The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [107]
Bobby began to tremble, in Kearney’s recollection, “shaking like a leaf.” In the end Bobby scribbled some desultory notes and passed the paper back to his friend. For Bobby, quivering as he nervously perused the questions, this moment was a precursor to the great moral dilemmas of his life.
Bobby wanted to be what he thought his brothers were and what his father told him he must be, but he did not have what he considered their great and noble gifts. He struggled harder than they ever did, but even that wasn’t enough to lead him to the head of the crowd. Everywhere he looked along the marathon of his life he saw moral shortcuts, hidden routes that might lead him to the front of the pack.
This was tempting, but Bobby was not simply moral, but moralistic. He had to be able to justify his actions in the name of goodness. On this occasion Bobby didn’t take down all the questions. He could probably rationalize that he was doing something different from the boys who cribbed every answer, that his actions were a cut above those of the cheats and the dissemblers.
Rose sent Teddy to join his brother at Portsmouth in May 1941. He arrived in short pants, a pudgy, freckled-faced Little Lord Fauntleroy led up the driveway by his impeccably attired father. Teddy was at a double disadvantage: he was several years younger than the other boys, and he had been unceremoniously placed at the school most of the way through the year. That was the story of Teddy’s childhood, shuttled from school to school, ten in all, adhering to his parents’ schedules, rarely staying long enough to make real friends. “That was hard to take,” Teddy reflected. “I can’t remember all those schools. I mean, at that age, you just go with the punches. Finally I got through schools where I spent some time learning and trying to find out where the dormitory is and the gym.”
Teddy complained to Bobby that the bigger boys were picking on him. Bobby was a scrapper, but he had a small boy’s shrewdness. He knew enough not to attempt to take on his brother’s cause, at least not now. “You’ll just have to look out for yourself,” he told Teddy, advice that went against everything his father had taught his boys about family.
Teddy was still recovering from a serious illness, and he found it hard to look out for himself. “I had been at a boarding school in Riverdale,” Teddy recalled.
And when I went there, I got whooping cough and pneumonia, and I was very, very sick. I was in the hospital for about four or five weeks and missed a central part of the year. Mother just canceled all of her plans, and just she and I went up to Cape Cod and spent the better part of three and a half months up there. I almost died. And then they said I would need a good deal of rest and attention. So when I first went up there, I was in bed, and it was really sort of the two of us. Someone came in and cleaned up. And Mother would cook breakfast and lunch and dinner and read all afternoon. And then as I got a little stronger we went out for walks, short walks, longer walks, together. And then I had a relapse up there actually, which she blamed herself for. And so we stayed up there. And so my father came up periodically. But she stayed there the whole time.
Rose had never nurtured Teddy’s older siblings as long and as deeply as she nurtured her Teddy. He was her last child, and she lavished her emotions on him. Her youngest son returned her dedication in kind, with a deep, simple, abiding love. He never berated her, as Jack had, for her lack of physical affection. She had succored him, and he cherished such sweet memories of his early years as Rose each evening coming to his room where “she’d read a Peter Rabbit story and sort of act out the little characters and the voice. And then we’d say prayers and I’d go to bed.”
Teddy’s brothers and sisters loved their summers at Hyannis Port, but for him the place meant even more. It was a symbol of his mother