Uphill Walkers Read online

  We called anything that possessed even the faintest whiff of finality the Last Hurrah.

  “Let’s see,” she continued, laboring over her obituary. “First complete sentence was ‘I like lilacs’ around age one. Favorite month: May.” She was born on May first and often referred to herself as Queen of the May. “Second favorite: June, because you can get peonies at a bargain.”

  By now the ashtray would be filled with discarded butts, the ends smeared with the red of her ever present lipstick, the one womanly wile that she never abandoned.

  “Should I say I loved birds and squirrels? Should I mention an affinity for fog? Should I lie and describe myself as a passionate gardener, a gifted dancer, and a galleried artist? Claim that I traveled extensively, particularly in the tundra? Should I put hobbies?” she asked herself and then answered her own question. “When you come right down to it, what hobbies did I have other than you children?”

  Often the hi-fi would be playing a mournful tune, about a boy named Danny lost in sunshine and in shadow or that other one about a pale moon rising above the green mountains. She would quiz us, a Celtic rather than a Roman catechism:

  “What year was it that your great-grandfather Patrick was born in Ireland?”

  “1839.”

  “And why did he leave his village?”

  “Because the British burned it down so often.”

  “And when did he come to the United States?”

  “As a child, during the Famine.”

  “What kind of work did he do here?”

  “The same sort as his own parents. He trained horses and worked as a blacksmith. Later, he was an undertaker in addition to serving as postmaster for the town of Chicopee from 1886 to 1890 appointed by” (long pause for effect, as if this were a certifiable brush with glory rather than a routine bureaucratic gesture) “President Grover Cleveland.”

  “And on my mother’s side what poet is our relation?”

  “Our grandmother’s grandfather’s cousin Frank Mahony, known by his pen name, Father Prout, was the author of ‘The Bells of Shandon.’”

  “Which goes?”

  On this I ponder, whe’er I wander

  And thus grow fonder, sweet Cork of thee:

  With thy bells of Shandon,

  The sound so grand on

  The pleasant waters of the river Lee.

  By then the needle of the record would be caught at the end, making that repetitive rasping noise.

  She would sigh as she got up to put it back, her full skirt rustling, ashes falling willy-nilly while the singer sang the praises of one Mother Machree and the light in her eyes everlasting. “John McCormack,” she would announce to anyone within ear-shot, “was the most famous Irish tenor who ever lived. He was even better than that Italian scamp, what was his name, Enrico Caruso. This,” she would say, as the music poured forth, muffled and ancient, “is your heritage.”

  Chapter Four

  Kissing the Sky Good Night

  IF OUR MOTHER DID NOT ALWAYS LIKE THE FACTS OF HER LIFE, SHE COULD at least control the interpretation of them. To this end, she maintained a paper trail, a series of a dozen or so scrapbooks that survived as the official documentary narrative of our childhood, our true inheritance. These archives, as haphazard as they sometimes seemed, have always been treasured: big bulging repositories filled with elementary school report cards in which “Maintains Good Posture” and “Courtesy” were separate categories, along with “Takes Pride in Personal Appearance”; Christmas lists in which we asked for “charm bracelets, key necklaces, and blue long-legs”; and frail yellowed newsclips memorializing “the children’s horse show set for Sunday at Mt. Holyoke” or this long forgotten social event:

  “Mrs. Romeo Grenier was hostess at a supper party at her house on Juniper Hill Saturday in honor of her daughter, Joan, who was observing her fourth birthday. Among those attending were Joan’s playmates, Tina Blais, Mary Apgar, Jacqueline Blais, Debbie Sexton, Kevin Brooks and Bobby Grenier.”

