by Monica Wood
On Sunday night—Mum unpacking our things after the trip to Our Nation’s Capital, the washing machine thrashing and bumping in the bathroom—the past few days already seem like a dream. I imagine Father Bob back in his room at the sock-monkey hospital, gazing out at the parking lot, maybe looking for us even though he saw us leave with his own eyes, even though he knows that by now we’ve made it all the way back home.
As Anne helps us lay out our school uniforms for the following morning, the phone rings. It’s Sister Mary of Jesus, suggesting to Mum that Betty might be “happier at home.”
Would she ever.
Mum goes quiet, but her bearing is newly chin-up, Jackie-like. She nods into the phone, listening. “Yes, Sister,” she says. “I’ve thought of that.” She squints at the ceiling, pretending to be weighing the pros and cons, but she’s been mulling the same handful of facts for years. She knows.
“Thank you, Sister,” she says. “I’ll think about it, Sister.”
Come morning, Cathy and I leave our Pupil behind forever. Oh, that lucky duck. We feel jealous but strangely heartsick, we three now we two. Two girls walking down the street every morning. Two sets of uniforms draped over the ironing board.
That night, in bed, Cathy and I converse quietly, almost reverently, in a mélange of regular English and a language we made up when we first learned to talk. Like certain Eastern tongues to which we’ve never been exposed, our communication depends on pitch and stress for meaning. Only one example from the lexicon has been cleared for public scrutiny:
Ecana egala (ee-CAH-na ee-GAH-la): 1. Exclamation of self-regard, e.g., “Aren’t we something else!” 2. Exclamation of dismay, e.g., “Oh, shoot.” 3. Exclamation of affection, e.g., “I love you so much, please don’t die.”
In the dark, Betty listens. She understands our language, too, understands that we’re both glad and not glad that Mum finally took her out of school. Out in the kitchen Mum and Anne murmur to each other over a cup of Red Rose tea. As their spoons clink, I pretend the sound is silver, that they’ve got a silver pot and bone-china cups out there, that Mum could be Jackie and Anne one of the young Kennedy women—maybe Teddy’s wife—talking things over at the end of a day filled with long cars and candelabras.
Cathy drifts off, sounding like a soft-snoring mouse, whispery, babyish, disturbingly weak. Across the narrow gap, Betty in her bunk drifts off, too, in airy sighs of relief now that school’s out for good. I remain pulsingly awake, suddenly haunted by the president’s bloody death and the nuns’ terror tales of the holy saints and martyrs dying six ways from Sunday: flayings and stabbings and lightning strikes and conflagrations at the stake and plain old dying in their sleep. For hours, it seems, I wait in wakeful vigil between my sleeping sisters, unnerved by the hitches in their little mouse breaths. When at last I succumb to the weight of my forced-open eyes, another breathing enters my conscious world, beyond our room, beyond our windows, beyond the reach of the holy saints and martyrs.
Puff . . . puff . . . oooom, it goes. Puff . . . puff . . . oooom.
It’s the Oxford, over there on the riverbank, that faithful, heavy-breathing monster, the huff-and-puffer that glows in the dark. Dad no longer goes in there and out, but its potent self somehow abides, immense and inescapable, bigger than the rumors of change: cutbacks, reorganization, maybe a sale. Puff . . . puff . . . oooom. It never varies, this sound, this inhale and exhale, all day, all night, a mountainous, animal presence.
Cathy makes another mouse cry and startles awake. Betty, too, is stirring. Shhh, I whisper, listen. A brief, bright thought comes to me, fueled by the religious pageantry of the president’s three-day funeral and our own secret brush with celebrity: Maybe Dad can speak to us through the steam.
We listen, all three, absorbing the sound as children from the coast might absorb the tidal sighing of a nearby sea, an ebb and flow so enduring that after a time the sound appears to be coming from within your own unsuspecting self. It’s been a long seven months, April to November, a tender time bracketed by death. A father, a president; the one grieved only by us, the other by a whole spacious-sky, purple-mountains-majesty, grain-waving country. I listen, with my sisters, in a kind of stupefied surrender, as the mill’s enduring breath smoothes over us, inhale, exhale.
