By the time we hit Hamilton Street, I’d eaten three bananas. My father had eaten six! We pretended our bananas were the torch of the huge statue they just finished building of Lady Liberty. She now towered over New York’s harbor, a gift from the French people.
“They say the torch alone is almost thirty feet high,” my father said.
I stretched out my arm and held my banana even closer to the darkening sky, and smiled so big it hurt my frozen cheeks.
When a wagon passed us on the road, we tossed three bunches of bananas to the children in the back and belly laughed at their happy screams. My father hugged me with one arm as the wagon rolled away, a brawl developing over the bananas.
“Share, citizens!” my father howled at the tail of the wagon. “Share!”
One little boy stood and saluted us. We saluted him back.
“ ‘Let no man imagine that he has no influence,’ ” I sighed, quoting Mr. George.
Father tugged me closer. “Or no young woman.”
Who knew fruit could change the world? Even if it was just our little corner of Corning. But the best part of bestowing bananas was not how happy it made everyone, and not how happy it made me, but how happy it made us together.
A few miles of uphill trudging and we were finally home. We entered the yard with only half a box of bananas left. It was dark. My ears and fingers burned with cold. The fruit sat in an unsettled lump at the bottom of my stomach. Lady Liberty had vanished—it was Margaret Louise Higgins who would face my mother without coal money. Or coal.
“We will be cold,” she snapped. Not at him, but at me. Because I should have known better. Just as Eve should have known better in Mr. Milton’s poem.
I looked to my father for help, but he had returned to his chair . . . to his book, where he would stay until he was called for dinner. Was my father the serpent or Adam? Did it matter? Men were never wrong. Only women.
I turned back toward my mother, reaching for her, because I was so sorry. So, so very sorry, and I needed her to know it, really know it. And there were no words for being so sorry you couldn’t breathe.
But she hurried away to finish setting the table, leaving me trapped alone with my useless apology.
A Day of Rest
It had been raining for a week. Mud was everywhere—tracked through houses and shops, lining hems and trouser cuffs; it had even found its way into little Henry’s ears.
“How’d it wind up in here?” I asked, scrubbing black mud out of his plumb red ears.
“Clio did it.” He smiled.
“Oh, Henry.”
Henry was my favorite, and I didn’t mind saying it. He was a tiny copy of John and Nan, loving and kind. Clio was a terror. And the baby, Richard, just six months old now, was still too much tears and snot to love yet.
Since it was Sunday, Mother had the idea that all the babies should be washed, and since she was pregnant again and it was hard for her to lean over the basin, I quickly volunteered for the job. I’d been doing a lot of volunteering. It had been months since my banana mistake, and I was still working hard to correct it.
I chose to bathe Richard first because he was cleanest to start with. And Clio next, because I wanted him done. I saved Henry for last.
“Henry, who is the smartest boy in all the world?” He was playing with a rag, swishing it round him in the basin.
“I am,” he said. He knew the answer without thought.
“Stand up now, silly.”
I wrapped him in a towel and carried him to the cookstove where Mary was skinning rabbits, our old English setter, Toss, lying warm near her feet. She pulled a chair up close to the stove, and I sat down with Henry on my lap, his wet, sweet-smelling hair tickling my nose.
Mary broke both of a rabbit’s hind legs and yanked them out of their fur, then she gathered a great handful of hide around its anus and ripped the fur straight off its body in one long, wet tug. I turned my chair so as not to see her skin the others. I loved rabbit. Especially when Mary cooked it. But I didn’t love watching her tear their skins off like she was tearing up old bedsheets for rags.
Henry’s warm body leaning against mine and the warmth of the cookstove had me sleepy. I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of my mother, brothers, and sisters. Father was at his shop for the day. He always worked Sundays. Since he was an atheist, none of us attended church, including my mother. He liked to work on Sunday to prove it didn’t have to be a day of rest. He took Monday for this.
My mother was a silent believer. Though she didn’t take any day for rest.
“Marget,” Henry said. “Tell about the house.”
