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