When We Were the Kennedys (6 page)

One hundred percent of my life, all nine years, filled to the brim with Dad. How could I have figured so glancingly in his?

Addition is easier than subtraction. So I write different numbers. It has been sixty-one hours. After that, I count by days.

 

Come Monday, April 29, the start of our fifth day without Dad, we have to go back to school. Anne's bunk is neatly made up; her papers and grade books are gone. I smell oatmeal.

“We have to get up,” Cathy whispers.

“I know. Betty, you awake?”

“NO.”

“We have to,” Cathy says.

“You first.”

“No, you.”

In the stillness we put on our uniforms. Cathy runs a comb through Betty's hair. We creep into the kitchen, use the bathroom in turn, come to the table without being told.

“I'm not hungry,” I tell Mum when she puts my bowl in front of me.

Cathy: “Me neither.”

The parakeet flutters down to eat with us. I run my finger over his smooth, feathered back. He's so tiny and warm; it's a miracle that a creature this small can look me in the eye.

“DO WE HAVE TO EAT?” Betty wants to know.

“Eat what you can,” Mum says. “Try one bite.”

She is fully dressed: plaid housedress with a snappy belt, skirt cut on the bias. How is she doing this? She moves slowly, as if under water, her eyes so swollen her eyelashes have nearly disappeared.

We take one bite each. One more. Then Mum takes our bowls, puts them in the sink. She urges the bird back into his cage. She finds our sweaters, one-two-three, and gentles us out the door.

“CAN'T WE STAY HOME?” Betty asks.

“No,” Mum says gently. “You have to go.”

“WHY?”

“I don't know,” she tells us. “Because.” Her voice is wavy and hoarse, a pitch lower than normal. Has she slept at all since it happened?

We descend the stairs mousily (no
Make stop you jump!
from the Norkuses), bend to pat Tootsie as Dad surely had, and head to school together, doing our good-girl duty, shoulders bumping, avoiding the silence of our friends.

In my fourth-grade classroom, I file through the door with my classmates and slide into my seat. Is Sister Ernestine looking at me? I hope not. Instead, to my great relief, she asks us all to stand, as usual.

“Bonjour, mes enfants,”
she says, as usual.

“Bonjooour, ma Soeur,”
we say, as usual.

She asks us to recite the Lord's Prayer, as usual, and then to sit down, as usual. She begins with Religion, as usual. She says nothing about Dad.

Sister Ernestine, memorable and kind, divides our days into discrete units designed to deliver relief to children who are good at some things and bad at others. After Religion comes Geography; Sister moves straight to Ferdinand Magellan, the explorer whom we read about last week.

“Mr. Magellan, you will recall, lost his parents at the age of ten—” A silence. Sister stops, clears her throat. I drop my gaze to my desk and leave it there. “But because he had an illustrious family,” she says, moving quickly now, “he was sent to the royal court to serve as a page to the queen.” I fixate on the surface of my desk, a hundred initials and ink marks scrubbed over and sanded out and defaced anew, generations of fiddlers and doodlers before me. The room falls quiet again. I hear the snap of the pull-down map, the tap of Sister's pointer.

“Where was Magellan born?”

Sabrosa, Portugal,
I say to myself.

“Portugal,” somebody says.

“To what kind of family?”

Illustrious,
I say to myself.

“Industrious,” somebody says.

“And Mr. Magellan was the first explorer to do what?”

Cross all the meridians of the globe,
I say to myself.

Sister waits.

Cross all the meridians of the globe,
I silently urge somebody to call out. But nobody knows. My face burns from the inside out, for I can feel the prickle of my classmates' gaze as they look to me. This is my kind of answer: an exact copy of the homework reading.

“To cross . . .” Sister says. “Anybody? To cross all the . . . ?”

“Countries?”

“No.”

“Bridges?”

“No.”

“Crosses?”

“For heaven's sake, no. Monica?”

“Meridians of the globe,” I murmur, tender explosions of shame erupting everywhere. Face, toes, everywhere.
Run,
I think.
Hide!
But where?

“Thank you, Monica.”

Sister Ernestine moves on, recapping Mr. Magellan's fearless voyage and pointing out the strait that bears his name. I imagine the man at the prow of his ship, heart-shook but determined, chin lifted against the usual dreads: death by mutiny, death by scurvy, death by storm or shark or rogue wave, death by unreceptive natives. Sister normally skips these inconveniences, ending all explorers' tales the same way: discoveries galore, everybody safe. But I read the whole chapter last week, not just the half-page assignment, so I know what nobody else knows: Magellan died on the island of Mactan, his body savagely pierced by iron spears.

