The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [176]
One of Ethel’s brothers-in-law, John Dowdle, found what he thought was the perfect device to exact some exquisite revenge. Dowdle had offered to set up the newlyweds’ six-week Hawaiian honeymoon. Bobby would be paying for this, and nobody would be there to pick up the check this time but his father.
Without Ethel’s knowledge, but with the blessing of the rest of the family, Dowdle searched through resort brochures and talked to travel agents with one goal in mind—to make the trip as absurdly expensive as possible, an endeavor with which Dowdle’s travel agent was happy to comply. A first-class hotel? Of course. A suite? Why not. The bridal suite? Definitely. The presidential suite? All the better. Flowers delivered every day? Show me where to sign. Lilies or orchids? Whichever is the most expensive.
This was a classic Skakel joke, endlessly amusing to its authors but potentially immensely hurtful to its victims. In their first weeks of marriage, Bobby and Ethel could have been embroiled in the kind of petty bickering over money that destroys many marriages. Ethel, however, didn’t get the joke, and neither did Bobby. To the bride, money poured out endlessly from a golden spigot; her honeymoon was not mindlessly extravagant but simply comme il faut.
As for Bobby, he was not much more versed in the mundane prices of life than his bride, and anyway, he was in love. He found no disparity in the fact that while his bride traveled with thirteen suitcases, he had only one. Twenty-four-year-old Bobby was still so imbued with a sense of himself as a Kennedy that after his honeymoon he planned to spend three weeks at Hyannis Port before returning to law school at the University of Virginia.
Bobby and Ethel went to live that fall of 1950 in Charlottesville, where they rented a large, comfortable old house. One evening Wally Flynn showed up at the front door for a steak dinner with the newlyweds. “Wally, come in,” Bobby said, a hangdog look on his face. “Come in. We’re all fouled up,” Bobby told his old Harvard football mate. Wally looked around and saw that the place was in a shambles. A pregnant Ethel rested upstairs in bed. Hearing the voice of Bobby’s Harvard teammate, she shuffled downstairs. “I’ve got to go back to bed,” she said and shuffled back up the stairs.
“Look, I’ll straighten this out right now.” Wally said looking at the stacks of dishes in the kitchen. “You go do what you have to do. I won’t get in your way tonight or anything else.” Bobby didn’t argue but left and shut himself away from the worst of the squalor.
Ethel and Bobby had nobody to take care of the tedious business of domestic life. Undone chores were simply piling up around them. Wally could see why nobody had washed the dishes. The sink was stopped up. He found some tools, got down under the sink, and cleaned out the whole system before putting it back together. Then he washed the dishes, took out bag after bag of garbage, spiffed up the place a little, broiled some steaks, and set the table.
“What’s going on?” Bobby asked, as he returned to the dining room.
“Nothing unusual. You wanted a steak dinner and I fixed the kitchen sink.”
“Where’d you learn to do that?”
“My mother taught me.”
Bobby shook his head in awe. That wasn’t exactly one of the things that he had learned from Rose.
Bobby was a dogged, pugnacious young man attempting to follow the same arduous pathway that his older brothers had set out on. But what Jack performed with fluid ease and grace, Bobby managed with awkward difficulty. He had no qualms in treating much of the rest of the world as helpmates in his ascent.
One day Bobby came charging into Jack’s office holding a stack of papers in his outstretched hand. “You’re Mary,” he