Uphill Walkers Read online

  Each day’s potential queen not only got her specific wish, but also would receive a variety of other booty, including such things as matching luggage, a trip to someplace warm, a dinette set, a sewing machine, and a new dress for after five, “an iced blue sheath with threads of gold.” One of the best bonus gifts was five minutes of unimpeded free shopping in a supermarket. Sometimes there was footage of a former queen with a shopping cart on a spree, and that’s when we would shout, “Meat! “Meat! Go to the meat aisle, stupid.” Michael used to think we lived in the United Steaks of America.

  Who would it be this time? The one who wanted the tools or the washer/dryer or a house and food or a secret meeting or a new bike for her boy?

  In the midst of each show’s deliberation, I would mentally draft yet another inquiry: “Perhaps you’d like as your guest a mother of six from Granby, Massachusetts, to appear on your show. I know she’s available because she’s my mother …”

  I imagined her on television and hoped that the scent of her fame might perfume the rest of the family. The house would become a wonderland of free new stuff. We would all experience a windfall. I, for instance, would change dramatically overnight, be able to do cartwheels, have no fear of the high board, win at arm wrestling, and give up the earth colors I had favored basically since birth. Even my looks would change: gone would be the girl with limp brown hair and glasses, replaced by someone jazzy and intriguing, born to boas and feathers.

  By then we realized we had two versions of our mother.

  Which mom should we send?

  The first version could go on the show and in her Best Speaking Voice, she could explain that the price of living in a house with two living rooms was high in ways that were hard to predict. The roof, the furnace, the faucets: you never knew what might need fixing next. She could show the studio audience those family scrapbooks, all that haiku she encouraged us to write, the handwritten menus from breakfast in bed, family portraits done in crude crayon.

  The first version would be in what we called her Chatty Cathy mode, named after the doll that spouted set pleasantries when you pulled a string. She could talk about how she had been recently chosen to serve on the committee to bring books to Brightside, a nearby orphanage whose very name dictated the kind of beaming, up-with-people outlook expected of its denizens. She would dress smartly in a suit from Best & Company, and she would make a hardheaded request for money for college tuition. She could tell the audience that in junior high school, she was quoted in the newspaper along with other members of a social studies class during National Education Week as saying, “Education is a gold mine for those who wish to make good. Brain is the bank, knowledge is the money, success the interest. Make large deposits!”

  In the Shea family all four children, two girls and two boys, went to college during the depression. One son became a lawyer, and the other got his doctorate in food chemistry, once writing a scholarly article for a scientific review, the very title so dry and uninviting as to certify its erudition: “Corn Distillers’ Dried Grain with Solubles in Poultry Rations.” She herself had attended state teachers’ college at Bridgewater, Massachusetts, where she wrote high-minded essays with Topic Sentences, such as, “Tolerance is a delightful virtue and should be considered worth acquiring” and “The proposal that there be some changes in the type and number of courses offered students at Bridgewater has been regarded as heresy by some, but, by many of the thoughtful students, an idea worthy of consideration.” She even got an A in economics.

  And then, she could add, with a slight downward tilt of the chin, that none of her children could go to college anywhere without a scholarship.

  Or, we could send to Queen for a Day our other mother, the second version whom we called Miss Orange Brown when she was out of earshot, the one who was edgy and disgruntled, who threatened to send us to Brightside when we were, as she put it, itchy and out of control, the one who felt inadequate as a single parent, especially trying to raise her sons, suspecting she had more of a knack for daughters, the way you could be better at crusts than at fillings. This was the mother who acknowledged it would have been easier if she’d just had two of us and then, pausing, would also admit, “The problem is, which two?”

  In our family we had no real twins. Yet we were paired by our mother in a variety of dyads: Raymond and Michael as the boys, Raymond and I as the big kids, Jacqueline and I as the older girls, Maureen and Christina as the younger ones, Maureen and Michael as the old baby and the new baby. The four girls were often thought of as one entity: conflated and confused with one another, elided, a blur of bony faces and straight hair. “Four roses and two thorns,” we used to say, proud in our solidarity.

