When We Were the Kennedys Page 9

  Why did these shoes mean so much to me? Dad had given me my name (Why don’t we call her Monica? he said to my groggy mother, who was too surprised to say no), but this new gift from him unfurled as a conscious pact, a mutual inkling that miracles lay dormant everywhere, that one could navigate the world as an optimist and be rewarded for it.

  Tock, tock, tock went my red shoes on the stairs. Every tap of their heels pleased me. Tock, tock, tock on too much stairs. Which meant the rules must have been different before. Or, that the rules were the same but didn’t quite signify when we had a man in the house.

  Suddenly I see Dad’s car—not the Chrysler but the one before that, a bulbous Pontiac in a shade of green I still love, parked in the driveway where cars are not allowed. And I see the new car, too, gleaming on the swept asphalt. I see our garbage tossed into the trash shed uninspected. I see bags and bags of groceries floating unmolested past the first-floor landing. I hear Dad’s steadfast tread. If those aren’t the most desperate-foolish rules, say the footfalls of a man with a thundering laugh, a man with Popeye forearms, a man who works sixteen hours at a crack and holds tabby cats cradle-style. Make all the rules you want, fulla; they don’t apply to me.

  Because Denise insists that I walk her downstairs after our special pork-chop supper, Mum gives me the rent money—“As long as you’re going.” Dad had always paid the rent himself, but now, on Saturday nights, Cathy and I draw straws; the loser has to creep downstairs with seven dollars and hand it over in the cabbage-y smog of the Norkus kitchen. That’s our chore. Our contribution to the running of our fragile household.

  Tonight the job is mine because I’ve had the honor of hosting a friend. Denise creeps down the stairs ahead of me, peering around each landing. “They don’t yell on the way down,” I assure her, but she can’t be convinced. On the bottom landing no Norkuses appear, but Denise sneaks past on her toes anyway. As she hits the driveway and makes her dash for home, I heave a great sigh—the kind of noise you might hear at a guillotine—and knock on the Norkuses’ door.

  “Thank you, Munnie,” says Mrs. Norkus as I thrust the bills into her hand.

  Everything down here in cabbageland emanates Old World mystery, vaguely Communist, even as we transact the American capitalist exchange of money for shelter. “Seven dulla,” Mrs. Norkus whispers, filling out the receipt. I wait, wordless. She says nothing of the NO BRING FRIEND infraction from earlier. For all their bluster, the Norkuses’ anger doesn’t accumulate; they keep starting over from scratch.

  “Seven dulla, seven dulla.” Her handwriting, like everything else I associate with her, is deliberate, effortful, correct. She gives me the receipt. “You wait.” She opens a box, lifts out a chocolate. “You take,” she says. I hold out my hand as ordered. Mrs. Norkus places the droplet in my palm, whereupon I thank her as I’ve been taught, stuff the chocolate into my mouth, and make a break for the door.

  When I get back upstairs, Anne’s washing Betty’s hair and Cathy’s in the parlor watching the Jackie Gleason Show. Mum is nowhere, with Tom purring in her arms, nowhere. She looks at me and comes to. She smiles. “What a good eater.” She means Denise, who cleaned her plate as her mother had warned her to.

  “It was so good, Mum. She liked it.”

  “Do you get pork chops over there?”

  I shake my head no, even though she knows this already.

  “Mum?” A pause. “Mumma?”

  She looks at me.

  “Why do we live in a block?”

  This question has never occurred to me until now. After the day’s Norkus drama, seeing Mum staring at nothing in a kitchen that costs seven dollars, I wonder: Why wouldn’t Mum want her own kitchen, her own window boxes, her own trash cans, her own stairs on which her kids can run wild?

  So she tells me a story—not all of it on this particular night; not all of it in any case—but some of it. Enough. All her life, she believed in God. She believed in Jesus and Mary and Joseph and St. Anthony and the pope and the president. But she also believed, shyly, in her own turbulent intuitions. One of these intuitions, rooted in a dream, was that if she and Dad bought a house, something bad would happen to him. This warning had lived in her, undimmed through all their years in the Norkus block, until Dad came home from work, a year before he died, with three words: Contract. Overwhelmingly. Approved.

  Overwhelmingly, Dad said. And why not? The Oxford at peak production then, the town’s population growing, the schools so bloated with fourth-graders that both Rumford and Mexico had plans to build a new high school.

