The twins were waking up; their eyes lit up with Daddy’s excitement, and I wasn’t budging. I kept my eyes down. But Daddy was on a roll.
“The next buyer?” Daddy looked at me, still down in the mouth. “An older gentleman, who could afford the sticker price of $1,250 on the new Rambler American. I detected his means by noticing his attire, and he detected my confidence. I led him to the automobile of his final choice, like a lamb to the slaughter. Annie, confidence is contagious. That’s what sold the second buyer.”
I got up and walked into the dining room and sat down in a huff. Clara is one of those thirteen children he’s bragging about. But he just put her out of his mind. We weren’t on the same wavelength. He sat down next to me and told me this poem, hoping it would inspire me.
The tree that never had to fight,
For sun and sky and air and light,
But stood out on the open plain,
And always got it’s share of rain,
Never became a forest king,
But lived and died a shabby thing.
It was a good poem if I took it at face value, or if anyone but Daddy was reciting it. But things looked different to me.
I wasn’t going to instantly believe everything he said, like I used to.
Chapter 26
announcement from the principal’s office
November 28 – Dear Blessed Mother, How did you let this happen? Please pass along the message to Jesus. Have mercy on all of us!
You couldn’t have suspected it, especially if you based your suspicions on the kind of day it was. A sunny day after the rain, everything crisp and shiny. Even in Pasadena there were a few trees whose leaves changed to yellow and orange, reminding you that it was fall. Later on, as the sun beat down, the smog stretched its fuzzy dirt across the horizon and made the sky whitish, but right then, it was perfect.
I couldn’t wait for recess. All our 7th grade heads were bent over our shiny beige desktops, penciling in a geography assignment. Mrs. Parry walked up and down the aisles checking on us like inmates. Static scratched the wall to the right next to the clock. I heard fumbling. Someone cleared her throat.
“This is an announcement from the Principal’s office. We have been informed that President Kennedy has been shot. It is not known if he will live. Please pray for his recovery.”
Mrs. Parry marched to the front and put the pointer on the ledge next to the chalk. “Continue with the assignment, boys and girls.” Then she opened the door and let the steel grasshopper leg on the top corner of the door pull it shut. A murmur rose up from all of us. Who would that be? I wondered, the person who continued with the geography assignment after the announcement that the President has been shot?
At recess, Sister Everista stood on the cracked asphalt near the lunch tables in her black robes and her thick rosary jangling from her leather belt. Her eyes were red from crying. I walked past her, thinking that her face would somehow answer some of my questions. What did she know about the President that made her cry? I’m pretty sure she never met him. He was a Catholic and a Democrat. Sister Everista obviously couldn’t see through Kennedy’s Catholicism to the truth of his political mistakes. I wondered if God considers being a Democrat a sin. Maybe it’s a big sin, and maybe the President was being punished.
After recess we processed into the cool church, single file, all the grades, from first grade to eighth grade for a mandatory student body noon Mass. We were going to storm heaven with our prayers. All four grades of St. Andrew’s High School joined us. It wasn’t long before Monsignor came to the pulpit and we heard that “shot” had been changed to “assassinated.” President Kennedy was really dead, and we were all let out to go home. It was hard to understand. Since he was a Catholic, he would be up in heaven right now, enjoying the big pay-off. If he managed to go to confession before he was shot down. But the shock of his death was much more real. Everyone was talking about it. On the radio, in the newspapers, on television, everywhere. Nobody said anything about heaven in the world outside our parish.
I was perplexed and a little bit frightened that in the clutch, not only did our prayers fail, but the doctors couldn’t save him either. Modern medicine was so smart. They had drugs, and they could operate. Their machines could keep you going when you were just lying there with your heart stone still. Why couldn’t they put him back together again, with stitches and somebody else’s blood flowing through his veins? He was the most famous man in the land. Our country was the luckiest in the world. What happened?
I felt guilty; could it have been my fault?
