VAGABONDS

One_________________

   A year after I killed my husband the girls and I were living out of a van in Hyannis Port.  I left Oak Park in the van with my daughters despite the fact that the neighborhood rallied around us once news broke that Ron had abandoned us. 

     We nearly lost the house on East Avenue, but the neghbors had a fundraiser for us to save it.  Our bills were paid by more money they raised.  All the while Ron was buried deep beneath my garden in the side lawn of the houseon East Avenue.  The very house those neighbors were desperate to save for us.  

        People thought it was strange that I left with the girls, but I had to leave.  The day I woke the girls from their beds, bundling them into the old van I bought with no seats in the back a painter in the neighborhood sold to me cheap when the station wagon Ron had purchased finally died, I was desperate to get away from Oak Park.  That afternoon I tried to kill Ron’s bastard child.

          It was easy to take the one-year-old from Amber Sullivan.  She was a young inexperienced mother.  A teenager really.  Mothering was not easy for her.  She wanted to be with her friends.  Her parents were burdened.  Money did not come easy for them.  Matk Sullivan swore and bellowed over their lack of it each night.  The stress the family knew was intense.  While the neighborhood rushed to support me because I was an abandoned single mother with four small children those same neighbors shunned Amber Sullivan.  Back in those days the world was different.  Teenagers who had unwanted pregnancies were not treated the way that they are now.  These days I see high school students wearing their big bellies like a new purse, the baby that finally comes out an accessory other girls seem to admire.  Unwed teenage mothers get their ownr eality show. There are television shows that seem to glorify unwed mothers.

        The day I left Oak Park with the girls I took Amber Sullivan’s baby from their backyard.  Amber was not even aware of it, dozing in the sun exhausted it seemed.  My own girls were asleep for a nap upstairs in our hot house.  It was easy to take the child because the mother was still a child.  I returned to our yard and sat in a chair by the small plastic pool my daughters played in.  The water was warm from the sun as I sat watching Ron’s bastard child facedown in it, drowning.

        As I drowned Ron’s bastard child I imagined what people would say.  Amber Sullivan fell asleep.  Her child had crawled into our yard and drowned in the small pool that was unattended while I napped my own children.  It would be a tragedy.  Nobody would know that I sat watching the child gasp for air as I flipped through an old issue of LIFE Magazine in a chair a few feet away.  It was easier to get rid of Ron’s child than it had been to get rid of him.

        The magazine saved me.  I saw a black and white photo of Bobby Kennedy leaning over his sons in their beds.   That photo had a spell over me, all of a sudden.

Bobby was the one I always liked, even more than Jack.  The sight of him in that photo bending over his sons stopped me from drowning Amber Sullivan’s child.  I stood up and pulled the child from the water, took it back to the yard where Amber was still asleep.  Then I woke my own girls and bundled the into the van that night.  We started driving toward the place in LIFE Magazine where the photos of Bobby Kennedy were taken–Hyannis Port.   

 

 

TWO____________

   Once a person has killed someone everything else in life comes easy.  At least that is how it was for me.  I loved the attention we had after Ron was gone, how the neighborhood supported us.  People gave us things.  It was easy to take advantage of them.  They wanted to help us.  If it hadn’t been for that afternoon I almost drowned Amber Sullivan’s child I could have lived that life forever, grown old on the generosity of our neighbors on East Avenue in Oak Park.

   Some people would have found the life I lived with my girls after we left Oak Park difficult.  I loved it.  We stayed at motels as we drove from Chicago to Cape Cod, the magazine article with photos of Bobby Kennedy my fuel.  When we reached Hyannis we stayed in a motel on Main Street that I loved.  The girls thought it was  a fun adventure.  To me it was all a blur.  I was excited to start our new lives in Hyannis Port.

     It was easy to blend in with the summer people.  Days we spent at the beach.  We hauled our chairs because we did not have a sticker to park in the beach parking lots.  I drove from town to town on Cape Cod that summer.  Our days were ice cream cones and sunburns.  The trouble came in September when everyone else seemed to return to their real lives.  We continued to live on the beach.

         Winter was difficult that year.  We managed to rent a small mother-in-law cottage behind a house on North Street in Hyannis for a song and a dance.  By that time I was good at telling people our sob story.  People wanted to hear it.  But getting heat and other utilities was difficult.  Money was scarce because I could not work.  I put the girls in school in Hyannis but they never fit in.  Each school year I would switch schools for the next five years.  We lived in various places all along the mid-Cape until we were tossed out.  One year we stayed for more than six weeks in the doorway of a pharmacy each night.  All the while we still had the house in Oak Park on East Avenue, bought and paid for by our sympathetic neighbors. 

