“K-E-double
N-E-D-Y
Jack’s the
nation’s favorite guy,
Ev’ryone wants to back
Jack
Jack is on the
right track,
And he’s got
high hopes…”
Gerry and Annette Shea and their five-year-old daughter, Colleen, sang along with Frank Sinatra to the radio ad, heading up the hill in their 1957 Dodge in the dwindling light. Past the stone Presbyterian Church on the corner illuminated from within, where people could already be seen kneeling, praying to prevent the world from going to hell via the election of a Roman Catholic. They had just dropped off the last of the precinct lists Gerry had been calling after driving voters to the polls all day, along with a set of Kennedy/Johnson signs Annette and Colleen had waved throughout the long, damp afternoon at the corner of Main and Cherry, striving to convince Rocky Ledge’s predominantly Protestant Republican population to take a chance on Jack’s “new frontier.”
Jack, thought Annette. Like everyone else, she called him by his first name, as if he were some kind of intimate. As if she might ever actually find herself on a first-name basis with a millionaire. His kind eyes with that tissue paper crinkle of pain around the edges cast a spell on you from behind the TV screen, with pregnant Jackie standing elegant and serene at his side. Annette smoothed her new hairdo, a bouffant, just like Jackie’s. Everyone said she resembled Jack’s wife with her dark hair and eyes, courtesy of her French Canadian father. From a distance, at least, until you made out her mother’s round face and snub Irish nose.
“Again, sing it again!” cried Colleen, as they pulled into the driveway.
“We need to feed you and Timmy so Mommy and Daddy can get ready for the party we’re having,” Annette said. “You’re going over to Michael and David’s house tonight, remember?”
“Those children are monsters,” said Colleen.
“They’re not so bad,” Annette lied.
“I want to be at the party with you, Mommy,” Colleen said. “I want to watch Jack win.”
Annette caught her husband’s eyes.
He smiled and shook his head.
Jack had actually shaken Colleen’s hand when Gerry drove those folk singers with stringy hair to a rally in Poughkeepsie, instantly transforming her into a miniature fanatic on the Senator’s behalf. Graced with a photographic memory for lyrics, she had memorized their ballads and lay in bed each night belting out the likes of “If I Had a Hammer” and “Blowing In the Wind” in a perpetual effort to stave off sleep, ever fearful of missing the next transforming scene in the unfolding drama of her life. She was not your run-of-the-mill five-year-old. She wanted to vote, build a bomb shelter, star on Broadway, and buy a gorilla, usually in that order.
“You have school tomorrow morning, remember?” Annette said, hoisting her daughter out of the back seat.
Colleen’s small strong legs gripped her mother’s waist. She cupped Annette’s chin in her hands, amber eyes wide and beseeching as Ingrid Bergman’s in Joan of Arc, the movie Colleen had watched with them on TV, miraculously adopting the saint’s persona as her own. “Please, Mommy,” she said. “This is a once in a lifetime moment.”
Gerry laughed.
Their lives were but a series of once-in-a-lifetime moments.
“Jack is on the right track, Mommy,” Colleen said, sealing the deal.
Really, she was putty in this child’s hands. She needed to pull Dr. Spock down off the shelf before she had hopelessly spoiled her daughter. “You can come for a little while, if you’re a good girl and go in with Daddy now while I go get Timmy,” she said.
Colleen kissed her mother on the cheek over and over again with a wet, smacking noise.
Annette handed her to Gerry and headed across the street to Alice and Joe’s to retrieve their son.
When no one answered the side door, Annette let herself into the darkened kitchen and called out, inhaling the perfume of fresh-baked cheese straws cooling on cookie tins on the stove. Alice had strong opinions about food, particularly what passed for cuisine in suburban America. A béchamel-splattered Joy of Cooking sat on her kitchen counter at all times. Now and then--Alice absorbed in perfecting a cheese soufflé or salmon aspic or tarte tatin--Annette would find Alice’s boys wandering the neighborhood in their pajamas of a late summer morning, take them in, and feed them Cheerios and grilled cheese sandwiches until her friend’s latest culinary seizure had passed. Knowing she would reap just rewards as the recipient of Alice’s Michelin-worthy masterpieces.
“Alice,” Annette called again. Her eleven-month-old son, Timmy, staggered out of the glowing hallway on his stubby legs, attacking her calves like a cat.
She scooped him up, planted a kiss on his ruddy cheeks, and smoothed his hair, pale and soft as the silk on a cob of corn.