Madcap was going out at night and sneaking back in at all hours, and sometimes, I had to cover for her. Which meant that I was committing venial sins every time anybody asked where she was. I always said she was in her room, doing her homework. I didn’t even know where she went. Sometimes she ditched school; she’d duck out of line when the student body filed into the church on special days. Aaron Solomon would pick her up. And sometimes she didn’t get back until after everyone else had gone to bed. I don’t know how she got away with it, except I was part of it. Sometimes when she came in, waking me up by throwing seed pods at my window, she seemed silly and talkative and sleepy at the same time and her breath smelled like Daddy’s breath just before dinner, after Mother and Daddy had their martinis. I sat in Madcap’s room at times like this, trying to stay awake, while getting information from her about what she had been doing. Just in case. I was afraid for her. If anything happened, how would we ever know where to look?
And Wanda told fibs to her parents, too. Like the time we both went to the store to get Abba Zabbas instead of making her bed and arranging her dolls that had real glass eyes and fancy costumes.
Her mom pounded on the door, “Is your room cleaned up?”
“Spic and Span!” Wanda had said, as we chomped down on the chewy taffy, giggling. “And no, you can’t come in!”
Wanda thought confession was embarrassing, so she never went and I felt scared for her soul, just like I did for Madcap. What if Wanda died without getting the chance to wipe the slate clean? But she had a point—the priests could recognize our voices, we were both sure, or maybe they could see us through the screen. We both hated the idea that they had all the nasty details to our personal lives. When you have to tell private sins to a man, and you’re a girl, well, that’s why they put the confessional in the dark. I myself have to close my eyes and say it. I usually rehearse my sins so I don’t chicken out. I say them in a list, trying to sound very matter-of-fact about it. I hit my sister, I told a small lie, I borrowed a red scarf from my other sister without permission. Your soul is like the blackboard and confession is the eraser.
Lying seemed like a necessary thing, an unavoidable consequence of being in the world where there are so many rules. It’s bad enough that God can spy on your every thought. There’s no privacy at all, once you figure in the church and confession and your parents knowing where you are at every minute. Other people had to be doing it, too, and if everyone else is telling stories, it wasn’t just me—how could President Kennedy’s death be punishment for my sins?
But there was some good news on the horizon—Cardinal Stefanucci was coming to visit on Thanksgiving. We were all given extra chores to tidy up the house before he got there. I had to wipe off the smudges and boogers on all the doors and walls. It took a few hours, but when the stuff came off, the doors around the handles seemed to glow, and I looked at them every time I passed, feeling like I had accomplished something.
On Monday, November 25th, schools all over the country were closed to observe the funeral. Televisions beamed out of all the houses on our street. Branches of the redwood tree reflected through the picture window, and it was hard to see the TV screen because there was so much light.
Jacqueline Kennedy walked bravely between her brothers-in-law, Robert and Edward, down the street towards St. Matthew’s Cathedral for the funeral Mass. She wore a black hat and I could see the breath in front of her in
white clouds under her black veil. I was afraid someone was going to shoot her out in the open like that.
The coffin was draped with the American flag, and I imagined the President’s body inside, stiff yet jiggling in the dark under the lid, rolling along behind magnificent white horses, with men in dark uniforms sort of bouncing atop their backs. The hush of the huge crowd staring in silence could almost be heard through the television. On the steps outside the cathedral, Jackie leaned over and whispered something to John-John. And then the little boy saluted. He was only three, a year younger than the twins.
Mother sat on the couch in her apron, wearing the usual thick-soled shoes and tensor stockings, sighing. Maybe I was too young to notice the last time, but I can’t remember her ever being this tired. Drums and bagpipes floated their squeaky, sorrowful music all the way out to California from Washington, DC. The guns went off, soldiers stood at attention in white gloves, the eternal flame was lit, and we heard the final lonely notes of a bugle playing “Taps.” I held my hand over the hard surface of Mother’s tummy to feel the baby kicking, and I thought how Jackie is like the Blessed Mother. She is the woman who loves the most important man in our country, but who has to suffer while everybody else watches her.
