Born with Teeth: A Memoir (2 page)

She looked at him, smiled, and went back to her work.

Some weeks later, my father and my grandmother decided to send my mother on a cruise. My father bought my mother new dresses and a new coat, not only to accommodate her fifth pregnancy but because she had become so thin, having subsisted for weeks on a diet of cigarettes and coffee. I can’t remember whether she kissed me good-bye or not, but it didn’t matter because I knew I would be spending many days alone in my room, watching the other kids playing in the Odd Lot, secure in the knowledge that it was I, and I alone, who had killed my sister Maggie that fateful day when I had forced the ice water into her lungs.

I had tried to tell my mother, but she wouldn’t listen. And now it was too late.

To atone for his sins, and the regularity with which he committed them, my father drove into the countryside one Sunday afternoon when I was six years old and did something marvelous. He bought a house. Certainly, it was a gift for his wife, who had tired of town life and longed for solitude, surrounded, as she was, by an ever-deepening pool of offspring. To add to the first three, my father had committed two new sins, whom they called Laura and Tessie and who had arrived so quickly and unceremoniously it was as if they were pulled out of a hat. Perhaps that was my father’s intention: a magic trick so dazzling that my mother would be forced to shake off her sadness and leave the memory of Maggie behind.

As it turned out, we left everything we’d known behind and traveled what seemed great distances, across highways, through valleys, and onto curious and foreign gravel roads until suddenly we came upon a place so vast and beautiful as to appear unreal. We were very little—Tom, Joe, Laura, Tess, and me—but
even very small children know paradise when they see it, and this was paradise. The driveway led up to a big brick house with a wide front porch that opened onto a sweeping lawn studded with magnificent trees. There were cornfields to the right as far as the eye could see and, to the left, a shadowy glen that we would learn turned into a secret timberland, and beyond that timberland, a ribbon of creek wound its way over hills and through valleys of untamed farmland.

The house had been built in the 1850s, Italianate in design, with high ceilings and clean, stately lines. It contained surprises of every kind, awe-inspiring novelties such as a maid’s room and a stairway for servants, wooden shutters that closed over floor-to-ceiling windows, a basement cool and deep, full of dark corners and secret caves.

Upstairs, there were five bedrooms and a long, curved stairway with a smooth mahogany banister that served as the main artery to the downstairs, in which every room had a distinct purpose. The “good” living room eventually evolved into a formal living room, but in the beginning it is where we all slept, camp-style, in sleeping bags on the floor. There was a comfortable middle room that we dubbed the “TV room” because the single television set we owned but were never allowed to watch was put in there to serve as a reminder of a dream that might come true if only we behaved like perfect children, along with the stereo set, all of Mother’s books, a complete set of
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
and my father’s prize photograph of a Sioux Indian chief who had swallowed a bumblebee. The dining room, airy and graceful, had windows on all sides, and almost every room boasted a fireplace, which, to us, was unspeakably thrilling. The main kitchen led into the summer kitchen, which was tenuously attached to the house, and then, beyond the back door and very close to the big house, was another, smaller house, which we immediately christened the Ghost House, and
beyond this a chicken coop, an apple orchard, and a red barn with a silo.

This modest estate was called Derby Grange. My father had stumbled across the place on one of his Sunday drives, had been invited in for a drink, and left four hours and twenty-one thousand dollars later the proud owner of not only the house but also the forty acres of land that surrounded it. Because of this unexpected and astounding gift, I instantly and unconditionally forgave my father all of his sins and, in fact, decided that it was the one place on earth capacious and beautiful enough to accommodate all of my siblings, despite their shortcomings.

