MARY ANN MCGUIGAN

Come Into the Parlor

My mother’s family has been in America for decades, but the Kearnys don’t take well to change. So my grandmother’s wake is being held in her living room, the way it’s done in the old country, at least in the parts of Ireland civilization hasn’t reached yet.

I have to miss a day of school, but I’ll never tell anyone in class where I went. I’d be mortified if the other seventh-graders knew that my family can’t break away from such a barbaric tradition. My great-Aunt Annie was waked in the very same room almost four years ago, before President Kennedy was elected, but me and my sister June, who’s two years older, were considered too young to attend. My brother Jimmy remembers desperately wishing he could escape while old Father Coughlin, who smelled like camphor and spoke with a lisp, slogged through the Rosary.

The fathers and uncles were all down the block at the tavern already, three deep at the end of the bar, saying a proper goodbye, and Jimmy wanted to be there, raising a pint to a fine woman who knew how to have a good time, knew the steps to every jig and reel. Jimmy was sure that standing among a dreary crowd of women droning on about the mother of god was not her idea of a fun afternoon. He didn’t want to look at Aunt Annie, lying in her satiny box, her pale gnarly fingers tangled in Rosary beads she had less use for than ever, but he couldn’t settle his gaze on anything else. The grownups said their prayers at the coffin, each making a point of declaring how good she looked. Jimmy was baffled. Aunt Annie was never anyone’s idea of a beauty, but even on her worst day she was no ghoul.

“Just make sure you don’t get stuck in the parlor when Father Coughlin gets there.” That’s Jimmy’s only advice to me. He says nothing about the shortage of chairs, the suffocating mix of the women’s perfumes, or the scowls me and my sisters and my cousin get for daring to lean on the highboy in the dining room. “What’s it doing in the dining room anyway?” cousin Theresa whispers to my sister Alice. They’re the same age, nine years older than me, and don’t hold back much. Ever since they were small, they’ve been a comedy team. They could get Grandma so mad she’d speak in tongues. But Theresa wants to be respectful so she keeps her voice down.

The uncles and male cousins breezed in earlier for a quick Hail Mary and some pecks on the cheek. Now they’re all at the tavern. Irishmen in my family are rarely expected to take on anything that can be left for their wives and sisters to do. My brother Billy is with them, happy to honor that tradition. He’s nineteen. Jimmy didn’t come to the wake, because when he married a Protestant, Grandma turned the invitation over and wrote that attending such a wedding would be against her religion. So Jimmy told Mama that attending the wake of a plaster saint was against his.

It’s time for me and June and my younger brother Eddie to go up to the coffin for a prayer, but Eddie sticks close to Mama’s side and won’t budge. My Aunt Ann, who enforces Catholic traditions like her place at the right hand of god depends on it, is ready to scold him. But one look at the expression on my mother’s face and Aunt Ann changes her mind. Nobody messes with Mama’s darlin’ boys.

Her daughters are in a different class. June and I are guided to the coffin and we drop to our knees. As soon as I reach the kneeler I close my eyes, but too late to miss the silly dress they’ve put her in—a dark blue double-breasted thing with lots of brass buttons like she just got furloughed from the Brooklyn Navy Yard—and what they’ve done to her hair. It’s set in tight short pin curls that make her look like a badly aging Betty Boop. I hold my breath, and I know if I release it, I’ll burst out laughing. To distract myself, I try to say an Our Father, but I can’t. And I can’t hold my breath any longer. I begin to let it out and sure enough there’s the hint of a giggle. June shoves a sharp elbow into my side and I nearly lose my balance, but it works. Somehow I’m breathing again, and not laughing.

But poor Grandma. Rosy circles sit on her chalky white cheeks and her mouth is so stern she looks like one of the stray Italian women you see at Mass sometimes, with their heads hidden in thick veils and their legs in black stockings. Not that Grandma was ever a barrel of laughs. We were all frightened of her. To move a knick-knack out of place was to be banished from the parlor, if her gaze didn’t turn you to stone first. To fail to finish your cabbage was to risk being labeled an ungrateful urchin. She was a devout Catholic but never put much stock in forgiveness. The first time Mama tried to leave Dad—after her second trip to the ER in a week—she asked to stay with Grandma till she could figure something out. The welcome mat was abruptly pulled in. “You made your bed; you lie in it,” Grandma pronounced. Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy. But not at Grandma’s house.

Uncle Johnny, one of Mama’s brothers, arrives late, and we find him in the kitchen after we escape from the parlor. “It’s a fine turn out,” he’s saying, “a credit to her.”

We can tell Uncle Johnny has had a few already, but it’s not a worry. He’s not like Daddy. Nobody will get hurt. He’s just talkative, mostly funny. He’s asking his daughter Theresa if she remembers when Grandpa died. She doesn’t, mainly because she wasn’t born yet. But she’s heard the stories. We all have. But Uncle Johnny repeats them now. He says nobody went to the tavern in those days. The drinking was done in the kitchen. Later Mama tells us that’s true. Then he describes how they stood the coffin up in the corner to make room to dance in the parlor. Mama says they really did dance, but the coffin-in-the-corner part is made up.

Outside on the stoop later, waiting for my uncles and my cousins to return from the tavern, we tell Theresa what she said, but she insists Mama’s wrong. “No, they really did stand him up. Ask my mother.”

“That’s the truth,” Alice says, always loyal to her mischievous partner.

It’s hard not to believe them. And it makes me sigh. “We miss all the good stuff.”

“Maybe not,” Theresa says. “My dad brought some records with him. The Clancy Brothers.”

“Whoopie,” Alice snorts. She hates Irish music. And unless Elvis Presley records “The Croppy Boy,” she’ll never change her mind.

“We just have to wait till Aunt Ann goes to bed.”

Alice laughs, but my stomach flutters. Up the street, I see kids home from school. The shadows across the brownstone stoops are getting longer. It must be past four o’clock, and I hope Theresa’s joking, because I don’t want to be anywhere near Grandma once it gets dark.

“What’s the matter?” Alice says. “You see a ghost or something?”

I don’t answer, because I don’t want them to tease me. But Theresa reads my mind. “Don’t worry. Grandma’s harmless now.”

June nudges my side, motions toward something up the block. “That’s Billy,” she whispers. He’s walking slow, unsteady on his feet.

Alice sees him too. “They shouldn’t have let him go there today. He’s too young.” Mama didn’t want him there, but Billy makes his own rules now. Alice curses under her breath. “It’s not ghosts you need to worry about,” she mutters. Nobody needs her to explain. She’s worried Billy likes the drink too much. I am too. I’m afraid someday he’ll get like Daddy when he’s drunk, when the world becomes his private combat zone.

With her hand on the railing, Alice pulls herself up, her back straighter now, like she’s made a decision. “It’s time to go home,” she says, heading back inside. We follow behind. “At least we’ll be spared the Clancy Brothers,” she says to me, and I laugh, mostly because I’m glad we won’t have to be here when it’s dark. I think Alice can tell, because she rests her hand on my back, like I’m a little kid. “By the time Aunt Ann falls asleep, it’ll be too late to do any dancing,” she says.

“Maybe not,” Theresa chuckles. “My dad said he sweetened up her tea.”

Alice and June laugh, but not very hard. Maybe they don’t think it’s funny either.