The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [50]
In early January, Jack was back in the familiar confines of the infirmary with “a mild cold in his head.” Mrs. St. John wrote Rose that Jack had arrived with “a lavender bathrobe and lavender and green pajamas” and appeared to be “settling in for a pleasant stay,” as if he were setting off on a Caribbean cruise.
Rose was consumed with her son’s condition. Yet even after he had been in bed for two weeks, it was unthinkable that she would drive the sixty-five miles to Wallingford to see her sick son. Instead, she wrote letters telling the school that three years before Jack had had “mumps, and the doctor thought it was probably a cold.” She suggested that he be given a teaspoon of Kepler’s Malt and Cod Liver Oil after every meal. Jack’s mother was assured that not only would he be forced to take a daily dosage in the infirmary, but that the tonic would continue back in his dormitory room. It was hardly a routine to please a boy who would have to be paraded in front of his peers after each meal to receive his medicine, a regimen that would continue until Jack was “full of pop.”
The school treated Jack like a fragile seedling that had to be sheltered lest he be torn away in the storm of life. They were about to let him return to his room when the weather turned cold, wet, and unpleasant. So he was kept a bit longer in the infirmary. Whether owing to the mysteriously regenerative benefits of cod liver oil or simply the “glorious sunshine” that had finally graced the Connecticut winter, Jack was allowed to return to his room and to the dining hall, where the masters attempted to fill their 117-pound charge with salads and vegetables and in the afternoons to get him to down glasses of eggnog.
Rose telephoned Mrs. St. John asking that Jack be pushed to “finish well this term so that he will not have to do any summer work.” Jack was back in the infirmary in April with a mysterious “swelling” and urine that “was not entirely normal.” Despite Rose’s entreaties, Jack had to return in August for the summer session.
The following academic year Jack was plagued with a whole new range of illnesses. He had problems with weak knees. He had bad arches that required special built-up shoes, a condition that alone merited ten letters from Rose to the administration. He was in the infirmary with possible “pink eye” and on another occasion with a high temperature and “a little grippy cold.”
Scrawny, frail Jack was not the sort of youth who went out for football, not at Choate, and not anywhere else. But as a Kennedy son, Jack had to go out for the team on which his brother starred. Earl Leinbach, one of the junior coaches, was a severe disciplinarian who egged his charges on by chasing after them with a paddle and striking them full force on the buttocks. Jack’s most distinguished contribution to the team was managing to avoid the coach’s paddle as he swerved away from the strokes. In the end Jack was so unhealthy that he had to leave the dream and the honor that he had sought on the football field.
Jack had gone out for football and for two years fought with tenacity, but he was simply too small and weak. In the end, as he wrote his father, the closest he could get to the Choate football team was to be a cheerleader.
Golf was scarcely a worthy alternative to the struggles of the gridiron, but even here Jack feared that he was not up to the mark. “The golf is going good,” he wrote his father, “and I have a slight chance for the team because it is rather bad this year.”
Jack needed to find a separate sphere where he could stand tall and apart, not always in the shadow of his brother, whose light blocked out the younger Kennedy’s accomplishments. He found those spheres largely in collaboration with Kirk LeMoyne “Lem” Billings, the classmate who became his closest friend and conspirator in the games of youth. Lem was a six-foot, 175-pound, gawky, bespectacled son of a socially prominent Pittsburgh physician, with a sense of humor almost as darkly ironic