When We Were the Kennedys

by Monica Wood

  Strike means to hit something, but also to walk away from something—your job—so you don’t get hit.

  “Mum? Mumma? Is there going to be a strike?”

  She shakes her head, rifling the hall coat rack for our sweaters. “The men in Manhattan can’t afford one.” Is this what Barry said on the phone? “Cathy, put him down. Where’s your skirt?”

  “Mum? What men in Manhattan?”

  “The men who own the mill.”

  I don’t know what to say. I’d thought Dad owned the mill. Dad and all the fathers. The mill manager’s visit had been my first clue; now this.

  “Are you sure? About the strike?”

  “Don’t be a worrywart,” Mum says. “Nobody’s going on strike. Betty, here’s your milk money. Right here in your pocket. Don’t lose it.”

  “Mum? How do you know nobody’s going on strike? Mumma? How do you know—?”

  “Because Dad said so.” She sighs. “Now get your shoes on.”

  What? Does she mean Dad said this when he was still living, or that he said so just now? On the phone? Is there some way to speak to him that is known to everyone but me?

  “Mum—?”

  “Now. Get your shoes on.”

  During Religion lesson, Sister Ernestine stuffs us with advice about how to retain our Catholic Conduct over the unfettered months of summer. I stare out the door-size windows of our classroom at the sky filled with real and manmade clouds. The Oxford’s work is never done—that’s what Dad always said. It runs on a three-shift schedule, around the clock, around the year, halting only for Christmas and the Fourth of July, and even then a skeleton crew goes in to keep the machines running. Otherwise, it stops not for illness or dismemberment or flood or fire, not for a single high holy day. And not for Dad.

  Sister is winding up her be-good-during-summer homily—Remember who you are! Remember your good character!—but I can’t take my eyes off the Oxford, after weeks of pretending it wasn’t there. The world looks wrong after a death, its elements tilted, the insides of things exposed in ways you don’t want to see; but you do see, you know things you don’t want to know. Dad had come home every Christmas with a complimentary turkey—a good fat one, Mum always said, not one of those poverized critters people shot in the woods. Which is the kind of thing that, after a while—whether you passed your eight hours in the blow pits or the woodyard, whether you were a timekeeper or a hydraulics man—led you to think you owned the place. That your work couldn’t be underestimated. That the men in Manhattan respected you, maybe even loved you.

  I’d expected the place to drop with the news; I thought the clouds should shrink to plumes the size of cattails. Dad loved Hugh Chisholm’s mill, and that’s a fact. But the men in Manhattan did not love Dad, and in the seven-almost-eight weeks since he died, the mill they owned had not skipped a single breath.

  School lets out at last, the neighborhood ashriek with giddy children. My leisure hours swell with misery, just as I’d feared they would. Cathy and Betty inch back into the neighborhood, hovering at the edges of play, as I lie on the couch all day, reading anything I can find. It doesn’t have to be good, or interesting, or for kids. Sister Ernestine had advised us all, as we cleaned out our desks on the last day, to continue “exploring” through the summer. You didn’t have to have a car, or a destination, or someone to drive you there. No, indeed. You could roam the entire world, in any century, without so much as a bus ticket. The only thing you needed was a good book.

  The first grown-up thing I’d ever read was Dad’s obituary. We got two daily papers in Mexico, both published in Lewiston, a shoe- and textile-manufacturing city about forty-five miles downriver. The Lewiston Daily Sun, which came in the morning, skipped the Irish obits; the Lewiston Evening Journal, which came in the afternoon, skipped the French. So I’d had to wait until afternoon to see that it was really, really true.

  Mum had clutched the paper to her breast, murmuring, “Are you sure?” Did she think the printed words would scare me? I nodded yes, yes, and she gave in—a vibrant, etched moment in which I felt like a grown-up girl. Dad’s name, ALBERT WOOD, would swell in memory to a four-inch banner—a dramatic proclamation to all of western Maine, possibly all of the United States—but in fact his stingy little notice appeared at the bottom of the page in small type, the short length and incalculable breadth of his life committed to about one column inch.

