When We Were the Kennedys

by Monica Wood

  Can Dad see all this from heaven?

  “Sister Bernadette says life goes on,” I say to Anne. We’re halfway through October, the ever-starched collar of my school uniform already wilting with wear.

  “Life does go on, sweetie. It has to.” She’s at the kitchen table, tabulating grades on her adding machine, a refurbished thirty-pound brute Dad bought only months ago. He’d touched it, paid for it, carried it home for Mum to wrap as a gift to their schoolteacher daughter. I love the sound—especially at night when I’m in bed—a muscular clacketing that means Anne is out there.

  “I miss Fath.”

  “He’s busy, that’s all,” she tells me. “It’s hard to be a pastor.”

  I sidle up to the table. “I want everything to go back how it was.” Before Dad, I mean. I blush at the unseemly baby-whine in my voice.

  Anne pulls out her chair and gathers me into her lap, which is too small for me now. I’ve shot up over the summer, suddenly too big for her body. “We have two choices,” she says, holding me fast. “We can ask why-why-why, over and over. Why-why-why?” She pauses, letting that useless plea sink in. “Or,” she says, “we can just do.”

  I well up. “I don’t want to just do.”

  She waits; this is how I always know she’s listening. Then: “Monnie,” she whispers. “Just doing doesn’t hurt as much as why-why-why.”

  Of course she’s guessed what I’ve privately been asking God for. Sometimes I ask nicely—O merciful God, O heavenly Father—and sometimes I don’t—Give him back! I mean it! Right now! I’ve also asked God’s army of surrogates—the Virgin Mary; Jesus the Son; the angel Gabriel; St. Anthony, who’s good at finding things; and my own patron saint, St. Monica, whose claim to sainthood was to pray endlessly for her degenerate son, Augustine, to become a writer and saint remembered through the ages. Twenty years later God finally said to St. Monica: Oh, all right. Happy now?

  I slip off my sister’s knees, infused with a resolve to do better, to be better. I finish October by writing the inaugural issue of the fifth-grade newspaper for several days running, spread out in the parlor with Denise, my co-editor. We gather all the news, write all the articles, draw all the comics, choose the weekly prayer. We use Oxford paper—store-bought by Anne—which doesn’t smell the same. As Mum reads all four pages with her brow rumpled in admiring concentration, I begin, possibly for the first time, to perceive accomplishment as a way out of despair. At school I launch into spectacular overreach, reading ahead by chapters not pages, staying for ménage not once a week but every day, keeping my school desk a model of godliness, spritzing it daily with a lime-green fluid Sister Bernadette keeps in the cupboard. For a show-and-tell on South America, Denise and I use up a month’s worth of Times back issues to make a papier-mâché topographical map, slopping water on Mum’s parlor rug and leaving strips of paper stuck to the chairs. The finished map is so huge and unwieldy that as we wrestle it down over the first-floor landing, the Norkuses go mute with befuddlement. The messy projects tend to unfold in my household, and the neat ones—we’re teaching ourselves guitar on Silvertones bought at Montgomery Ward—in hers.

  This is called “doing.” This is called “not asking why-why-why.” But it is not—not exactly—life going on.

  Coming home after school one Friday near Halloween, I open the door to find the kitchen empty, the radio off, the parakeet muttering under his breath. Is this when I first notice the absence of song? That sound I’d been hearing all summer—was it the sound of Mum not singing?

  “Music is prayer,” Sister Louise, our choir director, is fond of saying. “God hears you faster.” Cathy and I sing in choir, we sing along to the jukebox at the Chicken Coop, but we don’t sing here anymore. At home. In this kitchen, which had once been filled all the live-long day with my mother’s voice.

  We have a family song—the car-trip song, courtesy of Irving Berlin, a song I haven’t heard in a long time. Months. Six months to be exact, back in April when Dad drove us to Lewiston for our annual trip to Peck’s, a department store with a beguiling elevator and luscious array of Easter dresses. Dad tapping the wheel as Anne and Mum swapped roles in a syncopated show tune that demanded concentration and immaculate pitch: I hear music but there’s nooo one there! I smell blossoms but the treees are bare! Dad’s speaking voice had depth and gravel and other consolations, but a singer he was not. He liked to step-dance instead, badly, like a rooster wearing galoshes, a jokey tribute to his PEI roots, steppity-tappity-bang-bang-BANG, which made Mum laugh, hard and hooty, every single time. In the car that day he just listened, guiding us along a road that followed our filthy, frothing, flowing river.

