The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [49]
Joe Jr. would have no part of hazing underclassmen but indulged in a full share of innocent wickedness. He delighted in filling his housemaster’s shoes with sand, short-sheeting his bed, and then shaking his head mournfully as he commiserated with the teacher about whoever would do such a dastardly prank.
Optimistic. Conservative. Ambitious. Athletic. Friendly. Loyal. Intelligent. Exuberant. Joe Jr. was everything Joe wanted in a son. In comparison to Jack, it seemed at times as if Joe had passed on to his firstborn son everything of value. Joe Jr. was that most rare of spirits, a natural extrovert. The center of the room was Joe Jr.’s natural resting place, and he strode into any setting with that energetic manner.
Jack had the most tortured, complex feelings toward his big brother. That admixture of love, jealousy, anger, and competitiveness had jelled into the seminal relationship in young Jack’s life. Jack, for all his sensitivity, could not see that Joe Jr. probably felt threatened by his brother and saw Jack’s potential far better than Jack saw it himself.
Joe wanted his sons to be loyal as brothers, and much of the time they acted with deep affection toward each other. Yet there remained an undercurrent of rivalry and endless competitiveness. Though Joe was sure that Joe Jr. would win, he watched like a promoter who owned both boxers. He created a family climate in which Joe Jr. could berate his little brother and Jack could fight back with words as much as he did with his clenched fists.
“When Joe came home he was telling me how strong he was and how tough,” Jack wrote his father in Palm Beach while he was still at Canterbury. “The first thing he did was to show me how tough he was to get sick so that he could not have any thanksgiving [sic] dinner. Manly youth.” Jack was the brother for whom the infirmary was a second home, and the sight of his sick brother was sweet vengeance. “He was then going to show me how to Indian wrestle. I then through [sic] him over on his neck.”
As Jack saw it, Joe Jr. had nothing to teach him, and he had colleagues in his campaign against his big brother. “Did the sixth-formers lick him? Oh Man he was all blisters, they almost paddled the life out of him. He was roughhousing in the hall a sixth-former caught him he led him in and all the sixth formers had a swat or two. What I wouldn’t have given to be a sixth former.”
At Choate, Jack was for the most part too sly, too ferretlike, to be caught and bullied by the upperclassmen, but what a ransom he would have paid to have been there among those beating “the life out of” his brother.
Jack appeared shy, but his was not that sort of shyness that plagues a person in public places, taking immense energy to accomplish what for others is nothing but the routine of daily social life. Jack was not so much shy as reserved, keeping a distance from everyone and everything. Part of this manner was his way of building his own niche apart from his brother.
And partly it was the result of his illnesses, of lying in bed watching adults scurry around him trying to hide their knowledge of his maladies. Although the Kennedys projected an image of a family of radiant good health, only young Joe Jr. seemed immune to disease. Rosemary was slow. Eunice was plagued with illnesses. Kathleen had asthma. None of them, however, suffered from the scourge of afflictions that affected Jack.
Jack had scarcely settled into his routine at the prep school before he was in the infirmary. Mrs. St. John wrote Rose that Jack had what “seemed to have been the beginnings of a little cold.” Rose might have surmised that Jack’s condition was potentially more serious or the infirmary would have been overflowing with sniffling students, but the two women spoke in a genteel code language, always minimizing,