Rare Objects Read Free Page A

he wasn’t just a man but an era; the golden age in Ma’s life, illuminated by optimism and possibility, gone before I was born. I’d grown up praying to him, begging for his guidance and mercy, imagining him always there, watching over me with those inquisitive, unblinking eyes. God the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, and Michael Fanning. In my mind, the four of them sat around heaven, drinking tea, smoking cigarettes, taking turns choosing the forecast for the day.
    â€œWhat time are you going to mass?”
    â€œSix o’clock. I want to go to confession before.”
    Confession.
    Now there was the rub. I certainly wasn’t going to confession.
    â€œWell,” I said vaguely, “I’ll see what I can do, Ma.”
    My parents met in Bray, a small seaside town in county Wicklow, Ireland. Fresh from university, Michael Fanning turned his back on his family’s considerable resources to teach at the local comprehensive, where Ma was a student in her final year. After a brief and clandestine courtship they married, against both their parents’ wishes, when she was just seventeen. They planned to immigrate to New York, where Michael’s cousin was already established. But he contracted influenza, and within three days was dead. No one from either family came to the funeral.
    With what little money remained after burial costs, seventeen-year-old Nora set sail for America rather than turn to her family for help. The only ticket she could afford landed her in Boston, and so I was born six months later, in a tiny one-room apartment above a butcher’s shop in the North End, with no heat, hot water, or bathroom. I was delivered by the butcher’s wife, Mrs. Marcosa, who didn’t speak English and had seven children of her own, most of them kneeling round the bed praying as their mother, sleeves rolled high on her thick arms, shouted at my terrified mother in Italian. When I finally appeared, they all danced, applauded, and cheered.
    â€œIt was one of the most wonderful and yet humiliating days of my life,” Ma used to say. “The Marcosa children all loved to hold you because of your red hair. They found it fascinating. The whole neighborhood did. I couldn’t go half a block without someone stopping me.”
    She took in seamstress work during the day, piecing together cotton blouses for Levin’s garment factory nearby, and in the evenings she traveled across town to clean offices, taking me with her in a wicker laundry basket, wrapped in blankets. Setting me on the desks, she made her way through the offices, dusting, polishing, and scrubbing, singing in her low soft voice from eight until midnight before heading back across the sleeping city.
    But she always hungered for more. And even when she joined the alterations department at Stearns, she’d already had her sights set on moving from the workroom to the sales floor. She enrolled in Sunday-afternoon speech classes from an impoverished spinster in Beacon Hill, taking me with her so that I could learn to enunciate without the telltale lilt of her brogue or, worse, the flat vowels of the Boston streets. I suppose that’s something we have in common—the unshakable conviction we’re destined for better things.
    Year after year she continued to apply for a sales position, ignoringthe rejections and snubs, refusing to try elsewhere. “It’s the finest department store in the city,” she maintained. “I’d rather mop floors there than anywhere else.” She could endure anything but failure.
    Stubbornness is another trait we share.
    She still wore the plain, slim gold band her husband had given her on her wedding ring finger, not just as a reminder but also as a safeguard against unwanted male attention.
    â€œYour father would’ve been proud of you, Maeve, getting your secretarial degree.” She took a final drag from her cigarette, stubbed the end out in the sink.
    I