Strings Attached

Twenty-one



Providence, Rhode Island

May 1937



It was Muddie who saw them first. Three balloons, floating on the breeze, heading straight for us.

She reached out her arms. “Look — it’s our present!”

Jamie and I followed her, all of us racing to be first to catch the waving strings. It was our fourth birthday, so of course the balloons had to be for us.

Muddie clutched the string of her blue balloon. She wound it tightly around her index finger. “It’s our present,” she repeated. Her eyes shone. “From heaven. It’s from her.”

“Don’t be a dope,” Jamie said. “She’s dead.”

“She’s an angel,” Muddie insisted. “Da says so. And she sent them!” She stamped her foot.

I tipped my head back and looked up at my red balloon. Behind the balloon, blue sky. And heaven, up where I couldn’t see. Was my mother looking down, right then, right into my face?

We never did find out where the balloons came from. Balloons did not fly around the neighborhood of Fox Point. It was made up of the working poor, and in the Depression, that changed to the occasionally working poor and those desperately hanging on to the little they had. The Irish shared the neighborhood with the Portuguese from the Azores and Cape Verde, all of them drawn to the work on the docks, despite the fact that it was disappearing and heading into the factories instead.

In Fox Point the air smelled like the river. Visitors were ushered to the kitchen, not a parlor, where manchupa simmered on a stove, fragrant with garlic and the parts of the pig the swells on College Hill would not eat. In the backyards, tomato plants and grapevines competed with shrines to the Virgin Mary for attention. You could buy a New Deal lunch for fifteen cents on South Main. If you had fifteen cents.

We saved the balloons until they were just scraps of rubber trailing on grimy strings that we worried like rosary beads. Even years later, after I knew the balloons hadn’t dropped from heaven but had probably floated down from up the hill, from a birthday party where children got presents and cake and ice cream, even then, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watched over by someone unseen. Someone greater than God. I’d burn in hell for thinking such a thing. But that would probably happen anyway.

Someone I’d killed on the very day I was born.



Da always told the story the same way.

They didn’t have money for the doctor, you see. They didn’t know it was triplets — the midwife thought twins. After ten hours of labor, Da saw the fear in the midwife’s eyes and ran down the street at three in the morning and pounded on Jack Leary’s door. Jack was a good man, and he had a car. He drove them to the Lying-In Hospital with Maggie groaning in the backseat. Even then, Da said, she was too polite to scream. The woman had the manners of a duchess.

They took her away from him and he started to pray, even though he’d walked out of St. Joseph’s when his parents died and had never gone back. God would have to find him where he lived, Da always said, because why should he have to go to His house all the time? He seems like a bit of a loafer, if you ask me, Da would end, with a glance at his sister, Delia, and a wink at us. Delia would press her lips together and shake her head and say God did live in our house, He was watching all the time, in every room. One time Jamie asked, Is He in the crapper, too? And Delia had to get up and leave the room she was so mad, because Da had laughed along with us.

That night when Da heard the first scream, he couldn’t stand it any longer and pushed back the nurse who was saying — and here Da would imitate a high, bossy soprano — Mis-ter Corrigan, get back where you belong! And he had shouted, I belong with my wife! and burst in.

And then tears would roll down his cheeks. I saw her pretty feet first, he would say. Her pretty white feet. The room was full of blood. A river of it. And the butcher of a doctor was still working on her, but I saw her soul rise to the angels, saw it clear as day, and felt her breath on my cheek as she passed. She blessed you, each one as she went, she did. You were blessed by an angel.

And Da would touch our heads, one by one, in order of our birth.

She was naming you all as she went by, because I heard the names like a bell. Margaret, James, Kathleen.

Your mother is an angel, he would say, tears still rolling down his face. She forgave me, too, for not going to the doctor right away. I saw her smile at me. She forgave Kitty for not wanting to come out and join her brother and sister. Even then, our Kit had to make an entrance. You are all blessed, he’d said.

