St. Patrick’s Day may be the occasion most Americans associate with the Irish, but it is the wake that comes closest to capturing the emotional complexity of that long-suffering race. Living in isolated homesteads in Ireland, many saw their neighbors only when they had received word that someone had died. Fueled by poteen, a potent home-brewed liquor, the wake took on the celebratory nature of a reunion. If the deceased wasn’t one of your loved ones, an Irish wake could provide some of the best entertainment in town, and it certainly was well attended.
As soon as I arrived in Minooka, I immediately went to see my aunt. Although she was in the last days of her life, Aunt Marie greeted me with a feisty, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Now I know I’m dying, if they sent for you.” Taking hold of my hand, she said, “Don’t look so worried. I’ve had the last rites twice before, but I’m still alive, and Father Kelly’s dead and buried.”
It was obvious Aunt Marie wasn’t going to leave this world without a fight, but it was a fight she was going to lose. The air in coal towns is hard on everyone’s lungs, but most especially on those of miners and ladies from another era, who passed their evenings rocking on front porches while smoking their pipes.
In the last week of her life, my aunt drifted in and out of consciousness. In her lucid moments, she spoke of her childhood on the beautiful shores of Loch Corrib in the west of Ireland, as well as some of the more memorable of the hundreds of her students, including my parents, who had passed through her classroom from the time she had begun teaching in Minooka in 1887. She insisted that her only regret was not returning to Galway, but there was no way that she would have left Minooka with her sister and brother up on the hill in the church cemetery.
The Egan Funeral Home did a nice job with Aunt Marie, and I’m sure she would have been pleased at how good she looked, with curled hair and wearing her best dress, a pale blue A-line, with matching pumps, and a faux diamond brooch given to her at the time of her retirement.
Aunt Marie had died two days earlier, and her open casket was in our parlor for what was to be the first of two days of viewing for family and friends. Three members of the Sodality of Mary, dressed from head to toe in black, had arrived to lead the mourners in the rosary, and Sally Bluegoose, who had once run a hole-in-the-wall, selling whiskey to the miners, started keening. “Wora, wora, wora!” A banshee crying from the hills of Connemara could not have done a better job.
My father, who did not get along with Aunt Marie, nevertheless was busy toasting her memory. While Dad put away another one, my mother was setting out more food for the mourners, all the while trying not to cry because there was just too much to do.
Most of the men were gathered in the parlor, talking politics or telling stories about their days as slate pickers at the breaker or as mule drivers before reaching an age where they were old enough to go underground and work “down in the hole.” The women were either helping in the kitchen or were gathered in a circle around the coffin gossiping, but in quiet voices, so as not “to wake the dead.”
Along the back wall were the ancient ones, those who still spoke Irish and who punctuated their speech with their clay pipes while enjoying “a drop of the creature.” Grandpa Joyce was among the few abstaining because thirty years earlier, at the request of his pastor, he had taken an oath of abstinence. It was too bad Father Loughran hadn’t asked him to be nicer to his family.
Through the kitchen window, I could see the perpetual glow from a fire on Downes Mountain fueled by an inexhaustible supply of coal from below. There was nothing that better served as a reminder that I was back in Minooka than the pervasive smell of sulfur that was the signature of every town in the hardcoal country of eastern Pennsylvania.
Patrick had picked me up at the Lackawanna Station, and his first words to me were, “Where’s your cowboy? I don’t see a ring, and you know what they say, ‘It don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that ring.’”
“How’s your love life, Pat?” I asked, knowing that most mothers wouldn’t allow him to darken their doors. Even with a stellar service record in the Navy, including a commendation for bravery when his ship had been torpedoed near Cuba, mothers had long memories when it came to their daughters.
“I don’t have one. No one in particular, that is,” he said, smiling like the Cheshire cat. “I like to share the wealth.”
“In other words, no one will go out with you.”
Patrick started to say something when I asked him to stop. “For God’s sake, we haven’t made it to the city line, and we’re already fighting. Can you just give it a rest?” After taking a deep breath, I asked him how Aunt Marie was.
“She’s dying.”
“Really, Patrick? Thanks for the news bulletin.”
“Mom thinks it’s only a matter of days.”
“How’s J.J.?”
John Joseph Mulkerin had come to Minooka from Ireland in the 1870s as a ten-year-old orphan. He had been delivered by an emigrating adult from his village to his father’s cousin, Mary Coyne, who “didn’t have a pot to pee in.” But J.J. was so engaging that the whole town had adopted him. After he got a job as a mailman, he became a hot item because he was employed and he wasn’t a miner. But J.J. had eyes only for my Aunt Marie. What on earth would he do without her?
“Aunt Marie’s never alone,” Patrick continued. “Mom or Aunt Agatha fix her meals every day, and the neighbors are taking turns checking up on her. She wouldn’t let J.J. spend the night because it would be ‘indacent,’” he said, mimicking Aunt Marie’s brogue that had survived her sixty years in America. “At 8:00, he pretends he’s leaving, and she pretends he’s not in the next room.” According to the little man with the big heart, they had been dating for forty years, and he proposed to her every year on her birthday.
“Grandpa’s looking forward to seeing you again,” Patrick said, smiling. “He just found out where you’ve been living. He thought you were still in Germany.”
When we pulled into the alley behind the house, I was overwhelmed by a flood of memories, especially of my grandmother. All summer long, Grandma would be in the garden checking on her tomatoes and other vegetables to make sure they had ripened to perfection. While Grandma was out in the garden, my mother would be in the kitchen, peeling, slicing, or boiling potatoes, which was what she was doing when I came through the door. I had not seen her since August 1946.