  Record keeping is by most definitions an orderly act, proceeding from an urge to impose limits. As a result these scrap-books provoked wonder in a household that was topsy-turvy and chaotic with so many children: we were like a kitchen with too many pots and pans, all about to boil over. The surfaces of the tables all sported a multiplicity of rings. The cereal boxes in our house looked as if they had been assaulted rather than opened. Orange juice cartons invariably had fat lips. I thought it was normal for toothpaste to squirt out from the middle. Towels rested in damp lumps on the bathroom floor. The ice trays in the fridge were usually bloated with frost and in order to coax any ice out we often slammed the entire device on the floor. If a coat happened to be hung in a closet, it was usually askew, as if it had made a halfhearted attempt at escape. I once found a sweater belonging to Michael that had survived his childhood; although it possessed the correct number of buttons, each one was different and each had been fastened with a different color thread.

  Little Eileen O’Sullivan once told her mother that we seemed like very nice people, but our sinks were often clogged and we appeared not to possess a pencil sharpener. I think of us in those days as disorganized, ragtag, ad hoc. During my high school years I remember standing guard with a broomstick over my Latin vocabulary lists at breakfast so as to prevent anyone from inadvertently smearing food on the precious passwords to my future, pelliculum and lacrima and gravis. To me the house itself seemed covered with jelly, so it is amazing that these scrapbooks and their contents survived the general rot of time as well as the specific continual descent from refinement that a house and its objects inevitably face in the vicinity of that many kids.

  When I was younger and I looked at the scrapbooks, I experienced their offerings narcissistically; I was more interested in how I came across as an individual than in how the others appeared. In snapshots I occupy the bossy center, wearing a ribbon in a bow the size of a sofa and radiating the most imperial forced smile. The overbearing center is still my spiritual bailiwick, doomed as I am to the role of social leader, hostess, faux mom. Even as a child, I sometimes behaved like a sailboat that had caught a permanent good wind.

  What does this crayoned self-portrait done on September 10, 1953 (“Madeleine’s first paper from first grade”) say about me at that moment in time? At the same age I drew a picture with four round nearly identical heads and labeled them:

  Madeleine: prutty.

  Jacqueline: hapy.

  Christina: not hapy.

  Maureen: truble ahead.

  Did I really ever think madras patchwork Bermudas were right on me?

  Was I getting a fair representation, or was the work of my siblings receiving more space?

  How did their drawings compare to mine, their Bermuda shorts?

  Only with the passage of time did it occur to me that these books are not the objective accounts I had always assumed. During their gradual page-by-page assembly our mother was more than just some file keeper. She was in fact an author, a shaping intelligence, and we were the characters, the players. The various versions of us had been put through the filter of her hopes and the gauze of her fantasies.

  The papers that survived our schooldays were the ones that showed “originality” or that argued in the affirmative about our “promise” and our “imagination.” They spoke to our best selves, just as the photographs never showed anyone fighting but instead offer one seamless pose after another of variously grouped happy siblings.

  Among my favorite pieces of writing were several biographies, especially one sister’s saga about Utensil the Pencil, who traveled east from the great timber forests of the Northwest, and another bit by another sister, composed during the Kennedy years: “I am a chandelier. I am in the White House. I am in the blue room. I can remember when I was worthless sand. Now people admire me very much. I am Irish crystal…. Once I remember very clearly when a boy at the age of six almost broke me. I can imagine how his parents felt. But think how I felt …”

&nb
sp; Raymond wrote an essay entitled “How Do They Dress?” “The Eskimos make their clothes from the skins of animals. Most Eskimos wear jackets and hoods, breeches, and high boots. The women make the clothes. They use bones for needles.”

  We documented national milestones. From a paper by Raymond, dated January 20, 1953: “Mr. Eisenhower will become our new president shortly after noon today.”

  We were urged by our mother to write to famous people, such as my delusional message to Grace Kelly, “I am a little girl who looks just like you” and this note from Michael to a right-wing zealot, “Dear Mr. Birch, I would like to draw to your attention that your party is wrecking America” and the plea for help from one of the girls to Dear Abby, “My problem concerns boys….” The mystery of how these people could hear from us and yet not ever write back, not even send an autographed picture with a stamped-on name, was solved when the realization dawned that since these letters were saved intact, they clearly had never been sent.

