by Monica Wood
That’s a clue. But we’re not sure, until, after a moment of exquisite suspense, we hear the jolly rooty-toot of the horn.
“She got it!” Mum shouts. “She got it!”
“She got it!”
“She got it!”
“SHE GOT IT!”
Norma gets out of the passenger side and waves up at us.
“Come on, girls,” Mum says, grabbing a sweater. “Come on!”
We stampede downstairs, past the nodding Norkuses (they approve!), and into Dad’s car we go, hooting our congratulations. Anne backs us into the street and takes us for a ride just for the plain joy of riding as we talk over each other—Was the man nice? Was the test hard? Did he make you park?—and jounce in our seats and sing the car-trip song and wave out the windows to our friends and neighbors.
The strike is over and we’re living again among three thousand fully employed papermakers and fourteen thousand citizens across our two towns, ten thousand in Rumford, four thousand in Mexico. We are part of this prosperous, invincible place.
From this shimmering perch, who can imagine the strike of ’64 as the last civilized walkout, the last conflict of the “Good Old Days of the Oxford”? Who here can imagine the strikes of our future: hired replacements we’ll call “scabs”; families permanently scorched by betrayal; ultimatums written in spray paint and buckshot; the union’s broken back; the mill’s changing names?
The strike has tolled the first, faint alarm for what is to come, a slow vanishing, almost imperceptible at first, another thousand souls gone away at the threshold of each coming decade, a slow, unstoppable dwindling that will carry through the next ten, twenty, thirty years, until the glorious might of the mighty, mighty Oxford—aka Ethyl, aka Boise-Cascade, aka Mead, aka Mead-Westvaco, aka NewPage—will survive mostly through memory.
But on the morning of Anne’s new license we know nothing of this. The strike is done, the father has come back, all is forgiven, the mill breathing hard again on the riverbank.
Anne toots to this one, to that one. On Brown Street we spot Denise waving with both arms. Stop the car! Hop in! I hear music but there’s nooo one there! I smell blossoms but the treees are bare! Dad’s fancy-gorgeous car still smells weakly of Camels. Adults on the street—neighbors, nuns—pause to smile at us, a back-seat jumble of kids no longer exactly children: a sixth-grader, her sixth-grader friend, a fourth-grader, and Betty, a gradeless, eternal child who will stay here forever, though not with her mother—who will die young—but with her big sister, this lovely young teacher at the wheel.
We wave to other kids’ mothers, other kids’ fathers; we yell out the windows, Hey, everybody, lookit lookit, she got it! The grownups nod indulgently. So cute! So lively! So bright! All day long I seem to waaalk on air! I wonder whyyy! I wonder whyyy! They want Mexico’s children to be educated, these mothers and fathers and teachers. They want us to know something of the larger world. To live better than they did.
Have they worked out their plan to its inevitable conclusion? Grownups stand at the front of classrooms, they put hamburg steak on supper tables, they sell insurance, they operate heavy machinery, they administer vaccinations, they paint our peeling houses. They cross the footbridge into the Oxford three times a day and come out again, full of their children’s dreams. Do they not hear that distant tolling, that low, plangent harmony line in the song they have made of us?
How can they not know? Their children will leave them.
Anne drops Denise at her house. “Come on up,” Denise says.
But I don’t come on up. I stay here, in this Dad-smelling space. With Mum oohing and aahing in the front, with Anne providing such an even, reassuring ride, with all of us together in this car Dad once drove, I prefer at last to come home. Stars that used to twinkle innn the skies! Are twinkling innn my eyes! I wonder whyyy! Anne rounds the block and eases Dad’s car to a soft, complete, textbook stop at 16 Worthley Avenue. In the driveway. Good job, Annie! Yaaay!
I breathe in a feeling—a feeling I’ve heard tell of: everything falling into place. Until now, I didn’t know what everything meant. Or place.
Everything means us.
Place means us.
This feeling is us falling into us.
And us is this family of women, singing the car-trip song. There is no journey we cannot make this way.
