The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [135]
Among Joe Jr.’s meager effects in the Nissen hut was no creased, much-read letter from his father telling his son that he was a hero too, and that when he returned to Hyannis Port, they would all stand and toast his honor. That was the letter that he needed, some paternal notice that he had done right and good. His father had nearly cried when Joe Jr. won his wings, and his love for his sons was the deepest passion of the man’s life. He did not see, though, that Joe Jr. needed, if not a letter then at least a paragraph, or if not a paragraph then one simple line telling him that his father was as proud of him as he was of Jack.
Joe Jr. was not a man who thought that irony was a worthy lens through which to look at the world, but he was full of irony these days. Jack had not courted danger to win a hero’s medal. Danger had come to him in the shape of a black destroyer slicing through a blue-black sea. Jack and his men had survived, and for that he was sung a hero’s song. Unlike Jack, Joe Jr. was wooing heroism, stalking it as if it were something that a man had to pursue. He had done what he had been asked to do, and he had done it well. He had won no singular medal, but he had been one of a few hundred men who had turned the Bay of Biscay into killing grounds, dropping Nazi submarines into the deep waters so they could not go forth to disrupt shipping, prolong the war, and kill hundreds of merchant marines and sailors. It did not matter that Joe Jr. had no notch on his belt for a sunken submarine or a plane that he had sent down. He was doing his share, if only he could see it.
In May, a New York Sun reporter showed up to write about the squadron and said that he wanted to interview the best pilot. He was shown into the officers’ hut, where Joe Jr. sat before a warming fire. That was a singular honor to be so chosen, but Joe Jr. was obsessed by what he had not done. “I’ll still take carrier duty with a fighter,” he said, bemoaning the fact that he had seen no submarines. “Things happen. You don’t fly 1,700 hours and see nothing. You don’t make twenty-nine trips, ten to twelve hours each, and see nothing. Yeah, I’ve made twenty-nine. The next one is my thirtieth. Know what happens after you’ve made your thirtieth? You go out on your thirty-first.”
“That is,” the reporter concluded his article, “if, like a guy named Joe you just don’t have any luck.”
Whatever solace Joe Jr. received was in the tender arms of Pat Wilson whenever he could get away from Dunkeswell. Her cottage was one of those rustic redoubts favored by the nature-adoring British upper class. She had chickens on her tennis court, a chauffeur whose duties included milking the cow, and an ever-evolving set of smartly attired weekend guests that often included not only Joe Jr. but Kathleen and her beau, Billy Hartington.
The war had led some to wenching and boozing and mindless games, but gave others the strength to cut through all the silly proprieties and narrow moralisms to live as they wanted to. Joe Jr. was having an affair with a married woman. She had not seen her husband for over two years, and she might not see him until war’s end or perhaps never again. Hearts were the least of the things being broken in this war, and no one condemned the couple for their adulterous affair. Kathleen had fallen in love with Billy Hartington before the war. He was a man worthy of love, a combat officer in the Cold Springs Guards, a good and gentle man, bearing one of the great names of England, and he would be the next duke of Devonshire. His only flaw, as Kathleen saw it, was that he was a Protestant, from a family known over the centuries for its hatred of the Catholic Church. In a different time, Kathleen would have fled from his heretical embrace, but she hurried toward him now. Not settling for a paltry affair, she was contemplating