When We Were the Kennedys (26 page)

Then comes a day when we wait for the verdict. I'm watching out the kitchen window again, the way I did on the morning Dad died.

“It won't happen any faster with your face glued to the glass,” Mum says. She, too, is antsy, pretending to wipe down the stove.

“Hey!” I shout. “She's here! Everybody, hey, she's here!”

Ohhh,
my mother sings.
Ohhh.
Cathy and Betty switch off the Saturday cartoons and jumble out to the kitchen. Now we're all at the window, watching Dad's car round the corner of Worthley Avenue and slide audaciously
into the driveway.

That's a clue. But we're not sure, until, after a moment of exquisite suspense, we hear the jolly rooty-toot of the horn.

“She got it!” Mum shouts. “She got it!”

“She got it!”

“She got it!”

“SHE GOT IT!”

Norma gets out of the passenger side and waves up at us.

“Come on, girls,” Mum says, grabbing a sweater. “Come on!”

We stampede downstairs, past the nodding Norkuses (they approve!), and into Dad's car we go, hooting our congratulations. Anne backs us into the street and takes us for a ride just for the plain joy of riding as we talk over each other—
Was the man nice? Was the test hard? Did he make you park?
—and jounce in our seats and sing the car-trip song and wave out the windows to our friends and neighbors.

The strike is over and we're living again among three thousand fully employed papermakers and fourteen thousand citizens across our two towns, ten thousand in Rumford, four thousand in Mexico. We are part of this prosperous, invincible place.

From this shimmering perch, who can imagine the strike of '64 as the last civilized walkout, the last conflict of the “Good Old Days of the Oxford”? Who here can imagine the strikes of our future: hired replacements we'll call “scabs”; families permanently scorched by betrayal; ultimatums written in spray paint and buckshot; the union's broken back; the mill's changing names?

The strike has tolled the first, faint alarm for what is to come, a slow vanishing, almost imperceptible at first, another thousand souls gone away at the threshold of each coming decade, a slow, unstoppable dwindling that will carry through the next ten, twenty, thirty years, until the glorious might of the mighty, mighty Oxford—aka Ethyl, aka Boise-Cascade, aka Mead, aka Mead-Westvaco, aka NewPage—will survive mostly through memory.

But on the morning of Anne's new license we know nothing of this. The strike is done, the father has come back, all is forgiven, the mill breathing hard again on the riverbank.

Anne toots to this one, to that one. On Brown Street we spot Denise waving with both arms. Stop the car! Hop in!
I hear music but there's nooo one there! I smell blossoms but the treees are bare!
Dad's fancy-gorgeous car still smells weakly of Camels. Adults on the street—neighbors, nuns—pause to smile at us, a back-seat jumble of kids no longer exactly children: a sixth-grader, her sixth-grader friend, a fourth-grader, and Betty, a gradeless, eternal child who will stay here forever, though not with her mother—who will die young—but with her big sister, this lovely young teacher at the wheel.

We wave to other kids' mothers, other kids' fathers; we yell out the windows,
Hey, everybody, lookit lookit, she got it!
The grownups nod indulgently. So cute! So lively! So bright!
All day long I seem to waaalk on air! I wonder whyyy! I wonder whyyy!
They want Mexico's children to be educated, these mothers and fathers and teachers. They want us to know something of the larger world. To live better than they did.

Have they worked out their plan to its inevitable conclusion? Grownups stand at the front of classrooms, they put hamburg steak on supper tables, they sell insurance, they operate heavy machinery, they administer vaccinations, they paint our peeling houses. They cross the footbridge into the Oxford three times a day and come out again, full of their children's dreams. Do they not hear that distant tolling, that low, plangent harmony line in the song they have made of us?

How can they not know? Their children will leave them.

Anne drops Denise at her house. “Come on up,” Denise says.

But I don't come on up. I stay here, in this Dad-smelling space. With Mum
ooh
ing and
aah
ing in the front, with Anne providing such an even, reassuring ride, with all of us together in this car Dad once drove, I prefer at last to come home.
Stars that used to twinkle innn the skies! Are twinkling innn my eyes! I wonder whyyy!
Anne rounds the block and eases Dad's car to a soft, complete, textbook stop at 16 Worthley Avenue. In the driveway.
Good job, Annie! Yaaay!

