When We Were the Kennedys Read online

  Mrs. Hickey shows up with a tuna pie; the O’Neills drop off some biscuits; other neighbors, too many to sort, bring meat loaf, deviled eggs, soda bread. At some point, somewhere between Mr. Cray’s visit and Father Bob’s arrival, somebody asks, “Where’s Cathy?”

  Everyone looks at me.

  “I don’t know.”

  I don’t. Their faces scare me. The whole house has tilted somehow, and it’s hard to see, and to hear, and everybody seems to be saying something to somebody who is saying something to somebody else. Those first few hours are like being caught inside a washing machine, an agitated drowning.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” Mum says, panicking, alive again after a zombielike lull that I have no way of recognizing as shock. My mother, who never panics over anything, starts to shake. “People don’t just vanish into thin air.”

  But Dad did. His soul, anyway. His baptized soul lifted from his body and vanished into thin air.

  On any other day, a vanishing child would present no calamity. Kids always turn up, like cats, playing in a neighbor’s yard or eating in some other kid’s kitchen. Why does it matter that Cathy’s gone missing? We’re always missing. We live in an era when mothers throw their children into a teeming neighborhood with the instructions “I don’t want to see you kids till supper.”

  But Mum is up now, her eyes darting. “Mother of Mary,” she murmurs. All the adults are, suddenly, up.

  Anne puts on a sweater, heads for the door. Where is Cathy?

  “SHE WENT TO SCHOOL,” says Betty, who speaks in stammering capital letters, and just then Cathy materializes from the thin air into which she vanished, having been sent back home from St. Theresa’s, where she’d showed up in Sister Edgar’s second-grade classroom, her hair unbrushed but uniform complete, to slip behind her flip-top desk and take out her pencil and prepare to do Religion, which was the first subject of the day no matter what grade you were in.

  “Why are you late?” Sister Edgar asked.

  “My father died.”

  “When?”

  My sister’s pink quivering lip: “Now.”

  Sister Edgar, a young, kindly nun, stork-tall with dolorous dark eyes and long, lithe fingers, ushered Cathy back into the hall, assured her that her mother would surely prefer to have her near, then sent her home—one block away—with her unspent lunch money fisted into one hand.

  “You went to school?” Mum says, incredulous, sitting down again with the weight of this fresh news. Her youngest child went to school, alone, carrying the unspeakable burden of Dad’s death. Mum is raising good girls and this is what good girls do. Dad’s bold-hearted girl, his favorite, has transformed herself within an hour into a child so invisible she can vanish into thin air and nobody, not even her own mother, will notice.

  Something about Cathy’s instinctive act of normalcy makes the thing that is happening newly unbearable. I go to the place where I, too, can disappear. I slink to a corner—a shadow of space between the couch and the door to the screen porch, with a book, or a sheaf of Dad’s paper, and I bend my head to another family with a different story, either writing one or reading one. I stay there until Anne finds me and leads me back to the kitchen, which has filled with people and a flocklike physical warmth that brings an aimless, muffling comfort. We take turns nuzzling against our glassy-eyed mother, though nothing we do can cure what ails her.

  Just before nightfall, when we can barely close the fridge for all the casseroles and have literally run out of places to sit, a final visitor arrives: a well-dressed stranger in a tie, his hair damp and neatly combed, his face grave with sympathy. Mum is sitting in the kitchen, same chair into which she collapsed hours ago after Mr. Cray said his yes. A silver pin glints from the stranger’s brushed lapel: Oxford Paper Company.

  This man, who looks like Don Ameche, Dad’s favorite actor, is the mill manager. In memory he is tall, broad, grave. My mother, who has not risen from her chair all day, rises for him.

  “I’m so sorry,” he says. His shoulders too wide, his jacket heavily structured. I’ve never seen a man in a suit like this.

  Mum puts out her hands, which look thin and fairylike, and he folds them into his: large, pinkish, full of a confusing authority.

  “I’m so sorry,” he says again. “We’re all so sorry.”

  How has Mum become so small? I look down; she’s wearing the shoes she had on this morning: low, sensible heels, but pretty, with a strap. This is her full height, I can see, but it’s different from the full height she woke up with.

