The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [106]
For the Fourth of July weekend, Joe Jr. returned to Hyannis Port. The Kennedys were a family of special occasions, and no holiday was so brilliantly memorialized as the nation’s birthday. “Year after year, they were the highlights of our summers on Cape Cod,” Teddy recalled nearly four decades later. “Even today, I can see the gaily decorated porch, the long wooden table piled high with boiled potatoes and green peas and its centerpiece of fresh salmon, which Dad had brought in from New Hampshire or Maine, or even Newfoundland if he’d heard that the best salmon were running there.”
The table was as heavily laden with food as ever, and the laughter as deep, but over the gathering hung Joe’s terrible fear that if war came there would never be a family gathering like this again. Joe Jr. and Jack, along with their father, dominated the conversations. Kathleen, Eunice, Pat, and Jean adored their brothers. They were honored enough just being there without injecting themselves often into the manly conversation. Rosemary sat there too, slightly reticent, a gentle presence, never entering into the quick-witted repartee. Bobby and Teddy were observers of their big brothers and the great world about which they reported like scouts back from reconnaissance.
The major event of the weekend was the Fourth of July sailboat race. As they always did, the whole family went down to the pier, where they piled into a motor launch to watch Jack or Joe Jr. lead the pack of sailboats to victory.
For the most part Jack and Joe Jr. ignored their baby brother, but this afternoon Jack motioned to little Teddy to join him in his beloved sloop, Victura, to serve as his crew. As splendid a moment as it was for Teddy, he must surely have dreaded that Jack might do what Joe Jr. had done four years before, dumping him in the water in frustrated competitive zeal.
If victory had been what mattered today, Teddy might have found himself tossed into the drink like unwanted ballast. But on this day, unlike so many others, something else mattered more than coming in first. “We lost, but I admired Jack all the more, because he should have blamed me and didn’t,” Teddy recalled. “Winning was important, he said, but loving sailing was even more important.”
Jack and Joe Jr. left after the weekend, but Bobby and Teddy stayed at Hyannis Port for the summer. They were only boys, but even they could sense how much their world was changing. Their father was selling their house in Bronxville, the only home they had ever known. From now on they would live itinerant, if privileged, childhoods, shuttled between vacation homes and boarding schools.
Bobby had started out at St. Paul’s, but Rose decided that the Episcopalian school was more interested in proselytizing an untrue faith than educating her seventh child. She transferred him to Portsmouth Priory, where she believed the Benedictines would educate him in true Catholic principles. Rose’s letters to her son were as preachy as anything Bobby heard in chapel (“Remember, too, that it is a reflection on my brains as the boys in the family are supposed to get their intellect from their mother, and certainly I do not expect my own little pet to let me down”). He tried to make his name an emblem of success, working hard to get decent grades and make the football team. He was as mediocre at one as the other and ended up as the manager of the hockey team.
Bobby was always struggling to keep up and to achieve the honors that his brothers won with such grace and ease. Bobby wanted to swim as fast as Joe Jr. and Jack, to throw the football as far, and to stand as high in his class, but he had neither the brawn of his biggest brother nor the brains of either one. He had another weakness for a boy who sought to compete in his brothers’ manly world—a passionate religious faith that tempered everything he sought to do.
One day at Portsmouth, Bobby was studying for his final Latin exam when his closest friend, Pierce Kearney, came rushing into the room. In his hand he held a smudged mimeographed paper that had been