Uphill Walkers Read online

  We didn’t go to Boston, we didn’t go to the Cape, we hardly went anywhere at all, but for reasons that had more to do with the kind of life my mother wished to live than with the life she was leading, she energized herself, with an unnatural fury, for her visits to New York City, which entailed a four-hour train ride and two nights in a hotel.

  Once there, our routine did not vary.

  First stop: Tall Gals, which specialized in shoes for tall gals with narrow feet. She wanted something strappy that suited her quadruple A (or was it quintuple A?) heels. We visited the public library to admire the stone lions. We went to Lord & Taylor, where our mother sashayed into Better Dresses to inquire about the latest Anne Fogarty, rattling off the name of the designer with a kind of bored aplomb, the purpose of which was to establish once and for all that she knew Something about Something. Lunch followed, at the Birdcage Restaurant, which served sherbet and miniature sandwiches. Then, on to more of the usual tourist hoopla: the Empire State Building, the Oyster Bar beneath Grand Central, the Met to see the pictures of the fat naked ladies and blurry landscapes, the Rainbow Room for peanuts plus a view. We ate dinner at Horn & Hardart’s Automat, mesmerized by what passed for high tech at the time. After we deposited a series of nickels into a slot, a fresh sandwich would slide into view in a small metal compartment. This apparition of bread and hope in a germ-free cubicle had the air of a certain kind of low-level miracle such as you might hear about in New Jersey or the Philippines when people claim they can see Jesus’s face in the folds of a cinnamon bun or in the arrangement of seeds in a pomegranate: the Immaculate Conception of Cold Cuts.

  While we were there, she tried to instruct us in some of her random convictions.

  Ladies do not swing their arms when they walk.

  No one should butter his or her bread in the air.

  Diamonds, ideally, come from Tiffany’s.

  The most pleasing serving platters are oval, and black and brown can be a very smart combination.

  I remember trooping behind our mother as she sailed the streets, borne forward by a private breeze. The exhaust was a kind of perfume, the honking an aria, the jostling crowd an appreciative claque.

  One time we took a sightseeing bus. In the Bowery, we saw the bums, as we called them, men warming their hands and stubbled faces in the heat of barrels rosy with lighted trash. This scene served to launch our mother into her standard Great Depression reverie, a familiar spiel about how people wrapped up butter and put it under the Christmas tree and how men she knew, proud men from proud families, were forced to leave their neighborhoods and go to places like Hartford, pronounced as if Hartford were the end of the world, and sell pencils and apples on street corners. She knew women who were so traumatized by those lean, frightening years that they practiced thrift for the rest of their days to a deranged degree, even hanging used tea bags on the clothesline. From a distance it would look as if someone were lynching mice.

  “You cannot understand how hard it was unless you lived through it … ,” she said, her voice trailing off, her gaze devouring the horizon. “You don’t understand.”

  On that particular day, as we made our way past the gauntlet of fumes and beggars, one of the men eyed the bus and, assuring himself, falsely, that no one was watching, took an empty bottle and smashed it on the pavement. Then he stowed it, shards and all, as future weaponry, inside his coat pocket. Who were these men, unattached and slovenly and full of menace? What combination of bad luck, bad judgment, and bad dice led them to these shadowy concrete corners, huddled and grubby and neglected? Later, we went to Chinatown, where our mother got what looked like chopsticks to put in her hair and where the drinks had umbrellas and the cookies had mottoes.

  She changed in the city, with each inhalation of pavement and commotion.

  In New York, trailed by one child or another, dressed in a suit, Maureen Shea Blais would transform, become a different, lighter person. Though well into her forties, she was pleased to realize she was making an impression, creating a tableau. When she returned home, she would sigh and say how much she missed it.

  “In New York,” she always said, “the men still whistle.”