  “You didn’t have to come,” she tells the man, and now I hear an oddly vibrant note in her voice, an incongruous little trill that pierces the fog of this awful day, that softens the shock of her changed height. She is both larger, and smaller, than her real self as she keeps her hands in the hands of this man.

  “We’re praying for you,” says the man. “For all of you.”

  “Thank you,” my mother whispers. “It means so much to us that you came.”

  He stays only a few more moments—charged, bright, layered moments in which I feel both enthralled and muddled, honored and ashamed. An important man has come to see my mother; he resembles an actor; his condolences tip a scale that I did not know existed. His visit elevates Dad’s standing; this much is clear. Which means this man is more important than Dad.

  And that Dad cannot be, as I so long believed, the most important man in the world.

  These intuitions provide my first, feeble inklings about social class and its myriad contradictions, its necessity in times of trauma, its cool, dispassionate lessons about who we are and where we are in the world.

  It seems the whole town has come to see my family today, to offer food and sympathy and reassurance. Why do I not feel reassured? Instead, I experience a profound dislocation, a feeling like slipping on the shifting surface of my allotted scrap of God’s earth, in the country of America, in the state of Maine, in the town of Mexico, my Mexico, the one Dad no longer lives in.

  This morning we woke up as the Wood family. Who are we now?

  2. Wake

  SELECT CASKET. CALL relatives. Pay mortician. Get Mum through funeral. Anne, Anne, Anne, Anne. Did she choose Dad’s clothes after tucking us in, picking through the closet with Mum, hunting up a Dad shirt that wasn’t plaid, Dad pants that weren’t work-green, Dad shoes that weren’t boots with steel toes? Plink, plink, plink go the flimsy wire hangers, so quick they make sparks in the dark, fleeting past like a brief, bright life, releasing the scent of wood pulp and Camels. I see the clothes coming off the hangers, my sister’s pink-lacquered fingernails working the buttonholes, Mum staring at the empty sleeves.

  Anne must have done these things quick and birdlike, and yet when I peer back into the diorama of our stricken kitchen where the news breaks over and over, where three wailing girls set upon their big sister in a tide swell of misery and need, Anne appears to me in stillness. Poised in front of our round-shouldered fridge as if waiting for a camera click, somewhere at the middle of the morning, wholly still, her slender arms enfolding Betty, who leans against her as one might lean against a leafy tree. Like that tree, Anne is the thing that holds fast to the shifting ground.

  Mexico has no funeral home but Rumford has two, Thibeault’s and Meader’s: one Catholic, one Protestant. While the adults go to Thibeault’s to guard Dad’s body, we girls have to stay with my friend Margie, who lives just behind us, one lot over. The Lavorgna block has a long front porch and barnlike garage. Anne walks us over there on the afternoon of our second day with no father, where we’ll be supervised until after the evening calling hours.

  “I’ll be back for you after eight,” she says.

  “WHAT TIME IS EIGHT?” Loud is Betty’s default setting; she never raises her voice from there.

  “After Superman is over,” Anne says.

  “Do you dress up for a wake?” asks Cathy. All morning she had begged to go. Begged and begged.

  “Yes.”

  �
��Is it like church?”

  “A little bit. We’ll say the rosary.”

  “Does everybody know about Dad?” I ask.

  “Not everybody. A lot of people, though.”

  “What if somebody asks about Dad?”

  Here is what Anne figures out, that already I’m living in dread of explaining the thing I have no word for. I can’t bring myself to say the word dead. So she gives me a new word, my first writer’s word.

  “You say, ‘deceased,’” she tells me. My big sister, my own future English teacher, instructing me already: “You say, ‘deceased.’”

  Mrs. Lavorgna opens the door, big friendly smile. A tall, handsome woman, a chatty store clerk who drives her own car. “Hello, girls,” she says. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

  “My father is deceased,” I tell her.

  “Oh, honey,” she says. “I know.”

  I’ve been here many times to play with Margie, but this feels different. It’s wrong and sad for the three of us to be here together, like storybook orphans at a stranger’s door. Anne squeezes us each in turn. “You’ll have fun.”

