When We Were the Kennedys

by Monica Wood

  I ravage my word collection, sifting through dozens of beauties to construct sentences, paragraphs, and, I hope, a whole, happy story for a Nancy of my making. Many of my sentences—often entire paragraphs—look remarkably like scenes written by Carolyn Keene. “We’ll just see what happens to meddling girls!!!” sneered the wild-eyed caretaker. Not a single criminal in my book has regular eyes.

  Nancy arrives at the home of a worried wife; Nancy speaks to a Suspicious Character; Nancy outlines the case for her “pensive” father. I fashion limitless descriptions of hats and parlors and cars and nighttime, specializing in “lengthening shadows.” My time with fake Nancy is like falling into a peaceful hollow of forgetting.

  But you can’t write all day when you’re nine-almost-ten; you can’t spend every second reading the Times, or a Nancy Drew you’ve already read twice; you can’t spend every afternoon pretending you belong to a Franco family that doesn’t like cats. My idle moments swell like a beige balloon, featureless and burstable.

  “You guys want to play School?” I ask my sisters.

  Cathy and Betty are inside today, too; this hot July rain has lowered the whole sky, the reek of the mill nearly dizzying.

  “NO,” Betty says. But School is my favorite game, and Cathy’s too, its rules as stringent and diverting as the real thing, so we steamroll her, as always, into the thankless role of Pupil.

  Betty can’t read, which has never stopped us from drilling her in the alphabet. We’ve taught her to print her name, to recognize a minuscule list of useful words like God and Mum and cat. But the game is more than just fun now; we’re marking off days in a summer so numbing and Dadless that it needs a word other than summer. It’s just . . . space.

  Cathy sets up the cardboard boxes; I fetch a fresh packet of Oxford paper from the cupboard.

  “Good morning, children,” I say. It’s my turn to be the Teacher.

  Cathy: “Good morning, Sister.”

  Betty: “GOOD MORNING, SISTER.”

  “Children, for today’s lesson we shall read page three and page four. After that, we shall copy the words onto our sheets.” I pass out two fresh leaves of Dad’s paper. “Remember: Well-formed, even letters are a pleasure to the suffering eyes of Jesus.” I try to look stern and martyrly, like the exhausted teachers I’m imitating. “Now, whose turn is it to read? Hmm. Betty Wood. I mean, Elizabeth Wood, in the second row. Please read page three.”

  “NOT ME,” Betty says. “IT’S CATHY’S TURN.” This is what she always says.

  “Very well. Catherine Wood, in the first row. Please read page three.”

  “See Jane run. Run, Jane, run! Run for your life!”

  “Excellent.” It really is. Cathy spikes everything with drama and as a writer myself I don’t mind the embellishments. “Now. Who’s next? Hmm. Let’s see. Elizabeth Wood, in the second row. Please read page four.”

  “RUN RUN RUN.”

  “No, I’m sorry, Elizabeth. That’s page three.”

  “Let her read page three,” Cathy says.

  “Very well. Elizabeth Wood, please read page three.”

  “RUN RUN RUN.”

  “You’re not reading. You’re copying what Cathy said.”

  “NO I’M NOT.”

  “What’s that word?”

  “RUN.”

  “Is not. It’s Jane. Catherine, please follow along with your finger to show Elizabeth the words.”

  “See.”

  “SEE.”

  “Jane.”

  “JANE.”

  “Run.”

  “RUN.”

  “This is stupid,” Cathy gripes. “Can we do arithmetic?” Cathy considers Dick and Jane and their baby sister Sally and their unctuous parents and Spot and Puff boring goody-goodies and way too easy. But it’s the only book that gives Betty a snowball’s chance.

  “Very well. Please turn to your Arithmetic book. Hmm. Who’s next? Elizabeth Wood, in the second row. Please count for the class, starting with eight. Then we shall write the numbers on our sheets. Remember: Well-formed, even numbers are a pleasure to the suffering eyes of Jesus.”

  “ONE TWO THREE—”

  “Starting with eight.”

  “ONE TWO THREE—”

  “Eight-nine-ten,” Cathy says. “Like that, Bet.”

  “EIGHT NINE TEN!”

