Mademoiselle has scuffs on her shoes.
Franny reserved the worse circle of hell for mumblers. “How can it be,” she would rail at some girl whose natural-born shyness caused her chin to be devoured by her neck, “that despite all my best efforts I have failed so totally to turn you into an exhibitionist!”
Franny was also the drama coach, a title she welcomed because it gave her the chance to travel from Stockbridge to Boston, to cut loose and indulge certain flesh-driven cravings. It was well known that she never refused an offer to stop along the pike at Howard Johnson’s for the all-you-can-eat fried clam special.
When she wasn’t goading us to do better, she would invite us into her special club involving male-female intrigue. She was the driving force behind our tea dances, awkward daylight events in which the partners were often students’ brothers and cousins, with the exception of the occasional paper boy innocently delivering the Union, only to be collared by a large nun and ordered onto the dance floor. While inside the school we were shuffling our feet to the music, Franny would be standing at the door, scanning the horizon for more male recruits. These dances were always held in the winter, and she would pretend to be drawn to a snowfall. “Ah,” she would say, quoting, I believe, James Joyce, “the filigree petals, falling so purely, so fragilely surely,” clasping her rosary against her bosom, secretly praying, “Dear St. Ann, send a man.”
Although not in the world in the least, she was clearly drawn to it. She told a story that was both confused and sorrowful about how as part of her religious training she was cloistered for a year in the early 1940s, cut off from all communication. During the war, while transferring from one convent to another by train, she entered a car filled with soldiers close to her in age.
“Pray for us, sister,” they said.
“Of course I’ll pray for you. Is there any special reason?”
“You know the reason, sister. We’re going to war.”
She gazed at them and did not dare ask, “What war? With whom?”
She hid Life magazines under her mattress because in the convent they amounted to contraband, filled with shocking information about parties and the Pill and movie stars of dubious virtue. She would sneak them into class, drawing them forth from the folds of her habit, and whisper, “Look here, girls.”
“Brigitte Bardot,” she would tell us, “is a famous French actress. Let’s hear you say it right.”
Bridge Eat Bar Dough, we would reply.
“What’s the terrible thing that happened to Clark Gable shortly after he filmed The Misfits with Marilyn Monroe?”
“He died of a heart attack.”
“En français, s’il vous plait.”
“Monsieur Gable est mort d’une attaque du coeur.”
“What kind of woman is Marilyn Monroe? En français, s’il vous plait.”
“Une femme fatale.”
We followed Franny, those of us who also wanted to break loose, to various contests in which we intoned passages from The Hunchback of Notre Dame (“Sanctuary, sanctuary”) and invoked the oratory that preceded the death by hanging of Irish Freedom Fighters, as well as reciting the more maudlin poetry of William Butler Yeats, including “The Ballad of Moll Magee.” This doomed soul, Moll Magee, had the horrible misfortune of lying on top of her infant baby and suffocating him after a long day of work at the salting shed.
So now, ye little children,
Ye won’t fling stones at me;
But gather with your shinin’ looks
and pity Moll Magee.
Franny was the coach when I entered the Voice of Democracy speech contest and helped me write a tribute to Herbert Hoover, that often overlooked statesman, who as a child helped support his widowed mother with a paper route, working his way slowly but surely to the top, becoming president of the United States, then through his actions helping to create a depression, thus affording millions of other youngsters the chance to follow his lead and raise themselves up by their bootstraps.
The dramatic selections for the girls of Ursuline were always safe, laudable, and above all clean. Other students from other schools performed the more daring works of Edward Albee and Tennessee Williams, who would have been considered too modern and transitory and crass for us to study formally. Albee’s Everyman on the bench in The Zoo Story, who felt that sometimes you had to go a long way out of your way to come back a short way correctly, and Williams’s flighty character in A Streetcar Named Desire, Blanche Dubois, the one who depended on the kindness of strangers. Who needs their shabby posturing? There was something suspect about them. If you saw them walking toward you, you’d think: Iffy, iffy.
