When We Were the Kennedys Page 4

  “Norma. And Mr. and Mrs. Hickey.”

  “WHO ELSE?”

  “The Gallants.” They live next door, old Mrs. Gallant and her grown daughters and grandkids, whom we play with. A household of women, which is what we are now.

  “WHO ELSE?”

  “Betty! Quit it!” Cathy. Me.

  “It’s all right. Let’s see. The Gagnons, and the Dohertys, and the Fleurys, and the Witases and the Dons and the Fourniers.”

  Our neighbors. Who paid respects. To Dad. As we pass the Gagnons’, pretty Mrs. Gagnon comes bounding out to murmur her quel dommage; we play with her girls and sometimes help her sew shoes in her parlor—piecework she brings home from the area shoe factories. Then it’s turn left at the Dohertys’, and here is Worthley Avenue and our driveway and there are the Norkuses in their lit-up kitchen window, he in an overshined suit jacket, she in her dress coat, a thick dark cloth thing, too heavy for the season, that hangs below her knees. Up we go, up we go, up we go, Anne in her church dress and us in our pedal pushers, and when we get to our door it opens into an altered place.

  Mum is at the table, sitting again, still in her good dress and pearls. We’re wild to see her, but she stares at us for a split second as if she’s forgotten who we are. Then she wakes up, puts out her arms, kisses us one-two-three.

  “Time for bed,” she says, still sitting. After the heartwreck of the first day, the sustained shock of the news, the ordeal of the wake, she’s composed herself for good and at great cost, and her body when I press myself against it feels like a gently closed door. It’s been thirty-eight and a half hours. Any further tears—thousands, millions, in the years she has remaining of her own brief life—she will shed out of our sight.

  Father Bob is still here, standing next to the birdcage, breathing like a gut-shot deer. Mum looks up. “Father,” she murmurs to her baby brother, “you’re going to have to pull yourself together.”

  Another turn of phrase new to me, and it too sounds just right, for we have burst, haven’t we? We lie in pieces that must be pulled together, and Father Bob has to help whether or not he believes he can. He will pull himself together because his big sister reminds him that he must. Tomorrow he must act as chief celebrant at the funeral Mass, his snow-white vestments signifying birth, not death. He must lead the Requiem prayer and sprinkle holy water on Dad’s draped casket, and he will have to do this without breaking down.

  Mum takes his coffee cup to the sink and he gets up. He puts one hand lightly on Mum’s head; the other, fingers spread, hovers over the rest of us. “In nomine Patris . . .” he begins, blessing us all. I shut my eyes to receive God’s grace. I pray for my uncle, who is still crying. We hug him goodbye—he’ll stay the night in his room at Cumpy and Aunt Rose’s house on Mexico Avenue—and then he, too, is gone.

  So here we are, same as always, getting ready for bed as Anne lays out the new dresses we’ve worn only twice: last Sunday, and on Easter, the Sunday before that. We’ll wear them again tomorrow to Dad’s funeral. Anne helps us find our Easter hats. We’re a working machine with a part missing. No Dad, just us, and the cats and the bird, and the Hickeys below, and the Norkuses below that, and the car with no driver, and the mill huffing and puffing on the bank, oblivious and aloof, the mill that gave Dad work and purpose and, quite possibly, the instruments of his death.

  We wash our faces as we’re told, brush our teeth, climb into our beds, and recite our nightly prayers: the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Angel of God, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Act of Contrition.

  “AHH FATHA,” Betty begins. “WHO AHHT IN HEAVEN. HELLO BE THY NAME.”

  “That’s wrong. She’s saying it wrong.”

  “It’s all right,” Anne says. “Keep going, Bet.”

  “THY KINGDOM . . . COME . . . THY . . . THY . . . AHH FATHA . . .”

  “Betty!”

  “Be nice, you two. We can start with a Hail Mary.”

  Mum is in her bedroom, undressing in the dark—or maybe just sitting there in her good dress—wondering how to finish the awesome task of raising three more children, one of whom, at age eleven, can’t advance past second grade or get her prayers straight.

  “AHH FATHA . . .”

  “That’s not Hail Mary.”

  “She always says it wrong.”

  “God doesn’t mind, Monnie.”

  We’re draped over Anne the way we used to drape over Dad. Cathy on one side, I on the other, Betty in Anne’s narrow lap. She smells like flowers, after an evening spent near the flower-choked coffin of a big-laughing, chain-smoking man who once taught her how to hem a skirt.

