Uphill Walkers Read online

  My parents met at a New Year’s Eve party during the depression. My mother had finished her four years at a state teachers’ college and was living at home with her parents. They met because someone told a joke and when my mother threw back her head to laugh, my father asked, “Who is that lovely woman?” The joke and the punchline are of course long forgotten, but from that fleeting laughter flowed a dense series of repercussions: marriage, children, a Maytag dishwasher, the freezer from Sears, Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys and Betsy Wetsy and Tiny Tears dolls, velveteen dresses with lace collars, Pontiacs, Ramblers, and Chevelles. There would be loss and sorrow and even a few more laughs. But what if on that day he hadn’t been moved by her bounce, by the unusual lightness of being, the long neck thrown back, the cascade of dark hair tossed without thought? That lovely woman, wishing even then for a life with more expansive borders, told a wishful lie about her circumstances and said that she was pursuing a graduate degree in English at Columbia, thus postponing their courtship while he waited for her to finish this mythical spring semester before calling on her that following June.

  To be of Canadian ancestry, as he was, and to be all-Irish as she was, made them fiercely ethnic in their time. It was my father who married up. He was the son of a factory foreman from Holyoke, though for years I had the vague notion that his father was a bricklayer—hard, even boring, facts were sometimes difficult to come by in my childhood. My father was born in the flats of Holyoke, the established landing place for the lowliest of the newcomers in that traditionally divided town, the French having replaced the Irish who have currently been replaced by Puerto Ricans. In that low-lying warren, filled to this day with grim buildings and clotheslines dangling ever weary garments, he grew up speaking Canadish, which is what we children came to call the spotty French you used to hear more commonly in the Connecticut River Valley. His bride-to-be was the daughter of a doctor in Chicopee who had gone to Georgetown and spent a postgraduate summer in Vienna. Only a few letters from him to her survive their courtship, containing the trivia of his schoolwork and their logistics intermingled with avowals of undying love:

  I’ve got to give my first injection for anesthesia this week. I don’t know how it will be, but I’ll be hoping and praying. It should be a lot of fun though.

  The dance is definitely set for April 23, and after the initiation next week, I shall be able to give you every detail.

  You know what I would like to do right now. Just hold you and squeeze the breath right out of you. Really, I can think of nothing better. Darling, I think you better get working on a trip to Baltimore this fall. Anytime would be fine, and the sooner the better, so get going, honey, and we’ll be together again.

  I think that is all for now, my sweet, and I’ll write more soon. I love you (if I were a poet or a romanticist, I might be able to put it in a more delightful manner.) However, it still goes.

  Love, Ray

  They married in October of 1941 to the strains of “Panis Angelicus.” Maureen Shea wore a gown of duchess slipper satin made in classic princess lines; Irish lace edged the sleeves and the sweetheart neckline. Her veil was fastened in a scalloped Tudor bonnet, and she carried a cascade of bouvardia, roses, and orchids. The ceremony was followed by a wedding breakfast, and the couple left later on a motor trip, the bride traveling in a brown wool suit with Persian lamb trimming, headed for a honeymoon at Crocker Lake Camps in Jackman, Maine, where they stayed for a fee of four dollars per day per person. A brochure that survives says, “This is an excellent camp for ladies, also a good place to send your family during the summer months. Meals are served in a clean and pleasant dining-room, overlooking the lake, with fresh eggs, milk and cream, berries, and fruit, and vegetables from our garden.” The drinking water was from a high mountain stream. Fishing and hunting (partridge, deer, bear) licenses were available.

