NOTE: The following chapter comes from my self-published book "Nursery School Dropout."
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Growing taller than Grandma and her sisters did not make them appear any less powerful to me. They mystified me too. They were so full of praise, always saying how great everything was.
Auntie Rose once told me how cute the dimple was on one of my cheeks. I thought this was a nice thing to say about an acne scar.
But they gave out more than compliments. Whenever I visited Auntie Ag during a college semester, she would bake a double batch of brownies. One went to me and the other to my fellow University of Maine student and cousin, Jennifer.
Auntie Pat was bedridden during one of the final times I saw her in her room, where family photos covered the walls. Many featured small, rectangular school photos of nieces and nephews with colors faded from long exposure to sunlight. Auntie Pat told me before I left that if I saw any Reader’s Digest condensed books I was interested in on the way out, I could help myself to a few and share them with my family.
Auntie Pat was the aunt I always felt most nervous around while in her presence. She had the family nickname of “The General” because of the way she took charge of things. Her house in Camden was the one where my parents reminded me to remain on my best behavior before we even approached the door. I needed to ask for permission to help myself to M and Ms in the lidded glass container. With a little luck, we kids might get money from her for ice cream too.
Auntie Pat wore a dress with pearls. Always. And pumps, the kind with no heels, even when her ankles and feet swelled up and resembled sausages. It looked like it was painful to be the general. Other sisters could wear sneakers and jeans.
Uncle Gene was her late husband whom we never mentioned. No one talked too much about Richmont, where Auntie Pat used to live right across from her. The silence came from the same family desire to not spread sad news.
Richmont was a mountainside estate overlooking Megunticcook Lake in Camden. When family members discuss her house at Richmont, it was usually to say how pretty it was.
But even mountaintops have differences. At Richmont, Auntie Pat lived in a beautiful home next to an even bigger one. Her brother-in-law and sister-in-law, Uncle Walter and Auntie Duckie Rich, lived there along with her mother-in-law, Ma Rich.
Yes, the whole family was named Rich. No one brought it up, or how the Irish Catholic genetic heritage seemed to have been replaced in its entirety by a very English one. I would learn of English Protestants in our family tree later, but even before then I sympathized with people calling at manor homes in BBC period dramas. They resembled Auntie Pat visits.
The feeling came from more than just the look. Auntie Pat didn’t have a loud laugh like my grandmother. When she invited people over to her house for the Fourth of July, we were served lamb with mint jelly. The rest of the family might eat barbecue off paper plates. We sat in Auntie Pat’s dining room with the good silverware and china to mark the holiday.
In contrast, the Flanagans in Rockland swore more, smoked a lot and expressed their feelings to a much greater degree. I felt I was most like them. That was my secret. Mom is a member of the Camden Flanagans. I think it would have been easier to live in Rockland, as the child of a state trooper and a hairdresser, than in the town with well-off relatives living in a big house on a mountain.
Grandma’s death opened all sorts of boxes and closets that were forbidden when she was alive. In addition to a large collection of handbags in a closet and canceled checks kept in empty tissue boxes, Grandma possessed photo albums of her family I had never seen.
From these, I learned about the sisters no one talked about — Eileen and Kathleen. Each died of tuberculosis as a young woman. And for the first time, I saw pictures of Auntie Pat when she was young and had dark hair. One photo made her appear as if she was in one of the manor house television shows I watched. She was horseback riding in what looked like a tweed jacket.
After Uncle Gene’s death, Auntie Pat moved out of her house on Richmont and into a smaller house near downtown. The smaller mountain home got torn down while the bigger one remained. Singer Don McLean of “American Pie” fame lives in it now.
Bringing up the estate, and how Auntie Pat’s was the second-place house, would have been awkward. She had no horses in her house near the downtown, just a nice old car she named Nellie.
Auntie Pat still did well by my standards. She was the first person I knew with a remote control garage door opener. Its plastic cover had a pearl-like sheen and one button in the middle.
Since I had already gone through uncomfortable moments at funerals, I thought I was ready for hers. I was an adult by then. My family stayed at her house and I had to sleep in Auntie Pat’s bed before her August 1993 service. I didn’t ask if she died there.
