When We Were the Kennedys Read online

  Here—.

  A bursting in his chest.

  He drops his lunch pail. Sees a flash of light. Thinks of us in our innocent beds.

  And he’s gone.

  I hope he had a moment of purity, a clearing of all thought and memory, a beautiful surrender. Dad was a Catholic who believed in the saints. I hope he saw the face of God.

  The teenage boy who found Dad grew up to be a stage singer of no small reputation. But on this morning he’s just a neighborhood kid, an older boy whose mother teaches piano. He’s home from college and on his way to Fisher’s Store, where he works sometimes as a clerk. Passing the Venskus block, humming an aria he’s been rehearsing with his teachers, he makes a disbelieving double take.

  Is that—?

  The sight of my father lying in front of the garage door, cap knocked off his head, lunch pail spilled at his feet, must surely endure in his memory. He thuds down the blacktop, hard and quick on his feet, but Dad has flown, he is no longer a person, and the boy can see this. He runs to the back doors of the Venskus block, pounds on a window, a door, until people come running, but the commotion stays tucked inside them, nobody speaks above a whisper. A man they know is lying here dead, his family just over there; if you crane your neck and look up, over the roof of these garages, you can see the skeletal back stairs of the Norkus block, where inside, on the third floor, this man’s widow, who does not yet know she’s a widow, is pouring oatmeal into a pot of water, humming something pleasant and known.

  Somebody calls the constable. The boy with the marvelous voice says a prayer.

  I have met this now-grown-up boy a handful of times over the years. I have watched him perform. He sings in a rich, operatic tenor, heart-crushingly beautiful, in which, I believe, Dad’s final moments still live.

  We were an ordinary family; a mill family, not the stuff of opera. And yet, beginning with the singing boy who found Dad, my memory of that day reverberates down the decades as something close to music. Emotion, sensation, intuition. I see the day—or chips and bits, as if looking through a kaleidoscope—but I also hear it, a faraway composition in the melodious language of grief, a harmonized affair punctuated now and again by an odd, crystalline note fluting up on its own. A knock on a door. A throaty cry.

  Not long after the boy pounds on the Venskuses’ windows, Mr. Cray, our town constable, comes plodding up the driveway of the Norkus block like a horse in mud. Mr. Cray, florid and hefty like Dad, moving with Dad’s heavy step, the first dissonant note of the day. I squint down three stories as I dawdle over my oatmeal. “Mum, Mr. Cray is here.”

  My mother bursts into song. Or so it seems, on this morning in which nothing is as it seems.

  Ohhh, my mother sings. Ohhh.

  For a moment—before the first stir of alarm, that tight knot of suspicion struggling up to my throat—I assume that Mum’s keening will be shortly explained, will become another glinting droplet in the blizzard of information that composes any childhood. Her hands fly to her forehead, she whirls around to face the door, egress blocked by a laundry basket and ironing board that she bulls her way around.

  We’re confused now, and getting scared. What is Mum doing? As we listen to Mr. Cray’s footfalls on the stairs—a sound exactly like Dad coming home from work—the morning acquires a pitiless momentum. Mr. Cray passes the Norkuses’ on the first floor, keeps going; passes the Hickeys’ on the second floor, keeps going; and finally stops outside our door, which my mother flings open, crying out, “He’s dead, isn’t he!”

  Who? Who does she mean? Big Mr. Cray, as formless and crumpled-looking as a pile of warm sheets, appears in our shoe-filled front hall. A strange commotion arises there. I begin walking backwards, something we do sometimes for fun. Backwards, retreating from the noise in my mother’s throat, backwards into our bedroom, backwards, trying to reverse time. Betty waits there, sitting on her bunk, alarmed but uncomprehending, her eyes pale as dimes. Cathy—the bravest, the one who takes nothing at face value—stands her ground in the kitchen, where the morning will take on the shellac of permanence and become the museum piece we will all come back to again and again, seeing something new each time in this preserved, precious thing.

