Prologue and first chapter from

When We Were the Kennedys

A Memoir from Mexico, Maine

For Denise Vaillancourt, who shared her father 

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Author's Note

            This is a memoir: the truth as I recall it. You will find herein no composite or invented characters, no rearranged chronologies, no alterations in the character or appearance of the people I remember. I changed only one name. One chapter contains a blizzard that my sisters now inform me occurred on a different occasion; and indeed, when I looked up weather for November 1963 I found not only no blizzard, but—astonishingly—no snow to speak of. The inaccurate memory is so embedded in my psyche, however, so inextricable from the remembered events of that chapter, that in the end I decided to leave it alone. Otherwise, events or processes I could not remember with accuracy or was too young at the time to understand—for example, papermaking, strike politics, the specific character of my father's work—I filled out as accurately as I could through research, the venerable Rumford Falls Times, and the memories of others. The bulk of this story, however, results from my having been an observant child living in a vibrant place and time. 

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Prologue:

My Mexico

              In Mexico, Maine, where I grew up, you couldn't find a single Mexican.  

We'd been named by a band of settlers as a shout-out to the Mexican revolutionaries—a puzzling gesture, its meaning long gone—but by the time I came along,  my hometown retained not a shred of solidarity, unless you counted a bottle of Tabasco sauce moldering in the door of somebody's fridge. We had a badly painted sombrero on the WELCOME TO MEXICO sign, but the only Spanish I ever heard came from a scratched 45 of Doris Day singing "Que Sera, Sera."

            In fourth grade, after discovering that the world included a country called Mexico, I spent several befuzzled days wondering why it had named itself after us. Sister Ernestine adjusted my perspective with a pull-down map of the world, on which the country of Mexico showed up as a pepper-red presence and its puny namesake did not appear at all.

            In high summer, when tourists in paneled station wagons caravanned through town on their way to someplace else, hankies pressed comically to their noses against the stench of paper being made, I sat with my friends on the stoop of Nery's Market to play License Plate. Sucking on blue Popsicles, we observed the procession of vehicles carrying strangers we'd never glimpse again, and accumulated points for every out-of-state plate. These people didn't linger to look around or buy anything, though once in a while a woman (always a woman, with the smiley red lips all women had then) popped out of an idling car to ask the posse of sun-burnished children, Why Mexico?

We looked at one another.  I was the one in the wrinkled tee shirt bought at the Alamo by my priest uncle, Father Bob, who loved to travel. Or maybe that was my little sister, Cathy, or my next-bigger sister, Betty, or one of our friends. Who could tell one kid from the next? White kids in similar clothes; Catholic children of millworkers and housewives. We lived in triple-decker apartment buildings—we called them "blocks"—or in nondescript houses that our fathers painted every few years. The only Mexico we knew was this one, ours, with its single main street and its one bowling alley and its convent and church steeples and our fathers over there, just across the river, toiling inside a brick-and-steel complex with heaven-high smokestacks that shot great, gorgeous steam clouds into the air so steadily we couldn't tell where mill left off and sky began.

            Like most Irish Catholic families in 1963, mine had a boiled dinner on Sundays after Mass and salmon loaf on Fridays. We had pictures of Pope John and President John and the Sacred Heart of Jesus hung over our red couch, and on holidays my big brother, the frontman in a local band called the Impacts, came with his wife and babies and guitar to sing story songs packed with repentant jailbirds and useless regret and soldiers bleeding to death on heathery fields. In my friend Denise Vaillancourt's French Catholic family they ate meat pies—"tourtières"—on Christmas Eve and sang comic Québécois songs about mistaken identity and family kerfuffles. I had another friend, Sheila, who lived just our side of the Mexico-Rumford bridge, in a Protestant, two-child, flood-prone, single-family house; and another friend, Janet, who lived atop her parents' tavern, the regulars marshmallowed onto the barstools by three in the afternoon listening to Elvis on the jukebox. At St. Theresa's we greeted our teachers with a singsong "Bonjooour, ma Soeur," diagrammed morally loaded sentences at flip-top desks, and drew flattering pictures of the Blessed Mother. We went to Mass on Sunday mornings and high holy days, singing four-part Tantum Ergos from the choir loft in a teamwork reminiscent of our fathers sweating out their shifts in noisy, cavernous rooms. The nuns taught us that six went into twelve twice, that the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, that California exported avocados and Maine exported paper—tons and tons of paper, the kind our fathers made.

