When We Were the Kennedys (2 page)

In this filled-to-brimming place on the morning of Dad's death, Mum's parakeet flutters down from her shoulder to perch on my oatmeal bowl, his scaly feet gripping the rim. He pecks at my breakfast, spattering gruel, gibbering words gleaned from my mother's patient repetitions. He can also sing and dance, but not now; Mum wants us at school on time and so far it doesn't look promising. Cathy appears, wearing half of her school uniform—the starched white blouse—and a slip. I'm half-dressed, too, in opposite: army-green skirt and pajama top. Mum presses our clothes in stages, so that is how we put them on. Outside, the morning radiates the particular cool of April. Betty comes last to eat, in full uniform, everything tucked and smoothed and buttoned up right, her ankle socks neatly creased. Mum always makes sure she's fully shipshape before moving on to us. We dawdle over orange juice as Cathy, against orders, puts the parakeet on a pencil to see if he'll do a spin; it's his best trick and kills the room every time. This is how mornings go, a tango of getting ready, each girl a separate challenge, Mum alternately shooshing us and making us
sit! sit! sit!
to eat.

I'm the slow eater. The “absent-minded” one. I watch out the window, but nothing looks different. Dad is already dead but I don't know this yet, can't imagine this. No shiver in the air catches my eye, no subtle darkening in the same old steam clouds cluttering the morning sky. I am nine years old; when I look out the window, all I see is Mexico—my Mexico, the only one that counts.

From here I see the Dohertys' back line hung with clothes. Next to them, the Gagnons'; we play with their girls and have a crush on Mrs. Gagnon, with her ripple of auburn hair. Cater-cornered from the Gagnons are the O'Neills, and then the Yarnishes, their driveway patrolled by a disgruntled crow that hollers, “Hiii Joe, hiii Joe!” all day long. The rest of the neighborhood fills out with Gallants and Fourniers and Burgesses and Nailises and Fergolas, a census that repeats to the town line of our stewpot town and crosses the river to Rumford, the mill's official home.

We get chocolate cake whenever we want—Mum's splendid recipe survives to this day. Lemon tea bread, cherry pie, yeast doughnuts, just ask! We have a talking bird and priest uncle. We never have to clean our plates or finish our milk. Dad comes home every day with candy in his pockets. Father Bob, Mum's baby brother, comes to town once a week and sometimes says the First Friday Mass, where all our friends simmer with envy that God's young, dashing stand-in belongs to us. Mum gives us
dollars
to bring to school to save the pagan babies. Last year Dad bought a 1962 sea-green Chrysler Newport, brand-new. We think we're rich.

We
are
rich.

 

Dad, like most people, must have applied a kind of rhythm to his workday. I followed that rhythm in my mind many times after that morning: his feet hitting the floor upon waking, the morning ablutions, the soft exchanges with my mother as she hands him his lunch pail and clears his breakfast plate, the door clicking shut behind him, the three downward flights. Possibly he stops to pet the Norkuses' cat, Tootsie (like all men in our family, Dad was a cat man), before stepping into the street.

Perhaps he is in pain; I hope not. Even so, his last mortal moments are swaddled by the familiar. He leaves us, turns right onto Gleason Street, passes the O'Neills', the Gagnons', the Velushes', turns right again at Miss Caliendo's onto Mexico Avenue to the Venskus block, where they rent out their row of six attached garages at the back of the wide, blacktopped driveway, each bay just wide enough to fit one car.

Perhaps he stops here for a moment, gazing down that long paved drive, for at times he still deeply misses the furrowed fields and quilted hills of Prince Edward Island, Canada, and the siblings who remain on the family farm. Is this crisp April morning one of those times? It's cold but the air contains the coming spring. So, yes, he stops—right here, at the head of the driveway, hanging on to the post—to take it in. He doesn't yet know he's running out of breath; he thinks it's memory doing this, the memory of the long dirt lane to the homestead he left at age twenty. The farmhouse with its blistered roof. The pumped water. The lilacs and hollyhocks. The neighborhood of colorful characters who live along the road.

