Mrs. Clayton's gift: there'll always be an Irish…

Commonweal, March 12, 1999 by Katharine Byrne

My mother used to visit old Mrs. Clayton often, and because she felt more comfortable with something to hang onto, even the hand of a ten-year-old, I was the reluctant child chosen to accompany her to the house on Hyde Park Boulevard shrouded in dusty plum-colored draperies and portieres, filled with ponderous mission oak furnishings, the walls crowded with pictures brought from Ireland when Mrs. Clayton came to this country from Limerick.

My mother called Charlie Clayton's widow - elderly, frail, and housebound - a "poor soul without chick nor child." But Charlie had been a successful liquor salesman and the genial proprietor of a prosperous saloon on Lake Park Avenue, the owner as well of a great many little apartments in the same building. Charlie died well-off and his wife, my mother was sure, had inherited a lot of money.

My father, on the other hand, while loving his children extravagantly, was unable to provide for them with any consistency, his feckless career changes rendered even more precarious by habitual gambling. He played poker and wasn't very good at it.

As we walked to Mrs. Clayton's home, my mother often reminded me that we must be good to this poor soul in the hope that she, a childless widow and not in the best of health, would be good to us. My mother would ask herself and voice the question to me, "Who's going to get all that money?" And answer the question rhetorically, "Why not us?"

When I was older I used to wonder: Was it not, after all, my mother who was the poor soul?

My mother had been educated at a convent school conducted by Ursulines, where she learned to embroider the deep hems of linen pillowcases, to play on a mandolin the pieces Bach composed for his young second wife, and to speak a little French in the German accents of Mother Stanislaus and Mother Hildegarde. Nothing remotely useful.

After graduating she went home to wait for someone to come along and marry her. While waiting, it was customary to find good works to do. As a volunteer at Hull House she met a charming and handsome young man new to the city but apparently doing well, working for his uncle who owned a commission house on South Water Street. He came to her house carrying long-stemmed roses and strawberries in the middle of winter, and leather-bound copies of Shakespeare's Sonnets and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, crafted in the print shop at Hull House. "A guy with his head in the clouds," was the comment of one of my mother's pragmatic brothers. Demetrios, called Jim, was unlike anyone they had ever known. But here we were now, a dozen years later, struggling in free-fall financial circumstances, the family's poor relatives.

For Mrs. Clayton, my mother played the role of a cheerful, appreciative, helpful companion, willing to listen to repeated complaints and reminiscences, straightening antimacassars, plumping dusty sofa pillows. For my part, I was polite and willing, running to the post office for two-cent stamps or to the store for tea and cat food. The tea was a mixture compounded according to Mrs. Clayton's recipe: one ounce each of oolong, souchong, and gunpowder assembled by the grocer at the A&P from bins along the wall of the store, black as coffee and served to us with milk out of Beleek cups sprigged with roses. The cats ate rice and King Oscar sardines. They stared at mother and child as though they knew and scorned our subtle machinations.

Apparently the old woman was glad of our presence, even speaking euphemistically of her intention to be good to us when the time should come. "You and the girl are my only friends," she would say.

Occasionally we would encounter another visitor, Mr. Clancy, a lawyer who collected the rents and handled Mrs. Clayton's affairs. She identified him as "a spoiled priest," a designation I did not understand, but it seemed to guarantee his integrity. Once he asked me my name and how to spell it. "Why does it begin with a 'K'?" he wanted to know. "She was named for her Greek grandmother," my mother had to admit. "The Greek alphabet does not contain a 'C.'" As though considering the legal consequences of such a failure, Mr. Clancy told us that there were nine women named Catherine in The Lives of the Saints, and all of them were spelled with a C. My mother was upset by this failure to comply, but she did take it as a good sign that he wanted to know how to spell my name.

Now it happened that one of my mother's brothers owned a great farm in Michigan. Every year in August we spent two weeks there, the happiest times of my young life: picking peaches, walking barefoot down a hot dusty road to the mailbox, crying over my Aunt Nancy's purple-bound copies of the life and hard times of Elsie Dinsmore.

But this was a bad summer for my mother. She seemed to think that if we had been at home things would have turned out differently. Mrs. Clayton, as my father cynically observed, "up and died on us." Died and was buried in our absence.

When Mr. Clancy conveyed the news to us, it was to tell my mother that although she was not one of the legatees according to the will, one of my older brothers could come to pick up something of sentimental value to the deceased. Not a good sign, my mother feared.