Читать книгу The Importance of Being Kennedy - Laurie Graham - Страница 11

It had been good for Jack to have Joseph Patrick going off to school every morning. It left him cock of the walk for a few hours, with his sisters looking up to him. Once Jack started school he was back in Joe's shadow. Mrs K said it didn't matter. She said having an older brother who was strong and fast and smart would make Jack push himself all the harder to match him, but that wasn't how it worked. He knew he couldn't beat Joseph Patrick, so he hardly tried. Young Joe would pick a fight and they'd be like a pair of terrier dogs for five minutes till he had Jack pinned to the floor. The times I had to separate them, before bones got broken. You could have made two Jacks out of Joe. And Jack would never cry, no matter how much he was hurting. He'd wait till Joe was out of earshot and then say something about him, to raise a laugh from Kick and Rosie. Wisecracks were Jack's only hope of getting even with Joseph Patrick.

There was no new baby in ’22. Betty who came in to do the laundry reckoned she always knew when romance was in the air because Mrs K would have a silk peignoir laid out on her daybed, and that hadn't been sighted since before she fell for Euny It seemed as if Herself had shut up shop, and who could blame her. As she said, she'd been blessed with two fine boys and two fine girls, and Rosie.

Rosie was always tagged on at the end.

We'd be getting out of the motor to go in to Mass and Herself would say, ‘Joe, you take Euny, hold her by the hand. Jack, you take Kick. And Rosie, you go with Nora.’

‘We're playing at Olympic Games,’ Kick would say. ‘And Rosie can watch.’

They sent her to the kindergarten at the Devotion School but she'd have been happier left at home for another year, playing with her dollies. She couldn't get the hang of writing her name, nor even of holding the pencil properly. Mrs K had her up to her room for an hour every day, writing out words for her to copy. She'd the patience of a saint for anything like that, but if you ask me it didn't help Rosie. You could have her write out ‘cat’ a hundred times and by next morning if you asked her what it said she'd guess ‘dog’ or ‘efilant’ as she called it. ‘Efilant’ drove Mrs K crazy. She thought it was just a sloppy, baby way of speaking, but I don't think Rosie ever noticed how the rest of the world said ‘elephant’.

Sure, we all have our funny little ways. Fidelma always misses seven when she's counting, and my sister Margaret still talks about ‘the electric gas lighting’.

We didn't get a new baby in ’23 either, though as soon as we were back from vacationing at Cape Cod Mrs K did make an appointment to see Dr Good and he told her there'd be a new arrival the following spring. We'd plenty of funerals in 1923 though. Mr K's mother's was the first. She'd just faded away with stomach pains, till there was nothing left of her. They said the procession brought the traffic to a halt in Winthrop, the biggest funeral there in living memory and not for anything the old lady had ever done. They turned out as a mark of respect for old Mr Kennedy and his loss. Ursie was very impressed. She cut the obituary out of the newspaper and sent a copy to Edmond and one to Deirdre, all the way to Africa. Nora's people, Irish but very high up, she wrote on it, in red ink.

Then Mrs K's sister Eunice passed over. It was the tuberculosis. She'd been up and down to a sanatorium for years so it came as no great surprise and Herself hardly missed a beat. She went to the funeral in the morning and to the dressmaker's in the afternoon, and I never saw her shed a tear. Me and Fidelma did. We didn't know the poor creature but twenty-three is no age whoever you are.

My brother-in-law Frankie's mother was the final one, on Christmas Eve of all days. Mrs Mulcahy had had palpitations for years but she picked her moment. Well, she was always the one for the big entrances and exits. The day Margaret and Frankie got married she was twenty minutes late to the church, like she was the blushing bride herself, then she drank so much honey wine at the wedding breakfast she had to be wheeled home on a cart borrowed from the fish market and put to bed. She swore it had happened in error. Every time I saw her she said, ‘You know, Nora, I'm a total abstainer so that wedding beverage must have been doctored.’

