When We Were the Kennedys (21 page)

Mum had taken us to visit Cousin Joe, a placid old man in his fluffy bed; his sweet, sorrowing wife, Jessie, brought in a plate of soda breads. She smoothed Cousin Joe's tiny bald head and his white, freckled hands.

A day later, the phone rang. Anne picked up, listened, turned to Mum. “Brace yourself,” she said. This is what adults said:
Brace yourself.
Mum knew what was coming: Cousin Joe had died in the night.

“Brace yourself,” Anne said again.

Again? Mum's eyes fired up; her soft hand moved to her heart.

“Jessie died half an hour later.”

Dropped like Dad. A widow for thirty minutes, then mercifully killed by grief.

 

Lee Harvey Oswald created two widows that day, aside from his own: Jackie Kennedy and Marie Tippit, wife of J. D. Tippit, a patrolman with the Dallas Police Department. As Mum told and retold it, Marie got up at dawn to make her husband's breakfast, their three young children still abed. Officer Tippit's humdrum beat was Oak Cliff, a neighborhood of houses and swing sets and smiley dogs, but at thirty minutes past noon every cop radio in the city of Dallas crackled with instruction. Officer Tippit had just been home for lunch—Marie, again, a sandwich and fried potatoes—and with his full belly went on the lookout for a “thirty-year-old white male of slender build.” He found one hurrying along East 10th Street and guess who it was: the ferrety, slinking, pistol-packing murderer of our first Catholic president.

Officer Tippit slowed his cruiser, exchanged a few irrecoverable words with the slender male through the vent of the passenger-side window, then got out of the cruiser, where he was shot-shot-shot-shot in broad daylight before the pinned-open eyes of two bystanders. Three bullets to his powerful chest, one more to his handsome, beloved head. Shortly thereafter, Marie went the way of Jackie and Mum, a shuddering woman rocked by grief, looking into the eyes of her half-orphaned children.

Officer Tippit lived in a modest house and led a modest life, a cop with two part-time jobs besides. His wife took in neighbor children to clink a few extra coins into the family till. They weren't much different from us, in fact: J. D. a little like Dad, Marie a little like Mum.

But when it comes to the art of emulation, it's Jackie Mum must choose, though she does not leave Mrs. Tippit unremembered. She'll spotlight every scrap of Tippit news that dribbles in over the coming weeks: a photo in
Life,
a sidebar in the
Lewiston Daily Sun,
a footnote in the TV retrospectives that begin appearing as soon as the smoke clears from the twenty-first saluting gun.

“Officer Tippit came home for lunch that day. Imagine, a normal lunch, a sandwich and fried potatoes. She had no idea.”

“Jackie sent Mrs. Tippit a letter. ‘We share a bond' is how she put it.”

“The older boy came home sick with a bellyache. Pure coincidence that he saw his father one last time.”

“The middle one's a girl.”

“Jackie sent Mrs. Tippit a picture of the family. Not a posed one. A candid
.
”

“He wasn't old enough for a pension, poor man.”

And the
pièce de résistance
: “If it wasn't for FDR, Mrs. Tippit would be out scrubbing floors.”

Jackie, for her part, after suffering in front of the whole world, plans to flee to a beach in Hyannis, sheltering her children from the press, nursing her private, serene, noble grief. She's right to leave Our Nation's Capital, Mum says, right to shun the press, right to hide her children. That family has suffered enough.

I don't know if I understood at the time what Mum was telling us—or even if she did—as she peeled back her own metaphorical black veil. I know I witnessed the return of her authority, her dignity, her willingness to turn her widow's face once again to the light. She never directly compared herself to Jackie, but often in the following months, standing at the stove, she might suddenly stop in mid-stir, cock her head like a bird, and say, “I wonder how she's making out.” Never mind that the woman had more money than Moses and would in time break Mum's heart by marrying a Greek billionaire. For now, Jackie's story made Mum's bearable.
See?
she could have said, sitting under the dryer at Laura Remeika's beauty parlor, opening
Life
magazine's multipage spread of Jackie in her pink suit, Jackie on the tarmac, Jackie staring dead-eyed at the Bible while Lyndon Johnson takes the oath.
See? This is what widowhood looks like.
Of course she never said any such thing, but I believe she took a private comfort in the way Jackie had made grief look beautiful.

