When We Were the Kennedys Read online

  He would have died anyway. Eventually. Of something. Even if he’d made it to the unheard-of age of one hundred, he’d be dead now; many hundreds more years had passed since then. These men who made memorable journeys, discovered fountains of youth and stores of gold and America itself—they all died in the end. In my newfound terror of the mystery of mortality, it is Magellan, the explorer with the gemlike name, who will keep me awake nights imagining death—my own, everyone’s. Forever after I’ll conflate the image of Magellan gliding over the straits in his ship with Dad moving down Mexico Avenue on his own last voyage.

  Everybody dies. And despite our daily preparations to meet God in eternity, I seem to be the only one in my class who knows this.

  I have to get up for lunch, join a line, walk to the cafeteria. I follow my feet, still looking down, over the scarred floors and stray crumbs; I drop into my seat and stare at the bag; and open the bag; and eat what’s there. All around me the din of children with fathers. All around me, regular life, which is loud, which smells. Egg smell from the bag lunches, swampy smell from the hot lunches, a whiff of kid-sweat. Cathy and Betty eat at the second-grade table, way over; I can’t look. My vision shrinks to a small, private circle—the table, the bag, my egg sandwich—and then a hand slides into that circle, the hand of my friend Denise, who passes a cookie to me, a Toll House her mother made special. I grab it, I eat it, I don’t look up.

  In Arithmetic, my classmates have moved a step beyond the long division Dad helped me with on the night before he died; now we’re working multidigit problems that render me mute with shock. Five days ago I understood it all, Dad scratching his pencil over my paper back when the world, like arithmetic, obeyed the rules. Now, I sit at my desk squinting down at too many numbers, wishing people really could vanish into thin air, as Cathy had so briefly done.

  My hair is red and my cheeks freckled like Dad’s—“the map of Ireland all over her face.” But in the classroom I’m not only the sole redhead but the sole Monica in an era of Debbies and Lindas and Karens and Pams, and my very name feels like a neon hat. I’m the girl whose father died—dropped, people said, as if describing an apple falling from a tree; Dad, our shiny apple, dropped, and now I’m one of three fatherless children in the entire school. The other two are back in Sister Edgar’s second-grade classroom, one of them struggling with a pair of knitting needles, the other writing a letter to Mum, trying to close the distance between now and last bell, when we will all three run headlong home to find her still living.

  For three weeks, day by inching day, we leave Mum in the morning, our oatmeal half eaten. Seven hours later we return to her at a gallop, finding her resting on one of our beds. We sit on the covers and tell her we’re home. She looks at us, she listens. Cathy learned her times-fours; I liked my sandwich; Betty saw a bird. We bring her these things as if they were frankincense and myrrh. Then she gets up, busy at the stove by the time Anne gets home from the high school.

  Every few days another neighbor drops off a casserole. Mrs. Hickey from downstairs, the Gallant ladies next door. Mum’s friendly with the other mothers, but she doesn’t have a circle of close lady friends, not even within her family; her father and sister live a block away but her job is not to be their pal but their pillar. When Dad was living she’d gone to Mass and Benediction, parents’ night, the church fair, meetings of the Sodality of the Immaculate Conception. But mostly, like us, she waited every day—in the busy, chore-filled, aromatic shelter of our bright, packed rooms—for Dad to come home for supper. The Gallant ladies linger a bit, they speak kindly, they squeeze her hands, but this is the era before “closure,” before “letting it out,” an era of private mourning. You don’t say things out loud. Mum, a shell-shocked widow trying to find her footing, intends to keep her misery to herself.

  She isn’t sleeping. One night I wake with a start—everything eerily calm, Cathy asleep next to me, Betty asleep in her bunk, Anne, softly breathing, asleep in hers. I slip out of bed and listen: nothing. I crack open our bedroom door and find the kitchen empty, everything in silhouette: the table and chairs, the sewing machine, the birdcage. Nothing breathes; even the cats have vanished. Then I hear something—at least I think I do, a sound nearly eroded from memory, something that might be a voice, or a motion, or a thought.

  Is it Dad? In there, in the parlor? One step, then another, and I’m at the parlor doorway, peering in. I see a human shadow in the darkness. Blood rushes through my ears, I can no longer place the sound I either did or did not hear, and then the figure resolves into the motionless shape of my mother.

