When We Were the Kennedys

by Monica Wood

  Wherever you fit into this plan—giving Communion or receiving Communion; top of the class or mentally retarded; working or on strike; whole and happy or hacked to pieces by grief—you fit. That was the Plan’s cruel beauty. You wept if you had to, hid your face and gnashed your teeth, but you knew that if you repaired to your bed of pain it was because God wanted you there—only you; only there—to complete the unknowable requirements of something great and vast and ultimately beautiful.

  Believe it or not, this was a comfort.

  Sometime—not long—after I ask for the “I Hear Music” song, Mum resumes singing at last. Humming, really, with the occasional full-blown song—“Flow Gently, Sweet Afton,” her favorite, about a woman in her stream-side grave. The resumption of singing in our house, even a song as troubling as this, feels like a turning tide.

  But it’s early November now, and still Father Bob hasn’t surfaced.

  “Where is he, Mum?” I’m not a baby fourth-grader anymore. I want answers and I want them now.

  Washing dishes in the pocked double sink, Mum pretends not to hear. “‘My Mary’s asleep by the murmuring stream,’” she sings. I know the difference between when she can’t hear because of her bad ears and when she can’t hear because she doesn’t like the question.

  “Ask Anne,” Cathy says.

  “Where is he, Annie?”

  “He’ll be back.”

  “WHERE IS HE?” That’s Betty; now they have to tell.

  “In the hospital,” Mum says finally.

  We look at each other, flabbergasted. Why didn’t they just say so? This news is no surprise; this news is nothing! Father Bob’s been in the hospital plenty of times: lower back, gallbladder, upper back, kidney stones, you name it, scars all over.

  “Can we go see him?”

  Father Bob always goes to the hospital in Bangor. Aunt Rose could drive us; she’s like her brother that way: single, drives all over, all the time.

  “The hospital’s in Baltimore,” Mum says. “That’s in Maryland. Which is another state far away from here.”

  But that’s not the real reason. We just know it. We move in, crowding her body as she scrubs a pan. Her body is our comfort, so pillowy and warm.

  “How far?”

  “Far. Near Our Nation’s Capital.” This is how she always refers to President Kennedy’s city—reverently, in capital letters.

  Cathy uses this information to surmise that Father Bob could be visiting President Kennedy, who’s Catholic like us and has a retarded sister like us and is handsome in a Father Bob–ish way. Like most of Cathy’s conclusions, this one sounds reasonable enough to me. I picture my uncle watering a tray of pansies affixed to the window of his hospital room, which overlooks the White House lawn where Caroline, just a little bit younger than me, rides her pony in ecstatic circles as her parents watch with their pearly smiles.

  Betty’s the one who thinks to ask: “WHAT HAPPENED TO HIM?”

  “Gallbladder,” Cathy says. She always gives the answer.

  “You only have one gallbladder,” I inform her. “They can’t take it out twice.”

  “His back, then.”

  “THEY TOOK OUT HIS BACK?”

  “He’s just nervous,” Mum says. She dries the flour scoop, glances at Anne, opens the flour bin, drops it in, la-la-la.

  We don’t like the sound of this. Nervous is a PEI word whose meaning slips around. Aunt Rose gets “nervous” sometimes, when she comes over with her face crimped and red and her eyes popping. Cumpy, too, on occasion. Sometimes Father Bob wears his fedora because we tell him it looks so fancy, but other times he wears it to cover the inflamed scales along his widow’s peak. That means nervous. Mum puts Vaseline on his head, which never helps.

  But maybe the hospital will fix it. And maybe Father Bob will bless the president, and then the president will invite us to the White House and give us a ride on Caroline’s pony. These fancies keep my mind alight for days, until Mum announces at supper one night that instead of Thanksgiving at home next week, we’re going on a trip.

  What? We’ve never gone on a trip.

  We are now. To the hospital in Baltimore.

  “Yaaaay!”

  We’ll pick up Father Bob in Aunt Rose’s car, and then drive to Our Nation’s Capital—

  “Yaaaay!”

  —to see the White House in person, and the Capitol, and the Lincoln Memorial, and the Washington Monument.

  We can’t believe it. We cannot believe it. We make Mum tell us again.