It must be memory doing this, squeezing his chest, summoning an anointed place that could not give him what he found here: steady, decent, good-paying work. He found his wife here, had five children over twenty years. His youngest, Cathy, is eight; his oldest, a son who lives ten miles away, will turn twenty-seven in a week. Is he thinking of us now? He lets go of the post, steps onto the blacktop, walks—slow, so slow—to the garage door, intending with all his heart to put in another blessed day of a life he never dreamed possible.

In another eight years he can retire, this man who has never taken a vacation or owned a house. Does he think of this as he reaches for the handle? Can he picture long visits back to the Island, then endless, easeful days back here, tilling the borrowed plot he keeps in his father-in-law's yard just a few houses up the street from where he stands now—tight-chested, filling with memory—at six o'clock in the morning, April 25, 1963, in the first waking of an ordinary day?
Here we go,
people say at these humdrum moments of repetition, the day's momentum released by the turn of a key or the punch of a time card or, in Dad's case, the sliding open of a garage door. The door makes a loud, sacrilegious
clang
against the morning quiet.

Here
—.

A bursting in his chest.

He drops his lunch pail. Sees a flash of light. Thinks of us in our innocent beds.

And he's gone.

I hope he had a moment of purity, a clearing of all thought and memory, a beautiful surrender. Dad was a Catholic who believed in the saints. I hope he saw the face of God.

 

The teenage boy who found Dad grew up to be a stage singer of no small reputation. But on this morning he's just a neighborhood kid, an older boy whose mother teaches piano. He's home from college and on his way to Fisher's Store, where he works sometimes as a clerk. Passing the Venskus block, humming an aria he's been rehearsing with his teachers, he makes a disbelieving double take.

Is that—?

The sight of my father lying in front of the garage door, cap knocked off his head, lunch pail spilled at his feet, must surely endure in his memory. He thuds down the blacktop, hard and quick on his feet, but Dad has flown, he is no longer a person, and the boy can see this. He runs to the back doors of the Venskus block, pounds on a window, a door, until people come running, but the commotion stays tucked inside them, nobody speaks above a whisper. A man they know is lying here dead, his family just over there; if you crane your neck and look up, over the roof of these garages, you can see the skeletal back stairs of the Norkus block, where inside, on the third floor, this man's widow, who does not yet know she's a widow, is pouring oatmeal into a pot of water, humming something pleasant and known.

Somebody calls the constable. The boy with the marvelous voice says a prayer.

I have met this now-grown-up boy a handful of times over the years. I have watched him perform. He sings in a rich, operatic tenor, heart-crushingly beautiful, in which, I believe, Dad's final moments still live.

 

We were an ordinary family; a mill family, not the stuff of opera. And yet, beginning with the singing boy who found Dad, my memory of that day reverberates down the decades as something close to music. Emotion, sensation, intuition. I see the day—or chips and bits, as if looking through a kaleidoscope—but I also hear it, a faraway composition in the melodious language of grief, a harmonized affair punctuated now and again by an odd, crystalline note fluting up on its own. A knock on a door. A throaty cry.

Not long after the boy pounds on the Venskuses' windows, Mr. Cray, our town constable, comes plodding up the driveway of the Norkus block like a horse in mud. Mr. Cray, florid and hefty like Dad, moving with Dad's heavy step, the first dissonant note of the day. I squint down three stories as I dawdle over my oatmeal. “Mum, Mr. Cray is here.”

My mother bursts into song. Or so it seems, on this morning in which nothing is as it seems.

Ohhh,
my mother sings.
Ohhh.

For a moment—before the first stir of alarm, that tight knot of suspicion struggling up to my throat—I assume that Mum's keening will be shortly explained, will become another glinting droplet in the blizzard of information that composes any childhood. Her hands fly to her forehead, she whirls around to face the door, egress blocked by a laundry basket and ironing board that she bulls her way around.

We're confused now, and getting scared. What is Mum doing? As we listen to Mr. Cray's footfalls on the stairs—a sound exactly like Dad coming home from work—the morning acquires a pitiless momentum. Mr. Cray passes the Norkuses' on the first floor, keeps going; passes the Hickeys' on the second floor, keeps going; and finally stops outside our door, which my mother flings open, crying out, “He's dead, isn't he!”