  The mother we were used to simply vanished in New York. She was gone, the creature who loosened her bun at night, removed the switch she used to fatten it and the wire pins that kept it tamed and cowering by day. Out would spill the long dark hair, down to her shoulders and beyond. Often in the evening she delivered herself for hours to her daily stack of newspapers, entering the den of information in black and white with an addict’s wish to obliterate the present: this was her gin and her bingo. She picked it over, reading not only the news and the political columns in which men of swagger opined and fulminated, but also “Today’s Chuckle” and the advice columns and the ads, the letters to the editor, the crossword puzzles, even, fruitlessly, the household hints, disappearing into the world of facts and figures, irony and despair. She would skim the ads for mink stoles and consider just how much of a bargain it would be to eat a dinner of pot roast and all the fixin’s for seventy-five cents at Waldorf’s Self-Service Restaurant, or fried scallops for ninety, skipping only the agate describing scores from games all over the country as well as in local high school gyms, pausing to shake her head at whatever commotion had been caused by Furculo or Peabody or Bellotti or by those silly Red Sox who were always discovering whole new ways to shoot themselves in the foot.

  “Now, doesn’t this take the cake,” she would say, whenever something offended her sensibilities. One time there was a story in the paper about a lady who had triplets and how she felt thrice blessed. The triplets were already six months old, and if you looked at the lady’s picture, you saw someone who looked plumb tired out, certainly not someone you’d care about one way or another. The lady’s husband was out of work, but somehow things would take care of themselves. Maureen Blais’s dislike could not have been more swift or more profound; she could take the tiniest grit and massage it into a pearl of pure pique.

  “Just listen to this nincompoop,” she said, “as if talking about the mortgage is the same as paying it, nattering on and on about how the three in her arms aren’t anywhere near enough. All that palaver, acting as if she’s the first woman ever to have a baby when any cow can have a calf. Oh, she says, I want a dozen more.” And then, building to her worst slur. “Just who does she think she is?” Pause. Then again, “Just who does she think she is? You know, I have the urge to track her down and ask if I can speak to her for just one minute. I could tell her a thing or two about the heartbreak that’s in store for her. Oh, I hate to be the kind of person who discourages someone from setting out with full sails in such an obvious high wind of, well, personal optimism. But I feel honor-bound, woman to woman, to tell her she should stop now while she’s feeling so positive. The thing people don’t understand is that babies are more than just coos and big eyes. Babies are work.”

  Years later, I heard babies described as soil-depleting crops, and I think that’s what my mother was driving at, the contradiction at the heart of human generation, the way, as they say in the South, children sharpen their teeth on their parents’ bones. We were what kept her up and we were what kept her down.

  But certainly we were not soil-depleting all the time. We conspired to find ways to make our mother smile. Our plan was to get her to live forever. Having lost one parent, there was always a sense of impending doom, a question of when the next shoe would drop. We proceeded slowly, wary of change, fearful of leaps and falls, cautious and elderly at a tender age. No black diamond trails for us: just getting through the day was an extreme sport. We soon learned that good report cards lifted her spirits, as did drawings, especially of her. We would guess what kind of flower she would be if she could be a flower: a rose on the days she was acting stern and official, a peony when she seemed rugged and exuberant, or a daisy when she was acting humble as a smile. Putting on kerchiefs and proceeding to douse everything with disinfectant, singing songs we�
��d heard on commercials, “There’s less toil with Lestoil,” we would organize ourselves to clean the house when she was at the Food Mart or the S&H Green Stamps Redemption Center so she could return home to a big surprise. We brought her breakfast in bed. The toast might be burned, the marmalade gummy, the orange juice weak as water, but it revived her to see us carrying the tray into the room. She would draw us into bed with her, cradle our heads. Sometimes on the table next to the bed would be a book, tossed aside in the night, or a jar of cold cream that accidentally served as an ashtray, signs that she had been up late. When our mother was angry or distracted, we were a nameless blur: this one, that one, his nibs, her nibs, yooouuu. Or she would go through the list of our names and get the wrong one. When corrected, she would say, “You know who I mean.” On the good days, the breakfast-in-bed days, it didn’t matter whether she remembered our names or not: we were little lost lambs, pumpkins, even princesses. We were grand, we were brilliant, her pride and joy, her little lovies, her old stars.

