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Joe believed, as he told the reporter, that in America the sons of wealth had a special obligation to serve their country. Even as he said it he knew his words might sound sentimental, or worse yet, that he might seem to be promoting his own brood.

“But it’s not just my children,” he insisted.

I think it should apply to all children of parents who can afford it. What we need now is selfless, informed, sincere representation and service at home and abroad…. Please don’t try to make any heroics out of this, but you asked me an honest question and I’ve given you an honest answer. That has been our family plan for our children from the first. If it doesn’t work out with them, it could work out with some others. I’m naturally tremendously proud of John. I think Joe, if the Lord had seen fit to spare him, would have been a fine man, and would have taken his place somewhere. Robert has yet to prove himself, but he’s bright, conscientious, and he seems to be tremendously interested.

Joe mentioned Eunice’s work in Washington, but he didn’t mention Kathleen. If she had been his son, he would doubtless have considered her life self-indulgent, a trivial pursuit of pleasure. Kathleen had made herself a part of the upper-class British world that shunned him. Kathleen had an endless supply of wit and a wondrous self-possession that never left her. At the age of twenty-seven, she had fallen in love again, this time with thirty-seven-year-old Earl Fitzwilliam, who suffered the dual disabilities of being both Protestant and married.

Fitzwilliam was a perfect exemplar of the parasitic life of wealth and privilege that Joe abhorred for his own sons. Kathleen and her beau were scheduled to meet Joe in Paris to discuss their future. If Kathleen could convince her father that Fitzwilliam offered her happiness, he would have to decide whether he would stand with her against all the onslaughts of Rose and the Church.

Joe did not sit idly in Paris waiting for his daughter and her lover to arrive. He had taught his children that time was the rarest commodity in life. Some men squeezed a half-dozen lives into their given time. Others diddled through their days in what was scarcely half a life. “Time is man’s dominant foe,” he said. “All man has on earth is the present moment…. To make proper use of your time is life—to waste it is merely to exist.”

Was it any wonder, then, that Kathleen lived her life like a Fourth of July sparkler, flashing brilliantly in the night? Kathleen and Fitzwilliam had decided to fly down in a private plane from London to southern France for one day. Then they planned to fly back to Paris for a Saturday luncheon at the Ritz with Joe.

On their way to the Riviera, the couple stopped in Paris for dejeuner. Their meal ran late, and when they returned to the airport, the weather had turned so threatening that all commercial aviation was grounded. Despite the late hour and the menacing reports, Fitzwilliam insisted that the pilot take off. Kathleen agreed with her lover and they flew toward the dark storm, considering it nothing but a momentary diversion, holding them back for a few nervous moments from the sun and warmth of the Cote d’Azur.

Early the next morning, Joe received a call in his suite from a Boston Globe reporter who told him that the plane had crashed. Kathleen and the other passengers were dead. There are as many ways to grieve as there are to die, and Joe turned immediately to what he considered the task at hand: to see that the truth was buried even before his daughter. No one was to dare to suggest that Kathleen had died a merry widow blithely flying off for a weekend with her adulterous lover. Joe told the reporters that his beloved Kathleen, who had stayed in England to be near her husband’s grave, had hitched a ride with Lord Fitzwilliam, a mere acquaintance.

Jack was usually out somewhere for dinner, but this evening he was sitting at home listening to a recording of the Broadway musical Finian’s Rainbow, with its haunting,