  These memories well up as I stow my schoolbooks and listen harder to the quiet. Sister Louise’s dictum—Music is prayer—loops like a melody in my head. Cathy and Betty are at the Fourniers’, visiting the pigeons in their coop; Anne’s still at school; the ambient sounds of our family at home after a school day have been stilled. Is it this stillness that unnerves me, or merely the weather—a dampening that isn’t rain, a thickening odor from the mill, portents of a late burst of Indian summer? As I wait in the softening air, I recognize how long I’ve missed Mum’s singing, how I’ve pined for it, her stretched notes and dolorous crescendos in “Autumn Leaves” and “You’ll Have to Go” and “Tammy,” all the most-requested from WRUM.

  But all is soundless now. I mouse-creep into my bedroom to find her napping on the bottom bunk with an afghan slung over her shoulders. Across from her, on the bed I share with Cathy, Tom is sacked out on a pillow, also asleep.

  “Mum?”

  She stirs. The cat stirs.

  “Mum? You awake?”

  She rouses herself, puts on her glasses, looks at me. The cat sits up and purrs.

  “Remember that song?” I ask her. “‘I Hear Music’?”

  She nods. Her hair’s all mashed on one side.

  I wait. “‘I hear music but there’s no one there’? That one?”

  She tries to smile, murmuring the song’s big finish: “‘You’re not sick, you’re just in love.’”

  “Uh-huh. That one.”

  I wait some more. Nothing happens. So I pick up the singing cat and give him to her.

  She kisses his hard fuzzy head. “You’re a goosey cat,” she croons. “You’re a goosey goosey gumdrops.” This is how she talks to animals, in baby talk; we all do. But lately, at odd times, like now, she reverts to her regular voice. “Time to start supper, I guess,” she says to him, still sitting on the bottom bunk. “What about hamburg? I’ve got some hamburg in the fridge.” Hearing her gives me the shivers, as I half expect Dad to answer through a slit in the sky.

  But neither of Mum’s dearest male creatures, only one of whom talks back, can answer for Dad. The parakeet can sing four bars of “Sugartime” and open the gate on his cage, but he can’t make our landlords open the gate to the garden. The cat can warm Mum’s feet at night but can’t lug the oil can upstairs or fix a stogged-up toilet.

  Even if Father Bob could magically appear on the instant, he wouldn’t be able to do these things either, not with his bad, much-operated-on back. He’s famously unhandy, and the Norkuses, cowed by his cassock, behave beautifully in his presence, leaving him no opening to rectify their trespasses. We need Father Bob anyway; if he’s not the man in the house, he’s the man of the house. And he’s gone, stuck at his parish, because the stupid bishop visited; because the stupid parish council met; because a stupid dying parishioner asked to be anointed.

  Is he thinking of us, in his tidy, two-story rectory? It has white steps and a mowed lawn, not unlike the houses from Dick and Jane. And cats, too—pliable, affectionate, good-smelling beasts he rescued from the road. Like Nancy Drew, Father Bob has a housekeeper, a bony, aproned woman named Thurza Hines who likes children and makes cookies with M&M smiley faces before smiley faces have a name. Mrs. Hines doesn’t live in, an arrangement that allows Father Bob to do some of his own cooking, and so the guest rooms and h
ousekeeper’s digs become ours whenever we visit.

  Oh, the splendor of those rooms: the tasseled bedspreads, the white nightstands, the floral curtains, a bathroom to ourselves alone. Since toddlerhood we’d made these visits, each glorious one beginning with a Mass in the church next door, a Mass that looked nothing like a real Mass. We were the only congregants and it was not Sunday and we were not in Sunday clothes. No altar boys. No choir. No homily. No concelebrants. Just our magnificent uncle chanting the Offertory in a sonorous talk-singing that sounded as if it came from an ancient, echoing cave. He consecrated the host, whispering in Latin, sipping the wine till it was gone. Stillness overtook us. This was the awe of God.

