The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [18]
Some experts believed that ideally sex should take place once a month, or among the passionate few, even twice a month. The reason for having sex only once a month had nothing to do with religious mandates that sex was for procreation, not pleasure, but with medical and psychological factors. Although the wife’s condition was duly and necessarily noted, the primary concern was the man. In this mechanistic concept of manhood, sperm was the precious elixir of life that, when unnecessarily spilled, dissipated the man, who thus abused himself and the future of his race.
Joe was a man of immense vitality who sought in his marriage to have an active sex life. Instead, almost from their wedding day, sex was a matter of tension between the couple. Rose was pregnant so often during the first decade of their marriage that if the couple followed the conservative regimen, he would have had sex with her hardly more than half a dozen times a year.
Joe, like his wife, was a man of profound discretion when discussing personal family matters, but Rose’s sexual reticence was so upsetting to him that he talked about it among friends. “Now listen, Rosie, this idea of yours that there is no romance outside of procreation is simply wrong,” he lectured Rose in front of their neighbors, the Greenes. “It was not part of our contract at the altar, the priest never said that, and the books don’t argue that. And if you don’t open your mind in this, I’m going to tell the priest on you.”
Joe moved his bride to a new house in the suburb of Brookline. The town, one of the wealthiest communities in America, was home to many of the most affluent members of the Protestant elite, their mansions set in cul-de-sacs or shrouded in trees, far back from the vulgar streets. Joe had come out to Brookline in search not so much of fresh suburban air but of a good address signaling that he was an American success pure and simple, no rude immigrant, no hyphenated Irish-American. His neighbors on Beals Street were not old Yankees but for the most part people like himself whose forebears had arrived more recently in steerage.
Joe and Rose were at the beginning of a migration of middle-class Irish-Americans and largely German Jews to Brookline. He had headed out to the western suburb to get away from the taint of his immigrant past, but Brookline was a veritable colony of the Irish: at 11 percent, they made up the largest foreign-born element by far. For the most part these were not bankers and businessmen, though, but cooks, maids, firemen, cops, plumbers, and sanitation workers, a caste of workers and servants.
Joe’s new home, not far from the trolley into Boston, was a small three-story structure that the newlyweds filled with what they considered all the accoutrements of civility. Part of that was the maid and later the nurse who lived in tiny rooms on the third floor, where they shared the same bathroom and were so close to Joe and Rose that the couple always had an audience. Rose had the maid/cook wear a black uniform at dinner and serve her banker husband on fine china.
Each evening Joe returned home to what was in many respects a miniaturized upper-crust world, or more accurately, Joe and Rose’s imitation of what they thought that world was. There was the same self-conscious civility between the two of them as between their parents, no vulgar Irish excess, no loud arguments within hearing of the maid. They practiced the decorum that never faltered and wore the masks that never fell.
When Rose was about to give birth, Joe took his wife to a rented summerhouse on the ocean at Hull. To minister to her, he brought a special nurse, a maid, and two doctors, notably Dr. Frederick Good, who became the family’s pediatrician. There, on July 25, 1915, Rose gave birth to their first child, Joseph Patrick Kennedy Jr., a squalling healthy son who weighed in at a formidable ten pounds.
Joe was proud of this son who bore his name, but he kept a distance from the tedious business of raising the baby, handing him off to nurses or his mother. Joe was acting