John F. Kennedy by Lucy Post Frisbee

Author:Lucy Post Frisbee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aladdin

CANTERBURY TALES

THE COMMON ROOM at Canterbury’s North House was full of boys doing exactly the same thing, writing a letter home. Jack Kennedy chewed his pencil, looked up at the ceiling.

“Psst,” he whispered to the boy sitting next to him. “How do you spell literary?”

“L-i-t—” the boy began, “—r-y, I think.”

“Are you sure that’s right?” Jack asked.

“If you’ve got to be sure, ask the dictionary, not me. Can’t you use another word?”

“Hardly,” Jack replied. “Not when I’m asking my dad to send me the Literary Digest.”

Although the school library stocked magazines and newspapers, Jack wanted to have his own look at current affairs. He missed the talks around the dinner table at home, the give-and-take discussions of the past, the present, and the future.

Laboriously, he kept at his letter. “We are reading Ivanhoe,” he wrote, “and although I may not be able to remember material things such as gloves, tickets, and so forth, I can remember Ivanhoe, and the last time we had an English exam, I got a ninety-eight.”

He drummed the table with his pencil, then started to write swiftly. “More good news. I can swim like a fish. Fifty yards in thirty seconds. The swimming coach thinks swimming is very important because it’s a sport that can save lives. I never thought of it that way but I guess he is right. Who knows? Someday my being able to swim may save my life. Or better yet, somebody else’s!”

The boy frowned. He was duty bound to write about his Latin marks. Perhaps if he tucked his grades in between the swimming item and the ninety-eight in English—

“Mr. Brodie,” he wrote, “says I can do better than this in Latin. As a matter of fact, Mr. Brodie thinks anybody can do better than this. But Mr. Brodie is a Rhodes Scholar and very bright. He actually likes Latin!”

Jack thought a moment, then continued, “He told all of us in his Latin class that most people consider Latin the beginning of a liberal education. Then he sort of smiled and said, ‘If you young sprouts don’t study Latin, you just won’t get into college!’ I guess he knew that would get through to us. It did to me.”

Young Kennedy sat back in his chair. That last line, he thought, was a stroke of genius. It might convince his father that Jack was studying. The boy shook his head and sighed. His father was not easily convinced, he knew, nor easily fooled.

Purposefully, he wrote, “I’m going to try and get my marks up in Latin. I really mean it this time.”

That would please his father. For his mother, he wrote, “If I knew more about Latin, I could understand the Latin part of the Mass. I’m getting very pious with chapel so often. I’m also cold at night. Please send up a puff.”

The second part of his letter was important to him. At Christmas, just before starting back to Canterbury for the second term, Jack had finally got up courage enough to ask his father for a larger allowance.

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