He would have died anyway. Eventually. Of something. Even if he'd made it to the unheard-of age of one hundred, he'd be dead now; many hundreds more years had passed since then. These men who made memorable journeys, discovered fountains of youth and stores of gold and America itself—they all died in the end. In my newfound terror of the mystery of mortality, it is Magellan, the explorer with the gemlike name, who will keep me awake nights imagining death—my own, everyone's. Forever after I'll conflate the image of Magellan gliding over the straits in his ship with Dad moving down Mexico Avenue on his own last voyage.

Everybody dies. And despite our daily preparations to meet God in eternity, I seem to be the only one in my class who knows this.

I have to get up for lunch, join a line, walk to the cafeteria. I follow my feet, still looking down, over the scarred floors and stray crumbs; I drop into my seat and stare at the bag; and open the bag; and eat what's there. All around me the din of children with fathers. All around me, regular life, which is loud, which smells. Egg smell from the bag lunches, swampy smell from the hot lunches, a whiff of kid-sweat. Cathy and Betty eat at the second-grade table, way over; I can't look. My vision shrinks to a small, private circle—the table, the bag, my egg sandwich—and then a hand slides into that circle, the hand of my friend Denise, who passes a cookie to me, a Toll House her mother made special. I grab it, I eat it, I don't look up.

In Arithmetic, my classmates have moved a step beyond the long division Dad helped me with on the night before he died; now we're working multidigit problems that render me mute with shock. Five days ago I understood it all, Dad scratching his pencil over my paper back when the world, like arithmetic, obeyed the rules. Now, I sit at my desk squinting down at too many numbers, wishing people really could vanish into thin air, as Cathy had so briefly done.

My hair is red and my cheeks freckled like Dad's—“the map of Ireland all over her face.” But in the classroom I'm not only the sole redhead but the sole Monica in an era of Debbies and Lindas and Karens and Pams, and my very name feels like a neon hat. I'm the girl whose father died—
dropped,
people said, as if describing an apple falling from a tree; Dad, our shiny apple,
dropped,
and now I'm one of three fatherless children in the entire school. The other two are back in Sister Edgar's second-grade classroom, one of them struggling with a pair of knitting needles, the other writing a letter to Mum, trying to close the distance between now and last bell, when we will all three run headlong home to find her still living.

 

For three weeks, day by inching day, we leave Mum in the morning, our oatmeal half eaten. Seven hours later we return to her at a gallop, finding her resting on one of our beds. We sit on the covers and tell her we're home. She looks at us, she listens. Cathy learned her times-fours; I liked my sandwich; Betty saw a bird. We bring her these things as if they were frankincense and myrrh. Then she gets up, busy at the stove by the time Anne gets home from the high school.

Every few days another neighbor drops off a casserole. Mrs. Hickey from downstairs, the Gallant ladies next door. Mum's friendly with the other mothers, but she doesn't have a circle of close lady friends, not even within her family; her father and sister live a block away but her job is not to be their pal but their pillar. When Dad was living she'd gone to Mass and Benediction, parents' night, the church fair, meetings of the Sodality of the Immaculate Conception. But mostly, like us, she waited every day—in the busy, chore-filled, aromatic shelter of our bright, packed rooms—for Dad to come home for supper. The Gallant ladies linger a bit, they speak kindly, they squeeze her hands, but this is the era before “closure,” before “letting it out,” an era of private mourning. You don't say things out loud. Mum, a shell-shocked widow trying to find her footing, intends to keep her misery to herself.

She isn't sleeping. One night I wake with a start—everything eerily calm, Cathy asleep next to me, Betty asleep in her bunk, Anne, softly breathing, asleep in hers. I slip out of bed and listen: nothing. I crack open our bedroom door and find the kitchen empty, everything in silhouette: the table and chairs, the sewing machine, the birdcage. Nothing breathes; even the cats have vanished. Then I hear something—at least I think I do, a sound nearly eroded from memory, something that might be a voice, or a motion, or a thought.

Is it Dad? In there, in the parlor? One step, then another, and I'm at the parlor doorway, peering in. I see a human shadow in the darkness. Blood rushes through my ears, I can no longer place the sound I either did or did not hear, and then the figure resolves into the motionless shape of my mother.

