• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1161 0

spoke of such matters, and Joe most likely stayed clear of such behavior in word and deed. Joe’s own family displayed attitudes suggesting that they considered sex a matter largely peripheral to the serious business of life. As a young man, his father was too busy succeeding to squander his time in momentary flirtations. He had not married until he was nearly thirty, only then starting his family of four children. Joe’s own uncle, John Hickey, a doctor, and his aunt Catherine had never married, and indeed, they lived together—another fine example of how the bothersome business of sex could be exorcised.

Joe was six feet tall, far above the average height for his generation, and his height advertised his virtue and manhood. He was a hardy, athletic, outgoing youth. He had an interest in the opposite sex, but it appeared to be confined to the narrow parameters of civilized life. In the summer of 1907, Joe met a petite young woman in Orchard Beach, Maine, where his family spent part of each summer. He had met the vivacious sixteen-year-old a decade before on the same beach, but he did not remember her. Her name was Rose Fitzgerald, and she had all of the virtues that his mother had taught him to hold dear in a woman. She was a deeply religious Catholic. She was a cultivated woman who could play the piano. She was a far better student than Joe. And not least among her merits, she was the beloved favorite daughter of the mayor of Boston, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald.

Honey Fitz was everything Joe’s mother had taught her son to deplore: a professional Irish-American full of self-conscious blarney. This man sang “Sweet Adeline” at the hint of an invitation and cried Irish green tears on cue. He was the kind of Irish-American politician the Brahmins hated, a mountebank who, on a congressman’s salary, had built a mansion in Dorchester and jig-danced away from anyone who tried to investigate him. He was an embarrassment to those Irish-Americans who were attempting to brush the straw of Ireland off their clothes. He was nonetheless a man of such immense native sagacity that he had served three terms in Congress from Boston’s North End while living in Concord, a full sixteen miles from his district and the constituents whom he vowed he loved so much. Honey Fitz was deeply possessive about power, publicity, and his beloved daughter Rose. He would choose her suitors, and he was not about to see her wooed by Joseph P. Kennedy.

Joe began a romance with Rose that was both innocent and clandestine. The couple met in the Boston Public Library after Joe’s baseball games and wherever they could manage a few delicious moments together. For Joe, the risks were penny-ante, a momentary embarrassment. For Rose, however, this mild dalliance was an adventure of high order. The religious guides were full of terrifying warnings of the fate in store for the young woman who did not protect her virginity as life itself (“He is shut out from the Kingdom of God. His portion will be the worm that never dieth, the fire that is never quenched. O Christian maiden, tremble before this awful sin!”).

Rose had wanted to attend secular Wellesley College. Instead, at the insistence of Bishop William O’Connell, Rose’s father enrolled his daughter at the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Boston. Then a year later, in the spring of 1908, when his almost eighteen-year-old daughter expressed her intention of marrying Joe, he sent Rose and her younger sister, Agnes, off to Europe to the Convent of the Sacred Heart at Blumenthal, Holland. There she would be cloistered away from Joe and his pernicious influence.

The Joe from whom Rose was sailing away had become an ideal specimen of young manhood. At nineteen, he was half a foot taller than most of the men of his father’s generation, and his striking face was perfectly groomed, his reddish hair impeccably brushed, his eyes a brilliant blue. He had a proud military bearing. His manners were military too, given more to abruptness than graciousness, but among his peers at Boston Latin he was a popular student.

The fact that