After a while, it’s clear enough, I know at last and for good: Dad’s no longer in there. Or anywhere reachable. Dad is gone, Dad is gone, even as the sound of his life’s work presses in, closing our heavy eyes. By the time Anne slips into our room, kisses our slackened faces, and crawls into her own bunk, we have all, one-two-three, gone sound asleep.
13. Anniversary
AND THEN—HOW COULD this be?—another April, 1964, the Norkuses’ crocuses popping through the grass, a second springtime without Dad. For his anniversary Mass, we file into St. Theresa’s church in our good clothes, all of us praying side by side in the front pew, the town outside the church windows seeming less and less like the vibrant thing from which our father so suddenly vanished, taking all that vibrancy with him.
I open my hymnal, mouth the responsorial psalm, and wonder: Would he remember me? I wear glasses now, blue cat’s-eyes like Mum’s; I’m two and a half inches taller; my hair, though still red like his, sweeps away from my face in a big-girl “flip”; I’m in fifth grade going on sixth. Heaven, it is said, brims with God and music and other divine distractions. If he came back and I said, Hi, Daddy, would he know it was me?
How has one year—a year containing almost everything I will ever know—passed so invisibly? Twelve months have melted behind me like snow.
“Why, look, children!” squeals Sister Bernadette, setting down her flash cards. She loves flash cards, uses them for French, English, History, Math. “Look who’s here!”
“Bonjooour, mon Père!”
Back at work since the first of the year, Father Bob has edged once again into the waking world. I’m the only one here who knows where he’s been. He jaunts into our classroom, cassock riffling at his heels, still trying hard but less gutted by the effort. Since his sojourn at the sock-monkey hospital—I had a very good doctor is all he’ll ever say—my uncle has recovered the dropped notes in his layered voice. “Boys and girls,” he says, arms akimbo. “What’s nyew?”
Sister Bernadette, a terrible singer, has nonetheless taught us seven songs, one for every sacrament. We treat Father Bob to a rendition of “Holy Orders Made It So” as he nods along, smiling beneath the portrait of President Kennedy that Sister has not deigned to remove. Like the whole country, we’ve grown grudgingly used to the new president, Mr. Johnson, with his boring, Protestant, not-cute, too-old daughters; and his big-hair wife who goes by the silly name of Lady Bird.
“Very pleasant,” Father Bob says to us, applauding. “Very, very pleasant.” His smile looks more like his real smile, his cheeks pink with health, his forehead clear. “Denise Vaillancourt, how are your mother and father?”
“They’re fine, Father. Thank you, Father.”
“And Margie Lavorgna, your mother’s still working at Larry’s?”
“Yes, Father. Thank you, Father.”
My uncle gives me his special glance—I know you’re here—and I all but slurp it up. My heart aches, in a good way. This man standing before us wouldn’t be caught dead stuffing a sock monkey.
“Thank you, Sister.”
“Oh, thank you, Father!”
“Au revoir, mes enfants.”
“Au revoir et merci, mon Père!”
Before he leaves, he prepares to bless us. He asks us to think of our families, the better for his blessing to extend its reach. He knows, in a way that we children cannot, that the ground beneath Mexico’s mothers and fathers has begun to quaver. Something new has moved to town: efficiency—competition’s heartless sidekick. A nearby shoe shop closing for good, the entire Maine shoe industry teetering on collapse. At the mill, another bumpy season of labor negotiations lies just ahead, stepped-up rumors jangling everyone’s nerves as our competitors
—foreign and very, very efficient—load cheaper paper onto ships and planes, towers of paper destined for American trucks and trains that will convey the goods to stationery stores and pressrooms and insurance companies and publishing houses from sea to shining sea.
Father Bob raises his hand for the blessing. He looks older, seems older. Not only him. Me. All of us. The whole country. Everyone and everything touched by death.
“In nomine Patris, . . .” Father Bob says.
Down go our heads. I think of my family, as Father Bob asked. Anne at the high school teaching Shakespeare; Cathy at her desk in the classroom downstairs from me, learning her times-fives from Sister Mary of Jesus; Betty at home drawing snowmen with Mum. Her fling with Jackie Kennedy worked magic on us children; maybe that was the point all along. I no longer cry every night over Dad, and if someone asks me, “Who’s your father?”—as people do back then—I can look that stranger in the eye and say “deceased” and know that we both hear the tacit postscript: Just like Caroline’s father, our assassinated president.
