card game for which no one had told me the rules. In many ways, I was to realize as the years went by, I had been right. The McLaughlin family has their own means of communication, secret ways of attack, and fierce allegiances that are unreadable to outsiders. And I have always remained an outsider.
What I did not realize then was that by that point it was fairly rare for all of the McLaughlins to be under one roof at one time. It was school break time—Johnny was only a few weeks from dropping out of high school to enlist in the army, Meggy was home from her Catholic boarding school, and Pat from graduate school. Kelly, Theresa, and Ryan still lived in the stately house in Ridgewood. When the McLaughlins were all together, Catharine was on guard, her eyes moving from her husband to her children’s faces and back again. The children, Kelly included, were a bundle of nervous energy, crackling from time to time in a sharp comment, a kick under the table, a pass at a visiting boyfriend. Ryan laughed hopefully at anything even resembling a joke. Theresa pet the small dog under her chair. She had just found the mutt on the street, and it would be promptly evicted by Patrick after lunch. Kelly held on to my hand as if she were a kite in danger of taking off and I was the sturdy post she happened to grab hold of at the last minute.
My own family rarely ate together. My father, who was going to die of a swift, severe attack of pneumonia in two months’ time, always ate at his office. My mother, a flighty woman who a few years after my father’s death descended into the murky grasp of Alzheimer’s disease, served me dinner each night and hovered while I ate, asking if I needed any extra salt, pepper, or ketchup. It didn’t matter what I was eating— she always eagerly offered those same condiments. I never saw her sit down and eat a proper meal. She liked to pick at food, she said, and she picked all day long in the kitchen.
In any case, due to my unfamiliarity with the experience of a family meal—much less with a family this big and uneasy—and my unpopular aspiration to take Kelly away from this family to live a different, happier life at my side, I was relieved when Patrick pushed back his chair and the meal officially ended. I stayed at the table with Johnny, Pat, and Ryan while the women cleared the dishes. We fiddled with the silverware until it was taken away, and awkwardly chatted about Jack Kennedy and the Dodgers. Then Catharine called me into the kitchen.
This summons seemed fortuitous, since I had been hoping to have a private word with her. The first thing that struck me as I walked through the swinging door was how clean the kitchen was. We had finished eating a big meal no more than ten minutes earlier, and the counters, the floor, the stove, everything was spotless. All the McLaughlin girls had disappeared.
“Thank you for the delicious meal, Mrs. McLaughlin,” I said. “I really enjoyed it.”
Catharine held up her hand. “I realize that you have serious intentions toward my daughter, Mr. Leary. I know about your engineering degree, and your position with the architectural firm. I know that you can provide for my daughter. But I saw you looking to me for approval or assistance during the meal, and I wanted to address that. You need to know that my husband makes the decisions for this family. He cannot be gotten at through Kelly or through me. I will not be able to help you.”
My breath was gone. I realized that the whole house was silent. I imagined all the McLaughlins pressed up against the door behind me, listening. I now understood why Kelly jokingly called her mother “the iron glove.” All I could manage to say was, “I see.”
“Good. Now, are you certain you’ve had enough to eat?”
It took me two more months and a shot of whiskey before I had the nerve to ask Patrick McLaughlin for his daughter’s hand. Patrick didn’t turn off the golf game on the television set while I asked, or while he answered. He kept his eyes on the small white ball the entire time. He said I had his permission to marry his twenty-six-year-old daughter, but only because Kelly was already an old maid and