  MEXICO—Albert Wood, 57, died unexpectedly Thursday morning while preparing for work.

  I liked the funnies and had never seen an obit. Other names were listed there, not just Dad’s. Other families across a dozen towns had woken up on April 25, 1963, to learn what we’d learned about somebody they had loved just as much. I read it once, Cathy reading over my shoulder, our faces heating up.

  “Mumma, they spelled your name wrong.”

  “I know.”

  “DOES IT SAY ABOUT DAD? READ ABOUT DAD.”

  Betty wanted us to read to her.

  I didn’t want to.

  Cathy didn’t want to.

  So Anne read the newspaper words to Betty, her voice catching over unexpectedly, a gross and wounding understatement. The obituary would also appear in the Rumford Falls Times, our local weekly, in a version that would spell Mum’s name right. It was this version that I filched from a little stack Mum had cut out to send to relatives.

  I’d read the clipping a hundred times over the past eight weeks, in secret, looking up the words I didn’t know (celebrant; communicant) puzzling out possible tricks. Maybe there was a code somewhere. Maybe if I read the words backwards, or cut them in half and attached them back-to, they could begin to mean something else.

  That issue of the Times had also run an ad for the Impacts, accompanied by a photo of my brother with his bandmates in their matching jackets:

  Dance to the music of

  THE SENSATIONAL IMPACTS

  Now at the Rumford Eagles

  Each Thurs and Fri

  for

  your dancing pleasure

  These two items, opposite news in every possible way, converged as a quiet gnawing in my gut. I took a fervid interest in the Times after that—there was so much to know! All those obituaries, and people still went dancing. Frowning through the headlines and sidebars, I looked up words and read about the other people in my town. Every so often I’d find more news of us, either another ad for the Impacts, or an item from the high school (At the school assembly, Miss Anne Wood gave out the English award).

  And so, after Sister Ernestine releases us for the summer with her warnings and admonitions, the first place I “travel” to is those inky pages, reading everything I can manage, including all the obits, where I discover the same two words over and over: People die either unexpectedly or after lingering. Fast or slow, take your pick. I read with a kind of curious terror, learning that words can pin their readers to place, confer permanence on the ethereal, make the unimaginable true.

  The Times comes only once a week, and there isn’t that much else in the house to read. We own a copy of Little Women, which I’ve already read twice; and the Golden Books that Father Bob buys for twenty-five cents at Sampson’s—easy and colorful and way too young for me now. The other books belong to Anne, small-print books with vaguely risqué covers showing people either emerging from or entering into shadow. Jude the Obscure, which I assume to be a book about the crucifixion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, sports a messy ink drawing of an unhappy foreign fulla in a formless garment. Judas, I figure, post-betrayal.

  The other covers are equally daunting, Victorian women and rapacious-looking men lounging beneath confounding titles like Daniel Deronda or Tess of the d’Urbervilles, or soulless covers with fat blue typeface—Journeys into British Literature—with no pictures at all. I consider the Mexico Public Library, whose bookshelves I know by heart, but like Mum I’ve developed a dread of public places. So I stay home, reading what I already have, determined to explore through literature, as Sister Ernestine said we should.
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  In the absence of other choices, I reread Little Women, a book stuffed with Victorian locutions I have to look up again. Four girls, father off to war—the story opens in me like a wound, the March family’s troubles nearly unbearable this time around. Meg, the oldest, would be Anne: sensible, wise, benevolent. Like most girls I imagine myself in the role of Jo, tough and bright and living by the pen. Cathy would be Amy, the impulsive one; and Betty, of course, would be Beth: the frail daughter, the lighted soul, the innocent at the core.

  I’d always loved books for their reassuring heft, for their promise of new words, for their air of mystery, for the characters who lived in them, for the sublime pleasure of disappearing. But not until now, at the threshold of this perilous summer, have I ever turned to storybooks for instruction. Might we be the Marches, crossed by fate but headed for redemption? Like them, might we be rewarded for bearing up? Mr. March comes home at the end of the story, a miracle I know my family can’t have, though I pray for it anyway.

