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Title: When We Were the Kennedys: a Memoir From Mexico, Maine by Monica Wood
Details: Copyright 2012, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): ""Monica Wood has written a gorgeous, gripping memoir. I don't know that I've ever pulled so hard for a family. When We Were the Kennedys captures a shimmering mill-town world on the edge of oblivion, in a voice that brims with hope, feeling, and wonder. The book humbles and soars."
-- Michael Paterniti, author of Driving Mr. Albert
Mexico, Maine, 1963: The Wood family is much like its close, Catholic, immigrant neighbors, all dependent on the fathers’ wages from the Oxford Paper Company. But when Dad suddenly dies on his way to work one April morning, Mum and the four deeply connected Wood girls are set adrift. Funny and to-the-bone moving, When We Were the Kennedys is the story of how this family saves itself, at first by enlisting the help of Mum's brother, Father Bob, a charismatic Catholic priest. And then, come November-- her brother still overwhelmed by grief, her country shocked by the president's death, and her town bracing for a labor strike-- Mum announced an unprecedented family road trip. Inspired by the televised grace of Jackie Kennedy, herself a new widow with young children, Mum and her girls head to "our nation's capital" to do some rescuing of their own. An indelible story of how family and nation, each shocked by the unimaginable, exchange one identity for another."
Why I Wanted to Read It: When I was researching around a bit to review the Jackie Kennedy biography last year, a book highly recommended about the Kennedys was this one, and it kept getting recommended. I couldn't see what it would have to do with the Kennedys really, other than the surface setting, but thought I'd take a look anyway.
How I Liked It: Do you remember where you were, what you were doing during a particular historic event? On New Year's Eve 1999, did you think it was stupid, but still held your breath anyway to see if Y2k might happen? On 9/11, did you look up from your toys as your parents rushed in to turn on the TV? When the Berlin Wall fell, did you and your college roommates stare in amazement at the footage? When it came over the radio that FDR died, did you take a minute and hug your family members? When Obama was elected, did you stop and think about how you thought you'd never live to see this day?
We collect these experiences as in part elements of our shared humanity. This was not a moment we experienced alone, it was a moment with a whole nation, a whole world.
And that's the collective spirit of When We Were the Kennedys.
The bulk of the book's action takes place in 1963, obviously. Almost-ten-year-old Monica Wood lives with her adult teacher sister Anne, her other sisters close in age: Betty (older, but developmentally disabled-- the author notes "we said 'retarded' back then") and Cathy (two years younger), and their parents along with a plethora of cats and a very friendly parakeet. They have an adult brother who lives with his wife and children of his own. Their landlords, the Norkuses, Lithuanian immigrants who have rented their home since their parents' marriage, complain constantly about various grievances, but seem to know and love the family. The mother's much-younger brother, Father Bob, a priest, is a frequent and beloved uncle, taking the girls on various trips. The father works for the Paper Mill, as do a significant portion of the town.
The family's happy world is shattered when the father suddenly drops dead of a heart attack in his fifties one April morning. The family (including Father Bob who saw his much-older brother-in-law as a father figure) is in agony and struggles to cope. Monica finds escape through stories and fiction, particularly Nancy Drew, which nets her a much-needed new friend.
Father Bob tries to help the family, but succumbs to his own grief and anguish. The family struggles on, and is shocked as is the rest of the country by the assassination of the first Catholic President in November. But it's in that family's grief that the Woods surprisingly find their own footing. The author gives us an abbreviated version (obviously) of what happened to her family since, ending with the joyous wedding of her oldest sister Anne in the then-present day.
Before I even go any further, I have to tell you, I adored this book. If the last book reviewed here was the first truly awful book of the year, this is the first truly wonderful.
The author starts with a curious disclaimer that I'd never seen in a memoir, and I've read a lot of memoirs.
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 the 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 the 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. (pg vii)
The author goes on that any events or processes that she could not remember accurately and/or was too young, she filled out through research of various kinds, and has this poignant conclusion:
The bulk of this story, however, results from my having been an observant child living in a vibrant place and time. (pg vii)
I'm not generally one to be too much of a stickler when it comes to memoirs of this nature. She's telling a story that resonates, and a few little details here and there don't bother me. The nature of human memory is flawed after all, and I like the fact she left in something the way she remembered it.