  Mum said, Maybe it’s time.

  She didn’t have to ask Dad twice. He longed for his own garden to replace his backyard patch at Aunt Rose and Cumpy’s. He wanted his own soil. His own fence. His own claim on a quarter acre of sunshine.

  They didn’t look far—Mum didn’t want to move far—and the right house did not appear. Then, in February, two months before Dad died, snow still banked over the Norkuses’ petunia planters, Mum got wind of a house up the street that had been sold without a FOR SALE sign. The Desjardins place: single-family, two stories, big yard, corner lot.

  “It would have been perfect,” Mum says. “I couldn’t believe that house was gone. On the market a month and I never heard a word.” She puts down the cat, shakes her head. “I was just sick about it. Sold right under my nose.”

  Her crushing regret, however, had turned out to be a blessing in disguise—didn’t everything?—for shortly after losing out on the Desjardins place, she dreamed Dad’s death. Dreamed that her fifty-seven-year-old husband dropped dead on his way to work.

  Then she dreamed it again. And once more. Then it happened.

  For nearly three decades she’d declined to buy a house in case something bad befell him—a mill accident her most reasonable guess—and just when she thought it safe to succumb to her heart’s desire, her fear came true.

  “Imagine if we’d bought it,” she says, her arms twining me now. She’s still mad at Mrs. Norkus for peering into the grocery bag; but she’s also glad to have given my friend a classy meal as recompense, and glad to have a place to live, a place she knows, and she’s a little sorry to have gone all balled up over something as silly as beef kidney. She’s “offered it up”—to God, who apparently has some secret use for her troubles. “Can you imagine,” she murmurs, “a big house like that to manage all by ourselves? Think of the mortgage to pay, storm windows to put up, a boiler on the fritz.”

  What I think: my own room, with two windows.

  “Oh, it haunts me,” she says, shuddering. “That near-miss.” She’s speaking of God’s benevolence, the hand of the Father guiding those other people to the Desjardins place, preventing the soon-to-be widow from getting in too deep. “It’s a miracle I didn’t hear about it,” she whispers. “We’d have bought it for sure.” I linger in her embrace, as she adds, “God provides, Monnie. We don’t always see it until after.”

  It does not occur to her, and certainly not to me, that had she and Dad bought a house at the beginning, we’d have a paid roof over our heads. Instead, as I’m washing my face before bed, I glance out the bathroom window, which looks directly up the street to the Desjardins place. The yard is full of toys. “Move,” Cathy says, elbowing past me to get a towel. “Move yourself,” I tell her. That’s mine no it isn’t yes it is. Believing we’ve been touched by miracle, I stare at the large lighted windows of our averted calamity, thinking: Thank God thank God thank God.

  The Norkuses, of course, had sorrows of their own. “No see my mamma again,” Mrs. Norkus had told Mum one day, when asked about her family back in Lithuania. The Norkuses let down their guard sometimes, punctuated their soldiering fortitude with glints of kindness. I feared their mossy English, their owlish stares, their curtains that looked spun by giant spiders, but it was Jurgis, it is said, who’d asked to hold the newborn me on my first day home. When I was three I’d named Mum’s parakeet Jurgis, apparently detecting something in our landlord that was feathery and
soft and aching to communicate. The Norkuses gave us squash and tomatoes from the forbidden garden; they’d once invited us to their camp at Roxbury Pond, urging us to glory in the view, the water, the new spindles on the porch rail. More swim in pond! they’d called. More eat hamburg! We’d come back baffled and sunburned, Dad chuckling at the wheel, our trunk stuffed with freshly cut flowers.

  What had they thought of Dad? Had they seen him as a fellow traveler who’d abandoned a bucolic, beloved, but dead-end homeland to embrace an industrial rebirth? Or did they view his journey, a brief ferry ride and then a train to prosperity and happiness, as the voyage of a pretender, a man who had it too easy? Is it possible they were cowed by Dad’s painless passage, the way he slipped into town already speaking the language, so comfortable in his skin?

  The Norkuses, who missed nothing, surely heard Cathy tromping down the stairs on the day Dad died. They saw her pass the landing in her school uniform. Watched her trudge down the driveway and head toward school. What did they think of this? There was so much of America they didn’t understand; every Halloween they’d stare at us with pained and baffled faces, then pelt us with nickels before slamming the door. Was this—this child headed off to school a half-hour after her father is discovered dead twenty yards away—another indecipherable American tradition they had failed to accommodate?