And I thought — blessed with what? Cursed was more like it. For being the last one out, from swimming away from the doctor’s forceps with a will of my own. Did I want to stay near my mother’s flickering heartbeat? The curse was clear in the way Jamie and Muddie turned to me with a look of awe — because I had killed our mother.

And so my birth was Irish to the core — guilt and suffering, attended by a ghost, scored with celestial bells and the whispered blessings of angels.

It was only the next day that the commerce began.



Since their parents died, he and Delia had always scraped by, dropping out of school and finding work when they could.

At least, that was the story they told. Not the whole story — that came later. Just a few sad facts sprinkled in for a bit of waterworks from the audience, and the rest jokes and exaggerations. Da was never afraid to talk about the past, but he had locked in his stories on bar stools and at kitchen tables over the years, and he stuck to them. He knew every beat and every pause.

And so there he was, a widower with three babies to raise. Delia had moved out of their small apartment to give the couple privacy, taking a room nearby. The day of Maggie’s funeral, she moved back in. They’d saved up for Delia to attend a secretarial course, so she had a good job at the artificial flower factory, in the front office, not at the machines. A good salary, but not for a family of five.

That first night while the babies slept, Da and Delia sat in the kitchen and discussed their options. They were two people used to calamity and it didn’t scare them. There was no question that Delia had to keep working. There were no jobs now, in the worst year of the Depression. How would Da cope with the babies, with feeding and diaper pins and baths? How could they afford blankets, and soap, and milk, and medicine? That’s when Da got the idea.

The day he left the hospital, three nurses following him out with the babies in their arms, a taxi drove him home for free. Turned out the driver gave tips to a newspaperman at the Journal, and in no time at all there was Da on the front page, holding the babies in his arms. Within an hour, a delivery of free formula from the local drugstore arrived at his door.

Wasn’t the world apt to cry at the sight of motherless babies? Three at once?

Da didn’t have much, but the man knew what to do with a story.

THE CORRIGAN THREE SLEEP THROUGH



THE NIGHT IN SLEEP-TITE CRIBS



WHEN IT COMES TO EVAPORATED MILK,

THE CORRIGAN THREE LOVE THEIR PET!



THE CORRIGAN THREE SAY “YUM!” FOR



DEAL’S COD LIVER OIL!



LISTEN TO THE CORRIGAN KIDDIES:

“DADDY BUYS SLEEK-O-TIRES FOR A SMOOOOOTH RIDE!”



So we became the Corrigan Three, and within a few months we were famous in Providence and Boston and, after a newsreel team came to film us, around the entire United States of America. When we were babies and toddlers, companies would pay for our endorsements — the endorsements of tiny things who spit up for a living — but later, as the Depression ground on and the public moved on to a fascination with flagpole sitting and dance marathons, Da was reduced to accepting things in trade. Rarely did the trade involve something we could use. Suddenly, the apartment would fill up with cartons of bicycle tires or laxatives while we opened a can of beans for dinner. But Da would take the tires, or the laxatives, and go around the neighborhood, trading them for a bit of butter, or secondhand shoes.

All of Providence knew us, the redheaded Corrigan triplets. Every Easter we were invited to the egg roll at the statehouse, and as soon as we could walk, we marched in as many Fourth of July parades as Da could cram in, driving from one small town to another. Our pictures were taken on Santa’s lap every year.

We were famous for being famous. For a while.

All families peg their kids — the smart one, the slugger, the mischief maker. Imagine a whole country pegging you as one thing. Da decided early on that we needed personalities. Muddie was the shy one (Muddie, trained to make a show of peeping out from between Da’s legs), Jamie was the charmer (trained to bow and say “how do you do” from the age of three), and I was the ham, the sassy one who stole the show.

During the summers, Da traded in every favor in order to borrow Jack Leary’s DeSoto and take us on tours of state fairs as far west as Iowa, where we learned how to sing “Galway Bay,” repair a blown tire, and pee in a can.