  Our mother was above all a connoisseur of obituaries, otherwise known as the Irish sports pages. She remarked the calling hours at the wakes for people she’d never even heard of, let alone met, monsignors and teachers and politicians, professors, lawyers, and doctors, as well as all those Lucky Joes whose chief claim to fame was that they’d survived the Cocoanut Grove fire in Boston in 1942, only to be felled at a later date by more mundane causes. She had a particular regard for the obituaries that made nuns sound interesting: “It’s a real gift to describe a life that’s both contemplative and altruistic with any kind of drama, unless of course she’s the kind of nun with a secret specialty, like a great pitching arm that she uses at recess to win favor with the boys, or she can play an instrument at one of those singalongs.”

  With a splash of sherry in a glass at her side, just a cheerful little splash, a cigarette aglow in the nearby ashtray, ignored, consuming itself, she would sometimes compose her own obituary, taking pleasure in reviewing her entire life, losing herself in a haze of smoke and sentiment. The past called out to her the same way cotton candy and fake tomahawks called out to me at the annual Columbus Day Fair in nearby Belchertown.

  For a woman whose tongue could be sharper than the lid of a freshly opened can of tuna, she found herself overcome by shyness when it came to putting words on paper. She would sit in the living room in the house in Granby, decorated in the style of the fifties with turquoise walls and gold drapes. We had American eagle everything, especially lamps. Over the mantel of the fireplace two crossed swords were mounted. Such a patriarchal flourish had a zany effect in a house dominated by women. At Christmas these instruments of war were laced with garlands of tinsel.

  “Born in Chicopee,” she would begin, though the exact date was usually withheld for reasons of vanity. One of her father’s many sisters wrote a tribute on the day of her birth:

  Fair is the unfolding of a flower

  The gentle sprouting of the springtime sod

  And fair the bright white burst of morning’s glory

  But fairer still thy birth, oh flower of God.

  As morbid as the composition of her own death notice might seem to someone outside the family, it was hardly noteworthy inside it. After reading all those obituaries night after night, she could not help but speculate where she fit in. What kind of lastditch spotlight would her life merit? The answer was bleak but obvious: unhailed in life, she would be in all likelihood unhailed in death. “Who’ll print this anyway?” she would say, in a fit of despair, rattling the piece of paper with her proposed obituary. “Probably not even the weekly shopper.”

  But still she labored over it, piling up detail upon detail.

  “Born in Chicopee,” she would start it again, and again the year 1913 eluded print. She misled us about her age, lopping off fifteen years, liposuctioning time itself, by revising a camp song from when she was young. She’d gone to Bonnie Brae in 1927. She sang,

  1-9-4-2 at Bonnie Brae

  No other year the same

  Every scout a camper true

  No matter her name or fame.

  We weren’t yet cunning about math or chronology, so we accepted her numbers: if the song had been accurate, she would have been a girl at camp in 1942 and two years later, a grown woman with her first baby.

  “Daughter,” she would write, “of Dr. Michael I. Shea, former mayor of Chicopee, and Madeleine Mahony Shea.”

  My mother had the preposition problem that undermines the sense of personal identity of so many women: daughter of, sister of, wife of, mother of. Her father’s tenure as mayor, which lasted all of two years, was presented to us as a landmark event in the nation’s political history: you could sign the Constitution, you could be president, you could be mayor of Chicopee.

  She never heard the unintended comic effect of the word Chicopee, seeing in it only her pleasurable beginnings. It was an old mill town, and the Irish and the Polish and the French Canadians lived there at the beginning of the twentieth century in easy harmony. In fact, her father learned Polish in order to do his job and was sometimes paid in pirogi or kielbasa for a new baby or a cured cough.

  “Graduate of Chicopee High School.”

