children,” Joe said. “I didn’t want them to go through what I had to go through when I was growing up.” His sons knew that among their schoolmates the term “Irish” was not a term of honor, but they surely would have been bewildered if they had been told they were leaving their friends and their neighborhood to save them from the horrors of prejudice.
The Kennedys were leaving a Boston in which the Protestant upper class dominated banking and the law, but the city itself, by the mid-1920s, was largely run by Irish-Americans like James Michael Curley, who was mayor during most of this period. Joe, moreover, was moving to a suburb of New York that was even more an enclave of the Protestant elite than Brookline.
On one occasion two decades later he did admit why he had left Boston, though he made it seem as if he had been a poor man driven out of the city because he could not get a job. “It is not a pleasant thing for a young man born and reared and educated in Boston to have to pull up his stakes and seek opportunity elsewhere,” he said. “I know, for I had to do it.”
Joe fancied not only that he had fought against outrageous prejudice and was driven in hunger out of Boston but that he had struggled upward fromthe pits of poverty. That too was a common American belief: if you were not born rich, then the next best thing was to have been born poor and to have pulled your way up with nary a helping hand. As the train pulled out of South Station, however, Joe was leaving behind not poverty but most of the inconvenient witnesses to his past.
Those most irritated at his attempt to wrap his past in the sackcloth of poverty were his maternal aunts and uncles. They were proud of their family’s achievements and thought that Joe was diminishing them and their lives. His Aunt Catherine had so much believed in young Joe that she had lent him much of her life savings, when he was trying to save Columbia Trust Company from a takeover bid, without so much as asking for a promissory note.
It was not a woman’s place to know much about banking and finance. When, several years later her check bounced at the Columbia Trust Company, she had gotten dressed and gone down to the bank to find out why it had made such an embarrassing mistake. Joe had never replenished her account, and indeed he would never do so. Nor did he return money to his other relatives. Catherine and her brother and the other Hickey relatives were nothing more than reminders of a past he wanted to forget. As he left Boston that day, he was leaving unpaid debts. He was a sagacious judge of character, as ready to take advantage of the nobility of a relative as the ignobility of a stranger. He knew that these debts would never be called, that his actions would never be known beyond his uncles and aunts, who would bear a silent shame.
Joe was used to traveling endlessly. Rose’s roots were far deeper, and she would never grow them as deeply again, away from her family, from her identity, from her own separate status as the mayor’s daughter. She now had seven children, including her third daughter, Eunice, born July 10, 1921, her fourth daughter, Patricia, born May 6, 1924, and her third son, Robert Francis, born November 20, 1925. She was pregnant now with her eighth child, and as the train rolled onward she was traveling each mile farther away from the security of Dr. Good, who had delivered her babies and in whose care she planned to return to give birth to her newest child. Rose, even on this day, kept studious notes of her children’s lives. She wrote that six-year-old Eunice was suffering from stomach problems. Another mother might have scribbled down that perhaps her sensitive daughter was upset by the move. That was a guilty suggestion that Rose would never consciously admit, or her daughter dare to speak.
Rose was proud that her children were so wonderfully resilient, and the seven young Kennedys soon settled into life in the gracious
The Kennedys were leaving a Boston in which the Protestant upper class dominated banking and the law, but the city itself, by the mid-1920s, was largely run by Irish-Americans like James Michael Curley, who was mayor during most of this period. Joe, moreover, was moving to a suburb of New York that was even more an enclave of the Protestant elite than Brookline.
On one occasion two decades later he did admit why he had left Boston, though he made it seem as if he had been a poor man driven out of the city because he could not get a job. “It is not a pleasant thing for a young man born and reared and educated in Boston to have to pull up his stakes and seek opportunity elsewhere,” he said. “I know, for I had to do it.”
Joe fancied not only that he had fought against outrageous prejudice and was driven in hunger out of Boston but that he had struggled upward fromthe pits of poverty. That too was a common American belief: if you were not born rich, then the next best thing was to have been born poor and to have pulled your way up with nary a helping hand. As the train pulled out of South Station, however, Joe was leaving behind not poverty but most of the inconvenient witnesses to his past.
Those most irritated at his attempt to wrap his past in the sackcloth of poverty were his maternal aunts and uncles. They were proud of their family’s achievements and thought that Joe was diminishing them and their lives. His Aunt Catherine had so much believed in young Joe that she had lent him much of her life savings, when he was trying to save Columbia Trust Company from a takeover bid, without so much as asking for a promissory note.
It was not a woman’s place to know much about banking and finance. When, several years later her check bounced at the Columbia Trust Company, she had gotten dressed and gone down to the bank to find out why it had made such an embarrassing mistake. Joe had never replenished her account, and indeed he would never do so. Nor did he return money to his other relatives. Catherine and her brother and the other Hickey relatives were nothing more than reminders of a past he wanted to forget. As he left Boston that day, he was leaving unpaid debts. He was a sagacious judge of character, as ready to take advantage of the nobility of a relative as the ignobility of a stranger. He knew that these debts would never be called, that his actions would never be known beyond his uncles and aunts, who would bear a silent shame.
Joe was used to traveling endlessly. Rose’s roots were far deeper, and she would never grow them as deeply again, away from her family, from her identity, from her own separate status as the mayor’s daughter. She now had seven children, including her third daughter, Eunice, born July 10, 1921, her fourth daughter, Patricia, born May 6, 1924, and her third son, Robert Francis, born November 20, 1925. She was pregnant now with her eighth child, and as the train rolled onward she was traveling each mile farther away from the security of Dr. Good, who had delivered her babies and in whose care she planned to return to give birth to her newest child. Rose, even on this day, kept studious notes of her children’s lives. She wrote that six-year-old Eunice was suffering from stomach problems. Another mother might have scribbled down that perhaps her sensitive daughter was upset by the move. That was a guilty suggestion that Rose would never consciously admit, or her daughter dare to speak.
Rose was proud that her children were so wonderfully resilient, and the seven young Kennedys soon settled into life in the gracious
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