“Hmm,” I whispered into his clean little ear. “One day,” I began.
“You will buy a big house.”
“I will,” I said.
“With plumping,” he added, as usual.
“With plumbing,” I corrected, as usual.
“And a special room.”
“A very special room. A room that is only Henry’s.”
His giggles tickled my chest.
“With a featherbed.”
“A big bed,” he said.
“A big featherbed just for Henry and no one else.”
“Specially not Clio.”
I laughed. “We’ll lock him right out.”
“Even if he knocks and acts really nice?” Henry asked.
There was a hardy knock on the door making Henry and me jump. John answered before my mother could. It was Father Coghlan.
I immediately picked up naked little Henry and started upstairs to dress him as my mother greeted the priest, Mary put the kettle on for tea, and Nan cleared a place at the table for our guest to sit. But before he did, the priest greeted each of us by name. I said hello from up-top the stairs.
Father Coghlan spent many nights at our house chatting with Father about unions, fair wages, and better working conditions at the glass factory. Like my father, he enjoyed a bit of whiskey and a good argument. Two of my father’s favorites. But my father wasn’t here, and Father Coghlan knew this. He was here to speak with my mother.
My mother suggested we all join Joseph and Thomas in the barn to see if we could help with their chores.
“The barn!” I blurted. “But . . . not the babies. I just finished washing them!”
My mother never stopped smiling at the priest, but I saw the tight pull at the edges of her mouth. Disapproval. Of me. Erasing all of today’s volunteering in a tiny stretch of her lips.
Nan grabbed my arm and tugged me toward the door. John swept up Ethel before she could also complain. And Mary herded out three sweet-smelling little boys who would very soon . . . not be.
The late September sun was still shining but had lost most its heat. Knowing full well Joseph and Thomas did not need our help, we headed to the barn past a long row of diapers flapping in the evening breeze.
It was dark in the barn, and smelled dusty from this past spring’s brome. Mary lit a lamp and we closed the barn doors to keep the boys from going outside in the mud. Instead, they disappeared into the dirty stalls of the barn. I decided I no longer cared. Let them roll in the mud with the pigs. This was exactly why I despised housework—and babies were housework—it always came to nothing.
We could hear Thomas shouting something at Clio—everyone was always shouting at Clio. A moment later, he emerged from the interior of the barn and stared at Mary, Nan, Ethel, and me sitting on the old bales.
“How delightful to see you all here in the barn,” Thomas said, obviously not the least bit delighted.
“Father Coghlan is visiting. Mother asked us to come help you and Joseph,” Mary explained.
Joseph was now yelling at Clio.
Ethel, Nan, and I laughed. Mary silenced us with a look.
“What does he want?” Thomas complained.
But he already knew. We all did. Our father had invited the well-known atheist Mr. Robert Ingersoll to speak in Corning next week, and the priest was here to stop it.
It seemed Father Coghlan had put up with Father’s spouting about socialism and a single tax, along with his constant talk about the misery of the working people (whose suffering, my father never failed to mention, the old priest’s God never relieved), but to host a heathen might be going too far. It was no secret that if Father Coghlan had his way, the entire Higgins clan would be dunked in holy water—and just like those diapers drying on the line, all of us Higginses would be lined up in a pew for Mass each Sunday. But I thought he would accept our mother putting an end to my father’s latest adventure.
She wouldn’t.
My mother had ten children, not a one of us baptized. Father wouldn’t hear of it. Although she’d been brought up in the faith and still firmly believed in it, she’d married a freethinker, an atheist, a socialist, a proud member of the Knights of Labor. Nothing, not even my mother’s iron will, would change this.
I had often tried to imagine the days of my mother and father’s courtship. When my father was jolly, he was an easy man to love. Big, with a loud Irish brogue and a mighty head of long red hair, he could talk and laugh and drink more than anyone I’d ever known. My only guess was that my quiet mother fell in love and never looked back. Or, at least, we never saw her look back. She was my father’s wife, and Thomas, as well as Mary, Joseph, Nan, John, and I knew she would side with Michael Higgins over Father Coghlan and his Catholic church any day of the week, including Sunday. Including this Sunday. And wasn’t this what the church asked of her?
