When We Were the Kennedys

by Monica Wood

  They’ve spent much of their summer at the Gagnons’, another house stuffed with girls whom we’ve played with since we were old enough to leave the yard. Mrs. Gagnon, the neighborhood beauty; Mr. Gagnon, a woodsman who comes and goes in his wool cap, his face craggy with sun and wind. Mr. Gagnon speaks no English that I know of and seems too big for his house, unlike Dad, who had fit us exactly.

  Not everyone in Mexico works at the mill, even though it often seems that way. If you don’t make paper, then you’re a woodsman like Mr. Gagnon, or a butcher like Mr. Lavorgna, or a nurse or a lawyer or a secretary or a roofer or a schoolteacher or a repairman or a realtor or a bookkeeper or a Times reporter or a waitress or a grocery clerk or an insurance agent or a nun.

  Either that, or your game is shoes.

  We have one small factory in town—we call it the “shoe shop.” Other shops flourish within driving distance in all directions, filled with lifers who’ve punched in every day for years, decades. Stitchers and antiquers and machine tenders and leather cutters, who cut first from the back and hind of the hide, leaving the shanks for the trimmy parts like tassels and tongues. Mothers and fathers inspect vast mats of tanned hide for nicks and wrinkles, the ghostly print of a cattle brand, a stray hair follicle, a half-erased scar. Flawless hides make flawless leather and flawless leather makes flawless shoes. Like Maine-made paper, a Maine-made shoe results from the laying on of hands. Many, many hands. Despite the noise and danger and varnished air, shoemakers, like papermakers, deeply admire the polished fruit of their labors.

  Shoemakers like Mrs. Gagnon, on the other hand, bring their work home. Once a week she drives to Rumford to the pickup/drop-off on Waldo Street, where she and the other pieceworkers, mostly women, gather up cumbersome cartons stuffed with shoe parts—uppers and lowers, shapeless leather flaps. Mrs. Gagnon has long arms roped with muscle, strong narrow hands veined from overuse. During her weeklong training session she’d learned the rules, which go like this: Limit, forty paid hours a week. Limit, twenty cases of shoes, thirty-six shoes per case. That’s a wage of $2.45 per case. Even for a nimble, experienced stitcher, a case requires at least two hours, with help. And so Mrs. Gagnon, like most pieceworkers, had come directly home to train her kids in turn.

  The Gagnon girls—Jocelyne and Liliane, both blondish and a little older; and Francine, my age, with her mother’s smoky dark eyes—are nearly as adept as their mother at sewing shoes. After weeks in the company of the Vaillancourts, I follow my obliging sisters back to the Gagnon sewing circle—lively and generous and lighted with the singular thrill of a grown-up job well done. Our task is to stitch the toe end of a loafer, which is a lot harder than it sounds.

  How to sew a shoe: Take an upper flap from one soaking bucket, a lower flap from the other. Water relaxes the leather. Select your implements, which are so comely and alluring you’ll remember them all your life: a hard white bar of wax; a weighty needle with a generous eye; a length of rawhide drawn from a coiled skein; a padded leather glove, clumsy and fingerless. No matter how small your hand, there’s a glove in your size. Prep the rawhide for threading by drawing it in whippy little strokes across the wax. The fuzzy hide will slick right up. Now, take your upper flap, match its machine-punched holes to the ones in the lower flap, and work the needle through this first set of holes. Mrs. Gagnon—whom you adore—will start you off, and then it’s up to you.

  Pinch the leather as you’d pinch a piecrust, then zzzip the rawhide through the holes—the glove will protect your palm from rope burn—and yank tightly enough to force the shape to hold. Do this over and over, thirty-two times, thread-pinch-zzzip, thread-pinch-zzzip, making even, sprightly stitches, feeling a little kick as this flat, lifeless thing finds its form, an arc that starts at the pinky toe and ends on the opposite side, where a satisfied customer’s bunion will not hurt at all in a shoe this watchfully made.

  Mrs. Gagnon will check your work by jutting her own needle into your stitches to test their fastness. She’ll smile with her entire fine-boned face, tell you Bon, merci, then complete the tie-off with a whip-quick flourish that fills you with awe.

  Your shoe is good. Its toe end looks wearable, its back end still a hapless flap that’s not your concern. Toss it into the “done” box, which heaps up rewardingly until you’ve passed an entire afternoon without noticing where it went.