Coming in direct contact with what was left behind by the deceased had happened to me before. When Uncle Tom died, I had to sleep in his room. The bed still had his scent, probably a combination of Old Spice and the Safeguard soap that was always in the bathroom. Auntie Pat’s bed was too small for me, so in addition to wondering how I could avoid offending her spirit, I did not move around much for fear I would roll onto the floor.
Once roused from my dead aunt’s bed, though, all I had to do was attend the funeral and the gathering at the house afterward. While trying the marinated tomatoes, I noticed a lack of soft drinks for the kids. I volunteered to pick up sodas in the Millville section of town away from the snarl of Route 1 traffic.
But I had to drive past the cemetery. Auntie Pat’s burial plot sat in the front.
Her casket had already been lowered as I headed up Mountain Street. A cemetery worker stood up to his waist in the grave. Then he did a little hop on it, maybe making sure the lid on the vault was in place.
All I could think of was, “Oh no, Auntie Pat!”
They were sealing her in. I didn’t mention the sight when I returned with two-liter soda bottles.
Auntie Ag died the following month. While married to an architect and living much of her adult life in Yonkers, N.Y., Auntie Ag wasn’t like her older sister. Not only did she have a loud laugh, lots of my pictures of her feature an open mouth as she is either talking, laughing or both. I have my mouth open in a lot of family pictures too.
The question I never had the nerve to ask Auntie Ag was whether she would have gotten married to Uncle Ed Fleagle earlier in life had he been Catholic. He was Presbyterian. By the time I knew him Uncle Ed was a better Christian than most of us.
Auntie Ag and Uncle Ed had no children. Maybe they would have with an earlier marriage.
Religion was not a difficult question for Auntie Ag to ask. While doing her aunt’s hair, my cousin Colleen mentioned she was dating someone new. Auntie Ag asked, “Is he one of us?” Meaning Catholic.
The month after Auntie Ag’s funeral, October 1993, another aunt died. This time it was Sr. Carol. I had lost three in a row. One cousin had a hard time convincing her boss about needing to take additional time off for the funeral of yet an additional elderly relative.
Our aunt, who had spent more than 50 years as a Sister of Mercy, knew what was coming. When my brother Pat saw Sister Carol in the convent for the last time, they talked baseball. As he prepared to leave, Sr. Carol gave him a long hug, longer than usual.
While I never got to see Auntie Pat’s mountainside estate in its glory, I saw Sr. Carol’s home all the time. The dome of St. Joseph’s Convent Mother House loomed over the treeline near my parochial school in Portland.
It looked like a castle. When Sr. Carol gave us a tour of the building once, though, I was surprised how small her room was. It had a bed with a wardrobe closet built into a wall and little floor space.
Like Auntie Pat, Sr. Carol always had a certain look: a black veil and a black dress. She wore white when she worked in the gardens in the summer.
Her style changed on her 50th jubilee. Sr. Carol ditched the black habit and wore a white blouse, a dark blue blazer with a crucifix on the lapel and a skirt. Later, she got rid of the cats-eye frames and replaced her glasses with rounded ones.
Sr. Carol was in Mercy Hospital the last time I visited her. She admitted to having troubling thoughts in confession and the priest’s advice was, “Tell the devil to go to hell!”
She said that felt good and laughed. I skipped communion in her hospital room while she received it with her hands folded in her lap.
Sr. Carol walked me out to the elevator in her bathrobe, which was weird to see her dressed in. I got choked up after the doors closed.
It didn’t strike me that I was talking with a person coming to terms with the end of her life. All I saw was the honesty. She had something to worry about in confession — Sr. Carol?
Her sharing this was a gift. She could have used the regular religious lines about how everything was fine and God looked after the faithful. Instead, she admitted to being worried.
Having three of Grandma’s sisters die in quick succession a few years after her meant that even the most powerful people, including the General and a woman working for God, were mortal. If I was more religious, I would be praying for the fate of their souls in the afterlife. But I’m not too worried about their status. Auntie Pat, Auntie Ag and Sr. Carol were generous people who encouraged others. What I think most about is what they left me.
Years later, one of my cousins gave his newborn daughter the middle name of Agnes in honor of Auntie Ag. She was his favorite. Carol was mine.