  The Norkuses never said of Dad, “so young, oh so young.” They’d gone quiet over the news, and chastened. Mrs. Norkus probably sent up some blynys. They’d liked Dad; who didn’t? But to the Norkuses our tragedy must have seemed ordinary enough. Fifty-seven years: not a long life, but not a short one, either. A gentle sorrow, in the grander scheme of sorrow.

  How easily Dad had acquired what he wanted: work, spouse, children. The Norkuses, too, had acquired these things (though their children were now grown and gone), but unlike Dad—who came here healthy and well shod—they’d left so much more behind, their past gone for good. The Norkuses picked through our stuff and tossed almost nothing themselves, for they looked upon the trash shed as a repository for second chances.

  We need our things. We protect our things. We make rules around them if we have to. The Norkuses guarded their stairs because they loved their stairs. They had bought those stairs, and the building attached to them, by leaving their mammas and their cherry trees and their big blue sky and their language and their nation. They guarded their garden because they loved their garden. Every carrot and parsnip and rhubarb stem. They guarded their driveway because they loved their driveway. Every crack and fissure and shiny knot of frost-heaved tar.

  It took years for me to know this, to see how loss can tighten your grip on the things still possible to hold.

  6. Paper

  THE NORKUSES HAD THEIR petunia planters, their trash shed, their garden, their stairs. What I had was paper. Oxford paper. Exquisite paper, blindingly white. Heavy enough that I knew I held a prideful product, not so heavy that it seemed too good to use. Sleek to the touch, but not too sleek. Oxford paper took the weight of a pencil with just the right give, and even the leakiest ink flowed upon it without smudging.

  This is what I had, though I did not think to guard it. We ran short of sugar sometimes, or milk, or bird gravel, or shampoo. But no household in our town ever ran short of paper.

  On paper day, the last Thursday of every month, Dad would come home at five-thirty—after a shift and a quarter, his foreman’s hours. His clothes would be dampish, his boots sawdusty, his hands scraped and hard-callused, but he smelled like soap, for he’d taken a shower before coming home. A shower! I don’t know what we girls imagined—we’d never seen a shower in person—but, my goodness, a shower. How filthy he must have gotten, day after day, to require one before facing Mum in her clean housedress, her hands scented with Jergens almond-cherry cream.

  “Here he comes,” Mum would say, hearing him on the stairs. “Go!”

  Me first me first me first! We charged him like a flock of crows, pillaging his pockets for candy.

  “Hey, hey, hold your horses,” he laughed, which is how we remembered it was paper day.

  One-two-three we stepped away and saw that under one arm was tucked his lunch pail and a bag of groceries from Fisher’s; under the other, a glowing packet of paper, a thing of creaseless beauty, the clean, high-style product of Dad’s grubby, overheated work. He brought it in, placed it on the kitchen table.

  Dad made that.

  Oh, that gorgeous, spotless stuff. It was, simply, beautiful. Though it seemed a shame to tear open the pack and dig in—we had plenty extra in the cupboard—dig in we did, working through a whole ream every few weeks.

  Cathy and I drew pictures: nuns and angels; God the Father; God the Son; God the Holy Ghost with his flappy, histrionic wings. We drew cats and parakeets and neighbor dogs in idealized amity, holding hands, paw to wing. We drew ourselves, and Mum and Dad, and Anne in her pretty clothes. We drew Father Bob in his cassock, Barry playing his May Belle. We drew Cumpy with his ever-present pipe; and Aunt Rose, who worked at the Credit Union, with her jangling keys and cigarettes and new car. We drew our neighborhood, all the houses and flat-topped blocks, the neighbors and their swing sets and their porch chairs. We drew the mill, too: the stacks and conveyors and brick walls and smoky windows and the colorful hills beyond. We drew our world, over and over and over, and other worlds, too, filled with horses and sunsets and princes and castles and ladies with high hair and capacious, sky-pink ball gowns.

  Betty drew snowmen.

  Three circles, and a straight-line mouth that sliced the snowman’s face in half and jutted past both sides. Then buttons, huge buttons almost as big as the original circles. First it didn’t bother us, then it did.

