When We Were the Kennedys

by Monica Wood

“Well, isn’t that the whole point of dancing?” She is twenty-two years old; Dad’s death is so big; she is so small. “There you go, now you’re getting it.”

  Suddenly Mum is here. For a moment she just watches us, then her toe begins to tap.

  “TRY IT, MUM!”

  She moves like a gorgeous, weary swan, keeping time, keeping time, keeping time.

  “WOW, MUMMA!”

  “‘You ain’t nuthin’ but a hound dog,’” she sings, and we all laugh, laugh, laugh to hear her old voice, a bright bit of her old self that lasts for sixteen bars.

  Father Bob, too, steps it up in this summer of stopped time. Before Dad died, our uncle’s visits had been unpredictable—a death, a baptism, a broken church window, so many things could ruin his one day off. But now he arrives every Thursday morning without fail. Like an apparition out of a saint’s biography, here he is, waving at us with his pale hands. We charge at him as we used to charge at Dad, vying for his arms.

  He’s taking us somewhere—it’s a surprise—but first he has his coffee with Mum, and then he goes into the parlor to read from his breviary, which he does seven times a day no matter what.

  “Mum,” Cathy says from the window. “Mumma? Jurgis is peeking in the garbage again.”

  We look down into the driveway and there’s our landlord, his back end sticking out of the trash shed he’s recently painted a worshipful shade of green. Square and sturdy as a guesthouse, the trash shed has three doors, one for each floor, which swing open on oiled hinges to reveal a single garbage can for each family. Our cellar, a hair-raising, webby lair with a dirt floor, has similar partitions, the better for the Norkuses to inventory who’s wasting what. We keep a potato bag down there, and a few sticks of furniture. The Hickeys, too, keep potatoes and a few oddments, some extra onions. But the Norkuses’ section burgeons with great secretive bins of wizening root vegetables, enough to cover all three families in case of an unexpected maraud by the Russian army.

  “What do they think I’m throwing away, babies?” Mum grumbles. Jurgis extracts a bag of stale doughnuts and tsks so loud we can hear him up here.

  The stepped-up garbage rules have forced us into an elaborate cloak and dagger, Mum repacking our trash to hide our offenses—a half-eaten sandwich, a ruined blouse, three-quarters of a bag of cat food in a flavor Tom no longer loves. We squash milk cartons into unassuming flats, squeeze drops of juice from orange peels and apple cores before tossing them, crush the packaging of a new doll or a hand cream inside empty bread bags. But the Norkuses cannot be outwitted. Earlier in the week, like trained hounds, they had sniffed out a housedress from beneath the beef-kidney wrappings and presented it to Mum with an ash-ash, ticka-ticka, push-push of rue. “Missus no throw good dress,” Mrs. Norkus said of the piebald thing Cathy had bought for a nickel at the church rummage sale.

  “You have to feel sorry for people with that much time on their hands,” Mum says, turning away. She puts Father Bob’s coffee cup in the sink, then she begins a quick assembly of bologna sandwiches.

  Aha. Beach food.

  “Yaaay!”

  That’s the surprise. Father Bob comes back after reading his breviary and confirms it: He’s taking us to Reid State Park, all the way to the ocean, which he calls “the surf.” Anne has packed our bathing suits into a paper bag.

  “Have fun,” Mum says. “Behave yourselves.” As soon as we leave she’ll go to bed.

  Once on the road, Father Bob stashes his starchy Roman collar in the glove box but otherwise remains in full regalia: rabat and jacket, black fedora tipped rakishly forward. At the park he’ll change into his plaid swim trunks and walk us to the beach in his shiny black shoes.

  On Route 2 he starts a round of Elephant in the Road, a car game we’ve long outgrown.

  “Look, girls, an elephant in the road!”

  “WHERE?”

  “Where?”

  “Where?”

  “Whoopsy, you just missed it.”

  “DARN!”

  “Darn!”

  “Darn!”

  “I’m just doing it for Betty,” I whisper to Cathy.

  “Me, too. This is way too baby.”

  But really we’re doing it for him. He wishes we could stay little.

  “Holy smoke, a kangaroo!”

  “WHERE?”

  “Where?”

  “Where?”

