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By Root 1367 0

was only part of what Joe considered the terrible unfairness of that year. That spring Joe did not move up to a starting position on the Harvard varsity but sat on the bench watching players whom he believed he could outperform. As frustrating as it was to sit and watch, Joe’s identity at Harvard was based largely on being a varsity ballplayer, and he could not possibly leave the team. He knew that he still could be chosen for one of the final clubs. He was on eternal probation, his conduct monitored, his gestures noted. He continued his sagacious assault on the social world by joining the Junior Dance committee, which included a Frothingham, a Lowell, and his dear friend Potter. The event was held in the Union, which was festooned with potted palms, laurels, Japanese lanterns, and frosted bulbs. “Everywhere was to be seen evidence of the activity and good taste of the committee in charge,” the Harvard Crimson noted.

Joe’s Brahmin friends had assumed that his Irish uncouthness would eventually work its way to the surface, but on the committee he had appeared an arbiter of good taste. Joe’s only disappointment was that Rose had been unable to be his date. She had returned to Boston after her year studying at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Blumenthal, Holland, and another year at the Sacred Heart boarding school at Manhattanville in New York City, an exquisite rendering of Catholic womanhood. For all his social ambition, Joe had no intention of marrying anyone but a Catholic, and there was no Catholic woman in all of Boston like Rose Fitzgerald. Her mother had retreated into her private life, and Rose had largely become her father’s hostess. Mayor Fitzgerald ruled over his family with a narrow severity that he did not attempt over Boston; he insisted that Rose accompany him for a vacation in Palm Beach, Florida, rather than attend the Junior Dance.

Joe had kept up his romance with Rose over the years and over the distance, and despite her father’s attempts to dangle other suitable young men before his beloved eldest daughter. Honey Fitz might not like Joe, but his daughter’s innocence was safe with Joe. There was no greater taboo than to touch the sweet maiden whom he hoped might one day be his wife.

The ideal of manhood at Harvard had nothing to do with sex. Passion was for the football field, not the boudoir. Teddy Roosevelt was proud that his mother had taught him that he should be as pure as the woman he married. Joe’s generation of educated young men learned not only that there were good women and bad women, but also that the bad women were either prostitutes or amoral seductresses who preyed on vulnerable young men.

If Joe should partake of their fatal charms or chance on an unknown working-class woman at a public dance hall, he risked horrors beyond measure. Even these seemingly innocent young girls might already be infected with syphilis that had progressed to the stage when the victim has “a peculiar kind of sore throat with white mucous patches [and] … the moisture from the lips is as venomous as the poison of a rattlesnake.”

Such warnings were enough to keep many young men in the library and the club, preferring Quaker oats to wild oats. Joe, however, was not to be dissuaded. He headed to Boston, where he attended musicals and squired around young actresses and showgirls. This dangerous world lay far beneath the carefully prescribed pathways of society and morals. Here he was, as his friend Arthur Goldsmith remembered him, “a ladies’ man.” On one occasion he and Goldsmith went out with a couple of charmers from the chorus line of The Pink Lady. Joe was arm in arm with a young lady, whirling her around a roller rink, when he came upon Rose skating by herself. “He talked himself out of that one,” Goldsmith said, impressed at Joe’s ability to excuse the inexcusable.

Joe had learned the sweetest lesson of all. Down this road lay not disease and death but pleasure. He could be the good layman at church on Sunday, the good gentleman around Harvard Square during the week, the honorable escort to Rose on special