The summer visits to Hyannis Port on Cape Cod followed the same pattern. The Cape Cod compound had been a Kennedy family gathering place since Joe Kennedy purchased the property in 1926, and its landscape — the waterfront, the lawns, the family houses grouped together on the same property — was a setting in which Rosemary had spent time as a child and young woman, before England, before the surgery, before everything.
Whether those settings evoked anything like memory or recognition in her is impossible to know. Whether the faces of siblings and their children read to her as family rather than strangers is similarly unresolvable from the outside. What can be said is that family members who were present at these visits described Rosemary as someone who had preferences and responses — who appeared to enjoy swimming, who appeared to find large, noisy gatherings more difficult than smaller ones, who had good days and difficult days.
The physical contact of a family environment — being touched, being spoken to, being included in the space of people who had known her before the surgery and who chose to maintain a relationship with her afterward — may have mattered to Rosemary in ways that cannot be fully measured but should not be dismissed.
The Burden of the Secret and What It Did to the Family
The concealment of Rosemary’s situation from her siblings for twenty years had consequences not just for Rosemary but for the family dynamic in ways that are documented only partially and often retrospectively.