“I just couldn’t think of anything,” I wailed, and though Miss Solway was one of my favorite teachers, I added, “It was a dumb topic anyway.” I was almost twelve years old, and I already knew that there are some secrets too big to tell, like the one about my mother and Mr. Conklin and what happened the July that I was ten years old.
That summer was hot, dreadfully, dreadfully hot. We should have been used to it after three years in Hartford, but we weren’t. Days when the thermometer crept up into the eighties and then the nineties, my mother would wipe her face and say, “What I wouldn’t give to be back in Ireland now. It was never imagined to be this hot in Ireland.”
Of course other days Mother “wouldn’t have had Ireland as a gift,” as she’d say, not with my dad dead. “Not an honest day’s work to be had. Nothing but pride, poetry, and ignorance. It’s bad times here, but worse there. You remember that and work hard in school, my girl.” I would promise, of course. I liked school and did well, even though I was in the public school and not with the sisters, who provided a really good education. But Catholic school was out of the question, an unimaginable luxury. Although Mother worked hard, cleaning at the motel and the restaurants, we still lived from week to week. Her pay was usually owed from the moment she got it, and we ate cereal or beans for supper most Wednesdays and Thursdays.
I don’t suppose we’d have managed at all if it weren’t for Mr. Conklin, our tyrant and savior, who was a distant relative of my late father. Mr. Conklin owned a triple-decker house near his “Irish pub.” He also owned a motel and a snack shop at the shabby end of Park Street where the Puerto Rican section stopped and the Portuguese, new immigrants like ourselves, were moving in. Their children went to the big, frightening city schools — rough and full of black people, Mr. Conklin said — while we had the top apartment of his triple-decker just over the city line in an old Irish-Italian neighborhood. The schools in the suburb were much, much better Mr. Conklin said, as “they damn well should be, considering the taxes.” Both the apartment and my admission to the local elementary school were the direct result of Mr. Conklin’s intercession. It was understood that either could be withdrawn at a moment’s notice.
Stout and redfaced with a pug nose and a loud, jovial voice, Joseph P. Conklin was a sentimental bully with unsettling moments of gaiety and kindness. He brought me a doll once — and occasionally chocolates for Mother — and he sang “Danny Boy” every St. Patrick’s Day as the restaurant was closing. But even in his best moments I was leery of him. I hated it when he wanted me to sit on his knee and tell him how I was doing in school. Fortunately his interest was usually focused on his property: the restaurants, his triple-decker, and his motel. He hiked his profits and kept his costs down by employing illegal immigrants like Mother, for whom he had originally gotten a visitor’s visa.
As relatives, Mother and I occupied a privileged position; we were given the apartment and protected from the school authorities. In exchange, Mr. Conklin paid Mother less than the minimum wage and visited every Saturday around five o’clock on his way to the restaurant. If it was nice weather, Mother would send me out on the big front porch of the triple-decker, where I would watch the traffic and try to spit on the drooping heads of the hydrangeas that flanked the front steps far below. If it was bad weather, Mother would tell me to go down and see Annie on the first floor. Annie was a stooped, arthritic old lady with a close and cluttered apartment and a fat gray neutered cat. She was lonely for company and never minded my visits. We would sit companionably, watching her old black and white TV or crocheting, until I heard Mr. Conklin’s smart patent leather loafers descending the stairs. Then I would tell Annie I had to go to dinner.
Upstairs, Mother would set the table and lay out dishes without saying much. When we first came, she’d cried and talked to her saint and said Aileen — this was Mr. Conklin’s wife, who’d had polio and was in a wheelchair — would put a stop to it; later on, she was flustered and ashamed; finally she was bitter. That was when she realized we were trapped. Mr. Conklin relied on that. “You’re nobody,” I heard him say to her once. “Nobody knows you’re here. You’re invisible and be damn glad you are or Immigration’ll have you back on the blessed Old Sod before you can pack your bags.”
Working in the restaurant and the motel and being visited by Mr. Conklin changed my mother. She lost the prettiness I can see in her old photographs, and she lost the playfulness and sweetness that she had when my dad was alive. She grew tired and silent and tough. I was not tough — not then and not for many years. That July I was still afraid of the dark people at the far end of the street and of the sirens and night noises and of Mr. Conklin, who held our lives in his clean, meaty hands.
Since Mother was out working during the day, I spent afternoons in the local park, where there was a pool, picnic tables, a playground, and an organized recreation program. Whenever the swim team or adults had the pool, the rec department supervisors encouraged us in messy arts and crafts and group singing. Eventually, some of us formed a chorus, and the plan was that we would sing for our parents and for the local convalescent home at the end of the summer.
Everything about the chorus was wonderfuclass="underline" the rehearsals under the maple trees during the hot afternoons, the schmaltzy songs like “It’s a Small World” and “Frere Jacques,” the giggling groups of gossipy, self-important little girls. The only difficulty came when the chorus voted to wear dresses for our concerts. I had a skirt for Mass, of course, but for the concerts a dress, preferably a pretty sundress, was essential, and for weeks I teased Mother and scoured the newspaper ads for sales. Finally she announced that she’d gotten some material. Secretly I would have preferred something from Caldor’s or Ames, but the material she pulled out of the bag — light blue with small pink and yellow flowers — was soft and pretty.
“With a ruffle,” I asked. “Can we have it with a ruffle?”
Mother smiled. I look at her pictures now and think how pretty she was, how very pretty before she grew tired and overworked and tough. Once she had liked nice clothes, been flirtatious, carefree, popular; she understood the importance of a ruffle. Mother started the dress early the next morning, before she went off on the bus to clean at the motel, and she finished it late the same week, after she came in from mopping up the snack bar. On Saturday morning, I found the dress waiting for me, a pinafore style with ruffles around the arm holes and two pockets on the skirt.
I put it on. It was not just a perfect fit but a perfect, transforming dress. I was undersized, bony and plain. In the dress, I seemed dainty; the effect was charming; I was enchanted.
“Take it off and hang it up,” said Mother. “You’ll have it dirty before the day’s out. It has to be kept for good.”
I hung the sundress up in our closet, but as soon as I came back from the park, I ran to look at it, to stroke the ruffles and spread out the skirt. And when, just around four, the phone rang and Mother had to go out on an errand, I could not resist trying on my dress again.
I dragged a kitchen chair into the bathroom and climbed up to look in the mirror of the medicine cabinet. I was standing there admiring myself when I heard the knock on the door followed by the sound of a key turning in the lock.
“Are you home, Patsy?” Mr. Conklin was the only one who ever called my mother Patsy.
“Patsy?” I heard him walking softly through the living room and down the hall. For a fattish man he had a light tread.
I didn’t want to see him, and if I hadn’t been afraid of dirtying my dress, I’d have slipped under the bed. In my moment of hesitation he appeared in the doorway.