  “Excellent,” I tell her. “Gold star for Elizabeth Wood. What comes after ten?”

  “TEN.”

  Numbers are useless. There she sits at her cardboard-box desk, patiently letting me imitate—by the hour—our brilliant, exacting, autocratic nuns. We use fat red pencils still sharp from Dad’s jackknife, and a wooden ruler to make lines on which a Pupil could form a jangling, uneven B-E-T-T-Y W-O-O-D ten times if the Teacher asked. But she always gets something wrong. The tail of the y on the wrong side; a b in place of a d.

  “That doesn’t say ‘Betty Wood.’”

  “YES IT DOES.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “YES IT DOES.”

  “It says Batty Woob.”

  “NO IT DOESN’T.”

  I’m an excellent Teacher! I make flawless imitations of the Sisters! Why can’t my Pupil write on the line? Why does my Pupil write a instead of e? Why why why? Her blue eyes patient and bafflingly bright, her shiny, useless ringlets cascading to her shoulders, my Pupil, whom I love with a protective, steadfast, blood-rushing ferocity, poses my second object lesson in the futility of changing a thing that is clearly the way things have to be, God’s brainless plan, the bone truth.

  The nuns have told Mum that Betty will go to third grade in the fall, with Cathy. Sister Mary of Jesus, the third-grade teacher, is exceedingly patient. What does Mum think of this? She steps into the parlor to end our game of School—it’s time for supper, and she’s just gotten up, smoothing her dress over her hips, shaking out the hem. She slips Betty’s paper from our cardboard desk and examines the balloonish lettering, the backwards y’s. Surely she knows that third grade will be worse than second, her child stuck at a real desk for hours on end, arithmetic and grammar drills washing over her like the sound of falling water, or crows in trees, or the Oxford’s sighing steam stacks. What should Mum do? Send her back or keep her home? In a few weeks she’ll have to decide, but who will help her?

  Anne is a schoolteacher who knows about educating; Father Bob has the ear of God; but they don’t know what it feels like to be Betty’s mother, or Betty’s father. How hard and deeply Mum and Dad had prayed, for years, all those rosaries and novenas and midnight imprecations. After those early, faint, throat-knots of suspicion—Come on, baby, lift your head; roll over; reach for the bunny—and then the wing-lifts of hope—Look, Albert; there she goes; better late than never—and then more suspicion—Maybe she’s just a little slow—and more hope—Didn’t I see a paper in her hand just now?—Mum, alone now, must surrender at last to what she knows.

  She rattles the sheet of Dad’s paper from our make-believe school where every child gets an A. “Good job,” she says—to Betty for writing her name and to us for teaching her. Then she gathers up our papers and adds them to the stack she keeps next to the sewing machine, missing Dad.

  I slip over to the Vaillancourts’ as often as I can, where Denise and I sit on the whaleback of grass that passes for her front yard, planning stakeouts or refining our code or reading Nancy’s next case, Denise trying to puzzle out the plot’s secrets in advance. My own secret is that I’m waiting for Mr. Vaillancourt to come home.

  I wait for him.

  I watch him.

  I love him.

  Every moment in his company feels desperate and vanishing.

  “Don’t tell me what happens,” Denise warns me, looking up from her book. She’s reading volume 9, the one where Nancy saves an orphan who turns out to be an heiress.

  “Keep your eye on the guardians, that’s all I’m saying.”

  What I’ve been reading in the Times is also a mystery. Employees of Oxford Paper Company, goes
the United Mine Workers’ quarter-page ad, you owe it to yourself and your future to obtain the from the UPP officials . . . Watch the UPP when you demand in , guarantees to ensure your .

  This sounds like the dramatic talk of Suspicious Characters, so I ask Mr. Vaillancourt what “squirm and twist” means. Mostly I want to hear his heartening voice. His is name is Omer, but everyone calls him Oats. When I imagine him climbing the massive machinery—which I do, often—he seems too small for a job like that, too handsome and wavy-haired. I imagine his path having crossed Dad’s every day at the gates:

  Hello, Red!

  Hello, Oats!

  There’s a contract negotiation coming right up, Mr. Vaillancourt explains; a tough one. Management wants change and the papermakers don’t. The United Pulp and Paperworkers union has been signing up members, lobbying to replace the existing union.

