The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [27]
Rose may have set off on her trip in guiltless bliss, but Jack had struck at an unpalatable truth. As a youth, he would tell his closest friend, that he had cried every time his mother left on one of her endless trips, until he realized that his tears not only did no good but irritated Rose and caused her to pull away emotionally even more from her second son. He realized that he had “better take it in stride.” The terrible threat was that if he did not buck up, Rose would return physically to the home in Brookline, but she might not return emotionally. As an adult, Jack reflected that his father was “a more distant figure” than his mother. Rose, however, although more often physically present, was “still a little removed which I think is the only way to survive when you have nine children.”
Jack rationalized the psychological distance that Rose kept from him and his brothers and sisters. It was in part the same distance that Rose’s mother and Joe’s mother had kept from their children, a distance common in Irish-American homes. Love was a sweet cake given out only on special occasions, and then only in modest nibbles.
Rose took her children to see Bunker Hill and Plymouth Rock. She did not allow Jack and Joe Jr. to romp over the sites but insisted that they stand there while she inundated them with details and anecdotes worthy of a tour guide. Upon returning to the house in Brookline, she quizzed them over lunch, pushing them to remember and recite. When she took her children to Boston’s Franklin Park Zoo, the boys and their sisters did not simply stand and watch the lions prowling back and forth. Rose stepped forward and lectured her children on the Christian martyrs who had been eaten by lions such as these.
Most women of Rose’s generation might have attempted to follow the child-care experts, but the burden of raising children was such that they often had no time to follow this “scientific” imperative. Rose, however, knew that her one legacy would be her children. She was a literalist who took the ideas of the modern scientific experts and applied them as if they were absolute dictums.
Regularity was the key to scientific child-rearing, and Rose treated it as a moral imperative that played into all of her natural instincts for order and discipline. The authoritative guidebook, The Care and Feeding of Children by Dr. L. Emmett Holt, instructed mothers that babies had to be fed and put to sleep “at exactly the same time every day and evening.” They were to be fed for no longer than twenty minutes, and if they started falling asleep, they were to be kept alert by “gentle shaking” until they finished feeding.
Dr. Holt warned against displaying too much affection, hugging a crying child, or indulging in mere emotion. The expert considered plumpness the mark not of a healthy bonny baby but of a lethargic, indulged child who, he believed, might be eating “twice as much food as is proper.” Rose had a mandate to take her own obsession with weight and apply it to her children so they would not have a peasantlike girth. She apportioned food to them like medicine, holding off on helpings to Joe Jr. and Rosemary and adding food to Jack’s plate.
Rose monitored everything that might touch her children’s lives in the home like a guard patting down visitors for contraband. She could not have her children polluted by improper reading material, and she purchased approved books for them at the Women’s Exchange. She was appalled when her mother bought a popular book, Billy Whiskers, and gave it to Jack. “I wouldn’t have allowed it in the house except that my mother had given it to him,” Rose recalled. Rose found the brash colors of the book offensive. It was not the pictures that made the series Jack’s favorite but brash, bold Billy himself. Billy would not be tethered or harnessed. He ate whatever he wanted to eat, from popcorn to cakes, and butted anyone who got in his way. For Jack, it was surely an exquisite dream of a book about a