  During the commencement ceremony she was asked to stand up four separate times: for having perfect attendance all four years, for being a member of the Pro Merito Society, for composing an original graduation march (she can’t remember how it goes anymore), and of course for the awarding of the diplomas. All her memories of the high school are positive except for one mean English teacher who allegedly never gave anyone Irish more than a B plus. “Her name was Ruth Stone. And there was one very unusual thing about her. For some reason that no one could figure out …”

  If you had not heard this story before, you immediately prepared yourself for a major confidence. At the very least, my mother’s tone promised that one would learn that Ruth Stone had an extra finger or a morphine addiction or fancied other women. My mother would then whisper, “Everyone called her Peggy.”

  “A graduate of Bridgewater State Teachers’ College.”

  One of her favorite memories from college was how on Saturday afternoons she and her friends used to go to the nearby prison and entertain the female inmates, most of whom were prostitutes caught selling listless, broken-down bodies during the depression.

  She accompanied a girl with a beautiful voice on the piano. Our mother would pause again in the midst of her composition to serve tea to the memory: “The girl sang, come to think of it, what was probably not the most sensitive choice given the prospects of the audience, ‘Look Down That Lonesome Road,’ and my friend Miggie danced, wearing red shoes. Whenever we showed up, the male inmates would lean out the windows, to ask, ‘Is Red Shoes here?’ and if Miggie was with us, they would all applaud.”

  “Member of the Granby Library Board of Trustees for twenty-two years. Head for six.”

  It was my mother who introduced writers such as Seán O’Faoláin and Frank O’Connor to the town, over the objections of other board members who found her nearly exclusive allegiance to Irish and Irish-American writers a bit lopsided. For her part, she felt that anyone who objected was, to put it simply, a bigot, just like that Ruth/Peggy.

  She had that peculiar relationship to Ireland so common among Irish Americans, people who were not born there and perhaps never even visit, but who cultivate a sentimental tie that expresses itself in wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day and keeping a bottle of crème de menthe in the pantry, knowing the words to the Irish national anthem or to Robert Emmet’s dock speech, and seasoning conversation with expressions like “streelish” and “we ourselves” (the translation of Sinn Fein and the unofficial family motto). A meager individual who threw his weight around was filled with his “wee self.” In the twenties, her parents supported the American Commission on Irish Independence, sending contributions, saving the receipts: “This certificate will be your record that when Ireland appealed to you in the name of Liberty, you resp
onded to the acid test of sincerity.” They also saved correspondence from the commission urging the support of only those elected officials in America who supported a free and united Ireland:

  The need for your aid is urgent. Because they hold to their right of self-determination, the Irish people are at this moment tortured most cruelly.

  A foreign soldiery swarms over their country. No Irish patriot’s home is safe. His liberty and life even are at the arbitrary disposal of an irresponsible military cabal who have not hesitated to add private to public assassination. Thousands are taken from their homes and deported or imprisoned without trial or any definite charge being preferred against them. The women suffer equally with the men.

  For people like my mother, the longing for Ireland takes on the form of a dream of happiness in some ancestral town: oh, to spend a week in Cork, to gaze at the cathedral nestled in the hills, to throw a coin in the roiling river, to smell the turf heating in hearths all over town. To stroll across St. Stephen’s Green in Dublin, to see the swans in Galway Bay. There is the nagging thought that everything is better in Ireland: the priests, the tea, the trout, you name it. To be Irish, we learned, is to feel that no family gathering is ever complete, because there’s always someone missing, usually due to something that begins with the letter d: death, disease, dementia, or distance. To be Irish is to think too much about drink and to drink too much without thinking. It is to profess a naïveté about the meanness in teasing: “Really now, nothing was meant by that,” when something clearly was. To be Irish is to troll for the crack, the dig, or the insult, and to remember it forever, whether real or imagined. “What’s Irish Alzheimer’s?” goes one joke. “You forget everything but the grudge.” And to appreciate talk as long as it is public and noisy— sermons; speeches; editorials; ornate, vivid, vengeful monologues about what you would do if you had a windfall—but to eschew the kind of exchange that takes the form of intimacy, of heartfelt and troubled confidences, mainly because that talk could be used against you later. My people, humble people; my people, Humphrey Democrats, who talk all the time about winning the lottery.