      I thought about going back to Oak Park but did not dare, the day with Amber’s baby and the pool spooking me.  The neighborhood had saved the house for us, but I still had to pay taxes.  Even that I defaulted on several times, but it was always saved for us by someone who remembered our sad story.  I was a mother abandoned by a man who left me with four small children.

         We returned to Oak Park several times during those days.  I would drive the van back the first few years.  People in Oak Park were glad to see us.  I explained I was staying with family outside Boston, never telling them where we were living.  I made the girls promise not to tell anyone about Cape Cod.  When we had rested for several weeks, or even months once, we returned to Cape Cod.  The house on East Avenue was always waiting for us.  By the time the van was finally dead, when I was using stolen credit cards from wallets I lifted in South Station– desperate to leave Boston– to purchase train tickets the girls were getting old enough to cause people to question why I did not work while they were in school.  Things became a little trickier then.  I taught the older two girls how to take a wallet from an opened purse or a man’s back pocket.  One would distract the person while the other slipped the wallet away from them.  They became expert at separating people we met from their money as we traveled from place to place without purpose.  We were vagabonds.     

 

 

Three_________________

   Nearly ten years after I first left Oak Park we were finally settled in Hyannis Port.  As settled as we would ever be in a rental house situated on a wooded lot in Yarmouth that belonged to a couple who lived in Hyannis Port.  That connection to Hyannis Port was all we needed.  Each weekend I drove to Hyannis Port in whatever vehicle I happened to have at the time.  We went through many cars while we lived in Yarmouth.  Money was good for awhile because I was plugged into all of the social services I could be as a single mother with children who had been abandoned by her husband.  Having a car allowed us to drive in and out of Hyannis Port.  Knowing the people we were renting the small house in Yarmouth from provided a destination.

         Prior to meeting the Heller Family our only connection to Hyannis Port had been the red post office where I rented a post office box.  That gave me license to come to Hyannis Port each day for my mail.  We mingled with the people who lived in the wealthy area made up of homes facing Nantucket Sound neighboring the Kennedy Compound. 

     Mike was the man behind the counter in the small post office.  He was a patient man who only once told me in, a quick New England tone, that I better get my mail situated when I had it being delivered to several places at once.  That particular day I tried to get him to bring the mail to Yarmouth for me over his lunch break.  He told me to get my mail in order instead.

         I met the Heller Family while I was getting mail from the post office in Hyannis Port.  Each day I lived for the few moments a day when we could linger in the post office with the people I longed to know.  Outside, I would strike up conversations the best I could in a community so private it was impossible to break into, while my girls bought candy from the small store next to the post office that was only opened during the warm months. 

We met the Heller Family that way. That was our first glimpse of life in Hyannis Port, the way the small decks visible fromt he road offer such a limited view of the sea.  Some people would have been happy enough with that.  I wanted it all–the entire view.

       “Baby, don’t you bother those nice people!” I said to my youngest after I sent her to do just that–bother the Heller Family.

       “She’s no bother,” Mrs. Heller stated.  “What a beautiful child!”

So it began.  My foot was in the door.  Six months later we were renting the small house on the wooded lot in Yarmouth, after weeks of showing up at that post office where the baby who was no longer a baby could charm the Heller Family.  Once we knew their name and address we were in.  Each weekend after that we made a point of showing up, unannounced, at their home during the summer.  Over the winter there were threats of having us evicted because we did not pay rent from the moment we moved in.  The Heller Family was back in New York where it was more difficult to charm them.  We had picnics in their white gazebo on the expansive property overlooking Nantucket Sound.    Spring they returned.  For nearly two years we lived off of their good graces.  In the meanwhile we we in.  As in as we would ever be, I realized. It was during that time, one afternoon at the small gallery in Hyannis Port, that my Baby met her husband’s family.