  It felt, sometimes, as if each child had a signature defect, a trademark blemish. Raymond was too quick to anger. I was aloof and likely to scold. Jacqueline was generous to a dizzying degree. She always worried about everyone else’s welfare, making comments like, “Poor little birdies. Poor birdies have to go to the bathroom outside.” Diapers for robins: no one person could save the planet on any scale, especially on the one she envisioned. Christina could be social to a fault. She was always seeking definition outside the family. She looked different from the rest of us; her neat pretty features and dark cap of thick hair elicited from strangers tributes to her beauty, leaving the other three girls to languish in gawky silence. She had an efficiency about her that shamed the rest of us. All her life she has made lists, including a schedule for one Christmas in which she designated the time between 10 and 10:15 in the morning to “eat an orange slowly.” Our mother used to say that when she grew up, Christina should be secretary to the president of Chase Manhattan. Maureen was too self-effacing. She wore glasses and was easily ignored in the fray. Once we thought she was lost, and we recruited the entire neighborhood for a frantic search until she was discovered, in a sleepy heap, in back of a couch, its skirt a makeshift blanket. We used to call her “Slow Mo” because she had a maddeningly self-sufficient way of doing everything at her own pace. Maureen was so undemanding as to have almost turned herself into a rumor of a child rather than a real one. I used to love to hug her, my private doll. Michael was also undemanding and sometimes appeared to copy her vanishing act. His favorite game when he was a toddler and I was in the third grade was to grab me at the waist from the back. As I turned around and around in circles, asking, “Where’s that whippersnapper?” he would laugh at his implied absence. Because of his position as the baby in the family and the misfortune of possessing an easygoing nature, Michael’s flaw was that he was too easily framed. A fire from a chemistry set, a broken bicycle, fingerprints in the icing. We always tried to hang any suspicion of misconduct on him first.

  When Life magazine had a picture of an embryo on the cover, I asked our mother about birth control. “Birth control,” she answered, harried, moving about the house to scoop up some mess or another, “that’s something your father didn’t believe in.”

  But if you knew our mother, you knew our Queen for a Day scheme was ill fated. She would never go on television and unburden herself.

  The idea that we would even consider such a possibility for a second was proof of our inferior moral nature, our slipshod ethical standards, marking us as people who cared more about loot than dignity.

  She viewed our suggestion as preposterous.

  She quoted Shakespeare, “He who steals my purse steals trash, but he who steals my good name steals all.”

  She quoted Anonymous: “Fools’ names and fools’ faces oft appear in public places.”

  Catholics might confess, in formulaic language, to a shadow, in the dark, but not on TV.

  “I’m Irish, from New England,” our mother often said, to justify the double whammy of reserve that formed the backbone of her character. Her allegiance to certain standards of conduct reminded me of an obscure lady patriot named Barbara Frietchie, the subject of a poem that was taught as great literature in our elementary school: “Shoot if you must this old gray he
ad …” but don’t you dare tamper with Old Glory. Our mother’s Old Glory was not a mere piece of fabric festooned with stars and stripes but rather an invisible tapestry composed of everything she held dear and defensible, including language itself, against whose debasement she held a constant vigil. In her mind, words deserved the same thoughtful placement and balance as Belleek vases and chiseled crystal. We could not shut a door; we had to close it. Clothes were not dirty: they needed to be laundered. We couldn’t sleep over someone’s house; we could sleep over at it. She observed the mass’s shift from Latin to the vernacular with a heavy heart. She insisted that strangers address her as Mrs. Blais, explaining that it made her feel neither more comfortable nor more at home to be called Maureen by people who hardly knew her. Self-respect was predicated on fierce silence. One time she told us we could be as modern and godless as we wished. If we wanted to go to psychiatrists, that was our business. She had only one caveat, which, if you thought about and acquiesced to, would surely erode the spirit of, if not totally cripple, the entire enterprise. Her solitary stipulation: “Just don’t mention me.”

