The Kennedy Men_ 1901-1963 - Laurence Leamer [56]
Jack’s fragile health was also shameful, not only because it singled him out as a weak figure, but because of the sheer embarrassment of some of the diseases with which he was afflicted. When he returned from Palm Beach after the Christmas holiday, he came down with a terrible case of hives, covering his entire body, and was taken to the hospital in New Haven. “Well, you know, Jack, the doctors are simply delighted to have the trouble come out to the surface instead of staying inside,” Eddie Moore, his father’s associate, told him.
“Gee!” Jack exclaimed. “The doctors must be having a happy day today!”
When the hives began to disappear, Jack wished the doctors would stop poking at him and let him get back to his life. “If this had happened fifty years ago, they would just say, ‘Well, the boy has had a case of hives, but now he’s all over it,’ “he told Clara St. John, the headmaster’s wife. “Now they’ve got to take my blood count every little while and keep me here until they correspond to what the doctors think it ought to be.”
Jack wanted to get out of the hospital, but he was still so mysteriously weak that the doctors continued their tests. By the summer Jack had more vague symptoms, and his father decided to send him to the famous Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, for a battery of tests. It was a situation that cried out for his mother’s presence. Rose’s visit, however, would have been an omen of death or a sign of intolerable weakness. Instead, Eddie Moore, a surrogate parent, accompanied Jack.
Jack was a fiercely intelligent young man who looked with wry bemusement at his life. Never was there a moment of self-pity in Jack. Never did he muse aloud about why the God his mother worshiped daily should have plagued him with these constant illnesses. Never did he ask the heavens why he couldn’t have a disease that he might defeat instead of these inexplicable conditions that the doctors never seemed able to diagnose or resolve.
In a series of letters to his friend Lem, Jack sought to turn his weeks at the Mayo Clinic into a roguish adventure. His closest friend was staying at the Kennedy house in Hyannis Port, partaking of all the summer revelry that to Jack was the sweetest part of the year. Lem was living his life. Only occasionally did Jack even allude to the terrible uncertainty of his plight. “The reason I’m here is that they may have to cut out my stomach!!!” he scribbled on the side of one letter. He began another letter by exclaiming: “God what a beating I’m taking. I’ve lost 8 pounds and still going down.” He did not go on bemoaning his condition however, but wrote how he had gone to the movies and found himself sitting next to a couple. “You’ve never smelt anything so vile as that girl,” he wrote. “She stank. I mentioned to Ed to move over. He moved over and then I moved. Well the girl looked at me and then whispered something to the fellow. He took his arm down and stood up. I, nothing daunted, stared back. The girl grabbed his arm and he sat down. It was a lucky thing for him because he was only about 6’3” and I could have heaved him right into the aisle on his ass.”
Jack was lying in a hospital bed at St. Mary’s Hospital in Rochester, where, as he wrote Lem, “I’ve got something wrong with my intestines—in other words I shit blood.” He thought he might have piles. He was obsessed with his adolescent plague of pimples. The doctors performed procedures that seemed like base assaults on his dignity. Jack turned the tables on his tormentors by employing the only weapon he had: a dark sense of humor,
Yesterday I went through the most harassing experience of my life. First they gave me 5 enemas until I was white as snow inside. Then they put me on a thing like a barber chair. Instead of sitting in the chair I kneeled on something that resembles the foot rest with my head where the seat is. They took my pants down!! Then they tipped the chair over. Then surrounded by nurses the doctor first stuck his finger up my ass. I just blushed because you know how