When We Were the Kennedys (9 page)

“Mum—?”

“
Now.
Get your shoes on.”

During Religion lesson, Sister Ernestine stuffs us with advice about how to retain our Catholic Conduct over the unfettered months of summer. I stare out the door-size windows of our classroom at the sky filled with real and manmade clouds. The Oxford's work is never done—that's what Dad always said. It runs on a three-shift schedule, around the clock, around the year, halting only for Christmas and the Fourth of July, and even then a skeleton crew goes in to keep the machines running. Otherwise, it stops not for illness or dismemberment or flood or fire, not for a single high holy day. And not for Dad.

Sister is winding up her be-good-during-summer homily—
Remember who you are! Remember your good character!
—but I can't take my eyes off the Oxford, after weeks of pretending it wasn't there. The world looks wrong after a death, its elements tilted, the insides of things exposed in ways you don't want to see; but you do see, you know things you don't want to know. Dad had come home every Christmas with a complimentary turkey—a good fat one, Mum always said, not one of those poverized critters people shot in the woods. Which is the kind of thing that, after a while—whether you passed your eight hours in the blow pits or the woodyard, whether you were a timekeeper or a hydraulics man—led you to think you owned the place. That your work couldn't be underestimated. That the men in Manhattan respected you, maybe even loved you.

I'd expected the place to
drop
with the news; I thought the clouds should shrink to plumes the size of cattails. Dad loved Hugh Chisholm's mill, and that's a fact. But the men in Manhattan did not love Dad, and in the seven-almost-eight weeks since he died, the mill they owned had not skipped a single breath.

 

School lets out at last, the neighborhood ashriek with giddy children. My leisure hours swell with misery, just as I'd feared they would. Cathy and Betty inch back into the neighborhood, hovering at the edges of play, as I lie on the couch all day, reading anything I can find. It doesn't have to be good, or interesting, or for kids. Sister Ernestine had advised us all, as we cleaned out our desks on the last day, to continue “exploring” through the summer. You didn't have to have a car, or a destination, or someone to drive you there. No, indeed. You could roam the entire world, in any century, without so much as a bus ticket. The only thing you needed was a good book.

The first grown-up thing I'd ever read was Dad's obituary. We got two daily papers in Mexico, both published in Lewiston, a shoe- and textile-manufacturing city about forty-five miles downriver. The
Lewiston Daily Sun,
which came in the morning, skipped the Irish obits; the
Lewiston Evening Journal,
which came in the afternoon, skipped the French. So I'd had to wait until afternoon to see that it was really, really true.

Mum had clutched the paper to her breast, murmuring, “Are you sure?” Did she think the printed words would scare me? I nodded yes, yes, and she gave in—a vibrant, etched moment in which I felt like a grown-up girl. Dad's name,
ALBERT WOOD
, would swell in memory to a four-inch banner—a dramatic proclamation to all of western Maine, possibly all of the United States—but in fact his stingy little notice appeared at the bottom of the page in small type, the short length and incalculable breadth of his life committed to about one column inch.

 

MEXICO
—Albert Wood, 57, died unexpectedly Thursday morning while preparing for work.

 

I liked the funnies and had never seen an obit. Other names were listed there, not just Dad's. Other families across a dozen towns had woken up on April 25, 1963, to learn what we'd learned about somebody they had loved just as much. I read it once, Cathy reading over my shoulder, our faces heating up.

“Mumma, they spelled your name wrong.”

“I know.”

“DOES IT SAY ABOUT DAD? READ ABOUT DAD.”

Betty wanted us to read to her.

I didn't want to.

Cathy didn't want to.

So Anne read the newspaper words to Betty, her voice catching over
unexpectedly,
a gross and wounding understatement. The obituary would also appear in the
Rumford Falls Times,
our local weekly, in a version that would spell Mum's name right. It was this version that I filched from a little stack Mum had cut out to send to relatives.

I'd read the clipping a hundred times over the past eight weeks, in secret, looking up the words I didn't know (
celebrant; communicant
) puzzling out possible tricks. Maybe there was a code somewhere. Maybe if I read the words backwards, or cut them in half and attached them back-to, they could begin to mean something else.

