When We Were the Kennedys Read online

  “How old was your father?” people asked. Sister Ernestine. The clerk at Nery’s. Our pastor, Father Cyr.

  “Fifty-seven.”

  “Oh, so young,” they said, shaking their heads. “So young.”

  But Dad wasn’t young; strangers mistook him for our grandfather. Besides, I’d done the math: forty-eight years he’d lived before me. Maybe he, like Mum, believed God had delivered three extra children, one-two-three, as a sign of His plan for this couple’s long, long friendship. But God had also delivered to him the Oxford Paper Company, and the foamy river it sat upon. And the long working hours it required. And the poison it put in the air. Three more girls from God might portend a long married life, but a multi-acre paper mill, with much heat but no heart, could make for stiff competition if it decided to bestow the opposite.

  Maybe it was the work.

  Dad at the wheel. Dad in his chair. Dad on the steps with his lunch pail. Dad walking Mum to church. Look at the husband and wife. Look at the parents and children. Our life had been so mercifully predictable. So open to the light.

  Now every day we come home to our mother waking. “Mum? I saw a bird.” Every day she rises, puts on her glasses, tries to look like everybody else. Our third floor feels like the teetering top of a tower, the five of us hiding with our brushed teeth and clean clothes and washed faces, at the mercy of whoever, or whatever, might decide to give us one more good hard shake.

  4. Explorers

  IN EARLY JUNE, thirty-six days after Mum tells Father Bob he’ll have to “pull himself together” for the funeral, my uncle makes a surprise visit to my classroom at St. Theresa’s.

  “Why, look, children!” gasps Sister Ernestine. “Look who’s here!”

  Father Bob’s appearance makes me feel like St. Juan Diego finding roses blooming in the winter. For the first time since Dad died I look up from my desk, feverish with relief, leaping to my feet along with my classmates.

  “Bonjooour, mon Père!”

  “Bonjour, mes enfants.” He strolls to the front of the room, the hem of his swishing cassock lightly webbed with cat hair, his own hair pomaded into a shiny widow’s peak, his fresh-shaven cheeks scented with Aqua Velva. Though I don’t understand what an effort this is, I do see that his face isn’t exactly his face, that his grin is something he’s hauled up from somewhere deep for this occasion.

  Sister Ernestine takes his hat and then sits down to hide her swooning. Father Bob observes the class for a loaded moment, arms akimbo, his small shiny shoes tapping as if in impatience. What will he say? The suspense is exquisite. Will he advise us, as Father Cyr does, to live a life of loving kindness? Will he bring announcements, as Father LaPlante often does, about the church fair or First Friday Mass or the schedule for Confirmation?

  “Boys and girls,” he says. “What’s new?”

  Everybody laughs. This is so, so funny! Father wants to know what’s new!

  Nyew is how he says it, because he is splendidly educated and this is how they pronounce this word in England. He also says pro-gress, with a long o. Possibly he does this more with Dad gone. It drives Mum crazy. Quit putting on airs, she used to chide him, but as a priest he’s allowed to put on all the airs he cares to. He was born loving words and works them like a paint kit.

  Father Bob makes no special note of me except for a quick, sidelong glance that says: I know you’re here. This makes me a hundred times more exceptional than if he’d announced to the class, There’s my niece. He does this when visiting Cathy and Betty’s classroom, too, roving the room, singling out our friends instead of us, which is far more delicious, our glory deflecting to other kids who become celebrities once removed. The ones who didn’t have the smarts to want Betty’s friendship will now pay.

  “Denise Vaillancourt, how are you this morning?”

  “Fine, Father. Thank you, Father.”

  “Margie Lavorgna, I saw your father when I stopped at Fisher’s just now. He’s looking well. Such an affable fellow.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  I remind myself to look up affable and tell Margie what it means.

  “You’ll give your mother my very best regards?”

  Very best regards! Nobody we know says “very best regards”!

  “Yes, Father. Thank you, Father.”

  He has this way of sounding simultaneously chummy and formal, making a child the delectable center of something rare and memorable.

  “Sister, what are the children studying today?”