  “Draw something else, Bet.”

  “OKAY.”

  “That’s a snowman. Draw a house, Bet. Like this.”

  “LIKE THIS.”

  “That’s another snowman. What are those things?”

  “BUTTONS.”

  “Make them like this, Bet. See? Buttons are small.”

  “LIKE THIS.”

  “That’s the same thing you just drew.”

  “NO IT ISN’T.”

  “Yes it is. Another exact-same snowman with a line mouth and exact-same buttons. It looks like a little snowman inside a big snowman.”

  “NO IT DOESN’T.” Her voice was loud but forbearing. She never once got mad at us. She suffered our corrections as if we were a song on the radio she didn’t exactly enjoy but deemed not quite bothersome enough to turn off.

  “Draw a house, Bet. Look, it’s easy.”

  “Please, Bet? Pleeeeease?”

  “Pleasepleaseplease draw a house.”

  But she didn’t draw houses. Or God or princesses or trees or cats. She drew dozens of snowmen. Hundreds. Thousands.

  Now that’s some fearful-grand snowman, Dad said.

  Three toppling circles with more circles inside. Over and over. For years she did this. And why not? We had paper to spare, and more where that came from. Our parents allotted us one pair of shoes and bathed us all three in the same lukewarm tub, but when it came to paper we were allowed to be immoderate, shameless wastrels. We used one side. We started over. Flip, flip, flip went the pages, the elegant product of the beast across the river that pumped and pumped as we drew and drew and tossed the pages away and away because paper would come to us, like the sanctifying grace of God, free and forever.

  The blinding-white paper was one kind; there were others, many others, with fetching names like Mainefold Enamel and Oxford Bright. Our paper got shipped all over the world, some of it in packaged sheets, some in rolls higher and wider than our parlor on Worthley Avenue. It left town in trucks and freight cars every day by the hundreds of tons, then reappeared in the world as the pages of a fourth-grade spelling book, or the label on a soup can, or an issue of a financial journal that presaged a coming decline in American manufacturing that nobody—not here, not now, the Oxford’s machines at full roar—could fathom. The
shoemakers, yes: a closing here or there, another rumored, piecework up and down. That’s shoes for you. But not paper.

  We are the Oxford! The mighty, mighty Oxford! Paper wasn’t something you walked on. It was something you held.

  You make paper like this: tree to log, log to chips, chips to pulp, pulp to paper. A noisy, lengthy, oversize, stinking, seemingly chaotic process that requires exaction and attention and affinity. When Dad first arrived at the mill gates as a young man, the process was already impressively mechanized, but you needed men, many men, to run and maintain the god-size machinery, to lift and load and feed and receive, to tinker eternally with a hard-used infrastructure lousy with asbestos and lead paint. You needed aptitude. You needed focus. And at some stages, you needed a certain . . . flair.

  Dad came to Maine via the Canadian Pacific Railway in the fall of 1926, twenty years old and aching to earn, and moved in with his doting oldest sister, who’d set up with her husband in a block on Knox Street, a cobblestone’s throw from the mill gates. He came with his boyhood friend, Jack Mooney; “P.I.’s,” people called them (not kindly), with their PEI accents and PEI clothes and PEI sunburns and PEI fingernails caked with clay. Rosella packed them a lunch and they beelined over to the footbridge, showing up at daybreak in their rolled-down shirtsleeves to snap up a chance to work.

  They lifted their freckled faces to the miraculous thing. They could hear churning water, either from the river below them or from something ahead, behind the brick walls.

  “Big fulla,” said Dad, looking up.

  “Desperate large,” Jack agreed. “You s’pose they’ll take us?”

  Dad nodded. He knew.

  The odds of getting work were pretty good that year, no matter the prejudices harbored by whichever supervisor did the day’s choosing. Most days, most men who wanted work got it, for a daily wage and no benefits and a chance to prove your desire. Back then you worked a twelve-hour shift with a Tower of Babel team: an Italian, a Franco, a P.I., a Lithuanian, an Irishman, a Scot. If you had no natural alliances, or a language barrier, or even a knee-jerk enmity toward your foreign-tongued crewmate, then you didn’t tend to communicate beyond the requirements of running your machine. If you didn’t talk, you didn’t organize; if you didn’t organize, you didn’t get big ideas about what the mill might owe you for your work beyond your day’s pay.