That issue of the
Times
had also run an ad for the Impacts, accompanied by a photo of my brother with his bandmates in their matching jackets:

 

Dance to the music of
THE SENSATIONAL IMPACTS
Now at the Rumford Eagles
Each Thurs and Fri
for
your dancing pleasure

 

These two items, opposite news in every possible way, converged as a quiet gnawing in my gut. I took a fervid interest in the
Times
after that—there was so much to know! All those obituaries, and people still went dancing. Frowning through the headlines and sidebars, I looked up words and read about the other people in my town. Every so often I'd find more news of us, either another ad for the Impacts, or an item from the high school (
At the school assembly, Miss Anne Wood gave out the English award
).

And so, after Sister Ernestine releases us for the summer with her warnings and admonitions, the first place I “travel” to is those inky pages, reading everything I can manage, including all the obits, where I discover the same two words over and over: People die either
unexpectedly
or after
lingering.
Fast or slow, take your pick. I read with a kind of curious terror, learning that words can pin their readers to place, confer permanence on the ethereal, make the unimaginable true.

The
Times
comes only once a week, and there isn't that much else in the house to read. We own a copy of
Little Women,
which I've already read twice; and the Golden Books that Father Bob buys for twenty-five cents at Sampson's—easy and colorful and way too young for me now. The other books belong to Anne, small-print books with vaguely risqué covers showing people either emerging from or entering into shadow.
Jude the Obscure,
which I assume to be a book about the crucifixion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, sports a messy ink drawing of an unhappy foreign fulla in a formless garment. Judas, I figure, post-betrayal.

The other covers are equally daunting, Victorian women and rapacious-looking men lounging beneath confounding titles like
Daniel Deronda
or
Tess of the d'Urbervilles,
or soulless covers with fat blue typeface—
Journeys into British Literature
—with no pictures at all. I consider the Mexico Public Library, whose bookshelves I know by heart, but like Mum I've developed a dread of public places. So I stay home, reading what I already have, determined to explore through literature, as Sister Ernestine said we should.

In the absence of other choices, I reread
Little Women,
a book stuffed with Victorian locutions I have to look up again. Four girls, father off to war—the story opens in me like a wound, the March family's troubles nearly unbearable this time around. Meg, the oldest, would be Anne: sensible, wise, benevolent. Like most girls I imagine myself in the role of Jo, tough and bright and living by the pen. Cathy would be Amy, the impulsive one; and Betty, of course, would be Beth: the frail daughter, the lighted soul, the innocent at the core.

I'd always loved books for their reassuring heft, for their promise of new words, for their air of mystery, for the characters who lived in them, for the sublime pleasure of disappearing. But not until now, at the threshold of this perilous summer, have I ever turned to storybooks for instruction. Might we be the Marches, crossed by fate but headed for redemption? Like them, might we be rewarded for bearing up? Mr. March comes home at the end of the story, a miracle I know my family can't have, though I pray for it anyway.

Mum gives me her old, overloved copy of
Anne of Green Gables,
a second printing from 1906 passed along from her own mother. In miserable shape, my heirloom has a half-glued binding and defacements committed by my younger, preliterate, pencil-wielding self. Perhaps Mum thinks I'll take comfort in a fictional redheaded orphan who lives in Dad's homeland, that precious place I've never seen. Anne of Green Gables's foster mother is strict and watchful, just like Mum; her foster father, Matthew Cuthbert, is a big softie, just like Dad. And just like Dad, Matthew dies. Anne grieves hard, though her cracked world mends itself by the end, for she is cocky and strong and older than me and not even real, her life cushioned by a hundred thousand glittering, old-fashioned words from a lady author whose typing fingers can be trusted to write a happy ending. Down here in the lengthening daylight of Mexico, Maine, I'm stuck in the masculine hands of God, who, as far as I can tell, is a mean and careless writer, a ham-fisted hack, a lumbering, tone-deaf pretender.

Then I meet Nancy.

