When We Were the Kennedys (7 page)

“You girls stay put,” Mum says. “Anne will be home before long.” Anne with her papers and grade books, her dear, rich, healing presence. Mum's best friend now. Whatever time she gets back from school won't be soon enough.

Mum gives us a look. “No bickering.”

She means Cathy and me:
that's mine no it isn't yes it is,
our predictable loop of complaint born of being so closely quartered.
You're copying me no I'm not yes you are.
It seems wrong to act like this with Dad gone, but we do it anyway, ashamed that we've managed to wait mere days before reprising our trivial wrangles.

“CAN I GO?” Betty always wants to go with Mum, and Mum cannot refuse her.

She hesitates. “All right. Put on a sweater.” Betty is too skinny and always cold.

So they start out, the two of them, down the stairs, Mum with her lipstick and Betty in her school uniform, out into the brightness. Once on the street, Mum puts her hand to her hair and plumps it up. She has polished her shoes and cleaned her eyeglasses with vinegar and soaked her rings in ammonia. This vanity is not silly or merry or self-indulgent; rather, it is necessary. My mother is trying, as far as it is still possible, to resemble a married woman who packs her husband's lunch every morning and puts half his weekly paycheck into a savings account. She dreads appearing otherwise, and if this means paying to have her hair blued once a week from here to eternity, then so be it.

She moves down Gleason Street in her pretty shoes, a white cardigan, a pink dress I like. She holds Betty's hand. She walks the two blocks to the bank, where the tellers know all our names. There, my mother removes her first Social Security check from her white pocketbook. The teller, the daughter of one of our neighbors, says, “I'm sorry for your loss.” She instructs Mum to flip the check over; she has to sign. Mum flips the check over, finds the line that says sign. Now, in her careful, fine, Palmer-method handwriting, my mother writes
Margaret Mary Wood.
Right in front of everybody.

 

FDR's check comes as a palpable relief to my mother, but relief, like life now, is a paradox. On one hand, Mum takes great pains to prove she has not been left destitute—as indeed she has not; she saved Dad's money, and they might have kept a small life-insurance policy. Nothing obvious changes. She rises from her afternoon sleep to bake something rich every day; she bleaches our blouses to make them look new; she gives us money for weekly “hot lunch,” money for sno-cones, money to save the pagan babies. On the other hand, if we look too cared for, or she shows herself with a fresh perm or new shoes, then it stands to reason that we've got money to burn, and then, of course, the Norkuses could raise the rent beyond our ability to pay, and bang we're out on the street, atoning for Mum's grand deception, shoeless waifs selling used pencils while our dead-eyed mother toils in somebody else's house buffing the baseboards. (Whose house would that be? What family of our acquaintance has a hired floor scrubber?)

Nobody—not one person—in our town lives on the street. But Mum isn't kidding. Reasonable or not, “scrubbing floors” is her fear.

I absorb these fears during our first fragile weeks without Dad, keeping up my own appearances by brushing my teeth in a military right-left precision, parting my hair with a wetted comb. I'm timid in any case—“desperate odd,” Dad always said, which meant shy—but now I have something big and bright and lumbering: a deceased father. The only solution: Lie low. Lower. Be a good girl. Do everything the nuns say. Get your homework in not early, not late, but exactly on time. Uniform skirt smoothed before sitting down, smoothed again before standing up. Look normal. Look normal. Look normal.

Just as May turns to June, the weather prematurely hot, Sister Ernestine surprises our class by taking us outside for lunch and sitting splat on the ground, flipping back her veil like a ponytailed teenager. We sing something religious as grace, then eat our lunches on our laps, picnic-style. I pick at my bologna sandwich, watch a game of jump rope that I decline to join, sit on the grass with my feet straight out, ankles politely crossed.

At day's end, Sister keeps me after school. It's not, as far as I know, my turn to do
le ménage
—clapping the erasers outside, washing the blackboard, lining up used chalk by size. I come to the front of the room and wait, uneasy. Sister Ernestine is plump and short-limbed, not much taller than I, in fact is a good bit shorter than the tallest nine-year-old in the class. What can she possibly want? Zero chance that I neglected my homework, or talked out of turn, or allowed my eyes to stray briefly to the paper of my neighbor. Has she guessed that Cathy and I sneaked up the embankment behind the convent last fall to snicker at the dowdy white undies flapping on a clothesline? Does she know we peeked into the cellar windows and saw her roller-skating in the basement?

