When We Were the Kennedys

by Monica Wood

  First he cries. Then we do. Then a flutter in our periphery, people talking and not. Whispering and not. But we’re inside a bubble called Father Bob and care not, for once, to overhear what adults are saying.

  Mum and Aunt Rose and Anne close in then, and we huddle there, all of us. How small we must seem to the white-apron nun: this lost family, this frayed knot, this blot of Sunday-best color in the immense antiseptic hugeness of a Baltimore hospital for the Catholic and chronically nervous.

  Time collapses after that. We’re en route from the hospital to Our Nation’s Capital, seven of us now sardined into Aunt Rose’s car with the weather clear and clean and Father Bob at the wheel. Mum up front with her siblings; Anne in back with hers. Nobody singing the car-trip song. Cathy, the most reliable keeper of family memories, will recall nothing of this trip except for a low-grade anxiety, normally my territory. But I’m ten in this memory, and I believe that, like Nancy Drew, my obligation is to crack the code, remain calm, decipher the clues. It’s not right that Father Bob has been stashed into this hospital-not-hospital, that they engaged him in the sad, dumb work of making sock monkeys instead of driving his car hither and yon and wowing his parishioners from the pulpit and visiting our classrooms in his blacks and collar and playing Scrabble with Mum and pinochle with us. How beautiful and terrible it had felt when we ran to him and he scooped us so hard to his breast.

  Clue: Father Bob’s been given permission—by whom? —to come with us in the car. Clue: He’s been given permission—by whom?—to drive it himself. Or—big clue—he’s been denied permission but insists on driving anyway.

  I’m quiet for a time, sorting my info, and then, holy smoke! I remember.

  Me: The president died! Fath, did you hear the president died?

  Betty: HE GOT SHOT. THE MAN SHOT PRESINENT KENNENY.

  Yes, Father Bob says, I know. God rest his immortal soul.

  Cathy: Officer Tippit, too, Fath. He got shot by the man, too.

  Me: Lee Harvey Oswald. He lived in Russia!

  Father Bob has cried over this, too, I can see. Why oh why did I mention it?

  Then he makes a direction mistake, which never happens, and we’re in a part of Our Nation’s Capital that looks nothing like the postcards he himself once sent from here. No blooming, soap-bubble trees, no snow-clean monuments, no wide swept streets. Instead, lots of blocks that look sort of like ours but not really. Too many stacked stories, no yards, sidewalks garbagey and full of strange, not-garbage things. At the front of one set of stairs I spy something that looks like a shopping cart but can’t be. The Norkuses would be steaming. NO TOO MUCH GARBAGE!

  Everything in Washington is supposed to be white: the White House, the Capitol building, the monuments. Instead, black: black bunting hanging from narrow windows and shabby storefronts, the whole city draped in widow’s weeds as we edge through these blackish streets that are the wrong streets.

  “Are we lost?”

  “Lock your doors, girls.”

  Uh-oh.

  Father Bob puts his collar on.

  Cars: black. Bunting: black. People: black! Until now I’ve never once beheld a black person. Not even one. Not anywhere.

  “Stop staring, girls.”

  We inch through an intersection, turn this way: black black black. Another intersection, this other way: black black black.

  “We’re going to have to ask somebody,” Aunt Rose says. Father Bob keeps to the wheel, peering up at street signs. Clue: I’ve never seen him like this—lost. Lost in a car. This clue is even more confusing than black-black-black.

  Finally Mum rolls down her window and Father Bob slows to a trembling stop.

  “We’re looking for the White House.”

  A black man in a puffy jacket peers in at us, whitest teeth I’ve ever seen. The whites of his eyes, too, look really white, the inside of his lip the baby pink of Mrs. Norkus’s petunias. He takes our measure—what can he be thinking, a priest traveling with all these women? He smiles, points, gives Mum a set of quick, easy instructions. From the back seat we three gape at him with our mouths half open. Anne pats my knee: Stop staring, sweetie.

  The puffy-coat man stands back after giving his big-smile directions: “Ya can’t miss it!”

  Mum will chuckle over this the whole day, repeating “‘Ya can’t miss it!’” as if to say, Mother of Mary, they talk just like us! She’ll shake her head. “That man was so nice. Wasn’t that man nice, girls? ‘Ya can’t miss it!’”