  “We’re studying the explorers, Father.” Sister Ernestine swans across the room, pulls down the map of the world, and asks Judy Pepin to point out Portugal, and Spain, and Italy. Then, in case Father prefers a more contemporary show-and-tell, she asks Penny Naples to point out the neighborly provinces of Canada and the godless expanse of the U.S.S.R. She does not consult the boys, who can’t be trusted to come up with the right answers on cue.

  “Well done. Very, very well done.” Father beams at the child who has pointed correctly—but really he’s beaming at me. “Excellent pro-gress.”

  I sit there, thinking: Mine, mine, mine.

  “Very nice visiting with you, Sister. Thank you.”

  “Oh, thank you, Father!” She raises a single eyebrow at us, whereupon we leap once again to our feet.

  “Au revoir et merci, mon Père!”

  He shows his small, white hands and down go our heads, down, down, down, a domino-quick reflex.

  “In nomine Patris,” he intones, “et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.”

  We cross ourselves. “Amen.”

  His custom is to visit all the grades, not just ours, and then drive home to Mum and wait for us. As we file to the cafeteria for lunch, I spot him through the great doors. He’s sitting in his parked car, his hands on the wheel, his forehead gently resting on his hands. After lunch, filing past the door again, I look for his car and it’s gone.

  So he’s with Mum now, and here’s what I want to imagine as I finish my first good-tasting lunch in weeks: the brother and sister as their old selves, playing a ferocious round of Scrabble in the kitchen, Mum registering challenges until she can’t take one more ridiculous, unheard-of, perfectly legal English word pointed out in Father’s Bob’s take-along dictionary. She dawdles so long over sorting her letters that her baby brother groans in fake, theatrical anguish. Maaargaret!

  Keep your shirt on. I’ve got something. She’s angling for a seven-letter word but so far that’s happened only once.

  If you had something, you’d have played it—he checks his handsome watch—twenty minutes ago.

  Her cheeks pinken, she gives him a catlike leer, then lays down tile after tile. I imagine that S-I-N-G-I-N-G is the magic word, the g shared with Father Bob’s triple-word-scored ghost.

  La la la, Mum says. Don’t get too big for your britches, buster.

  But that’s not what will happen today when he goes to her. The Scrabble game will sit on the table, unopened. She’ll pour him some coffee. He’ll cry and cry. Mum will watch for us out the window, coming down the street in our green uniforms. “The girls are here, Father,” she’ll say when she spots us. And he’ll pull himself together.

  As soon as Father Bob leaves our classroom in a gust of glory, Sister Ernestine says, “Let’s stick with Geography.” She’s feeling good, flushed with secondhand celebrity, so instead of moving on to French, Geography it is. Her favorite. She’s mad about explorer stories, all those brazen men from Spain and Portugal in storm-shocked fleets they named for saints, their intrepid forays to convert the heathen masses while dumping their ballast of rocks and replacing it with gold, tea, saffron, curry. But the Europeans aren’t the only characters in her collection; still agog from Father’s visit, she unveils one of her favorites, a real corker about the Oxford’s founder, a story that unfolded “right here in our own backyard” about eighty years before she assigned us our permanent, scarified desks in her fourth-grade classroom. Every schoolchild in Mexico learns this story, which g
oes like this:

  On a snow-blown December day in 1882, a young, well-fed Portland businessman—Mr. Chisholm was his name—arrived by train at the Rumford Point Hotel, borrowed a sleigh from the proprietor, and started down the road along the river. What could he be up to? As he made his purposeful way, the snow magically lifted and the day turned clear and crisp and still. The man enjoyed this quality of quiet, for he was an industrialist whose daily life teemed with enterprise. The cold sun poured over this blessed quiet, until a remarkable thundering left the man no doubt of his location. Out of the sleigh he climbed, his eyebrows grizzled with hoarfrost. He shivered inside his heavy coat, ran a glove along the country-bred nose of his borrowed horse, slipped the beast a sugar cube for its trouble.

  “What was the horse’s name?”

  A beat. “St. Jude.”

  “Really?”

  “Well, the Chisholms were Catholic.” (Like all of Sister’s explorers, whether or not the evidence supported the claim.)

