When We Were the Kennedys (19 page)

“Come,” Mum says, shutting the fridge door. As awake as she's going to get. “You can help me set the table.”

I look hard at her. “How long is bye and bye?”

She runs her hand over my hair. “You girls have to learn how to wait.”

 

It will take a long time for me to know that Father Bob was not like Dad. For him to be anything like Dad—loose with laughter, physically tough, a natural lightheart—had never been possible. Mum and her siblings came from a family unhappy in all the usual ways: too much whiskey, not enough cash. They'd emigrated from the same PEI county that Dad would forsake a generation later, but unlike Dad's migration, theirs seemed hard-won, half-evolved, unfinished. Who knew why some farmers took to papermaking and some didn't? Maybe it mattered how much you'd loved farming in the first place, or how heavily you grieved for your abandoned, unyielding land. Dad talked about PEI all the time, told all those affectionate tales, made his homeland seem like a celebration he'd carried with him rather than a heartache he'd left behind.

Cumpy told no tales from his former life, not even when his brother and sisters came to visit. He and my unremembered grandmother raised their kids in a Rumford block and in time bought a real house in Mexico, a gabled single-family with a yard, every immigrant's dream. But by then it was too late to renew their faith in happiness, for they'd lost something far more precious than their homeland.

Mum was nine years old on that magically bright Sunday in 1923, skipping along Waldo Street in the September sunshine with her sister Sadie and their angelic baby brother, John James, joined by other children from other blocks, some cousins, some not. Shrieking and laughing, they act like kids from any generation, from any culture or faith, playing hopscotch or kickball in their bubbling pastiche of Franco and Irish and Italian expressions, one kid picking up from another.
Tant pis!
hollers one child,
Capiche?
shouts another,
Quit yer crakin'!
teases another, and like crows on a roadside they pluck these baubles and carry them home to their disapproving parents.

The melting pot boils over at times, but not today. Today is all high, cool sunlight and freshening fall air, the kind of dry, blue-sky day when the mill's stench fades a bit and goodwill bursts from unexpected places. A few hours after Sunday Mass, where they've bent their heads in dutiful supplication, the children have abandoned themselves to the day. A teenager across the street, barely out of boyhood himself, comes out to the stoop, feeling generous, perhaps, after the Gospel reading from the morning Mass:
And He took a child, and set him in the midst of them: and when He had taken him in his arms, He said unto them, Whosoever shall receive one of such children in My name, receiveth Me.
The young fellow sits his lanky self down, straightens his Sunday cuffs, and opens a bag of sweets. He calls across to the cute little four-year-old, Mum's beloved brother, my baby uncle:
You want one, kid?

Of course he wants one! John James, destined to ascend straight to heaven by virtue of his tender age and Catholic baptism, darts into the path of a luckless neighbor's coughing Model T. His sister screams his name and the whole day dies.

Internal hemmorage from automobile accident,
reads the misspelled death certificate signed in a bold, shocked hand by the Rumford town clerk.
Duration: 3 hours. Contributing cause: Nervous shock.

Three hours it took for little John James to die, and so much longer than that—never, I suppose—for his family to express its pain. Their blue-eyed boy had turned four in July, same birthday as his big sister, who'd given him four playful swats on the bottom—
plus one to grow on!
But it was not to be.

So here is Mum, young Margaret, suffering her little-girl grief, an engulfing shock made worse by the silence that will attend it forever after. Never will she hear his sweet Irish name again. Is it any surprise that the next boy born to the family—a “change of life” baby in more ways than one—will become her pet? They call him Bobby, until the moment of his ordination, when everyone, including Mum, his fourteen-years-older sister, will switch to “Father Bob” in less time than it takes for him to transform wine into the blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

The death of John James made everyone more of what they already were: mother sterner and needier and more resentful of her living girls; father heavier-drinking and quicker-tempered; and daughter—Mum—more straight-backed and responsible, more weighted down than ever as the oldest child. The packet of fading photos gives it away if you know how to look: always a rundown porch landing and stair rails behind, always a child squinting into strong sunlight and a grim-faced adult skulking in shadow. What must it have been like to grow up in that silence?