  We were brought up to use language with precision. If, in composing a thank-you note, any of us were fool enough to say something was “nice,” we were guaranteed an outburst: “Nice is a nice word. Can’t you think of something with more verve, more backbone? With, well, panache?” The new note would read: “Thank you for your panache gift.”

  Our mother’s deepest wish was that we would “enter the field of poetry,” and the way she said it, with each word given a dreamy elongation, one envisioned a location with an exact latitude and longitude, overwhelmed by flowers. She organized haiku contests, and she was understanding when we struggled with the syllable count. “It is, I grant you, a difficult form to master,” she would say, “like trying to catch a butterfly without a net.” She relished the offhand creativity in our casual observations about which is more, sand or stars, and why does the moon always let you be the leader and follow from behind, and is it true that hail is lightning that hits the earth? She perked up at our neologisms: words like pickery to describe the peculiar taste of ginger ale, the way it drilled holes into the tongue. If you called the sunset God’s birthday cake, you were on your way to a big hug. Better yet, claim that at dusk the mountains stand on tiptoe to kiss the sky good night. She saved even those dreadful holiday poems of mine teeming with seasons and reasons and stars from afar. There is one poem about bees whose handwriting belongs to Michael. I don’t know if the work is original or if it was the result of one of those copying lessons that becomes in the course of time a gentle plagiarism:

  There wouldn’t be sunflowers, wouldn’t be peas,

  wouldn’t be apples

  On the apple trees.

  If it weren’t for fuzzy old,

  Busy old bees,

  Dusting pollen from off their knees.

  If we weren’t destined to be poets, our mother was willing to settle for musicians, artists, or stage performers, and she assiduously squirreled away the documentation that upheld our early proclivities in those pursuits: mimeographed concert programs in which it is noted that I would be performing Peter Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Sixth Symphony op. 74, a high school playbill heralding my sister Jacqueline as Monsieur Purjan in The Imaginary Invalid by Molière. To be a politician might not be so bad; Michael’s biography of Abraham Lincoln was preserved perhaps for its own sake, but perhaps also with a future electorate in mind. We were encouraged to be politically inclined, and as a family we supported any and all candidates as long as they were FDR liberals and preferably Irish.

  A more practical sort of woman might have steered at least one of us to pursue a more solid professional goal, to become an electrician or even a plumber, some line of work in which concrete skills result in concrete accomplishments. She might have emphasized facts, physics, charts. She might have actively encouraged us to improve our standardized scores in number facility or spatial reasoning, but these were not our areas of strength and she even saved, as joyful evidence of certain desirable inadequacies, the old printouts from school tests that demonstrate as much.

  This constant proof of our cultural attainments, preserved indelibly, was accompanied at times by proof of our alleged high social standing, not just the two-inch account of a child’s fourth birthday but also a letter from the Headmasters House at the Choate School signed by a Mrs. Seymour St. John to my mother, dated January 28, 1967:

  “We at Choate are all agog as February 17th draws near, and with it the arrival of the fair sex on our campus.

  “It gives me great pleasure to welcome Christine” (Wrong, wrong; her real name is Christina; one little vowel, yet a lamentable omission, proof that the chattiness of the note, the intime tone is at its center, false) “as the guest of Tom Shorten, and I should like to assure you that we shall take every possible care of her.”

  The elegance of Mrs. St. John’s correspondence runs counter to my memory of a childhood spent much more preponderantly watching shows like Leave It to Beaver and snacking whenever possible on a set menu from the Hilltop Nook of twenty-five cents’ worth of junk food—which in those days meant one Sky Bar, two Hostess cupcakes of the Snowball variety with marsh-mallow and coconut flake frosting, and a bag of State Line potato chips—and reading from the Trixie Belden series, wishing for a new life in which I’d been born with a truly terrific first name like Trixie. But when I try to tell our mother that I remember things differently, with a slightly more mundane spin, she thinks I am just showing off or engaging in an irritating tease, a baiting sort of deflation, and she reminds me that this is nothing new; what about the time I came home from my Catholic women’s college and announced that although I would concede that Christ was indeed a world historical figure who had captivated the imagination of millions, I could no longer be certain he was divine.