During the day Tom, Joe, and I attended the one-room schoolhouse down the road called, appropriately, the Derby Grange School. In it, six grades of children matriculated in short rows consisting of no more than five chairs each. Ellen Birch, tall and peculiar, stared at us with unblinking black eyes from her lonely solo seat in the fifth grade. In the back, there was an outhouse, inglorious and filthy, and, for recess, a small yard with a swing set. A dirt ditch marked the school boundary. Mrs. Hartley was the teacher for all six grades, a jolly woman whom my brother Tom wooed with large jars of mayonnaise spiked with ketchup. He got straight As. I, however, did not, because next to me sat the infamous Peggy Hickey, who was forever whispering nonsense in my ear but who nonetheless brought a lunch box to school so full of delightful things that I couldn’t help but respond to her incessant questions and even managed to overlook the fact that she allegedly wore a diaper instead of underpants, so desperate was I for a nibble of anything that resembled real food.

At home, my little mother went about the business of making Derby Grange her own, but maybe because she herself was so petite and because she smoked incessantly and drank endless cups of coffee, dinner was always a disappointment. The fanfare
that preceded the event, however, was executed with élan every night.

If it was chicken and rice, we were going to Seville! If it was overcooked meatloaf and undersized mashed potatoes, it nonetheless came from a Craig Claiborne recipe, so pretend you’re eating at the 21 Club in New York! And if it was fish sticks, tepid brown pellets served on a cookie sheet every Friday night, she’d sigh and say, “I didn’t make the rules.” So much anticipation, and so little actual food. We never saw bread or fruit or sweets of any kind, and one small chicken divided among five starving children did not the trick do. We were always hungry, so much so that Mother tempered our appetites with criticism. “Joe, you look like a tiny truck driver hunched over the wheel—sit up!” “Kitten, keep eating like that and you’ll blow up like a balloon!” “Laura, for God’s sake get out from under the table—what are you
doing
down there? Very odd child.” And then, infuriatingly, “Tom, would you like to take Mrs. Hartley another jar of mayonnaise? She loves your secret concoction, doesn’t she?” Followed by complicit chuckles between mother and son and accompanied by the sound of five little mouths voraciously sucking on chicken wings the size of paper clips.

We discovered other ways to subdue our hunger. My mother was never one for conventional boundaries, and so we were free to do as we liked every day after school and on weekends. We hiked for miles, we swam in Gronau’s Creek, we played every conceivable kind of game our imaginations could contrive, such as seeing who could hold on longest to the electric cattle fence at Breitbachs’ farm, who could jump from the hayloft into Willie Breitbach’s arms without looking, who could spear the most frogs and, encouraged by my brother Tom the great wordsmith, take them home to Mother and say, “Look, Mom, a whole jar of little bastards!” We had fights with cow pies and fights with snowballs and fights to the finish. We had contests to see who
could hold their breath long enough to faint, at which point we would run over and pummel the semiconscious person’s chest, shouting, “Live, you must live!”

We organized freak shows over which my brother Tom presided, calling us into the neighbor kid’s bedroom to observe, for only a nickel, the little guy’s minute erection. We were often gone for hours, and when we would finally return home, exhausted, thirsty, and complaining of starvation, my mother would glance up from her book and say, “You should be grateful. You were born in wedlock, you’re an American citizen, and you live on dry land. Now go back outside and play.”

In the early years of their marriage, my father was infatuated with my mother and upon occasion was inspired to wax lyrical about his love for her. In the dead of night, we would all be awakened, hurried into winter coats and boots, and made to stand outside in the front yard in a straight line, where Dad, pointing toward Mother’s bedroom window, would begin his testimonial. “In that room lies an extraordinary woman, a remarkable woman, a beautiful woman. She is the woman I love. And she is your mother.” We needed to bear witness to his devotion until the bitter end, at which time, white with cold, we were sent off to our beds with a fond if brusque dismissal, leaving our father still standing there, face upturned toward her light.

One afternoon, while my father was at work, I heard my mother’s voice from upstairs, calling to me: “Katy Kitten Kat Mulgrew, get up these stairs, quickly!” I ran up the stairs and saw my mother standing in the bathroom just off the landing. She beckoned me to come in and indicated that I should close the door behind me. Then, pointing to the toilet basin, she said: “I need you to bear witness.” The bright crimson toilet bowl was full of strange clumps of dark brown debris. Mother stood over the basin and, making the Sign of the Cross, said, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy
Ghost. Amen.” She flushed the toilet. “I’m going to lie down for a minute, Kitten,” my mother said, “I’m having a sinking spell.”

