Uphill Walkers Read online

  In honor of the sacramental milestone, I had gone with Raymond and his friend Bob and Bob’s sisters Pauline and Pee-wee, who were celebrating the same milestone, to a double bill of horror films, one about a she-devil and the other about a large insect who crushed skyscrapers and juggled cars. Raymond also gave me a Tarzan book, which he took back for himself, and a box of pennies covered with turpentine. The sticky goo stained my hands and was supposed to trick me into thinking I was turning into a colored person, just like the ones I had seen in Springfield.

  Raymond commanded my respect because he could remember our father, in the way that a child remembers, with a vivid, sense-filled memory, uncontaminated by fact. Daddy was the smell of automobiles and cut grass and fried potatoes. He was big hands and the sound of coins jingling in pockets and a deep voice at the end of the day. Beyond that, Raymond was older, and the simple arithmetic of his seniority gave him the mystique of wisdom and power. Yet it was already obvious, though not acknowledged, that something was off-kilter about him. His very presence created a commotion in the house. When he was around, the noise was always noisier. Since my earliest memories, he appeared to me to lack a certain protective membrane. He had a vulnerability that left him open to assault, and given to it as well. He was the pond that invited the skimming rock, the branch that could be twisted off a tree, a weed waiting to be trampled. Sometimes the boys who teased him would include me in their insults. “Hey,” I remember them saying, “there goes Razor Blades’ kid sister.”

  “He’s my brother,” I would answer, telling the truth, “and I’m proud of it,” I would add, lying. My relationship with him was more complicated than mere pride. Early on I recognized that I was his protector rather than the other way around.

  Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

  I realized as I prepared for my first confession that the words were affording me a secret delight. Was it possible that behind the grid of the confessional my real father lurked? Or would the parish priest turn into him, the way the bread and wine transforms into the body and blood of Christ? Was this fantasy a potential sacrilege, a sin far worse than the standard fare of talking back to one’s elders or plain old bad thoughts? And, if I failed to acknowledge the flight of fancy, would I then be guilty of making a faulty confession? Congratulating myself for a moment at the quality of my moral thicket, I soon quivered with the knowledge that perhaps I had committed yet another sin, the sin of pride. I could sense, in some dim way, even at the age of seven, almost eight, how a life of wrongdoing builds on itself, how turpitude begets turpitude begets turpitude. I began to despair of ever feeling pure enough to accept, with a totally clean slate, the Communion wafer into my mouth, the presence of God into my soul.

  During the cold war, the skies above Granby boasted B52s, sleek bombers that bragged their way across the sky, cocksure and light, reminding us, as someone put it, of prom kings and class presidents on their way to heroic touchdowns. We were on our guard against the appearance of similar aircraft from either the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics or Red China. As school-children, we computed that we were better than the USSR because they had gray weather all the time and we had watermelon, sunshine, and fireworks, culminating in the Fourth of July. And we were definitely better than Red China because, in one of those conundrums that can create a headache if you think about it too hard, we got tomorrow after they did, meaning we could savor it longer, like hoarding the inside of an Oreo.

  At school we began each day with the Lord’s Prayer as well as a salute to the flag and to the “Republic for Whichistans.” School days were punctuated by frequent air raid drills, in which we would quickly file out into the corridors and crouch, our elbows cradling our ears, waiting for the big bang. We were especially vulnerable because Westover Air Force Base, which borders Granby, was a force to reckon with in the world of international defense, a SAC (Strategic Air Command) base. We were right up there with a base in Texas as a prime target. It made all of us, even the state kids, who usually reacted to everything with a dull shrug, shiver to learn that the Soviets kept atlases of places they wanted to destroy, including Granby. For all we knew, the Hilltop Nook or the Town Common was at the top of their list. To be part of the world stage, even at its annihilating worst, created a borrowed pride.

  With flickering clarity, as through heat waves on a highway, I remember us lumbering in a slow procession down 202, angling our way onto Center Street, walking past the rectory, and finally arriving home. Time moved as slowly as we did. For my mother, the dailiness of life was as massive and unyielding as the fieldstone fireplace. There were sometimes moments of passing gladness, not the least of which was the sorority of other mothers.

