BOOK OF O’KELLS SHORT STORY: THE RAPE OF THE KENNEDYS

© Copyright 2016

All Rights Reserved

by Michael Conniff

FROM The Novel BOOK OF O’KELLS: NATURE OF THE BEAST

Gaps — one learns to be unconcerned about gaps.

With our gaggle of press agents and fixers, we O’Kells have always been capable of filling in said gaps regardless. Our relationship to history has always been both cursory and unblinking: we can curse the darkness and lighten the very nature of the narrative by simple acts of derision and deletion. With enough money, we simply do whatever we want to do and worry about the actual details later (if at all). We know history has a price — to pay for history is priceless, actually — but any narrative can be leased like a cheap whore, as you shall soon see when it comes to yours truly, now arisen from the dead. An O’Kell can simply disappear, as I did, only to reappear months later with no explanation required. We can write our own history or stop on a dime.

The Kennedys have no such luxury.

Of course O’Kells have always been the embarrassing embodiment of those Shanty Irish that we behind the Lace Curtain so abhor. Joe Kennedy was a bootlegger, from Boston, a Hollywood studio chieftan, FDR’s Ambassador to England, and an adulterer who diddled and dallied with starlets. As the bastard son of Thomas Edison, our father Jake O’Kell’s bastardly pedigree was inescapable, but he nonetheless chose to live a righteous life full of humility and meaning. Father made things, for God’s sake, and he created a world that would not look the same without his many interventions. After even a modest breakthrough, Jake O’Kell always fell to his knees in humility in front of the consecrated Host in blessed residence in all of his homes. God the Father was his unforgiving overseer, and so our Father never forgot the ultimate reason for his success: He, the Three-In-One, was The One who cracked the whip.

Joe Kennedy, in contrast, made only one thing — money — and he craved the attention that came from living so public a life. No wonder then that the patriarchs of the Kennedys and the O’Kells had such antipathy for each other: Father saw Joe Kennedy as an unrepentant mick long ago lost to Mammon; Joe saw Jake O’Kell as that most unforgiveable of creatures, a sanctimonious prig far holier than himself. It was no accident that we O’Kells settled in Southampton for the summers, while Joe Kennedy colonized Hyannisport at the far end of civilization. Given their mutual loathing, the chances of Jake O’Kell allowing one of the randy Kennedy boys within hailing distance of his daughters was unthinkable and even sacrilegious.

Even still, the forces of nature must be considered when it comes to the children in question. At that very moment my sister Eleanor was 16, virginal, and without any visible flaw. Her teeth were perfect rows untouched by sweets, and her skin gleamed like a candle on the altar lit from within. Eleanor’s luxurious legs were the icing on the cake: all my sisters carried the long, elegant “O’Kell legs” to their graves. On such a foundation, the mutual beauty of the O’Kell girls was self-reinforcing as they assumed the mantle of good Catholic girls in Protestant society. The money helped — money always did — but money paired with beauty would lead the Sisters O’Kell to the Vanderbilts, the Fords, and (of course) the Kennedys, despite their Shanty origins.

As I take up this pen again Jack Kennedy is as dead as Joseph Junior before him. Joe Senior — for reasons known only to his God — has been left on this earth without his two eldest boys, with a daughter killed in a plane crash, and with another daughter lobotomized down into nothingness. The Kennedy patriarch knows all and sees all but cannot speak a word of it to anyone. Forever mute, he suffers in silence, but if there is a merciful God than He was made manifest in the one story about his son the President that the great and powerful Joe Kennedy was never told.

Was it rape?

Perhaps not and on one will ever know. We have only my sister’s version of events — but we do know that Eleanor O’Kell was (and is) capable of far worse than she’s willing to tell the world.

Rape might be the least of it.

Imagine young Jack Kennedy, blazered in a button-down white shirt and school tie, presenting himself to Eleanor O’Kell, just 16, in the Tea Room of The Plaza, one day before he is to go off to war. Eleanor is in the company of her sisters Diana and Rebecca, beauties both, but Jack has eyes only for Eleanor, the eldest and by far the most worldly of the three beautiful young girls.

“I’ve heard about you girls all the way up in Boston,” Jack says with that accent.

Diana and Becca twitter and blush.

“I hope I never go Boston,” Eleanor says. “It might as well be on the moon.”

“I’m from there,” Jack says. “Now you have a reason.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Eleanor says.

“When I come back, I’m running as a war hero in Boston,” he says. “I’ll need a wife. A Catholic. A beautiful one. Like you.”

“You haven’t done anything yet,” Eleanor says. “You haven’t even enlisted. You probably won’t even come back. You look like the dying type.”

“I’m enlisting tomorrow,” Jack says, “and I’ll be a hero when I come home after we win the war. You’ll see.”

“When Johnny comes marching home?” Eleanor says. “They could put you on a throne but you’d still be nothing more than a Kennedy. From Boston.”

“Eleanor!” Diana says.

“I’ll run as a war hero and I’ll be elected to the House from Boston, then Senator, then God only knows.”

“Daddy’s step-ladder to heaven?” Eleanor says.

“You’ll see,” John F. Kennedy Jr. says. “Dad’s got a photographer taking pictures of me in uniform tomorrow. Taking the oath. You’ll see what happens when I come back.”

“Daddy’s little boy,” Eleanor says. “Going off to fight the war Daddy didn’t want.”