Epilogue: NewPage
IN ONE OF MY last vivid memories of my mother standing, she lingers at the parlor door in her housedress and white Mary Janes, digging her toe into the rug, a nervous habit. Denise and I are running lines for our Mexico High School junior-class production of Our Town, directed by Miss Anne Wood, our English teacher. There’s Mum, a damp dishtowel held at her hip, her head at a bird-cocked angle, toe twisting slowly, something on her mind. She has just lost her younger sister, our aunt Sadie, a small, dimpled fifty-year-old whose husband had whisked her off to New York State and kept her there, until she came back home to die. Another sweet shriveling person in a cancer bed.
Maybe Sadie’s on her mind as she watches us rehearse. Denise, playing Rebecca, has been typecast as the little sister, the big-blue-eyed innocent. I’ve got the role of Emily, the small-town girl who dies in childbirth in Act Three, comes back as a spirit, and discovers the ignorance of the living. “I didn’t realize,” the dead, distraught Emily says to the wise old Stage Manager. “So all that was going on, and we never noticed.” He’d warned her not to go back, not to visit the living in any form, but would she listen? No. And now her unchecked impulse has revealed to her how blind she was to life’s daily wonders. The stage directions call for sobbing, which I can’t manage on cue.
Mum drops the towel over a chair back and offers to interpret my lines. “You don’t sound sad enough,” she tells me. “Let me try.” Flabbergasted, I give up my copy of the script. My mother, who as far as I know has never stood on a stage—has never even been to a real play—is about to give me acting lessons. I’m sixteen years old in this memory. I already know everything.
She clears her throat and makes an entrance, a step and a half to the center of the room. Flicking us a glance I can’t interpret, she runs her finger down the page, folds back the spine, then clears her throat again, a self-conscious little scratch.
“I didn’t realize,” she begins, reciting the way she sings, pulling syllables like taffy, making you think about the person who wrote the words. She declaims Emily’s entire goodbye-world speech, her voice rolling and dropping like a storm-tossed Irish sea. “Goodbye to clocks ticking,” she laments, one hand sweeping toward the loud ticker in the kitchen. “And Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses, and hot baths. And sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.” She looks beyond us to the homely wallpaper she put up, then couldn’t afford to replace: monstrous palm fronds floating on a sea-green background. Her eyes shiny and alive, she searches out her invisible audience of thousands behind the foliage, and I can almost hear applause.
Her cancer is already forming, unbeknownst. I see her in silhouette—we’re at midwinter, the sun setting too early, and behind her, through the parted curtains on the parlor window, I can make out the coughing smokestacks of the Oxford. Only we’re not the Oxford anymore in this year of Our Town. Bill Chisholm and a group of men sold us to a chemical company that goes by the ugly name of Ethyl. We are the “Oxford segment of the Ethyl Corporation.”
We are the segment. The mighty, mighty segment.
At the long-service banquet just after the sale, Bill Chisholm repeated the oft-told history of the Oxford and added Ethyl as the latest gleaming chapter in the book of us. I see no change anywhere, he assured the gathered workers, who were hushed, wary, a little too warm in their banquet clothes. The Ethyl CEO then got up and proclaimed the horrifying sale the best kind of merger that can take place in American business. After that, everyone dug in to a roast-beef dinner and a musical entertainment by a “fine young tenor” currently burning u
p the New England music circuit. He sang like an archangel, and when he finished everybody stood up for the local son, now living in Portland and really going places, this boy who had found my father.
“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?” Mum, as Emily, goes on. “Every, every minute?”
We wait. She waits. Then Denise checks her script and reads the Stage Manager’s famous reply: “No,” she says, following the line with her finger. “The saints and poets, maybe. They do some.”
Mum nods. Closes her eyes. Says, “I’m ready to go back.”
I watch this spectacle in a state of wonder and melancholy. A life flashes before my eyes. Not mine; hers. Or an unlived version of hers, one where she offers herself to a world beyond us. Saying these lines with such sympathy and conviction, she is neither my shy, my sad, my only mother with her unfinishable loss, nor the woman she might be if Dad were still here, but somebody else altogether, an imaginative stranger with an inner life just like mine, aching with secret hopes for her own marvelousness. I feel my own self exposed, my own rickety purchase on my own fleeting life uncovered as my mother stands before me in the winter light, reading the lines of a mourning girl.
