The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [39]
On the first day that ten-year-old Jack attended Riverdale Country Day School, he came running out late for the sparkling Reo bus, clutching a piece of toast in his hand, his shoes in the other hand, his tie askew. Jack had a preternatural instinct to take whatever was best. Instead of moving toward the back of the bus, he plunked himself down in the seat directly behind the driver. The seat had been claimed already as the prized property of one of his new classmates, Manuel Angulo. The boy cherished the seat in part because whoever sat there got first dibs in the afternoon when the driver stopped for the Good Humor ice cream truck. Manuel was no more going to argue his case with Jack than Jack was going to listen to his belligerent seatmate, and within a few minutes the boys started pounding each other, rolling into the aisle, setting off screams and shouts of encouragement. The bus driver pulled over to the roadside and separated the two boys. “After that we became good friends,” Angulo recalled.
Joe Jr. and Jack both had an intense, nervous hunger for all the minutiae of a boy’s life, treating touch football games as epic contests and passionately competing for even something like a bus seat as if the struggle were for life itself. Their friends relished their time at the Kennedy house, for everything was intensified there.
When Rose was home, she was not like many of their mothers, who were interested in bridge games and garden clubs. Rose was a mother who directed her children’s every endeavor. She had ample time for her children in part because the ladies of Bronxville had largely ostracized her. She was blackballed from the Bronxville Women’s Club, an outcast not because of her faith but because of her husband’s infidelity. It was also unthinkable that the Kennedys would be admitted to the Bronxville Country Club.
Jack and Joe Jr. were among the most popular boys at Riverdale. Joe Jr. was the dominant brother, pushing his little brother into the background. “Perhaps Joe Jr. was kind of spoiled,” Angulo recalled, “but then again, that was because he was the apple of his father’s eye. I wouldn’t say that Jack was spoiled.”
Joe Jr. was ahead of his class in everything, including his interest in girls. Jack was so shy around girls that when it came time for him to go to dancing class he would hide in the bathroom. He was a handsome lad, but when girls started calling him on the phone, he could not even bring himself to speak.
Girls weren’t everything. One fall afternoon Jack was sitting in the upper field with his football-playing mates, waiting for his turn to take the field. “What are you going to do when you grow up?” one of the boys asked. “I want to be a doctor,” one boy said. “I want to be an engineer,” a second asserted. “I’m going to be president of the United States,” Jack said matter-of-factly.
Little Bobby would never have expressed such bold dreams, or if he had, his words would have been lost in his big brothers’ boastful shouts. His own mother often scarcely paid attention to him. She ruefully admitted years later that by the time the seventh of her nine children was born, even she was dragged down by the relentless routine of mothering.
“As a mother, yes, I did get a bit tired after fifteen years of telling the same bedtime stories, celebrating the same holidays,” Rose confessed. She was traveling more now, including twice-yearly sojourns to Paris to be fitted for the latest styles, and much of the time she foisted Bobby off on governesses and nannies. She might have felt differently if Bobby had been a brilliant boy, but lost in the middle of the family, he seemed to have nothing singular about him.
His big brother Jack could not remember Bobby until he was three and a half. Jack’s first significant memory is perfectly emblematic of Bobby’s upbringing. There stood this tiny tyke on the deck of a yawl in Nantucket Sound, jumping again and again into the rough waters, teaching himself how to swim, while Joe Jr. watched from another boat. Joe Jr. might have stopped