When We Were the Kennedys (25 page)

“Well, girls, it's our last day,” Father Bob says. He's packed up his portable Mass and bought breakfast and now we're standing outside the motel restaurant looking down the hill toward the falls. “What do you want to do? Pick anything.”

“I think Mum should pick,” Anne says. “What do you say, girls?”

“Mum should pick! Mum should pick!”

Father Bob laughs. “Okay, Margaret. You pick.”

Mum looks sweet as an apple in her sky-pink dress, her white shoes. “I wouldn't mind going back to the arcade,” she says. “And the wax museum.”

“Yaaay!”

At the arcade, where a buffet of distractions includes a shooting gallery, bumper cars, and a fortune-telling machine, Mum beelines for the barrel in which Mrs. Annie Taylor, a sixty-two-year-old schoolmarm, tumbled over the falls at the turn of the century in a desperate attempt to make herself rich and famous. She got half her wish: The display takes up a good chunk of floor space, giant placards relating the story of a life that ended in a pauper's grave.

Mum lingers there, reading, studying a grainy, blown-up photograph of the dumpy little daredevil in her long skirt and high-neck blouse, already exhausted and battered-looking.

“Must've felt like the inside of an automatic dryer,” Mum says quietly. For each day of this vacation she has dressed up, curled her hair, carried a good purse. Her milky skin pinkens with adventure, even one this small.

I squint at Mrs. Taylor's picture, looking for terror in that face and finding nothing but a bleak resolve. She's consigned to something she can't undo; the only way forward is over that booming falls. Mum examines each photograph—they're six feet high—her head nodding slowly. The last photo shows Mrs. Taylor being helped out of the barrel at the end of her tumble, hair askew but otherwise all buttoned up. I can't stop staring, either, unable to reconcile this mousy old gal with her crazy brand of courage. I observe her at close range, as Mum does, committing her to memory.

“You have to hand it to the woman,” Mum says. “She wasn't afraid of
her
shadow.”

“Come on, Margaret,” Father Bob says. “Let's get this train moving.”

At the wax museum Mum lingers again, this time over the new installment, the big draw: a likeness of Jackie Kennedy. We ogle the display as if we've just run into a relative we forgot we had. Arms crossed, Mum eyes the creepy wax figure top to bottom, pillbox hat to spunky black pumps.

“What do you think, Mum?” we ask. She's the Jackie expert.

She takes another moment, considering the boxy suit, the wedding ring, the fake pageboy hair. “Quite realistic,” she says, nodding. “Very good.”

Of course we agree.

A week after leaving our tensed-up town, we cruise back into Mexico at midafternoon, we girls wearing new tee shirts and carrying
Maid of the Mist
change purses we plan to distribute to our friends.

Anne notices first. I hear a little intake of breath. “What—?”

A band of men, each carrying a big sign, heads across the footbridge.

“Sweet Mother of Mary,” Mum says. “We're on strike.”

T
HE
Times:
STRIKE ENTERS SECOND WEEK.

In school—sixth grade under way—I spend long fuddling afternoons learning equations from Sister Yvonne-Marie, a doe-eyed giant who loves math. My classmates are having trouble sitting still. As our hills redden, some of the fathers have left town to work the apple harvest, others to make long, dismal drives to investigate other mills in new towns, new states, some as far away as New Jersey. My brother, having hired a booking agent for the Impacts, is singing all over New England between gigs at the Rumford AmVets. Management—this is how we refer to Bill Chisholm and his cohort now—has dug in for the long haul, and so has the union, and now that the fathers are leaving town in search of work, the tensions have trickled all the way down to children at their desks trying to solve for
x.

I observe my classmates in wonder and amazement: Their fathers are gone. They drum their pencils on their desks. They tap their feet on the bright waxed floor. I feel all grown-up.

To my relief, Mr. Vaillancourt has stayed put. He logs walking shifts at the lower gate with other strikers who hold up signs and sing “Solidarity Forever” and pump their fists at the honking traffic. For this the union will pay him twenty-one dollars a week.

