Mapping Norwood: An Irish-American Memoir

Chapter 5: My Mother’s Chapter

142 5 My Mother’s Chapter Softly , in the dusk, a woman is singing to me; Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings. —D. H. Lawrence, “Piano” I’ve always loved D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Piano,” but I didn’t know why until I started to think back to my childhood. I realized then that the poem echoed one of my earliest memories. I am playing with blocks—ABCs in primary colors—on the yellow linoleum kitchen floor of our family’s apartment in Norwood. As we left that place in the summer of 1947, I was no older than four. I am sitting under the ironing board on which my mother is ironing shirts for my father. I feel the thump of the iron and smell the crisp, clean smell of hot metal on dampened cloth. The radio is on and Mum is singing along with a song. The radio was always on. The steady flow of news, music, soap operas, and baseball games kept her generation of “homemakers ” company. As for those songs my mother sang along with, the ones she really liked, I now realize that there was a ground note of sadness running through most of them. Why was this? World War II, with its myriad deaths and dislocations, had just ended. Before it, there had been the Great Depression, affecting many in her large extended family of tradesmen and laborers. Also, the decade of the Thirties had begun with her mother’s death and closed with her father’s, after a long illness. And both of these events had significantly diverted Mum’s dreams of how her adult life ought to have been getting under way. The songs that had come out of the war registered the enforced, threatfilled absences that went on for years: “We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when, / But I know we’ll meet again, some sunny day. / Keep smiling through, just like you always do, / ’Til the blue skies drive the dark My Mother’s Chapter 143 clouds far away.” One of her favorites was a song of military sacrifice: “There’s a Star-Spangled Banner waving somewhere / In a distant land so many miles away. / Only Uncle Sam’s great heroes get to go there / Where I wish that I could also live some day.” She would put something extra into the litany of heroes—“I’d see Lincoln, Custer, Washington and Perry, / And Nathan Hale and Colin Kelly, too.” Her voice would shake with emotion when she sang “Colin Kelly,” and she explained to me that he was a young man who had stayed at the controls of his doomed plane until his crew could bail out and it was too late for him to escape. Other songs had in common a wistfulness of missed connections, stalled relationships, loneliness. But I notice now that in those my mother sang most often the feelings were likely to be oblique, off-center, deflected by buffering and sometimes humorous conventions. “Little Sir Echo” (“How do you do?”) turns out to be talking to himself: “You’re a nice little fellow / I know by your voice / But you’re always so far away (away).” And in “Playmate,” the context for a similar refusal of contact is a child’s pretence: “Playmate, I cannot play with you / My dolly has the flu / Boo hoo hoo hoo.”Anotherfavoritewas“RedWing,”whichtellsofstar-crossedAmerican Indian lovers out on the prairie—a long way from Norwood: “Now, the moon shines tonight on pretty Red Wing / The breeze is sighing, the night bird’s crying, / For afar ’neath his star her brave is sleeping, / While Red Wing’s weeping her heart away.” All of this music was my initial exposure to rhythm, rhyme, and melody—to poetry, that is.There and then I realized that emotion could be bottled mnemonically and decanted at will. Germans In the nineteenth century, more people came to the United States from Germany than from any other place. In the peak decade of the 1880s, 1.5 million Germans took the chance of an American fresh start. More came from the southwest than any other part of Germany—first from the Palatinate in the central Rhine valley, then farther south from the provinces of Baden and W...