•••
On Thanksgiving day, Daddy pulled the car into the garage and Cardinal Stefanucci stumbled out of the grey Classic Rambler, looking like a regular, ordinary priest in one of those black and white collars and a lumpy black sweater. He was a tall, wide man, and his grey hair was just barely covering his scalp in strands across the middle of his head. I didn’t really recognize him; the last time we saw him, all I noticed were his new Archbishop gowns. Now it was his rosy, puffy cheeks, a round belly, and Frankenstein eyebrows. He was an important man, and he took up a lot of space. But he looked so strangely frail. I had this image in my mind of God’s right-hand man, the potential Pope, glorious at the altar with all the gold garments, the chalice over his head and incense around him, but here was this old guy with greasy strands that he combed over the shiny bald spot. The strength in him had already faded, but we were still going on with the myth.
He came in through the laundry room and kitchen with the usual welcome: one kid on either side, hanging from his arms. I shook his toasty warm hand. Even though he wasn’t married, he had a shiny gold band on his left ring finger. I wondered if we had missed something—are Cardinals married to the Blessed Mother, just like nuns are married to Jesus? He was older than Daddy, and the skin on his neck sagged in the middle around his Adam’s apple. And those bushy eyebrows, they hung over his eyes like an awning. And they were still black! There are a lot of places to look when you first meet our family, but Archbishop Stefanucci looked me in the face and said, “Pleased to see you again, Annie.” I’m pretty sure Mother told him my name just before we shook hands. For some unknown reason, I curtsied, blushing as usual.
By that time, the house was filled with the cooking and baking smells of Thanksgiving. In the kitchen, the cutting board was covered with flour, and so were Mother’s hands. Her powdery, white fingers pinched the crust against glass pie pans. Usually it was Clara helping her at supper, but this time, Mother had specifically invited Madcap and Jeannie to be the ones to make the Thanksgiving dinner together. They opened and closed the refrigerator door, cleaned up the dishes in the sink, washed the bird, salted, stuffed, and baked it like this had always been their job. If you had mentioned the name Clara, they would have said, “Clara who?”
“Would you like to sit here, Father?” I asked Cardinal Stefanucci, pointing to the couch, full of newspapers and unfolded diapers. I scrambled to push them aside—after all the cleaning, it was still a disgusting mess!
“Anywhere you want me,” he said affably. That cheered me up. Maybe he didn’t really notice. So I sat him on the end of our extra-long brown striped couch. (Good at camouflaging stains). The weight of him tipped the couch a bit, so I smoothed out a pillow in the center to encourage him to sidle over to the middle. Then I went back into the kitchen to get his martini. I wanted to make small talk with him, to make sure he remembered me for when he would come into our classroom and be introduced as my personal friend. I had to prepare him for his role as the Pope candidate who phoned me all the way from the Vatican and recognized my voice out of all thirteen. If he came unprepared to our class, it would only take one question from Sister Everista to expose me as a liar. I would never get to ride on the parish float. My latest essay would be disqualified from the “Christian Leadership” contest.
When I delivered the Cardinal his martini, Jude and the twins were creating a catastrophe waiting to happen.
Jude was a sturdy little guy, close to the ground, and now that he could walk he was somewhat dangerous. He was trailing around after the twins, trying to knock them over. The twins weren’t like normal kids, who fought with each other—they hung around together, I’d say within six inches of each other, like they could sense when the other had gotten just maybe six and a half inches away, enough separation to make them uncomfortable, and then they would both look around and find the other and head towards each other. They didn’t say much, either, but usually knew exactly what the other meant.
Right then, they invited the Cardinal to help them create an epic battlefield for their plastic war soldiers on the floor in front of the couch. Markie held a mass of gray and green soldiers in his arms as Matt cleared away a space on the worn rug.