As we watch TV for three days straight, I observe my mother in a dawning wonder, having spent most of three seasons comparing my family to other families, both fictional and real. We're not the Vaillancourts with their working father, or the Gagnons with their fried toast and heaps of shoes. We're not the Marches of
Little Women,
with their grand piano and happy ending; or the Cuthberts of Green Gables, with their one irrepressible child; or the Drews, lousy with last-minute luck. We are, it turns out, bracingly closer to a family that seems equal parts real and make-believe: stoic and storied and rich, admired the whole world over. Imagine my surprise.

W
E LEAVE MEXICO
on Tuesday in sunlight, the president's death accompanying us like another passenger, not quite a relative but close. In the scant time she's had to shake off her three-graves dream and the drama of the cortège weekend, Mum's demeanor has both darkened and lightened simultaneously. A fervid urgency invades her sorrow. She rushes us into the back seat of her sister's car, hurry-hurry, as if thinking:
Hang on, Jackie dear. I'll be there before you know it.

The downy flakes that meet us at the New Hampshire border thicken and stick and offer Aunt Rose's Chevy a woozy rapport with the road. My aunt inches along the interstate south of Boston as dusk comes upon us in the afternoon, Mum leading a rosary, Anne watching motel signs for a spot to duck from danger. no vacancy, they all say. no vacancy. Life feels mighty perilous in this week after assassination, and our world pulls a white blanket over itself to muffle the shock. Headlights and ambulance lights pulse off our windshield, and finally a lighted billboard at the highway exit, a quick decision, a fishtailing ride up a hill, and then a huge blinking
VACANCY
sign placed there, we know, by God Himself.

We get out into shin-deep snow. “You're a good driver, Rose,” Mum says, shaking. This rare compliment between the sisters signals the obvious: We've had a narrow miss. Mum's dream was nearly right.

We blunder into a bright lobby, the adults relieved to spend money they never intended to spend. One room left and we take it. Two double beds, cots for the kids. Look, Cath, a mat in the bathtub! Little soaps you get to unwrap! Towel racks all over! A shower cap! (
I called it I called it I called it!
) An ice bucket? What's an ice bucket? Lookit lookit, Betty, the glasses have paper covers!

We've landed in Oz. Even Father Bob's rectory isn't fancy like this. We turn the shower on and off. Try on the shower cap. Watch a TV—Kennedy-Kennedy-Kennedy—with good reception. We take turns sitting on an unheard-of length of bathroom counter till Mum says that's enough. We yank the drapes back and forth, staring out at the snow-spun parking lot. We duck in and out, taking turns with the key, until Aunt Rose says quit it, right now.

The rest of this long evening—four-thirty and dark when we first pull out of the blizzard—fills with more firsts. The motel has an attached restaurant where we gorge on pancakes topped with whipped cream, a concoction we've never seen, not even in our excursions with Father Bob. Tonight's shaping up to be the best night of our life so far.

“Can we stay here tomorrow?” I ask, suddenly afraid of visiting the hospital. What if—? (
He's dead, isn't he?
) The fright of the highway exposes other, tucked-away worries.

“It'll let up,” my aunt says, lighting a cigarette. We're back in our room, the lamps on. Aunt Rose sprawls on one of the beds, wiggling her stockinged feet. She whistles smoke through her lipsticky lips. At forty-three she already suffers a smoker's crosshatched face; she makes her own money and drives her own car and brings home snapshots from Credit Union conventions of herself in bright dresses, laughing harder than we ever see in real life, her arms draped over the high-laughing shoulders of other laughers. Aunt Rose was an infant in her cradle at the time of John James's death but nonetheless suffers her doomed family's worst consequence and manages through AA to keep stabbing the same unkillable dragon, the Irish curse. Through the years, and between the lines, I'll infer the humiliations that will precede her full redemption, but on this blizzardly night on our way to see Father Bob and possibly Jackie Kennedy, Aunt Rose is still my “nervous” aunt, tucked into bed with a cigarette between her lips.

“But what if it doesn't let up?”

“The worrywart,” she says.

Betty, who can't read
Dick and Jane,
reads my down-deep fear: “IS FATHER BOB STILL THERE?”

“Of course,” Anne assures us all. “He's fine. You'll see.”

“He'll be glad to see you girls,” Mum says. “Do him a world of good.”