She hands back my script and waits modestly. “That was great, Mrs. Wood,” says Denise. She means it. My dear friend.
“That was great,” I tell her. I feel, strangely, like crying. “Really, Mum. Thanks.”
“Try it again,” she urges me. Behind her, through the window, above the river, an Ethyl steam cloud wisps into the reddening sky. In Grovers Corners, the town in the play, nothing will ever change. In our town, where a decade is ending, the Oxford signs, which stood for nearly seventy years, have been switched to Ethyl long enough now to look normal; the shoe industry has all but expired; and Anne has lost her first student to Vietnam.
I snatch up the scripts and put them in my book bag. “Later, maybe. We’ve got other homework.”
“I’ll sit right here,” Mum insists. “I’ll be the audience.”
But I say no; those half-memorized lines have hit me blind-side and I can’t bear to visit them just now. When the curtain finally goes up in the Mexico High School auditorium, Mum applauds my portrayal of Emily, whose fictional losses so embrace me on opening night that the tears I pretend to cry in Act Three turn to real tears dripping off my chin. Mum watches from the second row—wearing pretty shoes made someplace else, holding a program printed on Ethyl paper.
What does it mean to love a place? This town, with its steam-pumping heart, loved the people who first loved me. As I return here now, passing the WELCOME TO MEXICO sign, I see up ahead my father’s ghost on the footbridge, his dusty boots, his cap and pail. I swing by the Norkus block, slow down, look up, and there’s my mother shimmering on the screen porch, lifting the bird to her lips, confiding a word into his invisible ear. The stairs once patrolled by the long-gone Norkuses want paint; the garden’s an overgrown thicket, the driveway a frost-heaved mess after another heartless winter.
On Main Street, Dick’s is still here, and the Chicken Coop, but the car dealerships are gone, and the dress shops, and the roller rink. The Bowl-O-Drome is now a vacant lot, its embankment leading up to the empty convent, the defunct church, the closed school. All around me, signs of wear. Perhaps my hometown always looked this way, and my recall has been shaded by a desire to shine up the past.
By the time my mother died, three years after her catastrophic cancer surgery, my sisters and I had learned to interpret the garbled language of her stroke; how to gentle her paralyzed arm through the sleeve of a brand-new blouse; how to change a bed with our vanishing mother still in it; how to surrender to the art of “offering it up.” Despite the despair that floated in and out like an Oxford steam cloud, we learned also to find the blessing in the disguise of Dad’s death—his death, after all, had prepared us for hers—because we loved our mother and believed what she’d always said: “God provides, girls. We don’t always see it until after.”
We’d had to move three blocks from 16 Worthley Avenue, to a ground-floor rent to accommodate the clanking bulk of Mum’s wheelchair. On moving day we carried our things down the three flights. We carried the jewelry box. The turkey pan. The kitchen chairs and the birdcage. The adding machine. The toy piano. The pictures of Pope John and President John and the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The things we carried had made the Norkus block our home, the only one we’d ever known.
Father Bob couldn’t lift much weight. Mr. Vaillancourt managed the heavy stuff—the beds, the dressers, the red couch. Turns out we didn’t have much in the way of bulk. Mostly, we carried little things. The electric fry pan. A box of Anne’s peep-toe shoes. Three eight-pound cats. Trip after trip, down the stairs and up, too much stairs now for sure.
Our mother died in the new apartment, on a December evening in her freshly made bed, while we girls chatted quietly in the kitchen, making supper. She died having been cared for by the children she’d taught, through her own example, how to bear up, be brave, look for blessings in disguise. The first person at our door the next morning was Mrs. Vaillancourt, holding a tray of biscuits. At the wake we saw our longtime neighbors, the Fleurys and the Gallants and the Gagnons and the O’Neills; we saw men from the mill; we saw priests and monsignors of Father Bob’s acquaintance, six of whom would concelebrate the funeral; we saw the whole of our town, it seemed—the town that could not be separated from our mother or father or us, not now or ever.
