The answer is simple:
In character.
Jacqueline could not have more helpful, to the point of offering to copy edit the entire proceedings. She did allow that she was pleased to see she got a starring role and that maybe it was long overdue.
Christina had the most misgivings and said that she could happily live with what was in the book already, but she would be just as happy if I refrained from writing one more word about her, her family, and her life.
Maureen said it made her feel wistful that she came across as so quiet, but she felt it was true to her persona, at least as a child. At the same time, she was glad to see that her garden got the salute she feels that it deserves.
Michael said I was wrong about my initial estimate of the price we got for the house at 5 Center Street when it sold in 1975. “Sixty K, not forty.” And that I also had the wrong name for the group singing “We Gotta Get Out of This Place.” He corrected it to the Animals, and said it showed once again how out of it I was during the heyday of rock ‘n’ roll. He pointed out, with some glee, that I had misused the conditional tense, not once but twice. What is more delicious than correcting a know-it-all? And he said that he was not certain I had captured just how old-fashioned our mother’s childhood had been, how nearly Edwardian, what a leap it must be for her to have lived long enough to see the world transform on the scale it has, to go from antimacassars to spandex, from songs with refrains like “I don’t want to play in your yard” to ones about how “if it weren’t for date rape, I’d never get laid.” As for Raymond, Michael said I failed to point out how in his early twenties he seemed to have aged overnight, and how hard that must have been for him. And, he added, “He knew I loved him because I told him so on the porch at mother’s cottage the summer before he died.”
My mother’s reaction was the most complicated. The words stirred up those old bedeviling feelings of ambivalence. Here was something to be proud of, here was something to keep hidden. She said she was glad to have read the manuscript because now she wouldn’t have to read it again. Yet later she surprised me by saying that if there were a movie, she didn’t want Katharine Hepburn playing her. I asked her what could possibly be wrong with Katharine Hepburn, Miss High Cheekbones, Miss Intelligent from Connecticut, Miss Here for the Long Haul?
My mother looked at me as if I were slower than the slowest pupil from Ursuline to ever enter her orbit.
Her tone was patient yet final. It reeked with dignity and noblesse oblige.
“Please keep in mind that Katharine Hepburn is older than I am.”
Thanks to my mother’s long memory and uncanny eye for detail, I was already able to correct many small errors of fact, but some of my mother’s other objections I saved until now because I thought they deserved their own spotlight.
The most significant involved Raymond. She said that I had painted a not entirely fair picture. She said there were times when I was off in Miami that Raymond did successfully run several produce stands. “He went to the Farmer’s Market in Springfield, very early in the morning, and picked out the best stuff, and he knew how to do it. He became acquainted with several of the old-timers and he learned a lot from them. He was friendly with several Hadley farmers for whom he had an enormous amount of respect. You can put that in. And now you can put this in: they in turn respected him. One of them was the son, or could have been the grandson, of the farmer whom Calvin Coolidge chose to ship fresh corn to the White House. One time one of the farmers loaned Ray a thousand dollars on a handshake because he was in a bind, and Ray paid it back. The farmer trusted him, and you know how those Polish farmers are. They can be pretty flinty. He used to tell me about these things after they happened, and that’s how I know about them.”
Some of the changes she suggested might seem trifling, but not to her. For instance, she could not believe that on those long-ago trips to New York City, I was so muzzy-headed as to report that we actually ate dinner at Horn & Hardart’s. “Only lunch or dessert. Dinner was at Stouffer’s or the hotel.” As far as my description of her as a woman whose tongue could be sharper than the lid on a freshly opened can of tuna, she wrote in the margins, “This isn’t me. Or is it?”
She also said that my statement about how everything was better in Ireland—the priests, the tea, the trout—was flat-out inaccurate. “No one thinks the priests are better.” When I reported my father had left very little insurance, she wrote NOT TRUE: “He left a good estate considering his age, but not big enough for the long years ahead.” She urged me at a couple of junctures to “stop knocking Catholicism” and she said that I was wrong to say I prayed to St. Anthony to help locate lost objects. “Catholics turn to saints to intercede with their intentions, but they pray to the Trinity.” And my reference to limbo as the refuge of unbaptized babies and well-intended heathens was outdated. The Church no longer teaches that doctrine.
She agreed that Christina was pretty as a child, but “so were the rest of you. Please change. Do you think I want to be remembered as the mother of three plain girls and one pretty one?”
As for the conversation in which she compared herself to the Kennedy women, she wrote, “I suppose you want to use this but I can’t imagine I said this.”
I turned to Jacqueline for corroboration.
“Not only did she say it—she said it all the time.”
She even rankled at the passing reference to powdered milk. “Don’t you remember? We had fresh cold milk. In quart bottles. Delivered daily.”
We did, in the fifties. The powdered stuff was the sixties.
Some points, however, are not worth the fight, and I am willing to concede that perhaps my memory of thin blue lukewarm milk served in pitchers with an inevitable sediment clinging to the bottom is just a silly fiction. In fact, if anyone asks, I’m going to say what I now believe to be the truth. Not only was every morning of the Blais children’s childhood awash with sunlight and optimism, but we also enjoyed crème fraîche and ripe strawberries with our Wheaties, even in the dead of winter.
Acknowledgments
As always, first and foremost, I’d like to thank my husband, John Katzenbach.
My agent, Esther Newberg, deserves her reputation as a wise and wonderful woman.
Morgan Entrekin runs a great shop, and Brendan Cahill is a fine editor.
I live in a part of the country that is chockablock with great colleges, and the following people were kind enough to share their resources: Tom Riddell and Holly Davis at Smith College; Lee Edwards, Jay Neugeboren, and Peggy O’Brien at the University of Massachusetts; Susan Snively at Amherst College; Mary Russo at Hampshire College; and Mary Jo Salter at Mt. Holyoke College, who served as poetry consultant. Students, former and current, can often be a source of inspiration, and I’d like to acknowledge Jodi Butler, Carla Costa, Harmony Desmond, Caledonia Kearns, Nan Klingener, Brian Mooney, Patty Norris-Lubold, Aaron Saykin, Shiela Seiler, Brooke Steinberg, and Andrea Ung among many others. I hope the organizers of writers conferences in Aspen, Key West, and Florida International University at Seaside, Florida will accept my gratitude for including me on their faculty from time to time. Certain small portions of this work appeared in somewhat altered form in The Washington Post, The Miami Herald, and Newsday and I would like to thank the editors at those publications for their early encouragement. I would also like to recognize the contributions of Ann Banks, Lynne Barrett, Marjorie Klien, Athelia Knight, Anne O’Brien, Geneva Overholser, Megan Rosenfeld, Julie Stanton, Ted Lawler, and Sharon White.
Finally, as my mother pointed out more than once, my sister Jacqueline deserves a special mention. Here it is.
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Uphill Walkers Page 24