  They shared domestic secrets:

  Peanut butter removes gum from hair.

  The perfect menu at a child’s birthday party is lemonade and Lady Baltimore vanilla cake from the Fannie Farmer Cookbook.

  Birthday presents should be simple and predictable: pencils, hankies, Golden Books.

  Except for Mrs. Ila Brooks, the Mormon, they all smoked. For a long time in our house, every flat surface seemed to contain an ashtray, the standard arts-and-crafts gift from children, but they were more than mere decoration. Form married function: those ashtrays got used. When I envision my mother and her friends of that era, I picture the innocence with which they smoked and how exciting it was to watch the at first absentminded, then slightly panicked search for the pack of tobacco, the patting of one pocket after another, and when it was found, to see the fingers graze the top, preparing for the smooth extraction of one, and only one, cigarette. To an onlooking child the suspense built, so that this gesture, which took but a second in real time, seemed to go on and on. Finally, when the cigarette was out of the pack and in hand, it was rapped against a flat palm or a hard surface, tap, tap, tap, so as to batten the interior, to fatten the virgin, and then, at last, time for the pyre, the actual ignition, always preceded, maddeningly, by a pause to find a match, more pat, pat, pat of the pockets, and when one was finally found, at long last came the sound of inhalation and its opposite, a process conducted not in today’s skulking atmosphere of apology, but out in the open with a spirit of ecstasy.

  The women reveled in the unspoken recognition that women all shared the same boat, which is to say the boat of their bodies. The human womb was the perpetual motion machine that scientists kept trying to invent. Good news was meant to be overheard: “Someone on the common, not me, is pregnant,” a woman would crow, and the guesswork created hoots and hollers, making all the women appear rejuvenated and less burdened for a brief moment. They saved their mumbled confidences for the bad news. They mumbled when they discussed the “mistakes” within a marriage, or worse, the mistakes outside one, especially if a young single girl, someone’s forever-labeled daughter, had become pregnant. They spoke in hushed asides about each other’s early hysterectomies, routinely offered in a paternalistic way as a form of birth control by doctors who counseled their patients that if they got rid of all the “yuck down there,” life would be a lot simpler. But the kinship with other women and our yelps and giggles and antics were not enough to guard against the conflation of one moment with the next.

  Our mother used to say, with a weary sigh, as she struggled to get us grown up, “Day by day, we chip away.” She had a private stash of doleful quotes, which she dipped into and trotted out whenever sufficiently dismal circumstances presented themselves. One of the top ten was adapted from Yeats: “The years go by like great dark cattle driven by the master herdsman, God.”

  From François Villon:

  Time goes, you say

  Alas, ah no

  Times stays, you see

  It’s we who go.

  From John Millington Synge’s Riders to the Sea, she appeared, with her usual appreciation for the morose, to revel in the last line, in which a character laments the drowning of yet another fisherman: “No man can be left living forever and we must be satisfied.”

 
And another, anonymous as far as I knew, featured one day above the masthead of the Holyoke paper, prophetic as well as terse: “It’s not the first tragedy, but the second, that breaks a man.”

  There was always a moment of profound quiet before our return, before the clunk of shoes being scuffed off, the thud of Dick and Jane and other books dropping on the floor, the banging of the door of the fridge as we lunged for the peanut butter and jelly, the shout of “first dibs” on the cold milk in the glass container with its thick ridge of cream on top. One of my mother’s favorite poems was by a woman with the truly unfortunate name of Adelaide Crapsey, the mention of which would launch us into the same spate of giggles with which we used to greet the information that we had some distant Irish cousins with the last name of Hoar. Yet the words my mother liked to quote had a kind of dreadful beauty:

  These be

  Three silent things:

  The falling snow … the hour

  Before the dawn … the mouth of one

  Just dead.

