When We Were the Kennedys (23 page)

The taxi driver is a black man who reminds me of that long-ago trip to Our Nation's Capital, our somber ride through the draped streets. Might I work “Ya can't miss it!” into our conversation, make him chuckle the way the puffy-coat man made my mother chuckle? As I open the door, he looks up crossly, says something I can't catch.

“Excuse me?” I ask, holding the door open. My heart is killing me.

“In the back.”

“In the—?” I keep my hand on the front-door handle, glancing fearfully into the back seat.

“In the
back,
” he repeats. He glares into my ignorant freckled face. “Sit in the back.”

My eyes heat up; I scramble into the back seat, smoothing out my shorts, holding my new purse from Doris's Dress Shop, trying not to cry. At home, if you had to take a taxi, you sat in the front, with the driver—common courtesy. Then the driver asked you how was school.

It takes a long time to get to campus and at the end the man charges me twelve dollars—which I pay, plus one dollar extra (also on Anne's instructions). Weeks later, comparing notes with my streetwise roommate, I'll discover his trick, Georgetown via the wrong bridge, many extra miles, my punishment for trying to sit up front. For being polite. For trying not to appear uppity.

He drops me at a dorm swarming with girls arriving from New York and Chicago and Boston and Philadelphia, their parents lugging televisions and stereos and trunks packed with new bedspreads and beaded curtains and posters of Cat Stevens. In minutes I come to understand how unhip I look, dragging my hometown behind me like a shirttail I can't keep tucked in. When two boys—you'd have to call them men; older, bearded premed students—dart from the lobby to help me with my things, I'm struck dumb with fear. If only Denise were here, but she's in Worcester, Massachusetts, moving into a dorm at Assumption College, a place where kids like us belong.

That first day on my own will last nearly all night, all the moving in and signing up and meeting girls with ankle bracelets and boys with shoulder-length curls. Ann from Chicago and Mindy from Pittsburgh and Jamie from Baltimore; Rob from Philly and Dan from Louisville and Andy from Altoona. My roommate is Christine from Trenton, being moved in by her brother, Saul, whose name I ask for again, thinking he's said “Salt.” My stupendous ignorance being revealed by the minute, I encounter food I've never eaten (I take the Cobb salad in the cafeteria, believing the hairnetted lady has mispronounced
crab
), places I've never heard of (Grosse Point; the Upper East Side; the Mainline), and cursing I've never heard in such electrifying ubiquity (fuck this fuck that fuck everything). I walk the campus with a sweaty map, classroom buildings spilling outside the stone walls into the streets, where I glance up alleyways for possible rapists. Then a party in the quad, where Mike from Levittown wheedles me into a date and I say yes even though I mean no, and I come back to my room—first key I've ever owned—to find it filled with kids and beer, so I sit there, cross my naked legs (pantyhose are laughable, I've learned since morning), and join a mortifying, elliptical conversation in which it must be explained to me, in patronizing enunciations, that Greenberg is a Jewish name, whereupon I must admit that I have never met a Jew. A Bernstein from Brooklyn turns to me in abject, half-admiring wonder and asks: “Where the fuck are you
from
?”

He laughs. He calls me the girl from Spain, Maine. He forgives me. They all forgive me. And by Halloween Eve, richly befriended, I return to my dorm from a class called The Problem of God (that's the Jesuits for you), alight with teachers who thrill me and ideas that shock me and plans that include Paris—the city in Europe, not the town back home in Maine. I shuffle my happy burden of books to one arm, unlock the door with my first key, and rush inside to grab my ringing phone.

It's Anne, who says, “Brace yourself.”

By then, Father Bob will have become the man who can meet me at the Portland jetport and hold back his tears to make room for mine. The man into whose arms I will run, run, run like a girl, though I fancy myself a woman after two months away. The man who, as I stagger to the car, will hold me up as he must, his drinking done with, his nervous period behind him. The man who, on the drive back to Mexico, will calmly be able to repeat the unrepeatable: Mum has cancer; they operated two days ago; last night she had a rare, unforetold, massive, postsurgical stroke.

I ask and listen, ask and listen, and his voice does not falter. Mum's much-loved face is now a lopsided puzzle, her entire left side immobilized, her speech a confusing garble. One hand on the wheel, the other holding mine, my uncle will be the man who can lay out these unfaceable facts and face them. For the whole of Mum's ordeal—the cancer will return in short order and take her for good—he will be that man.