“Your daddy . . .” she begins, and my stomach drops, and her eyes well, and I stand in an icy terror. She's going to
talk about it.
But I hold her gaze anyway, because I love her. She's old, I believe, though it's hard to tell—in those ponderous garments the nuns look no age at all. Her hairline, what I can see of it beneath her starched headgear, shows as a glint of silver, and she wears rimless glasses that sit atop her apple cheeks and jounce a bit when she talks.

“Your daddy,” she stammers again, the tears now coursing freely down her cheeks, “was called home to God.”

“Yes, Sister.”

Her hands are hidden inside her blousy black sleeves; her forehead pearls with sweat. Her chestnut-size rosary beads belt her at the waist, a silver cross dangling like Marley's clankety chains, all the accouterments of her faith unshakably displayed as she faces me with reddening eyes in front of the map of the world. Back in September she'd pointed out the big bright country of Mexico, then traced her finger across a whole continent to find the piddling speck that was us.

“God wanted your daddy . . .”

“Yes, Sister.” Look normal. Look normal. Look normal.

“ . . . to come home to Him . . .”

“Yes, Sister,” I whisper, gulping now, lost to her sympathy.

“God called him home . . .” She pauses, shaking her head; has she misplaced her point?

I gaze at her, then at my shoes. I ask the only question I have, the only question anyone has. It takes all my breath: “Why?”

She lays a hand on my shoulder. “For no reason I can fathom,” she tells me. “No reason at all, Monica.”

I pause, taking in my own name. “Yes, Sister.”

She closes her eyes. “Your poor mother. Your poor, poor mother.”

My poor mother. Despite her blued hair and pretty shoes and secret sleeping hours, her fear has come true: pity even from the nuns, who consider personal suffering a grace from God.

 

We used to rush him at the door, elbowing each other to get there first, cleaving to his scent, to the solid living fact of him, to his haw-haw-haw laughter.

“YOU'RE A BIG FAT EGG!” This was Betty's only joke and she milked it for years.

Dad put on his fake frowny face and flapped his jowls. “
What
did you call me?”

“A BIG FAT EGG!”

Frownier, jowlier: “
What
did you call me?”

The three of us: “HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!”

He sat on our bed at night, Cathy and Betty and I nestling against the time-softened flannel of his shirt, his presence a smoky, masculine mystery amid our dolls and hair bands and pink pajamas. One of the Oxford's specialties was “fine book paper,” yet we didn't own many books; instead, Dad told stories, his voice deep and smoke-scratched and lilted with an Island brogue.
Once upon a time there was a fulla,
a Dad story might begin.
A desperate-handsome young fulla, all huthery and poverized, no money a-tall, foostering through the neighbor's garbage can.
 . . . This “fulla” would turn out to be one of his boyhood neighbors, or else a prince in disguise—Dad always left the outcome in doubt. But if a princess showed up, we knew her “fearful-grand” beauty by the vividness of Dad's words, words I adored because they belonged to our family.

“How old was your father?” people asked. Sister Ernestine. The clerk at Nery's. Our pastor, Father Cyr.

“Fifty-seven.”

“Oh, so young,” they said, shaking their heads. “So young.”

But Dad wasn't young; strangers mistook him for our grandfather. Besides, I'd done the math: forty-eight years he'd lived before me. Maybe he, like Mum, believed God had delivered three extra children, one-two-three, as a sign of His plan for this couple's long, long friendship. But God had also delivered to him the Oxford Paper Company, and the foamy river it sat upon. And the long working hours it required. And the poison it put in the air. Three more girls from God might portend a long married life, but a multi-acre paper mill, with much heat but no heart, could make for stiff competition if it decided to bestow the opposite.

Maybe it was the work.