  And we don’t. Down this street, turn here, up that street, turn there, and look-girls-look: the White House, just where that nice man said.

  Except we can’t get near enough. Everything cordoned off. No visitors. Pennsylvania Avenue feels quiet, deadened by what has befallen us all. We will not go to the White House after all; we will not, while being escorted through the grand rooms with the rest of the tourists, be spotted by Jackie herself; the First Widow will not suddenly open a door and slip into view and lock eyes with Mum and say, “We share a bond.” It occurs to the adults, belatedly, that Jackie might not even be there. She might already have taken the children to Hyannis. “Good,” Mum says, nodding. “Good for her.”

  Up and down the somber streets, we take in the sights in silence. Past one massive monument after another, circle upon circle, an aimless vigil. I don’t understand that Father Bob is sick, and in despair, and drying out, and scared, but I know enough to be awed that he manages to do here what he does everywhere: drive. Today is Thanksgiving but nothing Thanksgiving-ish survives this memory of driving.

  We drive past white columns and white domes and statues of colossal white men on white horses, but Father Bob passes them all without comment because he’s looking for the National Cathedral, which he can’t find. We wind up—clue: by accident—in a neighborhood of pretty brick houses sheltered by black iron gates. We drive and drive, down one narrow street and up another, ogling the houses’ tall windows, their slate roofs and granite steps and handsome doors. Then, more streets in this mourning city, more turns, stop someplace for lunch, sandwiches oddly stabbed with frilly toothpicks and gross green olives, then more streets, and a highway, and then Here we are, girls, alarmingly, back in the parking lot of the sock-monkey hospital.

  Us: What—?

  Aunt Rose: Time to go home.

  Anne: It’s all right, girls. He’ll be back before you know it.

  Father Bob: I’ll be back before you can shake a stick.

  “Before you can shake a stick” means a long time. We’re young enough, and old enough, to know at least that. Now we’re boo-hooing, digging in. A white-apron nun comes flapping across the lot. Father Bob gets out. His eyes water up; his cheeks have disappeared, two flat, chalky panes of skin in their place.

  HE’S NOT COMING?

  Not yet, hon.

  What do they mean, he’s not coming? Isn’t this why we drove down here? Isn’t this why we stayed at that motel in a blizzard? Isn’t this why why why can’t he come back home?

  Because.

  Pleeeease!

  Come, girls, in the car.

  Pleasepleaseplease!

  In the car, girlsies! Come on, quick! Quick like a bunny!

  We kiss him and hug him—Bye, Fath! Bye, Fath!—and get in the car and head back north through what I remember now as a miraculous tunnel of sunny weather like the parted seas of Moses: storms on either side, coastal storms sweeping out to sea, western storms petering out in Ohio. We pull into a Howard Johnson’s and slide into a big orange booth.

  Mum looks over the menu, adjusting her glasses. She’s wearing a good dress, her lipstick and perfume, her crystal earrings from Dad. Her hair falls in short cloudy waves. Mum frowns over the big print, pretending to decide, but really she’s looking for something cheap. “I’ll have the Tommy Tucker,” she tells the waitress.

  “That’s a children’s plate,” the waitress says.

  “Oh,” Mum says. She blushes, because now the waitress knows.

  “I�
��m not very hungry. It looked small.”

  “Children only.”

  So Mum orders a hamburger like the rest of us, her cheeks blazing. Is she thinking of Jackie with her bone china and embroidered linen? She starts to chuckle, because the Tommy Tucker sounds so funny, and now we’re all laughing, even as I redden up myself on Mum’s behalf.

  Back in the car, we take turns saying, “I’ll have the Tommy Tucker!” as the highway exits zip past.

  “And here I was,” Mum says, hooting now, “all dressed up! Can you imagine the waitress in the back, telling the cook, ‘That woman ordered the Tommy Tucker, and she was wearing crystal earrings!’”

  “I’ll have the Tommy Tucker!”

  “Ya can’t miss it!”

  Past the car windows, a thousand amazing things: oil tanks; water towers; trees full of long black birds; tall, teetering houses with peeling paint; highway signs and interchanges; other cars crowded with kids, their parents in the front moving their lips. Who are they, these stranger children whom I count up, three here, five there, sometimes one lone face staring out of a back-seat window? Where are they going? I wonder. Where have they been?