  At last, Cathy barrels into our room, crying, “Dad died!” She’s eight years old, the announcer, the town crier, the loud one. And she’s blubbering loudly now, drowning out the disquieting sound just outside our door. Her army-green sash divides the white of her blouse but her skirt still hasn’t made it from the ironing board. She’s got a hairbrush stuck in her hair. “Daddy’s dead!” she announces again, making it true, understanding it all of a piece, accepting a sorrow she will never quite get over. I cry, too—instantly, violently—but my reaction feels less like grief (though how can I tell, having known none until now?) and more like the moment after a physical blow, that helpless empty space between the blow and the pain. Betty looks at us for a long moment, receiving the news more slowly, her eyes refusing to register the thing we say to her again and again, whispering first, then louder. Then louder. Until she cries.

  Now we all know.

  My mother will explain to us later that she dreamed it—three nights running, she dreamed that our fifty-seven-year-old father dropped dead on his way to work. She will wonder aloud whether she offered Mr. Cray any relief when she met him at the door already speaking the words he dreaded to utter. All that was left for him was to say yes.

  Anne gets the news at the high school, where she’s fully entered a cool spring morning in that alternative, all-consuming world. Hello to her carrel-mates in the English/History office. Coffee in the black-and-orange Mexico Pintos mug. A commotion of students in the lobby down the hall, a faraway sound like muffled applause. A copy of the Lewiston Daily Sun lies on a table littered with stained spoons and spent sugar packets. She glances at the headlines. Yesterday an integrationist was killed in Alabama, and now President Kennedy has sent his brother Bobby to talk to the governor. Across the globe, a country called Laos simmers into civil war; this, too, concerns the president. All this seems so far away, but she often twines current events into her examination of literature, just as Father Bob, known for his stirring, everyman preaching, twines Walter Cronkite into his Sunday sermons. She shakes a stubborn fountain pen, going over notes for her first-period English class, adjusts her hem before stepping into the waxy corridor.

  She must be so happy.

  Her teaching career will prove long and fruitful, but today, in the dwindling of year one, she is probably too young, too in love with literature, to see the folly of teaching Spenser’s The Faerie Queene to a galootish group of “shop boys.” They must love looking at her, this cute ninety-pounder in a lavender skirt and vest, the white ruffles of her blouse leaving ripples of motion like angel feathers as she smarts down the hall in her French heels. Her hair is pulled into a chignon; she wears gold clip-on earrings and a glimmersome bracelet, onyx disks trimmed in gold, a present from Father Bob, who loves buying jewelry for his girls.

  My sister loves clothes—“maybe too much,” she once confessed to Father Bob, who reminded her that as a young man St. Francis of Assisi was himself quite the snappy dresser. And anyway, fashion provides the underpinnings of her teaching philosophy, the bones in the corset: Students are worth dressing up for. When you enter a classroom, any day, every day, you should look as if you plan to accept an award.

  At first bell, the boys storm the room in a great collapse of size-twelve shoes and day-old stubble, smelling of machine oil and Brylcreem. They look older than their teacher (one of them probably is), but my sister—though pretty and fragile-looking and dressed for spring and still living at home and twenty-two years old and not yet possessed of a driver’s license—carries an air of grit that she will shortly put to use in a way she cannot, in this hopeful, entering moment, foresee.

  “We didn’t get it,” the boys tell her about their homework, sixteen lines of Spenser.

  “Did you read it?” Her lipstick today is a shad
e called Peachstone.

  “Of course we read it!”

  “Did you think about it?”

  “Uh—”

  “Exactly. It’s not enough to read. You have to think. So. Let’s think.”

  As they think, someone—perhaps Mr. Cray—leaves a knotted message with the school secretary, a message further tangled by whoever delivers it to Anne. A student, most likely, one of the good girls who work in the office during study hall. This girl ferries the message through war-era corridors to the windowed, oaken door of my sister’s classroom. There has been a mishap in Miss Wood’s household but nobody seems to know quite what.

  Anne experiences a lurch of fear for her little sisters, then looks back at her boys, who are struggling over Edmund Spenser’s lapidary raptures: Mirrour of grace and majestie divine . . . shed thy faire beames into my feeble eyne. Whatever appears in their teacher’s eyne at this moment makes them go silent as snow.

