When We Were the Kennedys (15 page)

Smiling out from another front-page picture in the
Times,
shovel in hand, Hugh II's son Bill has no idea—how could he?—that he's presiding over the beginning of the paper industry's long decline, that the current labor tensions presage a change in the Oxford's fundamental character, one as life-altering as a death in the family.

“You keep it up,” Mr. Vaillancourt says to me, which is what adults say to overachieving children.

From outside comes the slamming of car doors, Denise's aunties arriving for their summer visit. They move like starlings in flight, arrowing this way, then that way, in unison, trilling and hooting and cackling and hugging everybody more than once and pattering up and down the stairs to fetch overnight bags and presents and hats, bracelets jangling. I huddle like a stunned dormouse as they circle me, skirts aswirl, Mrs. Vaillancourt introducing me as “Denise's little friend.” They are so
enchantée
to meet me. How do you do!

I don't say,
Fine, thank you.
In fact, I say nothing at all. I'm struck dumb, as I often am. Despite my lists of words, my perfect marks in spelling, my desperately thumbed dictionary, I have no vocabulary with which to respond to the kindness that pours in from every quarter. This muteness, and its accompanying well of yearning, fills me with dread. Imagine: a childhood burdened by too much kindness.

The aunties clank their coffee cups and laugh like birds and tell the same stories twice and laugh harder the second time and water up over their own deceased father and sing funny songs in French. They've brought kids with them—Denise's cousins—too many, all ages. I stand at the periphery, memorizing names, but there are too many names, too many people.

At the end of this cacophonous afternoon, I linger outside in the quiet before heading home. Denise is back inside, being quizzed on French words or wheedled into a public performance of
“Je Te Trouve Toujours Jolie”
with her siblings and cousins or asked to report on her hopes for fifth grade. I'm in the yard, picking up my sleuthing notebook, looking over at the empty schoolyard with my own hopes for fifth grade, praying that Sister Bernadette has heard about Dad and therefore will refrain from the obligatory first-day Who Is Your Mother Who Is Your Father get-acquainted routine.

All of a sudden, another little flock from the house, not aunties or cousins, just Denise and Mr. Vaillancourt and Denise's baby sister, Jane. He's going to drive us to the Frosty for an ice cream—before supper, which is unheard-of. Maybe he needs a break from the aunties, who tell chancy jokes in French just to see him blush.

So he drives us to the Frosty. We stand in line. He takes out his wallet and says, “Three vanillas for my girls.”

Is this what I've been waiting for? I don't know, then I do.

We get back into Mr. Vaillancourt's Plymouth; he waves out the window to this one and that one. Everybody likes Omer. Sometimes he takes his wife dancing. They play cards with people. They put the words
social
and
life
together in a way I've never heard. It means their friends.

Everyone can see me in Mr. Vaillancourt's Plymouth, eating my ice cream in rude, gulpy, hoggish bites.
Lookit me, everybody!
I say to myself.
Lookit me! Lookit lookit, there's a father at the wheel!
When I get back to their house, I hide in the bathroom, patting my eyes with my fists, as if my eyelashes have caught fire. Outside the door the aunties' laughter sounds like expensive glass breaking. Then I press my eyes so hard the sockets will still ache that night, when I'm lying in bed next to Cathy, wishing she had a best friend with a father like Mr. Vaillancourt. But she doesn't, and neither does Betty, and it's beginning to dawn on me that God might not love all His children the same.

Three vanillas for my girls.

When the union vote happens a few days hence, I record the vote in my blue diary:
UPP wins in a runoff. Labor negotiations can now begin.
These developments barely register in my household, but I have to pay attention now. Because I'm one of Mr. Vaillancourt's girls.

S
UMMER PERSEVERES
, as stiff and slow-moving as my mystery book, the adults making what I now see as heroic attempts to soldier on.

