Read When We Were the Kennedys for Free Online Page B

good girl as always.
    â€œI tried to see around to the back of his head.” That’s Mum, talking about Dad in his casket.
    I can’t make the leap, not even in my febrile imagination, to picture Dad lying there, eyes closed, voice gone, hands devoutly folded, a rosary twined through his work-chapped fingers. Even harder to imagine Mum squinting at his dead freckled head, craning to look for bruises suffered as he hit the Venskuses’ blacktop.
    â€œI couldn’t see anything.” That’s Anne, confirming Mum’s hope that it didn’t hurt when he fell.
    â€œWell,” Mum sighs. “He was dead before he hit the ground.” This is her comfort, repeated to all the visitors, repeated so often that I’ll retain a permanent vision of Dad in slow motion, sliding open the garage door, pausing as if to hear a whisper from God, then dying quick, falling slow, and landing soft.
    â€œHe didn’t suffer,” Mum says. I hear the metallic clink of a teaspoon. “At least we have that.”
    Cathy nudges me. “What are they saying? Move over. I can’t hear.”
    â€œShh. It’s about Dad.”
    Another clink, a sigh, and then a rustling. Mum is fiddling with the curtains, sounds like, at the kitchen window. What is she looking at? There’s nothing to see at night but our neighbors’ rooftops, and the lights along the river, the lit-up smokestacks and dark sky filling with Oxford clouds.
    I hear Anne murmur something, her voice too low to catch—is she crying?
    â€œIs she crying?” Cathy whispers. My sleeve is wet where her cheek rests against it.
    â€œI don’t know. Shh.”
    â€œMaybe it was the work,” Mum says.
    The man practically lives there,
she used to say of Dad, who spent so much time at the mill, double shifts and triples, a wife and two children to care for, then three more girls.
    The man practically lives there.
    And now he doesn’t.
    I hear the curtains slide closed, green gingham curtains Mum bought and Dad liked. She’s closing us inside, away from the steamy sky, away from those other families with working husbands, living fathers.
    â€œIt might have been the work,” she says again.
    My eyes sting but I’m too young to fully know why. That hushed note in my mother’s voice is shame—the shame of widowhood: her husband gone
like that.
Gone, too, is our appearance as a family whole, gone the illusion of bounty, the sustaining tableau of a man with a lunch pail leaving 16 Worthley Avenue every morning and returning to that same address every night. Gone
like that.
    I hear a chair slide back, Mum getting up from the table—to go where? To her empty bed?
    â€œQuick,” Cathy says.
    We scuttle to bed, still listening. The bathroom faucet goes on, then off. A faint splashing of water. Then the faucet goes on again. Cathy burrows nearer and we put our arms around each other. Her hair feels damp; our pajamas need washing. Then another quiet, feminine exchange of words behind the wall. The floorboards creak beneath their negligible weight.
    After a moment of nothing, I hear another long, shame-shaded sigh from our mother.
    It has been forty-one hours. We are changed. We are less.

3. Hiding
    DAD'S SOLEMN REQUIEM HIGH MASS has vanished, utterly, from my memory. I don’t know where it went. Did I banish it myself, my nine-year-old mind deciding on the instant to evict the sight of my father’s casket being ferried down the aisle of St. Theresa’s? Or did it vanish eleven years later, after Mum’s cancer death—her Mass replacing Dad’s for all time, his incense and psalms replaced by her incense and psalms, her bells, her readings, her celebrant—Father Bob, again, his tears dripping down on her draped casket.
    What does remain of Dad’s funeral, vivid and urgent, is the afterwards: our kitchen filling once again with people. Dad’s people, that is, the ones from