“Annie!” Mother called me from the kitchen. “Set the table!” The way she pronounced that one word Annie told me that sitting with the Cardinal on our lumpy couch was akin to lounging by a pool when everyone else struggled to lift rocks in a prison work camp, bleeding from chains and dying of heatstroke under the sweltering sun.
“Maybe we can talk later,” I said to the Cardinal, standing up. “We were all praying for you to win, you know.”
“God’s will be done,” he said quite happily. “If I had become Pope, I wouldn’t be here now. And I’m enjoying myself.”
I cleared off the magazines, schoolbooks, pencils, dirty cups, and boxes of rubber bands from the dining room table.
“Salt and pepper, bread and butter, cream and sugar, knife, fork, spoon, napkins,” I reminded myself. After the places were set, I counted again to make sure I had the right number of table settings. Thirteen kids, minus Clara, plus the Cardinal and Daddy and Mother. Fifteen altogether. Daddy sliced the steaming white breast at the head of the table; John-the-Blimp ran up next to Daddy, bowing to anyone who would listen and watch.
“Dad! Look at that bird!” he said urgently, pointing out the window. We turned instantly and stared into the sky past John’s finger. As we looked away, he grabbed a morsel of meat.
“The disappearing bird!” he taunted, slamming the door behind him. “Now you see it, now you don’t!” he called down the hall.
“Supper’s ready!” Mother put the pies in the oven, wiped her hands on her apron, and sighed. Madcap and Jeannie brought bowls of steaming beans and mashed potatoes from the kitchen and set them in the middle of the long table. Now I was really feeling sorry for Clara; she was missing all this. Paul emerged from upstairs; John reappeared and snitched another bite before sitting right next to Daddy. Daddy smacked his hand.
“Enough, John!”
Rosie quietly climbed up onto her chair and sat like an honor student with her hands folded on her plate. As usual, she wore cotton candy pink and glowed like a pastel carnation on the mantle. Dominic, Bartholomew, the twins, and Buddy, pulled their chairs out from under the table, scraping them on the wooden floor, as we took our places around the steaming food. Conveniently, Cardinal Stefanucci sat in Clara’s empty spot. We all quieted down and folded our hands to say grace. This moment, the few seconds before grace, is one of the few actual incidents of silence in this family, and for this I am grateful to God. The Cardinal looked around.
“Where’s my favorite niece?” he asked, and the silence bounced around the room. “I’ve been
waiting patiently for her to come in the door at any time. But I’m not sure I would have recognized her.” He looked at Madcap, but his expression remained quizzical. “She must be quite a young lady by now.”
I was hoping I was his favorite niece. I sat up straighter and made noise with my knife and fork. Jeannie nudged me and I thought, Please God, don’t let it be her.
“Who is your favorite niece?” John-the-Blimp asked.
“Clara,” he replied. “We always played checkers whenever I visited.”
I looked up from my plate at Daddy. He was staring across the table at Mother. I could see from their expression that neither of them knew what to do. Madcap was smirking.
“She’s at the Mission in Ventura!” Markie blurted out.
The jig was up. There was only one reason that teenage girls went on retreats with the Sisters of Saint Isabella. Now I knew that.
And I knew what Mother and Daddy were probably saying in their minds. They were probably thinking Out of the mouths of babes. Now, they had to tell the Cardinal, the man who was almost the Pope, that their daughter was pregnant.
But that’s not what happened. Daddy cleared his throat and said, “Clara sends her regrets, Father.” (We all still called him Father, even though he was now Cardinal). “She’s on a retreat with the Sisters of Saint Isabella. In Ventura.”
The Cardinal glanced back and forth from Mother’s face to Daddy’s face. Finally he said, “A retreat! Wonderful! I’m just sorry I missed her. God bless her.” He looked to Mother. “And keep her safe and healthy.” Mother nodded. A weak smile appeared on her face. Then Daddy spoke.
“In the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,” he began. We all chimed in.
“Bless us oh Lord and these, thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord, Amen.” Then we prayed for the souls of the faithful departed, including President John F. Kennedy.
A Theory of Expanded Love Page 19
