When We Were the Kennedys (8 page)

We cross ourselves. “Amen.”

His custom is to visit all the grades, not just ours, and then drive home to Mum and wait for us. As we file to the cafeteria for lunch, I spot him through the great doors. He's sitting in his parked car, his hands on the wheel, his forehead gently resting on his hands. After lunch, filing past the door again, I look for his car and it's gone.

So he's with Mum now, and here's what I want to imagine as I finish my first good-tasting lunch in weeks: the brother and sister as their old selves, playing a ferocious round of Scrabble in the kitchen, Mum registering challenges until she can't take one more ridiculous, unheard-of, perfectly legal English word pointed out in Father's Bob's take-along dictionary. She dawdles so long over sorting her letters that her baby brother groans in fake, theatrical anguish.
Maaargaret!

Keep your shirt on. I've got something.
She's angling for a seven-letter word but so far that's happened only once.

If you had something, you'd have played it
—he checks his handsome watch—
twenty minutes ago.

Her cheeks pinken, she gives him a catlike leer, then lays down tile after tile. I imagine that S-I-N-G-I-N-G is the magic word, the
g
shared with Father Bob's triple-word-scored
ghost.

La la la,
Mum says.
Don't get too big for your britches, buster.

But that's not what will happen today when he goes to her. The Scrabble game will sit on the table, unopened. She'll pour him some coffee. He'll cry and cry. Mum will watch for us out the window, coming down the street in our green uniforms. “The girls are here, Father,” she'll say when she spots us. And he'll pull himself together.

 

As soon as Father Bob leaves our classroom in a gust of glory, Sister Ernestine says, “Let's stick with Geography.” She's feeling good, flushed with secondhand celebrity, so instead of moving on to French, Geography it is. Her favorite. She's mad about explorer stories, all those brazen men from Spain and Portugal in storm-shocked fleets they named for saints, their intrepid forays to convert the heathen masses while dumping their ballast of rocks and replacing it with gold, tea, saffron, curry. But the Europeans aren't the only characters in her collection; still agog from Father's visit, she unveils one of her favorites, a real corker about the Oxford's founder, a story that unfolded “right here in our own backyard” about eighty years before she assigned us our permanent, scarified desks in her fourth-grade classroom. Every schoolchild in Mexico learns this story, which goes like this:

On a snow-blown December day in 1882, a young, well-fed Portland businessman—Mr. Chisholm was his name—arrived by train at the Rumford Point Hotel, borrowed a sleigh from the proprietor, and started down the road along the river. What could he be up to? As he made his purposeful way, the snow magically lifted and the day turned clear and crisp and still. The man enjoyed this quality of quiet, for he was an industrialist whose daily life teemed with enterprise. The cold sun poured over this blessed quiet, until a remarkable thundering left the man no doubt of his location. Out of the sleigh he climbed, his eyebrows grizzled with hoarfrost. He shivered inside his heavy coat, ran a glove along the country-bred nose of his borrowed horse, slipped the beast a sugar cube for its trouble.

“What was the horse's name?”

A beat. “St. Jude.”

“Really?”

“Well, the Chisholms were Catholic.” (Like all of Sister's explorers, whether or not the evidence supported the claim.)

“But he borrowed the horse.”

“Then I assume the hotel man was also Catholic.”

In the bracing cold, the stranger's breath formed cloudlets of wonder as he took in the river's first plummet, a nearly perpendicular drop of seventy-five feet that split a wild expanse of land ringed by snow-muffled hills. His gaze traveled downriver, where the Androscoggin continued its plunge, one hundred eighty feet over a half-mile stretch, the rocks and boulders smoothed over time by the river's inestimable weight. Here was Hugh J. Chisholm, our town's industrial founder, standing on high like God at the beginning of the world, the sound of falling water and a new idea drumming in his head.

The horse rattled its furry ears. The winter light rinsed the scene with a nearly painful clarity. The wilderness rolled away, and away, until Hugh believed he could see all the way to Canada.

He'd grown up near Niagara and knew at once: The Rumford falls rivaled that legendary length.

“How did he measure it?”

