Rosemary: The Hidden Kennedy Daughter Read Online Free Page A

neighborhood, East Boston differed from other immigrant enclaves in Boston, because it had developed well-established districts populated by middle- and upper-class families. Joe’s father, Patrick Kennedy, lost his own father as an infant and was sent to work at an early age. His wages from toiling on the nearby wharves helped support his widowed mother, Mary Augusta Hickey, and two older sisters, Loretta and Margaret. Smart and hardworking, Patrick Kennedy made successful investments in small taverns and liquor importation that helped him move his family from its immigrant tenement to the wealthier East Boston neighborhood of Jeffries Point.His son Joseph “Joe” Patrick Kennedy, born in 1888, would have all the educational and economic advantages he did not as a child. Ambitious, articulate, and athletic, Joe would enter Harvard in 1908, a year after Rose began at the Convent of the Sacred Heart.
    By that summer of 1908, with possible criminal charges pending against him, Fitzgerald decided to bring his wife and two eldest daughters—Rose, then eighteen years of age, and sixteen-year-old Agnes—to Europe for a lengthy tour, with the goal of leaving his daughters at the Blumenthal Academy of the Sacred Heart in Vaals, the Netherlands, for the year. Having lost his campaign for reelection to a second two-year term as mayor the year before—the campaign that cost Rose her college education—Honey Fitz and the whole family had receded from the public eye. Though he was out of office, a continuing investigation into corruption during his mayoral administration weighedheavily on him. Rose, highly sensitive to her father’s disgrace, knew that it was a privilege to travel to the Continent for an education, but she also knew the tour meant not seeing Joe for a very long time.
    At Blumenthal, Rose immersed herself in European cultures and languages. The school, she observed, was overtly focused on the “practical things of this world,” including “
Kinder, Kirche, und Kuche
”—children, church, and cooking—and the necessity to prepare oneself for those domestic and religious obligations. It was assumed, Rose recalled, that once she and other young women at the convent were married, they would have hired help to cook, clean, and take care of the children. Therefore, their skills lay in their ability to manage household staffs and their proficiency in home economics.
    Religion, however, remained the “foundation and the crowning point” at Blumenthal, just as it did at all other Sacred Heart schools.But Blumenthal was an especially strict and rigorous convent school, requiring fasting, silence, and meditation. It was here that Rose entered into sodality with other young women dedicated to living their lives like the mother of Jesus by becoming a Child of Mary. The Children of Mary was a specialized society advocating devotion to Mary, seeking commitment from young women to be “pure like Mary, humble like Mary, charitable like Mary, obedient like Mary, industrious like Mary,” and to “apply themselves, then, to the constant imitation of Mary’s virtues, and they will be her favored ones indeed.”These essential virtues were “Purity, Humility, Obedience and Charity.”Within two months of enrolling at Blumenthal, Rose had become an “aspirant,” committing her to a six-month devotional and meditative experience preparing her to become a full-fledged Child of Mary. By the following winter, however, Rose realized that her infatuation withnews from home and her love of travel had kept her from truly engaging in her course work and communing with other young women at the convent. “It came to me,” she recalled, “that I must try harder to dedicate myself to the standards of the convent life, and that I must take more seriously my commitment to becoming a Child of Mary.”Rising early every morning for meditation, Rose aspired to be “a model of perfection” so that she could attain “the highest honor a