  “But he borrowed the horse.”

  “Then I assume the hotel man was also Catholic.”

  In the bracing cold, the stranger’s breath formed cloudlets of wonder as he took in the river’s first plummet, a nearly perpendicular drop of seventy-five feet that split a wild expanse of land ringed by snow-muffled hills. His gaze traveled downriver, where the Androscoggin continued its plunge, one hundred eighty feet over a half-mile stretch, the rocks and boulders smoothed over time by the river’s inestimable weight. Here was Hugh J. Chisholm, our town’s industrial founder, standing on high like God at the beginning of the world, the sound of falling water and a new idea drumming in his head.

  The horse rattled its furry ears. The winter light rinsed the scene with a nearly painful clarity. The wilderness rolled away, and away, until Hugh believed he could see all the way to Canada.

  He’d grown up near Niagara and knew at once: The Rumford falls rivaled that legendary length.

  “How did he measure it?”

  “By eye.”

  “How can you—?”

  “He was brilliant, children. Brilliant.”

  A calculating man, Mr. Hugh J. Chisholm, Canadian-born son of a Scottish scholar. In a less capricious world, our Hugh might have become a scholar himself, but his father’s untimely end—drowned after tumbling off a steamer from Toronto—sent the heart-rattled son into the working world at the age of thirteen.

  Another fatherless explorer. But this time nobody looks at me. Father Bob’s visit has shifted the burden of pity from me to young Hugh. I listen along with everyone else, my chin lifted toward the story of us.

  “How do you fall off a steamer?” somebody asks.

  “He was a scholar. I suppose he was reading a book.”

  After digging potatoes for two soul-numbing days, young Hugh turned to selling newspapers on the Toronto-Detroit rail line with another boy, name of Thomas Edison, a kindred spirit, fellow genius, and lifelong friend.

  “And Thomas Edison, you’ll remember, was the inventor of . . . ?”

  “The cotton gin!”

  “No.”

  “The Stanley Steamer!”

  “No.”

  “The telescope?”

  “Children, this was your homework two weeks ago. Monica?”

  “The electric light.”

  “Thank you.”

  Hugh saw something in paper that brainy Thomas missed. By the time he beheld the unharnessed power of the Rumford falls, Hugh was a seasoned capitalist used to the long view. Well supplied with cigars, he lingered at the summit. Standing a little, walking a little. His boots made pacing traces in the crystallizing snow. He did this for more than an hour. More than two.

  “Where was he?”

  “At the top of Falls Hill. Only it wasn’t Falls Hill then. It was just a little path overlooking that raging waterfall.”

  Beyond the deafening miracle of the falls, there really wasn’t much to see on that wintry day. No sign of human striving but a trifling wreck of a gristmill, a smaller sawmill weathered to the bone. The sun-spangled water ribboning between Rumford and Mexico existed mostly unseen and unknown, a geysering thunder already changing shape in Hugh’s thrumming mind. He climbed back into the borrowed sleigh, afire with plans.

  “And his plan was . . . what, children?”

  Everybody knows this one: “The mill!”

  Did he imagine the smokestacks, the woodyards, the whistle that would alert generations of children to the hour of nine in the morning? Did he envision the logjammed canal, the footbridges and savings banks, the sidewalks and church steeples, the dress shops and the bowling alley, schools brimming with smart, ambitious children? Did he foresee the great steam cloud pumping like a signal at the heart of the valley, pumping like a heart itself, a heart made of sulphur and smoke?

  “Well?” Sister asks. “Did he?”

  “Yes!”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because he was an explorer!”

  “And explorers have what?”

  “Courage!”

  “And what else?”

  “Goals!”

  “And what else?”

  “Imagination!”

  On the return trip, about a quarter mile from the hotel, St. Jude—who cared nothing for industrial daydreams and much for dinner in a well-stocked livery—bolted up a half-frozen hill, upsetting the sleigh and all its contents, including our town’s imagineer, now splatted on the ice with an additional shivery hour to ruminate on the glorious possibility of “building a city in the wilderness.” As the hard ground slowly numbed his hind parts, he thought of his old friend Thomas down there in his bright, warm workshop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, angling a way to deliver light to the masses.

