Terrible Virtue Read Free Page A

childbirth before taking to her bed for the next? A girl who sped from youth to old age with no stop between? But he didn’t notice that. He loved her too much, if you could call that cavalier sex-fueled sentiment love.
    â€œAll she needs is a dose of good Irish whisky,” he insisted.
    Good Irish whisky was his all-purpose cure. He wasn’t entirely wrong about its powers. It cured all his ills.
    I slipped into my mother’s scuffed newspaper-lined shoes. They pinched and rubbed my skin raw, but there was no point in crying out at the pain. Mary lived at the top of the hill. Nan was in Buffalo. The older boys were away all day in the glass factory; the younger boys and Ethel were in school. My father heard nothing but the roar of grief in his ears and the soothing clink of bottle against glass.
    The winter-shortened days passed in an endless round of man-centered chores. My mother asked for little. Later, I’d occasionally regret that I hadn’t made peace with her during those last months. No, peace is the wrong word. My mother had no animus against me. Birthing and nursing and cooking and cleaning for a family of eleven children had left no time for complicated emotions, and if she finally had the leisure to ruminate, she didn’t have the inclination. Poor Anne Higgins, as the neighborhood women called her, as if the adjectival pity were part of her name, loved all her children. That was what infuriated me. I wanted her to admit her regrets. I wanted her to say that if she’d had her choice, as the women on the hill did, if my father believed in French letters as fervently as he did in the single tax and socialism, she would not have spent her life populating the world and cleaning up after it. Like the priest who had taken to visiting when my father was not home, I wanted her to confess.
    But if my mother feared for her sins, she recognized no mistakes. All she saw was the eleven children God had given her, because He could have taken them as easily as the two who died in infancy and the five who perished in her womb. She could resent her children no more than she could blame the husband she loved with a brimstone-courting carnal passion or begrudge the priest who cultivated her soul.
    â€œLook what they’ve done to you,” I shouted one day, gesturing at the cramped room so furiously that my hand hit the wall.
    She just smiled, a beatific worn-out Madonna who didn’t mind being in a stable as long as she was off her feet for a while.
    Do I sound harsh? Having your life wrenched away from you does that. But there was another side to those last months with my mother. Every now and then, I’d let the laundry go unironed or put off starting the supper and spend a quarter of an hour reading to her, or curling her hair after I shampooed it, or, best of all, talking to her, not about the marriage and motherhood I faulted her for, but about the youth she’d never had time to tell me about. I sat beside that drawn gray woman, saw a flaming-haired girl who defied her family for love, and felt a kinship I never had before. She’d once been a firebrand, not for a cause but for my father. She was still a romantic. And the more she reminisced about her youth, the more we reversed roles. She became the child, I the mother. I know now that’s not unusual, but I was young at the time and found it strange, and not unfulfilling. In some inexplicable way, caring for my mother soothed the sting of her neglect.
    She died on Good Friday. By then, the ground had begun to thaw enough for the men to shovel the dirt with easy practiced strokes. My father insisted she had waited intentionally, out of consideration for the gravediggers, out of complicity with herGod. He had even let the priest into the house to administer last rites. He would deny her nothing, now that it was too late.
    Nan arrived from Buffalo for the funeral. Mary came down from the hill with a box of black gloves that Mrs.