When she was thirteen, she started working at the Laundromat. The first time she got paid, after kneading the bills awhile between her thumb and forefinger, she spread them on the table before her and did some math. If she kept working and saved every dollar she could, she wouldnt need anything at all from her parents once she was done with high school maybe even before. The prospect excited her, though excitement gave way to sadness. She didnt want to think of not needing anything from them. She would save her money for them.
Her mother drank harder than her father ever had, as though she were trying to make up for lost time. Eileen started tending to her needs in a prophylactic rather than merely reactive way. She made coffee, kept a constant supply of aspirin waiting for her, and lay a blanket over her when she fell asleep on the couch.
One night, Eileen came into the living room and saw that her mothers head was bobbing in that way it did when she fought sleep to hold on to a last few moments of conscious drunkenness. Sitting with her was easiest then. She was too far gone to say something tart and withering but could still register Eileens presence with a tiny fluttering of the eyelid.
Eileen took a seat next to her and felt wetness under her hand. At first she thought her mother had spilled her drink.
She was terrified to change her mothers clothes, because there was a chance her mother might realize what was going on, but she couldnt just let her sit there in that sopping spot all night. She managed to remove her wet clothes and wrap her in a robe. Then she lay her back down on the dry part of the couch. Getting her to bed would be much harder.
Eileen sat on her haunches next to the couch and guided her mothers head and shoulders from her lap to the floor, then dragged the rest of her down. Once she had her there, she slid her along by hooking her arms up under her mothers armpits. Her mother was making murmuring noises. When Eileen got her to the bed, though, she couldnt lift her up into it. Her mother had stirred to more wakefulness and was trying to stay on the floor.
Let me get you up, Ma, she said.
Ill sleep right here.
You cant sleep on the floor.
I will, she said, the end of the word trilling off. Her brogue came back when she was drunk or angry.
Its cold on the floor. Let me lift you up.
Leave me be.
I wont do that.
Eileen tried for a while and then gave up and lay on her mothers bed to rest. When she awoke it was to the sound of her father coming home from tending bar. She went to the kitchen and saw him sitting at the table with a glass of water.
Can you pick Ma up? Shes on the floor.
He stood without a word and followed her. It occurred to her that, except on Mr. Kehoes last night, shed never seen her father enter that bedroom. In the light streaming in from the kitchen, her mother looked like a pile of dirty sheets on the floor.
Eileen watched him pick her mother up with astounding ease, as if he could have done it with one hand instead of two. One of his arms was cradling her head. Her long limbs hung down; she was fast asleep. He took his time laying her in the bed. He looked at her lying there. Eileen heard him say Bridgie once quietly, more to himself than her mother, before he pulled the blanket over her and smoothed it across her shoulders.
Eileen watched him pick her mother up with astounding ease, as if he could have done it with one hand instead of two. One of his arms was cradling her head. Her long limbs hung down; she was fast asleep. He took his time laying her in the bed. He looked at her lying there. Eileen heard him say Bridgie once quietly, more to himself than her mother, before he pulled the blanket over her and smoothed it across her shoulders.
Go to bed now yourself, he said, and shut the door behind him.
Imagine all of Woodside filled with trees, Sister Mary Alice was telling her eighth-grade class. Imagine a gorgeous, sprawling, untouched estate of well over a hundred acres. That is what was here, boys and girls. What is now your neighborhood, all of it, every inch, once belonged to a single family that traces its roots back to the very beginnings of this country.
A garbage truck in front of the school emitted a few loud coughs, and Sister paused to let it pass. The rolled-up map above the blackboard swayed slightly, and Eileen imagined it unfurling and hitting Sister in the head.
The grandson of one of the early Puritan founders of Cambridge, Massachusetts, built a farmhouse near this spot, on a massive plot of land hed bought. Sister started walking around the room with a book held open to a page that contained pictures of the house. His heirs converted that farmhouse into a manor house. This manor houseSister practically spat the wordshad a wide hall leading to a large front parlor. It had a back parlor with a huge fireplace, a grand kitchen, a brass knocker on the door. It had an orchard to one side. The insistent way Sister counted off the houses virtues made it sound as if she was building a case against it in court. After a few generations, they sold the estate to a Manhattan-based merchant from South Carolina to use as a weekend retreat. Then, in the latter half of the last century, when the train lines expanded, a real estate developer saw an opportunity. He cleared the estates trees, drained its swamps, laid out the streets you walk on today, and carved it into nearly a thousand lots that he distributed by random drawing. He opened the door to the middle class, letting them pay in installments of ten dollars a month. Houses were built. The last vestige of the estate, the manor house, was razed in 1895 to make room for the church, and, eventually, the school youre sitting in right now.