Mrs K gave me a half-day to go up to Our Lady of Mount Carmel for the Requiem Mass.

I said to Margaret, ‘You'll be in clover, having the place to yourselves all of a sudden.’

They'd made do with two rooms in Mrs Mulcahy's house ever since they got married.

She said, ‘We'll likely take in lodgers. The money'll come in handy.’

So they let two rooms to a nice-seeming Italian couple but they didn't last long. Margaret couldn't stand the racket they made, shouting and banging doors and clattering pans, and then by the spring Margaret was expecting and she couldn't stand the smell of all the onions they cooked, so the Italians had to go.

Ursie said, ‘Well, now you're in a fine state, Margaret. How are you going to manage the rent on Frankie's money? Can you depend on his lungs not letting him down?’

Margaret said, ‘I don't know. No more than you know if your Mr Jauncey is going to fall downstairs and break his neck and leave you out of a job. You could drive yourself into the loony bin thinking like that.’

Ursie had got a new laugh since she left Ballynagore. Very quiet and superior, like there was a joke only she got.

They say it's a hard thing to be the eldest child but it's never appeared to give Ursie any trouble. She bossed us when we were playing with our dollies and she bosses us still, putting us straight, or so she thinks. The only one of six to rise to a job with a desk. You'd think it was General Electric she was running. But what's more important, raising a new generation, rearing children like my Kennedys, who'll likely amount to something, or watering Mr Jauncey's African violet and jumping every time he buzzes his buzzer? I'd not trade with Ursie for a pot of gold.

She said, ‘You must keep in mind, Margaret, I'm with the firm of Holkum, Holkum and Jauncey, established 1884, so my position is entirely different to yours. I just ask myself why you had to rush into bringing another hungry mouth into the world.’

I said, ‘She's hardly rushed. Four years married before she started a baby. Look at my Mrs Kennedy. She's the exact same age as Margaret and she's got number six on the way.’

Ursie said, ‘Mrs Kennedy is the wife of a wealthy financier, not a fish porter.’

I said, ‘Well, this baby won't go short of fish suppers, and if things go bad won't you and me throw in a few dollars? A pair of old maids like us, what else do we have to spend it on? And I think it's grand we'll have a little baby in the family. I only wonder you waited as long as you did, Margaret.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘it wasn't that I didn't want a baby, only I could never have done a thing like that with Mother Mulcahy in the next room.’

Rudolph Valentino Mulcahy was born November 1. If he'd been mine I'd have given him a proper name like John or Michael, but Margaret was crazy for the moving films. She'd have been down to the Diamond nickelodeon every night if she'd had her way, her and all the other women from Maverick Street. I suppose that's what Mr K saw coming when he branched out from the medicinal liquors and started buying picture palaces. He seemed to have a nose for where the money would be going next. Gin, racetracks, talking pictures. Joe Kennedy had more schemes than Carter's had liver pills. And the new businesses meant we saw even less of him. He'd be gone for weeks on end, to New York City or Miami, Florida, and whenever he was away we were guaranteed to see more of Mayor Fitzgerald.

The Dawsons' nursemaid down the street used to say, ‘I see the old crook was visiting again. I suppose that means the young crook's out of town.’

I ignored her. Making money is no crime.

And when Mr K did come home he did it in style, collected at the railroad station in his Rolls-Royce motor, with Gabe Nolan in a peaked cap and jodhpurs with a stripe down the side. There was a lot of snickering among the neighbours about Mr Kennedy's car but it was nothing but jealousy. All those Fullers and Dawsons and Warrenders thought they were a cut above.

I used to say to Fidelma, ‘I've a mind to go out barefoot today. Wrap myself in an old shawl and give them snoots next door a good dose of the begorrahs, so.’

‘Two-toilet Irish,’ they called the Kennedys. Well, God may have been an episcopalian on Naples Road, but it was a Catholic who had the gold Rolls-Royce.