, I explained, not wanting there to be any misunderstanding after the vows were exchanged. Most likely that would be in Queens, where Seamus already had a good-size apartment he had been sharing with his brother and sister, who would be moving on, anyway, by the time we married.
“I hope it’s a safe place,” Madam said. “How are you going to get back and forth to me, though?”
“Subway,” I said. It took about three-quarters of an hour to get from Astoria to the Upper East Side.
“The subway? Isn’t that too dangerous?” If she thought fear of commuting was going to keep me in my pink posy room during the workweek when I became a newlywed, she had another think coming.
“Oh, no, I take it all the time,” I said. Madam had a little-girl way of charming you into reassuring her, even though, in this case, her concerns were well founded. The subway, truth be told, was not at all safe for a woman to be riding alone at night. Even if you did escape the notice of the purse snatchers and perverts, the cars were still filthy and the stairs leading from the street down to the platforms always reeked of warm piss. I was so determined to flaunt my self-sufficiency, I completely missed the opening to ask my employer—one of the wealthiest women on the planet—for a few measly dollars in carfare to and from work each day. But it wasn’t shyness that held me back; it was pride and stubbornness. Mam and Dad had raised all of us to take care of ourselves, to never be beholden to anyone. There had to be a middle ground somewhere, but I was still looking for the map.
My biggest problem, Seamus and Johnny Cash had made clear, wasn’t Madam taking advantage of me—it was me encouraging it. I drew a deep breath.
“Of course, I’ll need to keep more regular hours once I’m married,” I told Madam matter-of-factly.
We both left it at that for the time being.
Baby steps, I thought.
Seamus and I had set a date for November 20, 1971, nearly a year away, but I still felt anxious about planning a wedding around my scattershot days off. My imagined time crunch became all too real when a letter arrived from Inniskeen that April.
Aunt Bridge was worried sick about Mam.
One of you girls better come home, the letter urged. Your mam won’t leave bed and she won’t eat.
Mam had struggled now and then with a bout of the blues for as long as I could remember, e
ven occasionally before Dad died, drawing in on herself for days or maybe a week at a time, but never taking to bed like this. The downward spiral had started after she returned to Ireland from Briege’s wedding the year before, according to our aunt. Mam had never been to New York before, and she had a great time seeing all the sights for the month she stayed. Toward the end of her trip, though, I noticed her spirits beginning to sink, and the sadness settled over her so fast and so heavy that I found a psychiatrist around the corner from my apartment and made her go, even though one visit was probably all I would be able to afford. It was worth it to get a professional opinion and advice, though. The doctor confirmed that it was depression, and said Mam would probably be okay once she got home again. She should go see a doctor in Ireland, though. She hadn’t, and the cloud hadn’t lifted, and now here was Aunt Bridge begging my sister and me for help. Mam wasn’t even getting up to go to church anymore.
“Well, I can’t go,” Briege said, handing the letter back to me. That much was as obvious as her round belly. She was in her last trimester. Even though I knew it was true she couldn’t travel so late in her pregnancy, I still resented her free pass. My life, as usual, was going to be the one put on hold. Planning my wedding would have to wait.
I showed Madam the letter and asked if I could take time off to go care for my ailing mother.
“Certainly you can go!” she said. She knew how upsetting this must be for me, she added. Nancy Tuckerman would book a flight for me right away. And there was something else.
“I hope your mother is well enough to travel,” Madam said. “I’m giving you a ticket to bring her back with you.”
I thanked her, knowing even then that the extra ticket would never be used.