            Though our elders in Mexico—who spoke French, or Italian, or Lithuanian, or English with a lilt—cherished their cultural differences, which were deep and mysterious and preserved in family lore, what bound us, the children, was bigger and stronger and far more alluring than the past. It was the future we shared, the promise of a long and bountiful life.

The unlikely source of that promise penetrated our town like a long and endless sigh: the Oxford Paper Company, that boiling hulk on the riverbank, the great equalizer that took our fathers from us every day and eight hours later gave them back, in an unceasing loop of shift work.

            "The Oxford," we chummily called it, as if it were our friend. From nowhere in town could you not see it.

The mill. The rumbling, hard-breathing monster that made steam and noise and grit and stench and dreams and livelihoods—and paper. It possessed a scoured, industrial beauty as awesome and ever-changing as the leaf-plumped hills that surrounded us. It made a world unto itself, overbearing and irrefutable, claiming its ground along the Androscoggin, a wide and roiling river that cracked the floor of our valley like the lifeline on a palm. My father made his living there, and my friends' fathers, and my brother, and my friends' brothers, and my grandfather, and my friends' grandfathers. They crossed the footbridge over the river's tainted waters, carrying their lunch pails into the mill's overheated gullet five, six, sometimes seven days a week.

            In every household in town, the story we children heard—between the lines, from mothers, fathers, mémères and pépères, nanas and nonnas, implied in the merest gesture of the merest day—was this: The mill called us here. To have you.

            This was one powerful story. Powerful and engulfing, erasing all that came before, just like the mill that had made this story possible. In each beholden family, old languages were receding into a multicultural twilight as the new, sun-flooded story took hold: the story of us, American children of well-paid laborers, beneficiaries of a dream. Every day our mothers packed our fathers' lunch pails as we put on our school uniforms, every day a fresh chance on the dream path our parents had laid down for us. Our story, like the mill, hummed in the background of our every hour, a tale of quest and hope that resonated similarly in all the songs in all the blocks and houses, in the headlong shouts of all the children at play, in the murmur of all the graces said at all the kitchen tables. In my family, in every family, that story—with its implied happy ending—hinged on a single, beautiful, unbreakable, immutable fact: Dad.

            Then he died.

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Chapter 1:

Morning

            The morning of my father's death begins like all other mornings: my mother stirring oatmeal at the stove, cats twining around her legs, parakeet jabbering on her shoulder. My oldest sister, Anne, who teaches English at the high school, is at work already; and Dad, who got up at five-thirty for first shift, is putting a crew together in the spongy air of the Oxford's woodyard. Or so we believe. Betty and Cathy and I, our hair starched from sleep, rouse ourselves after Mum's second call. We attend St. Theresa's, a French Catholic elementary school that we can see, over the rooftop of my friend Denise's block on Brown Street, from our third-floor kitchen window. I'm in fourth grade, Cathy in second. Betty—mentally disabled (we say "retarded" back then)—is also in second grade, for the third time; she sits at the desk next to Cathy, who lately has been teaching her to knit, a suggestion from Sister Edgar, who has just about run out of ideas.

            Below us, on the second floor, come the muted morning sounds from the Hickeys: That's Norma leaving for work as a secretary at the power company. Her mother, the only one-armed person I know, scoops up the Lewiston Daily Sun and snaps it open in a nimble abracadabra, one of her most enthralling sleight-of-one-hand feats. Mr. Hickey—a sweet, frail man "let go" from the mill for his ailing eyes and lungs—stays inside, drinking tea from Mrs. Hickey's white cups.

            Below that, on the first floor, our Lithuanian landlady begins her daily cooking of cabbage and other root vegetables that smell more or less like the mill. The ancient Norkuses speak halting English, charge us seven dollars a week in rent, and engage in an intermittent skirmish with Mum over whether we kids should be allowed to bring our friends up to visit. Too much stairs, they say, which could mean almost anything.

            In the Norkus block, where we live, the three apartments are identically laid out—four rooms, a screened porch in front, an open porch landing in back—but each has a separate, and separately revelatory, air of foreignness. The Norkus apartment, densely furnished, emanates a steamy, overdraped blurriness that I still associate with all Lithuanian households. The Hickeys' floor, quiet and tidy, seems like a trick, its scrubbed interior latitudes magically expanded. Every time I enter, I think of the Popeye cartoon in which Olive Oyl peers into a tiny tent and finds the inside of the Taj Mahal. Our top floor, full of girls and mateless socks and hair doodads and schoolbooks and cats and unlaced Keds and molted feathers, operates on the same principle, in reverse: when you open our door, the physical world shrinks.