I find her one flight down, in the Hickeys' apartment, which contains many seductions—bone-white dinner plates with gold trim; a spice rack filled with colorful powders; stuffed chairs unmolested by cats—but none so dazzling as Norma's frilly bedroom, the same footprint as ours exactly, tenanted by only one adult rather than one adult and three children. Shelved in Norma's tall, white, snow-clean bookcase are twenty volumes of the
Nancy Drew
mystery series, their numbered spines facing out, arranged in order, alluringly logical.

Nothing these days has order, or logic—but look at this.

“You want to read one?” Norma asks, reaching over my head—she's tall and big-boned, a twenty-two-year-old woman, Anne's old high-school chum who, like Anne, loves kids. She plucks volume 1 and hands it over:
The Secret of the Old Clock
by Carolyn Keene, the cover art presenting Nancy, a beautiful teenager, wearing a snappy little number from the forties, a modest but form-fitting blue dress that doesn't hamper her serious work of prying open a clock face with a screwdriver. On the gladed ground, her trusty flashlight; behind her, a dark, billowing sky. Though the paper in this book feels cheap and middling—not Oxford paper, not at all—I open it to the middle, stick my face in deep, and inhale. That's Dad.

The story follows a foolproof formula that I'll get to know well in the coming days. Old Nance is a fearless girl, lousy with pluck, who can tie knots and decipher codes and shadow Suspicious Characters and read handwriting upside down. I will come to understand that my home-cut hair is not embarrassingly “red” like Dad's, but rather a comely and unpronounceable hue called “titian.” Nancy has a useless boyfriend and two loyal girl sidekicks and her own room and her own car. She has no mother—a horror I can't begin to fathom. The Drews' housekeeper, a plump, pie-making cliché named Hannah Gruen, fills the bill just fine. Nancy does have a father (does she ever): Carson Drew, a dashing lawyer who gladly suffers Nancy's meddling and never raises his voice (
I am sorry that my confidence in you was a little shaken, Nancy dear
), even after her near-miss from a burglar's tire iron or a scuffle with Suspicious Characters on a steeply pitched rooftop. Though I make a halfhearted stab at pretending we're the Drews, the formula doesn't fit any better than that of the Marches or the Cuthberts. Nancy has no sibs, for starters, and if she misses her absent parent she makes no sign.

Even if my family does not remotely resemble the Drews—a reality I perceive before the first cliffhanger of the first chapter of the first volume—might it still be possible for me (individually, personally, me alone) to resemble Nancy? Isn't titian hair a fair start? I tap on our walls in search of secret passages, inspect crumples of paper for tossed-away codes. Every day, sometimes twice, I knock on Norma's door to return the book I've read and borrow the next in the series, my own personal lending library. I cannot believe my good fortune, and I all but
eat
those fearful-grand books, each one opening onto the same sensational landscape, twenty-five chapters each, where nothing worse than a conk on the head is allowed to happen to anyone, including the villains.

I live inside Carolyn Keene's
oeuvre
all day while the sun shines pitilessly on our neighborhood, while Cathy and Betty sleepwalk from yard to yard, playing Red Rover at the Gagnons' or climbing on the swings at the Gallants' or ogling the pigeon coop at the Fourniers', who keep twenty tame birds, all the humdrum pastimes that, for us, have been drained of color.

“Enough,” Mum warns, snapping a
Nancy
from my clutches. “You haven't been outside in five days.”

She, on the other hand, hasn't been outside for nine-going-on-ten weeks, if you don't count Sunday Mass and two trips to the bank. Nobody drives, so we've been getting groceries a few at a time; Father Bob brings a tin of coffee or store-bought cookies once a week. Her eyes shine in quiet desperation behind her blue-frame glasses. “You need air,” she says, more gently. “A little sunshine on your face.”

Eventually I trudge downstairs with
The Secret of Shadow Ranch
(volume 5) or
The Message in the Hollow Oak
(volume 12) or
The Clue of the Tapping Heels
(volume 16) to find a tree to read beneath, reading more and more slowly, trying to make them last. As June melts into July, I start again with volume 1. I crave Nancy's matching clothes and her blue roadster and her preternatural ability to know a clue when she sees one. Like the numbered volumes in which she appears, Nancy's mind works in a comforting, knowable order. She
deduces.
She always gets the right answer.