When We Were the Kennedys Read Online Free Page B

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?
    â€œSHE 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.
    â€œWhy are you late?” Sister Edgar asked.
    â€œMy father died.”
    â€œWhen?”
    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.
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œYou didn’t have to come,” she tells