On a blustery day that scatters leaves across the strike-calmed surface of the river, Bill Chisholm comes to town from his house in Manhattan to explain his dilemma on WRUM: profits down, competition up, expansion forcing management to get more efficient. That word again.
All for you,
he insists, then asks the strikers to ask themselves:
What will this strike mean to your family?

What can he be thinking, this third-generation president, as he speaks into the microphone at WRUM? Despite having married the daughter of a foreman from the beater room, Bill lacks his forebears' knack for attracting loyalty. He took office in 1956, a year in which he beat his old man's production by 230,000 tons. Elvis was king and so were we, king of paper, tiptops. Bill thought he'd inherited an American golden age of machine-coated paper, the kind that made magazines shine, a product of Chisholm ingenuity and Chisholm false starts and Chisholm do-overs and massive outlays of Chisholm cash. Hugh the first had built the place up from a raging river and vacant land; Hugh II had gambled on high-gloss and won big; and grandson Bill reinvested the winnings, deploying that Chisholm instinct to build-build-build, against an incoming tide of competition. New steam plant, power station, supercalender, pulp bleachery. The smiling man holding the scissors at one ribbon cutting after another had spoken for years of super-expansion and super-profits, the frosting on the frosting on the cake of our fathers' lives.

Now he sits in an overheated Rumford radio station, sliding those heavy glasses up on his nose, addressing a nervous, angry populace whom he's come to think of as family. But the days of complimentary Christmas turkeys are over.

The
Times:
STRIKE ENTERS THIRD WEEK.

Negotiations break down again over crew sizes. In the grip of a late-September stalemate, Bill Chisholm implores us again:
I have returned to talk to you today because of my deep personal interest and affection for Rumford and its surrounding area.
 . . . “Surrounding area” means us. His voice slides through the light static, steady and sincere.
May I now refer to some comments that have come to my attention,
he continues, meaning the strikers' vocal yearnings for the “Good Old Days of the Oxford”—which he might rightly interpret as a call for his forebears to return from the dead and save us.
We are all aware that many changes have taken place within the Oxford, particularly over the past three years,
he goes on, referring to the massive cash outlay for build-build-build.

Everything in this speech sounds like job cuts, but before we can reflect on the nuance of rhetoric, he appeals to the sentimental heart of our town, our history, our core identity:
A good many of you people have worked for the company a good many years, and many of your fathers and grandfathers did also—as did mine.
He asks for a gut check:
Down the years, work has been steady for you at the Oxford, and your wage scale and fringe benefits have been very fair.

At the Vaillancourts' these words are listened to, turned over, wondered about, as Mr. Vaillancourt leaves once again for the gates with his sign.

The
Times:
FEDERAL MEDIATORS ARRIVE AT OXFORD.

The
Times:
200 SALARIED WORKERS LAID OFF; CHISHOLM TO ANNOUNCE SALARY CUTS.

Mum says, “You stay here tonight. That poor woman has enough mouths to feed. Besides, I want you here. I want you girls here.”

I gaze across to the Vaillancourts' block, the school beyond, the mill looming over it all. I breathe in, but the smell is gone. The smell of bread and butter, Dad always said. The smell of money.

What will this strike mean to your family?

The
Times:
STRIKE ENTERS FIFTH WEEK.

“What will this strike mean to our family?” I ask Mum, as she sets out the real bread and butter we have in abundance thanks to FDR. “What, Mum? What will this strike mean to our family?”

The inconceivable answer: Nothing.

Strike or no strike, we can still live here because we can live anywhere. But we don't want to live anywhere. We want to live here, in Mexico—our Mexico, the only one we know.

I lie awake for nights thereafter, imagining a town in which we are the only residents—the five of us and a handful of others who stayed: old Mr. Arsenault with his hound dog; the Norkuses scowling at the emptied sky; a few nuns waiting to be reassigned; another fatherless family or two, living on Social Security. I imagine Denise's family leaving town forever in Mr. Vaillancourt's Plymouth, off to a New Jersey mill or one in Minnesota, where they'll have to make friends with people who have never heard of Moxie.

What will this strike mean to your family?