           Tanner’s father drove a golf cart to the post office during the summers.  I had seen him there for years.  We met through our children.  After years of being outcasts begging food from local charities in Hyannis and living on the good graces of people too proud ,or perhps even good, to put out a mother and children we were part of the landscape.  Tanner’s family acknowledged they had seen us at the post office in Hyannis Port for years.  I screeched with delight as my girls were given rides on the golf cart.  We sat with gratitude on lawn furniture when we were invited to an outdoor meal by Tanner’s parents.  They were people who did not listen to local gossip about us, not bothered by the fact that there were legalities between myself and the Heller Family suing us.  Tanner’s parents were the only ones crazy enough to open the door for us when we showed up each afternoon.  They took us to the Beach Club I longed to belong to.  It was members only.

      School was a problem.  In twelve years of living on and off of Cape Cod my girls attended every school in the area.  They had scholarships to a private one finally but that did not entitle us to respect.  Teachers made it difficult.  They were not advocates for my daughters because they did not like me.

      The soft spot for us was Tanner’s father.  A wealthy man with properties on Cape Cod and the Hamptons, beautiful residences all of them– and apartments owned in New York city and Boston–he allowed us into his life because of his mother.  He’d been a drinker barely able to pay his rent when his children were younger.  Often he tld me an inheritance changed his life, providing him with the good fortune he was living byt he time I met him.  His mother had been a single mother after his own father had died.  The man remembered what that felt like as a child.  He became a replacement father for my girls.  Drinking came back into his life.  He and his wife drank.  Tanner’s parents stabilized us, despite the fact that they were both alcoholics lost in their own misery.  We were allowed places we never would have been otherwise.  After nearly two decades of loitering around the post office in Hyannis Port, catching glimpses of the Kennedy Family, I was invited to social events where Tanner’s father introduced me to the very people I had only dreamt of being allowed to steal a glance at.  Gwen Coleman had arrived.     

 

 

Four________________

    The events that happened in the news were the glue of our lives in those days.   One of the Kennedy children lost a leg.  I made sure we were in Hyannis Port because they were a part of us. I told my girls they were our family.  When a Kennedy Wedding was happening we watched tents being put up.  The day Maria Shriver was married to Arnold Shwartzenegger I convinced a woman who lived across the street from Saint Frances, on South Street in Hyannis, to allow us to sit on her porch with her to watch.  My camera shot photos of everyone from Jackie Kennedy to Oprah Winfrey. Despte the protests of my daughters who were no longer young children, or even teenagers really, I made us a part of it all. 

      Years later I was finally really a part of it all by the time Rose Kennedy’s one hundredth birthday was being celebrated.  My girls were on with their lives by then, married or carving out their own lives.  I camped out in Hyannis Port for the entire month.  When the local police were ushering people away I belonged because of my baby.  My youngest daughter was engaged to Tanner.  We were part of Tanner’s family.

      Sea Street beach was a favorite spot for me.  I painted alongside the artist Sam Barber.  Ted Kennedy walked the dock Hurricane Bob destroyed then the new one built so close I could call out to him.  This was my life now.  It was the life I always envisioned for myself I realized as I stood watching my Baby being married to Tanner on a hill overlooking Nantucket Sound–at the church Saint Andrew’s By The Sea. 

 

       The summer John Kennedy, Junior died I was in Oak Park.  My time was always divided between the house on East Avenue and the life I was constantly building in Hyannis Port.  The girls were scattered.  Joyce had moved to Madison, Wisconsin after college there paid for by the generosity of others.  Ruth married right out of high school in desperation to get away from me.  Anger lived in both of my older daughters toward me.  I did not understand it because I had done so much for them.  Without as much education as she could have Ruth did well, catering events we spent our lives peering at from the sidelines.  College came for her later, night courses and finally computer classes until she graduated when her daughter was ten.  Emily married Edward in Oak Park.  That kept our ties to the community and the house on East Avenue.  My baby married Tanner, cementing me in Hyannis Port.  We belonged. 

     Early on someone had called to me one summer as I pushed a stroller along Main Street in Hyannis wondering where we would eat that night.

       “Hyannis Port, right?” the man nodded holding his own child as he recognized me as the woman pushing the stroller with the four kids up and down the roads

without sidewalks that made up Hyannis Port. I nodded, lifted by the greeting. It gave me a feeling as if I belonged then, never knowing what really belonging could possibly feel like.

        My heart broke the summer John Kennedy, Junior’s plane went down in the water off of Nantucket.  All of the world mourned, but I never did recover.  Each summer I returned to the shore with flowers for him and his wife, her sister.  They were people who I felt I knew because of the existence I had carved out in a place on a spit of sand my daughters and I should never ever have had any chance of ever becoming a part of.  A place we belonged as much as we belonged anywhere–because of me.