  “Did your mother ever remarry?” is another one of those questions often posed by strangers for which the short answer, by its very brevity, maligns the complications of the reality.

  Quickly, the answer is no.

  For a long time, her brother, our uncle Dermot, served as the emergency infusion of a male influence. He spent most weekends at the house from when our father died until the early sixties, when he took a job in state government running the newly established Consumer’s Council.

  At the time, his work life consisted of adjudicating insurance claims on the road throughout New England. He was not married, and he had that awkwardness common to people without children who are forced to spend time in their squealing company, like being made to write with the wrong hand. Once he backed up in the driveway and ran over one of our cats. He was so shaken that he went out and bought us all presents: game books with mazes, boxes of 64 crayons, homemade potholder kits.

  He was often stricken with a low-grade flu requiring canned soup, plain toast, ginger ale, and a generally quiet atmosphere for a cure. His passions were for politics, history, and his hi-fi, which we were not allowed to touch during his absence or in his presence. It was in the same category as the front door and the front stairs, off limits to greasy fingers and dirty feet. He tried to distract us from our usual high-minded pursuits such as burping competitions with slide shows in the Green Room of the One Hundred Most Beloved Works of Classical Art. He liked to listen to opera and war music, both at a high volume. He often raised his voice above all the squabbling to lecture us about the Civil War and famous figures he admired from history and sometimes about the nature of childhood itself, on which he was an expert because he himself had had one. Dermot was the designated disciplinarian, the person our weary mother tried to threaten us with all week until his arrival on Friday evening. “Who’s been bad?” he would ask soon after arriving. “Who needs a spanking?” We would all run for cover. Raymond, in particular, was the object of endless orations: “You have to stop creating turmoil, and go with the program. What makes you think the rules don’t apply to you?”

  Dermot believed, as if no one had ever before enunciated the concept, that children underwent important imprinting. If they were given certain experiences of surpassing happiness, those memories would sustain them in adulthood. These experiences took the form, almost exclusively, of fresh air. We were to spend as much time outside the house as possible. Fall weekends were spent raking the leaves on all four lawns, a task complicated by its endlessness, thanks to the leaves that kept blowing down from the Congregational Church across the street on a hill, giving Pope John XXIII’s so-called spirit of ecumenism a run for its money. Dermot advocated trips to anyplace there was water and on a couple of occasions helped subsidize lakeside vacations in Sunapee, New Hampshire. He especially liked Groton Long Point, Connecticut, on the Long Island Sound, where the sea was a tonic, a restorative, the ultimate pick-me-up. At the time we used to visit, G.L.P. was filled with Catholics from West Hartford, Connecticut, and Longmeadow and Springfield, Massachusetts, and the talk had a comforting familiarity, with frequent allusions to Boston College and the Cross as well as the excellent basketball being played by those boys at Providence. We children could be let loose under somewhat controlled circumstances, choosing the beach where we wanted to swim: East, Kiddie, South, Main. At any one of them, for years in succession, the portable radios all seemed stuck at the same tune, filled with cornball longing, about seeing someone in September, when the summer was finally through. Main Beach was the most popular, partly because of its boardwalk, a concrete span that echoes the curve of the half mile of sand and is lined with clapboard dowager cottages so close to each other that some of the windows are smoked and so close to the sea that most front yards consist of small stones instead of grass. On the sunniest, hottest days, towels would cover the entire beach. Two ropes stretching a decent distance into the ocean defined the swimming area. A small wooden raft, a few hundred feet out, was the farthest anyone went. Our mother could not see the raft without mentioning a favorite short story she had once read. “I think it was in the Atlantic Monthly. It was by that Jewish writer, you know who I mean.”