And to be sure, memory is a big part of this. The author is covering an era of history that's been rehashed and revisited so much you're already hearing the twenty seconds of the Byrds song as I type this. But what feels so staggering about this book isn't just that it's beautifully written, it feels fresh. It's not the 1960s through a nostalgic lens, or several nostalgic lenses, it's like uncovering a time capsule. So many details, turns of phrases, customs, even the idea that a priest in a car with young children is anything other than a deeply unsettling image, speaks to the authenticity of the era in a way the umpteenth period piece does not.
But making a much-rehashed era feel fresh is just one of the features of this book. It's also a staggering treatise on grief and childhood trauma. As Wood finds escape through fictional families and literary heroines, she starts writing for herself, a Nancy Drew-like story that is not technically the Nancy Drew she so loves, and writes it with the paper their father always provided for the girls' drawings and scribblings. Horrified to see it running out in his absence, she scrimps on her usage with the idea it might keep his presence alive in their house.
The book as you might imagine, hits a particular high after the President is assassinated. Wood and her sister Cathy both have the same horrible thought when the news is announced at school: the worst thing they can imagine now is losing their mother, their only surviving parent. Thus, she notes the strangeness of their reaction:
"The president's dead, the president's dead!" shouts a kid in line, one of the histrionic boys. "There's gonna be a war!"
Who cares? Cathy and I are possibly the only two citizens of the United States of America who receive the heart-jangling, era-shaping news of twelve-thirty P.M., Central Standard Time, November 22, 1963, with a a gulping wallop of relief.
Mum is home, making a salmon loaf for our no-meat Friday supper, alive alive alive. (pg 169)
To children made horribly "different" by their circumstances (a weeping nun attempts to comfort Wood about her father's death but can't get the words out; in school when an explorer is mentioned to have lost his father, eyes fall on and then jerk away awkwardly away from the young student), a national tragedy of this magnitude is oddly freeing.
I no longer cry every night over Dad, and if someone asks me, "Who's your father?" -- as people do back then-- I can look that stranger in the eye and say "deceased" and know that we both hear the tacit postscript: Just like Caroline's father, our assassinated president. (pgs 201 and 202)
It's the children's mother who probably finds the most inspiration in the family, though. Jackie Kennedy's elegant portrayal of widowhood and raising young children can't help but speak to Mrs. Wood.
In allowing the girls to watch all the televised footage ("Our TV, like everyone's, stays on for three solid days while shock follows shock" pg 170), of Walter Kronkite breaking down on air, of Jackie getting off from the plane in the bloodied suit, of a live murder on TV of Kennedy's assassin, the mother narrates.
She had shielded us from much of Dad's own Catholic goodbye, but we watch every second of the gruesome coverage, every second of the national wake, the national funeral, the national burial. Protecting us now from the death of a husband and father would be pretty much a locking-the-barn-door affair. The set stays on; Mum keeps vigil with Jackie, narrating the First Widow's first hours, the shell-shocked wife, the heartsick mother, the chin-up architect of the national funeral.
"Oh, girls. Look at that suit. That's blood."
"See that, girls? See how she's staring at nothing? She's thinking of the children now."
"She hasn't even changed her clothes. That's shock, girls."
"Mother of Mary, how is she ever going to tell them?"
"There she is, girls, God love her soul. Even in shock, how beautiful."
On and on, for three days.
"Look, girls, there's Bobby." The president's younger brother. His favorite. Caroline's uncle. "He'll be the man of the house now." She speaks with the quiet passion of an insider, her every observation delivered with a weary, unwanted authority.
"Bobby won't leave her side," she goes on, mopping her eyes. "Thank God she has him."
[...]
Jackie and Caroline kneeling to kiss the casket.
Had we done that? Kissed Dad's casket?
[...]
"Look, girls, she's put her veil down now. She doesn't want people to see her face." The way she says it-- people -- makes me realize: other people. Not us. Because we know what's under there.
"Oh, those dear children. Little Caroline and John-John."
Our counterparts. I drink them in.
[...]
Mum gazes into the snowy light of the TV, her lips moving in prayer as she cries along with Jackie. They could be sisters, conjoined in their loss.
"The eternal flame," Mum murmurs. "That was Jackie's idea. She's protecting his memory perpetually." That's what Mum had given Dad; "perpetual care." Which meant that St. John's Cemetery would keep the grass mowed for as long as the earth grew grass.
"It means forever," Mum adds, unnecessarily, since the word perpetual appears in all the prayers and half the hymns we've memorized since we were old enough to talk. "That flame will never, never be allowed to die, girls. That's how much she loved him.
