John has loads to review with me before he leaves town. Outgoing mail, including a bill that has to be paid but not until tomorrow, a note for Mr. Graham that I’m eager to deliver. Emergency contacts. Pizza money. Directions. Martin needs this, Milly likes that, check on Pop if you haven’t seen him by eleven A.M., Evan doesn’t need anything, John explains, like a zookeeper handing out care-and-feeding instructions for all the animals, the ones he’s cared for since birth and the ones that came with the park.
He looks commanding in his pressed Qantas blues, more like a pilot than a flight attendant. I bet this is what he was wearing the day he met Ellen. Maybe they crossed paths in the Sydney airport, waiting for a morning flight—John self-assured among his colleagues, talking twin engines and load factors; Ellen impressed by his manly knowledge. Playing the wingman, his workmate asks Ellen where she lives … does she travel often … with her husband? When she says she’s divorced, John steps in, buys her a cup of tea, a cranberry scone. His crew is summoned over the PA but John hangs back, asks if he can ring her sometime. She blushes while she writes out her phone number on a paper coaster. She watches him walk away, wondering if he might be someone important to her someday, someone to have and hold until death do them part.
“Remember,” John says to me, “the next-door neighbor’s number is on the pad in the kitchen if you need anything.”
“Yeah, and I have Evan.” He raises his eyebrows like I’m counting on the town drunk. Never mind that I’ve been taking showers and blow-drying my hair every morning for that bum.
“I’ve left some money on the counter for pizza or groceries.”
“Yup. Thanks.”
After John leaves, I close the front door and head back to the living room with my book. I have three hours until I pick up the kids.
My Ántonia is set in Nebraska around the time that train travel was taking off. It’s one giant flashback, narrated by Jim, a grown man recalling his memories of a hardworking bohemian girl he knew when he was young. We learn in the prologue that they lost touch when he went east for college, but she never left his mind. He thinks of her often, probably more than a married man should, and when he does, she’s bathed in sunlight, running across a prairie in a homemade sundress. It’s all very romantic and nostalgic, and I love it straight off. But my mother? She doesn’t go for a lot of golden-light nonsense.
Or so I thought. What do I know?
I know that my mother loves sauerkraut and anchovies and pearl onions. I know she prefers mashed potatoes from a box, and when she wants to, she can peel an orange in one go. I know she likes her first drink to be vodka—one full jigger, over ice, with a lemon rind—and then she downgrades to Chardonnay, which she pours into the same glass over the same ice with the same piece of lemon floating on top, one less dish to wash. I know her favorite movie is either Gone with the Wind or Pretty Woman, whichever comes to mind first. She considers house pets and clothes you can’t wash in a machine and changing lip colors with the seasons ridiculous. I know she doesn’t think fathers need to know every single thing about their children. She feels her best on her knees after Communion and thinks too many people treat church like a fashion show or a social outing, and she has no words for the Christmas and Easter Catholics except That’s between them and the good Lord above. I know she has an old silver rosary under her pillow, where she can find it in the night when she starts fretting about something that wouldn’t have a chance against her in the light of day, and next to her rosary is her huffa-puffa, for her asthma, which gets worse in the summer and when she worries.
Maybe what I don’t know is that she secretly lives for a good love story.
Maybe, like my dad says, she’s a romantic, something I’ve always dismissed as biased.
My father first laid eyes on her at a wedding. He told me the story on a car ride to Baltimore.
“She was a bridesmaid for Cousin Nancy. I went over there to pick up my grandmother, and the whole gang, huge bridal party, was out back posing for photos in the yard. You should have seen the camera, Lovey. Big as a suitcase, up on that thing—what do they call it?”
“Tripod?”
“Tripod! Boy, you’re quick, Lovey!”
“So, about Mom …”
“Best-looking gal in the bunch.”
I had seen a photo from that day. My mom’s hair was short and swept high off her forehead like Lucille Ball’s in one of the serious episodes. Her skin was creamy, and her dress wrapped around her shoulders and hips like it’d been sewn on her that morning.
“How old was she?”
“Young, Lovey. Too young for me!”
“How old were you?”
“Well, let’s just say I was a little older than I needed to be at that particular moment. So I did something to make her remember me.”
“Like?”
“Oh, a little jig, a soft shoe …”
I gave him a look that said if a boy came to our house and did any sort of dance, that’d be the end of him.
“I knew what I was doing, Lovey.”
“Keep going.”
“During the ceremony, I watched her on the altar, and I could tell she had a BIG-TIME relationship with God.”
I knew what he was talking about. On Sundays after communion, during the time set aside for quiet prayer, she’d cover her whole face with her hands, like a girl who knew well her meekness. She’d stay that way, on her knees, longer than all the rest of the congregation, making me wonder what she was telling God, or if she was waiting for Him to speak to her.
“And she’s smart.”
“How could you tell?”
“You know, that famous Mary Corrigan wit.” Everybody’s everything was famous, according to my dad.
“Mom?” Most of the time, when she cracked a joke, she had to explain to me that she was being funny, and I’m pretty sure that if you have to tell someone you’re being funny, you’re not.
“Oh, God, yeah! I’d say she was the funniest girl I’d ever met.”
“So, did you ask her to dance?”
“Every guy there asked her to dance. But I did a number on her, Lovey. The Green Man did a number on her. I danced with her mother, too.”
“Libby was there?”
“Oh yeah, they all knew each other—my parents, her parents, the whole Catholic mafia.”
“Did you talk to TJ?” There was something scary to me about my mom’s dad; it could have been his FBI-type glasses or sharp nose or severe jawline. Whatever it was, TJ was not the type to pull pennies from behind your ear. He actually spanked me once. It hurt like hell, and I cried my eyes out, but he didn’t care. He thought I was overindulged, which was laughable, considering my mother’s opposition to everything from baked goods to sleepovers to pierced ears.
“I did what I could to make a positive impression. I may have even suggested I was a few years younger than I actually was. You know, TJ didn’t want his little girl running around with some old dog.”
“How long before he found out?”
“The next weekend, I asked her to come see my lacrosse game, which she did with a few of her girlfriends, and the Green Man put one in the net for her.” I could have guessed this part of the story, or assumed it. Lacrosse often figured in the seminal moments of my family’s life. “The next day, the Baltimore Sun wrote up the game with a big photo of the Green Man, and underneath, in the little caption part, it said CORRIGAN, AGE 30, SCORES WINNING GOAL.”
“Whoops.”
He laughed like that was the best reaction anyone could’ve possibly had to his story. “Whoops is right, Lovey! Your mother and your aunt Betsy tried to hide the paper when they saw it, but TJ went straight for the sports section, and whammo!, the truth was out.” Dancing, fibbing, hiding a paper. There’s romance there, I guess.
“You just fell in love right off the bat?”
“She was irresistible,” he offers as a matter of fact. After decades of living together, which you would think would dull even the shiniest of starts, my dad’s take was stunningly simple: “Angel on my shoulder that day, Lovey.”
My mother, a godsend. Hard to imagine.
My dad and I have relived the beats of this story many times since, even though my mom doesn’t like him filling my head with romance. She thinks his bang-o! version creates unrealistic expectations. Your father makes it sound like a Gidget movie, Kelly. Even if she was romantic once, a Baltimore miss who devoured My Ántonia and let herself be twirled on a dance floor by a stranger, those girlish days are gone. She was a mother now, my mother, and she didn’t trust the dreamy look in my eye, not one bit. Picking a husband was a serious matter best done with a cool head.