  We have no way of knowing that we’re learning a craft just in time to see it vanish. The zhhr zhhr zhhr of sewing machines in Taiwan and South Korea is too far away to hear as we take another set of shoe parts from the box. The leather feels alive in our hands: resilient and willing, just like us.

  The Gagnon girls, deft enough to add to the “done” box without their mother’s inspection, do not cast aspersions on Cathy and me, flub-fingered amateurs by contrast. A done shoe is a done shoe, no matter how long it takes, each identical stitch a little sunbeam of triumph. Those toe ends are faultless and we know it. A handsome arc of identically made stitches, shiny with human sweat. Every Sunday we’re reminded that we embarked on a journey at the moment of our baptism, a journey that follows a pitted, potholed, booby-trapped road to heaven. What we wear on our feet, I figure, is no trifling matter.

  We take dancing breaks to the stack of 45s on the Gagnons’ record player. Mrs. Gagnon has little else to offer by way of reward. We boogie down to “Oh, Sweet Pea,” or sit in doleful silence for the whole of Frankie Valli’s “Rag Doll,” about a beautiful poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Betty joins us sometimes; she loves the Gagnons’ baby sister, Jacqueline. They fill coloring books or push Jaci’s doll carriage up and down the driveway. Neither of them is allowed to sew, but they dance with us (Betty like a phone pole, Jaci like a cricket) and join in the end-of-sewing-time treat: white bread, larded and salted on both sides, then fried in Mrs. Gagnon’s big black pan. She calls this “toast.”

  At week’s end Mrs. Gagnon hangs the finished shoes on round metal hooks, making circular bundles like giant key chains. One by one she hefts them over her knotted shoulder, loads her car, and drives to Rumford to pick up another batch.

  Mum doesn’t wholly approve of our sewing shoes now. What if the neighbors think we’re actually employed, her little urchins earning bread money? But Mum understands the curative power of work, remembers how Dad admired our tiny calluses. And this besides: She admires Mrs. Gagnon’s beauty and resolve; and, she likes shoes. She wears pretty ones even in the house, shoes with shiny toes or butterfly bows or maybe a kitten heel. They come in different colors, a little shock in the colorless land of grief, every tick of her heel a reminder that she still exists.

  The Times continues to provide a trove of information, much of which I don’t understand. “What does ‘feet of clay’ mean?” I ask Father Bob, here for his weekly visit. I’ve been muddling through an article about the mighty Oxford’s unraveling rapport with its rank and file.

  Father Bob is drinking Mum’s coffee and teaching Cathy the fine points of card shuffling while I study the paper, waiting my turn. Feet are feet, Father Bob explains, and clay is clay, but when you put them together it means finding out that people you think are perfect in every way turn out to have a Tragic Flaw. I can think of only one “person” who’s perfect in every way, since even Father Bob barks at us on occasion. “Jesus, you mean?”

  “Jesus doesn’t have feet,” Cathy says. “He’s invisible.”

  Father Bob laughs his ho-ho-ho laugh, which floats over us like a cloud filled with sunlight, reinforcing my elevated impression of our place in God’s esteem. As an ordained priest in the Roman Catholic Church, Father was born to be God’s stand-in on earth, and if he thought we three were cuter than cute . . . ? I modestly left it to others to draw the obvious conclusion.

  “Then who? Mum?”

  He chuckles. “No.”

  She’s standing right here, and we all agree that if any mortal could be deemed perfect in every way, it would be Mum. And Anne. And Father Bob, of course. Possibly the cat.

/>   “Sister Edgar?”

  “No.”

  “SISTER EGGER?” Betty offers.

  “Betty, I just said that.”

  “MRS. NORKUS AND JURGIS?”

  He’s laughing it up now, his forehead reddening.

  Mum gives her brother a look. “Those people came to America with rags on their feet.”

  Again with the feet. “Who then?” I ask. “Who has feet of clay?”

  But Father can’t, or won’t, think of anybody, and so my quest for the Tragically Flawed roaming among us goes unrequited until the last Thursday in August, the mill pumping out chewable air that hangs low over our valley. Mrs. Gagnon has a batch of shoes to finish before day’s end, but we forsake our pastime to wait at home for Father Bob. Who is late.

  “There’s his car!” Cathy announces.

  “Yaaay!”

  From our back door she’s glimpsed it moving down Mexico Avenue. Odd. Not his usual route. We wait. And wait. He hasn’t missed one single Thursday since Dad died. We get our bathing suits out, a blow-up ring for Betty. And wait some more.

  “It must have been somebody else’s car,” Mum tells her.

