When We Were the Kennedys

by Monica Wood

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  Prologue: My Mexico

  1. Morning

  2. Wake

  3. Hiding

  4. Explorers

  5. Too Much Stairs

  6. Paper

  7. Three Vanillas

  8. Offer it Up

  9. The Mystery of the Missing Man

  10. Just Nervous

  11. Widows’ Instructions

  12. Our Nation’s Capital

  13. Anniversary

  14. I Hear Music

  Epilogue: NewPage

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © 2012 by Monica Wood

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Wood, Monica.

  When we were the Kennedys : a memoir from Mexico, Maine / Monica Wood.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-547-63014-4

  1. Wood, Monica. 2. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. 3. Mexico (Me. : Town)—Biography. I. Title.

  PS3573.05948Z46 2012

  813’.54—dc22 [B] 2011016069

  Book design by Brian Moore

  Printed in the United States of America

  DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Credit: Gregory Orr, “This is what was bequeathed us” from How Beautiful the Beloved. Copyright © 2009 by Gregory Orr. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

  For Denise Vaillancourt, who shared her father

  Author’s Note

  This is a memoir: the truth as I recall it. You will find herein no composite or invented characters, no rearranged chronologies, no alterations in the character or appearance of the people I remember. I changed only one name. One chapter contains a blizzard that my sisters now inform me occurred on a different occasion; and indeed, when I looked up weather for November 1963 I found not only no blizzard, but—astonishingly—no snow to speak of. The inaccurate memory is so embedded in my psyche, however, so inextricable from the remembered events of that chapter, that in the end I decided to leave it alone. Otherwise, events or processes I could not remember with accuracy or was too young at the time to understand—for example, papermaking, strike politics, the specific character of my father’s work—I filled out as accurately as I could through research, the venerable Rumford Falls Times, and the memories of others. The bulk of this story, however, results from my having been an observant child living in a vibrant place and time.

  This Is What Was Bequeathed Us

  BY GREGORY ORR

  This is what was bequeathed us:

  This earth the beloved left

  And, leaving,

  Left to us.

  No other world

  But this one:

  Willows and the river

  And the factory

  With its black smokestacks.

  No other shore, only this bank

  On which the living gather.

  No meaning but what we find here.

  No purpose but what we make.

  That, and the beloved’s clear instructions:

  Turn me into song; sing me awake.

  Prologue: My Mexico

  IN MEXICO, MAINE, where I grew up, you couldn’t find a single Mexican.

  We’d been named by a band of settlers as a shout-out to the Mexican revolutionaries—a puzzling gesture, its meaning long gone—but by the time I came along, my hometown retained not a shred of solidarity, unless you counted a bottle of Tabasco sauce moldering in the door of somebody’s fridge. We had a badly painted sombrero on the WELCOME TO MEXICO sign, but the only Spanish I ever heard came from a scratched 45 of Doris Day singing “Que Sera, Sera.”

  In fourth grade, after discovering that the world included a country called Mexico, I spent several befuzzled days wondering why it had named itself after us. Sister Ernestine adjusted my perspective with a pull-down map of the world, on which the country of Mexico showed up as a pepper-red presence and its puny namesake did not appear at all.

  In high summer, when tourists in paneled station wagons caravanned through town on their way to someplace else, hankies pressed comically to their noses against the stench of paper being made, I sat with my friends on the stoop of Nery’s Market to play License Plate. Sucking on blue Popsicles, we observed the procession of vehicles carrying strangers we’d never glimpse again, and accumulated points for every out-of-state plate. These people didn’t linger to look around or buy anything, though once in a while a woman (always a woman, with the smiley red lips all women had then) popped out of an idling car to ask the posse of sun-burnished children, Why Mexico?

