CHAPTER 19
Her prayers at last received an answer in the unlikely form of Carmel Offie, a friend of her father’s who worked in the State Department. She made a passing remark that DC “is great, but no London,” and he’d replied, “You know, you could parlay that job at the Times-Herald into a press visa to get to London, though your father would kill me for suggesting it.” The rest of the lunch had been consumed with plans for making it happen, starting with a well-placed phone call Offie promised to make to Ambassador Anthony Biddle, who was stationed in London working with Poland and other countries currently occupied by the Nazis.
To celebrate her bright, shiny secret, she’d gone out with Inga and John and some of the other reporters and had quite a gay evening, though she regretted it the next morning when her head was pounding and her stomach churning. “If you’re going to keep up, you’ll need to learn to pick yourself up the next day,” John told her at work before taking her to lunch at a tiny restaurant called Betty’s. “Best thing about this place is that you can get eggs any time of day. And eggs and bacon are exactly what you need.”
The coffee was good, too. “I hate to admit it,” said Kick, starting to feel human again halfway through her breakfast for lunch, “but you’re right.”
“Why is it so hard for you to give in?”
“Kennedy curse,” Kick said.
“You joke, but it appears to be true. It’s what got your father in that mess in England.”
“Let’s not talk about Daddy,” Kick said. Or England—I don’t want to jinx my chances of getting back.
“Can’t talk about Brother, or Father,” John said, stroking his chin as if in deep thought. “What can we talk about? The only Kennedy lady I’m interested in is you.”
Kick felt her face flush and drank some cool water to restore herself.
“How about Dr. Freeman over at Saint Elizabeths?” she asked as casually as she could. “I read your first article about him. Sounds interesting.”
Asking John about his writing was like flipping a switch in his brain—Kick was convinced it was part of his arrogant streak that he liked discussing subjects he knew more about than anyone else. But she also liked to see the way his work animated him, the way it ultimately took him outside himself and his own immediate concerns and desires. “It is interesting,” said John, leaning both arms on the table. He had such a tightly wound body, the heat from it just wafted off of him. She leaned back in her seat to stay cool.
“The hospital’s been in that huge Gothic building for almost a century, and few journalists have ever really looked into it. Did you know that Carl Jung worked there? And Ezra Pound was a patient? It’s the nerve center of psychiatric work in this country, if you’ll forgive the metaphor.” He went on to describe the hospital’s state-of-the-art medical equipment and the new “truth serums” they were beginning to test on patients.
“Is that what Dr. Freeman is studying?”
“No, no,” said John, lighting a cigarette. “Dr. Freeman is testing lobotomies.”
“What’re those?”
“Brutality, if you ask me. He’s scraping out people’s brains in the hopes of curing them of a whole host of mental disorders. Which it does, in a manner of speaking. It can make hyperactive patients calm. Too calm.”
Kick shivered. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you look into their eyes and it’s like looking through a window. A clear glass pane.”
“But you said it calms them down?” She wanted him to say something more . . . hopeful. Something that might validate any shred of what her father seemed to believe.
“Who’d want to be calm at the expense of everything else? Drinking too much and falling in love and having eggs and bacon on a Wednesday at lunchtime when you ought to be pounding away on your typewriter?” John grinned at Kick. It was his best smile, the kind and solicitous one that made her feel beautiful and necessary. She only hoped he meant that part about falling in love generally. Not specifically about her.
“So you disagree with these articles in the New York Times that seem to suggest Dr. Freeman’s a genius?”
John inhaled deeply on his cigarette and blew the smoke out so it just tickled Kick’s right ear. “Oh, he’s a genius all right. But so’s Adolf Hitler.”
She nodded, understanding exactly and shivering again at the foreboding goose bumps on her spine.
“And now for a happier subject,” he declared. “My sister Patsy is dying to meet you.”
“Me?” Kick’s head was still in the discussion about Dr. Freeman, and she felt conversational whiplash.
“She can’t imagine anyone as smart as I’ve said you are believing in all that Catholic nonsense.”
“Not this again!” Kick moaned.
“I’d leave you alone for a kiss,” he countered.
She laughed off his offer, and said, “I suppose I’ll have to find a way to cope, then.”
