When We Were the Kennedys (24 page)

Father Bob raises his hand for the blessing. He looks older, seems older. Not only him. Me. All of us. The whole country. Everyone and everything touched by death.

“In nomine Patris, . . .”
Father Bob says.

Down go our heads. I think of my family, as Father Bob asked. Anne at the high school teaching Shakespeare; Cathy at her desk in the classroom downstairs from me, learning her times-fives from Sister Mary of Jesus; Betty at home drawing snowmen with Mum. Her fling with Jackie Kennedy worked magic on us children; maybe that was the point all along. I no longer cry every night over Dad, and if someone asks me, “Who's your father?”—as people do back then—I can look that stranger in the eye and say “deceased” and know that we both hear the tacit postscript:
Just like Caroline's father, our assassinated president.

 

The
Times:
OXFORD PAPER COMPANY EARNINGS UNCERTAIN
.

One Monday during that anniversary spring, I come home from school to find my brother in the kitchen drinking coffee with Mum. I rarely see him like this—alone, without his wife and kids—and never on a workday.

I put down my books. “Did something happen?” I glance frantically around. There's Betty in Dad's chair, listening. Cathy, I know, is a few paces behind me, walking home with one of the Gagnon girls. Is it Anne? Father Bob? Cumpy or Aunt Rose? Who is it? Who?

Barry says something about a wildcat. I picture a big animal doing something bad.

“What? What did you say?”

A wildcat walkout. This morning at the Oxford, fourteen machine tenders left their posts in protest over the first occurrence of job combining, which sounds like
including
but really means
excluding.
In job combining (Mr. Vaillancourt says) you get assigned to two machines on a single shift, dashing from, say, the rewinder to the supercalender and back, cutting two crews by half a man.

Subtracting
one job by
adding
yourself to two jobs. A human antagonym. Nobody wants to be that man.

By noon word spread to every sector of the mill, from the beater room to the woodyard, and the place emptied out. Almost nobody went in for second shift. The union scheduled an emergency meeting for tonight, which is why Barry is here drinking coffee and talking to Mum.

“He loved that place,” Mum says, shaking her head. “The man practically
lived
there.”

Barry says to her, “Well, he wouldn't recognize it now.”

What's going on? Aren't we the Oxford? The mighty, mighty Oxford?

“Guys are mad as hell,” Barry says to Mum. “They mean business.”

The walkout ends on Wednesday morning, two days later, but a tone on both sides has been brazenly set. Contract talks will begin soon; our town is in for a long summer.

 

The
Times:
THREE OXFORD WORKERS FIRED AFTER WILDCAT WALKOUT; ELEVEN SUSPENDED
.

Shortly after school lets out for the summer, mill manager Charles Ferguson publishes an open letter in the
Times
to the citizens of Rumford and Mexico, pleading that a strike
will serve no purpose whatever. In addition to depriving you of your pay,
he reminds one and all,
it would hamper the company's ability to satisfy the needs of its customers. Without customers, the Company is out of business and your job security disappears. The rumor of a work stoppage may be without foundation, but I felt that you should know the facts before it's too late.

The facts: We are the Oxford. The mighty, mighty Oxford.
National Geographic
loves us, they buy only Oxford paper for their color-picture magazine, which you can find all over town—all over America! all over the world!—stashed into bathroom magazine racks, towered onto parlor tables, stacked against screen doors to keep them from slamming shut. That's
our
paper on which you read articles about African matriarchies and babies born at the North Pole and flowers so small and rare you can't find them without a magnifying glass. That's
our
paper in a magazine so colorful they pile up like totems because no mother in America—or the world!—can bear to throw one out.

The
Times:
BUILDING CAMPAIGN CONTINUES AT OXFORD
.

The
Times:
OXFORD EARNINGS DROP.

The facts: Charles Ferguson came to our door, fifteen months ago now, to say,
I'm sorry for your loss.
He put on a jacket and took Mum's hand and said kind words because Dad was a foreman in the woodyard, a good worker who was never late, a member of the long-service club, part of the Oxford family. Charles Ferguson—someone
important,
someone
up there—
ascended our stairs, past the Norkuses', past the Hickeys', and came to us, his Oxford Paper Company pin glinting on his lapel.

The
Times:
UPP WINS AGAIN; NEGOTIATIONS SET FOR AUGUST
3.