  “Nuh-uh. It was his. Blue and white.”

  “There are lots of blue-and-white cars.”

  Actually, there aren’t. Father Bob always has a good-looking car in an eye-catching color. Cathy is stubborn and smart and bossy and you can’t put a thing over on her. “Let’s go get him,” she whispers. There’s only one other place he could be.

  “We shall pursue his trail,” I say, or something like it.

  “You can’t come if you’re gonna act like Nancy.”

  “I’m not acting like Nancy.”

  “Are too. Nobody says ‘shall.’”

  Chastened, I agree not to say “shall.” Here’s an actual mystery, at last—Father Bob’s never late—but it’s not the thrill I might have been hoping for. No thrill at all. I feebly suggest a flashlight, but Cathy says that’s acting like Nancy and anyway it’s one o’clock in the afternoon. So we set off for our aunt and grandfather’s house, averting our eyes when we pass the Venskus block where Dad’s brand-new Chrysler waits in its bay, untouched since April. We step it up and keep going, and in two minutes we’re planted on Cumpy and Aunt Rose’s sloping porch, staring in disbelief at the door.

  “It’s locked,” Cathy says.

  So extraordinary is this news that it leaves me speechless. I sprint around the side of the house and come back with more news: “His car is here.”

  The front door has a long oval window covered from the inside with a crummy lace curtain. We try to see through the holes. Aunt Rose and Cumpy aren’t home. But Father Bob’s in there. We know he is.

  “Knock on the door.”

  “You knock.”

  “No, you.”

  Like cats used to indulgent owners, we do not know what to make of a locked door in the middle of the afternoon. Finally Cathy knocks. Nothing. Then we both start knocking—polite, small-fisted inquiries.

  Finally, the curtain parts and there’s Father Bob’s face. Or, his face plus a Tragic Flaw, his eyes so wrong, so not his, so cloudy and unfocused they seem to be floating in his head. Like eggs. Like big fat eggs. At the same time he looks stricken, blinking at us through the window. He drops the curtain and we see him again through the scrim of lace.

  We stand there, our hearts skittering, trying to make sense of our world gone all awhack. Finally he opens the door. “Girls!” he says, his customary gladsome greeting. But the word slushes out as if uttered under water, a sodden mouthful of l’s. I think: This can’t be him. Maybe this isn’t him.

  It’s him, all right. He moves backwards, on tippy toes, his clay feet weaving to and fro.

  “Fath, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, girllls!” he gurgles. He’s wearing his priest pants with a wrinkled white undershirt.

  “Why didn’t you come over?”

  “Cathy saw your car. We waited and waited.”

  “Fath, what’s the matter?”

  “Nothing, girllls. Nothing, nothing, nothing.”

  Cathy’s mouth opens, rubbery and soft. “Father Bob! Father Bob! Are you sick? Monnie, I think he’s sick!”

  Father, I think, you’re going to have to pull yourself together. But I can’t say it aloud. “Let’s go, Cath, let’s tell Mum.”

  “No-oh-oh,” he says, another watery mouthful. He totters into my aunt’s cluttered parlor, a dreadful little two-step, like a cartoon character weaving out of a saloon—exactly like that, a character with eggs for eyes and a stream of bubbles emanating from his head. He tries to put his features in the proper order, then reels backwards with the effort.

  “He’s drunk!” I gasp, finally believing my eyes. “Cathy, he’s drunk!” We have never once beheld a drunk person but apparently we’re looking at one now. I feel like a stepped-on flower.

  “He’s not drunk,” snaps my know-it-all sister. “He’s dancing!”

  I leave her crying there and sneak down the short hall that leads to the kitchen. Cumpy’s cat, a sumptuous orange coon cat named Roddy, sits on the counter, batting at a long, clear, empty bottle. It spins in a slow, mesmerizing circle, right in place. I’ve never seen a bottle like this except on TV, but I know it’s liquor, and I know that liquor makes cartoon characters dance exactly the way Father Bob is dancing. I kiss Roddy on the face, listen to his guttural purring—we call it “singing”—and close my eyes. Whiskey, I think: the only liquor I’ve heard of. Whiskey! Father Bob, Perfect in Every Way, drank an entire bottle of whiskey.

  I hug the singing cat. Think! Think! Do you die from drinking a bottle of this?

  I fly into the parlor and yell at my sister, who is still crying, begging Father to tell her what’s wrong with him. So I tell her again.

  “I saw a bottle! He drank a whole bottle!”

