A Bigamist's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page B

left for college, my mother was known to nearly every priest and nun in the Rockville Centre diocese as good Mrs. Connelly, and she’d had lunch with the bishop three times. When she took a weekend off to drive me up to school, I felt rather like some mongrel who’d interrupted the meditations of Saint Francis to be let out to pee. She did it graciously, willingly, because she loved me, but it was clear she had more important things to get back to.
    She kept our house and her faith until I graduated from college, and then, on the day I returned with my steamer trunk and my arctic parka, my diaphragm and my résumés, she said I’d have to find an apartment of my own because she was selling the house and moving to Maine.
    She said nothing about giving up her religion, but when I arrived in Maine that August and went into her bedroom to unpack my bags, I saw no crucifix above the bed, no rosary beads on the night table, no prayer book, no holy cards, not even the statue of St. Jude, patron of hopeless cases and her favorite apostle, perched on the wide windowsill.
    There was only the white chenille bedspread on the big,fourposter bed and, on the heavy dresser, in a new silver frame, a blurry snapshot of my father.
    “I’ve cleaned out the two top drawers for you,” my mother said, pointing to the dresser. “And half the closet.”
    She pulled open the closet, which was actually an old wooden armoire, and showed me the empty side, the tangled hangers rattling within it. “That should be enough room.”
    “Sure,” I said. “I guess so.” I glanced at my three suitcases, my coats, my shopping bag, all my worldly possessions.
    “Of course,” my mother said, “you’ll have to leave some things packed. Just push the suitcases under the bed when you’re through with them.” She had her hands on the hips of her gray, baggy trousers and her rolled-up shirtsleeves made little wings on her elbows. I was used to seeing her plump, her hair teased into curls, her face round and somewhat surprised-looking. I had a terrible impulse to wail, I want to go home!
    She crossed the room and embraced me again. Even her smell was wrong, not perfume but soap and woodsmoke. “It will be all right,” she whispered, in her old way, and then she backed away, smiling, as if she had given me some secret message and now must carry on with her part. “You must be hungry,” she said, “I’ll make us something to eat.”
    I smiled, too brightly perhaps: an intruding houseguest pretending her welcome was sincere. “That sounds great,” I said and she nodded and patted my arm, leaving me alone to unpack what I could.
    My mother had been raised to believe that to ask any personal questions was to pry, to presume there was something that would not be told voluntarily, and, as I was growing up, she had passed the belief on to me. It seems ironic in light of our Catholicism, which makes a ritual of prying, of exposing your private life to another, albeit in a quiet, guarded atmosphere,a yellow-lighted darkroom of sorts, where the exposure will not be too great and the listener is sworn to secrecy, but even now I am surprised and somewhat offended by strangers who can sit beside me at a party or on a train and ask me about my love life and my sex life and my deepest fears. I am somewhat envious, too, of those who can answer such questions easily, although I often wonder what so much discussion, so much exposure, does to the quality of those feelings.
    That evening, over grilled cheese sandwiches and tea, we discussed Ward (“He’s a dear man,” my mother said, “but so ugly.”) and Lillian, an old woman my mother had met on the beach, and some of my friends from high school and even the service on Amtrak. But she did not ask me why I had left Buffalo so suddenly, nor did I ask her why she was living here, so far from all her old friends and neighbors, from Brooklyn and Long Island where she had spent her life.
    Whatever you need to know