To the Blais family, the Kennedy White House was proof that we had arrived. If, as it so often seemed in our world, the highest status accrued to families with a priest in their ranks, because then you had your own special pipeline to the divine, having an Irish Catholic in the White House had the same feeling of privilege and intimacy. The whole nation had been shrunk to something smaller and more manageable, to parish. One of ours was at the helm.
We followed the entire presidency, of course, but we were most enamored of Jacqueline Kennedy’s televised tour of the White House. She had grace and class; what’s more, she wasn’t afraid to express her opinions, telling the audience: “When General Grant became President Grant, he put false, elaborate timbers across the ceiling and furnished the room in a style crossing ancient Greece with what someone called ‘Mississippi River Boat.’” In that famously breathy voice she praised Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of Washington but also complained, “So many pictures of later presidents are by really inferior artists…. I just think everything in the White House should be the best.” Of course, we concurred.
At home, we played a game based on the Kennedy women. Our mother wanted to know which one she most closely resembled.
We were honest.
“Not Joan,” we said. Too young and too fluffy.
She seemed to agree.
“Not Ethel, either.” Ethel was too toothy and too tennis, anyone?
Again, no argument.
We paused when we came to President Kennedy’s wife.
Maureen Shea Blais looked up, hope flashing.
We knew we would hurt our mother’s feelings, but we all need to face facts. “Not Jackie, either.” No, not Jackie with her perfect hair, perfect pearls, and perfect life.
There was one right answer: “Rose,” we said with a flourish, yes, yes, yes, Rose, with her hats and her head held high, her daily mass and her constant campaign teas for her baby, Ted.
The static-swaddled crackle of the voice of the principal came over the intercom: Mother Mary Austin, announcing the news that the president had been shot.
“There has been terrible news about President Kennedy. The president has been shot.”
Stunned, silent, without being told, we knew we should fall to our knees onto the hard linoleum, a torture we gladly endured because after all Christ had allowed Himself to be crucified for our sins and you had to ask yourself, which was worse, and we began to pray for his recovery. The prayers of course did no good: Kennedy died soon after we heard he had been shot, but still we remained kneeling, shifting gears, praying now for the repose of his soul, as if there could be any doubt that someone as handsome as he was, from our own home state no less, a devoted father and family man, a believer in the one true holy apostolic faith, would have any trouble whatsoever getting into heaven. “Think about it,” said one of my classmates, like all of us a sudden expert on the subject of eternal salvation. “If anyone deserves to bask in the Beatific Vision, surely it is President Kennedy. We are talking State of Grace to the nth degree.”
At home, we spent the weekend watching scenes of the first lady climbing on top of the car, ruining her suit with blood, wearing, if truth be told, that unflattering little hat. Later, we witnessed the commotion at the jail when Oswald suddenly slumped over and Jack Ruby was arrested for his murder. We watched the funeral corteg
e—a new big word—with the riderless horse clomping down some big wide street in Washington. The horror and the spectacle were a leavening force, humbling evidence that everyone could have it tough, even the high and mighty.
Clichés are the most self-respecting of phrases; you don’t get to become one unless you embody an extreme and unassailable truth. The more I thought about the randomness at the heart of human existence and the more I contemplated the bullet that killed Kennedy, shot from the textbook depository, the more anxious I became. I said three Hail Marys to myself at the drop of a hat, and I made the sign of the cross all the time, unremarked, in the palm of my hand. I knew a girl at Ursuline who liked to invent forms of penance. She put rice on the stairs and walked up them on her knees; at school she would offer to sharpen everyone’s pencils. I thought if I wanted to enter a similar black hole of pain and frustration, I could always try to match all the socks in our house.
In Franny’s class, for weeks on end, the formal study of French was suspended.
Instead, she read the accounts of the funeral out loud:
The terrible ordeal of Mrs. Jacqueline Kennedy reached its final phase today.
