When We Were the Kennedys (14 page)

I'd rather be at the Vaillancourts, where the landlords are nearly invisible and I've been thoroughly absorbed into the family routines, which are rulish but not Norkusy. No shoes indoors, dear. No food away from the table, hon. No animals in the house, please.

Mr. Vaillancourt pats my head. He looks me in the eye. He calls me dear. Mrs. Vaillancourt pats my head. She looks me in the eye. She calls me dear. They ask,
How's your mother?
They always ask,
How's your mother?

Good, thank you. She's very good.

I don't say,
She sleeps a lot.

I don't say,
In our bed.

I don't say,
If Anne left I think we would die.

I don't say,
I'm afraid my mother might be shrinking.

I don't say,
She does everything the same but she's not here.

I don't say,
Sometimes I pretend I live here with you.

I don't ask Mr. and Mrs. Vaillancourt, who have brightened my days like an apology from heaven:
Why did God forget the rest of my family?

Mum wants to know:
What's it like over there? No shoes, really? Even in summer?
It's as if with Dad gone she's lost her knack for mothering and is featuring how to get it back without having to leave home. I deliver stagy reports in the style of Dad's old PEI neighbor Mrs. McCarn, clearing our kitchen counter of bread wrappers to replicate Denise's mother's pristine kitchen, which, like ours, must be endlessly swabbed against the myriad assaults of children. Mum nods and squints, taking mental notes, intensely interested in how this other, mother-father Catholic family operates. She's grown fond of Denise, a dimpled child with large, trusting eyes and impeccable manners, to whom our household is a revelation of broken rules: cupboards unlatched, the TV on whenever we want, cats parked on tables and chairs, a talking bird lolloping from room to room and landing on mirrors and bedposts and our own heads. Mum takes in only small breaths of comfort in these suffocating weeks, and one of these comforts is Denise, who makes no secret of her wonderment.

But lately, as I head to the Vaillancourts' at afternoon shift change—the better to catch a father coming home in his dusty clothes—Mum says,
Why don't you stay here?
Softly, not sternly.
Stay here,
she says. My insides open to a flood of love and I stay.

Today it's raining anyway, a steady pelting. I fill pages and pages, working on a “setup” scene, undiscouraged. Sometimes I depart from the story to write a single word over and over, a discipline Sister Ernestine had insisted on, the better to practice our spelling and penmanship. Certain words become little obsessions, containing not only meaning and sound but an irresistible physical loveliness. I like shapely words like
coop
or
loop
or
good,
all those connected circles. In one of Anne's books I find the name
Oona,
a word I write twenty-six times: thirteen times down one side of the page, thirteen times down the other. Words like
tatter
or
letter
or
kettle
resemble forest ridges in miniature, sudden peaks of
l
's and
t
's jutting up from a horizon of
e
's and
a
's and
o
's. Words like
ominous
or
sneer
or
simmer,
their letters all the same size, look like bridges between spiky words like
the
or
but.
What satisfaction, to know how to read, to write, to spell these words; to admire them, to pronounce them, to define them; to arrange and rearrange them; to commit them to a sheet of paper made to last.

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 Dr
ew 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.