When We Were the Kennedys (3 page)

“Uh—”

“Exactly. It's not enough to read. You have to think. So. Let's think.”

As they think, someone—perhaps Mr. Cray—leaves a knotted message with the school secretary, a message further tangled by whoever delivers it to Anne. A student, most likely, one of the good girls who work in the office during study hall. This girl ferries the message through war-era corridors to the windowed, oaken door of my sister's classroom. There has been a mishap in Miss Wood's household but nobody seems to know quite what.

Anne experiences a lurch of fear for her little sisters, then looks back at her boys, who are struggling over Edmund Spenser's lapidary raptures:
Mirrour of grace and majestie divine .
.
 . shed thy faire beames into my feeble eyne.
Whatever appears in their teacher's
eyne
at this moment makes them go silent as snow.

“Excuse me,” she tells them. “I've been—summoned.” The nuns at her college used words like this. Composing herself, she lingers a moment at the too-big wooden lectern, her hands grasping its cumbersome sides. She smoothes the pages of the open anthology, the teacher's edition, too wide and too heavy and hard-backed. Everything in this room is bigger than she is. “Duane,” she says. Her throat is all dried up. “And Ed. You're in charge.” Two lunky boys in short sleeves stand up, nearly step on each other getting to the front of the room, where they will lead the class in the cracking open of sixteenth-century lyrics. They're good with a hammer and she trusts them to do it right.

She leaves the room at a normal clip, closes the door behind her, then begins to run, her toes jamming into her pointy shoes, down the long corridor to the office, where the school secretary offers her the phone.

“Come home,” Mum says. “I need you.” She does not say why and Anne does not ask.

Scarcely one downhill mile separates the high school from our block. The principal gives Anne a ride, offers to come upstairs. “No,” she tells him, trembling now with alarm. “I'm sure it's fine.”

Then we hear her, coming back to us, quick-quick, her patent-leather pumps puncturing each wooden tread—first floor, second floor, third floor, quickening as she nears us, quick through the door.

The clamor stuns her but in she comes. Crying baby sisters. Mother heart-shocked in a chair. Ironing board still heaped with unpressed laundry, a bottle of starch dripping over a soggy blouse. The parakeet dancing on his perch,
sugartime sugartime sugartime
he sings, nervously back-and-forthing on his spongy feet, he wants out, he wants out, he wants out. The cats have fled to hide inside things inside other things. The shape of our family has been upended and rearranged, its roof flattened, its gateposts ripped from the earth by God's own brutal hand, and only the animals know enough to make a run for it.

Stepping into this exploded, delicate thing that will forever now be us, Anne decodes the muddled message at last. So simple, so razoringly precise: Dad died.

She pulls herself together and, in the lingo of our time and place, begins to “do” for us. Make the calls. Greet the visitors. Feed tea and toast to our weeping mother. Fold up the ironing board. Finish the dishes.

Someone has to “do.” And so. She does.

 

My brother, a married Air Force veteran with two boys, is a pipefitter in the mill, where he gets the news in a similarly convoluted way. “You're wanted at home,” somebody says. So Barry drives heart-thumpingly home—to
his
home, a little house in Dixfield, the next town downriver.

“What's wrong?” he asks Nila, who's buttoning Stevie into a little shirt after walking Mike to his kindergarten.

His wife looks up, alarmed. “Nothing. What are you doing here?”

“You didn't call for me?”

She shakes her head, eyes darkening. “No. Someone called for you?”

So Barry calls the mill back, confused. “You must have another John Wood,” he tells the front office. In paperwork he goes by “John”—John Barry. Anne is Mary Anne; on Prince Edward Island you call children by their hidden names. In this year of 1963, the mill at its booming peak, there might well be another John Wood somewhere among three thousand employees scattered over three shifts, someone from Byron or Roxbury or West Peru or any one of our surrounding towns, another John Wood wanted at home for a reason nobody has the nerve to explain.

“Are you John?”

“Yes.”

“You work in the pipers?”

“Yes.”

“Your father died this morning.”

He sprints back to his car, drives too fast to Mexico, and thunders up those three flights.

