The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [251]
Teddy’s romantic life was the one arena of adventure left to him, and he took immense pleasure in all the sexual games of bachelorhood. During the summer of 1958, he was still only twenty-six years old, and he was more like Jack than Bobby in his enjoyment of life as a single man. His mother and sisters talked about Joan, and it was clear that if he was going to obey the mandates of his family, he should follow his brothers and sisters into matrimony.
Teddy and Joan were walking along the beach on Labor Day weekend. They had rarely been alone, and they were lovers neither physically nor emotionally. They prowled around each other with wary uncertainty, both knowing the stakes of the game they were playing. “What do you think about getting married?” Teddy asked as nonchalantly as if asking for a dinner date.
“Well, I guess it’s not such a bad idea,” Joan answered, replying with the same shrug-of-the-shoulders dispassion as Teddy.
“What do we do next?” he asked, as if he had just made a business deal.
For Joan, this was in many respects the most crucial moment of her life, and over the years she reflected time and again on it. At first she thought that Teddy “proposed in a very off-hand manner” because he was “kind of guarding himself in case I said no.” Teddy’s reticence, she realized later, was perhaps not the mark of a shy lover overwhelmed by the depth of his emotion and the fear that he might be turned down. His seeming inarticulateness was an articulate expression of his feelings.
The next morning Teddy told Joan that she had to meet his father, who had just arrived home from France. The sixty-nine-year-old patriarch sat in his great wing chair in the far end of the living room, looking at Joan like a monarch holding court. Joan walked tentatively into the room and sat at Joe’s feet on an ottoman.
“Do you love my son?” Joe asked. It was the crucial question, but it was rarely asked so boldly. This was no social chitchat but an intense interview. Joe had been home only a few hours, but he seemed to know everything about Joan and her family. “When the interview was over—and it was an interview—he said if we wanted to get married, we had his blessing.” Joan remembered. “At the end, I felt terribly relieved. He may have been tough, but he did make you feel at ease. When I returned home on Monday, I told my parents, and they were very happy.”
Joan may have been happy, but Teddy was sending out distress signals to anyone who chose to read them. “I was young and naive then, but looking back, there were warning signals,” Joan recalled. “We didn’t see each other from the time of his proposal until the engagement party.” That evening at the Bennett home in Bronxville, he arrived when the event was half over. “So he wouldn’t embarrass my mother, he chose to come in the back way, through the maid’s quarters,” Joan said. Teddy ran up the stairs, bringing with him an engagement ring that his father had picked out and that he had not even seen until Joan opened it.
Joan saw that Teddy was acting purposefully disdainful toward all the rituals of his engagement. She would never have behaved so rudely as her fiancé, but she too had her doubts about the approaching wedding. Joan went to her father and told him of her overwhelming fear and reservations.
Bennett thought that his daughter’s happiness mattered more than family appearances. He went to Joe and told him that Joan wanted either to postpone the wedding or to end the engagement.
Joe was a man who took care of problems, and Teddy was a problem. Joe and Rose considered it their