Standing in the center of the room, she fumbles with her nightgown as if she's just put it on. What is she doing? What time is it? I do not understand the thing to which I'm bearing witness: a widow awake in her too-small house, unwilling to return to her marriage bed. Like a spirit from the ghost stories she and Dad loved to tell, she haunts her own house at night, and as soon as it empties out in the morning she sleeps at last, borrowing beds that smell of her children.

She hears me. Turns. Her beautiful brown eyes meet me in the dark.

“Mumma?” I whisper.

She doesn't answer. I'm not positive she can see me. I've intruded on something adult and private, and so, not knowing what else to do, I retreat gently, as if backing away from a strange but benign-looking animal, my eyes still fixed on hers. By morning it feels like a dream.

 

Twenty-nine days now without Dad. We come home from school, a bright, late-May day, to find Mum already up. “Where's Betty's paper?” she asks.

“What paper?”

She'd been watching us from the window, her girls coming home from school, Cathy and I toting book bags and pencils and papers marked
A.

“Didn't I see a paper in her hand? Just now?”

This isn't the first time Mum has seen a paper where none exists. Betty never has a paper. Not an arithmetic paper not a name-the-explorers paper not a religion paper not a spelling paper not a vocabulary paper. In the six school years that have taken her only to second grade, not once has Betty come home with a paper. But sometimes Mum sees a paper anyway, wishful thinking she'd surely discussed with Dad, who shared Mum's worry for their eternal second-grader who could knit but not purl, who could not add two and two or reliably spell
cat.
More than one well-meaning meddler had suggested a home for the “feeble-minded,” a place to unburden us all of the bruised fruit of Mum's womb. Mum and Dad had met these well-wishers with equal parts fire and ice: Betty would grow up with us, go to school with us, make her First Communion and Confirmation like any other Catholic child, be our big sister as long as she could, and our forever little sister after that. She and Dad had decided that, together.

“I thought she had a paper,” Mum says.

I would give anything—all the cats, all my
A
's, my immortal soul—to will a paper into Betty's hand. A paper with a big fat
A-plus.
A big fat
Excellent work, Elizabeth!
Mum's eyes look wounded and wet.
Don't go back to bed, Mum,
I think.
Stay up, with us.

Somehow, she opens a drawer. Somehow, she pulls out a baking pan. Somehow, she asks us, “How does banana bread sound?”

 

A few days after that—the brilliant weather still holding—we come home to find her not only up, but in the bathroom unraveling her pincurls. She hasn't been out of the house once since Dad died except for Sunday Mass and once, yesterday, to have her hair freshly blued. Because today she has to go to the bank.

The three of us crowd her at the sink to watch this palliative scene, Mum making herself pretty again. Putting on her lipstick, she begins to look more like our real mother—a petite, cushiony, dimpled, doe-eyed woman with milky skin and prematurely gray hair.

Cathy pats her hair. “Mumma, you look beautiful.”

Mum blots her lips on a Kleenex. “I'm going out to meet my public,” she says. This is her best joke, a leftover from her old vibrant self.

Only it's not a joke anymore. The “public” is watching. We follow her into the kitchen, where she opens the cupboard and takes an envelope from the gravy boat—her first check from the United States government.

“If it wasn't for FDR,” she tells us, “I'd be out scrubbing floors.”

She has said this a dozen times since Dad died.
If it wasn't for FDR, I'd be out scrubbing floors.
She means the New Deal, of course, enacted to protect families just like ours. But she doesn't explain; perhaps she finds it embarrassing. All I know in this hastening moment, my mother hiding the check in her big white purse, is this: FDR is a dead president to whom we are meant to be grateful. I'm used to loving the president we have now—the Irish Catholic President Kennedy—because Mum has taught us to love him. His windblown hair, his Hyannis tan, his pity for the poor. She refers to him as “Jack” and loves that he won't wear a hat in the cold. She can quote from his inauguration speech. And she looks for news of him: his weekly trips to Mass with Jackie and the children; his dealings with the old, ugly, hatchet-faced Khrushchev (those poor Russians, with a president who looks like that!); his cultured Boston accent, whose wide
a
's sometimes creep into her own speech. She loves the backlighted shots of him cavorting with the kids despite his bad back; the shots of all those birthdays and Catholic holidays, a whole packload of Kennedys laughing around a table, their houses adorned, like ours, with a crucifix or a picture of the Sacred Heart. “Jack's one of a kind,” Mum likes to say, but now there is this other president, this long-gone FDR, to whom we are indebted, so I try to love that president, too, and thank him in my prayers.