The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [42]
Jack’s grades were as sickly as his health, and his teachers knew him more as a patient than as a pupil. Joe finally caught on to the message Jack was sending him and allowed his son to come down to Palm Beach for a vacation. “I hope my marks go up because I guess that is the best way to say thanks for the trip,” Jack wrote his father, fully understanding that Joe considered life a matter of exchanges. Jack was not able to repay that debt, for as soon as he returned to Canterbury he was stricken with stomach pains. The surgeon who was flown down to attend him pronounced that Jack had appendicitis and needed an immediate operation. Jack never talked about the fear he surely must have felt clutching his stomach in terrible pain, then being carried off to Danbury, Connecticut, where he was operated upon, alone and isolated. He did not return to Canterbury that year but was taken to Bronxville, where Rose monitored his recovery, making him study so he would not lose his academic year.
Jack and his siblings looked forward that summer, as they did every summer, to their sojourn at the Kennedys’ house in the hamlet of Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. Joe had rented the white clapboard house for three years before purchasing it in 1928. The oceanfront house, set on two and a half acres of land, had plenty of room for tennis courts, a pool, and an expanse of grass for football games.
Hyannis Port became as close to a spiritual home as the Kennedys would ever have. These Cape Cod summers were not vacations, filled with the natural lassitude of hot, humid days. Hyannis Port was the school in which more than anywhere else Joe and Rose created the emotional ethos of the young generation of Kennedy men.
Joe believed that every moment of life had to be squeezed of its juices until only dry pulp remained. In the morning he was the first to get up and go for his hourlong horse ride. After breakfast he took his place on a deck outside his upstairs bedroom window, where he could survey his domain. He could not abide seeing his children sitting around, even for a moment. They moved from tennis to swimming to football to sailing, sometimes led by a full-time sports instructor. Joe had taken the playing fields of Harvard and brought them to Hyannis Port, out to the tennis court and out on Vineyard Sound, anywhere his sons might challenge each other and the lesser sons of other vacationing families.
When the boys played touch football, their friends soon learned that “touch” meant something different to the Kennedys than it did to others. It was the Kennedys’ field and the Kennedys’ football, and they usually claimed quarterback as their natural due. They had their own rules, often changing the parameters of the field on each play. They threw every pass as if it were the last play of the game and they needed a touchdown to win.
In the summer of 1937, Joe Jr. took Teddy out in his sailboat for his first race. Five-year-old Teddy was a natural sailor, and he and his big brother had the sails up just as the starting gun sounded. “Pull in the jib,” Joe Jr. shouted as the boat cruised ahead. “Pull in the jib.” Teddy looked around as if looking for some implement with “JIB” written on it in big letters. As the other boats drew farther ahead, Joe Jr. jumped up and grabbed the jib. Then he took Teddy by the pants and threw him into the sea. As Teddy felt the cold water and the stark fear of the moment, Joe Jr. grabbed him by the shirt, lifted him up, and dumped him on the deck like a fish. After the race, in which they came in second, Joe Jr. warned Teddy not to talk about the incident but to keep it eternally between them.
Joe was the master of competitiveness, and he doubtless would have found his eldest son’s action only