Mum's empathy for Jackie swells her eyes[.]" (pgs 171, 172, and 173)
I don't know if I understood at the time what Mum was telling us-- or even if she did-- as she peeled back her own metaphorical black veil. I know I witnessed the return of her authority, her dignity, her willingness to turn her widow's face once again to the light. She never directly compared herself to Jackie, but often in the following months, standing at the stove, she might suddenly stop in mid-stir, cock her head like a bird, and say "I wonder how she's making out."
Never mind that the woman had more money than Moses and would in time break Mum's heart by marrying a Greek billionaire. For now, Jackie's story made Mum's life bearable. See? she could have said, sitting under the dryer at Laura Remeika's beauty parlor, opening Life magazine's multipage spread of Jackie in her pink suit, Jackie on the tarmac, Jackie staring dead-eyed at the Bible while Lyndon Johnson takes the oath. See? This is what widowhood looks like. Of course she never said any such thing, but I believe she took a private comfort in the way Jackie had made grief look beautiful.(pg 177)
Similarly, a visit to DC that was arranged before the assassination finds the family in a grim, abandoned city.
We will not go to the White House after all; we will not, while being escorted through the grand rooms with the rest of the tourists, be spotted by Jackie herself; the First Widow will not suddenly open a door and slip into view and lock eyes with Mum and say, "We share a bond." It occurs to the adults, belatedly, that Jackie might not even be there. She might already have taken the children to Hyannis. "Good," Mum says, nodding. "Good for her." (pg 188)
When Monica's developmentally disabled sister is finally put out of a school that can't accommodate her (she's in second grade for the third time when the book opens), their mother takes the news better than she had before:
It's Sister Mary of Jesus, suggesting to Mum that Betty might be "happier at home."
Would she ever.
Mum goes quiet, but her bearing is newly chin-up, Jackie-like. (pg 196)
Her fling with Jackie Kennedy worked magic on us children; maybe that was the point all along.(pg 201)
But this isn't just about the Kennedy assassination and how it resonated for one family. This is also a kind of loveletter to the small town of Mexico, Maine. A town, incidentally, that was run by a paper mill, the very mill that possibly led to Wood's father's death:
So he goes in. Before Local 900. Before "air-quality index." Before mandatory safety glasses or hardhats or steel-toed boots or automatic shutoffs or safety guards or bright yellow signs telling you to tuck in your shirttail, for God's sweet sake! No OSHA no EPA no Clean Water Act. Rumford-Mexico in 1926 is an enviable axis of industry, the Oxford the largest book-paper mill in the world under one roof, the thriving moneymaker that can turn the most ordinary man into a breadwinner, a marriage prospect, a safe bet. (pgs 103 and 104)
When there's a workers' strike the next year, the entire town is impacted-- save for the Woods, who "thanks to FDR" are safe in light of their fathers' death. (The then-relative newness of Social Security and the comfort it provides is something in which Wood's mother notes and given its institution in her adult lifetime, she would certainly remember life without.)
What will this strike mean to your family?
The Times: STRIKE ENTERS FIFTH WEEK.
"What will this strike mean to our family?" I ask Mum, as she sets out the real bread and butter we have in abundance thanks to FDR. "What, Mum? What will this strike mean to our family?"
The inconceivable answer: Nothing.(pg 216)
Mexico, Maine, with Senator Ed Muskie (Wood's mother's classmate in school), whom the author spies later at DC National Airport (as she's away at school for the first time, and nearly gets to meet, were he not so busy with the new Clean Air Act and its detractors:
All these regulations, the Maine voter is probably saying. We can't compete. Same thing everybody says. Leave the water alone. (pg 192)
She briefly describes the slow decline of the town over decades as the paper mill, such a force and entity, ceases to be the force it once was. At the time of the book's publication, barely operating, having passed through a string of forces, the mill none the less captures the author's memories.
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. (pgs 230 and 231)
The town at the time of Wood's childhood is more thriving, but still behind the times. The whole town is a bit of a preserve, and while the children encounter many different Catholic immigrant families, they don't meet a Black person until the family trip to DC (wherein they have to be told to stop staring) and Wood endures teasing and disbelief away at school for the first time, when she admits she's never met a Jewish person before.
