The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [17]
With neither a fortune nor a great name to bestow on Rose, Joe had set out upon graduation to establish himself in the business world. He first took a job as an assistant bank examiner for the state. It was not a grand position, but it was an enviable one in which to learn how banking truly worked and just how close to the brink of illegality a bank could go without falling off the edge. “If you’re going to get money, you have to find where it is,” Joe told his cousin Joe Kane.
Joe had been at his new position only a little more than a year when his father came to him and said that a major Boston bank, the First Ward National, was trying to take over Columbia Trust, the bank P. J. had co-founded. The keys to holding on to the bank were the shares held by the estate of the late John H. Sullivan, another founder of the bank. With the barest hint from Joe, Uncle James and Aunt Catherine Hickey came up with the money that, when added to that of his father and several others, saved the bank from a takeover.
In partial repayment for Joe’s acuteness, the twenty-five-year-old was named president of Columbia Trust, supposedly becoming the youngest bank president in America. He was now a man of such position and promise that he could rightfully claim Rose Fitzgerald’s hand. For Rose, it was an exquisite dream finally realized. “I had read all these books about [how] your heart should rule your head,” she remembered decades later. “I was very romantic and there were no two ways about it.”
As the newlyweds walked out of the chapel into the bountiful sun of an Indian summer day, they waited on the steps while photographers took pictures. The reporters and photographers were not there for Joe. They would feature the couple on the front page of the next day’s Boston newspapers only because Joe Kennedy was marrying the former mayor’s daughter, the most eligible Catholic woman in Boston. Even in this moment Honey Fitz took his own pound of publicity, standing there with Rose while Joe huddled in the background.
The wedding party drove over to the Fitzgerald mansion in Dorchester for a wedding breakfast for seventy-five guests. When Rose had made her debut, her father postponed the city council meeting so that his colleagues might attend, and he also invited the governor-elect and other high officials, as well as hundreds of celebrants young and old. For his daughter’s wedding to Joe, he was putting on only the minimally acceptable celebration, a reception at his home primarily for family members.
It was just as well that so few outsiders were present, for in the midst of the party Joe and Honey Fitz began yelling at one another. Rose was so distraught that she took off her wedding ring and put it on the mantel. By the time the couple left for their honeymoon at the Greenbriar Hotel in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, however, her ring was back on her hand, and her smile was back on her face, and they departed as if it had been a perfect day.
When the newlyweds returned from their two-week-long honeymoon, Rose was probably pregnant. As flattering as that was to Joe’s sense of manhood, it also meant that if he followed accepted practice he could have no further sexual relationships with his bride until after the birth of their child. If sex outside of marriage was unthinkable and unspeakable, sex inside of marriage had to be carefully rationed. Some experts believed that there was an unfortunate tendency among frisky young married couples to indulge in sex gluttonously every night. Before long, warned Winfield Scott Hall, the leading sexual hygienist, the poor wife “is in a condition of neurasthenia, or nervous prostration, and the husband is consciously depleted in his powers, and his business efficiency noticeably decreased.” Those who indulged too frequently, or in what was considered an unnatural manner, suffered, as Dr. A. T. Reinhold warned, “the most desperate cases of paralysis