  To which my mother sometimes added a soft fourth: the house at 5 Center on a school day shortly before three in the afternoon. Her first major decision as a widow was not to sell the old white colonial, so that even though my father became less real to me over time, the house, which was his monument, became more real, almost like a member of the family, a breathing, sometimes tyrannical, sometimes enveloping presence filled with nooks and crannies, history and eccentricity.

  Chapter Three

  Bread and Hope

  LIKE ANY MOTHER, OURS ON OCCASION HAS AN URGE TO CITE THE VARI-ous ways in which she not only went to bat for us as children, but also walked the extra mile and managed somehow to get water from stones as well as blood from turnips. This tendency has only deepened due to her status as a “single mom” long before that phrase, with its pop sociology peppiness, came into being.

  In their marriage, my father got the premature berth at St. Patrick’s Cemetery across from the Moose Club in Chicopee.

  He got the pickled adulation of a passel of children.

  He got our prayers.

  My mother got the house in Granby.

  She got all the doctors’ appointments, the calls from concerned teachers, the bills from various colleges. She also got the challenge not to make his death her death too.

  Being fierce, from New England, she took the words of Robert Frost personally when he wrote, “Provide, provide.” On the other hand, being Irish by heritage, she took Frost’s meaning in the most unlikely light, not so much concerning herself with the homely task of supplying the basics in a cold climate, firewood and flannel, as dedicating herself to giving us what she thought our lives would have been like had our father lived: a swirl of lessons and opportunities and symbolic offerings, such as red meat and equestrian training at Mt. Holyoke College. Sometimes she still cannot resist the urge to name all the ways in which she sought to enrich our lives.

  “It wasn’t easy, you know.”

  No, it wasn’t, we readily agree.

  “I felt inadequate. Who wouldn’t? All of you so different, the one from the other, such distinct individuals. And so needy. I used to think wouldn’t it be great if on Sunday I could just fill you up with stew and milk and then not have to feed you again all week. I was younger than I thought when your father died. I didn’t appreciate how young. I didn’t have much to fall back on, just the hope of a teaching job if I was lucky. And then time went on and you got so tall and bold and definite, you threw me for a loop. Besides, what resources did I have?”

  We know our cue, answering interchangeably, the same response no matter which child is speaking. We had to be careful to answer with just the right pitch of sincerity. Our mother had a gift for detecting the clammy and counterfeit.

  You did have the Waterford glass pitcher.

  “That would have been worth?” she nudges us along.

  A thousand dollars …

  “If it weren’t cracked.”

  Our mother could see the lost promise in anything, including a cracked pitcher. The vaunted value of a thousand dollars is a willful inflation, typical of her impulse to fictionalize reality, to take what is true and reshape it, so there is not only a better ending, but also a better beginning and a better middle.

  We rush to reassure her.

  You did your best.

  Our mother nods in agreement: “I did feed you steak.”

  Yes, you did. Sirloin.

  “And I didn’t run away and join a commune back in the sixties when it was popular for housewives to be, well, skittish.”

  No commune for our mom.

  “I arranged for you girls to study with the smart nuns.” Yes, you did. The Ursulines. The female equivalent of the Jesuits.

  “You took piano.”

  And learned one song: “The Londonderry Air.” But at least it was a good song.

  “You joined the Scouts and got all those badges.”

  That proved so useful in adult life.

  “I exposed you to Irish Step.”

  Way before anyone heard of those River Dancers.

  “And don’t forget. I also arranged for you to take elocution with a famous thespian, Mrs. Jean Guild of the Valley Players.”

  By the time the four Blais girls came under Mrs. Guild’s influence, she had faded gently from empire, and what early stardom she had experienced and ambition she had once entertained had been downsized to playing bosomy busybodies in summer stock standbys like Arsenic and Old Lace and to passing on her skills and secrets to unappreciative pupils, such as me and my sisters. She was a commanding alto and was capable of a convincing emotive quiver should the right stimulus present itself.