  We laugh at the picture: our portly founder, flat on his backside.

  “That’s humility,” Sister says. But she’s laughing, too. “No success without failure, children. First you have to fall flat down.”

  Hugh got up from that frozen ground and spent the next decade secretly buying all the land along the river. And lo, it came to pass: A city in the wilderness did indeed rise up, year by year, dam by dam, canal by canal, turbine by turbine, mill by mill, block by block—blocks like ours, filling with workers now coming in by the trainload.

  In they went, over the footbridges to mills flourishing on Chisholm land. “To the Rumford Falls Paper Company, which made—?”

  “Newsprint!”

  “And the Rumford Falls Sulphite Company?”

  “Sulphite pulp!”

  “And the International Paper Company?”

  “Manila, envelope paper, newsprint, and writing paper!”

  “And the Continental Paper and Bag Company?”

  “Bags and envelopes!”

  And finally, on the land where the river made its elbow bend into Mexico, the Oxford Paper Company, Hugh’s ruby of modern papermaking, an innovation that eventually enfolded its sister mills and met what its founder rightly predicted as an exploding twentieth-century demand for books and magazines. With the modern century barely under way, our once drowsy, vacated valley had been fully remade as an industrial powerhouse of more than ten thousand lucky, multitongued, deeply grateful souls, their fortunes tied forever to a Canadian immigrant and his headlong dreams.

  “And at some point along the way,” Sister tells us, “your own fathers stepped onto a Rumford train platform and joined their number.”

  She waits for the ending to sink in, a little twist we haven’t heard before. All year Sister has told this explorer story and others, their embedded lessons accumulating thusly: Be brave. Set goals. Use your imagination.

  But today the lesson is this: We live in a town made remarkable by the work of our fathers. Today she tells this story just for me.

  A few mornings later, Mum picks up the ringing phone as we get ready for school.

  Only two days left of our nun-dictated routine; the looming of summer, that upcoming season of free time, feels for the first time e
ver like a saddling weight. Too many hours to fill, and the only foreseeable balm is our big sister hearing our prayers at day’s end. How many days does summer hold? I’ve tried to count them out but they’re too abundant to hold in my head, just as the count of Dadless days has at last gotten away from me. Fifty-four days, fifty-six days, the numbers piling up too fast now, relentless and unruly. I have to count by weeks instead—nearly eight of them so far, a smaller sum that makes Dad seem a little less far away.

  “Is it just talk?” Mum says to someone on the line. She means the strike talk wildfiring around town: contract negotiations coming up, three unions suddenly battling for the right to rep the rank and file.

  Cathy snatches up the parakeet and swings him around by the tail, which he never seems to mind, but her laughter, and Betty’s, makes it hard to hear. “Shh,” I tell her. “Put him back. Get your skirt on.”

  “It’s probably just talk,” I hear Mum say again. “A few flapjaws stirring up trouble.” Who is she talking to? Our brother? Is he worried about a strike?

  My family is collapsing like a pile of sticks because we can’t believe Dad’s gone; why wouldn’t the mill, where Dad spent so much of his time, be doing the same? Because I am nine years old and willing to believe anything, I believe Dad’s death has changed Hugh Chisholm’s mill. Its constant sighing finds me in my bed at night; in the daytime I lift my chin, avert my gaze. I can’t bear to look at it, to smell it, to hear its heavy breath. With Dad not in it, the Oxford suddenly looks like a factory.

  Mum hangs up but doesn’t look worried. She doesn’t look anything. The world isn’t getting through. “Who was that?” I ask her.

  “Nobody.”

  “Was it Barry?”

  “Put that poor creature down,” Mum says to Cathy. “I mean it.”

  “Mum?” I persist. “Is there gonna be a strike?” Sister Ernestine has a thing for English words and the tricks they play. She loves homographs and synonyms and sometimes teases us to spell words backwards. As far as I can make out, the word strike is an antagonym, Sister Ernestine’s word for a word that means both itself and its opposite. Like buckle, which means to fasten and secure, or to implode and collapse. Like cleave, which means to brutally split apart, or to cling together.