            In this filled-to-brimming place on the morning of Dad's death, Mum's parakeet flutters down from her shoulder to perch on my oatmeal bowl, his scaly feet gripping the rim. He pecks at my breakfast, spattering gruel, gibbering words gleaned from my mother's patient repetitions. He can also sing and dance, but not now; Mum wants us at school on time and so far it doesn't look promising. Cathy appears, wearing half of her school uniform—the starched white blouse—and a slip. I'm half-dressed, too, in opposite: army-green skirt and pajama top. Mum presses our clothes in stages, so that is how we put them on. Outside, the morning radiates the particular cool of April. Betty comes last to eat, in full uniform, everything tucked and smoothed and buttoned up right, her ankle socks neatly creased. Mum always makes sure she's fully shipshape before moving on to us. We dawdle over orange juice as Cathy, against orders, puts the parakeet on a pencil to see if he'll do a spin; it's his best trick and kills the room every time. This is how mornings go, a tango of getting ready, each girl a separate challenge, Mum alternately shooshing us and making us sit! sit! sit! to eat.

            I'm the slow eater. The "absent-minded" one. I watch out the window, but nothing looks different. Dad is already dead but I don't know this yet, can't imagine this. No shiver in the air catches my eye, no subtle darkening in the same old steam clouds cluttering the morning sky. I am nine years old; when I look out the window, all I see is Mexico—my Mexico, the only one that counts.

            From here I see the Dohertys' back line hung with clothes. Next to them, the Gagnons'; we play with their girls and have a crush on Mrs. Gagnon, with her ripple of auburn hair. Cater-cornered from the Gagnons are the O'Neills, and then the Yarnishes, their driveway patrolled by a disgruntled crow that hollers, "Hiii Joe, hiii Joe!" all day long. The rest of the neighborhood fills out with Gallants and Fourniers and Burgesses and Nailises and Fergolas, a census that repeats to the town line of our stewpot town and crosses the river to Rumford, the mill's official home.

We get chocolate cake whenever we want—Mum's splendid recipe survives to this day. Lemon tea bread, cherry pie, yeast doughnuts, just ask! We have a talking bird and priest uncle. We never have to clean our plates or finish our milk. Dad comes home every day with candy in his pockets. Father Bob, Mum's baby brother, comes to town once a week and sometimes says the First Friday Mass, where all our friends simmer with envy that God's young, dashing stand-in belongs to us. Mum gives us dollars to bring to school to save the pagan babies. Last year Dad bought a 1962 sea-green Chrysler Newport, brand-new. We think we're rich.

We are rich.

&&&&&&

Dad, like most people, must have applied a kind of rhythm to his workday. I followed that rhythm in my mind many times after that morning: his feet hitting the floor upon waking, the morning ablutions, the soft exchanges with my mother as she hands him his lunch pail and clears his breakfast plate, the door clicking shut behind him, the three downward flights. Possibly he stops to pet the Norkuses' cat, Tootsie (like all men in our family, Dad is a cat man), before stepping into the street.

Perhaps he is in pain; I hope not. Even so, his last mortal moments are swaddled by the familiar. He leaves us, turns right onto Gleason Street, passes the O'Neills', the Gagnons', the Velushes', turns right again at Miss Caliendo's onto Mexico Avenue to the Venskus block, where they rent out their row of six attached garages at the back of the wide, blacktopped driveway, each bay just wide enough to fit one car.

Perhaps he stops here for a moment, gazing down that long paved drive, for at times he still deeply misses the furrowed fields and quilted hills of Prince Edward Island, Canada, and the siblings who remain on the family farm. Is this crisp April morning one of those times? It's cold but the air contains the coming spring. So, yes, he stops—right here, at the head of the driveway, hanging on to the post—to take it in. He doesn't yet know he's running out of breath; he thinks it's memory doing this, the memory of the long dirt lane to the homestead he left at age twenty. The farmhouse with its blistered roof. The pumped water. The lilacs and hollyhocks. The neighborhood of colorful characters who live along the road.