  “Excuse me,” she tells them. “I’ve been—summoned.” The nuns at her college used words like this. Composing herself, she lingers a moment at the too-big wooden lectern, her hands grasping its cumbersome sides. She smoothes the pages of the open anthology, the teacher’s edition, too wide and too heavy and hard-backed. Everything in this room is bigger than she is. “Duane,” she says. Her throat is all dried up. “And Ed. You’re in charge.” Two lunky boys in short sleeves stand up, nearly step on each other getting to the front of the room, where they will lead the class in the cracking open of sixteenth-century lyrics. They’re good with a hammer and she trusts them to do it right.

  She leaves the room at a normal clip, closes the door behind her, then begins to run, her toes jamming into her pointy shoes, down the long corridor to the office, where the school secretary offers her the phone.

  “Come home,” Mum says. “I need you.” She does not say why and Anne does not ask.

  Scarcely one downhill mile separates the high school from our block. The principal gives Anne a ride, offers to come upstairs. “No,” she tells him, trembling now with alarm. “I’m sure it’s fine.”

  Then we hear her, coming back to us, quick-quick, her patent-leather pumps puncturing each wooden tread—first floor, second floor, third floor, quickening as she nears us, quick through the door.

  The clamor stuns her but in she comes. Crying baby sisters. Mother heart-shocked in a chair. Ironing board still heaped with unpressed laundry, a bottle of starch dripping over a soggy blouse. The parakeet dancing on his perch, sugartime sugartime sugartime he sings, nervously back-and-forthing on his spongy feet, he wants out, he wants out, he wants out. The cats have fled to hide inside things inside other things. The shape of our family has been upended and rearranged, its roof flattened, its gateposts ripped from the earth by God’s own brutal hand, and only the animals know enough to make a run for it.

  Stepping into this exploded, delicate thing that will forever now be us, Anne decodes the muddled message at last. So simple, so razoringly precise: Dad died.

  She pulls herself together and, in the lingo of our time and place, begins to “do” for us. Make the calls. Greet the visitors. Feed tea and toast to our weeping mother. Fold up the ironing board. Finish the dishes.

  Someone has to “do.” And so. She does.

  My brother, a married Air Force veteran with two boys, is a pipefitter in the mill, where he gets the news in a similarly convoluted way. “You’re wanted at home,” somebody says. So Barry drives heart-thumpingly home—to his home, a little house in Dixfield, the next town downriver.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks Nila, who’s buttoning Stevie into a little shirt after walking Mike to his kindergarten.

  His wife looks up, alarmed. “Nothing. What are you doing here?”

  “You didn’t call for me?”

  She shakes her head, eyes darkening. “No. Someone called for you?”

  So Barry calls the mill back, confused. “You must have another John Wood,” he tells the front office. In paperwork he goes by “John”—John Barry. Anne is Mary Anne; on Prince Edward Island you call children by their hidden names. In this year of 1963, the mill at its booming peak, there might well be another John Wood somewhere among three thousand employees scattered over three shifts, someone from Byron or Roxbury or West Peru or any one of our surrounding towns, another John Wood wanted at home for a reason nobody has the nerve to explain.

  “Are you John?”

  “Yes.”

  “You work in the pipers?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your father died this morning.”

  He sprints back to his car, drives too fast to Mexico, and thunders up those three flights.

  We do not see my brother often, but when we do, he brings his wife and boys and his beloved May Belle acoustic guitar and takes over the parlor, where we beg for melodramatic rockabilly songs about heartbreak and missed chances in a velvety timbre that Dad called “fearful-grand singing.” But he brings nothing with him today but a powerful sense of dread as he bursts through the door and looks into the drained face of our mother and asks, “Is it true?”