The real answer: Everything. Without the mill there's no work and without work there's no money and without money there's no Nery's, no Bowl-O-Drome, no Larry's, no Fisher's, no Chicken Coop, no Doris's Dress Shop, no Lamey's, no Lazarou's Motor Sales. Without the mill, one by one the neighbors will leave, one by one the schools and parishes will close, one by one the thriving little businesses where the clerks know us by name will board up their windows and lock up their doors.

Perhaps others—other kids, other grownups—lie awake with these same fears, for after six and a half tense, troubling weeks, the news travels like light from the lower gates to the riverfront to Main Street and house to house to house.

Our phone rings. “I just heard,” Mum says to Barry. “Thank God.” That's what everybody says:
Thank God thank God thank God.
The steam-plant workers report back first, on the Sunday-night third shift. Pulping operations resume on Monday-morning first shift, and from there it takes thirty-six more hours to feed the pulp through all the systems, producing the first post-strike roll of paper.

At the Vaillancourts I discover that my place at the table has not, as I feared, been snatched up by someone else. There it is, just as I left it. Mr. Vaillancourt can't contain his relief, eyeing his laden table like a man presiding over a banquet, doling out second helpings for everyone.

Unbeknownst to him, I've been writing a new book— with full-page illustrations done in crayon and colored pencil—called
Omer and Brownie: A Love Story.
When I present it to him after supper, quaking with adoration, he blushes and says,
Isn't this something
and laughs that chuckling laugh as I nearly implode with pleasure. Forty-five years later, Mrs. Vaillancourt—Theresa—will unveil
Omer and Brownie,
kept over all those decades, through our growing up and her growing old, and we'll page through it at her kitchen table, which will be downstairs by then, the block bought from the landlords and converted to a single-family, Denise's old room now a repository for objects incandescent with memory, the mill's power and glory ebbing, and Omer twelve years gone.

I'd remembered
Omer and Brownie
as an homage to Mr. and Mrs. Vaillancourt, who were made for each other and called each other “honey” and kissed right in front of us sometimes. I'd remembered a jaunty story about a lady duck who falls in love, despairs when her beloved swims briefly away, then rejoices upon his return. They thought it was about them. I thought it was about them. But really it was about me and Mr. Vaillancourt. And
really
really, it was about me and Dad. Or maybe it was about loss itself—of people, livelihood, love—the things we lose and manage to find again. This is what it is to be twelve, or thirty, or fifty-five: to look back, with new eyes, on what you did not know you knew.

 

Mmm. Smell that? That's the mill starting up. Everybody takes a deep, grateful breath of it. The counterman at Nery's waits in unaccustomed patience as we choose our nickel's worth of penny candy.
Take your time, girls.
The booths fill up again at Dick's and the Chicken Coop, the new cars at Lazarou's begin to move off the lot, the men who left to pick apples are hurrying home twenty miles over the speed limit. Everyone so relieved, so glad to be working, already forgetting.

We gaze across the river at the big fat clouds and applaud. Sister Yvonne-Marie says, “No homework tonight, boys and girls.” Mr. Vaillancourt gets called in—the Number Ten having trouble getting back online.
What competition?
he seems to say as he heads toward the footbridge that leads to Hugh Chisholm's brilliant, opportune, lucrative, fully bloomed idea.
We're the best papermakers in the world.

 

It takes three days to restart an idled paper mill, and much more time than that for a twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher to finally learn the basics of driving. Norma does the honors, taking Anne out in Dad's “new” car, his sea-green Chrysler Newport, our own riderless horse. It, too, has been unceremoniously idled—for a year and a half now, but after a perfunctory throat-clearing it signals a clarifying, clean-engine all-clear.

The car's a charmer; Anne can see why Dad loved it. Stick shift, four-on-the-floor, smooth-moving, and big in back. Like Black Jack, Dad's Chrysler bucks and stalls down Gleason Street, up Mexico Avenue, and back down Roxbury Road on its maiden voyage, but by week's end its new mistress has gotten the hang of shifting and they're off again. With Norma riding shotgun, calmly giving directions, Anne cruises down to Main Street, inviting jokey horror from her students, especially the licensed boys loitering in front of the Bowl-O-Drome, who will swarm her in homeroom the next day and offer to teach her themselves. They call the car “her,” the “green dream,” and wonder how fast she'll go.