  “Is that what you wanted to know?” he says, standing by the sink in his coveralls, unpacking his lunch pail. I have followed him inside.

  “I guess so.”

  He looks at me. French, soft-spoken, and young, Mr. Vaillancourt isn’t much like Dad, but he goes to work on the morning shift like Dad, wears hard-used boots exactly like Dad’s. Are my eyes filling? I don’t know what I’m after, but he does. “Your father was still one of us,” he says.

  My father: promoted to foreman but a union man to the bone. A light blinks on inside me.

  Mr. Vaillancourt pats my head. “It’s good that you’re paying attention.”

  I nod, yes, yes, I’m paying attention! The Vaillancourts, like everybody else, have a Times lying out where anyone can pick it up. Sometimes I read it over here. On this day there is likely a front-page photo of the Oxford’s president, Bill Chisholm—grandson of the first Hugh Chisholm, son of the second Hugh Chisholm, the third Chisholm to make his way in paper. He’s handing out a scholarship, or planting a tree, or cutting a ribbon for the new steam plant or power station or grinding room, always in that good dark suit. A Yale man in heavy, bookish eyeglasses, Bill is in his seventh year at the helm, following the four-decade tenure of his father, the great Hugh II, whose legacy still burns high in the breasts of Mexico’s fathers. It was Hugh II who’d run the mill when Dad first saw it; Hugh II who’d rightly predicted that the road to riches would be paved with machine-coated paper. Out with the old machines, in with the new, two million bucks here, four million bucks there, big fat plans undimmed by fire or flood or war or Great Depression. While the rest of America had stood in bread lines, Hugh II’s papermakers kept their mill running three and four days a week, heeding their president’s advice to place their faith in paper.

  Smiling out from another front-page picture in the Times, shovel in hand, Hugh II’s son Bill has no idea—how could he?—that he’s presiding over the beginning of the paper industry’s long decline, that the current labor tensions presage a change in the Oxford’s fundamental character, one as life-altering as a death in the family.

  “You keep it up,” Mr. Vaillancourt says to me, which is what adults say to overachieving children.

  From outside comes the slamming of car doors, Denise’s aunties arriving for their summer visit. They move like starlings in flight, arrowing this way, then that way, in unison, trilling and hooting and cackling and hugging everybody more than once and pattering up and down the stairs to fetch overnight bags and presents and hats, bracelets jangling. I huddle like a stunned dormouse as they circle me, skirts aswirl, Mrs. Vaillancourt introducing me as “Denise’s little friend.” They are so enchantée to meet me. How do you do!

  I don’t say, Fine, thank you. In fact, I say nothing at all. I’m struck dumb, as I often am. Despite my lists of words, my perfect marks in spelling, my desperately thumbed dictionary, I have no vocabulary with which to respond to the kindness that pours in from every quarter. This muteness, and its accompanying well of yearning, fills me with dread. Imagine: a childhood burdened by too much kindness.

  The aunties clank their coffee cups and laugh like birds and tell the same stories twice and laugh harder the second time and water up over their own deceased father and sing funny songs in French. They’ve brought kids with them—Denise’s cousins—too many, all ages. I stand at the periphery, memorizing names, but there are too many names, too many people.

  At the end of this cacophonous afternoon, I linger outside in the quiet before heading home. Denise is back inside, being quizzed on French words or wheedled into a public performance of “Je Te Trouve Toujours Jolie” with her siblings and cousins or asked to report on her hopes for fifth grade. I’m in the yard, picking up my sleuthing notebook, looking over at the empty schoolyard with my own hopes for fifth grade, praying that Sister Bernadette has heard about Dad and therefore will refrain from the obligatory first-day Who Is Your Mother Who Is Your Father get-acquainted routine.

  All of a sudden, another little flock from the house, not aunties or cousins, just Denise and Mr. Vaillancourt and Denise’s baby sister, Jane. He’s going to drive us to the Frosty for an ice cream—before supper, which is unheard-of. Maybe he needs a break from the aunties, who tell chancy jokes in French just to see him blush.

  So he drives us to the Frosty. We stand in line. He takes out his wallet and says, “Three vanillas for my girls.”

