!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
Once again, we spent every evening we could together, the week or so before I left for the Vineyard. Days when he worked early, Mike would come to my house, and watch the TV news with us, before we ate, or maybe we’d go to a movie, or just walk outside in the warm late spring evenings. By that time, my parents had acquiesced to his spending the night with me. He’d worked late that Wednesday night, closing the club, so we just fell asleep together on my little girl’s bed. Coming down to breakfast, I felt an unnatural hush. Dad was still there, seated at the kitchen table looking at the little TV mom had recently installed.
“Is he going to be all right?” he asked.
“They don’t know,” Mom answered. “They took him to a hospital there in LA, no one’s saying anything. But it doesn’t look very good.”
“What happened, what’s going on?” I sensed fear and anger in equal measures from my parents.
“Kennedy. He’s been shot.”
Mike seemed to breath in all the air in the kitchen, then sighed while sitting down, shaking his head. He looked about to cry. “Why now, why now,” he kept mumbling. “Wasn’t one enough? First Martin Luther King, now this…”
All my questions came pouring out. “Do they know who did it? Where did it happen? When? What does it mean? Did they catch the guy?”
My Dad calmly went through the details being repeated over and over on the TV. The last thing he said was “Sirhan Sirhan.”
“Sirhan Sirhan, his first name is the same as his last? What does that mean? Where is he from?”
“They say he’s from Palestine.” my mother answered.
Mike looked at each of us in turn. A year ago, he’d asked me about the Six Day War, about Palestine and Israel, and why they couldn’t get along. He thought it was not a recent thing, but a feud going back thousands of years between two tribes over the same land. I told him what my family said about it, which was very little, that Jews had wanted a homeland after the Holocaust, and they got it after the war, like reparations. He’d seemed skeptical then, and looked ready to raise that question once more.
“So has he said anything?” Mike asked.
Dad replied in a monotone. “Somebody heard him saying afterwards, ‘I did it for my country.’ He didn’t get a chance to talk, that Olympic guy Rafer Johnson and Rosie Grier, the big football player, were right by Kennedy, and they wrestled him to the ground. I’m surprised they didn’t kill him right there.”
“No more Lee Harvey Oswalds, I guess,” I said. Dad let out a hollow laugh. Dad and Mike both had to leave for work, so I was left with Mom to sort out our feelings.
“Sweetie, are you OK?” she asked. “Everything will be all right, I think.”
I was stunned. “How can you say that?” I almost screamed. “Bobby Kennedy was perfect, he was going to stop the war, help the blacks, make us whole again. I don’t know if I want to live in a world like this, where anybody who says, who does something good, just gets killed!” I started crying, Mom held me close, softly saying, “There, there, I know, I know,” as we rocked back and forth in each other’s arms.
I pulled myself together, pushed away from her, and firmly announced, “That’s it. I’ve decided, I’m going to Chicago with Eddie this summer. He’s right, we can’t let it go on anymore, this all has to stop.”
“Oh, honey, are you sure?” Mom looked worried.
That weekend, we left for Martha’s Vineyard. Eddie had told me earlier that spring, “Janie, I think this is the last summer we’re all going to be there together, you know. George has that job in New York, Linda’s going to graduate next year, and I think Dad is getting tired of paying for a place he only gets to spend a few days in each summer.” If that was true, I was going to enjoy my final weeks there doing everything, going everywhere. Each morning, I took the Sunfish out on the Pond. Denise was big enough for Arlene to let her come with me. She looked so cute, bundled up in her orange life vest. Afternoons, Linda and I, and sometimes Mom, would bike over to the towns, to Vineyard Haven or Oak Bluffs, and shop. Mom must have come back home with a dozen new scarves. Evenings featured sunsets, sometimes a fire on the beach, and jigsaw puzzles after dark.
Throughout it all, Mike and I kept writing. Our letters seemed to center those days on kids. Mine featured Denise, and the playtimes I’d supervise with her and a few neighbor children, toddlers to school age. Even with only three or four of them, keeping everyone safe at the edge of the water was a full time job. I watched them all, that summer, closely for signs of age-appropriate behavior, just like Kagan had discussed in our psych class. When I got a a chance, I started to read Kagan’s book on childhood development, comparing what he said to what I was seeing every day.
Mike seemed to have his hands full, as a lifeguard, and a volunteer coach for their swimming team. All he talked about in his letters was the joy he got from seeing them play, and playing with them. Their screams in the water, jumping and splashing on each other, their endless energy, their laughter. He seemed fascinated with the big Catholic families which used the pool and its lifeguards as their baby sitter. “Four, six, even eight! It might be hard work for the moms, but those kids look like they get to have so much fun with everyone at home. Each family a clan to themselves, I guess.”
One day, in late July, he wrote about a thunderstorm which emptied the pool. He was sent home, and told, “Looks like we’re done for the day.” Half way to Woodland Park, he looked up at the sky, where a cerulean sky to the northwest butted up against the shimmering clouds overhead, heralding an end to the lightening threat. He said, “I just had to go back to the club, to see those kids again.” The way he wrote it made it seem like he wasn’t talking about the younger ones. I wondered why I felt jealous, as I read between the lines.