Life with Chief Justice Roberts

Jane Sullivan Roberts, on roots, faith, family and her husband.

There was also the famous relative – Eugene O’Neill, no less – to brag about. “We have a letter from O’Neill who described a relationship, I can’t remember exactly, but he knew exactly what it was. We were always proud of that,” she says.

“There’s a lot of pride in our Irish background. We did Irish dancing, we did Irish music, had parties in my home where my grandfather and I danced together. Everybody had to have a party piece. I typically danced. I had one song, the ‘Gypsy Rover’ and I’m still asked to sing that song,” she says, laughing. 

Her mother, Kathleen Theresa O’Carroll, was her role model. She is still hale and hearty at 80. “My mother was very smart. She graduated high school at 16 having skipped two classes, and she graduated with honors. She was the only student in the whole town accepted to university – University of Cork. And she didn’t go because it seemed so unattractive; she said you go to Cork and live with some old biddy, and she wanted no part of that. She broke my grandfather’s heart in that sense. He forced her to do a typing course, because he said ‘you’re equipped with nothing,’ and that, in fact, is how she made her living at her first employment in New York.”

Her mother came to New York and ended up marrying the next-door neighbor, John Sullivan, by all accounts a remarkable man.

Jane Sullivan Roberts takes her deep commitment to Catholicism from him. “It’s probably more from my father,” she says about her faith. “He was very devout, but not in a pious sort of way. He had done theological studies in Iona College, so it was a mature faith as well. I probably have a bit of an analytical nature, and that appeals to me as well. He was a very clear thinker, he could cut through a whole lot of nonsense, and see things clearly, whether it’s political or social distinction, or religion. So I probably get that from him.”

As for the recent scandals involving pedophilia and the church in Ireland, she is still grappling with what it all means. “I’m still trying to reconcile all of that. I haven’t read the reports. I don’t know what to make of it. The question is, was it just confined to the orphanages? And the unwed mothers? That’s a terrible thing.”

Her parents had no easy time raising their family in the hungry fifties. “My dad started out in advertising and then he had a job on Wall Street; this was 1954/’55 and there was a recession and Catholics were the first ones laid off on Wall Street. He had me at the time, and my other sister was coming along, so he got a job in construction where, oddly, there was work.

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