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Authors: J. R. Moehringer
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movie houses in Hell’s Kitchen. After watching over and over whichever western or romance was playing, she’d walk home at dusk and be set upon by poorer kids in the neighborhood who couldn’t afford a ticket. Surrounded by this mob—whom I pictured as a mix of Bowery Boys and Little Rascals—Grandma would re-create dialogue and reenact scenes, and the kids would ooh and aah and applaud, making little Margaret Fritz feel momentarily like a movie star.
Grandma knew her audience. She always stressed a moral sure to have special meaning for her listeners. With me, for instance, she talked about her brothers, three beefy Irishmen straight out of
Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
“Those boys didn’t take any crap,” Grandma would say, her version of “Once upon a time . . .” Her classic story about the Brothers Fritz concerned the night they came home and caught their father punching their mother. They were just young boys, my age, but they took their old man by the throat and told him, “Touch Momma again and we’ll kill you.” Moral: Real men take care of their mothers.
From her brothers Grandma would segue to stories about my other set of cousins, the Byrnes, who lived farther east on Long Island. (I couldn’t keep straight in my head how they were related to me—they were the grandchildren of Grandma’s sister.) There were ten Byrne kids—one daughter and nine sons, whom Grandma put on the same pedestal as her brothers. The Byrne Boys had that same combination of brawn and grace, she said, holding them up to me as “perfect gentlemen,” which I resented. Easy for them to be perfect, I’d think—they have a father. Uncle Pat Byrne was dark and Black Irish handsome and played touch football with his boys every night after work.
At eight years old I was unusually gullible, and yet I was still able to divine the ulterior motive behind many of Grandma’s stories. Though she disliked my father, Grandma understood what I got from his voice and what I lost when his voice vanished, and she was doing what she could to summon new male voices for me. I was grateful, and also vaguely conscious that this wasn’t the only substitution taking place during our cake-and-story sessions. Grandma was being called upon to fill in for my mother, who was working longer hours, more determined than ever to get us out of Grandpa’s house.
As Grandma and I spent more time together, as we grew closer, we both worried that she would run out of material. Eventually our worry came true. Her archive of stories exhausted, she was forced to reach into literature, reciting lyrical passages from Longfellow, her favorite poet, whom she’d memorized as a schoolgirl. I liked Longfellow even better than the Brothers Fritz. I stopped breathing when Grandma recited
The Song of Hiawatha,
stared in awe as she described how the Indian boy’s father vanished soon after he was born, and how Hiawatha’s mother then died, which left the boy to be raised by his grandmother, Nokomis. Despite the warnings of Nokomis, despite her sense of dread, Hiawatha set off in search of his father. The boy had no choice. He was haunted by his father’s voice on the wind.
I enjoyed Grandma’s recollections about her epic brothers, and her poetry recitals about heroic men, but I felt embarrassed, even ashamed, because my favorite stories were about a woman—her mother, Maggie O’Keefe. The oldest of thirteen, Maggie was forced to care for her siblings while her mother was sick or pregnant, and she became a folk hero in County Cork for her many sacrifices, including carrying her baby sister piggyback to school when the sister was too lazy to walk. Maggie vowed that her sister would learn to read and write, something Maggie had always longed to do.
What it was that made Maggie leave Ireland, forsake her siblings and parents and flee to New York in the 1800s, we never knew. We yearned to know, because she was the first in a long line of leavers, the matriarch of
Grandma knew her audience. She always stressed a moral sure to have special meaning for her listeners. With me, for instance, she talked about her brothers, three beefy Irishmen straight out of
Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
“Those boys didn’t take any crap,” Grandma would say, her version of “Once upon a time . . .” Her classic story about the Brothers Fritz concerned the night they came home and caught their father punching their mother. They were just young boys, my age, but they took their old man by the throat and told him, “Touch Momma again and we’ll kill you.” Moral: Real men take care of their mothers.
From her brothers Grandma would segue to stories about my other set of cousins, the Byrnes, who lived farther east on Long Island. (I couldn’t keep straight in my head how they were related to me—they were the grandchildren of Grandma’s sister.) There were ten Byrne kids—one daughter and nine sons, whom Grandma put on the same pedestal as her brothers. The Byrne Boys had that same combination of brawn and grace, she said, holding them up to me as “perfect gentlemen,” which I resented. Easy for them to be perfect, I’d think—they have a father. Uncle Pat Byrne was dark and Black Irish handsome and played touch football with his boys every night after work.
At eight years old I was unusually gullible, and yet I was still able to divine the ulterior motive behind many of Grandma’s stories. Though she disliked my father, Grandma understood what I got from his voice and what I lost when his voice vanished, and she was doing what she could to summon new male voices for me. I was grateful, and also vaguely conscious that this wasn’t the only substitution taking place during our cake-and-story sessions. Grandma was being called upon to fill in for my mother, who was working longer hours, more determined than ever to get us out of Grandpa’s house.
As Grandma and I spent more time together, as we grew closer, we both worried that she would run out of material. Eventually our worry came true. Her archive of stories exhausted, she was forced to reach into literature, reciting lyrical passages from Longfellow, her favorite poet, whom she’d memorized as a schoolgirl. I liked Longfellow even better than the Brothers Fritz. I stopped breathing when Grandma recited
The Song of Hiawatha,
stared in awe as she described how the Indian boy’s father vanished soon after he was born, and how Hiawatha’s mother then died, which left the boy to be raised by his grandmother, Nokomis. Despite the warnings of Nokomis, despite her sense of dread, Hiawatha set off in search of his father. The boy had no choice. He was haunted by his father’s voice on the wind.
I enjoyed Grandma’s recollections about her epic brothers, and her poetry recitals about heroic men, but I felt embarrassed, even ashamed, because my favorite stories were about a woman—her mother, Maggie O’Keefe. The oldest of thirteen, Maggie was forced to care for her siblings while her mother was sick or pregnant, and she became a folk hero in County Cork for her many sacrifices, including carrying her baby sister piggyback to school when the sister was too lazy to walk. Maggie vowed that her sister would learn to read and write, something Maggie had always longed to do.
What it was that made Maggie leave Ireland, forsake her siblings and parents and flee to New York in the 1800s, we never knew. We yearned to know, because she was the first in a long line of leavers, the matriarch of
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