The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [131]
Bobby sought an authentic experience to mark him as a man in the same way that the war marked his brothers. In the summer of 1943, he wanted to work on a fishing boat on Cape Cod. He asked a family friend, the political operative Clem Norton, to get him a job where “nobody would know who he was and he would have to work just as hard as any fisherman.” That was a manly endeavor, but his mother would hear none of it, invoking the names of her two soldier sons. “This boy will have to go soon,” she said of her seventeen-year-old son, “so I want him as long as I can have him around.” Instead, his parents relegated Bobby to a pallid pursuit, working as a clerk in the East Boston bank founded by his grandfather P. J., where Joe had been president. That didn’t take the whole summer, and Bobby invited Sam Adams down to the Cape for a visit. Like so many other visitors, Sam had a splendidly idyllic time at Hyannis Port. He and his friend splattered each other with paint when they worked on Bobby’s boat, ran off for picnics with box lunches ordered up by Rose, and sang show tunes in the evening with Rose playing the piano.
Bobby’s sister Jean felt that a deep core of sadness resided within her brother. When Bobby returned to Milton for a visit after graduating in 1944, he wrote Hackett of a reunion that was more melancholy than gay. He was hardly the returning hero whose visage conjured up myriad images of athletic success or achievement. “Of course they were overwhelmed with happiness upon seeing me,” he wrote, his words etched in irony, “but I can see if I went back six times in as many weeks that they would get just a little tired of me.” He walked the old haunts, and to him it “all seems so inconsequential changing to blue suits and being on time for chapel and all that sort of thing.” He went on with the kind of emotional candor that Jack would never have exposed. “Things are the same as usual up here and me being my usual moody self I get very sad at times.”
Little Teddy had ample reason for sadness too. He had been shuttled from one private school to the next, eleven different institutions in all. “I was paddled fifteen times at Fessenden,” Teddy recalled, his one detailed memory of his tenure at the Massachusetts prep school. Through it all, this plump, impish boy remained resolutely good-natured, with an inordinate interest in all things chocolate.
One night at Fessenden, Teddy decided that he would sneak down in the darkness into the pantry and steal some chocolate. He was there reaching for several of the treats when he felt a hand grasp his neck and hold him tight. The one blind master had been lying in wait to capture the stealthy thief. As punishment, Teddy spent the night sleeping in a bathtub.
Teddy learned there were other ways to turn a chocolate trick. “Your youngest brother, Teddy, the merchant in the family, is as he says running a black market at Fessenden,” Joe wrote Kathleen. “He goes downtown to his Catechism Class, buys himself some chocolate bars at five cents apiece, comes back and sells them at ten to fifteen cents apiece to the boys who can’t get out…. There is a sneaking suspicion, I imagine, among some of the parents of boys who have done trading with Sir Edward that somewhere in the long dim past there was a little Jewish blood got in with the Irish and it is all coming out in him.”
Jack had warned Joe Jr. that if he insisted on shipping out to the Pacific, after a week there he would wish he had not been so rash. The warning held equally for the Cornish coast in England’s West Country, where Joe Jr. arrived in September 1943. The region had struck a devil’s bargain—exquisite, verdant landscape