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Mary smiled. It could be a lot worse. Melina could want to play the piano. She held her tongue: no smart remarks. “Not terribly,” she said, thinking of people who played the banjo back in Gastonia. “I think we could try to ‹nd one that’s more or less affordable. I mean, a banjo—it’s for everybody. Isn’t it?” 17 The summer of 1968 Alex telephoned from her work at a mental hospital, thrilled because an inmate had tried to set her hair on ‹re. It’s a sign from God, she told Mary. “How is that?” Mary asked. “Like the tongues of ›ame on the Pentecost!” “Ah,” said Mary. A summer internship for theology students at the state hospital in Sedro Wooley, Washington, with her living expenses paid by the Jesuits at Seattle University, seemed to be reconciling Alex somehow to the faith, after years of anguish over the denial of women’s vocations. “Am I not made in God’s image?” she had cried to Tony last year in Chicago. “Oh dear,” said Tony, putting her hand over her heart. “We’re all made in his image, they say, but I don’t think a man would want to confess his sins to a woman.” As if that should settle it. Alex, ›abbergasted, refrained from arguing. She was always loving toward her Chicago relatives. But her ‹rst few years at Seattle University she almost changed religions over her desire to become a priest. Preparing to become a professor of theology so that she could explain to young seminarians why there was in fact no theological reason that she could not join them at the altar—the confusion of it, she told Mary, threatened her soul. “The church wants me to become complicit in its own hypocrisy,” she said, “or something,” a little startled at her own bold words. But experiences at Sedro Wooley changed her thinking. When her hair nearly caught ‹re, she recognized her true calling, to become a psychiatrist. 163 “Take up your pallet and walk,” she said over the phone. “That’s what I’m called to do, to help people move, to get on with it, rise from the paralysis of disease!” Mary was so relieved. Even though this would mean medical school and phenomenal quantities of money. Dean Holbus rewrote her life insurance policy and from the dividends managed to extract a few thousand dollars cash. In the fall of 1968, with Alex in premed in Seattle, Sharon in Fairbanks , Becky up at Marquette, Michigan, and Sean heading off to Ann Arbor, Mary would have only one child left at home, her banjo-picking , daydreaming, tall-as-a-pine-tree baby girl. Melina at ‹fteen, a junior in high school, appeared to be on her way to a self-determined future just like her sisters. She had shot up in the past two years, the tallest by far of Mary’s daughters; she was outspoken and talented, as far as Mary could see. Her grades were ragged, her report card always brought a couple of unpleasant surprises, but there was still time to improve if she could stick to a plan. If she wanted a scholarship bad enough. In mid-August Melina joined Sean and Becky on a ‹eld trip to the UP, to deliver Becky back to Northern Michigan University in Marquette , via the White‹sh lighthouse—Melina was mad for lighthouses —and they spent two nights camping, just the three of them, on the shore of Lake Superior. After they returned home, Mary, Sean, and Melina packed up again and headed south for a quick visit to Chicago before school started. Mary imagined browsing with Melina through Marshall Field’s, choosing skirts and jumpers, fussing a little, having a rare bit of time just for the two of them to celebrate Melina’s becoming a young woman, but instead Melina wanted to ‹nd the navy surplus store. She wanted corduroy jeans and a blue denim shirt and a sailor’s peacoat that didn’t show off her pretty ‹gure at all. You can’t argue with adolescent girls about clothing, it’s not worth it, Mary reminded herself, disappointed. Nor with boys about the length of their hair. She wouldn’t even have been tempted. Sean’s sun-bleached hair, which turned banana yellow every summer, fell down his neck. Men snarled at him in Miltonia , but Mary thought his hair was pretty. Jim had never grown his much...
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