Eileen was watching the frowning white face of the clock at the front of the room when Sister came up to her with the book. Her gaze drifted lazily to the pictures, but once she saw them she couldnt take her eyes off them, and when Sister moved down the row, Eileen asked her to come back for a second.
The Queensboro Bridge was completed in 1909, and then the LIRR East River tunnel the following year, and they began laying out the IRT Flushing line the seven train to you station by station, starting in 1915. The Irish your grandparents, maybe your parents began coming across the river in droves, seeking relief from the tenement slums of Manhattan. They wound up in Woodside. Imagine ten people to an apartment, twenty. Then, in 1924providence. The City Housing Corporation began building houses and apartments to alleviate the density problem. Sister had made it back to the front of the room. The faint outline of a smile of triumph crept onto her lips as she addressed her final arguments to the jury. This is the way the Lord works. To those who have little, he gives. Isnt it nice to think of all of you here instead of it just one privileged family in a mansion in the woods? Wouldnt you agree, Miss Tumulty?
Eileen had been daydreaming about the demolished mansion shed just seen the picture of. Sisters question snapped her to attention. Yes, she said. Yes.
But all she could think was what a shame it was theyd knocked that house down. A big, beautiful house in the country with land around it that wasnt a bad thing at all.
And think of this, Sister Mary Alice said in closing. Not a single one of you would be here if that estate were still around. None of us would. We simply wouldnt exist.
Eileen looked around at her classmates and tried to conceive of a reality in which none of them had come into being. She thought of the little apartment she lived in with her parents. Would it be a loss if it had never been built?
She pictured herself on a couch in that mansion, looking out a window at a stand of trees. She saw herself sitting with her legs crossed as she flipped through the pages of a big book. Someone had to be born in a house like that; why couldnt it have been her?
Maybe she wouldnt have been born there, but shed have been born somewhere, and shed have found a way to get there, even if the others didnt.
Some nights she went up the block to see her aunt Kitty and her cousin Pat, who was four and a half years younger than her. Her uncle Paddy, her fathers older brother, had died when Pat was two, and Pat looked up to her father like he was his own father.
Eileen had grown up reading to Pat. Shed delivered him to school an early reader, and he could write when the other kids were still learning the alphabet. He was whip-smart, but his grades didnt show it because he never did his homework. He read constantly, as long as it wasnt for school.
She sat him at the kitchen table and made him open his schoolbooks. She told him he had to get As, that anything less was unacceptable. She said there was no end to what he could do with her help. She told him she wanted him to be successful, and rich enough to buy a mansion. She would live in a wing of it. He just rushed through his work and read adventure stories. All he wanted to do when he grew up was drive a Schaefer truck.
Her mothers morning powers of self-mastery, so impressive in the early days, began to dry up, until, when Eileen was a freshman in high school shed earned a full scholarship to St. Helenas in the Bronx they evaporated overnight. Her mother went in late to Lofts one day, and then she did so again a couple of days later, and then she simply stopped going in at all. One day she passed out in the lobby and the police carried her upstairs. After the officers left her father being who he was meant nothing would get written up Eileen didnt say a word or try to change her mother into clean clothes, because her mother would be embarrassed, and Eileen still feared her wrath, even when her mother was slack as a sack of wheat, because the memory of her mother taking the hanger to her when she misbehaved as a child was never far from her mind.
The next day, when they were both at the kitchen table, her mother smoking in silent languor, Eileen told her she was going to call Alcoholics Anonymous. She didnt mention that shed gotten the number from her aunt Kitty, that shed been talking to others in the family about her mothers problem.
Do what you want, her mother said, and then watched with surprising interest as Eileen dialed. A woman answered; Eileen told her that her mother needed help. The woman said they wanted to help her, but her mother had to ask for help herself.
Eileens heart sank. Shes not going to ask for help, she said, and she felt tears welling up. She saw her mothers darting eyes notice the tears, and she wiped them quickly away.
We need her to ask for assistance before we can take action, the woman said. Im very sorry. Dont give up. There are people you can talk to.