  Their first child arrived in the spring in 1944, during a war, marking him as a child of hope. Our father was stationed at a land facility, the U.S. Naval Training Center USS Burston. Telegrams were sent: “SHIP RAYMOND JUNIOR LAUNCHED SMOOTH SAILING AHEAD” and “MOTHER AND SON DOING WELL.” But within days my mother was worried. The baby had been born premature, weighing only five and one quarter pounds, and he kept spitting up the milk he was given to drink. At three months he was only eleven pounds. For several months, he lost weight rather than gained it. All her life, she remembered this statistic with a panicked clarity. Was he suffering from a case of what they now call failure to thrive? Why wouldn’t the doctors help find something that would satisfy those colicky outbursts? It was an image that would not leave her consciousness: the robust fat-legged newborn she had envisioned was small and puny, shrinking before her eyes into a pale and listless creature. Finally, a formula was found. The baby began to prosper. (She never stopped searching for an explanation. In 1987, the Springfield Union ran a Washington Post wire-service story entitled: “Infant Psychiatry: Birth of a New Specialty,” which she saved and pored over.)

  After the war, my father chose to move to Granby because it had been a summer retreat when he was a child, deep country where you could ride horses and be paid to pick corn and beans and tomatoes as well as to bale hay. In those days the chief product was meadowland; later, after the war, it would seem to be quickie houses, or perhaps children. It was such a quiet sort of place that when the Public Works Department decided to stencil the words, “Stop, Look, Listen,” at several intersections, a photographer was dispatched from the local paper.

  The family home on 5 Center Street was once visited by a columnist from one of the local papers for one of those “At Home with …” feature stories:

  Last Sunday we stopped at Dr. Blais’ lovely Granby home to accept a long-standing invitation to view his collection of Currier prints and found that the Blais home not only contains many unusual relics of prints but a wonderful assortment of other items of early Americana as well.

  The house was originally a colonial house of the late 1700’s which has been skillfully expanded with wings and additions which faithfully preserve the beauty of the original old homestead. Its cheerful red window shutters and spotless white clapboards proclaim it as a house where happiness and comfort abound.

  The first change my parents made was to the goldfish pond in the garden yard. My mother thought goldfish were fascinating: their fat gleaming bodies, urgent with allegory, growing as big as their environment permits. But she could not shake the vision of one of us—at the time of the move she already had four—toddling off to see the fishes and being discovered, hours later, face down. And so the pond was drained and filled with soft sand, a large dry square, with a row of pines lining the far end.

  The front door opened onto an unusual center staircase so that on either side was a full living room, like the right ventricle and left ventricle of the heart. One was formal with a fieldstone fireplace whose embers predictably launched my mother into one of her brooding moods. The other was less formal, the eventual roost of that great miracle of the fifties, the TV. When you turned it on, it emitted a strange white light that I thought might be, if not the Holy Ghost himself, then his first cousin, an unmistakable and eerie whoosh. We were the first family in our neighborhood to get a TV. On Sunday nights we had root beer and ice cream. This made us rich, sort of. I remember visiting my father’s office in Holyoke, in which there was a long table where presumably he fashioned crowns or dentures but where I thought, since he said that at work he made money, he drew dollars. Our TV attracted kids from all the other houses—the Brooks kids, the McCools, the O’Sullivans, the Kosciuskos—all stopping by to watch The Gene Autry Show or You Are There or I Remember Mama.

  Off the formal living room was the Green Room, a winterized sunroom, which contained the piano and the hi-fi. The dining room looked out on the garden yard, where the neutered pond offered its pool of dirt. The house had red shutters and a red front door, above which, like an eyebrow, was a half-moon window.

  Most houses of its vintage have wid
e uneven hardwood floors filled with an implied history of a grand lineage as the tallest, oldest pine in a former life. But this house had stone flooring from Italy that was cold and unappealing, colorless slabs soon covered with rugs. Magazines of the time heavily promoted fancy ovens as the executive desks of a good cook, so modern appliances, top of the line, were added to the large country kitchen with its view of the big yard and the barn and three or four apple trees whose yield was always, unfortunately, wormy. Over my mother’s not too strenuous objections, my father had someone demolish the graceful octagonal porch off the kitchen and replace it with a mega-porch, four times as big and not nearly as beckoning. The day the concrete was poured we got to carve our initials in the soft belly of the steps before it turned to stone.