Mum's waking hours can't be relied on—“lying down,” she calls her sleeping:
I guess I'll lie down for half an hour
—but she manages to fix her hair and make our beds and cook the meals and feed the animals and dress like her lost self. Anne takes us regularly to Dick's Pizza or the Chicken Coop, a restaurant owned by the Kerseys, a fruitful, ruddy family.
Good eatin', that's our greetin'!
We order the “open-faced turkey sandwich,” which sounds like something Jackie Kennedy might go for but in fact features soft white bread and a creamy gollup of gravy. We take turns slipping a quarter down the gullet of the booth-side jukebox, which has metal pages you turn by hand. Same song every time:
We'll sing in the sunshine .
.
 . we'll laugh every day.
 . . . Hearing us sing along must break our sister's heart. The other fave is “Big Girls Don't Cry.”

Anne's a Paul Anka girl who grew up going to “hops,” so after we get home one afternoon she teaches us the jitterbug, switching on WRUM, our only radio station.

“Who wants—?”

“Me first me first I called it!” Cathy jaunts to her feet and catches on in seconds.
Kinda showoffy on those underarm turns,
I think. But still. You have to admit: good dancer.

“Now me!” I say.

Anne trades partners while Cathy tries to teach Betty the hand-hold.

“LIKE THIS?”

“Palms up,” Cathy instructs her Pupil. “You're the boy.”

“I'M NOT THE BOY.”

“Just pretend.”

“I'M NOT THE BOY.”

Meanwhile, I dance with Anne, her body swaying back and forth—draw back, lean forward, draw back, lean forward—her hands tight in mine. This is how it will be, always, with our sister—close or far, connected always. Gone for weeks in summer to grad school: connected. On a solo trip to Copenhagen or Paris or Stratford-on-Avon: connected. Here or not here: connected. I get the hang of the jitterbug, just as Cathy did, right off, the way I'll get the hang of good posture, and thank-you notes, and subject-verb agreement. Anne can teach anybody anything and make them love what they learn.

Another song comes on: Elvis.

“NOW ME.”

“Elizabeth Wood,” I announce, “step up to the front, please.”

“This isn't School, sweetie,” Anne says. “This is dancing. Take my hand, Bet. You're the
girl.
Now, easy, just rock back and forth.”

“She's not rocking.”

“Can you hear the beat, sweetie?”

“Her feet aren't even moving.”

This is how Betty dances: Like a phone pole. A fence picket. A frozen hen. Hopeless. Worse than Dad, who used to dance wrong to make us laugh.

“She's doing fine,” Anne assures us as she jitters and bugs around Betty's stillness, her dainty feet toeing the speckled linoleum. “You having fun, Bet?”

“YUH!”

“Well, isn't that the whole point of dancing?” She is twenty-two years old; Dad's death is so big; she is so small. “There you go, now you're getting it.”

Suddenly Mum is here. For a moment she just watches us, then her toe begins to tap.

“TRY IT, MUM!”

She moves like a gorgeous, weary swan, keeping time, keeping time, keeping time.

“WOW, MUMMA!”

“‘You ain't nuthin' but a hound dog,'” she sings, and we all laugh, laugh, laugh to hear her old voice, a bright bit of her old self that lasts for sixteen bars.

 

Father Bob, too, steps it up in this summer of stopped time. Before Dad died, our uncle's visits had been unpredictable—a death, a baptism, a broken church window, so many things could ruin his one day off. But now he arrives every Thursday morning without fail. Like an apparition out of a saint's biography, here he is, waving at us with his pale hands. We charge at him as we used to charge at Dad, vying for his arms.

He's taking us somewhere—it's a surprise—but first he has his coffee with Mum, and then he goes into the parlor to read from his breviary, which he does seven times a day no matter what.

“Mum,” Cathy says from the window. “Mumma? Jurgis is peeking in the garbage again.”

We look down into the driveway and there's our landlord, his back end sticking out of the trash shed he's recently painted a worshipful shade of green. Square and sturdy as a guesthouse, the trash shed has three doors, one for each floor, which swing open on oiled hinges to reveal a single garbage can for each family. Our cellar, a hair-raising, webby lair with a dirt floor, has similar partitions, the better for the Norkuses to inventory who's wasting what. We keep a potato bag down there, and a few sticks of furniture. The Hickeys, too, keep potatoes and a few oddments, some extra onions. But the Norkuses' section burgeons with great secretive bins of wizening root vegetables, enough to cover all three families in case of an unexpected maraud by the Russian army.

“What do they think I'm throwing away,
babies
?” Mum grumbles. Jurgis extracts a bag of stale doughnuts and
tsk
s so loud we can hear him up here.

