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it’s a good thing she had the extra time to make arrangements, because when I was born I was almost thirteen pounds, and had given my mother twenty hours of labor.
    I held the record for birth weights in Boston, and Ma always told everyone how the doctors and patients came from all parts of Beth Israel Hospital to see me in the nursery. She said I was twice the size of the other infants, and while they all cried, kicking their legs with eyes sealed closed, I was quiet with two big spooky eyes staring around the room and observing all who had come to observe me from behind the glass window.
    I was my mother’s ninth child, with two sisters and six brothers before me, including Patrick. And we always did include Patrick in the count. The family had settled into Columbia Point three years before I was born. My mother was still married to Dave MacDonald, but he was nowhere to be seen. According to Grandpa, Ma’s father, the marriage of his oldest daughter had fulfilled everything he’d expected of it. On the day of her wedding, Grandpa woke Ma up, and told her to “get up for the market.” Soon into the marriage Dave MacDonald beat my mother, fractured her skull on two occasions, and broke her ribs on another. To this day, though, Ma will remind you of that one time she knocked out his teeth with one good kick.
    Dave MacDonald was an entertainer like Ma. He played country-western music on the guitar in barrooms throughout Boston. They’d met each other in a Valentine’s Day minstrel show at the parish hall. Ma had entered the show and played her Irish accordion while her four younger sisters step danced. Ma always told us that when she first laid eyes on Dave MacDonald, playing Davy Crockett, she immediately remembered that she’d had a terrible dream about him, a nightmare about a bad marriage. Nonetheless, Ma married him at the age of nineteen, and before long they became a musical duo. But the good times were few. He was an alcoholic, and further along in their marriage he would disappear on his wife and kids. A “womanizer,” Ma called him. My older brothers and sisters don’t remember seeing him around much. Occasionally they’d hear him back in the house, and learned to expect the yelling and things breaking. Ma always said there was “no such thing” as divorcing your husband back then. You lived with whatever you had married, even if it was all turning to hell. When she went to Father Murphy about the cheating and abuse, he told her, “You’re a Catholic, make the best of it.”
    For her, drinking too much was one thing, disappearing and going out with other women was another, and the beatings were bad. But not showing up for your own baby son’s funeral? When Ma confronted Dave MacDonald about being down at the local bar while his son’s tiny casket was carried through St. Thomas’s Church, he said that he’d seen too many buddies go down in Korea to give a shit about one baby dying. That was the official end of the marriage.
    Ma had already started to take care of the kids on her own, with financial help from welfare. Ma says that at the time the welfare policy actually encouraged you not to have a man, as you could receive a stipend only if there was no man around. So even when Dave MacDonald had been at home sometimes, Ma started to tell welfare that he wasn’t there with them anymore. It was the truth really—he wasn’t “there” for his kids like a real father. The family was living with cheap rent in the project—sixty-five dollars a month. The project wasn’t a safe place, but it was all we could afford with the sixty-five dollars we got from welfare every two weeks. And with the boxes of surplus cheese, butter, and powdered milk Ma dragged home from the maintenance office, we could survive there.
    It was while living in Columbia Point that Ma realized she and her kids were surviving without any help