Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

children and leaving Beals Street was a personally extreme act, one that risked social exposure if others outside the family guessed that Rose’s motives were more than to be near her mother as she approached her delivery. It seems likely that there was a precipitating event. Joe had always worked late, and now he traveled and spent more time out in the evenings with business associates.Rose would have known that he was enjoying some of his time away with young, liberated women; she might have taken in his “reputation for being a ladies’ man.” But now there was talk that Joe was having affairs, “and some of this gossip may have caught up with Rose.”Resettling into her old room in her parents’ home in Dorchester, Rose never spoke about what was going on, though her siblings and parents saw that she was unhappy and believed that Joe was at least part of the problem. Honey Fitz knew her future would be doomed if she left Joe permanently. Perhaps he stifled the urge to say he had warned Rose about him. She was married to Joe, married in the Catholic Church, and bound by vows that were ironclad in the minds of Catholics everywhere. Joe was not physically abusive, he was a good provider, and he was her husband. She was responsible for their children, whom Joe loved. And Honey Fitz’s home was nolonger her home. Rose paraphrased her father’s response to the separation: “The old days are gone. Your children need you and your husband needs you. You
can
make things work out. I know you can . . . There isn’t anything you can’t do once you set your mind to it. So go now, Rosie, go back where you belong.”
    The Catholic education Rose’s father had forced her to accept many years before would now become her solace. Reaching deep into that well of Catholic faith, and into her own resources of intellectual reasoning and determination, Rose left her parents’ house and slipped away to a Catholic retreat. It was only a few short weeks before the birth of a second daughter, Kathleen. Through intensive prayer and meditation, and inspirational lectures by priests who counseled spiritual rededication and rejuvenation to help one face life’s daily challenges, Rose found the strength to recommit herself to her marriage and to her role as a mother.
     
    R OSE NOW SAW clearly that the only way she could have access to the public sphere was in the role of the wife of a successful Joseph P. Kennedy. Joe’s financial success was a potential path to public office—always an undercurrent of his activity—and his wealth and public distinction would be her entrée back into the intellectual and social worlds that she missed and in which she thrived. Divorcing Joe and becoming an independent woman again was completely out of the question, but remaining at home, sequestered and miserable, was not an option either. She must get her husband to understand that she could be an asset to him, just as she had been to her father. Her role as wife was one defined by a rigid Catholic vision that regarded women as helpmeets to their husbands. She would take a back seat to Joe’s needs and desires, then, in order to gain entrance to his world.She would raise theirchildren to do the same thing: her daughters would learn to make sacrifices for their father, brothers, and husbands. Rose’s newly hardened worldview required her silence, particularly in public: “The most successful luncheons or dinners to me are when there are from six to eight people and the men talk across the table brilliantly and the women for the most part keep silent . . . If a woman at the table insists on injecting an extraneous remark or a stupid one, often the men will cease and not consider it worthwhile to prolong the discussion. I never talk very much as I think most people are interested in what Joe is doing and is thinking, not I.”
    Joe had long stopped discussing his business plans, ideas, and concerns with her. Later, Rose would reflect with some