Darlene entered the long low main deck saloon.
It was the first compartment Greg had made habitable before, with several friends and some of the older kids from his school, the ‘restoration crew’ had moved below decks. Large sections of the boat remained unexplored, uninhabitable and probably hazardous, including the old engine room. It was a warm day and she was feeling the heat.
Miranda had been reading yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle.
Going to Atlanta had reconnected her with something, although it was too early to specify exactly what. She felt different, less separate from things and curious again. It was as if she had gone away somewhere the day she heard Dwayne was dead and Atlanta had been not an act of remembrance and mourning — although it had been that too — but some kind of existential gateway back into the present.
The Chronicle carried a lot of West Coast stories but it was still a national paper, preoccupied with the same ‘big challenges’ that faced the rest of the US. It was a sign that despite what many people on the TV and the radio wanted Americans to think, a majority of people still believed in some meaningful way that there was still such a thing as America, and that patriotism really did signify strength through togetherness.
Lately, the news agenda was dominated by four stories: the jostling for the nominations of the respective parties for the Presidential nomination, Dr Martin Luther King’s March on Philadelphia and the ongoing violence across most of the South, inflation and the rocketing price of gas at the pumps, and the re-emergence of the Soviet Union as a military force in the Middle East.
This latter seemed an awfully long way away from California and most days the Chronicle and its main competitor the San Francisco Examiner treated this as a page six or seven story because apart from the Red Army gradually moving south towards the Persian Gulf nothing much was actually going on. Everybody tacitly assumed that sooner or later the US Navy or Curtis LeMay personally, or with several B-52 Bomb Wings would put the Russians in their place and the threat to the oil fields of Arabia — which most Americans honestly believed they owned because they also thought, mistakenly, in exactly the same way they assumed that the Rockefeller family in some way held Standard Oil and half the World’s known oil reserves in trust for the nation — would quietly ‘go away’.
It was a peculiarity of American politics that whereas the President and the other presidential hopefuls said a lot about ‘the Election’, each other, the state of the economy, and occasionally about the Civil Rights movement and the troubles of the Deep South, the Kennedy brothers, Lyndon Johnson, Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, John Cabot Lodge, Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon hardly ever talked about ‘the situation in the Persian Gulf’. A visitor from Mars would wonder if any of the Presidential pretenders could even find Basra or Abadan on the map.
At the bottom of page three there was a small by-line about widespread civil disorder having been reported in Milwaukee across the news wires. Miranda’s eye lingered on this simply because there was a footnote that eastern Wisconsin was ‘subject to the same Army Information Office restrictions as the Greater Chicago Area’.
There was little discussion in any of the papers Miranda had read in the last few weeks about the Warren Commission on the Causes and the Conduct of the Cuban Missiles War, other that is, than impatient rumblings about when it might finally set a date for its first hearings. Most bets were on mid-July. Likewise, there was much comment about the delay in bringing the first of the ring leaders of the failed coup d'état to trial for their part in the Battle of Washington last December; although one of their lawyers, a striking young woman who had been badly injured during the uprising seemed to be on every other newscast on the TV, and her remarks were voraciously reported on most radio bulletins most days.
Curiously, for some reason CBS kept coming back to the story about the six-month old sinking of the nuclear submarine the USS Scorpion, allegedly sunk by the British HMS Dreadnought, a thing the British Embassy had vehemently denied. It was a story which got a great deal more coverage than the ongoing war over the Falkland Islands. Miranda did not understand why the British, given all their other problems, simply did not let the Argentine have those stupid little islands in the South Atlantic.
There was an opinion piece on the inside cover of the Chronicle about the pros and cons of offering the Europeans (mainly the British) a new ‘Marshall Plan’, following on from a story broken by the New York Times over the weekend. The author of this article suggested sarcastically that it would be a ‘fair’ way to ‘curtail the British predilection for re-fighting lost colonial wars’. Wall Street was all in favor of doling out aid to the British on condition they spent every ‘US tax dollar in America’. Thus far the Administration had said very little about the subject, other than to admit that Secretary of State Fulbright had circulated a ‘briefing paper’ within the Administration. Apparently, no decisions had been taken on the ‘viability of any future assistance package’.
Today’s, or rather, yesterday’s scoop — syndicated under a two day old Los Angeles Times by-line — was the alleged exposé of a two decade-old Kennedy family scandal concerning Rose Marie, the oldest of the President’s four surviving sisters.
“Have you read this stuff about the President’s sister, Darlene?”
“No,” the other woman confessed. “People are always saying bad things about the President,” she added sadly.
Miranda turned the page around for Darlene to read.
THE SHAME OF THE PRESIDENT’S SISTER!
There was an accompanying head and shoulders photograph of a pretty young woman. Her hair was in the style of the 1930s. She smiled serenely into the lens of the camera; she seemed contented, on the cusp of womanhood.
Miranda did not know where to start; it was so awful…
She began to read at the beginning.
“This is the last known picture of Rose Marie Kennedy, the eldest daughter and third child of the late Joseph Patrick Kennedy and Rose Elizabeth Kennedy. Rose, President Kennedy’s eldest sister born on September 13, 1918. Within the family Rose Marie was commonly called Rosemary or just Rosie… ”
Miranda’s voice trailed away as she read ahead and tasted the poison to come. She steeled herself to continue. Her brow furrowed as she read aloud.
“During Rose Marie’s birth the midwife ordered Rose Kennedy to keep her legs together,” she paused, tempted to mutter several distinctly un-Christian words to express her incredulity, “forcing the baby’s head to stay in the birth canal until a doctor arrived at the Kennedy’s home in Brookline, Massachusetts.”
Darlene was frowning, also.
“That sort of thing would be very, very bad for the baby,” she groaned.
“Relatives of Rosie’s mother later blamed Rosie’s problems on her parents having been second cousins!” A disbelieving sigh was Miranda’s single eloquent comment on this observation. “Rosie was such a placid, pleasant child that nobody outside the family noticed that anything was amiss until she reached her teens. When she was fifteen her mother sent her to the Sacred Heart Convent in Providence, Rhode Island, where she was taught on her own by the nuns and by a special teacher brought in by the Kennedy family. At this time Rosie’s reading, writing and arithmetic skills were judged to be only up to 4th grade standard. It was around this time that Rosie was tested and found to have an IQ score of between 60 and 70 — a mental age of somewhere between eight and twelve years — and started exhibiting signs that suggested she was suffering anxiety and anger because she was a ‘disappointment’ to her parents and her family. At no time did Rose Kennedy admit that her daughter was anything but normal, even though several of Rosie’s siblings suspected something was wrong. The Kennedy children were brought up to be ambitious, to be top of their class in everything, to excel and to shine, and to reflect credit on the patriarch and the matriarch at the helm of the Kennedy ship. What else could explain the shameful fate which eventually befell poor, innocent Rosie?”