 

That's the man he will become, but today, two days after Thanksgiving of 1963, as Aunt Rose drops us off and we trundle over the slushy driveway and tromp back upstairs, I have no inkling of this, or any, future. I know only that we've left Father Bob in the sock-monkey hospital, that the whole country is in shock after what happened to the president, and that a tiny, colorful fragment of Mum's spirit has magically reappeared. I check her purse for my souvenirs—a cardboard coaster from a Howard Johnson's and a plastic replica of the Washington Monument—and there they are, safely transported, just as she promised.

On Sunday night—Mum unpacking our things after the trip to Our Nation's Capital, the washing machine thrashing and bumping in the bathroom—the past few days already seem like a dream. I imagine Father Bob back in his room at the sock-monkey hospital, gazing out at the parking lot, maybe looking for us even though he saw us leave with his own eyes, even though he knows that by now we've made it all the way back home.

As Anne helps us lay out our school uniforms for the following morning, the phone rings. It's Sister Mary of Jesus, suggesting to Mum that Betty might be “happier at home.”

Would she ever.

Mum goes quiet, but her bearing is newly chin-up, Jackie-like. She nods into the phone, listening. “Yes, Sister,” she says. “I've thought of that.” She squints at the ceiling, pretending to be weighing the pros and cons, but she's been mulling the same handful of facts for years. She knows.

“Thank you, Sister,” she says. “I'll think about it, Sister.”

Come morning, Cathy and I leave our Pupil behind forever. Oh, that lucky duck. We feel jealous but strangely heartsick, we three now we two. Two girls walking down the street every morning. Two sets of uniforms draped over the ironing board.

That night, in bed, Cathy and I converse quietly, almost reverently, in a mélange of regular English and a language we made up when we first learned to talk. Like certain Eastern tongues to which we've never been exposed, our communication depends on pitch and stress for meaning. Only one example from the lexicon has been cleared for public scrutiny:

 

Ecana egala
(
ee-CAH-na ee-GAH-la
): 1. Exclamation of self-regard, e.g.,
“Aren't we something else!”
2. Exclamation of dismay, e.g.,
“Oh, shoot.”
3. Exclamation of affection, e.g.,
“I love you so much, please don't die.”

 

In the dark, Betty listens. She understands our language, too, understands that we're both glad and not glad that Mum finally took her out of school. Out in the kitchen Mum and Anne murmur to each other over a cup of Red Rose tea. As their spoons clink, I pretend the sound is silver, that they've got a silver pot and bone-china cups out there, that Mum could be Jackie and Anne one of the young Kennedy women—maybe Teddy's wife—talking things over at the end of a day filled with long cars and candelabras.

Cathy drifts off, sounding like a soft-snoring mouse, whispery, babyish, disturbingly weak. Across the narrow gap, Betty in her bunk drifts off, too, in airy sighs of relief now that school's out for good. I remain pulsingly awake, suddenly haunted by the president's bloody death and the nuns' terror tales of the holy saints and martyrs dying six ways from Sunday: flayings and stabbings and lightning strikes and conflagrations at the stake and plain old
dying in their sleep.
For hours, it seems, I wait in wakeful vigil between my sleeping sisters, unnerved by the hitches in their little mouse breaths. When at last I succumb to the weight of my forced-open eyes, another breathing enters my conscious world, beyond our room, beyond our windows, beyond the reach of the holy saints and martyrs.

Puff .
.
 . puff .
.
 . oooom,
it goes.
Puff .
.
 . puff .
.
 . oooom.

It's the Oxford, over there on the riverbank, that faithful, heavy-breathing monster, the huff-and-puffer that glows in the dark. Dad no longer goes in there and out, but its potent self somehow abides, immense and inescapable, bigger than the rumors of change: cutbacks, reorganization, maybe a sale.
Puff .
.
 . puff .
.
 . oooom.
It never varies, this sound, this inhale and exhale, all day, all night, a mountainous, animal presence.

Cathy makes another mouse cry and startles awake. Betty, too, is stirring.
Shhh,
I whisper,
listen.
A brief, bright thought comes to me, fueled by the religious pageantry of the president's three-day funeral and our own secret brush with celebrity: Maybe Dad can speak to us through the steam.

