He stood, silently, in the gathering of the October day, looking at the simple headstone with only one word, KENNEDY, on it.
His second son had lived barely three days, his tiny body overwhelmed by an infection that its undeveloped lungs could not surmount. He had paced restlessly in the hospital corridor near the spot where his son fought for life in an oxygen chamber. As he paced he noticed, in one of the small cubicles, a child who had been severely burned. He borrowed a slip of paper to write a note of encouragement to the child’s mother. As he wrote, he was not the head of state, just a heartsick father. A child’s illness makes all parents equals.
Two hours later his son died, and he went upstairs to the room in which he had been sleeping, and he cried, alone.
The family’s old friend Cardinal Cushing said the funeral mass. But when it was over, the father lingered, touching the tiny casket as if he could not bear to leave it alone. None of his friends had ever seen him so distraught. The cardinal had to tug at him to get him to leave. “Come on, Jack, let’s go. God is good.”
After that, he and his wife had clung together, even, sometimes, in public, something they had never been known to do.
But on this October day he stood alone by the grave of his son, murmuring, ‘He seems so alone here, ‘ thinking that his family had known too much of death. Of four children born to him and his wife, only two survived. His sister lay forever still under British soil, and whatever traces of his brother remained were someplace in earth or water. Nothing had been found after his plane exploded in the air. He thought of the poem his wife had memorized for him, early in their marriage, after he had told her it was his favorite:
I have a rendezvous with Death
At some disputed barricade…
When spring brings back blue days, and fair…
But that was in the days when he was still obsessed with death. Now he had too much to live for to be enchanted by dark romanticism. He had a daughter and a son, still alive, who needed him. There should be no more children, he thought. He could not bear to lose another, and his wife was not robust. Two were alive, and that was enough. His mother had borne nine children, and then announced to her husband that he would come no more to her bed. Their marriage settled into sexless companionship, because she would not violate the church’s ban on birth control. He thought such behavior odd and antiquated. He had even told a friend that he thought abortion was sometimes a rational solution to an unwanted pregnancy. The old pieties had no claim on him.
With children — unlike with adults — the detachment that so marked him vanished. He loved the way his daughter nestled into his arms, the sweet smell of her hair as he read to her from a storybook. He loved the way she giggled, on the boat, when he told her about the white whale who ate men’s socks. Many a dignitary and aide had lost his socks overboard to the whale. His son, who hated to be still, delighted him when he raced about his office, poking his head into the crannies of his desk. Children touched something in him that adults never could. So long the second son, he had become the father, tending to the crippled old man and seeing his own children starting to grow tall.
He had never really thought much about middle age; he had been young so long. Only lately was he discovering that he rather liked it, now that he was there. There was an age when tousled, feckless youth was no longer becoming, but rather sad and out of place. He was even starting to like his new, mature face.
He had been self-absorbed for a long time, creating himself. He’d had to be, it was how he survived. His children took him out of that. He would watch his children learning and testing the world around them, but he would not, as his father had done, try to control their destinies.
He had worn the colors, fulfilled the dream. He did not regret it — though he wondered, sometimes, how it would have gone with him if he had not.
His children would not have its burden. They were Americans, with nothing to prove, and their lives belonged only to them.