People, like trees, want to grow toward the light, and for Mum, Dad was that light. This was true, too, for Father Bob, a lonely, bookish boy who found in Dad the father he'd always wanted. Maybe Mum did, too, in the older man she'd come to call “Dad,” a papermaker with merry blue eyes, the opposite of her brooding, dark-drinking father. A baby brother once himself, Dad took to little Bobby, possibly even wooed Mum by befriending the towheaded little fulla.

Later on they must have made a funny pair, Dad an aging papermaker with his yellow teeth and plaid shirts, Father Bob in the rinsed grace of his young priesthood, with his clean fingernails, his fluency in French and Latin, his taste for classical music, his degree from Holy Cross and Grande Séminaire. I haven't a single memory of them together; like my onetime heroine Nancy Drew, however, I can deduce Father Bob's devotion to Dad by recalling the depth of his heartache.

Perhaps Father Bob had always been a crier, but Dad's death had unlatched another gate; now my uncle puddled up over striped cats, straight-A report cards, salmon sunsets, Irish singers, God's everlasting love. Even so, I believed he was big and strong when in fact he was fragile, far more fragile than I knew in 1963, when he stumbled by default into the yawning void Dad left behind, a grief-broken priest presiding over the funeral, following the casket with the poise of a sailing ship, his billowing vestments filled with the breath of God.

I suppose he prayed for guidance. Prayed for strength. He typed out the Serenity Prayer from Alcoholics Anonymous and taped it into his breviary. Seven times a day he opened the supple leather cover and saw that prayer.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change .
.
 .
First he bent, and then he bent some more, and then he broke.

 

The Catholic tradition of my childhood—which I recall with affection, some awe, and a measure of yearning—did not allow for randomness. Every word and deed, every sorrow and triumph, every birth and death belonged to a Divine Plan. If at times you thought this Plan unreasonable, senseless, or just plain mean, you were asked to trust that even the most extreme sorrow had to be a blessing in disguise. Almost everything essential came to you in disguise. Everything that happened was part of something beyond your human ken, a necessary preparation—for what, remained to be seen. Best case: something better. Worst case: something worse.

Wherever you fit into this plan—giving Communion or receiving Communion; top of the class or mentally retarded; working or on strike; whole and happy or hacked to pieces by grief—you
fit.
That was the Plan's cruel beauty. You wept if you had to, hid your face and gnashed your teeth, but you knew that if you repaired to your bed of pain it was because God wanted you there—only you; only there—to complete the unknowable requirements of something great and vast and ultimately beautiful.

Believe it or not, this was a comfort.

 

Sometime—not long—after I ask for the “I Hear Music” song, Mum resumes singing at last. Humming, really, with the occasional full-blown song—“Flow Gently, Sweet Afton,” her favorite, about a woman in her stream-side grave. The resumption of singing in our house, even a song as troubling as this, feels like a turning tide.

But it's early November now, and still Father Bob hasn't surfaced.

“Where
is
he, Mum?” I'm not a baby fourth-grader anymore. I want answers and I want them now.

Washing dishes in the pocked double sink, Mum pretends not to hear. “‘My Mary's asleep by the murmuring stream,'” she sings. I know the difference between when she can't hear because of her bad ears and when she can't hear because she doesn't like the question.

“Ask Anne,” Cathy says.

“Where is he, Annie?”

“He'll be back.”

“WHERE IS HE?” That's Betty; now they have to tell.

“In the hospital,” Mum says finally.

We look at each other, flabbergasted. Why didn't they just say so? This news is no surprise; this news is nothing! Father Bob's been in the hospital plenty of times: lower back, gallbladder, upper back, kidney stones, you name it, scars all over.

“Can we go see him?”

Father Bob always goes to the hospital in Bangor. Aunt Rose could drive us; she's like her brother that way: single, drives all over, all the time.

“The hospital's in Baltimore,” Mum says. “That's in Maryland. Which is another state far away from here.”

But that's not the real reason. We just know it. We move in, crowding her body as she scrubs a pan. Her body is our comfort, so pillowy and warm.

“How far?”

“
Far.
Near Our Nation's Capital.” This is how she always refers to President Kennedy's city—reverently, in capital letters.