  Mum gives me her old, overloved copy of Anne of Green Gables, a second printing from 1906 passed along from her own mother. In miserable shape, my heirloom has a half-glued binding and defacements committed by my younger, preliterate, pencil-wielding self. Perhaps Mum thinks I’ll take comfort in a fictional redheaded orphan who lives in Dad’s homeland, that precious place I’ve never seen. Anne of Green Gables’s foster mother is strict and watchful, just like Mum; her foster father, Matthew Cuthbert, is a big softie, just like Dad. And just like Dad, Matthew dies. Anne grieves hard, though her cracked world mends itself by the end, for she is cocky and strong and older than me and not even real, her life cushioned by a hundred thousand glittering, old-fashioned words from a lady author whose typing fingers can be trusted to write a happy ending. Down here in the lengthening daylight of Mexico, Maine, I’m stuck in the masculine hands of God, who, as far as I can tell, is a mean and careless writer, a ham-fisted hack, a lumbering, tone-deaf pretender.

  Then I meet Nancy.

  I find her one flight down, in the Hickeys’ apartment, which contains many seductions—bone-white dinner plates with gold trim; a spice rack filled with colorful powders; stuffed chairs unmolested by cats—but none so dazzling as Norma’s frilly bedroom, the same footprint as ours exactly, tenanted by only one adult rather than one adult and three children. Shelved in Norma’s tall, white, snow-clean bookcase are twenty volumes of the Nancy Drew mystery series, their numbered spines facing out, arranged in order, alluringly logical.

  Nothing these days has order, or logic—but look at this.

  “You want to read one?” Norma asks, reaching over my head—she’s tall and big-boned, a twenty-two-year-old woman, Anne’s old high-school chum who, like Anne, loves kids. She plucks volume 1 and hands it over: The Secret of the Old Clock by Carolyn Keene, the cover art presenting Nancy, a beautiful teenager, wearing a snappy little number from the forties, a modest but form-fitting blue dress that doesn’t hamper her serious work of prying open a clock face with a screwdriver. On the gladed ground, her trusty flashlight; behind her, a dark, billowing sky. Though the paper in this book feels cheap and middling—not Oxford paper, not at all—I open it to the middle, stick my face in deep, and inhale. That’s Dad.

  The story follows a foolproof formula that I’ll get to know well in the coming days. Old Nance is a fearless girl, lousy with pluck, who can tie knots and decipher codes and shadow Suspicious Characters and read handwriting upside down. I will come to understand that my home-cut hair is not embarrassingly “red” like Dad’s, but rather a comely and unpronounceable hue called “titian.” Nancy has a useless boyfriend and two loyal girl sidekicks and her own room and her own car. She has no mother—a horror I can’t begin to fathom. The Drews’ housekeeper, a plump, pie-making cliché named Hannah Gruen, fills the bill just fine. Nancy does have a father (does she ever): Carson Drew, a dashing lawyer who gladly suffers Nancy’s meddling and never raises his voice (I am sorry that my confidence in you was a little shaken, Nancy dear), even after her near-miss from a burglar’s tire iron or a scuffle with Suspicious Characters on a steeply pitched rooftop. Though I make a halfhearted stab at pretending we’re the Drews, the formula doesn’t fit any better than that of the Marches or the Cuthberts. Nancy has no sibs, for starters, and if she misses her absent parent she makes no sign.

  Even if my family does not remotely resemble the Drews—a reality I perceive before the first cliffhanger of the first chapter of the first volume—might it still be possible for me (individually, personally, me alone) to resemble Nancy? Isn’t titian hair a fair start? I tap on our walls in search of secret passages, inspect crumples of paper for tossed-away codes. Every day, sometimes twice, I knock on Norma’s door to return the book I’ve read and borrow the next in the series, my own personal lending library. I cannot believe my good fortune, and I all but eat those fearful-grand books, each one opening onto the same sensational landscape, twenty-five chapters each, where nothing worse than a conk on the head is allowed to happen to anyone, including the villains.

  I live inside Carolyn Keene’s oeuvre all day while the sun shines pitilessly on our neighborhood, while Cathy and Betty sleepwalk from yard to yard, playing Red Rover at the Gagnons’ or climbing on the swings at the Gallants’ or ogling the pigeon coop at the Fourniers’, who keep twenty tame birds, all the humdrum pastimes that, for us, have been drained of color.