  We looked at one another. I was the one in the wrinkled tee shirt bought at the Alamo by my priest uncle, Father Bob, who loved to travel. Or maybe that was my little sister, Cathy, or my next-bigger sister, Betty, or one of our friends. Who could tell one kid from the next? White kids in similar clothes; Catholic children of millworkers and housewives. We lived in triple-decker apartment buildings—we called them “blocks”—or in nondescript houses that our fathers painted every few years. The only Mexico we knew was this one, ours, with its single main street and its one bowling alley and its convent and church steeples and our fathers over there, just across the river, toiling inside a brick-and-steel complex with heaven-high smokestacks that shot great, gorgeous steam clouds into the air so steadily we couldn’t tell where mill left off and sky began.

  Like most Irish Catholic families in 1963, mine had a boiled dinner on Sundays after Mass and salmon loaf on Fridays. We had pictures of Pope John and President John and the Sacred Heart of Jesus hung over our red couch, and on holidays my big brother, the frontman in a local band called the Impacts, came with his wife and babies and guitar to sing story songs packed with repentant jailbirds and useless regret and soldiers bleeding to death on heathery fields. In my friend Denise Vaillancourt’s French Catholic family they ate meat pies—”tourtières”—on Christmas Eve and sang comic Québecois songs about mistaken identity and family kerfuffles. I had another friend, Sheila, who lived just our side of the Mexico-Rumford bridge, in a Protestant, two-child, flood-prone, single-family house; and another friend, Janet, who lived atop her parents’ tavern, the regulars marshmallowed onto the barstools by three in the afternoon listening to Elvis on the jukebox. At St. Theresa’s we greeted our teachers with a singsong “Bonjooour, ma Soeur,” diagrammed morally loaded sentences at flip-top desks, and drew flattering pictures of the Blessed Mother. We went to Mass on Sunday mornings and high holy days, singing four-part Tantum Ergos from the choir loft in a teamwork reminiscent of our fathers sweating out their shifts in noisy, cavernous rooms. The nuns taught us that six went into twelve twice, that the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, that California exported avocados and Maine exported paper—tons and tons of paper, the kind our fathers made.

  Though our elders in Mexico—who spoke French, or Italian, or Lithuanian, or English with a lilt—cherished their cultural differences, which were deep and mysterious and preserved in family lore, what bound us, the children, was bigger and stronger and far more alluring than the past. It was the future we shared, the promise of a long and bountiful life.

  The unlikely source of that promise penetrated our town like a long and endless sigh: the Oxford Paper Company, that boiling hulk on the riverbank, the great eq
ualizer that took our fathers from us every day and eight hours later gave them back, in an unceasing loop of shift work.

  “The Oxford,” we chummily called it, as if it were our friend. From nowhere in town could you not see it.

  The mill. The rumbling, hard-breathing monster that made steam and noise and grit and stench and dreams and livelihoods—and paper. It possessed a scoured, industrial beauty as awesome and ever-changing as the leaf-plumped hills that surrounded us. It made a world unto itself, overbearing and irrefutable, claiming its ground along the Androscoggin, a wide and roiling river that cracked the floor of our valley like the lifeline on a palm. My father made his living there, and my friends’ fathers, and my brother, and my friends’ brothers, and my grandfather, and my friends’ grandfathers. They crossed the footbridge over the river’s tainted waters, carrying their lunch pails into the mill’s overheated gullet five, six, sometimes seven days a week.

  In every household in town, the story we children heard—between the lines, from mothers, fathers, mémères and pépères, nanas and nonnas, implied in the merest gesture of the merest day—was this: The mill called us here. To have you.

  This was one powerful story. Powerful and engulfing, erasing all that came before, just like the mill that had made this story possible. In each beholden family, old languages were receding into a multicultural twilight as the new, sun-flooded story took hold: the story of us, American children of well-paid laborers, beneficiaries of a dream. Every day our mothers packed our fathers’ lunch pails as we put on our school uniforms, every day a fresh chance on the dream path our parents had laid down for us. Our story, like the mill, hummed in the background of our every hour, a tale of quest and hope that resonated similarly in all the songs in all the blocks and houses, in the headlong shouts of all the children at play, in the murmur of all the graces said at all the kitchen tables. In my family, in every family, that story—with its implied happy ending—hinged on a single, beautiful, unbreakable, immutable fact: Dad.