The widow of the dead President, still bearing up proudly three days after her husband’s murder, chose to walk instead of ride behind the caisson bearing her husband’s body to the funeral mass.
Before that, the 34-year-old Mrs. Kennedy, who marked her 10th wedding anniversary in September, made her third sorrowful trip to the Capitol in less than 20 hours this morning. This time it was to accompany the body to St. Matthew’s Cathedral for a low Pontifical Mass.
Mrs. Kennedy left the White House shortly before 10:30 a.m. EST, to go to the Capitol. There she stood on the steps as the flag-draped casket was slowly brought from the Rotunda and placed on the horse-drawn caisson. A dirge sounded in the background.
She visited the casket in the Rotunda three times and kissed it twice.
“Girls,” said Franny, smuggling forth yet one more piece of paper from her capacious sleeve, “I have here a quote from the London Evening Standard that says it all: ‘Jacqueline Kennedy has given the American people from this day on the one thing they have always lacked—majesty.’ Repeat after me.”
And we did, our voices lingering on the word “majesty” as if it were a crown in and of itself.
My sisters and I did what insecure people so often do in the face of overwhelming external events that have no clear link to their lives: we found a connection. As fatherless children, John-John and Caroline were now, on some level, like us, a blood brother and a blood sister. Our feelings were mixed. While it was heady to be considered in their category, it also made us less singular. They would know, as we did, death’s great contradiction: the profound presence of those who are forever absent.
Chapter Nine
Din Din
THERE WAS A NEW MUSICIAN NAMED BOB DYLAN WHO HAD A SONG MY more renegade friends liked, called “Blowin’ in the Wind.” My sisters and I practiced the Watusi, the Frug, and the Hully Gully in case we got invited to a discotheque. We joked about the changes in our bodies and spoke of them in code: a bra was a cotton harness, shaving our legs was mowing the lawn, and we didn’t get our period, we got our punctuation mark. In my purse I kept a pack of Newports, entirely for show. I got my driver’s license, but I was so worried about working the clutch that I failed to learn how to use the rear view and side mirrors, so I could not drive unless I had a minimum of three passengers interpreting traffic patterns to the right and to the left and someone else looking permanently backward. My favorite character in literature was Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit in the story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” who said about an irksome grandmother, “She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” I took to quoting foreign phrases, including Sartre’s famously smarmy existential maxim “L’enfer, c’est les autres,” meaning “Hell is other people,” after which I would glance at my family, trying to imitate our mother’s trademark glare, which combined flames with daggers and which she used to try to reel us back in whenever we trespassed beyond her notions of acceptable boundaries.
I loved the movie What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? with its splendid theme of sister torture. Bette Davis plays the blond, ringletted child star who at the start of the film demands ice cream in exchange for performing a cloying version of an excruciating song, “I’m writing a letter to Daddy, to Daddy in heaven above.” I made Jacqueline see it with me, and she earned my admiration when, as the film nudged toward its denouement, she predicted, correctly, that the final scene would include ice cream at the beach. Jacqueline was changing, for the better. She was getting smart, and funny. “Din din,” we would say to each other for years afterward when it was time to eat dinner, quoting what Bette Davis says to her valiant crippled sibling, Joan Crawford (in a rare turn as a victim), as Davis diabolically delivers to her room a tray with a covered dish in which there rests a nicely garnished, exquisitely presented … rat.
But when it came time to write an application essay for college, I reverted to someone who ached to be dutiful, remarking how I had been a Girl Scout through the ninth grade, and how as a member of the Mission Club I got to take a bus the previous summer all the way to Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, for a “truly fascinating” national convention of Mission Club members, although I thought it would be indelicate to mention that the source of all that true fascination was in the dorm rooms, which were equipped with curious sinklike devices called urinals. Then, to cap, clinch, and clear all, these sweet lies: “Two of my favorite activities are to read the dictionary for the fun of it and to do as much volunteer work as possible.” The entire morass of self-deception and self-promotion was headed by the title “C’est Moi.”