Soon enough, however, another little face peered out from within the bassinette. My parents named him Sam, and he was a quiet baby, towheaded and serious. We older kids never paid much attention to who was in the bassinette, since obviously such a creature could make little if any contribution to the tribal elders, an elite group consisting of Tom and me with the occasional bone thrown to Joe, whose volatility often had us elders on tenterhooks.

In the second grade, I fell in love with a plump-cheeked, bespectacled boy named George, whose quiet, serious demeanor intrigued me. So entranced was I by his eyeglasses, and the fact that not only adults but evidently little kids could wear them, that I didn’t see Peggy Hickey pumping hard on the swing and flying toward me like a bat out of hell, and before I knew it I was out for the count, blood streaming from my forehead.

My mother, upon being notified, asked if someone would walk me home, and when I arrived, she applied a Band-Aid to the wound and told me to lie down and take a nap. She had a friend over for lunch, and this woman, the mother of sixteen children, took one look at me and said, “Joan, this girl needs stitches and she needs them now!” Whereupon we set off on an adventure that resulted in twelve stitches sewn laboriously into my brow and a nice doctor who said to my mother, “Your daughter’s lucky—another inch and she’d be missing an eye.” When we got into the car to drive home, she pulled out of the hospital parking lot and said, “I think that doctor was a bit of a flirt, don’t you?”

In the third grade, we had a new teacher called Mrs. Rideras. She was tall with pitch-black hair and a nice, if slightly severe, manner. She was no Mrs. Hartley, that’s for sure, as my brother
quickly learned when he attempted to dazzle her with his culinary masterpiece. “Pink mayonnaise? Oh no, Tommy, I don’t think so.” Mrs. Rideras sat at her desk, instead of strolling among us as Mrs. Hartley used to do, and she had insisted that a phone be installed in the classroom in case of emergencies.

One day the phone rang, and Mrs. Rideras picked it up. “Derby Grange schoolhouse, this is Mrs. Rideras.” Twenty-five faces looked up expectantly, each hoping that it was an emergency requiring his or her immediate dismissal from school. At first, we were perplexed by Mrs. Rideras’s silence—weren’t phone calls supposed to work both ways? She held the phone rigidly to her ear and then, reacting as if someone had actually hit her, Mrs. Rideras winced, her eyes filled with tears, and, after what seemed an eternity, she whispered, “I see. Yes, I see.” She put the phone down and, turning to the class, said, “Go home, children. The president of the United States has been shot, and you must all go home.”

Assuming a solemnity we neither understood nor truly felt, we all left the schoolhouse and made our respective ways home. There were no cars and no buses. Everyone walked. Our house was a quarter of a mile down the road, and we walked toward it slowly, sensing that what awaited us would not be good. When we arrived at the stone gates, we were surprised to see the driveway filled with cars. We entered through the back door and slipped into the kitchen unnoticed. From there, we could observe what was happening in the living room. The scene was disturbing. My father was the Dubuque County Democratic chairman, and it was not unusual to see him in the company of his political cronies, but it was extremely rare, and very unsettling, to see so many men gathered together in a confined space, watching the television in the middle of a weekday. They stood in absolute silence, their faces riveted to the screen. The room was thick with cigarette smoke.

I crept past them, through the kitchen and dining room, and it was then that I saw my mother. She was alone, perched at the top of the stairs. One hand was under her chin, elbow on knee, and the other grasped a banister rail.

Her hair was unkempt, and she was wearing a soiled apron that only slightly concealed the omnipresent pregnancy, but what struck me most was the look in her eye when I called up to her. It was a look I had seen once before and would see only once again in years to come, and it was a look that so frightened me, I actually could not move toward her.

Blank, vacant, empty eyes looked not at me but past me, and I knew my mother was lost in a memory I could never understand, nor ever be allowed to share. Some ancient sadness behind her eyes made me feel utterly helpless and alone. She wasn’t my mother in that moment; she was someone else entirely, a stranger to whom my existence mattered not at all.