  Is this what I’ve been waiting for? I don’t know, then I do.

  We get back into Mr. Vaillancourt’s Plymouth; he waves out the window to this one and that one. Everybody likes Omer. Sometimes he takes his wife dancing. They play cards with people. They put the words social and life together in a way I’ve never heard. It means their friends.

  Everyone can see me in Mr. Vaillancourt’s Plymouth, eating my ice cream in rude, gulpy, hoggish bites. Lookit me, everybody! I say to myself. Lookit me! Lookit lookit, there’s a father at the wheel! When I get back to their house, I hide in the bathroom, patting my eyes with my fists, as if my eyelashes have caught fire. Outside the door the aunties’ laughter sounds like expensive glass breaking. Then I press my eyes so hard the sockets will still ache that night, when I’m lying in bed next to Cathy, wishing she had a best friend with a father like Mr. Vaillancourt. But she doesn’t, and neither does Betty, and it’s beginning to dawn on me that God might not love all His children the same.

  Three vanillas for my girls.

  When the union vote happens a few days hence, I record the vote in my blue diary: UPP wins in a runoff. Labor negotiations can now begin. These developments barely register in my household, but I have to pay attention now. Because I’m one of Mr. Vaillancourt’s girls.

  8. Offer it Up

  SUMMER PERSEVERES, as stiff and slow-moving as my mystery book, the adults making what I now see as heroic attempts to soldier on.

  Mum’s waking hours can’t be relied on—“lying down,” she calls her sleeping: I guess I’ll lie down for half an hour—but she manages to fix her hair and make our beds and cook the meals and feed the animals and dress like her lost self. Anne takes us regularly to Dick’s Pizza or the Chicken Coop, a restaurant owned by the Kerseys, a fruitful, ruddy family. Good eatin’, that’s our greetin’! We order the “open-faced turkey sandwich,” which sounds like something Jackie Kennedy might go for but in fact features soft white bread and a creamy gollup of gravy. We take turns slipping a quarter down the gullet of the booth-side jukebox, which has metal pages you turn by hand. Same song every time: We’ll sing in the sunshine . . . we’ll laugh every day. . . . Hearing us sing along must break our sister’s heart. The other fave is “Big Girls Don’t Cry.”

  Anne’s a Paul Anka girl who grew up going to “hops,” so after we get home one afternoon she teaches us the jitterbug, switching on WRUM, our only radio station.

  “Who wants—?”

  “Me first me first I called it!” Cathy jaunts to her feet and catches on in seconds. Kinda showoffy on those underarm turns, I think. But still. You have to admit: good dancer.

  “Now me!” I say.

  Anne trades partners while Cathy tri
es to teach Betty the hand-hold.

  “LIKE THIS?”

  “Palms up,” Cathy instructs her Pupil. “You’re the boy.”

  “I’M NOT THE BOY.”

  “Just pretend.”

  “I’M NOT THE BOY.”

  Meanwhile, I dance with Anne, her body swaying back and forth—draw back, lean forward, draw back, lean forward—her hands tight in mine. This is how it will be, always, with our sister—close or far, connected always. Gone for weeks in summer to grad school: connected. On a solo trip to Copenhagen or Paris or Stratford-on-Avon: connected. Here or not here: connected. I get the hang of the jitterbug, just as Cathy did, right off, the way I’ll get the hang of good posture, and thank-you notes, and subject-verb agreement. Anne can teach anybody anything and make them love what they learn.

  Another song comes on: Elvis.

  “NOW ME.”

  “Elizabeth Wood,” I announce, “step up to the front, please.”

  “This isn’t School, sweetie,” Anne says. “This is dancing. Take my hand, Bet. You’re the girl. Now, easy, just rock back and forth.”

  “She’s not rocking.”

  “Can you hear the beat, sweetie?”

  “Her feet aren’t even moving.”

  This is how Betty dances: Like a phone pole. A fence picket. A frozen hen. Hopeless. Worse than Dad, who used to dance wrong to make us laugh.

  “She’s doing fine,” Anne assures us as she jitters and bugs around Betty’s stillness, her dainty feet toeing the speckled linoleum. “You having fun, Bet?”

  “YUH!”