  Standing in the center of the room, she fumbles with her nightgown as if she’s just put it on. What is she doing? What time is it? I do not understand the thing to which I’m bearing witness: a widow awake in her too-small house, unwilling to return to her marriage bed. Like a spirit from the ghost stories she and Dad loved to tell, she haunts her own house at night, and as soon as it empties out in the morning she sleeps at last, borrowing beds that smell of her children.

  She hears me. Turns. Her beautiful brown eyes meet me in the dark.

  “Mumma?” I whisper.

  She doesn’t answer. I’m not positive she can see me. I’ve intruded on something adult and private, and so, not knowing what else to do, I retreat gently, as if backing away from a strange but benign-looking animal, my eyes still fixed on hers. By morning it feels like a dream.

  Twenty-nine days now without Dad. We come home from school, a bright, late-May day, to find Mum already up. “Where’s Betty’s paper?” she asks.

  “What paper?”

  She’d been watching us from the window, her girls coming home from school, Cathy and I toting book bags and pencils and papers marked A.

  “Didn’t I see a paper in her hand? Just now?”

  This isn’t the first time Mum has seen a paper where none exists. Betty never has a paper. Not an arithmetic paper not a name-the-explorers paper not a religion paper not a spelling paper not a vocabulary paper. In the six school years that have taken her only to second grade, not once has Betty come home with a paper. But sometimes Mum sees a paper anyway, wishful thinking she’d surely discussed with Dad, who shared Mum’s worry for their eternal second-grader who could knit but not purl, who could not add two and two or reliably spell cat. More than one well-meaning meddler had suggested a home for the “feeble-minded,” a place to unburden us all of the bruised fruit of Mum’s womb. Mum and Dad had met these well-wishers with equal parts fire and ice: Betty would grow up with us, go to school with us, make her First Communion and Confirmation like any other Catholic child, be our big sister as long as she could, and our forever little sister after that. She and Dad had decided that, together.

  “I thought she had a paper,” Mum says.

  I would give anything—all the cats, all my A’s, my immortal soul—to will a paper into Betty’s hand. A paper with a big fat A-plus. A big fat Excellent work, Elizabeth! Mum’s eyes look wounded and wet. Don’t go back to bed, Mum, I think. Stay up, with us.

  Somehow, she opens a drawer. Somehow, she pulls out a baking pan. Somehow, she asks us, “How does banana bread sound?”

  A few days after that—the brilliant weather still holding—we come home to find her not only up, but in the bathroom unraveling her pincurls. She hasn’t been out of the house once since Dad died except for Sunday Mass and once, yesterday, to have her hair freshly blued. Because today she has to go to the bank.

  The three of us crowd her at the sink to watch this palliative scene, Mum making herself pretty again. Putting on her lipstick, she begins to look more like our real mother—a petite, cushiony, dimpled, doe-eyed woman with milky skin and prematurely gray hair.

  Cathy pats her hair. “Mumma, you look beautiful.”

  Mum blots her lips on a Kleenex. “I’m going out to meet my public,” she says. This is her best joke, a leftover from her old vibrant self.

  Only it’s not a joke anymore. The “public” is watching. We follow her
into the kitchen, where she opens the cupboard and takes an envelope from the gravy boat—her first check from the United States government.

  “If it wasn’t for FDR,” she tells us, “I’d be out scrubbing floors.”

  She has said this a dozen times since Dad died. If it wasn’t for FDR, I’d be out scrubbing floors. She means the New Deal, of course, enacted to protect families just like ours. But she doesn’t explain; perhaps she finds it embarrassing. All I know in this hastening moment, my mother hiding the check in her big white purse, is this: FDR is a dead president to whom we are meant to be grateful. I’m used to loving the president we have now—the Irish Catholic President Kennedy—because Mum has taught us to love him. His windblown hair, his Hyannis tan, his pity for the poor. She refers to him as “Jack” and loves that he won’t wear a hat in the cold. She can quote from his inauguration speech. And she looks for news of him: his weekly trips to Mass with Jackie and the children; his dealings with the old, ugly, hatchet-faced Khrushchev (those poor Russians, with a president who looks like that!); his cultured Boston accent, whose wide a’s sometimes creep into her own speech. She loves the backlighted shots of him cavorting with the kids despite his bad back; the shots of all those birthdays and Catholic holidays, a whole packload of Kennedys laughing around a table, their houses adorned, like ours, with a crucifix or a picture of the Sacred Heart. “Jack’s one of a kind,” Mum likes to say, but now there is this other president, this long-gone FDR, to whom we are indebted, so I try to love that president, too, and thank him in my prayers.

  “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. “Yo
ur 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.