  In two days we arrive home—“made good time,” as Father Bob would put it—where everything looks the same as when we left, because it is.

  Looking back on that trip to Washington now—a breathtaking distance of forty-five years—I wonder: As Father Bob drove the narrow streets of Georgetown, looking for the National Cathedral, could I have glanced above the slate rooftops and spotted the imposing edifice of Healy Tower on the campus of Georgetown University? I hope I did; I like to think I caught a bright glimpse as I sat in the back seat of my aunt’s burdened car, feeling throat-tight and afraid. I hadn’t the faintest notion—how could I?—that I’d one day return to this city as a matriculated French major, a move engineered by Father Bob (You can’t go wrong with the Jesuits, Monnie), whose jubilation at my acceptance would render him helpless with laughter, his old ho-ho-ho laugh by then long restored.

  The memory begins like this: I’m waiting on the street in front of our block, Father Bob stuffing my suitcases into the trunk of his Barracuda, my heart already fisted and homesick. The street seems far down; or, our apartment seems far up, everything distorted, overbright, surreal.

  The sun is vivid but cold. I become suddenly aware of myself as a beneficiary of gravity, feeling my tenuous connection to the earth. I can’t say where exactly Earth is right now in relation to the sun—I barely passed physics but got into Georgetown anyway; from some perspective, somewhere in the universe, I must be standing upside down without feeling it. Father Bob shuts the trunk and says, Well, Monnie, I guess it’s time to shove off.

  Goodbye, Mum. Her body feels warm, as it always does. Cushiony as a feather tick, nearly nappable. But it’s too late to sleep in my mother’s embrace. I’ve been eighteen for two weeks; all grown-up. So I leave her there, on our street, the last glimpse I’ll ever have of her whole.

  Father Bob has bought my plane ticket and drives me to the Portland jetport, assuaging my terror by enthusing over the Jesuits’ legendary reverence for learning, their worship of the intellect, their joy. He walks me all the way to the gate, kisses and hugs me. Bye, Fath! Bye, Fath!

  At the other end of this knee-shaking odyssey, I land at D.C. National, follow the signs to baggage claim (Anne’s written instructions), and wait for the conveyer to spit up my suitcases (soon I’ll be calling them bags). In the patient, practiced crowd—am I the only one who’s never done this?—I spot a man from home, the hound-faced, ludicrously tall Ed Muskie, our senator. He bends from his great height to pick up his own bag, which—by design?—comes first off the belt. Hello, I’m from Mexico, I practice to myself. Hello, Senator, my mother was in your class. Before I can will myself to approach him, another passenger grabs my place, engaging him in vigorous discussion, probably about the Clean Water Act, which the senator has been constructing law by law, amendment by amendment. All these regulations, the Maine voter is probably saying. We can’t compete. Same thing everybody says. Leave the water alone.

  When the Maine voter turns away, I try to catch the senator’s eye, hoping he’ll recognize me as a Mexico girl. But I don’t look much like a Mexico girl, in my new pixie haircut and the traveling outfit Anne picked out and Mum approved: paisley polyester “dress shorts” and a matching blouse. I wear them with pantyhose and white sandals. Excuse me, Senator, I say again to myself, but the senator vanishes into a jostle of strangers. I follow a sign for “ground transportation,” which I’d have taken for directions to a sidewalk if not for Anne’s instructions.

  The taxi driver is a black man who reminds me of that long-ago trip to Our Nation’s Capital, our somber ride through the draped streets. Might I work “Ya can’t miss it!” into our conversation, make him chuckle the way the puffy-coat man made my mother chuckle? As I open the door, he looks up crossly, says something I can’t catch.

  “Excuse me?” I ask, holding the door open. My heart is killing me.

  “In the back.”

  “In the—?” I keep my hand on the front-door handle, glancing fearfully into the back seat.

  “In the back,” he repeats. He glares into my ignorant freckled face. “Sit in the back.”

  My eyes heat up; I scramble into the back seat, smoothing out my shorts, holding my new purse from Doris’s Dress Shop, trying not to cry. At home, if you had to take a taxi, you sat in the front, with the driver—common courtesy. Then the driver asked you how was school.