It must be memory doing this, squeezing his chest, summoning an anointed place that could not give him what he found here: steady, decent, good-paying work. He found his wife here, had five children over twenty years. His youngest, Cathy,  is eight; his oldest, a son who lives ten miles away, will turn twenty-seven in a week. Is he thinking of us now? He lets go of the post, steps onto the blacktop, walks—slow, so slow—to the garage door, intending with all his heart to put in another blessed day of a life he never dreamed possible.

In another eight years he can retire, this man who has never taken a vacation or owned a house. Does he think of this as he reaches for the handle? Can he picture long visits back to the Island, then endless, easeful days back here, tilling the borrowed plot he keeps in his father-in-law's yard just a few houses up the street from where he stands now—tight-chested, filling with memory—at six o'clock in the morning, April 25, 1963, in the first waking of an ordinary day? Here we go, people say at these humdrum moments of repetition, the day's momentum released by the turn of a key or the punch of a time card or, in Dad's case, the sliding open of a garage door. The door makes a loud, sacrilegious clang against the morning quiet.

Here—.

A bursting in his chest.

He drops his lunch pail. Sees a flash of light. Thinks of us in our innocent beds.

And he's gone.

I hope he had a moment of purity, a clearing of all thought and memory, a beautiful surrender. Dad was a Catholic who believed in the saints. I hope he saw the face of God.

&&&&&&

The teenage boy who found Dad grew up to be a stage singer of no small reputation. But on this morning he's just a neighborhood kid, an older boy whose mother teaches piano. He's home from college and on his way to Fisher's Store, where he works sometimes as a clerk. Passing the Venskus block, humming an aria he's been rehearsing with his teachers, he makes a disbelieving double take.

Is that—?

The sight of my father lying in front of the garage door, cap knocked off his head, lunch pail spilled at his feet, must surely endure in his memory. He thuds down the blacktop, hard and quick on his feet, but Dad has flown, he is no longer a person, and the boy can see this. He runs to the back doors of the Venskus block, pounds on a window, a door, until people come running, but the commotion stays tucked inside them, nobody speaks above a whisper. A man they know is lying here dead, his family just over there; if you crane your neck and look up, over the roof of these garages, you can see the skeletal back stairs of the Norkus block, where inside, on the third floor, this man's widow, who does not yet know she's a widow, is pouring oatmeal into a pot of water, humming something pleasant and known.

Somebody calls the constable. The boy with the marvelous voice says a prayer.

I have met this now-grown-up boy a handful of times over the years. I have watched him perform. He sings in a rich, operatic tenor, heart-crushingly beautiful, in which, I believe, Dad's final moments still live.  

&&&&&

            We were an ordinary family; a mill family, not the stuff of opera. And yet, beginning with the singing boy who found Dad, my memory of that day reverberates down the decades as something close to music. Emotion, sensation, intuition. I see the day—or chips and bits, as if looking through a kaleidoscope—but I also hear it, a faraway composition in the melodious language of grief, a harmonized affair punctuated now and again by an odd, crystalline note fluting up on its own. A knock on a door. A throaty cry.

            Not long after the boy pounds on the Venskuses' windows, Mr. Cray, our town constable, comes plodding up the driveway of the Norkus block like a horse in mud. Mr. Cray, florid and hefty like Dad, moving with Dad's heavy step, the first dissonant note of the day. I squint down three stories as I dawdle over my oatmeal. "Mum, Mr. Cray is here."

            My mother bursts into song. Or so it seems, on this morning in which nothing is as it seems.

Ohhh, my mother sings. Ohhh.

For a moment—before the first stir of alarm, that tight knot of suspicion struggling up to my throat—I assume that Mum's keening will be shortly explained, will become another glinting droplet in the blizzard of information that composes any childhood. Her hands fly to her forehead, she whirls around to face the door, egress blocked by a laundry basket and ironing board that she bulls her way around.

We’re confused now, and getting scared. What is Mum doing? As we listen to Mr. Cray's footfalls on the stairs—a sound exactly like Dad coming home from work—the morning acquires a pitiless momentum. Mr. Cray passes the Norkuses' on the first floor, keeps going; passes the Hickeys' on the second floor, keeps going; and finally stops outside our door, which my mother flings open, crying out, "He's dead, isn't he!"

            Who? Who does she mean? Big Mr. Cray, as formless and crumpled-looking as a pile of warm sheets, appears in our shoe-filled front hall. A strange commotion arises there. I begin walking backwards, something we do sometimes for fun. Backwards, retreating from the noise in my mother's throat, backwards into our bedroom, backwards, trying to reverse time. Betty waits there, sitting on her bunk, alarmed but uncomprehending, her eyes pale as dimes. Cathy—the bravest, the one who takes nothing at face value—stands her ground in the kitchen, where the morning will take on the shellac of permanence and become the museum piece we will all come back to again and again, seeing something new each time in this preserved, precious thing.