  “No-oh-oh,” says Father, crying now. Our adored uncle, our priest-in-the-family, God’s stand-in, once again bawling like a baby.

  “I saw it, Cath! I think it’s whiskey!”

  No he didn’t yes he did no he didn’t.

  Then she looks at him again. Yes he did.

  I tug at her shirt. “Come on, Cath, we have to tell Mum.”

  She doesn’t want to go. Father Bob is sacked into a chair like a deflated beachball, the parlor a suffocating cave filled with knickknacks and cat hair, the blinds drawn tight. “What if he’s sick? What if he’s sick? What if he—?”

  I drag her out to the porch, where we shut the ugly door behind us and gallop home, breathless and wailing, thundering up the stairs past the silent Norkuses. How will we tell Mum? What if she cries? What if she says something terrible and life-turning like He’s dead, isn’t he?

  “Mum!” Cathy cries. “Mumma!”

  We tell our tale but Mum doesn’t even look surprised. Her slow, cheerless, head-shaking smile baffles us. On this day our loved ones’ faces are doing strange, strange things. “He’s sad, that’s all,” she says. “He’s very sad.” Her arms come around us. “Don’t worry, he’ll make out all right.”

  But we won’t be so easily consoled, and as that ruined day crawls to a close, Cathy and I whisper in our bed about what we’ve seen, careful to stay under the covers so Betty can’t hear.

  The next morning we open our swollen eyes to find Father Bob, in his blacks and collar, standing at the foot of our bed. He can’t speak, his face jellying with emotion, his hair wet-combed and slicked back, his jaw shaved too close, pink-pink and slapped-looking. We sit up, our hearts thundering. What do we do now?

  “Can you forgive me?” he stammers.

  “Yes, Father!” we cry, and bolt up, hugging him around the neck as he blubbers into our pajama collars.

  “I’m sorry,” he keeps saying, “I’m sorry I’m sorry.” He smells of peppermint and Aqua Velva and sweat.

  “That’s enough,” Mum says, coming in. “They forgive you. You want something to eat?”

  We all do. I sit at the
table, eating my oatmeal, the bird perched on the rim of my bowl, flicking out the raisins. Nobody says much. I eat slowly, taking surreptitious peeks at my uncle, who looks the same as always, handsome and put together, no resemblance to the dancing man we saw yesterday. Against the rules, I teeter back in my chair, the better to slide a glance at his feet, which are not shod in clay at all but in a black, spit-shined pair of Maine-made wingtips.

  Then Mum says, “You want some more?” and he says, “Are you trying to make me fat?” and Betty says, “YOU’RE A BIG FAT EGG,” and we all laugh, and the surreal feeling of that locked-door day begins nearly at once to fade.

  He will tell me, in time, that this day was his turning point. It is also mine. As I watch him come back to himself, a feeling visits me, an odd warmth that I don’t yet recognize as the essence of family love: the power to bestow forgiveness, to turn trespass into redemption, to stitch a lasting shape out of formless sorrows, even in a season already steeped in grief.

  He comes back on the following Thursday, same as always, clean-shaven and wet-combed and shoeshined, to take us up the pond or down the pond. And then, just as school resumes in September, he disappears.

  10. Just Nervous

  HE CAN'T MAKE it today, Mum said the first week.

  The second week: Last Rites. Can’t make it.

  The week after that: Bishop visiting. Can’t be helped.

  And again: Parish council meeting.

  And now here we are, in full autumn, and he’s missed another Thursday. We haven’t seen Father Bob once since school started—fifth grade for me, third for Cathy; and third for Betty because Mum’s decided to keep trying.

  The days snap open anyway, in that distinctive way of fall days, short and crisp, a sensation of change afoot. But nothing changes. Mum’s grief is less visible, perhaps, but her muted shame endures as a tender darkness in these shortening hours, the light vanishing in more ways than one.

  In the Times I read that the Strand is showing Kirk Douglas in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea; that the Mexico Pintos suffered their first loss of the year after the quarterback broke his collarbone; that the sensational Impacts will be playing all weekend in the Rainbow Room at the Legion hall. I read that the governor of Maine addressed the Sons of Italy on Thursday night, calling out the “ruthless Communist effort” as our greatest threat. To Bill Chisholm, who hosted the long-service banquet at the Rumford armory, our greatest threat was “competition.” Nine hundred papermakers looked up from their mashed potatoes as the Oxford’s third president announced a fifty-million-dollar expansion “to ensure our future.”