  In our house “that Jewish writer, you know who I mean” generally translated into Philip Roth.

  “It was about what you would call a lower-middle-class family in which the father was a tailor, and he worked very hard, and every summer the family went for two weeks to Long Island—at least, I think it was Long Island, because it was definitely the ocean—and I imagine they were at a Jewish resort, because back then so many places were restricted, not that I approve, but that’s the way things were, and every summer his son and all the other boys, the sons of other hardworking men, would try to swim out to the raft. Like lemmings, they got nearer and nearer each year, but it was always understood that by the time they got out to the raft and could finally dive from the high board, by that point they would have gotten too old to be on vacation and before they knew it they would be spending their summers in the hot city just like all their fathers, and what was so touching is that they kept trying to swim toward a fate they could not really have wanted.”

  Maureen Shea Blais, artist of melancholy, doyen of brooding. When most people see a raft, they see the dictionary definition, a floating platform often equipped with a diving board and usually secured in such a way as to remain relatively stationary at a reasonable swimming distance from the shore. She saw what Roth saw: the sorrow of what it is to be alive. She should have been a writer. What other profession reveres gloom to such a degree?

  She did in fact write one children’s story, and for years we were led to believe that if only Bubblelini could find a publisher, we would finally have a solution to all our money woes. We would be like people who invent what becomes a common everyday device, like the zipper or the ballpoint pen; we would be rich forever.

  The story went something like this:

  Once upon a time there was a little girl whose name was Bubblelini. Now, Bubblelini was not like the other little girls. She didn’t like to go to school, she didn’t like to go to birthday parties, she didn’t like to go to the store to buy new dresses, and she didn’t even like to watch TV. In fact, her mother had to make her watch TV, every Friday night for half an hour.

  There was only one thing Bubblelini liked to do in the whole wide world and that was to … blow bubbles!

  Mainly, her life was filled to the brim with us.

  Sometimes she would appear to break down and a kind of exhaustion would overtake her face, elongating it farther than nature intended. Irish faces tend to be either like hers, all lines and angles, or round and muffiny, circle upon circle. We’d be eating dinner, and in the midst of delivering to her lips a bite of food in a slow sorrowful arc, she would tell us: “The problem with children is that they start to leave home the moment they can crawl;
yes, they do. Before you could talk, when you were just toddlers, I could almost hear you plotting: how can we get away?”

  She would pause to take a pensive breath. “Except for Jacqueline, sweet little Locky Lou. You always said you’d live in a cabin with me. But Ray, you’ve been head-strong and footloose for years. And, Maureen, I never gave you permission to baby-sit for those people on Sound Breeze. Madeleine, don’t you ever lift your head out of a book? Even whales have to break the surface for oxygen every now and then. And Christina, dear little Christina, with your perfect blank face: whatever are you thinking? And you, little Michael, scooting into your sisters’ arms instead of mine. Oh, I’m not deaf. I’m not without a certain radar. What I don’t hear I can see in people’s eyes: poor Maureen, the broke widow. Some of those women can be so self-satisfied just because they have husbands who are obstetricians at a Catholic hospital, and we know they’ll never want for work, or isn’t it great, the Hanrahans are buying a house on the Cape with one of those sickeningly cute names like Uneeda Rest or Happy Daze, and someone else is getting a cabin cruiser. Or there’s that Meg Rafferty, sitting on easy street, so thrilled to be one of the package store Raffertys, thinking I can’t see the soupy look of pity in her eyes when she glances at us during mass when her mind should be on loftier matters. You know what I call them? I call them the smuggos, the complacos. I won’t give those people the satisfaction of the truth, and I swear, I’ll take the razor strap to you children if you so much as breathe a word of any of this outside the house. I want you to say we’re doing just fine, thank you.”

  She poked at her bun with a pin to secure an errant clump of hair.

  “At least now you know what to say if anyone asks.”