  Then he died.

  1. Morning

  THE MORNING OF my father’s death begins like all other mornings: my mother stirring oatmeal at the stove, cats twining around her legs, parakeet jabbering on her shoulder. My oldest sister, Anne, who teaches English at the high school, is at work already; and Dad, who got up at five-thirty for first shift, is putting a crew together in the spongy air of the Oxford’s woodyard. Or so we believe. Betty and Cathy and I, our hair starched from sleep, rouse ourselves after Mum’s second call. We attend St. Theresa’s, a French Catholic elementary school that we can see, over the rooftop of my friend Denise’s block on Brown Street, from our third-floor kitchen window. I’m in fourth grade, Cathy in second. Betty—mentally disabled (we say “retarded” back then)—is also in second grade, for the third time; she sits at the desk next to Cathy, who lately has been teaching her to knit, a suggestion from Sister Edgar, who has just about run out of ideas.

  Below us, on the second floor, come the muted morning sounds from the Hickeys: That’s Norma leaving for work as a secretary at the power company. Her mother, the only one-armed person I know, scoops up the Lewiston Daily Sun and snaps it open in a nimble abracadabra, one of her most enthralling sleight-of-one-hand feats. Mr. Hickey—a sweet, frail man “let go” from the mill for his ailing eyes and lungs—stays inside, drinking tea from Mrs. Hickey’s scalloped cups.

  Below that, on the first floor, our Lithuanian landlady begins her daily cooking of cabbage and other root vegetables that smell more or less like the mill. The ancient Norkuses speak halting English, charge us seven dollars a week in rent, and engage in an intermittent skirmish with Mum over whether we kids should be allowed to bring our friends up to visit. Too much stairs, they say, which could mean almost anything.

  In the Norkus block, where we live, the three apartments are identically laid out—four rooms, a screened porch in front, an open porch landing in back—but each has a separate, and separately revelatory, air of foreignness. The Norkus apartment, densely furnished, emanates a steamy, overdraped blurriness that I still associate with all Lithuanian households. The Hickeys’ floor, quiet and tidy, seems like a trick, its scrubbed interior latitudes magically expanded. Every time I enter, I think of the Popeye cartoon in which Olive Oyl peers into a tiny tent and finds the inside of the Taj Mahal. Our top floor, full of girls and mateless socks and hair doodads and schoolbooks and cats and unlaced Keds and molted feathers, operates on the same principle, in reverse: When you open our door, the physical world shrinks.

  In this filled-to-brimming place on the morning of Dad’s death, Mum’s parakeet flutters down from her shoulder to perch on my oatmeal bowl, his scaly feet gripping the rim. He pecks at my breakfast, spattering gruel, gibbering words gleaned from my mother’s patient repetitions. He can also sing and dance, but not now; Mum wants us at school on time and so far it doesn’t look promising. Cathy appears, wearing half of her school uniform—the starched white blouse—and a slip. I’m half-dressed, too, in opposite: army-green skirt and pajama top. Mum presses our clothes in stages, so that is how we put them on. Outside, the morning radiates the particular cool of April. Betty comes last to eat, in full uniform, everything tucked and smoothed and buttoned up right, her ankle socks neatly creased. Mum always makes sure she’s fully shipshape before moving on to us. We dawdle over orange juice as Cathy, against orders, puts the parakeet on a pencil to see if he’ll do a spin; it’s his best trick and kills the room every time. This is how mornings go, a tango of getting ready, each girl a separate challenge, Mum alternately shooshing us and making us sit! sit! sit! to eat.