The Times: OXFORD PAPER COMPANY EARNINGS UNCERTAIN.
One Monday during that anniversary spring, I come home from school to find my brother in the kitchen drinking coffee with Mum. I rarely see him like this—alone, without his wife and kids—and never on a workday.
I put down my books. “Did something happen?” I glance frantically around. There’s Betty in Dad’s chair, listening. Cathy, I know, is a few paces behind me, walking home with one of the Gagnon girls. Is it Anne? Father Bob? Cumpy or Aunt Rose? Who is it? Who?
Barry says something about a wildcat. I picture a big animal doing something bad.
“What? What did you say?”
A wildcat walkout. This morning at the Oxford, fourteen machine tenders left their posts in protest over the first occurrence of job combining, which sounds like including but really means excluding. In job combining (Mr. Vaillancourt says) you get assigned to two machines on a single shift, dashing from, say, the rewinder to the supercalender and back, cutting two crews by half a man.
Subtracting one job by adding yourself to two jobs. A human antagonym. Nobody wants to be that man.
By noon word spread to every sector of the mill, from the beater room to the woodyard, and the place emptied out. Almost nobody went in for second shift. The union scheduled an emergency meeting for tonight, which is why Barry is here drinking coffee and talking to Mum.
“He loved that place,” Mum says, shaking her head. “The man practically lived there.”
Barry says to her, “Well, he wouldn’t recognize it now.”
What’s going on? Aren’t we the Oxford? The mighty, mighty Oxford?
“Guys are mad as hell,” Barry says to Mum. “They mean business.”
The walkout ends on Wednesday morning, two days later, but a tone on both sides has been brazenly set. Contract talks will begin soon; our town is in for a long summer.
The Times: THREE OXFORD WORKERS FIRED AFTER WILDCAT WALKOUT; ELEVEN SUSPENDED.
Shortly after school lets out for the summer, mill manager Charles Ferguson publishes an open letter in the Times to the citizens of Rumford and Mexico, pleading that a strike will serve no purpose whatever. In addition to depriving you of your pay, he reminds one and all, it would hamper the company’s ability to satisfy the needs of its customers. Without customers, the Company is out of business and your job security disappears. The rumor of a work stoppage may be without foundation, but I felt that you should know the facts before it’s too late.
The facts: We are the Oxford. The mighty, mighty Oxford. National Geographic loves us, they buy only Oxford paper for their color-picture magazine, which you can find all over town—all over America! all over the world!—stashed into bathroom magazine racks, towered onto parlor tables, stacked against screen doors to keep them from slamming shut. That’s our paper on which you read articles about African matriarchies and babies born at the North Pole and flowers so small and rare you can’t find them without a magnifying glass. That’s our paper in a magazine so colorful they pile up like totems because no mother in America—or the world!—can bear to throw one out.
The Times: BUILDING CAMPAIGN CONTINUES AT OXFORD.
The Times: OXFORD EARNINGS DROP.
The facts: Charles Ferguson came to our door, fifteen months ago now, to say, I’m sorry for your loss. He put on a jacket and took Mum’s hand and said kind words because Dad was a foreman in the woodyard, a good worker who was never late, a member of the long-service club, part of the Oxford family. Charles Ferguson—someone important, someone up there—ascended our stairs, past the Norkuses’, past the Hickeys’, and came to us, his Oxford Paper Company pin glinting on his lapel.
The Times: UPP WINS AGAIN; NEGOTIATIONS SET FOR AUGUST 3.
The Times: NEGOTIATIONS BEGIN.
The Times follows the zigzagging road of compromise, one edgy meeting after another. It follows also our humdrum daily doings. In one issue I learn that Chief Maurice Cray brought a complaint “against a Rumford citizen” who illegally parked in Mexico; that the sensational Impacts are back at the Eagles hall; that a Rumford meteorologist predicted a colder-than-normal autumn (“So sorry . . . signed, Armand A. Violette”). Senator Muskie publishes a defense of the Clean Water Act on page three. And on the next page, an anonymous essay called “The Truth about Cancer,” lamenting the Hollywood deaths of Charles Laughton and Dick Powell. “They have not died in vain,” proclaims the mysterious scribe who lauds the release of the dirty word cancer into polite company.
