Mrs. Ward stepped out of the room. It was right after lunch We were all settling back into the classroom, all 52 of us, dreading the upcoming spelling quiz.

I had my head in my desk, looking for paper, when I heard steps. Closing the desk, paper in hand, I looked up expecting to see Mrs. Ward, but instead there stood Sister William. This was serious. Sister William was the vice principal, and hardly ever left her eighth grade classroom during school hours.

"Children," she said, "I have some very serious news to tell you. Mr. Kennedy has been shot. Please all bow your heads with Mrs. Ward and pray for him. I will speak to the other classes."

So I bowed my head and prayed with the 51 other fourth graders. What's nice about Catholic prayers is that, after the first 20 or so Rosaries, the prayers say themselves, moving tongue, lips and voice in a kind of spiritual possession, freeing the speaker's mind to reflect on other things. Which, I suppose, is what meditation techniques are for.

My reflections were confused. "Mr. Kennedy?" I thought. "Mister Kennedy? Why would anybody shoot the President's father?" It hadn't occurred to me that anyone would call the President anything other than President Kennedy. So I dutifully prayed for old Joe Kennedy.

We were dismissed from school within the hour. I suspect we would have left right away, except we had to wait for the buses to arrive.

It made no difference to me about the buses; I was a walker, living a block up the steep hill outside of school. I wasn't going home, either. I had a piano lesson with Sister Agnes, an arthritic retiree who lived in the red brick convent across the street from school, and who hit her students with the knitting needle she used as a pointer whenever one of us played a wrong note. There was only one thing worse in her book than playing badly, and that was missing a lesson. Was it the loss of an opportunity to torture us, or the loss of the $2.00 that made her angry? None of us knew.

My friend Patty walked around behind the convent with me. She didn't study piano, but liked to have an excuse to look at the garden statuary in the convent's back yard. She talked all the way over, nervously.

"You know what I think? I think that the Russians will attack us!" she said. "The Russians won't attack us," I answered, "and besides, even if they did, they couldn't get us all." For the duration of the Cold War, I had adapted the Huge Numbers Theory of pedestrian street crossings in heavy traffic, held by my Great-Aunt Rose, to foreign policy.

"You don't think the Russians will attack now that President Kennedy's been shot???" Patty asked insistently. The unthinkable began to penetrate my impressions -- surely they wouldn't dismiss school for Joe Kennedy -- but I said, "No, of course not. Why would they? They know they'd never win."

In my heart I knew then that the President, hero of my Irish-American family, whose election as President had been the biggest birthday present of my whole life, was the person I had been told to pray for. But I didn't feel afraid, only sad. We loved this man, we allowed him to lead us, but our safety was not tied to his life. This I knew from all the adults around me: Americans didn't rely on a leader for safety or freedom. We relied on ourselves.

Sister Agnes couldn't believe I had come for my lesson. She was in the TV room with the other nuns. "Go home," she snapped. "We'll have no lessons today."

So home I went, and Patty with me, because her mother worked and Patty had no key. When we got there, I took the bottle of milk and some Oreos out for us, and for my two little sisters, because my mother was in the family room watching the television, crying. Patty's mother called her on our phone, and said she was home, so Patty scarfed down two Oreos and left with black cookie crumbs all over her teeth.

My sisters and I looked at each other and slowly walked down the hall into the room where the baritone voice of TV news was all there was to hear, all of it bad, and my mother wept. We knew, without being told, that the Shirley Temple movie would not be on that afternoon, and that the world would be a dark place in the days to come.

Come to think of it now, I forgot to put the milk away.