“Ma,” he said, poking her throat. Unlike Colleen who began speaking in phrases at eight months, he had made no effort at speech besides that syllable. Annette suspected it could be years before her son uttered his first sentence. After all, Colleen happily served as her brother’s personal spokesperson.
“Alice,” Annette called, again, her nostrils confirming the suspicion that her son needed changing.
“We’re having a bath,” she answered.
Annette carried Timmy into the bathroom, like most of the rooms in this house identical to her own save for the color of the tiles--white with navy blue accents instead of pink with green.
“Welcome to paradise,” Alice said, kneeling on the bathmat and reaching into the soapy tub to let out the drain. “Say hello to Mrs. Shea,” she added, standing and handing her boys towels. She wore pedal pushers and a clingy sleeveless top. Weather and seasons did not seem to register on Alice who often showed up in sandals and a sundress for a Christmas party, flaunted black boots and velvet at Easter Mass, and had no respect whatsoever for the unspoken rule prohibiting the donning of white accessories before Easter or after Labor Day. She walked to the beat of a different drummer, Alice often claimed in self-defense, a faraway look in her eyes, as if actually watching said musician over your shoulder.
“Hello, Mrs. Shea,” chirped Michael and David, tiny replicas of their father with piercing blue eyes, brush cuts, and freckles so abundant their hides seemed crafted of calico. “Hello, Mrs. Shea,” they repeated, in their sing-song voices, beaming up at her like perfect little altar boys in training, as if the bath had somehow subdued the baser natures that kept their mother perpetually on edge. The boys had recently coated the walls of their room with Vaseline, shredded Alice’s mink stole to make a bed for their hamster, and painted their faces with Methiolade to go with the Indian headdresses Joe had bought them. The brush cuts followed Michael’s thankfully aborted attempt to scalp his brother with a butter knife.
“Now go get in your jammies,” said Alice. “ I laid them out on your beds.”
The boys careened out of the room naked and shivering, launching into a series of screeching laps around the hallway.
“How is turnout looking?” asked Alice, stacking plastic boats and measuring cups on the edge of the tub and half-heartedly swiping with a soggy washcloth at the gritty ring left by the draining water.
“Sounds good,” said Annette. “Joe said to tell you he’d be home shortly.”
Alice and Joe Cudden were the only other Catholic Democrats on the block. The two couples had immersed themselves in the campaign, dragging their kids to rallies throughout the county, helping coordinate the motorcade with Harry Truman at the old Haverstraw High School, stuffing envelopes, knocking on doors, and manning phone banks.
Alice stood, holding her back with one hand and herding tendrils of dark blonde hair into the headband from which they had escaped with the other. She rubbed her luminous green eyes, underscored in the florescent light by dark crescents. She hadn’t been sleeping again, Annette suspected. She could go for weeks on end like that. “It’s the only time I have to myself,” she would say, joking, but her exhaustion loosened the skin on the delicate bones of her face, drew her lips together in a hyphen that did not seem to move, even when she laughed.
“If you don’t get in your jammies this minute I’ll tell Kathleen you can’t watch The Flintstones,” she yelled, over her shoulder.
The boys stampeded into their room and slammed the door.
“It’s exciting,” Annette said. “I really think he can pull this off. I wouldn’t have believed it six months ago, but…”
“Oh, Annette, the world is changing,” said Alice, seizing Annette by the shoulders.
Timmy hid his head in his mother’s neck.
“We are just so lucky to be living right now, to be a part of this generation,” Alice continued, throwing out her arms as if addressing an auditorium full of skeptics. “Sometimes when I’m lying in bed staring at the ceiling, listening to Joe snore, thanking God for these two perfect children, my whole body tingles with the feeling that we’re right on the threshold of something so thrilling, something that will leave us completely changed, alive in a whole new way, you know?”
Annette nodded, rearranging a squirmy Timmy on her hip, thinking about Jack’s speech at the Democratic convention, America’s “new frontier.” Marveling at Alice’s talent for articulating concepts Annette had only just begun to consider. She thought about tackling unemployment and school segregation, closing the missile gap with the Russians, getting this country moving by making new, better, intelligent decisions. She thought about Jack and Jackie, the haloes they seemed to balance on their handsome heads, the electricity they so effortlessly exuded, their boundless promise. Was that what Alice meant?
Timmy reared back in her arms. She almost dropped him on his head.
“I better go feed these kids,” she said. “See you in a bit.”
Halfway down the driveway, she turned back to find Alice standing outside on the cement stoop, bare arms backlit by the yellow porch light, smoking a cigarette in air on the edge of birthing sleet. Squinting off into the distance through the thickening mist as if trying to discern previews of their future.