  My father died unexpectedly, if one can say any death by cancer is unexpected. Some cancers are quicker than others are, and he had one of the quickest kinds, attacking the body at its hidden center, the pancreas. He became ill enough to acknowledge that something was wrong in September, right around the time that Rocky Marciano knocked out “Jersey Joe” Walcott for a heavy-weight boxing title in thirteen rounds. He died two month later, during deer hunting season, just before the big snows.

  I found out about his death in a haphazard way from my older brother. I can still hear his voice, its unsettling singsong, bringing the news.

  “Daddy’s dead.”

  We were sitting in the living room with the TV. He was eight, and I was five and one quarter years old. I called my brother Rayboy to distinguish him from my father, Raymond, which I heard as Rayman. Already I knew that Rayboy was not the most trustworthy of big brothers. He made fun of my Buster Brown shoes, thick leather contraptions, saying they were for old ladies. He lied about the Davy Crockett song, saying he wrote the words himself. He was disloyal in public and liked to lead other kids in a chant meant to humiliate me:

  Matt, the brat

  The skunk

  In the rat.

  It worked perfectly.

  I was left to wonder: why would my brother be moved to tell the truth about anything, even the death of a parent? Yet, I was tuned in. For weeks, I had to concede, since September, something unusual had been happening in the house. Whispers, whispers, whispers. One day Daddy took a trip to Boston to a clinic. When he came home, he said maybe he had something called dyed beets. He used to be strong and he could pick us all up at one time, one huge scoop, and then he was doubled over, stricken with pain. His skin was yellow like the silky stuff at the top of corn. It turned out he didn’t have dyed beets, so he went to a different place for more tests. Maybe he would get better if he had what we children called “those vacation shots,” like they gave you for the measles, which left a white splash on the skin, playful as ocean foam.

  “Daddy’s dead,” my brother kept saying. I remember looking at his wide-open mouth. Rayboy was lucky. He had out teeth and in teeth. I only had in teeth.

  As much as I wanted this to be another of my brother’s horrible tricks, I had a strong feeling it wasn’t.

  I looked outside the large window at the once green, now brown and rusting yard of late November and could see more and more grown-ups pouring into the house, big black cars filled with friends of the family, men who’d gone to Holy Cross with my father, my mother’s sister from New York, the minister from the parsonage next door. They were pale and silent. Now and again you could hear the sharp strike of a match and soon smell the smoke from their Pall Malls and L&Ms. I could not read but I could identify letters, and I knew the joke.

  Do you know why L&M got kicked out of the alphabet? They got caught smoking.

  The grown-ups appeared paralyzed, especially my mother with her dark hair and red lips smeared with color so they always looked like crushed petals, her eyes blank. The men radiated tweed and rectitude. There was no use running to Nana, my mother’s mother. A blur of wrinkles and spectacles and nervous gestures, she was usually fixed in her chair, distant and frail, sucking on peppermint Life Savers and reading historical fiction and, somewhat surprisingly, given her reserved nature, westerns.

  I began a frantic search for Lizzie, who could usually be counted on: Elizabeth Cavanaugh, the Shea family housekeeper, who came to this country from the Dingle Peninsula at the age of seventeen, following her older sisters in a chain migration. When she first arrived, she found herself weeping nonstop tears. Then someone gave her a banana and she brightened, basically for the rest of her life, figuring that any country with fresh fruit couldn’t be all bad. She began taking care of my mother as a newborn. In age, Lizzie’s hair was still red, if faded. All she ever did, and her energy for it never flagged, was radiate goodwill. Usually she was in the kitchen, but on this day the Sunday morning odor of homemade bread, the friendly greeting of flour and butter wrapping itself around the house, was missing.

  Was something wrong with Lizzie, too?

  “Daddy’s dead,” my brother said again.

  He was trying not to cry. He kept turning his back, fiddling with the television set, a massive contraption even bigger and uglier than my shoes. Because it was a Sunday morning when Ray informed me of our father’s death, there was nothing to watch except bishops in beanies. The transmission was fuzzy. We both kept poking at the TV, slapping it on the top and sides, until my brother said, with manly authority, “I bet it’s on the blink.”