  I make a dash to the Vaillancourts’ to crow about our family trip. “We’re leaving on Tuesday,” I tell Denise. “I get to miss school.”

  Denise’s eyes widen. I have something she wants. This switcheroo floods me with a guilty, luscious light.

  “We might meet the president and Jackie and Caroline.” I don’t care about John-John, who is a boy and not worth mentioning.

  “You lucky,” Denise says. She’s officially jealous, but she still loves me; the moment is exquisite, and the pony ride of my daydream suddenly seems possible.

  “We’re getting new dresses, too,” I add, which might not be true.

  Before I get around to asking Mum about a new dress, a man named Lee Harvey Oswald sneaks into a book repository in Dallas, Texas, where he crouches at a sixth-floor window and points a gun and shoots the president dead. What happened to my family in April is now happening to the Kennedys; what happened to the Kennedys is now happening to the whole country; and the whole country cannot stop crying.

  11. Widows’ Instructions

  AN HOUR BEFORE Oswald pulls the trigger, I’m at choir practice, knuckling under the tutelage of Sister Louise, a lean, starchy woman who Means Business and Means It Now. For a goodly portion of our lunch hour every day, we stand in the choir loft, straight-shouldered and ladylike, singing into the rich echo chamber of the empty church, learning to sight-read and harmonize and pro-JECT, pro-JECT, pro-JECT! Sister Louise sounds out all the parts—not a good voice, though her pitch is flawless, her directing eminently followable. We keep our eyes on her long, lolloping fingers.

  The hands stop, shutting us up on the instant.

  “Who laughed?” Sister Louise swivels her flushing face from the altos to the soprano IIs to the high sopranos and back again, the scorching heat of her gaze liquefying the innocent and guilty alike.

  “I said, who laughed?”

  I exchange a sidelong glance with Denise, who stands beside me with the soprano IIs, and another with Cathy, over there with the altos. We know from experience that Sister Louise can hold out longer than Methuselah. She can keep us through the end of the school day if she takes a notion; through supper, through the night, through the feast day of St. Blaise, seventy-three days hence. Our skin will rot away, our hair fall out from starvation, we will petrify ourselves into a choir of singing skeletons, our uniforms gone to rags, and still she’ll be there: arms crossed, waiting for the malefactor to confess.

  And so: “I did, Sister.” Linda Cote, sixth grade, possessor of enviably long blond hair and, apparently, a sizable death wish.

  “Why were you laughing?”

  “No reason, Sister.”

  “People don’t laugh for no reason.”

  “Well, it sounded kind of funny when your voice cracked.”

  As Carolyn Keene would have it: They froze in horror!

  “And you thought that was funny?”

  “Yes, Sister.” No choice here. She has to tell the truth.

  “Is that so? Then perhaps you would do us all the great favor of singing these lines yourself.”

  Cue the organ, Sister Mary of Jesus (kindly; mustachioed; outranked) staring helplessly at the sheet music. A brief intro, slow and funereal. Then Linda sings four bars like a springtime sun, her voice warm and pure and touched by a faint, angelic vibrato. Tantum ergo Sacramentum, Veneremur chernui. . . .

  Uh-oh.

  “Well, students? Was that funny? Linda, did you hear anybody laughing while
you sang?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No, Sister.”

  Wherever Sister Louise might have been going with this, she appears to have lost her way. Perhaps she’s been blind-sided by the eerie joy of a young girl’s clarity of tone, or by the revelation that she, Sister Louise, has created a thing of beauty out of a mixed crew of schoolgirls who came to her with zero musical chops and wound up singing like the Cherubim and Seraphim. She teaches school because she has to; she directs the choir because she loves to. Her choir—our choir—is good. We’ve been told, by Sister herself, that we channel the sweetness of heaven.

  “All right, then,” she says, glaring briefly at Linda, then at Sister Mary of Jesus, pretending she’s nailed down her murky point. “Now. Everyone. From the first measure.” She lifts her hands, thumbs and index fingers lightly touching. “And remember, please: Music is prayer.”

