Mapping Norwood: An Irish-American Memoir

Preface

xi Preface As the title indicates, this book is an act of mapmaking, of plotting out overlapping territories, both topographical and temporal. These include the Boston area from colonial times to the recent past, the American Civil War, Ireland and Germany in the nineteenth century, encounters with Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and with Harvard College, and aspects of family life in a Massachusetts town from the 1930s to the 1960s. In her essay “Place in Fiction,” Eudora Welty was right, of course.“Location” is “the heart’s field,” in life as in writing.“Place,” she says,“absorbs our earliest notice and attention , it bestows on us our original awareness; and our critical powers spring up from the study of it and the growth of experience inside it. It perseveres in bringing us back to earth when we fly too high. It never really stops informing us, for it is forever astir, alive, changing, reflecting, like the mind of man itself.”As for applicability further down the road,Welty asserts that “one place comprehended can make us understand other places better. Sense of place gives equilibrium; extended, it is sense of direction too.” For me, that place was Norwood, Massachusetts. This book begins there, with the effort of remembering my own “original awareness.” Mapping that territory as I experienced it in the late 1940s and the 1950s has made me realize just how full of advantage this town of 16,000 was for me. I had only to be born there to receive the gift of a secure base from which to grow. In “Endpoint,” his valedictory poetic sequence, John Updike acknowledges his hometown of Shillington, Pennsylvania, in reverential terms with which I completely agree: Perhaps we meet our heaven at the start and not the end of life. Even then were tears and fear and struggle, but the town itself draped in plain glory the passing days. This book contains a chapter for each of my parents and their families, a tangle of tales that counters the “Irish American” subtitle. (As we all know, nobody’s story is that simple.) I am half Irish, to be sure, but also a quarter German and a quarter New England Yankee, and all parts of that mix have contributed to my own sense of self. Both of my parents had been born and raised in Norwood as well. They shared the steadying power of the place, which was also the site of painful losses. Born in 1909 to hybrid Irish Yankee parents, my father, Charles Frederick “Chick” Fanning, was the second of five children. His mother died when he was eight, two years later the family was burned out of an apartment in the middle of the night, and he left school to go to work after sixth grade. His father failed at a number of business ventures even before the Depression, which hit the Fannings hard. The fourth of five, all girls, my mother, Frances Patricia Balduf, was born in 1913 to German and Irish parents. When “Pat” Balduf was sixteen, her mother died and she took over the household, thus ending her dream of college and a teaching career. Before that, her family’s small ethnic community had been rocked by anti-German sentiment during World War I. In addition, her father endured his last illness during the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich. None of this kept my parents from providing their three children with a stable and salutary place in which to grow up. Though I’ve thought a lot about the Fannings and Baldufs, there is much about them that I’ll never understand, and that is one of the lessons of this project. I remain encouraged by William Maxwell, who says in Time Will Darken It that “the history of one’s parents has to be pieced together from fragments, their motives and character guessed at, and the truth about them remains deeply buried, like a boulder that projects one small surface above the level of smooth lawn, and when you come to dig around it, proves to be too large ever to move, though each year’s frost forces it up a little higher.” I knew only one of my grandparents, my father’s father, Charles Winslow Fanning. I didn’t come close to meeting the other three. Mary Ann Shedd Fanning died at age forty in 1918, Johanna Frances McAuliffe Balduf at fifty in 1930, and Edward Everett Balduf at sixty-two in...