Miranda was shaking her head in disbelief.
“According to this article the brothers and sisters privately believed that Rosie was epileptic or mentally ill. This is all too awful,” she repeated, unable to find another word to describe what she had read and was now re-reading for her sister-in-law’s benefit.
“Rosie was very slow at school, desperate to please, but otherwise a happy girl. She did not read much, ‘Winnie-the-Pooh’ was about her limit but few people looking at her guessed she was a child in a woman’s body. At twenty she was a beauty with a winning smile. Her parents told journalists that she was ‘studying to be a kindergarten teacher’ and that she had an interest in ‘social welfare work’, and embellished this by suggesting Rosie had a ‘longing to go on the stage’.”
Darlene put down the paper in disgust.
“The reporter says that during adolescence Rosie started having temper tantrums and sneaking out from her convent school in Washington, where she had been sent after she left the school in Rhode Island. Joseph Kennedy, her father was worried that Rosie would do something which would reflect badly on him and damage his political career. Around that time he was hoping to be the next President. In November 1941 when Rosie was twenty-three the old monster had her lobotomized!”
Darlene sat up, not entirely sure she had heard what she had just heard.
“Did what?” She mouthed in confusion.
“President Kennedy’s late father believed that a pre-frontal lobotomy,” Miranda paraphrased, planting the tip of her index finger on her brow, “carried out by two charlatans masquerading as doctors, would cure Rosie’s erratic behavior and make sure that she was never an embarrassment to the family. They strapped her down on a table. They must have given her some kind of local anesthetic because she was conscious when they started. They made incisions in her head,” she put down the paper and raised her left hand to touch the other side of her brow, “here and here, they inserted a surgical instrument that the reporter describes as being ‘like a butter knife’, and only stopped ‘wiggling’ it around inside her brain when Rosie stopped making a noise.”
Darlene stared at the other woman.
“That’s the sort of thing Greg says the Nazis did to people in Germany,” she said, struggling to make sense of it.
“The Nazis didn’t try to keep it quiet,” Miranda retorted.
“What happened to Rosie? Afterwards, I mean?”
Miranda read to the end of the article.
“She was unable to walk, talk and she was incontinent. After the ‘operation’ they think that she had a mental age of a two year old.”
“That’s… ”
“Awful?”
“Yes, terrible.”
“Apparently, journalists asked President Kennedy about his sister when he was running for re-election to the Senate in 1958. The Kennedy family told a pack of lies to hush everything up. They put out a story that Rose Marie was too busy working with disabled children to make public appearances at election events. Then in 1961, after the President was elected, the family put out a statement that she was ‘mentally retarded’ making no mention of the fact that they had had her lobotomized!”
Miranda wanted to go on shore and walk up and down the old Bridgeway warning innocent voters that Jack Kennedy was the Devil’s spawn.
“It makes you wonder what else our President has lied to us about!”
Darlene was more concerned with the personal than the political aspects of the horror story.
“What happened to Rosie?”
“Rosie is still alive. She was cared for at the St Coletta School for Backward Youth in a place called Jefferson, that’s in Wisconsin. Until last fall that was; sometime around the time of the Battle of Washington she was moved to a Kennedy family compound on Rhode Island. The reporter says that until their father died last year none of Rosie’s surviving brothers or sisters — there are seven of them including the President — ever visited Rosie. Not once.”
“Can all that be true?”
Darlene asked in a whisper as if she was suddenly afraid the two women were being overheard by the sort of monsters who could put a woman, not much younger than them, through such a barbaric and inhuman ordeal as to leave her as good as dead on the operating table just to avoid the risk of embarrassing an over-powerful man.
“Do you think it is true? Can it be true? The President seems such a good man?”
Miranda was folding the paper on her lap.
“I don’t think the New York Times or the Chronicle would print a thing like this unless there was at least some truth in it,” she shrugged. “I mean, Rosie was, is the sister of the President of the United States.”
“And,” Darlene murmured. She hesitated, her words stuck on her lips. “It is election year… ”
Chapter 13
Caroline Konstantis waited for her Air Force driver to jump out from behind the wheel and smartly open her passenger door before she moved a muscle. Her uniform had a stiff, new, rarely worn feel and her figure had filled a fraction since she had had it — and her other ‘sets’ — tailored and re-cut the year before the October War. She had pinned up her hair but even so she carried her cap in her left hand as she stepped into the burning desert heat of the summer afternoon. She used to try very hard not to be a civilian in uniform but not so much lately.
To reach the control tower and its surrounding complex of low, single storey blockhouses her car had had to cross the ‘race track’ twice. Today’s ‘race track’ seemed to weave a jagged figure of eight across the three mile long main runway and the maze of broad disused taxiways, its course marked with hundreds of oil drums and colorful pieces of redundant airfield ‘furniture’. The Air Force car, last year’s Lincoln, had halted for several minutes as a succession of low, lean racers flashed past.
The cars had roared into sight in formation with their motors revving murderously, their tires screeching, squealing and smoking as they slide across the tarmac where, until a year ago a line of silvery North American F-100 Super Sabre jet interceptors of the 4510th Combat Crew Training Wing had stood on the flight line. Caroline was surprised that there was such a large crowd, there were people everywhere, pickups, trucks and private cars parked apparently randomly around the old base buildings and in groups out on the field.
The big race, the second ‘Glendale Two Hundred’ had been held on Saturday and she had expected the circus would have moved on by now. She had arrived in nearby Phoenix late last night, catching the last possible Greyhound convoy out of Oakland over twenty-four hours before. The days when a Greyhound bus could traverse the South West unescorted were just a fading memory. Her convoy had had two California State National Guardsmen on board each bus when it departed the Bay Area. Local Guardsmen had relieved them at the Colorado River, the state line.