  The photos we took were steadfastly black-and-white for a long, long time, almost the entire length of my childhood. Every few years or so we gathered our suited, velveteened selves and posed in front of the fieldstone fireplace for a Christmas photo. In all those years, we sent out only two formal Christmas photos. In the first, taken when I was eight in 1955, my mother sits draped in a lovely dress on one side of an unlit hearth, its black hole too overdetermined to work as a metaphor. Raymond, in a white sports jacket, balances her on the other side. The five younger children are all seated on the floor, with me in the middle. Michael looks as if he is trying to make a fast break, in true toddler tradition. Our hands are clasped together as if in prayer. I can almost hear Uncle Dermot, surely the final element in the photo as the photographer, ordering us to pretend we were in church, not so much to appear pious as to ensure we wouldn’t hit each other. Five years later, we also gather in front of a hearth, but the line-up has changed. The players have moved. Chess, family style, is being played as its usual slow place. This time Raymond and my mother are on the right, together, nearly fused. She is seated, her head turned toward the rest of us, smiling. Raymond’s expression is flat. I balance them on the other side, my face quiet and steady. I am wearing my mother’s gold locket. Jacqueline and I are no longer dressed alike, but the other two girls have on long-sleeved cotton dresses with cross-stitching at the bodice. Michael is wearing some kind of sailor outfit.

  There are no real candids; if, as sometimes happened, a spontaneous incident occurred that suggested itself as suitable for a picture, we would have to track down the camera, a laborious process in a house where very little had a definite place, and then we would be forced to engage in its historical re-creation—which explains the picture of everyone in the kitchen doing the limbo. When the Christmas tree toppled, we retoppled it for posterity, just as we jumped in a just raked pile of leaves over and over and took our first bite from our first TV dinner several times in succession. This last was a noteworthy event because convenience food was a huge luxury, not a way of life, and those first frozen suppers were considered fascinating. In fact, the first time we had them, we sat on a sheet in front of the TV, but it was off, the better for us to concentrate on the various foods occupying the sepa
rate compartments.

  Our inaugural meal was Salisbury steak.

  “But,” said one of my siblings after peeling back the foil in which it had cooked, “this isn’t steak, this is hamburger.”

  “Even if it were just plain burger, and I’m not saying it is, don’t you think it’s commendable to treat it with such hope? Don’t you think it’s ennobling the way it has a whole new name?” my mother said. “And just look at these mashed potatoes. If I didn’t know better, I would think that pat of butter was more than just butter, it was the sun.”

  The majority of the photographs were taken outside, the easier to manage the light. Interior shots required the trickery of flashcubes, not easy among a group of people for whom gadgetry always seemed an alien menace. Photographs with no people in them weren’t photographs; they were a complete waste of film. In the entire collection of scrapbooks there is just one picture of a scene, a pond with some ducks, and I am sure someone outside the family took it and gave it to us, because there would be no other way to excuse such a grotesque display of conspicuous consumption.

  The click of the camera was an event unto itself, nearly as special and celebratory as the circumstances prompting the picture in the first place. As I look back at the photos, studying them for the stories they tell, one of the biggest distortions concerns Easter. Anyone leafing through these albums would be justified in concluding that this was without doubt the premier holiday of the year, dutifully captured annually with endless combinations of us standing at attention on the brown and barren front lawn of our house during spring in New England. In fact, birthdays were a bigger deal, and certainly Christmas was the biggest: those were the days on which the children were allowed to come in by the front door rather than the back and to use the front stairs with its red carpet. The emphasis on Easter occurred because during other special events no one was organized enough to remember the camera, but since the chief purpose of Easter appeared to be its own commemoration, it received far more than its true share of the spotlight.