An Invitation to the Kennedys

Chapter One

Kick

‘It’s a ship like a city,’ Kick said, tucking Eunice’s arm tighter into hers as they walked towards the end of the SS Washington’s deck.

It was calm where they were but she knew they would round the corner into a heavy wind that would buffet them like blows from the palm of an open hand.

The kind of wind she knew from family summers at Hyannis Port; that her brother Jack had described, with a grin, as ‘like being slapped by Kikoo. It can reach out and hit you in places you never expected.’ Kick had laughed.

They all had. Much as they loved Kikoo, their nanny, for the solid comfort of her presence that was so unlike the brittle distant affection of their mother, Rose, they also knew the feel of her calloused hands and the point at which, when they were younger and, sick of yelling at the nine of them, she would lash out with slaps that stung.

‘More like a small town for me,’ Eunice complained. ‘You get to stay up and go to dinner every night, and then whatever it is you all do afterwards – dance, I suppose – while I have to stay in my cabin with Pat and Jean, and Kikoo looking in on us every ten minutes to make sure we stay put.’

‘It’s only because Mother isn’t here,’ Kick said. ‘Pa needs someone to entertain with him. And to watch Rosemary.’

‘Watch her for what?’

‘You know, in case she says the kind of thing Rosie says sometimes, that we don’t mind because we know and love her, but that strangers might find mighty odd?’

Eunice laughed. ‘Remember the time she told Fr Palfrey that she had a spot, and he said he couldn’t see it, trying to be all reassuring, and Rosie said, “No, on my backside,” and Mother looked daggers right at her?

’ Kick, remembering, smiled a little. But along with what Rosemary had said, and the look on Fr Palfrey’s face, she recalled how that had been another step in their mother starting to leave Rosie out.

Not letting her go to parties or stay up when they had guests even though Kick, two years younger, was allowed.

How bewildered Rosie had been at first, and then how she had got used to being left behind and sweetly tried to make the best of it. Kick didn’t know which was worse.

‘Ready?’ Eunice asked now, bracing beside Kick for the wind.

Behind them, rows of passengers sat in deck chairs, rugs pulled up over their knees, watching the vast emptiness of sea and sky that wrapped around this ship that was so huge, and yet so tiny on the surface of the ocean.

Nowhere among them was the girls’ father.

He would be at the solid desk he had had installed in his stateroom, insisting that the flimsy dressing table be removed to make space for it, reading and responding to the telegrams that arrived each morning.

Later, he would take a turn about deck and watch the little boys at their tennis lesson.

Later still he would send for Kick and ask for a report on everyone’s day.

He would have had a report, already, from Kikoo. But it wasn’t enough.

‘She indulges those boys,’ he would say. ‘I can’t be sure she’s telling me everything I need to know.’

‘How do you know I will?’ Kick had asked, sitting on the edge of his desk, bare legs swinging.

‘I know you won’t,’ he had responded, ‘but I can tell a great deal from what you don’t say.’

They rounded the corner that brought them from calm quiet into the hectoring roar.

This deck was deserted and smelled of salt and wet wood, and whatever was cooking in the kitchens.

Why, Kick wondered, was it never a nice smell, like baking, the way the kitchen in Hyannis Port smelt?

Always, it was boiling vegetables. Or worse, boiling meat.

Her stomach tightened. They were two days into their crossing, with two more to go, and she still could barely believe she was there.

When her father’s appointment had been announced – Ambassador to the Court of St James – she had been sure their mother would decide she wasn’t to come.

Must stay behind even though she had finished at the convent.

Rose knew exactly how much Kick wanted to see England.

But that had not meant she would permit it.

Even as their things were packed for the sailing from New York, Kick had worried that her mother would change her mind.

But she hadn’t, and the seven of them, eight with Pa, had set sail, leaving Rose behind for an operation, a ‘small procedure’ as she called it, ‘nothing you need to know about’.

