When we met, I was young and green, and foolishly thought she was affecting an English accent. She had lived away from Boston by that time for almost thirty years, but her a's were as broad as they ever had been, and remained so throughout her life. She went to her grave still saying "sofer" instead of sofa and "sugah" instead of sugar.
"What did your mother say after meeting me yesterday?" I asked the then young man I was dating.
"She said you seem nice enough," he said. "She thought you could stand up a little straighter."
"Really?"
I hadn't thought much of her, either. Our first encounter belied the love that was to flourish between us.
She had no siblings, and yet, bar none, she was the most giving person I have ever known. So much for the selfish only-child theory! I enjoyed the stories she told me of her girlhood, of shopping with her mother at Filene's, or of sitting at the piano, "bawling my eyes out through the whole lesson because I was afraid the nun would rap me across the knuckles if I made a mistake."
"Some of those nuns could be real devils!" she said.
She reminisced of the time when she was a little girl and her father had taken her to the big bank in downtown Boston to shake hands with the young manager, Mr. Joseph P. Kennedy. "Lots of people in Boston went to him when they needed something," she said. "He was sort-of the Irish godfawthah."
"Godfather?" I asked.
"Yes, godfawthah, but he wasn't much. He was a skinny little runt."
She wasn't very tall herself, just five-feet-two, and plump and pretty, with long wavy red hair combed back in a bun. "My playmates used to call me Carrot Head," she said. "I hated that! I was fiesty when I was little." I could not even imagine that until much later.
She enjoyed the tales I had to tell her too, of all the funny things our children did and said. By the time our children were in the primary grades, my father-in-law had retired, and they had moved to our city to be near their only grandchildren. Most Wednesday afternoons, they would visit us, arriving about an hour before the school bus. I would make her a cup of coffee ("just give me powdered," she would say; she made life as easy as possible,) and she would sit at my kitchen table to drink it, and I would sit facing her.
"Well!" she would say. "Now tell me what they did this week."
I would tell them all I had saved up the past week for her. "Honest and truly, aren't they the limit!" she would say, wiping her eyes for the laughter.
"Look at this neat, tiny little accordion," I said to her one time. My husband had picked it up for me at a flea market.
"Yahh (she often prefaced what she had to say with this; I assumed it was her pronunciation of the word yeah,) well, that's real nice, Sugah, but it's not an accordion. It's an Irish occarina, or something like that. My mothah used to play one. (Her mother had come from Ireland as a young unmarried girl.) My fawthah was the boiler engineer on the ferryboat between Boston and East Boston. Sometimes he had to work Sundays, so my mothah and I would go on the boat with him and entertain the passengers on the passage back and forth. She played the Irish occarina, and I danced the jig. I was just a real little girl."
"Oh, how cute you must have been!" I said.
"Well, I don't know about cute, but they liked it. There were always a bunch of Boston Irish aboard. They liked anything." With that, she lifted her mid-calf-length skirt a little and danced a tiny jig.
"Oh, Mum," I said, delighted, "and you have been all over the world and yet never went to Ireland! How you would have loved it! Didn't you ever want to go? Didn't any of those people ever tell you how wonderful it is?"
"Yahh, they told me, but they were all Irishmen, and I figured what did they know? It's true, Pup and I have been all ovah the world (to her children and me she called her husband Pup, her corruption I think of the word Pop,) and I guess I should have gone to see where my mothah came from, but Pup never had any desire to see Ireland." She thought a moment and then shrugged. "Oh well, no mattah."
She had always done what her husband wanted. She was fifteen years younger than he, and it was all right with her that he dominated. What is sad is that by the time she and I were having this discussion, he had been long dead, and she, in her seventies and in rather poor health, was too old to make a trip to Ireland.
It is interesting that after he died, bereaved as she was, she seemed to come into her own, and a very strong personality emerged. From her cousin Anne who visited at the time of my father-in-law's last illness, I learned that as a child she had been most independent and strong-minded. I can only gather, then, that because she loved her husband so and recognized how special he was, she had been content to live in his shadow.
To this day, I sometimes hear in my head her sweet voice pronouncing Mary, my name. "May-ree," she would say, "you're a born mothah, Sugah. Honest and truly you are!" She had but a son and a daughter and thought I was nothing short of marvelous to be raising four children with no outside help. It was no more than most young mothers of my generation were doing, but who was I to argue with her? She always bolstered my ego, and God knows, in those days I needed it. How often still, after all these years, do I remember how she would shake her little freckled fist at my husband when he would verbally tease me, as is still his custom.
"Don't you dare say that to my May-ree," she would say.
Her May-ree! How many times now, when circumstances or persons make me sad and hurt, do I yearn to have her with me again, shaking her little freckled fist and saying, "Don't you treat my May-ree that way!"