At last, Cathy barrels into our room, crying, "Dad died!" She's eight years old, the announcer, the town crier, the loud one. And she's blubbering loudly now, drowning out the disquieting sound just outside our door. Her army-green sash divides the white of her blouse but her skirt still hasn't made it from the ironing board. She's got a hairbrush stuck in her hair. "Daddy's dead!" she announces again, making it true, understanding it all of a piece, accepting a sorrow she will never quite get over. I cry, too—instantly, violently—but my reaction feels less like grief (though how can I tell, having known none until now?) and more like the moment after a physical blow, that helpless empty space between the blow and the pain. Betty looks at us for a long moment, receiving the news more slowly, her eyes refusing to register the thing we say to her again and again, whispering first, then louder. Then louder. Until she cries.

Now we all know.

&&&&&&

            My mother will explain to us later that she dreamed it—three nights running, she dreamed that our fifty-seven-year-old father dropped dead on his way to work. She will wonder aloud whether she offered Mr. Cray any relief when she met him at the door already speaking the words he dreaded to utter. All that was left for him was to say yes.

&&&&&&

Anne gets the news at the high school, where she's fully entered a cool spring morning in that alternative, all-consuming world. Hello to her carrel-mates in the English/History office. Coffee in the black-and-orange Mexico Pintos mug. A commotion of students in the lobby down the hall, a faraway sound like muffled applause. A copy of the Lewiston Daily Sun lies on a table littered with stained spoons and spent sugar packets. She glances at the headlines. Yesterday an integrationist was killed in Alabama, and now President Kennedy has sent his brother Bobby to talk to the governor. Across the globe, a country called Laos simmers into civil war; this, too, concerns the president. All this seems so far away, but she often twines current events into her examination of literature, just as Father Bob, known for his stirring, everyman preaching, twines Walter Cronkite into his Sunday sermons. She shakes a stubborn fountain pen, going over notes for her first-period English class, adjusts her hem before stepping into the waxy corridor.

            She must be so happy.

            Her teaching career will prove long and fruitful, but today, in the dwindling of year one, she is probably too young, too in love with literature, to see the folly of teaching Spenser's The Faerie Queene to a galootish group of "shop boys." They must love looking at her, this cute ninety-pounder in a lavender skirt and vest, the white ruffles of her blouse leaving ripples of motion like angel feathers as she smarts down the hall in her French heels. Her hair is pulled into a chignon; she wears gold clip-on earrings and a glimmersome bracelet, onyx disks trimmed in gold, a present from Father Bob, who loves buying jewelry for his girls.

            My sister loves clothes—"maybe too much," she once confessed to Father Bob, who reminded her that as a young man St. Francis of Assisi was himself quite the snappy dresser. And anyway, fashion provides the underpinnings of her teaching philosophy, the bones in the corset: students are worth dressing up for. When you enter a classroom, any day, every day, you should look as if you plan to accept an award.

            At first bell, the boys storm the room in a great collapse of size-twelve shoes and day-old stubble, smelling of machine oil and Brylcreem.  They look older than their teacher (one of them probably is), but my sister—though pretty and fragile-looking and dressed for spring and still living at home and twenty-two years old and not yet possessed of a driver's license—carries an air of grit that she will shortly put to use in a way she cannot, in this hopeful, entering moment, foresee.

            "We didn't get it," the boys tell her about their homework, sixteen lines of Spenser.

            "Did you read it?" Her lipstick today is a shade called Peachstone.

            "Of course we read it!"

            "Did you think about it?"

            "Uh—"

            "Exactly. It's not enough to read. You have to think. So. Let's think."

            As they think, someone—perhaps Mr. Cray—leaves a knotted message with the school secretary, a message further tangled by whoever delivers it to Anne. A student, most likely, one of the good girls who work in the office during study hall. This girl ferries the message through war-era corridors to the windowed, oaken door of my sister's classroom. There has been a mishap in Miss Wood's household but nobody seems to know quite what.

Anne experiences a lurch of fear for her little sisters, then looks back at her boys, who are struggling over Edmund Spenser's lapidary raptures: Mirrour of grace and majestie divine … shed thy faire beames into my feeble eyne. Whatever appears in their teacher's eyne at this moment makes them go silent as snow.

