The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [22]
Joe was a competitor in everything, and to some degree his home life was not measuring up. He could not complain that Rose was anything less than the woman he had married: profoundly religious, Catholic-educated, and socially conservative. But she was not growing into the new age, a time when women could snap wisecracks as quickly as men, roll their stockings on the dance floor, smoke cigarettes, and vote.
Joe might not have wanted such a woman for his wife, but Rose remained a Catholic provincial. She might talk of culture, but he was the one who truly loved classical music and looked forward to their nights at the symphony.
Joe Jr. was his father’s namesake in every way, a healthy, vibrant four-year-old, but the other children were not quite measuring up. Jack was a scrawny, whining, sickly tyke, and the newest, Rose’s namesake Rose Marie, or Rosemary as she was called, born in September 1918, was painfully slow in every part of her life.
In January 1920, Joe came home from his new office on Milk Street in downtown Boston and found that his pregnant wife had returned to her father’s home in Dorchester. It was unspeakable and unthinkable that Rose should leave him, an insult to his manhood, to his children, to his family, and a full measure of the silent pain his wife was suffering. Joe was a good provider and a good husband by all the measures that mattered in the world in which he lived. He could not fathom the idea of divorce, which would sever him and Rose forever from the sacraments of the Church, making him such an outcast from Catholic society that his economic future would be compromised. He had no choice, however, but to wait his wife out, and wait he did for three full weeks.
In the end it was his father-in-law, a man Joe considered in part a mountebank, who told his daughter to return to her husband. In Honey Fitz’s world, appearances were reality. As mayor, he had orchestrated photos of himself as a devoted family man, the public image so different from the reality, in which Honey Fitz honored his love of home by rarely being there. So there would be, if necessary, a similar portrait of Rose and Joe and their family. Honey Fitz would have no divorces or separations to stain his family name, no disgrace brought on by his favorite daughter.
Rose’s father did not inveigle his son-in-law to share more of his life with his wife, to attempt to understand her despair, or even perhaps not to arrive home with the scent of chorus girls on his lapel. He saw Joe’s role first of all as a provider, and if there was any failure, it was that he had not provided well enough. “If you need more help in the household, then get it,” he told Rose. “If you need a bigger house, ask for it. If you need more private time for yourself, take it. There isn’t anything you can’t do once you set your mind on it. So go now, Rosie, go back where you belong.”
Joe was relieved that Rose was back, but he was as drawn as ever to women whose laughter rang freely in the night. He had a suggestively intimate style in his letters to young women. “I don’t know how close you will be obliged to stick to your boss tonight,” he wrote Vera Murray, the executive secretary of a theatrical producer in August 1921. “I know how close you would have to be if I were your boss.”
A month later Joe wrote Arthur Houghton, a theatrical manager and friend: “I hope you have all the good-looking girls in your company looking forward, with anticipation, to meeting the high Irish of Boston, because I have a gang around me that must be fed on wild meat lately, as they are so bad. As for me, I have too many troubles around to both[er] with such things at the present time. Everything may be better however, when you arrive.”
Rose returned to Joe having made a silent compact that she would build