John looked put out, but Kick ignored it. Surely he knew that a girl like her would take more courting than a few lunches and an invitation to meet his sister? American boys had no clue. She thought of Peter Grace and his years-long patience, which had finally come to an end. Just a few months ago he’d married mousy Margaret Fennelly, of all people. Well, Kick had thought when she learned the news, if he’s going to be happy with Margaret, then his pursuit of me was completely misguided.
I know what love can be, and I’m not going to settle.
It was torture waiting for word from Offie and Biddle, but lunch with Nancy Astor’s niece Dinah Brand went a long way toward reassuring her that she was on the right path. Dinah blew into Washington on a cloud of Penhaligon’s perfume, armed with a packet of letters she handed Kick as soon as they sat down.
“These are all from your friends, begging you to come back and save Billy from that parvenue.”
Kick laughed at the flattery.
“I’m working on it,” Kick said, still not wanting to mention the press visa. “I have a plan, but I don’t want to say too much about it yet. It’s almost impossible for Americans to get over there.”
Dinah waved her long fingers, and said, “Pish. You’re a Kennedy.”
Kick looked at the letters and opened the one on top from Debo and Andrew that began, “Dearest Kick, Billy still loves you. You! Sally is only second-best, and he’ll be ruined if he marries her. Even the duchess doesn’t like her . . .”
Kick felt her heart swell, her stomach riot. So things had gotten that serious between Sally and Billy? Just a few months ago, it only sounded as though they’d been seen together in the groups that roved from club to club over London. Now, it appeared, much more was at stake. Kick swallowed and realized her throat was parched. Her precious press visa—maybe she was too late. “I haven’t heard from Billy himself in weeks and weeks,” she admitted to Dinah. “I worry that I might not . . . make a difference.”
Dinah looked at Kick as if she’d suddenly sprung a third eye. “Darling, none of us has ever seen Billy so smitten with anyone as he was with you. His heart is yours, forever. He’s just that sort of man. Of course he hasn’t written you lately because he doesn’t want to remind himself of you when he’s on this absurd collision course with Sally. He’s only with her because he’s lonely and doesn’t want to go back to the war a bachelor. God forbid a virgin. He’ll drop her like a hot potato if you arrive back on the scene.”
From your mouth to God’s ears, thought Kick, though Debo’s letter sat like a bad omen on the white tablecloth.
The next day, there was a letter from Billy waiting for her after work. The sight of his nearly illegible scrawl on the Compton Place stationery sent a convulsion of excitement through her. Maybe their friends had succeeded in talking him out of it already. Maybe he’d come to his senses all on his own, and in her reply she’d be able to write the wonderful news that she was just waiting on a visa for the next boat to him. Maybe God had sent Dinah to prepare her for this news.
Her eyes moved over his words so fast she hardly understood them, especially as the tears rushed in. “I finally had to give up hope of our ever marrying . . . 400 years of history . . . I respect your position on the religion question . . . I respect you too much to ask . . . I must return to the war . . . Sally’s been a great comfort to me . . . I’ve made up my mind . . . duty . . .”
Curses on the passenger boats! It had taken longer for Dinah and her packet of pleas to sail across the ocean than it had taken Billy’s letter in one of the new airmail carriers. When Dinah had boarded her ship in London, there had been hope. Now there was none. He was engaged to Sally, code breaker extraordinaire.
And curses on Billy! Hiding behind what he thought she wanted. Behind propriety and those four centuries of history.
She crumpled the letter and threw it into her closet before screaming into her pillow. Then she was seized by an overwhelming need to move. Run, swim, jump—do anything other than sit in her wretched little apartment. But where would she go? This wasn’t Cannes or Hyannis Port or Palm Beach, where there were wide-open spaces in which she could exhaust herself in water or on a court. So she screamed and screamed and screamed, until the cotton pillowcase was hot and wet, pulverized with her grief.
“Kick!” Jack shouted jubilantly.
“Rats,” she cursed on seeing her brother in the foyer of the Gothic Times-Herald building. “You saw me first.” But really she was thrilled that he wanted to play their old game during the busy lunch hour. They bumped riotously into many people, some of whom stopped to watch while they jigged in a tight circle, calling out their rhymes:
“Trick,” she said, with emphasis.
“Lick.”
“Prick.”
“Stick.”
“Chick.”
“Flick.”
“Brick.”
“Crick.”
“Thick.”
“Mick.”
“Hick.”
“Shtick.”
“Knick.”