On the facing page, a reporter’s note on the specs of the Oxford’s new grinding room: Made of concrete. Covered with asbestos felt. No windows.
The Times: NEGOTIATIONS CONTINUE.
The Times: MANAGEMENT SPIKES RUMORS OF WHOLESALE PERSONNEL CHANGES.
The Times: BOTH SIDES LESSENING DEMANDS.
The Times: NEGOTIATIONS STALLED AT OXFORD.
During the mid-August labor talks, Denise and I celebrate our eleventh birthdays, five days apart, a cake for me at her house, a cake for her at my house. In celebration, I decide once and for all to rectify the Vaillancourts’ only perceptible deficiency by smuggling into Denise’s bedroom a homeless yellow cat we pick up on Gleason Street. The cat will live in the closet and be fed in secret until we can soften up Denise’s parents by inventing the cat’s dramatic backstory, in carefully timed, increasingly theatrical installments, salting it with quotes from St. Francis, the patron saint of animals (“O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console”), until finally Mrs. Vaillancourt, wracked with guilt, will mutter, Jesus Mary and Joseph, you girls are right as always, let us open wide our doors!—whereupon we cue the cat for his big reveal.
Denise has a blabby little brother, however; before we can pass a single afternoon with our yellow birthday cat, Mr. Vaillancourt appears, filling the doorway of the bedroom with his square, stern shoulders and disciplinarian face. He’s just come back from a union meeting. Is he mad about the cat (at the moment unraveling an afghan crocheted by an auntie or mémère) or mad about NEGOTIATIONS STALLED?
“What do you girls think you’re doing?”
His eyes are pond blue, like Dad’s. Twinkly. He reminds me of a tame bear. I pick up the cat, who is purring beatifically, an ambassador from St. Francis for sure. It has a well-brushed coat and clean, translucent ears and come to think of it might not actually be homeless. I shift its fetching visage so that Mr. Vaillancourt can better admire its beseeching, topaz-colored eyes.
“We’re sorry, Dad,” says Denise, whose negotiation skills are just plain pitiful.
To this lame defense I must add, prematurely, our trump card: “We named him Omer.”
I remember Mr. Vaillancourt’s laugh as a modest, rolling chuckle, as if he disliked making too much of himself. This pleasant, trickling sound trails him like fairy dust as he trots downstairs—without a word of reproach—and sets the cat outside.
“Mr. Vaillancourt?�
� I ask when he returns. “Are you mad at me?”
He shakes his head no; he’s not mad at me. In time I’ll come to understand that I break his heart. He pats my head. He looks me in the eye. He calls me dear. He asks me how’s your mother. Then he goes to the phone, for he’s been called in, again, to do battle with a monstrous machine.
The Times: DEADLOCKED.
How strange it seems to be leaving town with a strike looming, everyone coiled tight. But that’s exactly what we’re doing, leaving town. Father Bob has a one-week vacation and has invited us all on a trip in his new Impala: he and Mum and Anne in front, we three girls in back, a long car trip with restaurants and everything. He’s so much better now, his stay at the hospital now nine months old. On a hot morning in late August, he drives us out of town via Route 2, passing the Rumford falls and heading for the falls at Niagara, a journey that echoes in reverse the one taken by our industrial founder.
In Niagara Falls—the Canadian side—we check into a motel called the Empress and feel like royalty.
“Lookit, Cath! Lookit, Bet! A swimming pool!”
Indeed: a long blue pool ringed by large, painted climbable wooden animals, a fantastical mirage shimmering under high soft lights. It’s too late to swim, but Mum and Anne allow us to try out the animals while they perch at one of the plastic poolside tables and Father Bob goes inside to pay. Already this is nothing like our other trip; it hasn’t occurred to me even once to try to listen between the lines. All I want is to climb to the top of the elephant—there are steps built into its back—and holler, “Hellooo, down there!”
In the morning, Father Bob bangs on our door. “Get up, girls! The day’s half gone!”
Mum comes out of the bathroom, her hair still in pincurls. “For crying out gently, Father,” she tells her brother, “it’s only seven o’clock.”