“By eye.”

“How can you—?”

“He was brilliant, children.
Brilliant.
”

A calculating man, Mr. Hugh J. Chisholm, Canadian-born son of a Scottish scholar. In a less capricious world, our Hugh might have become a scholar himself, but his father's untimely end—drowned after tumbling off a steamer from Toronto—sent the heart-rattled son into the working world at the age of thirteen.

Another fatherless explorer. But this time nobody looks at me. Father Bob's visit has shifted the burden of pity from me to young Hugh. I listen along with everyone else, my chin lifted toward the story of us.

“How do you fall off a steamer?” somebody asks.

“He was a scholar. I suppose he was reading a book.”

After digging potatoes for two soul-numbing days, young Hugh turned to selling newspapers on the Toronto-Detroit rail line with another boy, name of Thomas Edison, a kindred spirit, fellow genius, and lifelong friend.

“And Thomas Edison, you'll remember, was the inventor of . . . ?”

“The cotton gin!”

“No.”

“The Stanley Steamer!”

“No.”

“The telescope?”

“Children, this was your homework
two weeks
ago. Monica?”

“The electric light.”

“Thank you.”

Hugh saw something in paper that brainy Thomas missed. By the time he beheld the unharnessed power of the Rumford falls, Hugh was a seasoned capitalist used to the long view. Well supplied with cigars, he lingered at the summit. Standing a little, walking a little. His boots made pacing traces in the crystallizing snow. He did this for more than an hour. More than two.

“Where was he?”

“At the top of Falls Hill. Only it wasn't Falls Hill then. It was just a little path overlooking that raging waterfall.”

Beyond the deafening miracle of the falls, there really wasn't much to see on that wintry day. No sign of human striving but a trifling wreck of a gristmill, a smaller sawmill weathered to the bone. The sun-spangled water ribboning between Rumford and Mexico existed mostly unseen and unknown, a geysering thunder already changing shape in Hugh's thrumming mind. He climbed back into the borrowed sleigh, afire with plans.

“And his plan was . . . what, children?”

Everybody knows this one: “The mill!”

Did he imagine the smokestacks, the woodyards, the whistle that would alert generations of children to the hour of nine in the morning? Did he envision the logjammed canal, the footbridges and savings banks, the sidewalks and church steeples, the dress shops and the bowling alley, schools brimming with smart, ambitious children? Did he foresee the great steam cloud pumping like a signal at the heart of the valley, pumping like a heart itself, a heart made of sulphur and smoke?

“Well?” Sister asks. “Did he?”

“Yes!”

“And why is that?”

“Because he was an explorer!”

“And explorers have what?”

“Courage!”

“And what else?”

“Goals!”

“And what else?”

“Imagination!”

On the return trip, about a quarter mile from the hotel, St. Jude—who cared nothing for industrial daydreams and much for dinner in a well-stocked livery—bolted up a half-frozen hill, upsetting the sleigh and all its contents, including our town's imagineer, now splatted on the ice with an additional shivery hour to ruminate on the glorious possibility of “building a city in the wilderness.” As the hard ground slowly numbed his hind parts, he thought of his old friend Thomas down there in his bright, warm workshop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, angling a way to deliver light to the masses.

We laugh at the picture: our portly founder, flat on his backside.

“That's humility,” Sister says. But she's laughing, too. “No success without failure, children. First you have to fall flat down.”

Hugh got up from that frozen ground and spent the next decade secretly buying all the land along the river. And lo, it came to pass: A city in the wilderness did indeed rise up, year by year, dam by dam, canal by canal, turbine by turbine, mill by mill, block by block—blocks like ours, filling with workers now coming in by the trainload.

In they went, over the footbridges to mills flourishing on Chisholm land. “To the Rumford Falls Paper Company, which made—?”

“Newsprint!”

“And the Rumford Falls Sulphite Company?”

“Sulphite pulp!”

“And the International Paper Company?”

“Manila, envelope paper, newsprint, and writing paper!”

“And the Continental Paper and Bag Company?”

“Bags and envelopes!”