  “Enough,” Mum warns, snapping a Nancy from my clutches. “You haven’t been outside in five days.”

  She, on the other hand, hasn’t been outside for nine-going-on-ten weeks, if you don’t count Sunday Mass and two trips to the bank. Nobody drives, so we’ve been getting groceries a few at a time; Father Bob brings a tin of coffee or store-bought cookies once a week. Her eyes shine in quiet desperation behind her blue-frame glasses. “You need air,” she says, more gently. “A little sunshine on your face.”

  Eventually I trudge downstairs with The Secret of Shadow Ranch (volume 5) or The Message in the Hollow Oak (volume 12) or The Clue of the Tapping Heels (volume 16) to find a tree to read beneath, reading more and more slowly, trying to make them last. As June melts into July, I start again with volume 1. I crave Nancy’s matching clothes and her blue roadster and her preternatural ability to know a clue when she sees one. Like the numbered volumes in which she appears, Nancy’s mind works in a comforting, knowable order. She deduces. She always gets the right answer.

  “What are you reading?”

  I look up. It’s Denise, standing nearby with her bicycle. We were friends at school but I haven’t seen her since school let out.

  “Nancy Drew. She’s a sleuth.”

  “I love Nancy Drew.” Denise lays her bike on the grass, and in the miraculous way of childhood friendships, this moment—or a moment like it, small and unremarkable—marks our first as best and lifelong friends.

  “You have to leave your bike outside the fence,” I tell her. Our landlords are fussy about their grass, their driveway, their everything.

  Denise moves her bike, then sits on the grass with me. She tilts my book to look at the cover.

  “I don’t have this one.”

  “I’ve already read it,” I say. “I’ll ask Norma if you can borrow it.”

  Denise looks at me for a moment; she likes me a lot, but like other children she’s a little bit afraid of me because my father died. “You want to come over to my house?”

  I look up; I can see her block on Brown Street from here—she, too, lives on the top floor—just over the rooftop of the O’Neills’.

  “Okay.”

  Unbeknownst to Denise—or anyone—I’ve begun writing my own mystery, starring a titian-haired girl with no freckles. This character, named Nancy Drew—but not the Nancy Drew—will solve The Mystery of the Missing Man. I’ve cracked open a clean pack of Dad’s paper, feeling a little like Ferdinand Magellan setting out in his ship. I’ve set goals: A man will go missing in Chapter 1. Cliffhangers will ensue. Then the man will be found. In
an act of authorial benevolence, I’ve exhumed Nancy’s mother (Nancy, dear, you really must try harder to keep out of trouble!) and retained her “prominent attorney” father, but I’ve ditched the housekeeper, the boyfriend, and the girl sidekicks. My Nancy will do her sleuthing alone.

  I’ve written two pages full of beginning—Nancy’s mother, Nancy’s father, Nancy’s house, Nancy’s yard, Nancy’s clothes and car and meals—searching, I suppose (in my book, in every book), for a family with no missing pieces, the family we used to be. When I follow Denise up the stairs of her block, where her beautiful mother and father say Hello, Monica!, my eyes sting open. There we are.

  5. Too Much Stairs

  THE VAILLANCOURTS ARE CATLESS but otherwise without flaw: mother, father, three girls, and a boy. Mr. Vaillancourt, a hydraulics man whose job is to prevent disaster, rotates through the mill’s myriad departments on first shift with his tools and hardhat, looking the massive machinery up and down, thinking, I’ll fix you before you can break. Mrs. Vaillancourt is pretty and kind and named Theresa, like our school, like my middle name, which I decide to start spelling with the French h.

  It hurts her some to see me here, quivering at the top of her stairs, asking Is Denise home?, craning to see into the kitchen. She, too, lost her father young, feels it afresh every time she hears the timorous knock and opens the door and it’s me.

  “Would you like to call home?” Mrs. Vaillancourt asks when suppertime comes and I make no move to leave. I want to stay so badly.