The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [385]
“I really don’t feel too well today,” Joe said, “but it must be the cold I’ve had.” He was hardly one to go inside because of a little sniffle. He was not a man for excuses, not for himself or for anyone else. Nor was he about to use one of the newfangled electric golf carts that sat there ready to be employed by the sedentary and slothful.
On the sixteenth hole Joe said he felt ill and sat down. The caddy hurried to bring over a golf cart, and Ann shepherded her uncle home as quickly as she could. “Don’t call any doctors,” he admonished his niece as she helped him walk into the house and upstairs to his bedroom.
Rose arrived home after mass and shopping to find her husband lying in bed. “He needs rest,” she said after looking at him. Rose should have called for a doctor, but there had always been a gentle conspiracy between Rose and Joe. She and her husband had never mused morbidly about life but had insisted that their children get up, shake off their illnesses or injuries, and move on. They had always been the best example of that, and it was hardly the time to turn timid.
By midafternoon, though, Rose agreed to call a doctor. The doctor scarcely had to look at Joe before he called an ambulance to carry him to Good Samaritan Hospital. As the ambulance sped across to West Palm Beach with sirens wailing, Rose headed out for her daily afternoon round of golf. “He’ll be fine, you’ll see,” Rose told the chauffeur. “I just cannot let this get me down. I must keep up my schedule. I have my routine. I’m going to play golf now, Frank. Yes, I will play.”
After Rose played golf, she returned to the house for her afternoon swim. She had faith in God and faith in routine, and she did not let this incident shake either belief. By the time the president and attorney general arrived that evening, they knew that Joe had had a serious stroke and the prognosis was not good.
Joe’s son-in-law Steve Smith believed that Joe had “nothing more to live for; his sons now being in power and having no further need for him, so the stroke came as a kind of solution.” Death might have been a solution, but surely not this, a proud, intractable man imprisoned in a broken body, unable to speak much more than gibberish, his intense blue eyes now his engine of communication, his arms striking out at those who offended him where once a word or two would have been sting enough. His right leg, right arm, and the right side of his face were paralyzed, and though his mind was lucid, try as he would, he could not speak coherently.
When Joe was brought back to the house in a wheelchair, everyone pretended that life was the same. His sons wanted the best for their father, but they could not make him walk or bring his speech back. Rose tried to be there for her husband within the strictures of her routine, but when she entered his room, he screamed “No!” and with his good left arm dismissed her with a gesture. For years they had maintained a relationship of mannered civility. Rose turned and walked away, keeping the distance from her husband in sickness that she had kept in health.
Joe wanted his grandchildren to be with him, but they had not learned to pretend, and some of them were afraid of this strange, gurgling, twisted old man. When he reached out to touch them, they fled from his embrace. He sat in the wheelchair crying.
Joe had all these women around him now, pushing his wheelchair, soliciting his tortured phrases, whispering to him, talking in low voices about him in the distant corridors. Luella Hennessey, the nurse who had gone with the Kennedys to London so many years before and had overseen the births of the grandchildren, arrived to help oversee his care. She took the daily calls from the president and held the receiver up to Joe’s ear so that he could make his incoherent grunts into the phone. Another nurse, Rita Dallas, had been brought in to manage the other nurses and a major