Mom looked much older. Added to the daily stress of living with a husband who drank too much and a father-in-law who raised meanness to an art was the strain of caring for my Aunt Marie. But Mom had an inner strength whose source was her unshakeable faith in her church and her belief that everything happened for a reason, according to God’s plan. We had been having a good cry when my Grandpa, sitting in his usual place by the coal stove, woke up.
“I thought you be dead,” he said.
In order to keep peace in the house, I needed to come up with a reason why I had been in England, the home of his enemy, for more than a year. But I thought it best to keep it simple. “The U.S. Government gave a lot of money to the British during the war, and there had to be some accountability on how the money had been spent.” That was the truth. It just didn’t have anything to do with me.
After a long silence, Grandpa finally said, “That be a good thing. Those teeving bastards need watching.” And he went back to sleep.
At the end of their workday, Dad and Sadie came home, and my sister grabbed me and spun me around. We had grown up sleeping in the same bed, which provided numerous opportunities to share stories as well as our hopes for the future. As for my dad, he came over and put his arm around my shoulder, and all he said was, “Welcome home, M’acushla.”
“Katie and little Jimmy are coming in from Jersey tomorrow to spend time with Aunt Marie,” my mother said. And that brought me back to the reason why I had left England. It also reminded me that I was now on the same continent as Rob. When I sent my telegram to Michael, I would send one to Rob as well letting him know that I was on his side of the Atlantic, and I wondered what, if anything, he would do.
After a long evening of catching up with a steady stream of friends and family welcoming me home, I finally went upstairs. Inside the door of my bedroom was a little holy water fountain screwed into the wall above the light switch, and the walls were covered with pictures of the Virgin Mary and the Sacred Heart, which made me realize that I was back under the aegis of Father Lynch. Before I left England, I had gone to confession because I wasn’t about to go into the confessional with Father Lynch. Not only would I have to confess that Rob and I had had sex, but I would have to estimate how many times we did it. Sackcloth and ashes would have been too easy a penance for someone who was obviously a loose woman.
The upstairs was heated by grates that opened to the kitchen below. During the night, when the fire in the coal stove had died down, the room was freezing, but for the time being, it was warm enough so that Sadie and I could talk. When I left Minooka in 1944, I was nineteen and Sadie was fifteen. In those four years, Sadie had easily become the prettiest girl in town. Although we shared the same physical characteristics — black hair, blue eyes, and fair skin — Sadie’s hair was blacker, her eyes were bigger and bluer, and at five-foot-six, she was four inches taller than I was. If she had a flaw, it was her habit of saying exactly what was on her mind. In the two years I had been overseas, that hadn’t changed.
“What happened with Rob?”
Should I tell my little sister that Rob and I were over, and how would I explain Michael? But then I decided to go for it, and I told the story of Michael’s waxing and Rob’s waning.
“Oh my God! My sister, St. Margaret Mary Joyce, had a flirtation with another guy while she was dating someone else?” Actually, after our time together on the sofa in the study, referring to it as a flirtation was probably no longer accurate, but I wasn’t going to tell Sadie that. “Going overseas really did change you. You used to be a real stick in the mud, so this is definitely a change for the better.”
One of the people I had missed the most while I was in Europe was my cousin, Bobby, who owned an Esso gas station with my brother on the main road between Wilkes-Barre and Scranton. Before sitting down in the office, I took out a handkerchief and placed it over the split red-vinyl chair. Bobby opened the vending machine and tossed a bag of M&Ms to me. We were alone, because Patrick was out picking up tires.
“How’s your love life?” he asked with his quirky smile that had gotten him out of more than one jam. Obviously, Sadie had told Bobby about Rob and Michael.
“Never mind about my love life. How’s yours?”
He answered in almost a whisper. “I’m dating a girl from Southside.” That was no big deal because a lot of people from South Scranton went to St. Joe’s, so it was considered to be an extension of Minooka — one with amenities. “Her name is Teresa Mateo.” I let out a whoop. Now, this was a big deal. Because of the high position Bobby’s father held in local politics, his mother thought she was better than everyone else. Having her son dating an Eye-tie would damage the family’s image.
“Do you know who gave me my first kiss?” I asked in the same voice he had used.
“Tommy Gallo.” Tommy had been killed on D-Day, June 6, 1944, while climbing the cliffs of Pointe du Hoc in an attempt to knock out a German pillbox. My final letter from Tommy had been dated June 4th. In it, he had talked about how he couldn’t wait for the invasion to start because he was tired of being penned up in holding areas with hundreds of guys in miserable weather. He just wanted it to be over, and for him and thousands of other young Americans, it was.
“I saw you getting into his car outside Dugan’s Diner. So I asked him if he was seeing you, and he said ‘yes,’ and then he said, ‘All of this baloney about Irish girls dating only Irish boys, and the same deal with Italians, is a load of crap. When I get back, I’m going to take Maggie dancing at the Hotel Casey and to hell with anyone who doesn’t like it.’” I brought the conversation back to Teresa Mateo because I didn’t want to think about how devastated I was when I had heard that Tommy was gone. He was the only one who could have gotten me to move back to Minooka.
Teresa’s family owned a bar on the city line, which was probably where Bobby had met her. She was a beautiful girl: thick black hair and blacker eyes and a very attractive figure. I asked him when he was going to tell his mother. I wanted to know when to leave town.
“Probably on Saturday,” Bobby said. “Teresa and I have a wedding to go to. I think her mother has figured it out because I’ve been eating a lot of spaghetti at the bar, but it’s going to be a shot out of the blue for Mom. She’ll get over it eventually,” he said with a confidence that I doubt he felt. I was happy for him, but I seriously doubted if Mamie Lenahan was going to take this lying down.