  It takes a long time to get to campus and at the end the man charges me twelve dollars—which I pay, plus one dollar extra (also on Anne’s instructions). Weeks later, comparing notes with my streetwise roommate, I’ll discover his trick, Georgetown via the wrong bridge, many extra miles, my punishment for trying to sit up front. For being polite. For trying not to appear uppity.

  He drops me at a dorm swarming with girls arriving from New York and Chicago and Boston and Philadelphia, their parents lugging televisions and stereos and trunks packed with new bedspreads and beaded curtains and posters of Cat Stevens. In minutes I come to understand how unhip I look, dragging my hometown behind me like a shirttail I can’t keep tucked in. When two boys—you’d have to call them men; older, bearded premed students—dart from the lobby to help me with my things, I’m struck dumb with fear. If only Denise were here, but she’s in Worcester, Massachusetts, moving into a dorm at Assumption College, a place where kids like us belong.

  That first day on my own will last nearly all night, all the moving in and signing up and meeting girls with ankle bracelets and boys with shoulder-length curls. Ann from Chicago and Mindy from Pittsburgh and Jamie from Baltimore; Rob from Philly and Dan from Louisville and Andy from Altoona. My roommate is Christine from Trenton, being moved in by her brother, Saul, whose name I ask for again, thinking he’s said “Salt.” My stupendous ignorance being revealed by the minute, I encounter food I’ve never eaten (I take the Cobb salad in the cafeteria, believing the hairnetted lady has mispronounced crab), places I’ve never heard of (Grosse Point; the Upper East Side; the Mainline), and cursing I’ve never heard in such electrifying ubiquity (fuck this fuck that fuck everything). I walk the campus with a sweaty map, classroom buildings spilling outside the stone walls into the streets, where I glance up alleyways for possible rapists. Then a party in the quad, where Mike from Levittown wheedles me into a date and I say yes even though I mean no, and I come back to my room—first key I’ve ever owned—to find it filled with kids and beer, so I sit there, cross my naked legs (pantyhose are laughable, I’ve learned since morning), and join a mortifying, elliptical conversation in which it must be explained to me, in patronizing enunciations, that Greenberg is a Jewish name, whereupon I must admit that I have never met a Jew. A Bernstein from Brooklyn turns to me in abject, half-admiring wonder and asks: “Where the fuck are you from?”

  He laughs. He calls me the girl from Spain, Maine. He forgives me. They all forgive
me. And by Halloween Eve, richly befriended, I return to my dorm from a class called The Problem of God (that’s the Jesuits for you), alight with teachers who thrill me and ideas that shock me and plans that include Paris—the city in Europe, not the town back home in Maine. I shuffle my happy burden of books to one arm, unlock the door with my first key, and rush inside to grab my ringing phone.

  It’s Anne, who says, “Brace yourself.”

  By then, Father Bob will have become the man who can meet me at the Portland jetport and hold back his tears to make room for mine. The man into whose arms I will run, run, run like a girl, though I fancy myself a woman after two months away. The man who, as I stagger to the car, will hold me up as he must, his drinking done with, his nervous period behind him. The man who, on the drive back to Mexico, will calmly be able to repeat the unrepeatable: Mum has cancer; they operated two days ago; last night she had a rare, unforetold, massive, postsurgical stroke.

  I ask and listen, ask and listen, and his voice does not falter. Mum’s much-loved face is now a lopsided puzzle, her entire left side immobilized, her speech a confusing garble. One hand on the wheel, the other holding mine, my uncle will be the man who can lay out these unfaceable facts and face them. For the whole of Mum’s ordeal—the cancer will return in short order and take her for good—he will be that man.

  That’s the man he will become, but today, two days after Thanksgiving of 1963, as Aunt Rose drops us off and we trundle over the slushy driveway and tromp back upstairs, I have no inkling of this, or any, future. I know only that we’ve left Father Bob in the sock-monkey hospital, that the whole country is in shock after what happened to the president, and that a tiny, colorful fragment of Mum’s spirit has magically reappeared. I check her purse for my souvenirs—a cardboard coaster from a Howard Johnson’s and a plastic replica of the Washington Monument—and there they are, safely transported, just as she promised.