What would England smell like? she wondered. Would it have the crisp, leafy air of New York State? The fresh blast that was Hyannis Port? Probably it would be like New York City, she decided. Cars and buses and people and everyone trying so hard.

‘Look,’ Eunice said, tugging her arm out of Kick’s.

Someone had chalked a hopscotch grid onto the deck, white lines wobbling over uneven wood, washed away by salt water in places.

Eunice balanced herself on one foot, holding Kick’s arm momentarily for support, then launched into a series of hops and skips.

‘Your turn,’ she called once she had finished.

Kick started after her, hopping into the wind that pushed at her, hoping she wouldn’t fall.

Almost at the end, she looked up. Coming towards them from the far end of the deck, wrapped in scarves, was a man and his wife, both Italian, who had been at dinner the evening before, seated opposite her at the round table where the captain entertained.

Kick, in her jersey and skirt, balanced on one leg over her hopscotch square, blushed.

She dashed a hand at her hair, whipped into wild curls no doubt, and thought of what she might say to cover what felt like an awkward moment.

But they passed her by without so much as a look.

They hadn’t recognised her. Kick started to laugh.

‘What’s so funny?’ Eunice demanded. ‘This.’ Kick flung her arms wide, leaning right into the wind and letting it almost support her. ‘All of this.’ The pale green silk scarf around her neck tore loose then and was whipped right away and over the side of the ship and down towards the water.

‘What will we do in England?’ Eunice asked, leaning close again when they had watched it go.

‘As we always do.’ Kick reached out a hand and ran it along the side of the ship.

The red paint was blistered so that her fingertips rose and fell over fat bumps and into ragged spots where it had peeled right off.

‘Lessons and tennis and riding. The house Pa has found is right in front of a big park, Hyde Park, that has a place called Rotten Row where we can ride.’

‘Rotten Row,’ Eunice echoed, laughing again. Above them one of the ship’s funnels rose up into the blue sky, black and smooth like a porpoise breaching.

‘Parties and lunches, that sort of thing. And then, when Pa’s time is up, we’ll come home again.

The boys will visit when they can …’ ‘The boys’ were Joe Jnr and Jack, not boys at all but men now, Joe in Baltimore and Jack at Harvard, but still called ‘the boys’, and distinguished from ‘the little boys’, who were Bobby and Teddy.

‘And the time will fly past. His appointment is for four years, but I don’t suppose we’ll be there that long …

’ Her mother had hinted as much, but Kick didn’t know why.

‘Oh, I don’t want it to fly,’ Eunice assured her. ‘I want it to go ever so slow. You’ve been away before. Italy and France. I never ever have. I plan to make the very most of it.’

‘Good for you!’ Kick said with a laugh. ‘Me too.’ She tugged gently at the little gold crucifix around her neck, fidgeting with the chain. ‘And then when we go home, we can settle into being ourselves again, only knowing that we’ve seen other places and met different people.’

After lunch, Kick went to find her father. He liked her to join him while he had coffee. ‘Will I come in?’ She tapped at the door and put her head around it.

‘Shall, not will,’ he corrected her. ‘You’re going to need to get that right in England.’

‘Shall,’ she repeated. ‘Though who really cares?’

‘Oh, they care alright,’ the ambassador said.

‘Stuffy,’ Kick said, coming and sitting on the edge of the bed, feeling the slip of the satin counterpane under her bare legs.

She filled him in on their morning, answering all his questions carefully – how many laps of the deck the little boys had done; the books they were all reading; what Pat, fourteen, had had for lunch.

‘No potatoes,’ she reassured him. ‘I made sure.’ Pat was inclined to ‘get fat’, as Rose said, and that was something to be managed by careful watching of what she ate, especially bread and potatoes.

No one said it, but they all knew that when Rose arrived, as she would in a few weeks, the thing she would least forgive would be the extra pounds on her daughters.