  Do I really remember someone saying, “It’s been decided. Maureen is adamant. None of the children is going to the funeral,” or is it that the words have somehow become encoded over the course of time? She refused to attend her husband’s funeral with all those children tugging at her. My main reaction, other than the empty feeling that goes along with grief, was complete confusion. What did it mean, any of it? My mother is adamant; my mother is a damn mint. I had never been to a funeral, but I knew it was one of those ceremonies you had to be quiet at and where men had to remove their hats, yet one more puzzling detail. Why? Were hats noisy?

  “Madeleine will go to Holyoke to the Mahoneys. Ray Junior is going to the Murrays.”

  Nothing could have proved the point more dramatically than this precipitous farming out of the older children. It must be true. He must be dead. But I wondered about the meaning of the word.

  “What’s ‘dead’?” I kept asking everyone.

  Either they didn’t hear me or the enormousness of the question, its boggling philosophical grandiosity, managed to keep the silence afloat. My inquiry was so naked, it seems to me now to contain a kind of pornography.

  “Lizzie,” I heard someone say, “can stay home with the younger children.” People nodded and glanced at my three baby sisters: Jacqueline at three, Christina at two, Maureen at one. They’re the lucky ones, went the common refrain. They’re too young to remember, and you can’t miss what you never knew.

  Within weeks after my father’s death there were more whispers in the house, less sad than the ones we heard in November. My mother kept getting bigger and bigger while her face grew more and more white and pale and narrow. And I knew that a baby was coming. My reaction was mixed. I pretended to be excited, but deep down I thought: Oh, no, not another one. My sisters still seemed useless to me: whiny, malodorous appendages who relied on me to tie their delinquent shoelaces and to tell them which hand was right and which was left. It was my job to keep them from darting across Route 202 with its surprisingly heavy traffic and to prevent coins from being stuck in their ears during magic tricks. I helped them pick out their clothes in the morning. Clashing was the chief fashion sin with which I was familiar, and I saw my job as a matter of keeping plaids and stripes, pinks and oranges, Belfast and Dublin, apart. I taught them the joy of licorice: “See, it makes your spit black.”

  Everyone said they hoped this final baby would be another boy, as if this would be a blessing: a male to replace a male, a sign that our luck was changing. Girls in our family were, by our very commonality, devalued coinage. When my mother left for the hospital, I told her I hoped she would bri
ng me back something, as if she were off on a shopping jaunt to downtown Holyoke, to Steiger’s or Forbes & Wallace. “And,” I added, “something good.” My mother remembers the formal way I phrased it: “Let it not be a ribbon.”

  When my younger brother was born on June 1, 1953, he was given the name Michael, and two middle names, Francis and Anthony, so two saints could watch over him. Saint Francis is the patron saint of nature, the saint who loved birds and got them to sit in his hand. It is a truism that a child born after a major death is often turned into a symbol of hope. Eager eyes chart his progress, grasping at proof not only that life goes on, but that it can be just as stupid with happiness as it had been before. To honor Michael’s birth, a statue of Saint Francis was placed in the garden yard, his thick-featured plaster gaze overlooking the extinct pond. The air of wonder that accompanied Michael’s arrival fed into the excitement that greeted two other events from around the world. His birth coincided with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth and the first successful expedition up Mt. Everest. Whenever in the late fifties I saw a puzzle map that breathlessly exclaimed, “Hawaii and Alaska included!” I thought of Michael with his distended little boy belly and his friendly face framed by light curls, curls our mother often touched with maternal hunger, with hands that lingered. The Blais kids: Raymond, Madeleine, Jacqueline, Christina, Maureen, and “Michael included!”

  The summer of Michael’s birth, Raymond got to go away to camp. It was assumed that a certain antsiness on his part, a vague disgruntlement, might be squelched if he had the wholesome experience of time away with other boys and with male counselors in the fresh air. My father’s friend Tim Collins, the one who ensures the annual mass, sent my mother a note. She saved it, along with so much else, as consolation, and as proof of something about my father and about the past, its hold on her, on all of us.