  We met once a week in the city of Holyoke in a building named Wisteriahurst, arranging ourselves in a semicircle under the high ceiling in hard-backed chairs, legs crossed at the ankles, hands folded in our laps. We began with tongue twisters: “The ragged rascal ran around the rugged rock.” Then we had flash cards with words like “hoi polloi” that the hoi polloi would be likely to mispronounce: “The car is called a coupe,” Mrs. Guild would say, “Not kuPAY. It’s Theodore Ruse-a-velt, not ROSE-a-velt. And now this word, so liquid and lovely, how do we say it?”

  “Lapis lazuli,” we would reply, dragging our voices.

  These exercises tested our tolerance: what possible utility was there in learning the correct way to say words that we could not envision using ever? Mrs. Guild told us this last word referred to a mineral famous for its blue color, but try as we might, we could not imagine the circumstances under which we might ever employ it, ever compliment some boy of our dreams on his lapis lazuli eyes.

  Finally, our larynxes warmed, we graduated to the recitation of poetry, as always encouraged to stress each syllable and flag every emotion, a kind of overcooking that managed to remove all the healthy nutrients.

  “My dears,” she would sometimes say with girlish glee, as if about to suggest we spend the rest of the lesson writing our names as “Mrs. Pat Boone.” A big wink followed by a crafty grin: “Let’s do Lord Alfred Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott.’”

  “Oh, boy,” we used to say when she turned her back, sticking a finger down our throats. “Tennyson.” Our delivery was accompanied by sweeping gestures, huge strides, the ceremonial hoisting of hand to forehead as we scoured an imagined landscape.

  She left the web, she left the loom,

  She made three paces thro’ the room,

  She saw the water lily bloom,

  She saw the helmet and the plume,

  She looked down to Camelot.

  The most important line was the last: we were both to lower the register of our voices and to raise the volume on the word “down,” so that the final line had a big boom in the middle:

  “She looked DOWN to Camelot.”

  We must have disheartened her, but she never let on, perhaps the truest measure of her acting talent. Week after week, she labored over our delivery so that we too could enter a room armor
ed with confidence and crisp diction. We were ashamed to be taking voice lessons, embarrassed to be pursuing something so old-fashioned and out of it, longing instead to take accordion, or tap, or best of all, baton. “You’re taking what kind of lessons?” our friends would ask. “Electrocution?”

  But nothing, absolutely nothing, impressed our mother so much as what she came to think of as her most stunning entry in the good mother sweepstakes. It surprises her more and more with each passing year, the daring of it, the glamour, the sudden heedlessness of expense. She took us, one or two at time, never the whole lot, naturally (you’d need to be a saint for that), to New York City.

  These excursions stood out. We were not the Grand Canyon type, not temperamentally suited to long car trips and lengthy pilgrimages, leading to caverns with stalactites or empty battlefields or roadside stands that sell shells and beaded moccasins.

  Mostly, we just stayed put in the Bay State, which held its own amusements, such as maple syrup and melting snow. If our mother ever writes her autobiography, her chosen title is Me, Maureen, from Massachusetts. Never a confident driver, she avoided all major arteries and took side streets whenever possible. Sometimes to create a false impression of an accelerated pace as we inched down narrow byways, she would sing, “Zoomie, zoomie, zoomie, zoomie, zoom.” She despised the Massachusetts Turnpike from the moment it opened in 1957 and spoke of it as if it embodied some unnamed evil, as if its soft shoulders were lined with gambling casinos and thousands of dancing girls clad only in sheets. I remember at times being so desperate for a change in scenery that when our mother used to get in the car simply to drive the mile or so to Dressel’s Service Station for gasoline, we lay in wait for the roar of the engine and then flew out of our rooms, propelling ourselves out of the front door, diving into the two-toned blue Nash Rambler, which had the strange distinction of being both stodgy and salacious. Before we became teenagers, the Rambler’s most prized attribute, the way the front seats reclined to a horizontal plane, the object of the same kind of snickering that attached to certain otherwise normal words, like miscarriage and queer and balls, when pronounced in a low, knowing way, was lost on the Blais girls.