I breathe in a feeling—a feeling I've heard tell of: everything falling into place. Until now, I didn't know what
everything
meant. Or
place.

Everything means us.

Place means us.

This feeling is
us
falling into
us.

And
us
is this family of women, singing the car-trip song. There is no journey we cannot make this way.

I
N ONE OF MY
last vivid memories of my mother standing, she lingers at the parlor door in her housedress and white Mary Janes, digging her toe into the rug, a nervous habit. Denise and I are running lines for our Mexico High School junior-class production of
Our Town,
directed by Miss Anne Wood, our English teacher. There's Mum, a damp dishtowel held at her hip, her head at a bird-cocked angle, toe twisting slowly, something on her mind. She has just lost her younger sister, our aunt Sadie, a small, dimpled fifty-year-old whose husband had whisked her off to New York State and kept her there, until she came back home to die. Another sweet shriveling person in a cancer bed.

Maybe Sadie's on her mind as she watches us rehearse. Denise, playing Rebecca, has been typecast as the little sister, the big-blue-eyed innocent. I've got the role of Emily, the small-town girl who dies in childbirth in Act Three, comes back as a spirit, and discovers the ignorance of the living. “I didn't realize,” the dead, distraught Emily says to the wise old Stage Manager. “So all that was going on, and we never noticed.” He'd warned her not to go back, not to visit the living in any form, but would she listen? No. And now her unchecked impulse has revealed to her how blind she was to life's daily wonders. The stage directions call for sobbing, which I can't manage on cue.

Mum drops the towel over a chair back and offers to interpret my lines. “You don't sound sad enough,” she tells me. “Let me try.” Flabbergasted, I give up my copy of the script. My mother, who as far as I know has never stood on a stage—has never even been to a real play—is about to give me acting lessons. I'm sixteen years old in this memory. I already know everything.

She clears her throat and makes an entrance, a step and a half to the center of the room. Flicking us a glance I can't interpret, she runs her finger down the page, folds back the spine, then clears her throat again, a self-conscious little scratch.

“I didn't realize,” she begins, reciting the way she sings, pulling syllables like taffy, making you think about the person who wrote the words. She declaims Emily's entire goodbye-world speech, her voice rolling and dropping like a storm-tossed Irish sea. “Goodbye to clocks ticking,” she laments, one hand sweeping toward the loud ticker in the kitchen. “And Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses, and hot baths. And sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you.” She looks beyond us to the homely wallpaper she put up, then couldn't afford to replace: monstrous palm fronds floating on a sea-green background. Her eyes shiny and alive, she searches out her invisible audience of thousands behind the foliage, and I can almost hear applause.

Her cancer is already forming, unbeknownst. I see her in silhouette—we're at midwinter, the sun setting too early, and behind her, through the parted curtains on the parlor window, I can make out the coughing smokestacks of the Oxford. Only we're not the Oxford anymore in this year of
Our Town.
Bill Chisholm and a group of men sold us to a chemical company that goes by the ugly name of Ethyl. We are the “Oxford segment of the Ethyl Corporation.”

We are the segment. The mighty, mighty segment.

At the long-service banquet just after the sale, Bill Chisholm repeated the oft-told history of the Oxford and added Ethyl as the latest gleaming chapter in the book of us.
I see no change anywhere,
he assured the gathered workers, who were hushed, wary, a little too warm in their banquet clothes. The Ethyl CEO then got up and proclaimed the horrifying sale
the best kind of merger that can take place in American business.
After that, everyone dug in to a roast-beef dinner and a musical entertainment by a “fine young tenor” currently burning up the New England music circuit. He sang like an archangel, and when he finished everybody stood up for the local son, now living in Portland and really going places, this boy who had found my father.

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?” Mum, as Emily, goes on. “Every, every minute?”