  “Why don’t we start all over, with the Our Father?” she asks us. “Everybody, now. ‘Our Father, who art in heaven . . .’”

  Our father—our actual father—art in heaven. Down here on earth, Anne is our calm. Our medicine. Our mirrour of grace and majestie divine.

  Later that night, Cathy and I lie on our stomachs, ears pressed to the crack under our bedroom door, listening to Anne and Mum confer at the kitchen table a few feet from our pitcher-size ears. Betty stays in bed, good girl as always.

  “I tried to see around to the back of his head.” That’s Mum, talking about Dad in his casket.

  I can’t make the leap, not even in my febrile imagination, to picture Dad lying there, eyes closed, voice gone, hands devoutly folded, a rosary twined through his work-chapped fingers. Even harder to imagine Mum squinting at his dead freckled head, craning to look for bruises suffered as he hit the Venskuses’ blacktop.

  “I couldn’t see anything.” That’s Anne, confirming Mum’s hope that it didn’t hurt when he fell.

  “Well,” Mum sighs. “He was dead before he hit the ground.” This is her comfort, repeated to all the visitors, repeated so often that I’ll retain a permanent vision of Dad in slow motion, sliding open the garage door, pausing as if to hear a whisper from God, then dying quick, falling slow, and landing soft.

  “He didn’t suffer,” Mum says. I hear the metallic clink of a teaspoon. “At least we have that.”

  Cathy nudges me. “What are they saying? Move over. I can’t hear.”

  “Shh. It’s about Dad.”

  Another clink, a sigh, and then a rustling. Mum is fiddling with the curtains, sounds like, at the kitchen window. What is she looking at? There’s nothing to see at night but our neighbors’ rooftops, and the lights along the river, the lit-up smokestacks and dark sky filling with Oxford clouds.

  I hear Anne murmur something, her voice too low to catch—is she crying?

  “Is she crying?” Cathy whispers. My sleeve is wet where her cheek rests against it.

  “I don’t know. Shh.”

  “Maybe it was the work,” Mum says.

  The man practically lives there, she used to say of Dad, who spent so much time at the mill, double shifts and triples, a wife and two children to care for, then three more girls.

  The man practically lives there.

  And now he doesn’t.

  I hear the curtains slide closed, green gingham curtains Mum bought and Dad liked. She’s closing us inside, away from the steamy sky, away from those other families with working husbands, living fathers.

  “It might have been the work,” she says again.

  My eyes sting but I’m too young to fully know why. That hushed note in my mother’s voice is shame—the shame of widowhood: her husband gone like that. Gone, too, is our appearance as a family whole, gone the illusion of bounty, the sustaining tableau of a man with a lunch pail leaving 16 Worthley Avenue every morning and returning to that same address every night. Gone like that.

  I hear a chair slide back, Mum getting up from the table—to go where? To her empty bed?

  “Quick,” Cathy says.

  We scuttle to bed, still listening. The bathroom faucet goes on, then off. A faint splashing of water. Then the faucet goes on again. Cathy burrows nearer and we put our arms around each other. Her hair feels damp; our pajamas need washing. Then another quiet,
feminine exchange of words behind the wall. The floorboards creak beneath their negligible weight.

  After a moment of nothing, I hear another long, shame-shaded sigh from our mother.

  It has been forty-one hours. We are changed. We are less.

  3. Hiding

  DAD'S SOLEMN REQUIEM HIGH MASS has vanished, utterly, from my memory. I don’t know where it went. Did I banish it myself, my nine-year-old mind deciding on the instant to evict the sight of my father’s casket being ferried down the aisle of St. Theresa’s? Or did it vanish eleven years later, after Mum’s cancer death—her Mass replacing Dad’s for all time, his incense and psalms replaced by her incense and psalms, her bells, her readings, her celebrant—Father Bob, again, his tears dripping down on her draped casket.

  What does remain of Dad’s funeral, vivid and urgent, is the afterwards: our kitchen filling once again with people. Dad’s people, that is, the ones from Prince Edward Island—PEI, that rolling, sea-bound homeland of red earth, a place thick with lilacs and lore and Irish roots so deep Dad still said daycent for “decent” and byes for “boys” and a-tall for “at all.” He’d colored our bedtime stories with characters from that place, Jack and Paddy and a cast of supporting players whose names over time had become, like characters out of Dickens, a family shorthand for warnings, exemplars, qualities of habit.