  We inch into the kitchen. Mrs. Lavorgna and Mum shared a room in the Rumford maternity ward when Margie and I were born, two women having midlife babies, and their passing resemblance—steel-gray hair and cat’s-eye glasses—bestows an unexpected comfort now. As for Mr. Lavorgna (the butcher at Fisher’s, where until yesterday Dad had stopped every night on his way home from work), as he stirs his bubbling spaghetti sauce in the steamy kitchen, we turn him into a faint shadow of Dad, despite his Italian good looks, his black hair and thin, tweezy mustache.

  I’m used to this house. Last fall I’d skulked at the door of the Lavorgna garage, where a luckless deer hung by its antlered head, pink tongue gone gray and lolling, a tableau repeated all over town. Dead, I thought, staring into its unlighted eyes. That Margie’s jokey, kindly father—that any of Mexico’s fathers—could have killed an animal so gentle-eyed, so soft-colored, stirred my insides with mystery. Dad had never killed anything, had been polite to ants and ladybugs; and, because he’d been too young for the War to End All Wars and too old for the one after that, he had never, as far as I knew, touched a gun. Mum, for her part, had a superstition about harming spiders, so we had to catch them in a Kleenex, put them in a cup, and escort them outdoors. My family didn’t like dead things. I’d wanted so badly to touch Mr. Lavorgna’s deer, for I’d been reading about saints and their miracles. Did I have the touch? Could I raise the dead? In the end I kept my possible power to myself, fearful that it wouldn’t work, or maybe that it would. Death—even of a deer—was God’s business, and you were supposed to leave God’s business alone.

  In her customary chair just inside the kitchen door sits Margie’s aged Lithuanian nana. Impossible to know what she thinks of the Wood children spending the evening of their father’s wake in her household, for her English is impenetrable and she’s not the type to converse with children anyway. I recall her as a lone figure, in her striped skirts and babushka, a throwback peasant lady plunked into the middle of 1960s America, condemned to die in an alien culture, gentling her carrots from their foreign soil as if they were a loved one’s tender bones.

  “Would you girls like something to eat?” Margie’s father asks.

  We glance at each other. “No, thank you.” We haven’t been schooled on rules regarding visiting orphans.

  “Ash-ash, ticka-ticka, push-push,” Nana says, or something like it.

  Margie saves us: “You wanna play in my room?”

  Margie has Barbie and Ken and Midge and Scooter. She even has her own record player but only one record, “Orange-Colored Sky,” a threadbare Doris Day song from the fifties that we listen to over and over, taking turns lip-synching and high-stepping while carrying Margie’s mother’s umbrella.

  “My turn,” Cathy says, grabbing the umbrella and twirling it as she dances, a trick Margie and I haven’t thought of. “I was dancing alonnng, thinking in sunshiiiine,” she sings out loud, muffing the lyrics. Betty, our audience, appears rapt, making things worse. Cathy is pretending to be the real Doris Day, I believe, in order to get as far from me—and Betty, and the reason for our being here in Margie’s room—as she can get. Her chopped hair jounces as she mugs and twirls and belts out the tune on a slight backbeat, sounding nothing at all like Doris Day, which in this strange long moment, thirty-seven hours after Dad’s death, breaks my heart. Her umbrella work kills us, though: She hip-checks across the room in her bare feet and pedal pushers, rocking her shoulders, the umbrella swiveling like a live partner, so convincing in this memory that I can almost see the shadow person helplessly swinging along, there but not there, like the child version of herself that she’s already leaving behind.

  Our stay with the Lavorgnas confers a sweet, brief relief, the truth of Dad’s death humming through me in intermittent twinges, like the feeling of grabbing an electric fence on a dare—first nothing, then a blunt pulse of pain, then your hand releases and it’s nothing again. Occasionally I check the back window of Margie’s block to see if the lights have come on in ours. Looking up at our dark windows, it’s true. Going back into Margie’s room, it isn’t. Dad died, no he didn’t, Dad died, no he didn’t.

  When we tire of “Orange-Colored Sky” we come out to the kitchen, where Mrs. Lavorgna feeds us a steamy helping of Mr. Lavorgna’s famous spaghetti. Their table shrinks with the three of us there.

  “How do you like working?” Cathy asks Margie’s mother. This is the kind of thing Cathy asks adults all the time, as if she herself were fifty.