‘Or for me,’ Kick added. ‘I’m getting fat too.

All those late dinners with the captain. ’

She thought of telling him about the Italian man this morning and the way his eyes had slid over her, not for a moment matching her with the girl who had been at dinner in pearls and black chiffon the night before.

But she didn’t. It was hard to know how her father might take this.

Would he think it funny, as she did, that she could still slip between being a young lady and almost a child; invisible, ignored?

Or would he be annoyed by some failure on her part that he saw and she didn’t?

A failure to be attractive enough? Distinct enough? Kennedy enough?

It was too lovely, she thought, being without her mother or her older brothers, to risk it.

This was the first time she had had so much of her father’s attention – the thing that was as precious as sunlight, made to spread among them all, with the lion’s share always going to Joe Jnr and Jack.

Shared too with her mother; with the many men who admired and wanted to be close to him; and the women who wanted something else from him, though Kick wasn’t exactly sure what.

To be noticed, she supposed. Same as she did.

‘Eunice asked me what we would do in England,’ she said, getting up and pouring a cup of coffee from the silver pot that stood on a tray and adding a splash of cream.

‘I told her, pretty much the same as we do at home. But what will you do?’ She was genuinely curious.

His appointment sounded so grand. Had been greeted by so much excitement – and relief, she thought – at home; a thing long wanted that had come to pass.

But what was it, exactly, apart from a ‘great honour’, as everyone assured one another?

‘I will keep America out of another war,’ he said, putting aside the pages he had been reading and looking up at her so that the light from his desk lamp glared on the round glass of his spectacles.

He looked like a man with shiny silver dollars for eyes.

‘I will steer us clear of the quagmire England is sinking herself into. And if I can, I’ll help to pull her out.

Europe stands on the edge of another war.

One false step and she will fall into that abyss.

And it is an abyss, make no mistake.’ He held up a finger.

‘Even though not everyone can see that. There are men who would push for those last critical steps. Who would force their way to war. They refuse to see that compromise with Germany, even at this stage, is possible and desirable. Some are moved by idiotic thoughts of glory, or by shame at what they call England’s appeasement.

But to say that peace is “shameful” is something I’ll never understand …

’ He paused a moment, honestly baffled. ‘Some are moved by confusion over what’s right.

But others again are more cynical – they see the personal opportunities in war. I’m here to stop all of that.’

‘But can you?’

‘I can. Not even the most belligerent want England to enter a war without America at her back.’ He sounded amused. ‘As long as I can keep Roosevelt from committing troops or money, even the ardent advocates for war with Hitler will think twice.’

How magnificent he sounded, Kick thought. There with the ship rolling beneath them and his sense of purpose like the engines that propelled them forward, it was like he spoke straight out of one of the Hollywood films he used to produce. He would succeed, she knew it. He succeeded at everything.

‘Will you help me?’ he said then, putting out a hand for hers and pulling her forward so that she put down her coffee cup on the green leather of his desk, spilling a little into the saucer, and leaned against the side of his high-backed chair.

‘By being careful to say “shall” and not “will”?’ she joked. She was shy of him, and didn’t know what else to say.

‘By being yourself.’ He ignored her joke and spoke seriously.

‘Will they like me, do you think?’ It was what she had been secretly thinking ever since she first heard of the trip.

‘Yes. I’m sure of it.’ She felt his approval warm upon her; light and heat and dazzle.

But he hadn’t finished. ‘But just remember, you are American. Not English. There could be no finer example of what it is to be American than you and your sisters and brothers.’ His approval, as ever, came with conditions.

‘OK.’ She didn’t know exactly what he meant, but it was safer to pretend she did.

‘You tell me what to do and I’ll do it. Where are we now?

’ she asked then, watching the square of clear blue that was the cabin window behind him moving in a way that was steady and slow.

Until you looked down at the rapid roll and curl of the waves.

‘About halfway between America and England; more than a thousand miles of ocean on either side.’