Dad at the wheel. Dad in his chair. Dad on the steps with his lunch pail. Dad walking Mum to church. Look at the husband and wife. Look at the parents and children. Our life had been so mercifully predictable. So open to the light.

Now every day we come home to our mother waking. “Mum? I saw a bird.” Every day she rises, puts on her glasses, tries to look like everybody else. Our third floor feels like the teetering top of a tower, the five of us hiding with our brushed teeth and clean clothes and washed faces, at the mercy of whoever, or whatever, might decide to give us one more good hard shake.

I
N EARLY JUNE
, thirty-six days after Mum tells Father Bob he'll have to “pull himself together” for the funeral, my uncle makes a surprise visit to my classroom at St. Theresa's.

“Why, look, children!” gasps Sister Ernestine. “Look who's here!”

Father Bob's appearance makes me feel like St. Juan Diego finding roses blooming in the winter. For the first time since Dad died I look up from my desk, feverish with relief, leaping to my feet along with my classmates.

“Bonjooour, mon Père!”

“Bonjour, mes enfants.”
He strolls to the front of the room, the hem of his swishing cassock lightly webbed with cat hair, his own hair pomaded into a shiny widow's peak, his fresh-shaven cheeks scented with Aqua Velva. Though I don't understand what an effort this is, I do see that his face isn't exactly his face, that his grin is something he's hauled up from somewhere deep for this occasion.

Sister Ernestine takes his hat and then sits down to hide her swooning. Father Bob observes the class for a loaded moment, arms akimbo, his small shiny shoes tapping as if in impatience. What will he say? The suspense is exquisite. Will he advise us, as Father Cyr does, to live a life of loving kindness? Will he bring announcements, as Father LaPlante often does, about the church fair or First Friday Mass or the schedule for Confirmation?

“Boys and girls,” he says. “What's new?”

Everybody laughs. This is so, so funny! Father wants to know what's new!

Nyew
is how he says it, because he is splendidly educated and this is how they pronounce this word in England. He also says
pro-
gress, with a long
o.
Possibly he does this more with Dad gone. It drives Mum crazy.
Quit putting on airs,
she used to chide him, but as a priest he's allowed to put on all the airs he cares to. He was born loving words and works them like a paint kit.

Father Bob makes no special note of me except for a quick, sidelong glance that says:
I know you're here.
This makes me a hundred times more exceptional than if he'd announced to the class,
There's my niece.
He does this when visiting Cathy and Betty's classroom, too, roving the room, singling out our friends instead of us, which is far more delicious, our glory deflecting to other kids who become celebrities once removed. The ones who didn't have the smarts to want Betty's friendship will now pay.

“Denise Vaillancourt, how are you this morning?”

“Fine, Father. Thank you, Father.”

“Margie Lavorgna, I saw your father when I stopped at Fisher's just now. He's looking well. Such an affable fellow.”

“Thank you, Father.”

I remind myself to look up
affable
and tell Margie what it means.

“You'll give your mother my very best regards?”

Very best regards! Nobody we know says “very best regards”!

“Yes, Father. Thank you, Father.”

He has this way of sounding simultaneously chummy and formal, making a child the delectable center of something rare and memorable.

“Sister, what are the children studying today?”

“We're studying the explorers, Father.” Sister Ernestine swans across the room, pulls down the map of the world, and asks Judy Pepin to point out Portugal, and Spain, and Italy. Then, in case Father prefers a more contemporary show-and-tell, she asks Penny Naples to point out the neighborly provinces of Canada and the godless expanse of the U.S.S.R. She does not consult the boys, who can't be trusted to come up with the right answers on cue.

“Well done. Very, very well done.” Father beams at the child who has pointed correctly—but really he's beaming at me. “Excellent pro-gress.”

I sit there, thinking:
Mine, mine, mine.

“Very nice visiting with you, Sister. Thank you.”

“Oh, thank
you,
Father!” She raises a single eyebrow at us, whereupon we leap once again to our feet.

“Au revoir et merci, mon Père!”

He shows his small, white hands and down go our heads, down, down, down, a domino-quick reflex.

“In nomine Patris,”
he intones,
“et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.”