"Excuse me," she tells them. "I've been—summoned." The nuns at her college used words like this. Composing herself, she lingers a moment at the too-big wooden lectern, her hands grasping its cumbersome sides. She smoothes the pages of the open anthology, the teacher's edition, too wide and too heavy and hard-backed. Everything in this room is bigger than she is. "Duane," she says. Her throat is all dried up. "And Ed. You're in charge." Two lunky boys in short sleeves stand up, nearly step on each other getting to the front of the room, where they will lead the class in the cracking open of sixteenth-century lyrics. They're good with a hammer and she trusts them to do it right.

            She leaves the room at a normal clip, closes the door behind her, then begins to run, her toes jamming into her pointy shoes, down the long corridor to the office, where the school secretary offers her the phone.

"Come home," Mum says. "I need you." She does not say why and Anne does not ask.

Scarcely one downhill mile separates the high school from our block. The principal gives Anne a ride, offers to come upstairs. "No," she tells him, trembling now with alarm. "I'm sure it's fine."

Then we hear her, coming back to us, quick-quick, her patent-leather pumps puncturing each wooden tread—first floor, second floor, third floor, quickening as she nears us, quick through the door.

The clamor stuns her but in she comes. Crying baby sisters. Mother heart-shocked in a chair. Ironing board still heaped with unpressed laundry, a bottle of starch dripping over a soggy blouse. The parakeet dancing on his perch, sugartime sugartime sugartime he sings, nervously back-and-forthing on his spongy feet, he wants out, he wants out, he wants out. The cats have fled to hide inside things inside other things. The shape of our family has been upended and rearranged, its roof flattened, its gateposts ripped from the earth by God's own brutal hand, and only the animals know enough to make a run for it.

            Stepping into this exploded, delicate thing that will forever now be us, Anne decodes the muddled message at last. So simple, so razoringly precise: Dad died.

            She pulls herself together and, in the lingo of our time and place, begins to "do" for us. Make the calls. Greet the visitors. Feed tea and toast to our weeping mother. Fold up the ironing board. Finish the dishes.

            Someone has to "do." And so. She does.

&&&&&&

My brother, a married Air Force veteran with two boys, is a pipefitter in the mill, where he gets the news in a similarly convoluted way. "You're wanted at home," somebody says. So Barry drives heart-thumpingly home—to his home, a little house in Dixfield, the next town downriver.

"What's wrong?" he asks Nila, who's buttoning Stevie into a little shirt after walking Mike to his kindergarten.

            His wife looks up, alarmed. "Nothing. What are you doing here?"

            "You didn't call for me?"

            She shakes her head, eyes darkening. "No. Someone called for you?"

            So Barry calls the mill back, confused. "You must have another John Wood," he tells the front office. In paperwork he goes by "John"—John Barry. Anne is Mary Anne; on Prince Edward Island you call children by their hidden names. In this year of 1963, the mill at its booming peak, there might well be another John Wood somewhere among three thousand employees scattered over three shifts, someone from Byron or Roxbury or West Peru or any one of our surrounding towns, another John Wood wanted at home for a reason nobody has the nerve to explain.

"Are you John?"

"Yes."

"You work in the pipers?"

"Yes."

"Your father died this morning."

He sprints back to his car, drives too fast to Mexico, and thunders up those three flights.

We do not see my brother often, but when we do, he brings his wife and boys and his beloved May Belle acoustic guitar and takes over the parlor, where we beg for melodramatic rockabilly songs about heartbreak and missed chances in a velvety timbre that Dad called "fearful-grand singing." But he brings nothing with him today but a powerful sense of dread as he bursts through the door and looks into the drained face of our mother and asks, "Is it true?"

Our apartment harbors few places to grieve in private: four rooms and only two with a door. Barry drags a chair from the kitchen and slips into the bedroom, where after a few minutes I crack the door open to the astonishing sight of my adult brother, facing away from me, sitting astride the spindly chair, his head down, his arms cradling the chair back, a pose not unlike the one he sometimes takes with his guitar. His shoulders heaving up and down, he forms soft, strangulated notes that stir me much the way those lyrics about heart-broke lovers often do. I've never seen him, or any man, cry. For a brief, melting moment I believe I'm hearing the sound of my brother singing.