And finally, on the land where the river made its elbow bend into Mexico, the Oxford Paper Company, Hugh's ruby of modern papermaking, an innovation that eventually enfolded its sister mills and met what its founder rightly predicted as an exploding twentieth-century demand for books and magazines. With the modern century barely under way, our once drowsy, vacated valley had been fully remade as an industrial powerhouse of more than ten thousand lucky, multitongued, deeply grateful souls, their fortunes tied forever to a Canadian immigrant and his headlong dreams.

“And at some point along the way,” Sister tells us, “your own fathers stepped onto a Rumford train platform and joined their number.”

She waits for the ending to sink in, a little twist we haven't heard before. All year Sister has told this explorer story and others, their embedded lessons accumulating thusly: Be brave. Set goals. Use your imagination.

But today the lesson is this: We live in a town made remarkable by the work of our fathers. Today she tells this story just for me.

 

A few mornings later, Mum picks up the ringing phone as we get ready for school.

Only two days left of our nun-dictated routine; the looming of summer, that upcoming season of free time, feels for the first time ever like a saddling weight. Too many hours to fill, and the only foreseeable balm is our big sister hearing our prayers at day's end. How many days does summer hold? I've tried to count them out but they're too abundant to hold in my head, just as the count of Dadless days has at last gotten away from me. Fifty-four days, fifty-six days, the numbers piling up too fast now, relentless and unruly. I have to count by weeks instead—nearly eight of them so far, a smaller sum that makes Dad seem a little less far away.

“Is it just talk?” Mum says to someone on the line. She means the strike talk wildfiring around town: contract negotiations coming up, three unions suddenly battling for the right to rep the rank and file.

Cathy snatches up the parakeet and swings him around by the tail, which he never seems to mind, but her laughter, and Betty's, makes it hard to hear. “Shh,” I tell her. “Put him back. Get your skirt on.”

“It's probably just talk,” I hear Mum say again. “A few flapjaws stirring up trouble.” Who is she talking to? Our brother? Is he worried about a strike?

My family is collapsing like a pile of sticks because we can't believe Dad's gone; why wouldn't the mill, where Dad spent so much of his time, be doing the same? Because I am nine years old and willing to believe anything, I believe Dad's death has changed Hugh Chisholm's mill. Its constant sighing finds me in my bed at night; in the daytime I lift my chin, avert my gaze. I can't bear to look at it, to smell it, to hear its heavy breath. With Dad not in it, the Oxford suddenly looks like a factory.

Mum hangs up but doesn't look worried. She doesn't look anything. The world isn't getting through. “Who was that?” I ask her.

“Nobody.”

“Was it Barry?”

“Put that poor creature down,” Mum says to Cathy. “I mean it.”

“Mum?” I persist. “Is there gonna be a strike?” Sister Ernestine has a thing for English words and the tricks they play. She loves homographs and synonyms and sometimes teases us to spell words backwards. As far as I can make out, the word
strike
is an
antagonym,
Sister Ernestine's word for a word that means both itself and its opposite. Like
buckle,
which means to fasten and secure, or to implode and collapse. Like
cleave,
which means to brutally split apart, or to cling together.

Strike
means to hit something, but also to walk away from something—your job—so you don't get hit.

“Mum? Mumma? Is there going to be a strike?”

She shakes her head, rifling the hall coat rack for our sweaters. “The men in Manhattan can't afford one.” Is this what Barry said on the phone? “Cathy, put him
down.
Where's your skirt?”

“Mum? What men in Manhattan?”

“The men who own the mill.”

I don't know what to say. I'd thought
Dad
owned the mill. Dad and all the fathers. The mill manager's visit had been my first clue; now this.

“Are you sure? About the strike?”

“Don't be a worrywart,” Mum says. “Nobody's going on strike. Betty, here's your milk money. Right here in your pocket. Don't lose it.”

“Mum? How do you know nobody's going on strike? Mumma? How do you know—?”

“Because Dad said so.” She sighs. “Now get your shoes on.”

What? Does she mean Dad said this when he was still living, or that he said so just now? On the phone? Is there some way to speak to him that is known to everyone but me?