There was no huddle.
Mr. Cowley was on the field, and he was whispering to the referee, and the guys were all talking at once, not standing with that patient hands-on-hips posture of football players waiting for a decision, but gesturing wildly instead. I could hear them saying, “The head, the head,” and I listened in bewilderment and fear because I was sure now that something terrible had happened to me, that they were all talking about my head, that maybe my neck was twisted at a funny angle, maybe there was a line of blood trickling from under my white helmet. The playing field was crowded with people now, what were they all doing on the field? The buzz was incredible, the referee finally blew his whistle to stop it, and a hush fell over the field, broken only by the keening of the November wind and the empty rattle of the sycamores lining the field.
Mr. Cowley cleared his throat. He seemed embarrassed.
“We’re calling the game,” he said.
“I cannot reconcile the events of this past week,” my grandfather said, tall and white-haired at sixty-three, sitting at the head of the table, the family patriarch, though I could sense my father’s displeasure with the old man for taking his usual seat. “To believe that in this day and age, in a country as sophisticated as America...”
“Is there any cranberry sauce?” one of the twins asked. She was my cousin, eight years old, the prettier of the two girls, though frankly neither of them was worth a glance, even in the third grade. She smiled at my grandfather because she knew she had interrupted him, and he reached over to touch her straight brown hair for just an instant before Aunt Linda said, “Your grandfather’s speaking, Mary. You can just wait for the cranberry sauce.”
“I’ll get it,” my mother said, and rose from the table.
“She can wait, Lolly.”
My mother’s name was Dolores, and the “Lolly” was a hangover from the days of her youth. I saw a small twinge of displeasure in her eyes as my aunt used the name now, but she recovered immediately and said, “I want to see how she’s doing, anyway,” referring to the new maid, a priceless gem from Georgia. She put down her napkin, and then left the dining room and went into the kitchen. The other twin, Marcia, yelled, “I want some, too, Aunt Lolly!” and my mother shouted, “Yes, Marcy!” from the kitchen, and Uncle Stanley said, “I want some, too, please, Aunt Lolly.”
“Please!” Marcy shouted to the closed kitchen door.
“The whole thing was a spectacle,” my father said. He said it very softly, I knew that voice, as if he hadn’t been patiently waiting through the twins’ nonsense for this moment when he could openly challenge Grandpa sitting in his place at the head of the table. Grandpa’s brows went up just a trifle. There was a glint of humor in his blue eyes. The two men squared off across two yards of white tablecloth. “That whole damn funeral was a theatrical production,” my father said.
“Well,” Grandpa seemed to agree, “there is something very theatrical about an assassination, wouldn’t you say?”
“Not to mention another murder following it,” I offered.
“I’m not talking about that aspect of it,” my father said.
“Are there any more yams?” Uncle Stanley asked.
“I’m talking about the funeral — the horses, the drums, all that overproduced crap.”
Aunt Linda shot my father a warning look: the children.
My father turned with a faint glance of annoyance, and then passed the candied yams to Uncle Stanley. Stanley was a heavy-set man with a bland open face, thinning blond hair, gold-rimmed spectacles, a Phi Beta Kappa key hanging on a gold chain across the front of his vest. He was wearing a brown suit (he always wore brown), a white shirt, and a brown tic upon which there were now several specks of gravy he hadn’t yet noticed. He accepted the proffered yams in the silver dish that had once been my grandmother’s, said, “Thank you, Will,” and promptly served himself the last two potatoes in the dish.
“Someone else may want some,” Aunt Linda said.
“I hate yams,” Mary said.
“I hate yams, too,” Marcy said.
“I’ll grant you,” my grandfather said, “that the Kennedy women have a certain flair about them, and that perhaps...”
“Even that annoys me.”
“What does?”
"That my father said. “The Kennedy Women!”’ He shook his head. “That’s for O’Hara novels, not real life.”
“The assassination was real life,” I said.
“I beg your pardon,” my grandfather said, turning to me with a small pleased smile, “but that’s where I disagree. That’s exactly my point, Walter, it’s exactly what I was trying to say.”
“Lolly, we need some more butter, please,” Uncle Stanley shouted to the kitchen.
“Coming!”
“I was trying to say that there is an air of total unreality to the events of this past week. The assassination itself, the television murder, the funeral, all of it. Unreal. Incredible.”
“The only unreality was the funeral,” my father insisted. “A play in three acts, produced and directed by Jacqueline Kennedy. The rest is only America.”
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“I mean that this concept of America as a sophisticated nation is all a lot of crap. We’re barely out of...”
“Oh, really, Will, I think...”
“... our infancy.”
“... America’s a pretty sophisticated country,” Uncle Stanley concluded, and stuffed a whole candied yam into his mouth. Aunt Linda shot my father another warning glance. She really looked a lot like him, I suppose, especially now when her blue eyes were flashing the same anger as his. They’d both inherited Grandpa’s high cheekbones and prominent nose, as well as the somewhat thin-lipped Bertram Tyler mouth — which I had also inherited — and which I felt looked more attractive on a man than on Aunt Linda, who always wore the look of a maiden lady about to peer under the bed, straight blond hair pulled into an old-fashioned bun at the back of her head, good breasts hidden in a high-necked blouse. “This is 1963, Linda,” my father said emphatically, half in response to Uncle Stanley, and half in reprimand to his sister for her prissy-assed ways.
“Yes, and we’re almost...”
“We’re less than two hundred...”
“... on the moon,” Uncle Stanley said.
“Are we ever getting that cranberry sauce?” Mary asked.
“Hush, Mary!”
My mother came from the kitchen. The new maid trailed behind her with a bewildered look, carrying hot bread and two butter dishes, as well as the celery and olives she’d forgotten to put on the table at the start of the meal. My mother put down the cranberry sauce, and then tucked a stray wisp of brown hair behind her ear, and smiled at me suddenly and radiantly when she realized I was watching her.
“Why, it’s one of the Tyler Women!” I said, and opened my eyes wide in fake astonishment.
“Yes, of course,” my mother said simply, smiling, and suddenly her eyes met with my father’s, her eyes clashed with the eyes of Will Tyler across those yards of white linen, and held, and I was reminded of the cold hard intelligent waiting eyes of a football team in a huddle, waiting for the play to be called, and my father mimicked in precise derision, “Yes, of course,” and it was as if the play had been called, and their eyes broke contact, I almost expected to hear the clap of hands as the huddle opened. I felt what I had felt last Friday, that something was terribly wrong. I almost expected to learn momentarily that yet another person had been killed. I guess I experienced in that instant an uncertainty I had never before known in my life, the rising fear that everything I’d learned to count on before then, a sane and ordered existence, an America comforting and secure, was rapidly crumbling all around me. And then I realized that the sharp crack of eyes across that Connecticut dining room table had been every bit as fatal as the rifle shots that shattered the Dallas stillness, and I knew further that my mother had been the victim.