Mary Higgins Clark - Kitchen Privileges

I n the autumn when the trees become streaked with red and gold and the evenings take on the warning chill that winter is coming, I experience a familiar dream. I am walking alone through the old neighborhood. It is early autumn there as well, and the trees are heavily laden with the russet leaves they will soon relinquish. There is no one else around, but I experience no sense of loneliness. Lights begin to shine from behind curtained windows, the brick-and-stucco semidetached houses are tranquil, and I am aware of how dearly I love this Pelham Parkway section of the Bronx.

I walk past the winding fields and meadows where my brothers and I used to go sleighriding: Joe, the older, setting the pace on his Flexible Flyer, little Johnny clinging to my back as we followed Joes sled through the twists and turns of the steep sloping field we dubbed Suicide Hill. Jacoby Hospital and the Albert Einstein Medical Center cover those acres now, but in my dream they do not yet exist.

I walk slowly from the field down Pinchot Place to Narragansett Avenue and pause in front of the house where the Clark family lives. Once again I am sixteen and hoping the door will open and I may just happen to run into Warren Clark, the twenty-five year old whom I secretly adore. But in my dream I know that five years more must pass before we have that first date. Smiling, I hurry along the next block to Tenbroeck Avenue and open the door of my own home.

The clan is around the table, my parents and brothers, aunts and uncles, cousins and courtesy cousins, the close neighbors and friends who have become extended family. Theres a kettle whistling, a cozy waiting to keep the teapot warm, and everyone is smiling, glad to be together.

Unseen, I take my place among them as the latest happenings are discussed, the old stories retold. Sometimes there are bursts of laughter, other moments eyes brighten with unshed tears at the memory of this one or that one who had such a terrible time, never a days luck in his life. Memories come flooding back as I hear the stories retold of tender love matches, of bad bargains made at the altar and endured for a lifetime, of family tragedies and triumphs.

I can speak for no other author. We are indeed all islands, repositories of our own memory and experience, nature and nurture. But I do know that whatever writing success I have enjoyed is keyed, like a kite is to string, and string to hand, to the fact that my genes and sense of self, spirit, and intellect have been formed and identified by my Emerald Isle ancestry.

Yeats wrote that the Irish have an abiding sense of tragedy that sustains them through temporary periods of joy. I think that the mix is a little more balanced. During troubled times, they are sure that it will all work out in the end. When the sun is shining, the Irish keep their fingers crossed. Too good to be true, they remind each other. Somethings bound to give.

Kate. Wasnt it a damn shame about her? The prettiest thing who ever walked in shoe leather, and she chose that one. And to think that she could have had Dan ONeill. He put himself through law school at night and became a judge. He never married. For him it was always Kate.

Anna Curley. She died in the flu epidemic of 1917, a week before she and Jimmy were to be married. Remember how the poor fellow had saved every nickel and had had the apartment furnished and ready for her? She was buried in her wedding dress, and the day of the funeral, Jimmy swore hed never draw another sober breath. And wasnt he a man of his word?

The faces begin to fade, and I awaken. It is the present, but the memories are still vivid. All of them. From the beginning.

May I share them with you?

My Parents, Nora and Luke Higgins, at Rockaway Beach, circa 1923

M y first conscious memory is of being three years old and looking down at my new baby brother with a mixture of curiosity and distress. His crib had not been delivered on time, and he was sleeping in my doll carriage, thereby displacing my favorite doll, who was ready for her nap.

Luke and Nora, my mother and father, had kept company for seven years, a typical Irish courtship. He was forty-two and she pushing forty when they finally tied the knot. They had Joseph within the year; me, Mary, nineteen months later; and Mother celebrated her forty-fifth birthday by giving birth to Johnny. The story is that when the doctor went into her room, saw the newborn in her arms and the rosary entwined in her fingers, he observed, I assume this one is Jesus.