  Even Betty knows we’ve got zero chance of spotting a kangaroo on Route 2, but we all look anyway. Because you never know. If an elephant or kangaroo revealed itself to somebody driving along in a car, then that Somebody would be Father Bob and that Car would be this one.

  At the Auburn tollbooth, Cathy shouts, “Collar!”

  Father Bob snaps open the glove box, grabs the white collar, and reaffixes it with one hand.

  “Go right ahead, Father,” says the nodding toll man. “No charge.”

  We sit up like ladies, pretending to be Caroline Kennedy, the privileged daughter of our Catholic president, slipping on through for free. Does it smooth the edges of our uncle’s anguish to know his girls are still capable of being thrilled, that they love the fact of the car barely pausing?

  Over the years he’s taken us “up the pond,” “down the pond,” to the ocean, to the hills, over the New Hampshire border to Storyland and Santa’s Village. For as long as we can remember he’s come home to us from his parish in Westbrook or New Gloucester or Hampden or Dover-Foxcroft, a new assignment every couple of years, a perpetual lifting up and setting down of roots and friendships, facing the vagaries of a new parish council, a new congregation, a new housekeeper to train with diplomatic precision, a new home in which to settle his big fat fussy cats. With each impending change we’ve lain in our beds praying, Oh please pick Mexico, oh pleasepleaseplease pick Mexico. But the bishop never picks Mexico. The diocese puts plenty of distance between their men and the appealing distractions of family, a distance that means nothing to Father Bob, who has driven and driven from all these places, only to pick us up, pack us up, and drive some more.

  At Reid State Park he lugs his Coleman cooler to a heat-splintered picnic table, then herds us into a frigid, marrow-numbing surf where despite his bad back he surrenders to our demand to be heaved into the lacy waters over and over, his hands threaded beneath our feet, heave ho! heave ho! as we bullet skyward and then plunge back down, breathless and alive.

  He rubs our hair dry with the beach towel, then opens the cooler and passes out bologna sandwiches and bottles of Moxie. “Boys oh boys, aren’t these good,” he says. His eyes are watering and pinkish. “Aren’t these good, girls?”

  “Yes, Fath!”

  “Are you having fun?”

  “Yes, Fath!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, Fath!”

  Now the cookies, as many as we want. His blurred emotions are too much for him, but he’s trying so hard. Twenty-four years older, Dad had been the father Father Bob always wanted. But we are the children Father Bob always wanted, and he must give to us the solace he himself requires. He makes us wait twenty minutes, then Back we go, girls, heave ho! heave ho!, managing somehow to laugh and make us laugh in turn, until he says, Well, girls, I guess it’s time to shove off, and now we’re on the long ride back, the three of us sun-achy and good-tired, our skin salt-tight and humming, our uncle joking at the wheel—Holy smoke, a wolf and a zebra!—our day with him almost over and a whole week to wait for the next one. We love our uncle, to whom we are always saying goodbye. Back through the tollbooth—“collar!”—back to Mexico, where he drops us off before suppertime and takes another coffee before resuming the long drive back to his rectory and his parish and his cats and his table set for one, always going, going, going, either fleeing from or moving toward, who can tell. I am not yet old enough to understand that despair is the disease and motion is the cure.

  “Bye, Fath! Bye, Fath!” we shout from the yard, and as his car rounds the corner and disappears, we bolt into the neighborhood to show of
f our sunburns before it’s time to come back in to eat.

  I’m the first one back, announcing to Mum, “Jurgis is peeking in the trash again.”

  “Offer it up.” She opens the cupboard. “How does macaroni and tomato soup sound?”

  “Yaaay!” Our favorite meal to top off a wonderful day.

  Now Cathy comes in, her cheeks reddened, her tee shirt a mess; she’s been making mud houses at the Fergolas’. Mum moves through the kitchen in her new way, slowly, as if the floor itself might give way. She’s stranded, afraid, unschooled in the work of being a widow. Whom do you look to? How is this done? She doesn’t know, which is why, on this day of heavy garbage inspection, an insult she has already “offered up,” she goes a little mad when Betty comes in last, telling us all she’s made a friend, a little girl named Susie, but Mrs. Norkus said NO BRING FRIEND.