It takes a while to bed us down; we're too keyed up over our fancy digs. The adults stay up, rearranging our suitcases, laying out the next day's clothes. Then Aunt Rose turns in. Just before I drift off, I catch a snippet of conversation, Mum to Anne: “The problem is, he can't get over Dad.”

Outside, the muffling snow falls in great, gorgeous, feathery layers. Is it snowing where he is? Weeks ago Father Bob sent us a treat: sock monkeys, the kind with red lips and cute red bottoms and long tails and little sock-monkey hats. Except mine wasn't a monkey, it was an elephant. Betty got a raccoon. Mum mailed him a card into which she tucked a photo of the three of us in front of the fridge, hugging our sock monkeys and holding a handmade
THANK YOU
sign.

Where did he buy these?
we wanted to know. He went on car trips to faraway places and brought back tee shirts that said
HOOVER DAM
or
LIBERTY BELL
or
ALAMO
. He went all over the country, we thought, just to come home and open his softened road map and point here and there with the three of us crowding his light.

“He didn't buy them,” Mum said. “He made them.”

“HE MADE THEM?” Betty examined her raccoon in guileless wonder.

Cathy was impressed, too—she had the monkey, after all, the best one—but I got “nervous.” What the heck kind of hospital taught you to make sock monkeys? I couldn't make sense of the image: Father Bob in his blacks—Father Bob who wove Walter Cronkite and
Sputnik
and Mister Ed the Talking Horse into his spellbinding Sunday homilies—trapped at a table with (I imagined) a bunch of beslippered
mémères,
his consecrated hands stuffing cotton batting into a monkey's cherry-red bum.

In my motel cot I'm visited by my own recurring dream, one that has plagued me since April: Fire! Our block on fire! Our things on fire! Our animals on fire! Help! Everything on fire!

I wince awake, convinced the motel room's ablaze, and indeed it is, an orange flickering reflection on the near wall. I lie there, paralyzed, eyes hitched open, mouth agape, unable to speak or scream or believe that nobody knows that our family is about to burn alive, and how will Father Bob get over
that,
when I turn over on my cot and through the window find the source of the fiery reflection:
NO VACANCY. NO VACANCY. NO VACANCY
.

 

“Behave,” Mum warns us, as we get stiffly out of the car. Hangar-size parking lot zebra-striped with snow and black pavement and more cars than I've ever seen in one place, including at Lazarou's, Mexico's big car dealership. I don't remember being cold. We've dressed as if for church, our good outfits and Sunday shoes now slopped with wet.

In memory I ascend a thousand granite steps and a hospital lobby opens upward and outward, colorless and cavernous and full of plastic-smelling air. Mum goes up to a desk and asks something of a nun behind the glass. The hospital nuns wear white aprons and brutally starched wimples. These habits resemble those of the first nuns of my acquaintance, the Sisters of Mercy—the “Irish nuns”—at St. Athanasius in Rumford. We'd begun our parochial schooling there, boarding a bus at the Knights of Columbus hall every morning and riding to Franklin Street, three miles from French-nun St. Theresa's. St. A's had been Mum's first and best hope for Betty's Catholic education, something she and Dad had discussed endlessly with Father Bob.

 

Mum:   Sister Stella Maris, she's especially interested in children like Betty.

Father Bob:   Oh, yes. Yes indeed, she's made excellent pro-gress.

 

But then came the hair-raising news: no more school bus from Mexico to Rumford. Dad left for work too early to drive us, so off we went in our new uniforms for our one-minute walk to the dreaded “French nuns” of St. Theresa's. Surprise: We already knew the required phrases, plus the full text of the Hail Mary (
Je vous salue, Marie, pleine de grâce .
.
 .
), thanks to our having cleaved to Mrs. Gagnon's every mellifluous word.

At Irish St. A's I'd known a little boy named David who sledded into the killing path of a car. Black hair, white-white skin, snappy eyes, the best aloud-reader in my second-grade class, with a crystalline, clarifying voice. Sister Germaine herded us into church for the weekday funeral, a small casket as white and solid and uncrackable as a January freeze. Mum yelped with helpless anger when I came home and told her where I'd been, but she needn't have worried; at seven years old I didn't know the box had a boy in it. Sister's speech about death hadn't registered, so I drew my own conclusions. When David's mother floated into church in her half-buttoned winter coat and little veiled hat, I took her for a ghost;
someone
had died and I guessed it must have been her. Her bloodless face, her swollen eyes, a living person drained of life.