The
Times:
NEGOTIATIONS BEGIN.

The
Times
follows the zigzagging road of compromise, one edgy meeting after another. It follows also our humdrum daily doings. In one issue I learn that Chief Maurice Cray brought a complaint “against a Rumford citizen” who illegally parked in Mexico; that the sensational Impacts are back at the Eagles hall; that a Rumford meteorologist predicted a colder-than-normal autumn (
“So sorry .
.
 . signed, Armand A. Violette”
). Senator Muskie publishes a defense of the Clean Water Act on page three. And on the next page, an anonymous essay called “The Truth about Cancer,” lamenting the Hollywood deaths of Charles Laughton and Dick Powell. “They have not died in vain,” proclaims the mysterious scribe who lauds the release of the dirty word
cancer
into polite company.

On the facing page, a reporter's note on the specs of the Oxford's new grinding room: Made of concrete. Covered with asbestos felt. No windows.

The
Times:
NEGOTIATIONS CONTINUE.

The
Times:
MANAGEMENT SPIKES RUMORS OF WHOLESALE PERSONNEL CHANGES.

The
Times:
BOTH SIDES LESSENING DEMANDS.

 

The
Times:
NEGOTIATIONS STALLED AT OXFORD.

During the mid-August labor talks, Denise and I celebrate our eleventh birthdays, five days apart, a cake for me at her house, a cake for her at my house. In celebration, I decide once and for all to rectify the Vaillancourts' only perceptible deficiency by smuggling into Denise's bedroom a homeless yellow cat we pick up on Gleason Street. The cat will live in the closet and be fed in secret until we can soften up Denise's parents by inventing the cat's dramatic backstory, in carefully timed, increasingly theatrical installments, salting it with quotes from St. Francis, the patron saint of animals (“O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console”), until finally Mrs. Vaillancourt, wracked with guilt, will mutter,
Jesus Mary and Joseph, you girls are right as always, let us open wide our doors!
—whereupon we cue the cat for his big reveal.

Denise has a blabby little brother, however; before we can pass a single afternoon with our yellow birthday cat, Mr. Vaillancourt appears, filling the doorway of the bedroom with his square, stern shoulders and disciplinarian face. He's just come back from a union meeting. Is he mad about the cat (at the moment unraveling an afghan crocheted by an auntie or
mémère
) or mad about
NEGOTIATIONS STALLED
?

“What do you girls think you're doing?”

His eyes are pond blue, like Dad's. Twinkly. He reminds me of a tame bear. I pick up the cat, who is purring beatifically, an ambassador from St. Francis for sure. It has a well-brushed coat and clean, translucent ears and come to think of it might not actually be homeless. I shift its fetching visage so that Mr. Vaillancourt can better admire its beseeching, topaz-colored eyes.

“We're sorry, Dad,” says Denise, whose negotiation skills are just plain pitiful.

To this lame defense I must add, prematurely, our trump card: “We named him Omer.”

I remember Mr. Vaillancourt's laugh as a modest, rolling chuckle, as if he disliked making too much of himself. This pleasant, trickling sound trails him like fairy dust as he trots downstairs—without a word of reproach—and sets the cat outside.

“Mr. Vaillancourt?” I ask when he returns. “Are you mad at me?”

He shakes his head no; he's not mad at me. In time I'll come to understand that I break his heart. He pats my head. He looks me in the eye. He calls me dear. He asks me how's your mother. Then he goes to the phone, for he's been called in, again, to do battle with a monstrous machine.

 

The
Times:
DEADLOCKED
.

How strange it seems to be leaving town with a strike looming, everyone coiled tight. But that's exactly what we're doing, leaving town. Father Bob has a one-week vacation and has invited us all on a trip in his new Impala: he and Mum and Anne in front, we three girls in back, a long car trip with restaurants and everything. He's so much better now, his stay at the hospital now nine months old. On a hot morning in late August, he drives us out of town via Route 2, passing the Rumford falls and heading for the falls at Niagara, a journey that echoes in reverse the one taken by our industrial founder.

In Niagara Falls—the Canadian side—we check into a motel called the Empress and feel like royalty.

“Lookit, Cath! Lookit, Bet! A swimming pool!”

