by Zoë Pollock
In the 1980s, Peter Terzian worked as a tour guide at John F. Kennedy’s birthplace in Brookline, Mass:
Familiarity quickly made me immune to the pathos of the Kennedy story. But if I had been older and less callow, I might have paid closer attention to the note of grief in Rose’s tapes, the things she couldn’t say. I buried four children, my eldest daughter was lobotomized, my youngest son was disgraced. One day I led a tiny, elderly Irishwoman through the house. At the end of the tour we stood side by side and looked at the kitchen, while Mrs. Kennedy talked about watching from the window as her children played in the sunny backyard. The woman cried quietly into a handkerchief and shook her head, as though she were crying not just for one family’s miseries but for everything that had ever gone wrong in the world.
The Dish 