We do not see my brother often, but when we do, he brings his wife and boys and his beloved May Belle acoustic guitar and takes over the parlor, where we beg for melodramatic rockabilly songs about heartbreak and missed chances in a velvety timbre that Dad called “fearful-grand singing.” But he brings nothing with him today but a powerful sense of dread as he bursts through the door and looks into the drained face of our mother and asks, “Is it true?”

Our apartment harbors few places to grieve in private: four rooms and only two with a door. Barry drags a chair from the kitchen and slips into the bedroom, where after a few minutes I crack the door open to the astonishing sight of my adult brother, facing away from me, sitting astride the spindly chair, his head down, his arms cradling the chair back, a pose not unlike the one he sometimes takes with his guitar. His shoulders heaving up and down, he forms soft, strangulated notes that stir me much the way those lyrics about heart-broke lovers often do. I've never seen him, or any man, cry. For a brief, melting moment I believe I'm hearing the sound of my brother singing.

 

Before Anne came home—thirty stopped minutes, a grotesque, ongoing
now
in which our mother shed her former self like a wind-shook tree—we children aged with fear. Our mother was both overly present—all that gasping and keening—and also eerily far away. We stood at the edge of the kitchen, knotted together, edging first toward and then away from those awful sounds, but because we, too, were yowling and keening there was nowhere safe. “I've lost my best friend,” Mum cried, to no one, to God, to the ceiling. “I've lost my best friend.” When she hid her face in her hands we mobbed her, petting her hair, her arms, then backed away again as her up-gushing grief took another vocal turn.

“What do we do?” Cathy whispered. She was standing so close that the heat of her breath moistened my neck. She and Betty looked at me; I was the one in fourth grade.

“I don't know,” I whispered back. “I don't know I don't know.”

More hot breath on my neck. “You have to get Anne.”

But how would I get the number? And who would answer? And how would I tell them what was happening, Mum bent at the waist, Mr. Cray thumping back down the stairs, everybody crying? But then the phone rang and Mum said,
Come home, I need you,
and for a second I thought,
That's Dad on the other end, maybe that's Dad on the other end,
until Mum squeezed me too hard—my arm hurting, my hand twisted between her body and mine—and then let go because she couldn't stand up, she had to sit, and then those terrifying, animal sounds gushed out again, and it seemed as if we were all stuck fast, stuck in one eternal moment, a locked trap of disbelief.

But now, a miracle, Anne is home—Anne's home!—and that encased moment geysers open, briefly cleansing our monstrous pain.

The door opens and opens. The phone rings and rings. People arrive and arrive and the day moves despite all, and we children, who had felt the queasy stirrings of duty—
At least you have your children,
Mr. Cray said—see now that nothing will be asked of us. We don't have to save Mum after all. We don't have to think up a way—think! think!—to call Dad back from heaven.

Childhood is over, but Anne's home, so we can still be children.

 

The rest of that morning, after Dad's unthinkable departure, fills with arrival. Father Bob, who will oversee Dad's funeral, comes home to us from his parish in Westbrook. He embraces Mum, blesses her—
In nomine Patris .
.
 .—
murmurs into her neck another prayer or incantation or perhaps something only a baby brother can say to his fourteen-years-older sister, something in plain English. Whatever it is, it doesn't work; my mother sits again, vacant, wordless, her lips gently parted.

A priest in the room is supposed to smooth things over, heal confusion, make ritual out of chaos. I cling to my shaking uncle, to the familiar scent of his blacks—his rabat and collar and jacket—but there are so many people here now, another neighbor coming through the door, and here are Aunt Rose and Cumpy—my aunt and my grandfather—and two of Dad's workmates from the mill, and after a while I realize that Father Bob, too, has headed for the bedroom—Barry has gone back home to break the news—where he lies on the bed with his black shoes on. I steal over to my own bedside, terrified.

Men crying everywhere.

He stares at the ceiling. Glasses fogged, cheeks gone scarlet, mouth quavering so badly it seems poised to slide off his face. He does not look at me but knows I'm here. “Is it all right for a man to cry, Monnie?” he asks me. He loved Dad more than he loves his own father.