All the Irishmen in this town referred to their wives as their ribs because when women married, they were being returned to the body of man. As unpleasant as it sounded, being even the tiniest of piggy toes of any of the rough and dirty men of Corning, would Father Coghlan have my mother go against her own body?
Joseph appeared with a howling Clio in his arms. He took one look at us all, and his anger turned to concern.
“Father Coghlan is here,” Mary informed him.
Joseph nodded as he dumped Clio in Mary’s lap. “Hush,” she told him. He listened. Everyone listened to Mary. Even Clio.
Joseph removed his hat and wiped the sweat from his face. Sighing, he slumped onto the hay.
“Mary?” Ethel asked.
“No,” Mary said.
And now Ethel sighed.
We sat and watched the dark close in around us, listening to the chirping crickets and to Richard gurgling in his sleep. John fell asleep too. None of us had anything to say. But I couldn’t help wondering what we were each thinking.
Did Mary wish Father would behave? I think Joseph did. Joseph behaved. John, too. Thomas didn’t, so he wasn’t allowed to be wishing this for Father. Although Thomas misbehaved using his fists, which strangely didn’t seem to carry the same harsh consequences as not behaving using words.
Nan. What did Nan wish?
I think Nan wished what I wished, that the world could be big enough for both Father and the Catholic church. That those who wanted to be heaved into a washtub of holy water could do so, and those who didn’t would be left alone. She wished workers were paid fairly. She wished the hill of Corning shared a little of the air and sunshine with the flats. She wished that she and I and Mother and Mary could vote. She wished she could be a writer. Like father, she loved words. She just wrote hers down.
I guess I wished the world were completely different, and Father would behave because he’d have no reason not to? And then the priest wouldn’t be in there making my mother . . . more miserable than she already was.
I jumped up from the hay. “I’m going back in there.”
“Sit,” Mary said.
And now I sighed, too . . . taking my seat back on the hay.
I pictured my mother sitting across the marble-topped table from the priest, listening to him speak. Because surely, she was doing just this, sitting quietly, listening. And then the most curious thought crept into my head . . . I wondered what my mother wished?
“Father will be home soon,” Joseph said, interrupting my thoughts. It was his way of saying the priest would be gone soon, and this long wait, trying all our nerves, would be over because we all understood the position our mother was in. A position there was no good way out of.
“I want Mother,” Ethel whined.
She always wanted Mother. And she always seemed to get her.
“If you’re going to behave like a baby, go roll in the pig shit with them,” Thomas snapped. I sometimes appreciated my brother.
My little sister wanted to cry, but before she could, we heard the priest’s loud voice.
Joseph tossed aside the rake he’d been holding. Thomas swiped the hay from his trousers. Nan woke John. And Mary, Ethel, and I headed for the babies.
We shuffled from the barn, each Higgins wishing Father Coghlan a pleasant evening as we passed him, except for me . . . and Ethel, but mine was in protest. Ethel just didn’t have any manners.
We filed into the house past my mother standing in the doorway. She was struggling to hold back her cough. As soon as the door closed, she gripped the doorframe and hacked and hacked and hacked, like every word the priest had stuffed into her needed to be purged from her body. None of us moved. Not even Clio.
Once she had expelled the long, hard conversation, the house sprang back to life around her. No one spoke, but the knock of knife on wood and the clink of plate meeting plate soothed me, and I placed Richard down in his crib and picked up the pail to empty the dirty wash basin from the boys, but then stopped. Instead, I grabbed a clean rag from the rag box, found the soap, and last, grabbed Clio.
I felt my mother’s approval just as surely as I heard Clio’s screeches ringing in my ears. A cold bath was no fun, but newly acquired pig shit was actually easier to remove than a week’s worth of old mud. I had Henry almost finished by the time Father walked in.
