Come to the Edge_ A Memoir - Christina Haag [72]
“It’ll be an adventure,” John said when he put me on the train at Penn Station. And it was. He’d fly down on the shuttle; I’d go up on the Metroliner. I sent long letters; he sent postcards of howling dogs with a list of days until we’d meet. He spent his term break in my small apartment on the Hill, studying at the Library of Congress while I was in rehearsal. “I’ve never been faithful this long,” he told me on one of those quiet streets behind the Capitol. And when I had an unexpected five days off during the load-in of the set, he sent me a ticket to meet him in Palm Beach at the house on North Ocean Boulevard that his grandfather had bought in 1933.
The sixteen-room estate, once the Winter White House, was secluded behind high hedges. Designed by Addison Mizner, famous for the Mediterranean Revival style of many of Palm Beach’s grand homes, the house had been christened La Guerida by the previous owners. At the entrance, a pair of espaliered trees hugged the pale stucco wall. A wooden door, Spanish-style and studded, led to a covered walkway through a courtyard to the main house. We rarely used it; John preferred the side door by the kitchen.
Most of the bedrooms were upstairs, but on the first floor the main rooms opened to one another and the sea. There were floor-to-ceiling windows with pinch-pleated draperies, the flowered chintz faded. Outside were tennis courts, a terraced pool, a well-trimmed lawn, and the patio where his father had announced his cabinet in 1961. By the seawall, tall, lean palms swayed, one of them deeply bowed by wind and age. To juggle the visits of so many children and grandchildren, the house was booked in advance through Joseph P. Kennedy Enterprises, the family trust offices in New York.
It was a cavernous place, neglected but clearly loved, and unlike his mother’s homes, it reeked of the past. When I walked through the rooms, it was as if there was music of another time playing. John agreed. Ghosts, he said. Good ones. And on that first trip, we found a wing of the house he’d never been in before. We explored the musty rooms—some draped with sheets, others empty—and he told me that one night many years after Joe Kennedy died, he had the sense that his grandfather was there with him. He smelled the acrid sweet of his pipe. Did I think it was crazy, he asked, to feel the presence of someone after death?
We had spent the first night of our trip at the Breakers. John’s aunt Ethel was scheduled to leave but had asked him for one more day, and he didn’t want to intrude on her time. When we arrived at the house, we were greeted by Nelly, the Irish housekeeper, who inquired where our bags should go. Mrs. Kennedy, she said, was playing tennis. And Mrs. Kennedy was staying in the room near the pool, the one John had requested, the one that had been his father’s. He seemed surprised that she was still there but shrugged it off. Perhaps, Nelly suggested with a knowing sigh, the bags should go to the Ambassador’s room until Mrs. Kennedy departed later in the day. We followed her up the stone staircase, and when she opened the door to the room where his grandfather had slept almost twenty years before, I thought, The house is still his.
Later, after we returned from the beach, my suitcase was missing. John found it down the hall in his grandmother’s suite. Nelly confessed that Ethel, on a tear because we were unmarried and sharing a room, had ordered the move. The bags went back and forth a number of times before she gave up. It was clear that she saw women as falling into one of two categories, and with a beady-eyed harrumph, she had cast me as the fallen sort. Perhaps I reminded her of someone? No, John said. She was just like that. He’d seen it with his cousins. Privately, he was incensed, but he opted to steer clear. “She’s difficult, but she’s still my aunt.” One of his mottoes was “Choose your battles,” and this wasn’t one of them. Nor was the fact that Ethel stayed put for the rest of our stay without a word about it to him.
But one morning in