What kind of question is this? What kind of question is this? I answer with another question: “Yes?”

“That's right,” he says, though I can barely hear him. “It's all right for a man to cry.”

I don't know what to do with this information; I'm afraid to touch him, my beloved uncle who has loved me in turn for as long as I can remember. He makes painful, held-in, small-animal sounds, his tears pooling on the pillows I share with Cathy. Then someone—I think it's Anne—touches my shoulder, releases me from this too-private moment, and leads me back out to the kitchen, now filled with people, tears all over.

Mrs. Hickey shows up with a tuna pie; the O'Neills drop off some biscuits; other neighbors, too many to sort, bring meat loaf, deviled eggs, soda bread. At some point, somewhere between Mr. Cray's visit and Father Bob's arrival, somebody asks, “Where's Cathy?”

Everyone looks at me.

“I don't know.”

I don't. Their faces scare me. The whole house has tilted somehow, and it's hard to see, and to hear, and everybody seems to be saying something to somebody who is saying something to somebody else. Those first few hours are like being caught inside a washing machine, an agitated drowning.

“What do you mean, you don't
know
?” Mum says, panicking, alive again after a zombielike lull that I have no way of recognizing as shock. My mother, who never panics over anything, starts to shake. “People don't just vanish into thin air.”

But Dad did. His soul, anyway. His baptized soul lifted from his body and vanished into thin air.

On any other day, a vanishing child would present no calamity. Kids always turn up, like cats, playing in a neighbor's yard or eating in some other kid's kitchen. Why does it matter that Cathy's gone missing? We're always missing. We live in an era when mothers throw their children into a teeming neighborhood with the instructions “I don't want to see you kids till supper.”

But Mum is up now, her eyes darting. “Mother of Mary,” she murmurs. All the adults are, suddenly, up.

Anne puts on a sweater, heads for the door. Where is Cathy?

“SHE WENT TO SCHOOL,” says Betty, who speaks in stammering capital letters, and just then Cathy materializes from the thin air into which she vanished, having been sent back home from St. Theresa's, where she'd showed up in Sister Edgar's second-grade classroom, her hair unbrushed but uniform complete, to slip behind her flip-top desk and take out her pencil and prepare to do Religion, which was the first subject of the day no matter what grade you were in.

“Why are you late?” Sister Edgar asked.

“My father died.”

“When?”

My sister's pink quivering lip: “Now.”

Sister Edgar, a young, kindly nun, stork-tall with dolorous dark eyes and long, lithe fingers, ushered Cathy back into the hall, assured her that her mother would surely prefer to have her near, then sent her home—one block away—with her unspent lunch money fisted into one hand.

“You went to school?” Mum says, incredulous, sitting down again with the weight of this fresh news. Her youngest child went to school, alone, carrying the unspeakable burden of Dad's death. Mum is raising good girls and this is what good girls do. Dad's bold-hearted girl, his favorite, has transformed herself within an hour into a child so invisible she can vanish into thin air and nobody, not even her own mother, will notice.

Something about Cathy's instinctive act of normalcy makes the thing that is happening newly unbearable. I go to the place where I, too, can disappear. I slink to a corner—a shadow of space between the couch and the door to the screen porch, with a book, or a sheaf of Dad's paper, and I bend my head to another family with a different story, either writing one or reading one. I stay there until Anne finds me and leads me back to the kitchen, which has filled with people and a flocklike physical warmth that brings an aimless, muffling comfort. We take turns nuzzling against our glassy-eyed mother, though nothing we do can cure what ails her.

Just before nightfall, when we can barely close the fridge for all the casseroles and have literally run out of places to sit, a final visitor arrives: a well-dressed stranger in a tie, his hair damp and neatly combed, his face grave with sympathy. Mum is sitting in the kitchen, same chair into which she collapsed hours ago after Mr. Cray said his yes. A silver pin glints from the stranger's brushed lapel:
Oxford Paper Company.

This man, who looks like Don Ameche, Dad's favorite actor, is the mill manager. In memory he is tall, broad, grave. My mother, who has not risen from her chair all day, rises for him.