One Brief Shining Moment

Audrey Hepburn, Sabrina, 1954

"She was an enchantress, inspiring love and beauty. And fairies never quite disappear altogether."

One morning in February, Ethel walked into the drawing room of Hickory Hill to find a picture of her and Bobby from their wedding day placed on the coffee table instead of hanging in its place on the wall. Upon examination, she discovered a powdery residue on it. Clearly, someone had been using the glass to snort cocaine. In her mind, this was one of the most sacrilegious things she'd ever heard of..she was "absolutely inconsolable for hours." That night, David didn't show up for the dinner, usually not a big deal. But this night, the Shrivers were holding a meeting with the third generation, hoping to get them involved in some philanthropic activities during the coming year. It was to Ethel's considerable embarrassment that her 4th born was absent. Afterward, he finally made an appearance, looking tired and disheveled. Throughout the time Sarge spoke about the importance of public service, mother and son glared at one another.

Finally after Sargent finished his talk... Ethel pulled David into the kitchen by his arm. Concerned about a potential blow up between the two, a couple of his siblings followed them, as did two of his friends. "How dare you show up looking like this?" Ethel demanded to know of David. "What is wrong with you?" David didn't answer. He just stood in front of his mother looking defeated. "And was it you who used the wedding picture of me and your father to do drugs?" she demanded. "It was you wasn't it? Who else?" she asked. "Who else?" Still no answer. "Answer me," Ethel demanded, looking at her son with angry eyes. But now she was crying. "You answer me this very instant, David Kennedy!" David took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

Then, seemingly very ashamed of himself and with tears in his eyes, he very quietly said, "I love you mom. That's all I've got." Ethel seemed stunned. The two just stared at each other for a few moments. "Oh my God, David," Ethel said, sounding almost winded by the surprise comment. Then, with tears streaming down her face, she took her son into her arms and hugged him as tightly as she could.

THE IMPACT WAS GREATEST on Bobby's own children, whom his magnetism had made the center of the clan. By the time of David's birthday on June 15, marked by a spiritless party at Hickory Hill whose high point was Bobby Junior's decision to put a laxative in everybody's milk, the heroic denial Ethel had been practicing since the funeral had begun to crack. Tension was thick in the house. The Little Kids and the Girls were immune from Ethel's dark moods. But the Big Boys were not; on the threshold of manhood themselves, they seemed to pose painful questions about the fate of Kennedy males. Their mother punished them constantly and capriciously, almost as if she blamed them for reminding her of her dead husband.

She told Joe he must be the man of the house now and allowed him to sit in his dead father's chair at the dinner table. But when he hit his younger sister Kerry for making noise, she gave him the infantile punishment of having to walk up and down the stairs a hundred times. (Later, Joe went into the yard and, in a moment of tenderness, took the hands of his younger brothers and sisters and began to sing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," their father's favorite song.) Meanwhile, Ethel kept saying to Bobby Junior and David, "Get out of here!" as if the house itself, with all the pictures of family triumphs, were a sanctuary they defiled by their presence. A few days after David's birthday, Ethel and the kids flew with Teddy to Connecticut and chartered a boat from Mystic to Hyannis Port. Ethel careened between gloom and febrile gaiety all during the trip. Once she took Bobby Junior and David below and hit them repeatedly with a hair-brush, the first such punishment they could remember, and one that made them cry in spite of their teenager resolutions to be stronger than their mother. "I can't stand it any more," she said when they reached home port. "You guys have got to get away from here." Thus began a diaspora that would continue for years to come, a process of leaving and returning that symbolized the next generation's ambiguous tie to the Kennedy Legacy.

When David returned home, things were in a state of ongoing disorder. It had been difficult for Ethel to keep domestic help in the best of times; during the summer there had been several resignations and his ten-year-old brother Michael, most resilient of the children, had taken to answering the phone with the words: "Confusion here." Although the Hyannis Compound was insulated by several acres, Ethel had played music so loudly that the neighbors had been forced to call the police. Seven months pregnant, she bounded around the tennis court every day, even though she was worried about the baby, which she had come to see as an obscure symbol of Kennedy will. In a doubles match pitting her and Jim Whittaker against Andy Williams and Art Buchwald, she had become so furious with frustration that she knelt down to bang her head on the court surface. As summer ended with a stream of friends visiting the family-Dave Hackett, Rosey Grier, Rafer Johnson, and John Glenn were the regulars—David kept waiting for someone to talk to him about his father's death. During a rare lull in his mother's almost nonstop activity, he cornered her in the kitchen and asked her about it. "It's not a subject I want to discuss," she snapped, elbowing her way by him.