And finally, at the bitter end of that wintry evening, we saw—inching down the carpeted aisle toward Mum’s glossy casket—the Norkuses. It had been three years. They were older than I’d ever realized, nearly to their nineties, leaning on each other in a way that rekindled my image of the young immigrants arriving with rags on their feet.
“Respect to Missus,” they said. “Too much sad.”
Too much sad. Father Bob succumbed a decade after that, also of cancer. After his diagnosis he retired from duty and spent the happiest year of his life, back in the town where he was born, in the company of Anne and Betty, living the humdrum domestic life he’d always wanted in a house filled with the sound of women.
It’s not our past I wish to conjure today, however; it’s our future. I’ve driven here, from my house in Portland, to help Anne plan her wedding. Her first wedding, to her first true love. She is sixty-eight years old but still resembles the sweet young teacher who inhabits this book. Anne’s groom—her equal in vivacity and compassion—is the director of Hope Association, a sheltered workshop for adults like Betty, who’s been a day client there for thirty-five years, making rolling pins, toy blocks, and lifelong friends.
Cathy, too, is on her way to town, driving up from Massachusetts, where she’s a vice president of a Catholic college, work she loves. She’s still the take-charge girl: We have flowers to pick out, menus to plan, a program to nail down, and these things cannot be done without her.
Anne always loved Jane Austen, who liked to end her books with a wedding. Imagine my delight, to end my book with this one. After a lifetime of caring for us, for Betty, for her students, for everybody else, our Anne has fallen for a man who wants to care for her.
Cathy’s husband will walk Betty to her seat of honor. My husband—my Rumford boy—will play the processional on guitar. Barry, retired from the mill but still gigging, will escort the bride. Cathy and I will sing an old song in a harmony learned long ago from Sister Louise. Denise, who made her career in Our Nation’s Capital as a public-health expert at the World Bank, will be sitting with her mother, near the front. After the ceremony, guests from the two towns will celebrate big, for Anne’s reach here—the high schools merged years ago—is rich and long.
And after that? Happily ever after, what else? This is what we all believe, because if my family has learned anything from our intermittent sorrows, it is this.
As I drive over the Mexico-Rumford bridge on the way to a house Anne has bought with her groom, the valley opens like a coat I can’t wait to pu
t on. The cleaned-up river makes its old ribboning trail. The mill—now, as then—hunkers on the riverbank, outsize witness to my childhood. The Oxford, with its bruising power to give and take, was my first metaphor. I pull over to give it a good look.
I was there, it tells me, still pushing smoke signals into the sky. Beneath those clouds, I experienced the shock of loss, the solace of family, the consolation of friendship, the power of words, the comfort of place. Beneath those clouds, I learned that there is, as my birthday Bible instructed me at age ten, a time for every season. Beneath those clouds, my parents died before their time. But they lived here, too, thankful for their chance.
The sign across the river says NewPage, after the investment company that bought out Mead-Westvaco, which bought out Mead, which bought out Boise-Cascade, which bought out Ethyl, which bought out the Oxford. They’ve just shut down the Number Ten—temporarily; again—another two hundred jobs gone. The mill looks like an animal that has outlived its ecosystem. Huge, beached, but still breathing. When did it cease to sound like God and instead like an old man wheezing? Puff . . . puff . . . oooom, it says, sighing over what might be its last generation of children, most of whom, like me, will make a break for it when they come of age and spend the rest of their lives looking back.
Of course they will. There is such joy here. The day is chilly, the sky so high, the steam clouds shaking with memory.
Thank you, I tell the dying beast. I forgive you.
Acknowledgments
Gail Hochman, my brilliant and tireless agent, read multiple drafts of this book and made it so much better every time. Bless you, Gail, for this and everything.
Many thanks to the good people of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, who embraced me as a new author. Deanne Urmy, my compassionate editor, thank you for your fierce devotion to this book. I’m so glad we’ve met at last. Much appreciation to copyeditor Barbara Wood, whose excellent work saved me from public disgrace, and to Martha Kennedy and Brian Moore for their thoughtful design. Thanks also to production editor Beth Burleigh Fuller, for making it all work.