We wait. She waits. Then Denise checks her script and reads the Stage Manager's famous reply: “No,” she says, following the line with her finger. “The saints and poets, maybe. They do some.”

Mum nods. Closes her eyes. Says, “I'm ready to go back.”

I watch this spectacle in a state of wonder and melancholy. A life flashes before my eyes. Not mine; hers. Or an unlived version of hers, one where she offers herself to a world beyond us. Saying these lines with such sympathy and conviction, she is neither my shy, my sad, my only mother with her unfinishable loss, nor the woman she might be if Dad were still here, but somebody else altogether, an imaginative stranger with an inner life just like mine, aching with secret hopes for her own marvelousness. I feel my own self exposed, my own rickety purchase on my own fleeting life uncovered as my mother stands before me in the winter light, reading the lines of a mourning girl.

She hands back my script and waits modestly. “That was great, Mrs. Wood,” says Denise. She means it. My dear friend.

“That
was
great,” I tell her. I feel, strangely, like crying. “Really, Mum. Thanks.”

“Try it again,” she urges me. Behind her, through the window, above the river, an Ethyl steam cloud wisps into the reddening sky. In Grovers Corners, the town in the play, nothing will ever change. In our town, where a decade is ending, the Oxford signs, which stood for nearly seventy years, have been switched to Ethyl long enough now to look normal; the shoe industry has all but expired; and Anne has lost her first student to Vietnam.

I snatch up the scripts and put them in my book bag. “Later, maybe. We've got other homework.”

“I'll sit right here,” Mum insists. “I'll be the audience.”

But I say no; those half-memorized lines have hit me blind-side and I can't bear to visit them just now. When the curtain finally goes up in the Mexico High School auditorium, Mum applauds my portrayal of Emily, whose fictional losses so embrace me on opening night that the tears I pretend to cry in Act Three turn to real tears dripping off my chin. Mum watches from the second row—wearing pretty shoes made someplace else, holding a program printed on Ethyl paper.

 

What does it mean to love a place? This town, with its steam-pumping heart, loved the people who first loved me. As I return here now, passing the
WELCOME TO MEXICO
sign, I see up ahead my father's ghost on the footbridge, his dusty boots, his cap and pail. I swing by the Norkus block, slow down, look up, and there's my mother shimmering on the screen porch, lifting the bird to her lips, confiding a word into his invisible ear. The stairs once patrolled by the long-gone Norkuses want paint; the garden's an overgrown thicket, the driveway a frost-heaved mess after another heartless winter.

On Main Street, Dick's is still here, and the Chicken Coop, but the car dealerships are gone, and the dress shops, and the roller rink. The Bowl-O-Drome is now a vacant lot, its embankment leading up to the empty convent, the defunct church, the closed school. All around me, signs of wear. Perhaps my hometown always looked this way, and my recall has been shaded by a desire to shine up the past.

By the time my mother died, three years after her catastrophic cancer surgery, my sisters and I had learned to interpret the garbled language of her stroke; how to gentle her paralyzed arm through the sleeve of a brand-new blouse; how to change a bed with our vanishing mother still in it; how to surrender to the art of “offering it up.” Despite the despair that floated in and out like an Oxford steam cloud, we learned also to find the blessing in the disguise of Dad's death—his death, after all, had prepared us for hers—because we loved our mother and believed what she'd always said: “God provides, girls. We don't always see it until after.”

We'd had to move three blocks from 16 Worthley Avenue, to a ground-floor rent to accommodate the clanking bulk of Mum's wheelchair. On moving day we carried our things down the three flights. We carried the jewelry box. The turkey pan. The kitchen chairs and the birdcage. The adding machine. The toy piano. The pictures of Pope John and President John and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The things we carried had made the Norkus block our home, the only one we'd ever known.

Father Bob couldn't lift much weight. Mr. Vaillancourt managed the heavy stuff—the beds, the dressers, the red couch. Turns out we didn't have much in the way of bulk. Mostly, we carried little things. The electric fry pan. A box of Anne's peep-toe shoes. Three eight-pound cats. Trip after trip, down the stairs and up, too much stairs now for sure.