Cathy uses this information to surmise that Father Bob could be visiting President Kennedy, who's Catholic like us and has a retarded sister like us and is handsome in a Father Bob–ish way. Like most of Cathy's conclusions, this one sounds reasonable enough to me. I picture my uncle watering a tray of pansies affixed to the window of his hospital room, which overlooks the White House lawn where Caroline, just a little bit younger than me, rides her pony in ecstatic circles as her parents watch with their pearly smiles.

Betty's the one who thinks to ask: “WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM?”

“Gallbladder,” Cathy says. She always gives the answer.

“You only have one gallbladder,” I inform her. “They can't take it out twice.”

“His back, then.”

“THEY TOOK OUT HIS BACK?”

“He's just nervous,” Mum says. She dries the flour scoop, glances at Anne, opens the flour bin, drops it in, la-la-la.

We don't like the sound of this.
Nervous
is a PEI word whose meaning slips around. Aunt Rose gets “nervous” sometimes, when she comes over with her face crimped and red and her eyes popping. Cumpy, too, on occasion. Sometimes Father Bob wears his fedora because we tell him it looks so fancy, but other times he wears it to cover the inflamed scales along his widow's peak. That means nervous. Mum puts Vaseline on his head, which never helps.

But maybe the hospital will fix it. And maybe Father Bob will bless the president, and then the president will invite us to the White House and give us a ride on Caroline's pony. These fancies keep my mind alight for days, until Mum announces at supper one night that instead of Thanksgiving at home next week, we're going on a trip.

What? We've never gone on a trip.

We are now. To the hospital in Baltimore.

“Yaaaay!”

We'll pick up Father Bob in Aunt Rose's car, and then drive to Our Nation's Capital—

“Yaaaay!”

—to see the White House in person, and the Capitol, and the Lincoln Memorial, and the Washington Monument.

We can't believe it. We cannot believe it. We make Mum tell us again.

I make a dash to the Vaillancourts' to crow about our family trip. “We're leaving on Tuesday,” I tell Denise. “I get to miss school.”

Denise's eyes widen. I have something she wants. This switcheroo floods me with a guilty, luscious light.

“We might meet the president and Jackie and Caroline.” I don't care about John-John, who is a boy and not worth mentioning.

“You lucky,” Denise says. She's officially jealous, but she still loves me; the moment is exquisite, and the pony ride of my daydream suddenly seems possible.

“We're getting new dresses, too,” I add, which might not be true.

 

Before I get around to asking Mum about a new dress, a man named Lee Harvey Oswald sneaks into a book repository in Dallas, Texas, where he crouches at a sixth-floor window and points a gun and shoots the president dead. What happened to my family in April is now happening to the Kennedys; what happened to the Kennedys is now happening to the whole country; and the whole country cannot stop crying.

A
N HOUR BEFORE
Oswald pulls the trigger, I'm at choir practice, knuckling under the tutelage of Sister Louise, a lean, starchy woman who Means Business and Means It Now. For a goodly portion of our lunch hour every day, we stand in the choir loft, straight-shouldered and ladylike, singing into the rich echo chamber of the empty church, learning to sight-read and harmonize and
pro-JECT, pro-JECT, pro-JECT!
Sister Louise sounds out all the parts—not a good voice, though her pitch is flawless, her directing eminently followable. We keep our eyes on her long, lolloping fingers.

The hands stop, shutting us up on the instant.

“Who laughed?” Sister Louise swivels her flushing face from the altos to the soprano IIs to the high sopranos and back again, the scorching heat of her gaze liquefying the innocent and guilty alike.

“I said, who laughed?”

I exchange a sidelong glance with Denise, who stands beside me with the soprano IIs, and another with Cathy, over there with the altos. We know from experience that Sister Louise can hold out longer than Methuselah. She can keep us through the end of the school day if she takes a notion; through supper, through the night, through the feast day of St. Blaise, seventy-three days hence. Our skin will rot away, our hair fall out from starvation, we will petrify ourselves into a choir of singing skeletons, our uniforms gone to rags, and still she'll be there: arms crossed, waiting for the malefactor to confess.