  Mertie McCormick, arriving on the doorstep “with one arm as long as the other,” nothing for the table. Moral: Earn your keep.

  Mrs. McCarn, grabbing the cap right off Dad’s head to act out a story in which he appeared. Moral: The story is all in the telling.

  The Kneebones, siblings who lived together in existential misery. If Gallacius were on fire and Templeton had a glass of water, Templeton would drink the water. Moral: Be nice to your sister.

  Tell that one, Dad, we’d beg. Tell the one about the Kneebones. Tell the one about Aunt Myrtle. Tell the one about John Quinn and the baked beans. We loved imagining Dad’s blue-sky farm, the ubiquitous dogs and cats, the potato blossoms and the mulish tractor, the guitar and fiddle music, the half-cracked neighbors who came and went. This was heritage, a chain made of words that had always felt a little like make-believe.

  And now, astonishingly, here they are, Dad’s actual people, gusting into our kitchen after the funeral like specters from that storied land. The Mitton girls, Dad’s married nieces, gabby and wavy-haired, with their hats and pocketbooks and Mass cards; Dad’s brother Fred in a threadbare Sunday jacket; Dad’s sisters in their perfumed dresses. A burr in their r’s and red dust on their heels, the uncle patting our heads with his big bumpy hands, the aunts weeping and cupping our chins and clutching their clacketing rosaries.

  “Would you look at Barry! Is he not the fill of his father’s shirt!”

  “And this one! The map of Ireland all over her face!”

  “Merciful God, Margaret! The world still here and Albert not in it!”

  Now Dad’s the one in the stories. “Albert.” “Uncle Albert.” “The red fulla.” Instead of being snuffed out like a spent cigarette, Dad’s expanding, like the trail of smoke steaming up from his ashtrays, and the smoke goes everywhere.

  One of the Mitton girls—the one who’d chosen Dad to walk her down the aisle—puts her pocketbook on a chair and reaches for me. “Your father,” she says. She is hugely pregnant but manages to press me to her heart. “Your father.” Her eyelashes are long and damp. “We loved Uncle Albert. We loved him.”

  Cathy and Betty, too, are being wonderfully smothered by emotional women who loved Dad. One of the aunts—Aunt Mae, short and bosomy and bowl-shaped—tries to hug us all three at once. “You girls,” she cries. Her patting hands land on my back. “Albert’s little girls.”

  Dad’s people help Anne put out the food, they sweep the spring coats into our bedroom, they hug my mother over and over. I cannot listen hard enough; it’s all such a wonder, all of Dad’s stories, the same colors and exaggerations living again. Above the jabber of voices I catch a word or phrase pronounced in Dad’s way, Dad’s stories being told again. Once, near the end of the afternoon, I hear a brief, bracing note of laughter from Mum, a little shock from our old life.

  Bit by bit, word by word, over the length of this fragile, disarranging day, I take in the remarkable fact that Dad had lived a life before me.

  Then, evening: so suddenly quiet, the storybook characters gone, Anne and Mum murmuring once again in the kitchen—I’m left with the thought that I can’t quite shake.

  Dad was fifty-seven years old. I am nine.

  On a sheet of Oxford paper I write the numbers, one over the other, the minus sign in its proper place as Sister Ernestine showed us, “sloppy work” being a horror to the suffering eyes of Jesus.

  57

  -9

  The number that results—48 years left over—cannot be right. Somehow, Dad had lived forty-eight years without me.

  Cathy and Betty have fallen asleep. I sit on the floor of our bedroom in a patch of moonlight, wedged between the toy piano and a pile of schoolbooks, staring at the page. Dad was an adored baby brother who had learned his figures in a country schoolhouse, step-danced at parties, attended weekly Mass, fixed broken axles and milked a touchy cow, harvested potatoes and buried his parents and left the farm to try his luck in the mills of Maine. He took the ferry to New Brunswick and the train to Rumford in the middle of a life story that even then would not include me for another twenty-eight years.

  One hundred percent of my life, all nine years, filled to the brim with Dad. How could I have figured so glancingly in his?

  Addition is easier than subtraction. So I write different numbers. It has been sixty-one hours. After that, I count by days.

  Come Monday, April 29, the start of our fifth day without Dad, we have to go back to school. Anne’s bunk is neatly made up; her papers and grade books are gone. I smell oatmeal.