“Dear God, Eleanor,” Becca whispers. “You don’t have to be so rude.”

“He’s a Kennedy,” Eleanor says. “Everything about him is rude.”

“Why don’t you tell your little sisters to go home and play with their blocks,” Jack says. “Then you can find out all about me for yourself.”

Jack Kennedy threw down cab money to Diana and Becca and then a $20 bill to cover the tab and then some. Eleanor told her sisters to go and to tell their father she had gone to Mass. When the girls left, Jack Kennedy asked my oldest sister to come up to his room.

“We can order in,” he says. “Room service. A real party. The whole works.”

“I’ll give you something to remember me by,” Eleanor says.

I have just described my sister as virginal but that is a bald-faced lie. There was enough of her innocence left to glow in the face of the world, but we all knew even then that something cataclysmic had befallen Eleanor as a young girl, something so hateful she would live with it until she was laid to rest. The cause of her darkness was Atomic Tom, of course, our half-brother, a man so insatiable and twisted he tracked the scent of his own blood as prey. Tom beat a path to Eleanor’s door as soon as she came of age, coming just often enough for her to know he was never going to stop. I can only imagine my sister’s terror, her horror at what had befallen her, but our Atomic brother was not a man (or a boy) that she could say no to. I have no doubt, none whatsoever, that Tom threatened her with death, and that he abused Eleanor so often she had given herself up for dead. Somehow, still a teenager, Eleanor O’Kell had grown up into a world so rigged and unfair that her only recourse was to never say a word about her lost innocence to anyone, not even to God. Sure, she bore the patina of youth and those languid O’Kell legs, but if you looked deep into my sister’s eyes you knew her soul had long ago departed for a better world.

Even so, with history stacked against her, my sister had been stoking an anger against men that had nowhere to go until the moment when Jack Kennedy locked the door of the room at The Plaza behind him.

Even then Jack had a reputation with women. He had done it, as we boys said at the time: he had done it more than once. He actually seemed to do it whenever he wanted, with anyone he chose. Like any boy in his sexual prime, it is fair to assume the only thing Jack wanted before we went off to war in the Pacific was to do it one more time with this beautiful young woman who was at least his equal in every way.

When he turns to face Eleanor, the rich young Irish Catholic boy from Boston is at the height of his boyish charm and confidence and certain of the outcome. Eleanor has come up to his room with no cajoling, and that act of capitulation is more than enough to assure young Jack Kennedy of another easy conquest, the latest in a list that would grow longer before and after his marriage. He can see that Eleanor is a bad girl — meaning that she is willing to have sex with him even though it is (and was) a sin.

All systems are go.

I speculate, of course, but I have been that boy in that room at The Plaza with Mary Ellen McDonnell, a cousin just far enough removed for me to remove her clothes. I speculate but only just, because I know too much of what it was to be a rich boy in just such a state. Jack Kennedy, may he rest, had no reason to doubt his own success at Harvard, at war, and in the bedroom. History had been arrayed in his favor by his father, an unforgiving man who never hesitated to vote when fornication outside of wedlock was an option.

Jack never had a reason to doubt his own destiny now.

The attraction is there for both of them, of course, boy and girl. Jack is looking for one last fling before he floats off to war, but something else entirely is raging within Eleanor, a self-hatred born the very first time with Atomic Tom in the middle of the night. She had instantly learned that life was brutal and bestial in the best of circumstances. Our hateful half-brother knew the dangers of such a coupling: when he was done with her he would spill the contents of his wand all over her sheets and her skin, the stench of her comeuppance a permanent scent that bespoke only shame.

One can only imagine how much she hated Atomic Tom O’Kell; and, in turn and in time, how much Eleanor O’Kell would come to hate men.

The cocky future war hero from PT-109 knows none of this, of course. He takes off his blazer and picks up the phone to order cocktails so as to further lubricate his new partner, but before he can dial Eleanor comes up behind him, takes off his belt, and playfully ties his hands together behind his back.

Before she is called to the Convent, my sister Eleanor finds her first victim in the figure of the future President of the United States.

She is actually stronger than him to begin with, and thus the bound Jack Kennedy has no chance of changing the course of events. At first, like any young man at the prospect of sex, we can assume he is amused and then aroused by this turn of events. He has no doubt imagined bondage and dominance, and at first he is delighted to experience it first-hand.

Do the details matter? Perhaps.

She stuffs his own socks in his mouth, and then Eleanor does things to young Jack that he has never done before and will never do thereafter: she does these things to Jack in a brutal and bestial manner, as one would to a conscript or a slave. Jack Kennedy immediately realizes his own free will is missing in action. Eleanor is acting like man and thus turning him into a little boy with no control over his fate. He begs her to stop — but Eleanor is not done with him until he is forced to do what she requires over again and again.

Night is falling over The Plaza when she leaves him, still bound but now shivering, on the bed. She covers him with a blanket up to his shoulders and then pulls the covers up all the way over his head, as if telling a maid that the bed has yet to be made.

“Goodbye, Jack,” Eleanor said. “You’re Daddy’s little boy now.”

Jack Kennedy was locked in that room at The Plaza until the middle of the next morning, when a maid with an Irish brogue knocked gingerly on the door and heard a sound from inside that she would never forget — the sound of a boy weeping, the cry that can only come when all is lost.