  “She said what?” Mum’s teeth grit hard. “She said what?” Reaching over me, she snaps the window all the way up, a violent ripping sound. Mum looks down; the little friend has already run home.

  What is Mum doing now? Offering it up? Sending her helpless wrath to God? Her delicate jaw vibrates; she jams her fists into her apron pockets and lets them quiver there.

  We stare at her. “Mum? Mumma?”

  But she’s someplace else, utterly lost to us. She picks up the kitchen phone—the only phone—a yellow wall phone that in this charged moment looks radioactive. And unnecessary. At this volume Mrs. Norkus can hear Mum just dandy, phone or no phone, through two floors and two ceilings.

  “What’s the matter with you!” Mum shouts. “What’s the matter with you!”

  Through the receiver comes a push-push of anger, a torrent of pulped syllables.

  Ticka-ticka-too-much-stairs-push-push-you-make-listen!

  “No, you listen!” Mum cries. “I’m telling you!”

  We can’t believe what we’re hearing, our soft-spoken mother in a bellow of rage. A full-out explosion now, each woman out-shouting the other, a confusing mash-up of words we know and words we don’t.

  “Don’t you tell me!”

  Ticka-ticka-no-bring-push-push-too-much-make-noise!

  “My children need friends!” Mum shouts back. “Children need friends!”

  Our mouths drop open, one-two-three, as our only mother, in a complete loss of her three-months-long composure, shrieks at our landlady, who must surely believe the Russians have come at last. “And another thing! The garbage is none of your business! It’s my business! You understand? My business!”

  Ash-ash—

  Bang! goes the receiver as Mum smashes it back into its cradle.

  We stare at our mother, our own selves vibrating with fear and shock and a stitch of pride. Then Mum yanks a chair from the table and sits. Ohhh, she sings. Ohhh.

  Instinctively, we glance around for Anne, but Anne’s at the Chicken Coop with Norma. We crowd my mother, petting her hair, eyeing each other.

  “Sweet Mother of Mary,” Mum says. She covers her face. “Evicted now for sure.” She drops her hands and stares at the phone.

  We wait, holding our breath.

  The phone does not ring. Enraged footsteps do not sound on the stairs.

  For days we wait.

  Nothing happens.

  “I guess we’ll make out all right,” Mum says, finally.

  Because the Wood family, in one form or another, has inhabited the third floor of the Norkus block since the day Dad carried his scrawny bride up too much stairs.

  Because the Norkuses know, better than anyone, that once you lose the first essential thing, all things become essential.

  Because the Norkuses, who guard their driveway and their trash cans and their flower pots and their stair treads, have apparently included their widowed tenant and her too much make noise girls among their guarded things held close.

  Come August, as summer begins to unwind, the Norkus rules go a little squishy, still in place but spottily enforced. Denise dodges the rules enough times to try the entire repertoire of Mum’s cakes and pies, which Mum offers in fulsome chunks to my friend, my consolation, my good eater. For my part, I take as many meals on Brown Street as I can politely manage, and when the union accepts a one-year, record-high contract, I hear the news at the Vaillancourts’ supper table, where the Oxford intrudes as a nearly human presence, almost family.

  On my tenth birthday, a week later, I smuggle not only Denise but also my friend Margie upstairs for cake and ice cream. Mum bakes a two-layer cake and gets all dressed up, pearls and everything; Cathy blows out half my candles and I don’t even care. Presents galore this year, two paint-by-numbers and a Tammy doll with platinum hair, but nothing compares to my gift from Anne, a Bible with a red leather cover, its pages trimmed in gold. Not one of those little-kid Bibles; a real one. A beautiful book that’s all mine. “These are the oldest stories in the world,” she tells me. I hold the book and feel its solemn weight.

  Leafing through the silky pages, I recognize some of the stories, in versions different from the cleaned-up tales I’ve heard from the nuns. Violence and vengeance hither and yon, but also charity and hope. They’re all in here, all the stories ever told.