&&&&&&

Before Anne came home—thirty stopped minutes, a grotesque, ongoing now in which our mother shed her former self like a wind-shook tree—we children aged with fear. Our mother was both overly present—all that gasping and keening—and also eerily far away. We stood at the edge of the kitchen, knotted together, edging first toward and then away from those awful sounds, but because we, too, were yowling and keening there was nowhere safe. "I've lost my best friend," Mum cried, to no one, to God, to the ceiling. "I've lost my best friend." When she hid her face in her hands we mobbed her, petting her hair, her arms, then backed away again as her up-gushing grief took another vocal turn.

"What do we do?" Cathy whispered. She was standing so close that the heat of her breath moistened my neck. She and Betty looked at me; I was the one in fourth grade.

"I don't know," I whispered back. "I don't know I don't know."

More hot breath on my neck. "You have to get Anne."

But how would I get the number? And who would answer? And how would I tell them what was happening, Mum bent at the waist, Mr. Cray thumping back down the stairs, everybody crying? But then the phone rang and Mum said, Come home, I need you, and for a second I thought, That's Dad on the other end, maybe that's Dad on the other end, until Mum squeezed me too hard—my arm hurting, my hand twisted between her body and mine—and then let go because she couldn't stand up, she had to sit, and then those terrifying, animal sounds gushed out again, and it seemed as if we were all stuck fast, stuck in one eternal moment, a locked trap of disbelief.

 But now, a miracle, Anne is home—Anne's home!—and that encased moment geysers open, briefly cleansing our monstrous pain.

            The door opens and opens. The phone rings and rings. People arrive and arrive and the day moves despite all, and we children, who had felt the queasy stirrings of duty—At least you have your children, Mr. Cray said—see now that nothing will be asked of us. We don't have to save Mum after all. We don't have to think up a way—think! think!—to call Dad back from heaven.

            Childhood is over, but Anne's home, so we can still be children.

&&&&&&

            The rest of that morning, after Dad's unthinkable departure, fills with arrival. Father Bob, who will oversee Dad's funeral, comes home to us from his parish in Westbrook. He embraces Mum, blesses her—In nomine Patris…—murmurs into her neck another prayer or incantation or perhaps something only a baby brother can say to his fourteen-years-older sister, something in plain English. Whatever it is, it doesn't work; my mother sits again, vacant, wordless, her lips gently parted.

A priest in the room is supposed to smooth things over, heal confusion, make ritual out of chaos. I cling to my shaking uncle, to the familiar scent of his blacks—his rabat and collar and jacket—but there are so many people here now, another neighbor coming through the door, and here are Aunt Rose and Cumpy—my aunt and my grandfather—and two of Dad's workmates from the mill, and after a while I realize that Father Bob, too, has headed for the bedroom—Barry has gone back home to break the news—where he lies on the bed with his black shoes on. I steal over to my own bedside, terrified.

            Men crying everywhere.

He stares at the ceiling. Glasses fogged, cheeks gone scarlet, mouth quavering so badly it seems poised to slide off his face. He does not look at me but knows I'm here. "Is it all right for a man to cry, Monnie?" he asks me. He loved Dad more than he loves his own father.

What kind of question is this? What kind of question is this? I answer with another question: "Yes?"

"That's right," he says, though I can barely hear him. "It's all right for a man to cry."

I don't know what to do with this information; I'm afraid to touch him, my beloved uncle who has loved me in turn for as long as I can remember.  He makes painful, held-in, small-animal sounds, his tears pooling on the pillows I share with Cathy. Then someone—I think it's Anne—touches my shoulder, releases me from this too-private moment, and leads me back out to the kitchen, now filled with people, tears all over.

Mrs. Hickey shows up with a tuna pie; the O'Neills drop off some biscuits; other neighbors, too many to sort, bring meat loaf, deviled eggs, soda bread. At some point, somewhere between Mr. Cray's visit and Father Bob's arrival, somebody asks, "Where's Cathy?"

Everyone looks at me.

            "I don't know."

I don't. Their faces scare me. The whole house has tilted somehow, and it's hard to see, and to hear, and everybody seems to be saying something to somebody who is saying something to somebody else. Those first few hours are like being caught inside a washing machine, an agitated drowning.

            "What do you mean, you don't know?" Mum says, panicking, alive again after a zombielike lull that I have no way of recognizing as shock. My mother, who never panics over anything, starts to shake. "People don't just vanish into thin air."

But Dad did. His soul, anyway. His baptized soul lifted from his body and vanished into thin air.