  After Mass we’d rush the sacristy to watch him shed his vestments, smooth out their gilded folds, and hang them in a closet made special. He stashed the chalice and paten. Everything so tidy, so proper. Each hidden place required a tiny gold key: closet, tabernacle, a cedar cupboard that held the altar linens. This was our first brush with elegance; we learned the after-Mass protocol the way children in other places learned to trim a sail or wax their skis.

  Afterwards, our fists clamped around dripping ice-cream cones, we’d stroll through a town not ours where we met parishioners who patted our heads and commended our sterling behavior. We were Father Bob’s wonderful girls, his honor and joy, and even in our earliest visits—early enough that I remember having to be lifted into the car—I’d perceived in his presence a dozy, distant weight, the baffling burden of being intensely loved.

  Those times with Father Bob seem far away as Mum finally gets up to start supper. I follow her into the kitchen, sick with longing. “When’s he coming back, Mum?”

  She knows who I mean. “Bye and bye,” she says, opening the fridge. She picks up a package of hamburg and stares at it. She looks like a spirit to me, a shimmer of herself: pale, with sky-blue veins netting her temples, a faraway sheen in her eyes. At times I believe I can see clear through her; but at least she’s here, right here, close enough that I can put my arms around her and squeeze. Father Bob, on the other hand, is just plain gone. I want to go to the rectory and pretend to be Caroline Kennedy in my frilly white twin bed. Even more, I want him to come to us, to visit my new fifth-grade classroom and drink Mum’s coffee and finish teaching me pinochle, a complicated card game that requires two decks I love to shuffle. I want him to drive us overtown where we can strut alongside him, up and down Congress Street to window-shop and then into Razzano’s for spaghetti and meatballs and Moxie with ice. I want to follow him into and out of stores where they give him free this and free that because he grew up here and went away to college and did not fail to answer his holy calling. I want to follow him like an imprinted gosling with my gosling sisters and believe he’s just like Dad.

  “Come,” Mum says, shutting the fridge door. As awake as she’s going to get. “You can help me set the table.”

  I look hard at her. “How long is bye and bye?”

  She runs her hand over my hair. “You girls have to learn how to wait.”

  It will take a long time for me to know that Father Bob was not like Dad. For him to be anything like Dad—loose with laughter, physically tough, a natural lightheart—had never been possible. Mum and her siblings came from a family unhappy in all the usual ways: too much whiskey, not enough cash. They’d emigrated from the same PEI county that Dad would forsake a generation later, but unlike Dad’s migration, theirs seemed hard-won, half-evolved, unfinished. Who knew why some farmers took to papermaking and some didn’t? Maybe it mattered how much you’d loved farming in the first place, or how heavily you grieved for your abandoned, unyielding land. Dad talked about PEI all the time, told all those affectionate tales, made his homeland seem like a celebration he’d carried with him rather than a heartache he’d left behind.

  Cumpy told no tales from his former life, not even when his brother and sisters came to visit. He and my unremembered grandmother raised their kids in a Rumford block and in time bought a real house in Mexico, a gabled single-family with a yard, every immigrant’s dream. But by then it was too late to renew their faith in happiness, for they’d lost something far more precious than their homeland.

  Mum was nine years old on that magically bright Sunday in 1923, skipping along Waldo Street in the September sunshine with her sister Sadie and their angelic baby brother, John James, joined by other children from other blocks, some cousins, some not. Shrieking and laughing, they act like kids from any generation, from any culture or faith, playing hopscotch or kickball in their bubbling pastiche of Franco and Irish and Italian expressions, one kid picking up from another. Tant pis! hollers one child, Capiche? shouts another, Quit yer crakin’! teases another, and like crows on a roadside they pluck these baubles and carry them home to their disapproving parents.