The stepped-up garbage rules have forced us into an elaborate cloak and dagger, Mum repacking our trash to hide our offenses—a half-eaten sandwich, a ruined blouse, three-quarters of a bag of cat food in a flavor Tom no longer loves. We squash milk cartons into unassuming flats, squeeze drops of juice from orange peels and apple cores before tossing them, crush the packaging of a new doll or a hand cream inside empty bread bags. But the Norkuses cannot be outwitted. Earlier in the week, like trained hounds, they had sniffed out a housedress from beneath the beef-kidney wrappings and presented it to Mum with an
ash-ash, ticka-ticka, push-push
of rue. “Missus no throw good dress,” Mrs. Norkus said of the piebald thing Cathy had bought for a nickel at the church rummage sale.

“You have to feel sorry for people with that much time on their hands,” Mum says, turning away. She puts Father Bob's coffee cup in the sink, then she begins a quick assembly of bologna sandwiches.

Aha. Beach food.

“Yaaay!”

That's the surprise. Father Bob comes back after reading his breviary and confirms it: He's taking us to Reid State Park, all the way to the ocean, which he calls “the surf.” Anne has packed our bathing suits into a paper bag.

“Have fun,” Mum says. “Behave yourselves.” As soon as we leave she'll go to bed.

Once on the road, Father Bob stashes his starchy Roman collar in the glove box but otherwise remains in full regalia: rabat and jacket, black fedora tipped rakishly forward. At the park he'll change into his plaid swim trunks and walk us to the beach in his shiny black shoes.

On Route 2 he starts a round of Elephant in the Road, a car game we've long outgrown.

“Look, girls, an elephant in the road!”

“WHERE?”

“Where?”

“Where?”

“Whoopsy, you just missed it.”

“DARN!”

“Darn!”

“Darn!”

“I'm just doing it for Betty,” I whisper to Cathy.

“Me, too. This is way too baby.”

But really we're doing it for him. He wishes we could stay little.

“Holy smoke, a kangaroo!”

“WHERE?”

“Where?”

“Where?”

Even Betty knows we've got zero chance of spotting a kangaroo on Route 2, but we all look anyway. Because you never know. If an elephant or kangaroo revealed itself to somebody driving along in a car, then that Somebody would be Father Bob and that Car would be this one.

At the Auburn tollbooth, Cathy shouts, “Collar!”

Father Bob snaps open the glove box, grabs the white collar, and reaffixes it with one hand.

“Go right ahead, Father,” says the nodding toll man. “No charge.”

We sit up like ladies, pretending to be Caroline Kennedy, the privileged daughter of our Catholic president, slipping on through for free. Does it smooth the edges of our uncle's anguish to know his girls are still capable of being thrilled, that they love the fact of the car barely pausing?

Over the years he's taken us “up the pond,” “down the pond,” to the ocean, to the hills, over the New Hampshire border to Storyland and Santa's Village. For as long as we can remember he's come home to us from his parish in Westbrook or New Gloucester or Hampden or Dover-Foxcroft, a new assignment every couple of years, a perpetual lifting up and setting down of roots and friendships, facing the vagaries of a new parish council, a new congregation, a new housekeeper to train with diplomatic precision, a new home in which to settle his big fat fussy cats. With each impending change we've lain in our beds praying,
Oh please pick Mexico, oh pleasepleaseplease pick Mexico.
But the bishop never picks Mexico. The diocese puts plenty of distance between their men and the appealing distractions of family, a distance that means nothing to Father Bob, who has driven and driven from all these places, only to pick us up, pack us up, and drive some more.

At Reid State Park he lugs his Coleman cooler to a heat-splintered picnic table, then herds us into a frigid, marrow-numbing surf where despite his bad back he surrenders to our demand to be heaved into the lacy waters over and over, his hands threaded beneath our feet,
heave ho! heave ho!
as we bullet skyward and then plunge back down, breathless and alive.

He rubs our hair dry with the beach towel, then opens the cooler and passes out bologna sandwiches and bottles of Moxie. “Boys oh boys, aren't these good,” he says. His eyes are watering and pinkish. “Aren't these good, girls?”