Indeed: a long blue pool ringed by large, painted climbable wooden animals, a fantastical mirage shimmering under high soft lights. It's too late to swim, but Mum and Anne allow us to try out the animals while they perch at one of the plastic poolside tables and Father Bob goes inside to pay. Already this is nothing like our other trip; it hasn't occurred to me even once to try to listen between the lines. All I want is to climb to the top of the elephant—there are steps built into its back—and holler, “Hellooo, down there!”

In the morning, Father Bob bangs on our door. “Get up, girls! The day's half gone!”

Mum comes out of the bathroom, her hair still in pincurls. “For crying out gently, Father,” she tells her brother, “it's only seven o'clock.”

But Father wants to
shove off,
he wants to
get this train moving,
especially since his derailment at the sock-monkey hospital. He means to fulfill his duty as small-
f
father twice over if he can manage it, making up for lost time, cramming all the small-
f
fathering he can stand into his one-week vacation. So we wash our faces and find our bathing suits and gather like cats waiting for the door to open.

“Now! Now! Now!”

But it turns out that Father Bob begins every day of his priestly life with morning Mass, no exceptions. He walks in wearing not his plaid swimming trunks but his cassock and surplice. Mum clears the motel dresser of feminine clutter as Father Bob lays out a makeshift Mass: portable paten, portable linens, portable tin holding a stash of unconsecrated hosts.

Cathy and I swap a look.
“Ecana egala,”
she whispers, which does not, in this case, mean
I love you.
It means
Oh, shoot.

We fall groaningly to our knees on the motel carpet as Father Bob murmurs the Offertory, consecrates six hosts, and administers Communion first to himself, then to us, in order of age: Mum, Anne, Betty, me, Cathy. With a pool shimmering just outside the window, this quickie Mass becomes the offer-up of all offer-ups.

“Amen!” we cry, then we shove off, we get this train moving, breakfast in the motel restaurant, which—
holy smoke!
—serves the same whipped-cream-on-pancakes as that other motel. Then an hour in the pool—
heave ho! heave ho!
—after which Father Bob hurries us down to the lookout or to the arcade or to the museums or to the hot-dog stands, the falls' presence tremoring beneath us no matter where we walk. He herds us to gardens with words spelled out in flowers, pays our way into an animal show where a portly green parrot rides a red bicycle and sings “O Canada.” He takes us to the Ferris wheel, the cotton-candy kiosk, and the merry-go-round, which is too sissy-baby but Betty likes it and won't ride alone. Lunch at a place where they sprinkle vinegar on the French fries. Back at the motel we climb on the giant wooden animals and cannonball straight into the safety net Father Bob makes of his arms. Over and over and over.

Eventually, we swim to the side of the pool—Betty with her blow-up tube—tired now, and quieting. Before lifting us to the deck, where we can pad back to Mum and Anne, Father Bob confides to us, “Your mother will never get married again. You know that, right?”

This seeming non sequitur splashes softly down, a perfect landing. He's read our minds—might some cheap substitute, some other man, start up Dad's car one day?—and now our minds have been set at permanent ease.

“Are you having fun, girls?” Anne calls from a chaise longue, her face damp from the pool. Mum, too, has tried the water, her feet still bare.

“Yes!” we yell. “We're having fun!” We mean it.

At midweek Father Bob springs for a river tour of the falls, where the boat man punches our tickets and winks at Anne and hands out oversize slickers. My bangs and eyelashes beaded with river mist, I wince against the concussive roar of the falls. You could run a hundred paper mills on the strength of that roar, raise up a hundred towns, produce paper enough for all the books in America. But I see no smokestacks, I hear no mill whistles; instead, I stand with my family and gape at the plummeting water, feeling the way Hugh J. Chisholm must have felt at his first glimpse of the Rumford falls.

“Wow,” Mum says, swiping at her hair. “That was something.” We're wet, all of us, shedding the soaked slickers. Between the swimming pool and the falls, we'll be wet every day—a metaphorical cleansing made literal. The adults seem lighter, looser, cleaner in spirit, beautiful with water—water, not tears—dripping off their eyelashes. In a few days I'll be parked at a sixth-grade desk, stiff-backed in my itchy skirt and overstarched blouse, learning the rules of a different nun for a different grade; but for now I am staring into the thunder of waterfalls, shaking water off the ends of my fingers. Despite the shuddering of the falls beneath its surface, the ground, for the first time since Dad died, has ceased to shift.