  Mrs. Lavorgna smiles. “I like it.” She works at Larry’s Variety, one of a dozen thriving stores on Congress Street, in Rumford’s business district.

  “What do you do for your job?”

  “I sell things,” Mrs. Lavorgna says. “Then I take people’s money and make change.”

  Nana sits in her usual spot, inscrutable. Now and again she murmurs something in Lithuanian. Ash-ash, ticka-ticka. . . . Maybe about us.

  “What do you sell?” Cathy again.

  “Oh . . . cigarettes and cigars.”

  “WHAT ELSE?” Betty now. She loves lists.

  “Oh . . . candy.”

  “WHAT KIND?”

  “Betty,” I warn. But I want to know, too. Mrs. Lavorgna is the only working mother we know, and maybe we’re all thinking the same thing: Will Mum have to work at Larry’s now?

  Mrs. Lavorgna names almost everything in the store, from Tootsie Rolls to toilet paper. Mr. Lavorgna names things Mrs. Lavorgna forgot. Nana listens to all this, in her chair, in her foreign-tongued silence, observing us the way she observes everything, as an alien entity on an unruly planet where she cannot quite believe she has landed.

  “Where do you put your car?” Cathy asks, reading my mind. Dad’s car is right next door to this block where we’ve been dropped for the evening; Dad’s wonderful car just a few yards away, entombed in one of the Venskus garages. Nobody left to drive it. Nobody left to work. Will Anne have to give us all her money? We don’t want Anne to have to give us all her money.

  “I usually park on Congress Street,” Mrs. Lavorgna says. Nana’s giving us the eye—too many questions! But Cathy’s question isn’t about Mrs. Lavorgna’s car. It’s about Dad’s car. Where will Mum park Dad’s car? That is, if she gets a job at Larry’s. And learns how to drive.

  We’re being rude—you’re not supposed to interrogate adults—but no adult is going to call us on it. Certainly not these kindly people. Certainly not tonight. Mr. Lavorgna gives us two cookies each; we eat them in front of the TV, where Superman will perform a just-in-time feat of life-saving strength. We’re in reruns, and I hope for the episode where Superman, after a rare failure to avert disaster, grabs the earth’s surface, pulls hard, and turns back time. But it’s not that one; it’s the one where he stands there smiling at the bad guys while bullets bounce off him like gumdrops.

  Will Mum sell gumdrops? When we come home from
school, will Mum be at Larry’s selling gumdrops? How lonely the kitchen will seem, the bird gibbering idly to no one, the chairs unoccupied, Mum not there until when—suppertime? bedtime? And then comes a larger, more terrifying thought—Mum not there at all. As Superman flies off, triumphant as usual, my welling eyes fix on the screen.

  “What’s the matter?” asks Margie. “Is it your father?”

  I nod, but it’s not Dad. Not exactly. I don’t know what it is, exactly. I don’t know that life hereafter will be filled with the threat of loss. All I know is that the impossible has happened—my father is gone—which means that God could take my mother too.

  After the lights in our house come on, we could easily walk home ourselves—kids walk all over the place in Mexico, unaccompanied, even after dark. But today is different, and here’s Anne, arriving shortly after Superman flies off into the sunset, just as she said she would. She says something to Margie’s parents, then thanks Margie—she always acknowledges children—and probably speaks to Nana, who probably answers in a nod.

  We turn left out the Lavorgnas’ driveway, walk silent past the Venskus block where yesterday Dad fell down dead. As we turn the corner at Miss Caliendo’s, Cathy asks, “Who was there?”

  “Lots of people. They came to pay their respects to Dad.”

  This turn of phrase is new to me. “Respects to Dad” sounds exactly right.

  “LIKE WHO?” Betty always wants to know about the people.

  “Well, like the Norkuses.”

  What? Our landlords—who shout Make stop you jump! when we kids run up the stairs too fast; our landlords to whom Dad paid rent once a week—they paid something to Dad? We walk in silence for a few more ticks.

  “LIKE WHO ELSE?” Betty again.

  Anne is holding Betty’s hand, Betty’s holding Cathy’s hand, Cathy’s holding my hand.