“Yick.”
“Yick?”
“Another form of yuck,” he said as both of them cackled and the small crowd who’d been watching applauded and then went about their business.
“Sounds like a party foul to me,” observed John White, who thrust out his hand to shake Jack’s. Kick introduced them.
“This must be the famous John Fitzgerald Kennedy? Hero and bestselling writer?” came Inga’s sultry voice from behind Kick.
The moment Jack laid eyes on Inga, Kick knew where the two of them were headed. Her brother kept his cool in the face of the older European beauty, shaking her hand almost as if she were a man and saying, “I don’t know about the hero part,” but Kick could tell from the way his blue eyes lingered just a little too long on Inga’s fine, creamy features that he would be single-minded in his pursuit of her. Inga was harder to read. No blushing or stuttering gave her away. But when she breezily gave her regrets, saying she couldn’t join them for lunch because she had other mysterious plans, Kick was pretty sure her friend was already playing hard to get. And there seemed to be a subtle, but still extra, swish to her step as she clicked away in her Italian heels.
Kick and John and Jack made their way to Hot Shoppes, which was jam-packed with reporters and junior statesmen looking for a fast and decent lunch on the cheap. Kick always ordered the grilled cheese sandwich with tomato and a Coke. If she was especially hungry, she’d add fries to her order and say a little prayer of thanks that her mother wasn’t within one hundred miles to see how low living alone had brought her daughter, dietetically—though with all the walking she was doing hither and yon, she was maintaining her figure without much of a problem. Taxis were a luxury on her salary, on which she was proudly living. John always ordered the Reuben and coleslaw, frequently with a root beer float. That day, skinny Jack ordered something called the Lumberjack Special: chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes with gravy, and maple syrup carrots. Plus a chocolate shake.
“Will all that fit in there?” John asked dubiously, scrutinizing Jack’s frame, which was about half the size of his own.
“Just you wait,” said Kick. Like her mother, she’d learned to be glad when Jack could eat, when one or another of his ailments wasn’t stealing his appetite.
“Far cry from what our friends across the pond are eating these days,” said Jack, referring to the tinned meat and dry toast even their finer English friends were suffering. The friends she was avoiding writing to in the wake of Billy’s bad news. She wanted to kick her brother under the table for bringing them up but didn’t want to have to explain why.
“Well, enjoy it while it lasts,” said John.
“Killjoy,” grumbled Kick.
“Come on, sis, I thought you were Roosevelt’s number one fan these days?”
“Just like my bestselling brother?” Kick asked with a raised eyebrow, referring to what she and her brother both knew was his last-minute reversal of thesis for the bestselling book Inga had mentioned, Why England Slept, prompted almost unbelievably by their father, who wanted to ensure his son didn’t make the same political mistakes he had. Just make Roosevelt look good, he’d told Jack.
“Dad says to tell you he’s sending a few dead mice for you in case you get hungry, Hawk Lady,” Jack jibed.
“Caw, caw,” Kick crowed in a flat voice. Jack chuckled the way he always did when he knew he’d gotten her goat.
“You, a hawk?” John said to Kick. “I wouldn’t have guessed you’re for the war.”
“Shows how little you really understand me,” Kick said, suddenly annoyed.
“You’re right,” John said. “I especially can’t understand how a woman of such intelligence could waste her mind on a religion that oppresses women.”
Jack whistled and Kick groaned, “Here we go again.”
“Again?” Jack asked John.
“I’ve made it my mission to disabuse Kick of Catholicism. Surely you’re not in favor of the tenets of your faith that keep women barefoot and pregnant,” John ventured to Jack as their food arrived. “I saw the way you looked at Inga back there. If she were a good Catholic girl, she’d hardly be so desirable at twenty-eight.”
Kick couldn’t help but be glad that John’s castigating eye knew no boundaries.
But typically, Jack didn’t let anything ruffle him. He laughed, dug into his mashed potatoes, and washed it down with a long swig of shake before replying, “John, my friend, there is Saturday night, and there is Sunday morning. Never the twain shall meet.”
Kick smirked as John shook his head in disbelief. Though Kick didn’t love the truth behind her brother’s retort, she was mighty glad he’d put John White in his place. God had sent her broken heart one small consolation, it appeared. Washington was about to get a lot better with her favorite brother stationed in the Office of Naval Intelligence.