  We’re rehearsing for the season’s High Masses, Latin prayers like O Salutaris and Panis Angelicus and Ave Maria and varying arrangements of the Tantum Ergo. Though Sister Louise tosses Pope John a few crumbs like “Holy God We Praise Thy Name,” we remain among the last congregants in the country to succumb to the retooled protocols of Vatican II. It seems that every new thing in America comes late to our town: rock-and-roll, collective bargaining, vinyl siding, the English-language Mass.

  But the news of the president reaches us fast, the same way it reaches everyone: Someone hears the radio, turns on the TV, calls everyone she knows. I’m lined up with the rest of the fifth-graders in the side lot after recess, waiting to return to our steam-heated classroom. Directly across the street—up there, top floor, behind the white sheers on the front-room windows—Denise’s mother gapes at the unfolding news. Perhaps she rushes to the window, looking for Denise and me, the two of us together in line as always, the sky over our heads exceptionally high and bright and cold. We’ve been on the girls’ side, jumping rope on bare pavement, the boys corralled on the boys’ side, strangling each other or hurling insults or hacking each other with sticks. No snow to speak of yet and we’re only six days from Thanksgiving. I entertain myself by imagining everybody standing here next week, their teeth rattling in the first snow, while I’m in Our Nation’s Capital, walking into the White House on the arm of my uncle.

  Just beyond the flat rooftop of Denise’s block, you can see the windows of our parlor, where Mum, too, drops to a seat in front of the TV and places her hand on her heart.

  All at once, Sister Bernadette bursts from the building, her small eyes rodent-red with turmoil. “Children,” she begins. “A terrible thing has happened.” Her doughy wrists jut from her cuffs and she hugs herself. She’s forgotten her coat, a tiered woolen monstrosity that weighs thirty pounds. Her mouth opens to the cold.

  Oh, no.

  Waiting in the crackled November sunshine, I can think of only one Terrible Thing. My body feels like a river in the act of freezing.

  On the other side of the building, the third-graders in line after their own recess, Sister Louise whispers something to Sister Mary of Jesus, who blanches while Sister Louise faces the line and says, “Children, I have very bad news.” Betty waits, docile and unmoved; everything about school is bad news to her. But Cathy, who writes letters to Mum when she’s supposed to be practicing her times-threes or teaching Betty how to knit, jumps to the same numbing conclusion: Mum died.

  But it’s not Mum.

  “Who?” I whisper to Denise. “Who did she say?”

  First I don’t hear, then I do. It’s President Kennedy, Mum’s other man. He has been shot.

  “The president’s dead, the president’s dead!” shouts a kid in line, one of the histrionic boys. “There’s gonna be a war!”

  Who cares? Cathy and I are possibly the only two citizens of the United States of America who receive the heart-jangling, era-shaping news of twelve-thirty P.M., Central Standard Time, November 22, 1963, with a gulping wallop of relief.

  Mum is home, making a salmon loaf for our no-meat Friday supper, alive alive alive.

  New word: assassination.

  Such a clamor, coast to coast, strangers from Detroit and Los Angeles and Hartford and New York sobbing into fuzzy microphones to tell the newsmen I can’t believe it, oh dear God, I can’t believe it, how can we go on? Mexico, too, mourns hard, especially the mothers, and most especially the Catholic mothers, who love beautiful Catholic Jackie even more than handsome Catholic Jack. Our First Lady wears boxy jackets with three-quarter sleeves. She sculpts her hair into shiny pageboys. She waltzes like a breeze-ruffled lilac. She rides brawny, upper-crust horses. Slim and graceful and humbly rich, she makes our mothers, in their cakelike hats from the fifties with fake flowers and crinkly veils, look suddenly dowdy and wanting. Jackie speaks “Paris” French, not the country French of our Franco neighbors. Her very name, Jacqueline Bouvier, honeyed and Continental, soaks our mothers with yearning.

  Mum’s 1963 Easter hat looked a lot like her 1962 Easter hat, but she’d come home from Doris’s Dress Shop calling it a pillbox because that’s what Jackie wore. “I like how it covers the head,” she said, “but not the hair.” This is what somebody on TV had said. Dad thought it a “desperate-handsome rig” for its trim of silk flowers. A month after that, she wore it to Dad’s funeral.

