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