The town's Catholicism exists on a time delay as well:
We're rehearsing for the season's High Masses, Latin prayers like O Salutaris and Panis Angelicus and Ave Maria and varying arrangements of the Tantrum Ergo. Though Sister Louise tosses Pope John a few crumbs like "Holy God We Praise Thy Name," we remain among the last congregants in the country to succumb to the retooled protocols of Vatican II. It seems that every new thing in America comes late to our town: rock-and-roll, collective bargaining, vinyl siding, the English-language Mass. (pg 167)
Arguably, as much as the book's a history lesson and time capsule of Mexico, Maine and the Kennedy assassination, it's also a history lesson and time capsule of American Catholicism, particularly how it relates to Kennedy:
We treat Father Bob to a rendition of "Holy Orders Made It So" as he nods along, smiling beneath the portrait of President Kennedy that Sister has not deigned to remove. Like the whole country, we've grown grudgingly used to the new president, Mr. Johnson, with his boring, Protestant, not-cute, too-old daughters; and his big-hair wife who goes by the silly name of Lady Bird. (pg 200)
Father Bob is a beloved priest, well-known at the girls' school, where they feel related to a celebrity when he makes an appearance. A notable scene I referenced earlier comes when Father Bob is taking the girls to the beach and when crossing a toll road, is waved through by the operator with a "Go on through, Father," assured that the priest is an upstanding member of society worthy of special privileges, as the sisters put on their best behavior, imitating Caroline Kennedy's lovely manners.
The fact Wood can take an era and an event so rehashed and make it feel fresh and new doesn't mean this is merely a memoir of the times (on multiple levels) either. Part of why the memoir hits home isn't just the history, it's the humanity at the core of Wood's story.
Her escape through literature accidentally but quite welcomely nets her a new friend (a fellow Nancy Drew enthusiast), whose family (particularly their father, who worked with Wood's father at the Mill and instantly understands and is kind about her preoccupation with him) whose lifelong friendship leads Wood to dedicate the book to her. Wood and her younger sister Cathy have their own sibling language, with just a few words and explanations allowed for publication. Childlike imaginings and ways of puzzling out and coping with tragedy are universal in Wood's hands and the ten-year-old self coping with the loss of a father and a President is as relatable as the teenager away from home at school for the first time and suddenly at a loss in a bizarre new world full of customs she does not understand.
Family, community, and sense of belonging are all concepts that get thrown around with books like these, but Wood really and genuinely explores them. Towards the end of the book when her older sister gets her driver's license (the father was the main driver in the family) and takes the family out for a spin in their father's car (undriven since his death) and is cheered by the landlords, the neighbors, and the community, it's a moment that in the hands of a lesser writer might feel overwrought. But Wood perfectly scores the sentiment throughout. The almost throwaway line of Wood's friend urging her to come play at the house where Wood has hidden from her grief and Wood's polite refusal and desire to stay with her family packs a wallop that some authors might spend pages (or an entire book) trying to capture.
I appreciate now why this book was suggested as required reading for the Kennedy mythos. It's not only excellent in making real and fresh what's surrounded now in nostalgia and myth, it's about the real family at the core of the tragedy. But beyond the Kennedy connection, it's a compelling coming of age story with memorable characters and stories that will stick with you.
This book nails home perfectly why we take where we were on historic events so personally.
As we watch TV for three days straight, I observe my mother in a dawning wonder, having spent most of three seasons comparing my family to other families, both fictional and real. We're not the Vaillancourts with their working father, or the Gagnons with their fried toast and heaps of shoes. We're not the Marches of Little Women, with their grand piano and happy ending; or the Cuthberts of Green Gables, with their one irrepressible child; or the Drews, lousy with last-minute luck. We are, it turns out, bracingly closer to a family that seems equal parts real and make-believe; stoic and storied and rich, admired by the whole world over. Imagine my surprise. (pg 177)
It's because often in historic events do we see our shared humanity that transcends so many barriers and that can sustain us.
Notable: Okay, one historical inaccuracy highly attributable to memory I caught takes place in 1963, when admiring a friend's doll collection:
Margie has Barbie AND Ken AND Midge AND Skooter. (pg 24)
Mattel didn't create Skooter (Barbie's little sister Skipper's best friend) until 1965. Skipper wouldn't be released until 1964.
Not that the Wood girls had any of those:
Mum, who's refused us a Barbie for her "vulgar" proportions (pg 171)
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Like Nancy Drew, Father Bob has a housekeeper, a bony, aproned woman named Thurza Hines who likes children and makes cookies with M&M smiley faces before smiley faces have a name. (pg 154)
The smiley face gained popularity in the 1970s, but obviously existed before then, which does beg the question what where they called before then? Happy faces? Smiles?
Final Grade: A
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