  It is then that I finally give up on my own book, not because it’s been written before—over twenty times, by Carolyn Keene—or because the Bible stories are so much better. Instead, I give up out of sheer exhaustion: I can’t figure out why my Missing Man disappeared. I’d planned multiple scenarios for his return (found by Nancy on ocean liner; found by Nancy in haunted hotel; found by Nancy on abandoned cattle ranch), but why did he vanish in the first place? My imagination had failed me there. In the Bible people suffered floods and famine and myriad plague-ridden consequences for inciting the wrath of God. Even when God was nice it was no picnic: Noah got to skirt the flood, but he also had to pick only two giraffes out of thousands of giraffes, two chickens out of millions of chickens, two ants out of billions of ants. How did he shore up under that burden? “You,” he had to say. “And you. Sorry, that’s it, no more squirrels.”

  Like Noah, my missing man had done nothing wrong. He’d been a good man, with a pleasant wife and a noble collie and a job as an insurance salesman. He had not been lost in a flood or plagued by locusts or swallowed by a whale. He was, simply, gone.

  I’d written chapter upon chapter of my book on Oxford paper, ripping sheets in half and starting over, adding copious, not-secret illustrations that I’d sometimes granted Cathy the right to color, though our Crayola set had no crayon called “titian.” (Cathy, infuriatingly, used orange.) Betty had no role in the making of my book because the tale took place in a season without snowmen, an oversight I hadn’t noticed until it was too late.

  In the end, it doesn’t matter. I show my book to no one. Mysteries are stupid, I conclude. You have to pretend to believe impossible things. How can a teenage girl get tied up by Suspicious Characters in each new case and undo the knots every time? Besides, isn’t the real Nancy too young to drive? Couldn’t she miss her mother, at least once? After all my fervid imitations, I’m weary of Nancy’s sorrow-proof life, her repeating arc of victory set into type and published a million times over, a fraud of perfection that God Himself hasn’t the least whiffling power to change.

  So, in this waning summer, I switch to writing “plays” patterned after the French dictées I encountered in Sister Ernestine’s classroom. The speakers in my dramas are usually sisters, their dialogue shot through with pearly, snootyboots expressions lifted from the Marches and the Cuthberts and the Drews.

  Then comes a day when I find only a few sheets left in the packet, so I go to the cupboard for more. When I lift the latch, the door swings open to an unspeakable sight.

  No paper.

  I gape into the empty larder, gut rising to my throat.

  Out of paper.

  Out. Of. Paper.

  Of paper.

  The first stage of grief is denial, and I suppose I imagined that last ream as an endless one. We’d wanted for
nothing since Dad died—we still had homemade pies and doughnuts and our animals and all the other people we loved. So we blundered forth in our heedless habit of extravagance, the usual pileup of Cathy’s princesses and horses, Betty’s snowmen, my artless prose.

  I shut the cupboard door, rushing a frantic, begging prayer to St. Anthony, then open it again.

  Still bare.

  I dare not tell Mum, so I tell Cathy. How, oh how, did we let Dad’s paper disappear? How, oh how, will we now acquire more? We do not understand that paper is something you can buy. Despite our ahead-of-grade reading, we’ve been sheltered by the times, our Catholic education, our priest uncle, our embracing big sister, our mother and father. We do not know the facts of life; we still believe in Santa Claus; we leave room on the couch for the Guardian Angel and regret having no remaining baby teeth to offer the Tooth Fairy. Dad’s paper is gone and we know of no way to get it back.

  How I ache for all those wasted pages; grief is not too strong a word for that ache. I suppose that up until this moment I believed, somewhere deep, that he could still come back. All those boring identical snowmen, all those stupid princesses with their big fat dresses, all my own vapid pages tossed out because of false starts and misspelled words and dimwitted clues and unlovely illustrations. We have six sheets left and I take them all, hoarding them, writing smaller and smaller, using both sides. With the last, luscious sheet, I revert to my earliest form of meditation, writing a single word over and over, absorbing the form, the feel, the meaning, the rhythm, the sheer sensual jolt of pen on paper.

  Deceased. Deceased. Deceased. Four months to the day, and it’s still true.

  9. The Mystery of the Missing Man

  AT THE END of that first Dadless summer, during the last bright sticky days of August, the Vaillancourts head “up the pond” for a week. I have an open invitation to come for a swim, but with no driver in our household I’ve got no way to get there. Instead of leaving me to fret by myself, Cathy and Betty forgive me my miserly, summer-long refusal to share my secret codes, my secret stakeouts, my secret book, my secret family; Come with us, my darling sisters say.