  And now Jackie, too, has suffered the unthinkable, her husband gone like that.

  Jackie in her bloody pink suit.

  Jackie with her children tucked close.

  Jackie taking her brother-in-law Bobby’s hand.

  Jackie with her finishing-school posture, her high-born cheekbones, her bravery and poise.

  Jackie bearing up.

  In a different year Mum might have done like the other mothers, who are meeting at grocery counters to buy the Friday fish and break into tears. Instead, Mum stays home, watching the televised spectacle with a ferocious, private empathy. She, too, knows about bearing up. She’d followed her own husband’s casket out of a church fogged with incense, her own mild brown eyes wounded and dry, her own coat buttoned up just so, as if to show everyone—even Jackie, had she been watching—how these things were done. She had her own little Caroline—three of them; her own Bobby; her own bravery and poise.

  Our TV, like everyone’s, stays on for three solid days while shock follows shock:

  Walter Cronkite, our trustworthy newsman, breaking down on air.

  Jackie getting off the plane, twenty-four hours since bang-shock-bang, still wearing the trim pink suit, its bodice defaced with blood and brain.

  Another murder, on live TV, a shady character named Jack Ruby gunning down the president’s killer as he’s led from a holding room by detectives wearing fedoras like Father Bob’s.

  Mum, who’s refused us a Barbie for her “vulgar” proportions, lets us watch all this. She had shielded us from much of Dad’s own Catholic goodbye, but we watch every second of the gruesome coverage, every second of the national wake, the national funeral, the national burial. Protecting us now from the death of a husband and father would be pretty much a locking-the-barn-door affair. The set stays on; Mum keeps vigil with Jackie, narrating the First Widow’s first hours: the shell-shocked wife, the heartsick mother, the chin-up architect of the national funeral.

  “Oh, girls. Look at that suit. That’s blood.”

  “See that, girls? See how she’s staring at nothing? She’s thinking of the children now.”

  “She hasn’t even changed her clothes. That’s shock, girls.”

  “Mother of Mary, how is she ever going to tell them?”

  “There she is, girls, God love her soul. Even in shock, how beautiful.”

  On and on, for three days.

  “Look, girls, there’s Bobby.” The president’s younger brother. His favorite. Caroline’s uncle. “He’ll be the man of the house now.” She speaks with the quiet passion of an insider, her every observation delivered with a weary, unwanted authority.

  “Bobby won’t leave her side,” s
he goes on, mopping her eyes. “Thank God she has him.”

  We watch it all: The president’s casket with its crisp, distressing flag. Weeping citizens filing past in their cloth coats and fogged-up eyeglasses and homely shoes. Jackie and Caroline kneeling to kiss the casket.

  Had we done that? Kissed Dad’s casket?

  Monday brings the president’s funeral and burial, school closed, a national day of mourning. On Tuesday we’ll leave for Baltimore and Our Nation’s Capital, which is steeped in mourning; we’ll miss school altogether this week, more time than we got for Dad.

  “Look, girls, she’s put her veil down now. She doesn’t want people to see her face.” The way she says it—people—makes me realize: other people. Not us. Because we know what’s under there.

  “Oh, those dear children. Little Caroline and John-John.”

  Our counterparts. I drink them in.

  “She chose Arlington because the president was a war hero, girls. That’s important—PT-109. Remember that.”

  We watch and watch: procession after procession, quiet but for the sound of horses’ hooves and the heartbeat percussion of muffled drums.

  New word: caisson. I toy with a memory of my making: Dad’s trip to the cemetery, led by a riderless horse like Black Jack prancing and shying behind a six-white-horse-drawn caisson. I invent Dad’s procession, Dad’s twenty-one-gun salute, Dad’s strangers from Detroit and Los Angeles and Hartford and New York keening into the cameras. Dad’s widow, a veil covering the thing she won’t let people see.

  New word: cortège. Mum barely moves from the brocaded footstool, the closest seat to the TV. We watch the funeral cortège, stirred by the pomp and ceremony, the slither of low black cars, the sea of crosses at Arlington National Cemetery, and Black Jack with his polished hooves and nothing in his saddle but a pair of boots set backwards into the stirrups.