“Happy Sunday,” he declared as he entered. And it was as if nothing had ever happened.
“Happy Sunday,” my mother repeated.
I looked up from Henry’s soapy head and caught her eye. It might be Sunday, but my mother wasn’t happy.
Satan Visits
“You worry too much, Anne,” my father said, waving away my mother’s concern. “You will see. Mr. Ingersoll will astound everyone.”
But everyone wasn’t going to hear Mr. Ingersoll speak.
My mother wasn’t because she was already growing larger with the next baby, a literally built-in excuse for not going anywhere. The boys barely sat through lectures at school, let alone a lecture on a Saturday. Ethel was too young, Mary too needed, and Nan too good hearted to slip out without finishing her chores.
I was going. And I knew enough to keep my saucebox shut about it. Otherwise, I’d be plucked up for a task that would surely keep me from being astounded. My father had been reading Mr. Ingersoll’s speeches to me over my mending and I had to say, unlike Mr. Henry George, Mr. Ingersoll was no bore. Also, there would be lunch.
When Father put on his hat, I slinked quietly for the door to make sure that when he left, I left. My mother had moved on to wringing out the laundry. She knew he would do as he wanted. It was what my father did. And what he wanted was to invite Mr. Bob Ingersoll—great orator, freethinker, and infamous atheist—to Corning to speak inside of Father Coghlan’s town hall.
* * *
It was just the two of us, as we knew it would be. The day was one of those early October afternoons when the sky was bluer than my father’s eyes, and the cool air seemed to lift us up with each step. My father was even more excited than I was, and I listened as he repeated all his favorite of Ingersoll’s ideas on the walk to the train station. There is no God. There is no place called hell. And women should be able to wear pants.
The pants idea he added just for me. He knew how much I loved to hear it. Pants! What a dream. Dresses dragged, pants floated. Just like my father’s words. And I couldn’t wait to meet this man who would let me wear a pair of pants.
I heard him before I saw him. He w
as loudly saying his good-byes to people on the train. I knew it was him because my father smiled down at me, his eyes telling me to get ready.
I stood straighter, hands at my sides, a serious look on my face . . . a pants-wearing look.
A giant man emerged and grabbed my father’s entire arm just to shake his hand. His laugh bounced off my chest. He smelled like starched sweat. “Is this Margaret?” he asked.
He put out his large hand so that I might shake it. I’d never shaken anyone’s hand before, so when I didn’t immediately reach out, he took my hand from my side and waggled my arm, his dark eyes piercing mine from under great bushy eyebrows that reached off his forehead like antlers off a buck. “I hear you’re the big bug.”
“Yes, sir,” I whispered politely. “A very big bug.”
The force of his laugh knocked me backward into my father’s coat buttons.
The three of us marched down Market Street, the Chemung River glistening in the sunshine between the buildings. My father and Bob—as he’d told my father and me to please call him—never stopped chattering, not even to listen to each other. Bob was to speak at the town hall at two o’clock. But before this . . . there would be lunch. This “big bug” planned on eating big. I knew my father had money in his pocket and my plan was chicken legs, corn fritters, and mashed potatoes.
I did get potatoes, but they weren’t mashed. They were rotten.
The first one hit me in the shoulder. The second one hit me in the shin. Then the air was full of rotten everything: beets, tomatoes, apples, and even dried ears of corn. The corn didn’t hurt much. But the apples did. Surprisingly, so did the beets.
My father howled at our attackers to knock it off. Not only did they not listen, they threw more, and with increased vigor, all while dodging at us and shrieking from contorted, angry faces.
Cold spit dripped down my neck and a tomato squished inside one of my boots. I wrapped my arms around my head and tried to move forward down the road, but it was obvious we weren’t going to make it to the town hall. My father tucked me under his arm, and the three of us retreated back toward the train station. The distance lessened the amount of rotten food pelting us, and for the first time I heard their terrible words.
What Every Girl Should Know Page 4