  The melting pot boils over at times, but not today. Today is all high, cool sunlight and freshening fall air, the kind of dry, blue-sky day when the mill’s stench fades a bit and goodwill bursts from unexpected places. A few hours after Sunday Mass, where they’ve bent their heads in dutiful supplication, the children have abandoned themselves to the day. A teenager across the street, barely out of boyhood himself, comes out to the stoop, feeling generous, perhaps, after the Gospel reading from the morning Mass: And He took a child, and set him in the midst of them: and when He had taken him in his arms, He said unto them, Whosoever shall receive one of such children in My name, receiveth Me. The young fellow sits his lanky self down, straightens his Sunday cuffs, and opens a bag of sweets. He calls across to the cute little four-year-old, Mum’s beloved brother, my baby uncle: You want one, kid?

  Of course he wants one! John James, destined to ascend straight to heaven by virtue of his tender age and Catholic baptism, darts into the path of a luckless neighbor’s coughing Model T. His sister screams his name and the whole day dies.

  Internal hemmorage from automobile accident, reads the misspelled death certificate signed in a bold, shocked hand by the Rumford town clerk. Duration: 3 hours. Contributing cause: Nervous shock.

  Three hours it took for little John James to die, and so much longer than that—never, I suppose—for his family to express its pain. Their blue-eyed boy had turned four in July, same birthday as his big sister, who’d given him four playful swats on the bottom—plus one to grow on! But it was not to be.

  So here is Mum, young Margaret, suffering her little-girl grief, an engulfing shock made worse by the silence that will attend it forever after. Never will she hear his sweet Irish name again. Is it any surprise that the next boy born to the family—a “change of life” baby in more ways than one—will become her pet? They call him Bobby, until the moment of his ordination, when everyone, including Mum, his fourteen-years-older sister, will switch to “Father Bob” in less time than it takes for him to transform wine into the blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

  The death of John James made everyone more of what they already were: mother sterner and needier and more resentful of her living girls; father heavier-drinking and quicker-tempered; and daughter—Mum—more straight-backed and responsible, more weighted down than ever as the oldest child. The packet of fading photos gives it away if you know how to look: always a rundown porch landing and stair rails behind, always a child squinting into strong sunlight and a grim-faced adult skulking in shadow. What must it have been like to grow up in that silence?

  People, like trees, want to grow toward the light, and for Mum, Dad was that light. This was true, too, for Father Bob, a lonely, bookish boy who found in Dad the father he’d always wanted. Maybe Mum did, too, in the older man she’d come to call “Dad,” a papermaker with merry blue eyes, the opposite of her brooding, dark-drinking father. A baby brother once himself, Dad took to little Bobby, possibly even wooed Mum by befriending the towheaded little fulla.

  Later on they must have made a funny pair, Dad an aging papermaker with his yellow teeth and plaid shirts, Father Bob in the rinsed grace of his young priesthood, with his clean fing
ernails, his fluency in French and Latin, his taste for classical music, his degree from Holy Cross and Grande Séminaire. I haven’t a single memory of them together; like my onetime heroine Nancy Drew, however, I can deduce Father Bob’s devotion to Dad by recalling the depth of his heartache.

  Perhaps Father Bob had always been a crier, but Dad’s death had unlatched another gate; now my uncle puddled up over striped cats, straight-A report cards, salmon sunsets, Irish singers, God’s everlasting love. Even so, I believed he was big and strong when in fact he was fragile, far more fragile than I knew in 1963, when he stumbled by default into the yawning void Dad left behind, a grief-broken priest presiding over the funeral, following the casket with the poise of a sailing ship, his billowing vestments filled with the breath of God.

  I suppose he prayed for guidance. Prayed for strength. He typed out the Serenity Prayer from Alcoholics Anonymous and taped it into his breviary. Seven times a day he opened the supple leather cover and saw that prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change . . . First he bent, and then he bent some more, and then he broke.

  The Catholic tradition of my childhood—which I recall with affection, some awe, and a measure of yearning—did not allow for randomness. Every word and deed, every sorrow and triumph, every birth and death belonged to a Divine Plan. If at times you thought this Plan unreasonable, senseless, or just plain mean, you were asked to trust that even the most extreme sorrow had to be a blessing in disguise. Almost everything essential came to you in disguise. Everything that happened was part of something beyond your human ken, a necessary preparation—for what, remained to be seen. Best case: something better. Worst case: something worse.