The rain continued to pour down throughout February. Kick was depressed about hardly seeing the sun, and longed for ‘Paris in the Spring’.23
She had heard from her family about Jack’s serious illness, and she was delighted when he was well enough to write to her. ‘Thought you might have died off,’ she wrote, disguising her deep anxiety about him. ‘Glad to hear you are finally out of hospital and getting very tan under Florida’s sunny skies.’24 She gossiped about all the girls who had been asking after him, and teased him about them finding ‘Jack Kennedy the cutest thing’. She told him that she was planning a trip to Italy and that the following year she wanted to go to Germany to learn German.25
In February, shortly after her birthday, she attended a magnificent ball at the Paris opera house. She was dazzled by the gowns, the jewels and the women wearing plumes in their hair. She wore a white gown trimmed with velvet, and danced with a young officer who later called at the Convent to ask the Reverend Mother if he could take Kick to an Aviation Ball: ‘Of course she said no.’26
Kick subtly mentioned ‘the boy from Cambridge’. Derek Richardson had been writing to her, and in March she went sightseeing in Paris with him and his mother. They climbed the Eiffel Tower, had lunch at a little bistro and went to the races at St Cloud. She told Rose that Mrs Richardson came to the Convent each time to collect her.27 The weather was finally improving: ‘Mother, Paris is really heavenly in the Spring.’
Her French was also slowly improving. She was reading classic novels, and made her ‘confession’ entirely in French when she was at retreat. She joked: ‘Finished the jolly old Retreat yesterday so feel very holy at this point.’ She enjoyed her confessor, a Belgian Jesuit whom she thought ‘very inspiring’.28 She told Rose that she longed to go to Lourdes, the home of St Bernadette, the girl who had seen visions of the Virgin Mary, which was now a place of spiritual retreat and pilgrimage for the sick and dying. She had been warned that it would be very hot in July, and also distressing to see so many sick people, but she was keen to go: ‘the sight is really worth seeing’.29
She added that she had received her ‘aspirantship to the Children of Mary … Feel very well that I have finally succeeded in getting it.’30 She worried about the storms and the bad weather in the United States: ‘Hope the floods aren’t too bad around the various Kennedy mansions – Sounds terrible from this side of the Earth.’ She reminded her parents: ‘next time I write will be under Italy’s balmy skies’.
At the end of March, she joined a group of friends for a month-long trip – chaperoned by the requisite nun, of course. Joe’s secretary wrote to her before she left, sending her the Rome address of a friend of the family, Count Enrico Pietro Galeazzi, a wealthy architect who had close Vatican connections in his capacity as Rome director of the Knights of Columbus, an American Catholic fraternity: ‘Your father would like to have you see him when you arrive in Italy as he thinks he will be able to help you a great deal.’31 Kick knew that this was an order, not a request. The nuns also hoped to arrange an audience with the Pope.
They first went to Venice, which Kick adored. They stayed at the Hotel Gabrielli Sandwirth, and she wrote excitedly to her parents, ‘Venice is too wonderful to give you all a good idea of how we are doing here.’ She described how they had taken the train with its impressive view of the snow-capped Alps, before passing through Milan and Verona. Her first view of Venice was in pouring rain, but she was unperturbed and the girls and chaperone nun travelled to the hotel on the Grand Canal in two gondolas. She thought it hilarious to be chaperoned by a nun: ‘it is the funniest thing to be with a nun in a hotel’.
They visited many churches, and the Accademia which had ‘a great many lovely pictures in it’. They took the boat out to the islands of Murano (‘the most lovely glass and Mosaics I have ever seen’),32 Burano (‘lace works’) and Torcello (‘noted for old cathedral of ninth century’). She was having the time of her life: ‘we walked for a while after dinner and it was the most perfect night’.33
Kick laughed when a friend was ticked off at mass at San Marco. When her friend was taking communion the priest told her that ‘her lips were too red’. ‘So that’s that,’ she quipped. In the evening the girls took a moonlit gondola ride: ‘Never have I seen such a night – we have all decided to come back here on our honeymoon.’34 A gondolier sang Venetian melodies to the girls, and the nun joined in, to ‘help him along … she thought the gondola was tipping over every other minute’.
The trip brought out her romantic side: ‘We sleep and are awoken by the sound of singing gondoliers.’ She loved San Marco and the Doge’s Palace (‘Perfectly marvelous’), and a trip to the Lido was a great success despite a scrum to get on to the crowded ferry. She complained, however, about the lascivious Italian men. ‘It is not very funny here as all the men talk to the girls on the street,’ she wrote to her parents. ‘We had about 6 in a cavalcade following us all over Venice today.’35 She sent a postcard to Eunice, Jean and Pat (the other sister, four years Kick’s junior): ‘no cars at all here. The gondolas are marvelous. All the men walk along the street singing.’36
To the boys she wrote: ‘Suppose you are tearing Palm Beach apart.’ She joked: ‘When I made the very crude remark that Venice reminded me of Palm Beach I was all but thrown in the Grand Canal.’ She told her brothers that she had fallen in love with Italy.37
But it wasn’t all gondolas and art galleries and fine dining. Among the gallant Venetians chasing Kick and her friends along the streets of the city were ominous-looking young men wearing black shirts. Kick was ticked off by the nun for not finishing her pea soup: ‘the nun proceeded to tell me that since the country was at war I must eat everything’.38 Italy was at war with Ethiopia (known at the time as Abyssinia). Young Italian veterans, returning from the front, strutted down the streets proudly wearing, stitched on to their military caps, the names of the towns they had attacked. Kick was swept up in the fervour, and attended a Fascist demonstration in the Palais des Doges, in honour of a Dominican priest who had been killed in Ethiopia: ‘His brother spoke. – Never seen such a collection of uniforms – very thrilling.’39 She bought herself a Fascist hat, ‘which will certainly make a big hit’, reassuring her mother that there was ‘Really no sign of war here at all except of course the [League of Nations] sanctions have closed down a great deal of the glass and lace works’.
She may have felt little sense of the war in Venice, but when the party moved on to Florence on 2 April she got caught up in a Fascist parade: ‘Just saw a parade celebrating victory of Gondar which was taken tonight. Shall be very Fascist by the time I get home.’40
Florence was not what she had expected but she loved it, and described the lovely pensione overlooking the Arno, where Dante had supposedly once lived. They visited art galleries and museums and attended lectures on Italian art.