My Mother Takes My Father to Find His Mother’s Grave

Adam notices that Eve is holding something close as they leave the garden. He asks her what she carries so carefully. She replies that it is a little of the apple core that she’s keeping for their children.

From the autobiography of William Butler Yeats

The bastard is looked upon with great coldness, aye, and his children’s children.

So we got in the car to go to the cemetery to go find Dad’s birth mother’s grave and we took the piece of paper Sheila gave us with the information, or we thought we did, but Dad forgot it so we had to turn around in Neponset and drive all the way back to get it. And the traffic—shit. I haven’t been to the North Shore for so long, I almost got lost. I was okay until I got out of Somerville. I know Revere, but I don’t know Malden too good.

Anyway, finally we got to Malden, and then I knew the way by heart. Remember Nonie’s funeral—all that rain and mud? You probably wrote it all down in your notebook, you don’t miss a trick. At Holy Cross Cemetery we parked near the cemetery gate and went into the office. Dad was so nervous, I thought he was gonna walk out and hitchhike home, I kid you not. But I told the secretary about Dad’s mother and she was very interested—very interested. All those years you couldn’t talk about this shit, it was all hush-hush, and now suddenly everyone’s interested in illegitimate children and all those poor girls. Mostly Irish. I wonder why? At least they didn’t get abortions like nowadays.

So the secretary looked through the index cards—oh you’d love it, the old wooden cabinets and all the names with cause of death—like a card catalogue at the library—you’d eat it up. There must a been a hundred

Mary Sullivans in one drawer. This lady—her name was Josie—had really long red fingernails, and they kept snagging on the cards. But she couldn’t find a Mary Christine Sullivan who died in 1950.

But then we remembered that Sullivan wasn’t Dad’s mother’s last name when she died, because she met that Hegarty guy and married him right after she stopped coming to see Dad when he was a baby at the Nortons. And then she had the three legitimate kids. So we should a been looking for Mary Hegarty. Poor woman, don’t you think she got the cancer because of what she did—her big secret—having a baby and giving him up? They think they know how people get cancer, these scientists, but they don’t know nothing. I think it ate at her. Only forty-two years old when she died. What a shame.

Anyway, this Josie told us to look in St. Bridget’s Lane for the stone, so we walked and walked till I couldn’t walk no more. Dad can walk, he walks everywhere, but my knees—I had to sit and rest on a wet bench. Do you remember going there to visit my father’s grave? Thousands of gravestones, all alike, all the Italian and Irish names, and once in a while a French Canuck or a Polack—oh, I got goosebumps. And we got so lost. I’ve never been so lost in my life.

So I said, ‘Dick, let’s just go visit Ma’s and Pa’s grave,’ cause of course I know by heart where my parents are buried. You remember? So we walked over to the Cammarata stone and can you believe it, it’s not even Thanksgiving yet and there’s a poinsettia on the grave. And you know who put it there? Who do you think? My sister Rosie, of course. The bitch. So we stood there and said a Hail Mary.

In the olden days they waked people at home in the parlor. So my father’s body was in the parlor. And oh that Rosie—one night she locked me in the room with his corpse. I’ll never forget it. Nineteen-fifty—I was fourteen. You see why I call her a bitch? My mother sewed up some purple bunting and hung it on the door so everyone would know there was a death in the family. Yeah, she outlived him by 44 years and didn’t stop wearing black until 1963. And then President Kennedy was assassinated and she wore black again for a while but by the time you kids were in school she was wearing flowered housedresses.

Anyway, we’re standing at Ma’s and Pa’s grave, praying, and I look up and I can’t believe my eyes—I kid you not—two rows away, right behind the Cammarata plot I been taking Dad to since we met at United Shoe in 1958—you remember we brought lilies every year?—well, right there— right there, right behind my parents’ plot!—I see a stone that says “Mary Christine Hegarty, Ireland, 1908 - Boston, 1950.”

I almost had a heart attack! I said, ‘Dick, Dick—look up,’ and I pointed at his mother’s stone. And he said, ‘Jesus, Mary,’ because he thought I was acting crazy. And then he looked up and he saw what I saw, and he started shaking. And he walked across the lane and crossed himself and threw himself on the grave of the mother he never knew. Crying like a baby.

In the car, he couldn’t stop shivering. He had to wrap himself in that quilt Nonie made from the scraps of her scraps. He was all soaked from the wet grass. Didn’t I tell you it rained up here all weekend? I didn’t?

Jesus, it was like the sky was crying.

by Linda Norton