  “We have to get up,” Cathy whispers.

  “I know. Betty, you awake?”

  “NO.”

  “We have to,” Cathy says.

  “You first.”

  “No, you.”

  In the stillness we put on our uniforms. Cathy runs a comb through Betty’s hair. We creep into the kitchen, use the bathroom in turn, come to the table without being told.

  “I’m not hungry,” I tell Mum when she puts my bowl in front of me.

  Cathy: “Me neither.”

  The parakeet flutters down to eat with us. I run my finger over his smooth, feathered back. He’s so tiny and warm; it’s a miracle that a creature this small can look me in the eye.

  “DO WE HAVE TO EAT?” Betty wants to know.

  “Eat what you can,” Mum says. “Try one bite.”

  She is fully dressed: plaid housedress with a snappy belt, skirt cut on the bias. How is she doing this? She moves slowly, as if under water, her eyes so swollen her eyelashes have nearly disappeared.

  We take one bite each. One more. Then Mum takes our bowls, puts them in the sink. She urges the bird back into his cage. She finds our sweaters, one-two-three, and gentles us out the door.

  “CAN’T WE STAY HOME?” Betty asks.

  “No,” Mum says gently. “You have to go.”

  “WHY?”

  “I don’t know,” she tells us. “Because.” Her voice is wavy and hoarse, a pitch lower than normal. Has she slept at all since it happened?

  We descend the stairs mousily (no Make stop you jump! from the Norkuses), bend to pat Tootsie as Dad surely had, and head to school together, doing our good-girl duty, shoulders bumping, avoiding the silence of our friends.

  In my fourth-grade classroom, I file through the door with my classmates and slide into my seat. Is Sister Ernestine looking at me? I hope not. Instead, to my great relief, she asks us all to stand, as usual.

  “Bonjour, mes enfants,” she says, as usual.

  “Bonjooour, ma Soeur,” we say, as usual.

  She asks us to recite the Lord’s Prayer, as usual, and then to sit down,
as usual. She begins with Religion, as usual. She says nothing about Dad.

  Sister Ernestine, memorable and kind, divides our days into discrete units designed to deliver relief to children who are good at some things and bad at others. After Religion comes Geography; Sister moves straight to Ferdinand Magellan, the explorer whom we read about last week.

  “Mr. Magellan, you will recall, lost his parents at the age of ten—” A silence. Sister stops, clears her throat. I drop my gaze to my desk and leave it there. “But because he had an illustrious family,” she says, moving quickly now, “he was sent to the royal court to serve as a page to the queen.” I fixate on the surface of my desk, a hundred initials and ink marks scrubbed over and sanded out and defaced anew, generations of fiddlers and doodlers before me. The room falls quiet again. I hear the snap of the pull-down map, the tap of Sister’s pointer.

  “Where was Magellan born?”

  Sabrosa, Portugal, I say to myself.

  “Portugal,” somebody says.

  “To what kind of family?”

  Illustrious, I say to myself.

  “Industrious,” somebody says.

  “And Mr. Magellan was the first explorer to do what?”

  Cross all the meridians of the globe, I say to myself.

  Sister waits.

  Cross all the meridians of the globe, I silently urge somebody to call out. But nobody knows. My face burns from the inside out, for I can feel the prickle of my classmates’ gaze as they look to me. This is my kind of answer: an exact copy of the homework reading.

  “To cross . . .” Sister says. “Anybody? To cross all the . . . ?”

  “Countries?”

  “No.”

  “Bridges?”

  “No.”

  “Crosses?”

  “For heaven’s sake, no. Monica?”

  “Meridians of the globe,” I murmur, tender explosions of shame erupting everywhere. Face, toes, everywhere. Run, I think. Hide! But where?

  “Thank you, Monica.”

  Sister Ernestine moves on, recapping Mr. Magellan’s fearless voyage and pointing out the strait that bears his name. I imagine the man at the prow of his ship, heart-shook but determined, chin lifted against the usual dreads: death by mutiny, death by scurvy, death by storm or shark or rogue wave, death by unreceptive natives. Sister normally skips these inconveniences, ending all explorers’ tales the same way: discoveries galore, everybody safe. But I read the whole chapter last week, not just the half-page assignment, so I know what nobody else knows: Magellan died on the island of Mactan, his body savagely pierced by iron spears.