The House of Kennedy(9)
Honey Fitz takes drastic measures. He sends Rose and her sister Agnes to a Sacred Heart convent in the Netherlands for the next school year.
But when the homesick sisters return to Boston, Rose secretly starts seeing Joe again.
When they go ice skating, she wears a veil to hide her face. She’ll allow other men to sign her dance card, but as soon as she is out of her mother’s chaperoning sight, Rose partners with Joe. When he invites Rose to his 1911 Harvard junior prom, the Fitzgerald family once again collapses into turmoil.
Honey Fitz may be serving his second term as mayor of Boston, but his daughter is a citizen lost. He reluctantly gives Rose permission to marry Joe.
On October 7, 1914, after seven years of clandestine courtship, Rose, then twenty-four, and Joe, twenty-six, have their wedding day in the private chapel adjoining the home of Cardinal O’Connell, who officiates the modest ceremony.
Dressed in tails and a top hat, the ambitious young bank president looks the perfect groom. But as a husband, Joe will fall woefully short.
Rose’s expectations of marriage are quickly dashed, especially in terms of sex.
“Now listen, Rosie, this idea of yours that there is no romance outside of procreation is simply wrong. It was not part of our contract at the altar,” Joe tells her. “And if you don’t open your mind to this, I’m going to tell the priest on you.”
Rose remains a dutiful wife. In the Brookline house on Beals Street, Joe Jr. is born in 1915, followed by Jack in 1917. Obstetrician Dr. Frederick L. Good delivers the eldest Kennedy sons, as he will all nine children in the family.
But the birth of their third child goes terribly wrong.
It’s September 13, 1918. World War I rages on, and so does a pandemic of Spanish influenza, infecting approximately five hundred million people, and killing fifty million worldwide, including six hundred seventy-five thousand Americans. Nearly seven thousand Bostonians have already died. To prevent further contamination, movie houses, churches, and other public gathering places are closed.
Rose goes into labor at home, as planned. But Dr. Good is detained. All physicians have been pressed into service to treat the sick and dying.
As biographer Kate Clifford Larson recounts, Rose was willing to wait, but the baby is not. She is already in the birth canal.
The nurse orders Rose to squeeze her legs tightly together to delay the birth, and, incredibly, goes so far as to push the baby’s partially exposed head back into the birth canal for two excruciating hours—depriving the baby’s fragile system of oxygen—until Dr. Good arrives. When the doctor finally arrives, he delivers a baby girl and pronounces her healthy.
Rosemary was “a beautiful child,” Eunice Kennedy Shriver later writes in an essay published in September 1962 by the Saturday Evening Post, “resembling my mother in physical appearance.”
Rose will also share her own name, Rose Marie, with this newest arrival. The family calls her Rosemary.
Though Rose employs a full household staff—baby nurse, housekeeper, cook (she never learned how to feed a family)—she insists, “It’s a good idea to be around quite often so that you know what’s going on,” and she soon observes that baby Rosemary lacks the coordination her two older brothers readily displayed as toddlers, struggling with tasks as basic as walking or holding objects.
Joe desperately consults doctors and psychologists for a “cure,” but medicine has yet to make sufficient pharmacological or therapeutic advancements. “I had never heard of a retarded child,” Rose confesses. Specialists advise that Rosemary be confined to a mental institution.
“What can they do for her that her family can’t do better?” Eunice recalls her father saying. “We will keep her at home.”
Eunice underscores Joe’s words: “And we did.”
Rosemary’s delays are cause for much dismay, especially as a reflection on her parents.
“I would much rather be the mother of a great son or daughter than be the author of a great book or the painter of a great painting,” Rose famously says.
Rosemary does not seem destined to meet the Kennedy standard of greatness.
Chapter 6
Rose can count on her husband, Joe Kennedy Sr., to provide for the family, but she cannot rely on his day-to-day presence. He travels frequently for business—and pleasure. She confides in her diary (today stored at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston) a torrent of feeling. She is at once certain of her husband’s infidelities (“I had heard that chorus girls were gay, but evil, and worst of all, husband snatchers”)—and dismissive of the idea (“But nothing shocking happened”).
In 1920, while pregnant with her fourth child, Kathleen, Rose makes a bold break. She flees Beals Street for her presumed safe haven, the Fitzgerald residence. But Honey Fitz turns his daughter away, insisting that a wife must stand by her husband—as Rose’s mother, Josie, has done.
Though the incident is never discussed outside the family, Rose’s youthful determination that her married life would be different, freer, than her mother’s, has faltered.
While Rose extends her absence at a religious retreat, two-year-old Jack falls ill with scarlet fever. Though Boston City Hospital is already past capacity, Joe applies his negotiation skills to enlist the influence of Mayor Andrew Peters, and Jack is admitted for treatment. The worried father keeps a two-month bedside vigil. “During the darkest days,” Joe would write to Jack’s doctor once the rash and fever have subsided, “I felt that nothing mattered except his recovery.”