  I’m the slow eater. The “absent-minded” one. I watch out the window, but nothing looks different. Dad is already dead but I don’t know this yet, can’t imagine this. No shiver in the air catches my eye, no subtle darkening in the same old steam clouds cluttering the morning sky. I am nine years old; when I look out the window, all I see is Mexico—my Mexico, the only one that counts.

  From here I see the Dohertys’ back line hung with clothes. Next to them, the Gagnons’; we play with their girls and have a crush on Mrs. Gagnon, with her ripple of auburn hair. Cater-cornered from the Gagnons are the O’Neills, and then the Yarnishes, their driveway patrolled by a disgruntled crow that hollers, “Hiii Joe, hiii Joe!” all day long. The rest of the neighborhood fills out with Gallants and Fourniers and Burgesses and Nailises and Fergolas, a census that repeats to the town line of our stewpot town and crosses the river to Rumford, the mill’s official home.

  We get chocolate cake whenever we want—Mum’s splendid recipe survives to this day. Lemon tea bread, cherry pie, yeast doughnuts, just ask! We have a talking bird and priest uncle. We never have to clean our plates or finish our milk. Dad comes home every day with candy in his pockets. Father Bob, Mum’s baby brother, comes to town once a week and sometimes says the First Friday Mass, where all our friends simmer with envy that God’s young, dashing stand-in belongs to us. Mum gives us dollars to bring to school to save the pagan babies. Last year Dad bought a 1962 sea-green Chrysler Newport, brand-new. We think we’re rich.

  We are rich.

  Dad, like most people, must have applied a kind of rhythm to his workday. I followed that rhythm in my mind many times after that morning: his feet hitting the floor upon waking, the morning ablutions, the soft exchanges with my mother as she hands him his lunch pail and clears his breakfast plate, the door clicking shut behind him, the three downward flights. Possibly he stops to pet the Norkuses’ cat, Tootsie (like all men in our family, Dad was a cat man), before stepping into the street.

  Perhaps he is in pain; I hope not. Even so, his last mortal moments are swaddled by the familiar. He leaves us, turns right onto Gleason Street, passes the O’Neills’, the Gagnons’, the Velushes’, turns right again at Miss Caliendo’s onto Mexico Avenue to the Venskus block, where they rent out their row of six attached garages at the back of the wide, blacktopped driveway, each bay just wide enough to fit one car.

&
nbsp; Perhaps he stops here for a moment, gazing down that long paved drive, for at times he still deeply misses the furrowed fields and quilted hills of Prince Edward Island, Canada, and the siblings who remain on the family farm. Is this crisp April morning one of those times? It’s cold but the air contains the coming spring. So, yes, he stops—right here, at the head of the driveway, hanging on to the post—to take it in. He doesn’t yet know he’s running out of breath; he thinks it’s memory doing this, the memory of the long dirt lane to the homestead he left at age twenty. The farmhouse with its blistered roof. The pumped water. The lilacs and hollyhocks. The neighborhood of colorful characters who live along the road.

  It must be memory doing this, squeezing his chest, summoning an anointed place that could not give him what he found here: steady, decent, good-paying work. He found his wife here, had five children over twenty years. His youngest, Cathy, is eight; his oldest, a son who lives ten miles away, will turn twenty-seven in a week. Is he thinking of us now? He lets go of the post, steps onto the blacktop, walks—slow, so slow—to the garage door, intending with all his heart to put in another blessed day of a life he never dreamed possible.

  In another eight years he can retire, this man who has never taken a vacation or owned a house. Does he think of this as he reaches for the handle? Can he picture long visits back to the Island, then endless, easeful days back here, tilling the borrowed plot he keeps in his father-in-law’s yard just a few houses up the street from where he stands now—tight-chested, filling with memory—at six o’clock in the morning, April 25, 1963, in the first waking of an ordinary day? Here we go, people say at these humdrum moments of repetition, the day’s momentum released by the turn of a key or the punch of a time card or, in Dad’s case, the sliding open of a garage door. The door makes a loud, sacrilegious clang against the morning quiet.