With Patience and Fortitude: A Memoir Read Free Page B

importance of helping people—or, if you put it in a religious framework, which I think she did, corporal works of mercy or living the beatitudes.
    Whenever there was an injustice in the neighborhood, Mommy took care of it. Ellen remembers, “She had this ridiculous trench coat with excessive jewelry on it, and whenever anything required her attention in the neighborhood, she would grab her trench coat, head out the door, and whatever the problem was, she’d get it resolved.” For example, we had Italian neighbors who didn’t speak English; she would go with them to the school over and over, to help their kids get the services they needed.
    Although she really wanted to, going back to work was not in the stars for my mother. It frustrated her terribly. In the years before she died, she was trying to teach herself typing so she’d have a better skill set when she started looking for a job. She had a typewriter on her desk and next to it was a self-instruction book called How to Type. She was frustrated and angry that she didn’t get to do the things she wanted to do. Angry that she was sick. Angry that she was scarred. Angry that her life didn’t turn out the way she’d hoped. Just thinking about all her sorrows makes me sad for her.
    In the end, I believe my mother wanted Ellen and me to have all the things that had eluded her. She wanted us to be able to do whatever we wanted in life. And when we figured out what we wanted to do, she expected that we would do it exceedingly well. My mother would be pleased to know that both her daughters wound up doing things we love. And we’ve both worked to be the best we can at what we do.

C HAPTER 2
    Being Irish
    G rowing up in Glen Cove, I knew that my family was different from the other families in our neighborhood. First of all, my parents were much older than my friends’ parents. Today a woman having a child at age forty is not uncommon, but these were the postwar years, when women married young and had their babies right away. Second, my sister and I were ten years apart. Most of my friends had brothers and sisters around the same age, so they played together and went to the same school at the same time. I was eight when Ellen went away to college. It wasn’t bad, just different.
    But most important, we were the only family on the block with live-in relatives. If this had been the Bronx or Queens or just about any neighborhood in Brooklyn where immigrants lived, it probably wouldn’t have been in the least bit odd. But in Glen Cove, as in many postwar suburbs, the nuclear family was the rule. Mother stayed home, Father worked, and there were usually no more than two children.
    I was in fourth grade when my mother’s father died and my grandmother and my mother’s sister, Julia, moved in with us. You would think that the addition of two people to our household would have changed our home life in significant ways, but it didn’t, in large part because both my grandmother and my aunt were quiet and kept to themselves, and also because they had always been involved in our family, even before they moved in. My grandmother tried desperately not to bother anyone, and to anybody who knew her, she came across as meek and mild. She must have been in her eighties when she moved into the guest room, and I remember my parents and everyone talking about how they expected her to wither away and die after my grandfather’s death because he was supposed to be the strong one whom she relied on. But despite her mild nature, she was capable of rising to the occasion when her life was on the line.
    Her maiden name was Nellie Shine. Her married name was Nellie Callaghan, and it’s entirely unclear how old she was, but at some point in her teen years she came to America. She was poor. She and her family had lived in Newmarket, County Cork, in Ireland. She came to New York because her parents had died, and her eldest sister had taken in an orphan from the village, and there simply