It was a grand gypsy life, we thought. We slept on the ground, wrapped in blankets, or in the car as Da drove from one fair to another. Occasionally, he was able to book us into a theater, where we would open for the movies, singing “I Faw Down an’ Go Boom.” We lived on cheese sandwiches and the food at the fairs — candy apples and funnel cakes, pickles and pies. We rehearsed in the car, singing as loud as we could as the hot air slapped our sticky hair against our cheeks.

In those hot summers, full of flies and white skies, corn and pigs, I learned what America was — people looking up from their work and trouble and hoping someone would tell them a story, sell them a dream. And I saw what it was like to be looked at, and came to like it.



Prosperity was just around the corner. So people said. At first I thought it meant that if Da could just walk another few blocks, he’d get a job, because the streets in Providence had names like Benefit and Benevolent, so why not Prosperity? But there was no Prosperity Street, and there were no jobs, even on a street called Hope. Delia’s salary was cut, and endorsements dried up. We were growing fast, and it was hard to look cute in a dress made out of an old faded pillowcase, even for me and Muddie. Shirley Temple was the child everyone wanted to see, with glossy curls and the fresh plump cheeks of someone who had a chicken in her pot and warm water to wash with.

In the winters, we spent all of our time in the kitchen, the biggest room at the front of the apartment, where the coal stove gave out a thin, inadequate heat. A bonus was that we were away from the thin walls of the rear bedroom, behind which the Duffys in the next apartment argued every Saturday night when Duffy came home drunk.

Delia had the bedroom, Da slept on the couch, and Muddie, Jamie, and I slept on a mattress in the hall closet, all tangled together, pushing each other and arguing about who got spit on the pillow. Aren’t you the luckiest of children, Da said, who get to sleep in a cave like wolf cubs, instead of in a regular room with a door?

And weren’t we lucky to hang on to that home when we saw other families losing theirs and disappearing in the middle of the night?

We were five years old the day Delia was fired, and we saw her cry for the first time, as fiercely as she did everything else. She prided herself on being a secretary, on her clean fingernails and her gray dresses and her pretty scarves. She was a professional.

We had never seen Da and Delia scared before.

Jamie stood up. “It’s time for the lucky pennies,” he announced.

It was a ritual we saved for only our most dire circumstances, and this was the worst one yet.

Da and Delia stood. They emptied all the coins from their pockets and Delia’s purse. Delia went to get the spare change she kept wrapped in a handkerchief for church. Jamie looked at the pile on the table. He took each coin and went around our apartment, placing them heads up on windowsills and door frames.

Then he put his hands on Delia’s knees. “All we have to do now,” he said, looking straight into her face, “is wait for the luck.”

“Darling boy,” she said, putting both hands on his cheeks.

That was Jamie. Darling boy.

At night we’d face each other, lying down in the darkness, and we’d press our cheeks against one another so that we could be eye to eye. Our eyes would be black and deep, and yet we’d wait to see the reflection of a point of light, the diamond that shone in our eyes. Then we’d shout the word straight in each other’s ears: Diiiiiaaaamond! Trying to blast each other’s eardrums and laughing fit to bust. I don’t know who thought of the game — it wasn’t a game, really, more like a ritual, a hunt to find the light in the darkness. There were diamonds in our eyes and all our coins were heads up. Everything would be all right.

Delia folded her dresses and the blouses and carefully placed them in the bottom drawer. She looked for work, coming home tired and thinner every day, insisting that she preferred her bread without butter and her tea plain, so that we’d still have bread with butter and sugar for our treat. She tried to take in washing, but others had got there before her. Finally, she found a job cleaning offices at night.

“That’s what our mam did when she came over, on her knees mopping floors,” Da said. “There’s Irish progress for you.”

Delia didn’t laugh. She tied a turban around her bright hair and went off after tea, leaving us to Da’s cooking. A pot on the stove with some kind of thin stew he called slumgullion. When one of us was hungry we’d take a bowl and slop some in, and that was dinner.

I’ve heard people say about their childhoods during the hard times, We didn’t know we were poor, and do you know what? They’re lying.