Who? Who does she mean? Big Mr. Cray, as formless and crumpled-looking as a pile of warm sheets, appears in our shoe-filled front hall. A strange commotion arises there. I begin walking backwards, something we do sometimes for fun. Backwards, retreating from the noise in my mother's throat, backwards into our bedroom, backwards, trying to reverse time. Betty waits there, sitting on her bunk, alarmed but uncomprehending, her eyes pale as dimes. Cathy—the bravest, the one who takes nothing at face value—stands her ground in the kitchen, where the morning will take on the shellac of permanence and become the museum piece we will all come back to again and again, seeing something new each time in this preserved, precious thing.

At last, Cathy barrels into our room, crying, “Dad died!” She's eight years old, the announcer, the town crier, the loud one. And she's blubbering loudly now, drowning out the disquieting sound just outside our door. Her army-green sash divides the white of her blouse but her skirt still hasn't made it from the ironing board. She's got a hairbrush stuck in her hair. “Daddy's dead!” she announces again, making it true, understanding it all of a piece, accepting a sorrow she will never quite get over. I cry, too—instantly, violently—but my reaction feels less like grief (though how can I tell, having known none until now?) and more like the moment after a physical blow, that helpless empty space between the blow and the pain. Betty looks at us for a long moment, receiving the news more slowly, her eyes refusing to register the thing we say to her again and again, whispering first, then louder. Then louder. Until she cries.

Now we all know.

 

My mother will explain to us later that she dreamed it—three nights running, she dreamed that our fifty-seven-year-old father dropped dead on his way to work. She will wonder aloud whether she offered Mr. Cray any relief when she met him at the door already speaking the words he dreaded to utter. All that was left for him was to say yes.

 

Anne gets the news at the high school, where she's fully entered a cool spring morning in that alternative, all-consuming world. Hello to her carrel-mates in the English/History office. Coffee in the black-and-orange Mexico Pintos mug. A commotion of students in the lobby down the hall, a faraway sound like muffled applause. A copy of the
Lewiston Daily Sun
lies on a table littered with stained spoons and spent sugar packets. She glances at the headlines. Yesterday an integrationist was killed in Alabama, and now President Kennedy has sent his brother Bobby to talk to the governor. Across the globe, a country called Laos simmers into civil war; this, too, concerns the president. All this seems so far away, but she often twines current events into her examination of literature, just as Father Bob, known for his stirring, everyman preaching, twines Walter Cronkite into his Sunday sermons. She shakes a stubborn fountain pen, going over notes for her first-period English class, adjusts her hem before stepping into the waxy corridor.

She must be so happy.

Her teaching career will prove long and fruitful, but today, in the dwindling of year one, she is probably too young, too in love with literature, to see the folly of teaching Spenser's
The Faerie Queene
to a galootish group of “shop boys.” They must love looking at her, this cute ninety-pounder in a lavender skirt and vest, the white ruffles of her blouse leaving ripples of motion like angel feathers as she smarts down the hall in her French heels. Her hair is pulled into a chignon; she wears gold clip-on earrings and a glimmersome bracelet, onyx disks trimmed in gold, a present from Father Bob, who loves buying jewelry for his girls.

My sister loves clothes—“maybe too much,” she once confessed to Father Bob, who reminded her that as a young man St. Francis of Assisi was himself quite the snappy dresser. And anyway, fashion provides the underpinnings of her teaching philosophy, the bones in the corset: Students are worth dressing up for. When you enter a classroom, any day, every day, you should look as if you plan to accept an award.

At first bell, the boys storm the room in a great collapse of size-twelve shoes and day-old stubble, smelling of machine oil and Brylcreem. They look older than their teacher (one of them probably is), but my sister—though pretty and fragile-looking and dressed for spring and still living at home and twenty-two years old and not yet possessed of a driver's license—carries an air of grit that she will shortly put to use in a way she cannot, in this hopeful, entering moment, foresee.

“We didn't get it,” the boys tell her about their homework, sixteen lines of Spenser.

“Did you read it?” Her lipstick today is a shade called Peachstone.

“Of course we read it!”

“Did you think about it?”