            On any other day, a vanishing child would present no calamity.  Kids always turn up, like cats, playing in a neighbor's yard or eating in some other kid's kitchen. Why does it matter that Cathy's gone missing? We're always missing. We live in an era when mothers throw their children into a teeming neighborhood with the instructions "I don't want to see you kids till supper."

            But Mum is up now, her eyes darting. "Mother of Mary," she murmurs. All the adults are, suddenly, up. 

Anne puts on a sweater, heads for the door. Where is Cathy?

"SHE WENT TO SCHOOL," says Betty, who speaks in stammering capital letters, and just then Cathy materializes from the thin air into which she vanished, having been sent back home from St. Theresa's, where she'd showed up in Sister Edgar's second-grade classroom, her hair unbrushed but uniform complete, to slip behind her flip-top desk and take out her pencil and prepare to do Religion, which was the first subject of the day no matter what grade you were in.        

            "Why are you late?" Sister Edgar asked.

"My father died."

"When?"

My sister's pink quivering lip: "Now."

Sister Edgar, a young, kindly nun, stork-tall with dolorous dark eyes and long, lithe fingers, ushered Cathy back into the hall, assured her that her mother would surely prefer to have her near, then sent her home—one block away—with her unspent lunch money fisted into one hand.

            "You went to school?" Mum says, incredulous, sitting down again with the weight of this fresh news. Her youngest child went to school, alone, carrying the unspeakable burden of Dad's death. Mum is raising good girls and this is what good girls do. Dad's bold-hearted girl, his favorite, has transformed herself within an hour into a child so invisible she can vanish into thin air and nobody, not even her own mother, will notice.

            Something about Cathy's instinctive act of normalcy makes the thing that is happening newly unbearable. I go to the place where I, too, can disappear. I slink to a corner—a shadow of space between the couch and the door to the screen porch, with a book, or a sheaf of Dad's paper, and I bend my head to another family with a different story, either writing one or reading one. I stay there until Anne finds me and leads me back to the kitchen, which has filled with people and a flocklike physical warmth that brings an aimless, muffling comfort. We take turns nuzzling against our glassy-eyed mother, though nothing we do can cure what ails her.

Just before nightfall, when we can barely close the fridge for all the casseroles and have literally run out of places to sit, a final visitor arrives: a well-dressed stranger in a tie, his hair damp and neatly combed, his face grave with sympathy. Mum is sitting in the kitchen, same chair into which she collapsed hours ago after Mr. Cray said his yes. A silver pin glints from the stranger's brushed lapel: Oxford Paper Company.

This man, who looks like Don Ameche, Dad's favorite actor, is the mill manager. In memory he is tall, broad, grave. My mother, who has not risen from her chair all day, rises for him.

"I'm so sorry," he says. His shoulders too wide, his jacket heavily structured. I've never seen a man in a suit like this.

Mum puts out her hands, which look thin and fairylike, and he folds them into his: large, pinkish, full of a confusing authority.

"I'm so sorry," he says again. "We're all so sorry."

How has Mum become so small? I look down; she's wearing the shoes she had on this morning: low, sensible heels, but pretty, with a strap. This is her full height, I can see, but it's different from the full height she woke up with.

"You didn't have to come," she tells the man, and now I hear an oddly vibrant note in her voice, an incongruous little trill that pierces the fog of this awful day, that softens the shock of her changed height. She is both larger, and smaller, than her real self as she keeps her hands in the hands of this man.

"We're praying for you," says the man. "For all of you."

"Thank you," my mother whispers. "It means so much to us that you came."

            He stays only a few more moments—charged, bright, layered moments in which I feel both enthralled and muddled, honored and ashamed. An important man has come to see my mother; he resembles an actor; his condolences tip a scale that I did not know existed. His visit elevates Dad's standing; this much is clear. Which means this man is more important than Dad.

And that Dad cannot be, as I so long believed, the most important man in the world.

These intuitions provide my first, feeble inklings about social class and its myriad contradictions, its necessity in times of trauma, its cool, dispassionate lessons about who we are and where we are in the world.

It seems the whole town has come to see my family today, to offer food and sympathy and reassurance. Why do I not feel reassured? Instead, I experience a profound dislocation, a feeling like slipping on the shifting surface of my allotted scrap of God's earth, in the country of America, in the state of Maine, in the town of Mexico, my Mexico, the one Dad no longer lives in.

This morning we woke up as the Wood family. Who are we now?