When I told the principal, Mother Mary Austin, that I wanted to go to one of the Seven Sister colleges and to major in English and to minor in psychology, her face paled and she began to tremble. “You want to study what? Psychology?”
She made it sound naked and undulating, not in the least something you would study.
“Surely, you are not inclined to expose yourself to the works of that man,” she said.
“You mean Sigmund Freud?”
“That man,” she said weakly, unable to befoul her lips with the pronunciation of his name. I could sense from the alarm in her eyes that such an exploration was unlikely to occur except over her dead, her martyred, her mutilated body.
“Tell your mother I must speak to her immediately.”
In solemn, urgent whispers, they stood and conversed above my head while I sat politely at a desk. Together, they decided my fate like two Mafia donnas, their hands and lips moving in a cadenced code in which mumbled words and sentence fragments were easily translated, the one by the other.
“Full tuition scholarship … our motherlode institution, the College of New Rochelle … appropriate areas of inquiry … proper influences.”
Everyone has a moment or two of pathos she would give anything to be able to undo.
I insisted on applying at Smith anyway, and when I went for my interview in one of those classic New England college buildings, gloomy, high-ceilinged, smelling of decaying paper and rectitude, I could tell within the first minute or two that I had no business being there.
The questioner was an older woman, thin, flinty, more interested in a stack of papers on her desk than in anything I had to say.
What did I say that day that made me so deeply unappealing? Could it have been my suffocating earnestness? Did I sprinkle French and inflated diction and even Latin into my spiel as much as possible, saying something like, “I grew up across from the bibliothèque, in a small Edenic community, where although we did not personally own a cheval, we did know many agricoli.” Did I overemphasize the Catholic aspects of my education, which is to say, did I mention them at all? Morning meditation. Marching in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Holyoke. Praying for heathens. Maybe it had b
een wrong to check the financial aid box, to tip the institution off to the depth of my financial need. All I know is that I have never felt so deeply invisible in my life.
When April arrived and I received one of those thin little no-dice envelopes, it was hardly a surprise. What rankles now more than anything is that for several years afterward I told people I had been put on the waiting list, unmindful of one of life’s most important lessons: If you’re going to lie, at least lie big about something important.
“You’ve been trying to sell yourself to us all your life, you might as well sell something else,” said our uncle to Raymond after he announced that he had found a job. It was hard to tell whether Dermot was being encouraging or just the opposite.
Raymond’s job would take him door-to-door, peddling encyclopedias.
He was drawn to the unpredictable rhythms of that line of work, its seesaw nature, the mountains and valleys inherent in trying to make a sale.
“Let’s just say a novena and hope this works out,” said our mother.
Once again she saved the documentary proof of his success, including a mimeographed piece of paper proclaiming that “a star has been born.”
In person, salesmen often have a certain amount of bluster and a slightly forced, almost preening, formality. These salesmen had in it their prose as well:
“Ray Blais started working for us 3 days ago, and so far has written 3 orders (one order each day he worked). Ride ’em, cowboy!”
In May of 1964, from the northeast division of Encyclopedia Americana:
This letter will serve as a confirmation of your appointment as Field Manager of our canvass operation.
May I take this opportunity, Ray, to not only congratulate you but to outline to you my thinking in regards to your promotion. Ray, you are embarking on a wonderful career which you so deserve, but it is imperative that you take stock not only of yourself but your prior working habits. I can assure you of one thing—that working with men is a rewarding as well as frustrating job. Unless you are the model of dependability, you cannot, regardless of your sales ability, gain their respect which is so important for any manager. I have told you on many occasions that without exception you are the best salesman in my division, but if that ability is not utilized properly it is wasted. I strongly recommend that you set up a plan and then you follow this plan.
Uphill Walkers Page 13