  Our apartment harbors few places to grieve in private: four rooms and only two with a door. Barry drags a chair from the kitchen and slips into the bedroom, where after a few minutes I crack the door open to the astonishing sight of my adult brother, facing away from me, sitting astride the spindly chair, his head down, his arms cradling the chair back, a pose not unlike the one he sometimes takes with his guitar. His shoulders heaving up and down, he forms soft, strangulated notes that stir me much the way those lyrics about heart-broke lovers often do. I’ve never seen him, or any man, cry. For a brief, melting moment I believe I’m hearing the sound of my brother singing.

  Before Anne came home—thirty stopped minutes, a grotesque, ongoing now in which our mother shed her former self like a wind-shook tree—we children aged with fear. Our mother was both overly present—all that gasping and keening—and also eerily far away. We stood at the edge of the kitchen, knotted together, edging first toward and then away from those awful sounds, but because we, too, were yowling and keening there was nowhere safe. “I’ve lost my best friend,” Mum cried, to no one, to God, to the ceiling. “I’ve lost my best friend.” When she hid her face in her hands we mobbed her, petting her hair, her arms, then backed away again as her up-gushing grief took another vocal turn.

  “What do we do?” Cathy whispered. She was standing so close that the heat of her breath moistened my neck. She and Betty looked at me; I was the one in fourth grade.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered back. “I don’t know I don’t know.”

  More hot breath on my neck. “You have to get Anne.”

  But how would I get the number? And who would answer? And how would I tell them what was happening, Mum bent at the waist, Mr. Cray thumping back down the stairs, everybody crying? But then the phone rang and Mum said, Come home, I need you, and for a second I thought, That’s Dad on the other end, maybe that’s Dad on the other end, until Mum squeezed me too hard—my arm hurting, my hand twisted between her body and mine—and then let go because she couldn’t stand up, she had to sit, and then those terrifying, animal sounds gushed out again, and it seemed as if we were all stuck fast, stuck in one eternal moment, a locked trap of disbelief.

  But now, a miracle, Anne is home—Anne’s home!—and that encased moment geysers open, briefly cleansing our monstrous pain.

  The door opens and opens. The phone rings and rings. People arrive and arrive and the day moves despite all, and we children, who had felt the queasy stirrings of duty—At least you have your children, Mr. Cray said—see now that nothing will be asked of us. We don’t have to save Mum after all. We don’t have to think up a way—think! think!—to call Dad back from heaven.

  Childhood is over, but Anne’s home, so we can still be children.

  The rest of that morning, after Dad’s unthinkable departure, fills with arrival. Father Bob, who will oversee Dad’s funeral, comes home to us from
his parish in Westbrook. He embraces Mum, blesses her—In nomine Patris . . .—murmurs into her neck another prayer or incantation or perhaps something only a baby brother can say to his fourteen-years-older sister, something in plain English. Whatever it is, it doesn’t work; my mother sits again, vacant, wordless, her lips gently parted.

  A priest in the room is supposed to smooth things over, heal confusion, make ritual out of chaos. I cling to my shaking uncle, to the familiar scent of his blacks—his rabat and collar and jacket—but there are so many people here now, another neighbor coming through the door, and here are Aunt Rose and Cumpy—my aunt and my grandfather—and two of Dad’s workmates from the mill, and after a while I realize that Father Bob, too, has headed for the bedroom—Barry has gone back home to break the news—where he lies on the bed with his black shoes on. I steal over to my own bedside, terrified.

  Men crying everywhere.

  He stares at the ceiling. Glasses fogged, cheeks gone scarlet, mouth quavering so badly it seems poised to slide off his face. He does not look at me but knows I’m here. “Is it all right for a man to cry, Monnie?” he asks me. He loved Dad more than he loves his own father.

  What kind of question is this? What kind of question is this? I answer with another question: “Yes?”

  “That’s right,” he says, though I can barely hear him. “It’s all right for a man to cry.”

  I don’t know what to do with this information; I’m afraid to touch him, my beloved uncle who has loved me in turn for as long as I can remember. He makes painful, held-in, small-animal sounds, his tears pooling on the pillows I share with Cathy. Then someone—I think it’s Anne—touches my shoulder, releases me from this too-private moment, and leads me back out to the kitchen, now filled with people, tears all over.