We listen, all three, absorbing the sound as children from the coast might absorb the tidal sighing of a nearby sea, an ebb and flow so enduring that after a time the sound appears to be coming from within your own unsuspecting self. It's been a long seven months, April to November, a tender time bracketed by death. A father, a president; the one grieved only by us, the other by a whole spacious-sky, purple-mountains-majesty, grain-waving country. I listen, with my sisters, in a kind of stupefied surrender, as the mill's enduring breath smoothes over us, inhale, exhale.

After a while, it's clear enough, I know at last and for good: Dad's no longer in there. Or anywhere reachable. Dad is gone, Dad is gone, even as the sound of his life's work presses in, closing our heavy eyes. By the time Anne slips into our room, kisses our slackened faces, and crawls into her own bunk, we have all, one-two-three, gone sound asleep.

A
ND THEN
—
HOW COULD
this be?—another April, 1964, the Norkuses' crocuses popping through the grass, a second springtime without Dad. For his anniversary Mass, we file into St. Theresa's church in our good clothes, all of us praying side by side in the front pew, the town outside the church windows seeming less and less like the vibrant thing from which our father so suddenly vanished, taking all that vibrancy with him.

I open my hymnal, mouth the responsorial psalm, and wonder: Would he remember me? I wear glasses now, blue cat's-eyes like Mum's; I'm two and a half inches taller; my hair, though still red like his, sweeps away from my face in a big-girl “flip”; I'm in fifth grade going on sixth. Heaven, it is said, brims with God and music and other divine distractions. If he came back and I said,
Hi, Daddy,
would he know it was me?

How has one year—a year containing almost everything I will ever know—passed so invisibly? Twelve months have melted behind me like snow.

 

“Why, look, children!” squeals Sister Bernadette, setting down her flash cards. She loves flash cards, uses them for French, English, History, Math. “Look who's here!”

“Bonjooour, mon Père!”

Back at work since the first of the year, Father Bob has edged once again into the waking world. I'm the only one here who knows where he's been. He jaunts into our classroom, cassock riffling at his heels, still trying hard but less gutted by the effort. Since his sojourn at the sock-monkey hospital—
I had a very good doctor
is all he'll ever say—my uncle has recovered the dropped notes in his layered voice. “Boys and girls,” he says, arms akimbo. “What's
nyew
?”

Sister Bernadette, a terrible singer, has nonetheless taught us seven songs, one for every sacrament. We treat Father Bob to a rendition of “Holy Orders Made It So” as he nods along, smiling beneath the portrait of President Kennedy that Sister has not deigned to remove. Like the whole country, we've grown grudgingly used to the new president, Mr. Johnson, with his boring, Protestant, not-cute, too-old daughters; and his big-hair wife who goes by the silly name of Lady Bird.

“Very pleasant,” Father Bob says to us, applauding. “Very, very pleasant.” His smile looks more like his real smile, his cheeks pink with health, his forehead clear. “Denise Vaillancourt, how are your mother and father?”

“They're fine, Father. Thank you, Father.”

“And Margie Lavorgna, your mother's still working at Larry's?”

“Yes, Father. Thank you, Father.”

My uncle gives me his special glance—
I know you're here
—and I all but slurp it up. My heart aches, in a good way. This man standing before us wouldn't be caught dead stuffing a sock monkey.

“Thank you, Sister.”

“Oh, thank
you,
Father!”

“Au revoir, mes enfants.”

“Au revoir et merci, mon Père!”

Before he leaves, he prepares to bless us. He asks us to think of our families, the better for his blessing to extend its reach. He knows, in a way that we children cannot, that the ground beneath Mexico's mothers and fathers has begun to quaver. Something new has moved to town:
efficiency
—competition's heartless sidekick. A nearby shoe shop closing for good, the entire Maine shoe industry teetering on collapse. At the mill, another bumpy season of labor negotiations lies just ahead, stepped-up rumors jangling everyone's nerves as our competitors—foreign and very, very efficient—load cheaper paper onto ships and planes, towers of paper destined for American trucks and trains that will convey the goods to stationery stores and pressrooms and insurance companies and publishing houses from sea to shining sea.