Rudolf’s Diner

My name is Kate Minogue—the first plucked off the tree for me by my father, Aidan Daniel, the second by my mother, Eileen Minogue Ahearn. O’Sullivan, the family name, translating to Eye of God and adding an inch to my father’s height, was trimmed to Sullivan when we came over in “48—too late for Mr. Roosevelt—on a little tide of a few thousand Irish. Da would have said when we came over the water. Over the sea, for which he had no affection. It stole a brother from him. Maybe two, he said. The rough grey beast. Over the sea to this country in love with tomorrow and getting there fast as possible. The O in our name disappeared because it took too long to pronounce in America.

Da was the youngest of 9—6 boys, 4 girls—the oldest boy drowned and the last one stillborn. Taken in the littlest sea— Mam’s belly. His were cheese and sausage people, with neighbors owning the herds. They sold honey too and eggs from a big coop of hens. A lucky raising, he liked to say. Mother, only half teasing, would toss back Got y’ free a the cheese and sausages, anyway! She meant going off like Uncle Terrence to train at the print house. But if Da was proud, it was of the Irish in his veins, Irish through and through, not a drop of anythin’ in the soup to dilute it.

My mother was not so pure. Her people were plain, they were crofters, she’d say. “Farmers, mother”, Da corrected, “we say farmers over here.” The Irish in her a mere three quarters. The nature of the fourth in some dispute. Her eyes went vague and I turned suspicious whenever the subject came up. Why couldn’t she come clear about the wayward ingredients or let the subject drop? Unless she harbored a spoonful of Brit? Now that would have ruined the soup in my veins as far as Da was concerned. But she held onto her secret, whatever it was. Maybe just to keep something separate from my father and me.

Da liked to set a person straight on what was what. Specially anything to do with roots. He’d brag on Irish this and Irish that. “Jail’s bulgin’ with Irishmen, Da” mother snapped once when it got too thick to bear. “An’ that’ll be drink, not poetry, got ‘em there”. He looked injured, going silent awhile. A relief to us. Tinged with guilt at his downcast face.

When mother got roiled, she’d brew up what she called her Irish Soup. Potatoes thick with greens and garlic and onions, not a fleck of pork or beef swimming in it—for Da, the savor and heart of any meal. No meat in a workin’ man’s sooper is a hurt on ‘im. At times, in his gloom, she’d take pity and fry him a cut on the side. But then he wouldn’t touch her soup at all – Leaves are for the ladies— making her madder than she started. Nor would she say what those leaves might be, we couldn’t identify them, though I was fairly sure there was a bit of the rough grey beast involved. Seaweed, I mean. Meat or no, to me it was delicious. I wheedled for it, crossing my father, especially if I was off my food.

When we came over, I was barely six . Cold wind and all of us retching , the rolling pitch of the deck beneath our feet. A stink of engine oil , wet wool, a clatter of talk I couldn’t understand. After that, queues and questions in the dockyard, and long long bus rides. We crowded in with the O’Byrnes, Da’s niece and her family. Our cousins. Who kept their O and caught us up with eccentricities of the American language until we got our own fourth-floor in Woodston, on the fraying skirt of Philadelphia. The Big War over. A lot of weedy cases after a fresh go, Da said of our neighbors from sundry parts of the globe. And fresh it was. Unless, I found out later, your tree bore the likes of Murasaki….

The why of coming over, like the wayward quarter of my mother’s soul, kept its unfinished flavor. What I remember of Ireland is running barefoot, never allowed on Lincoln Street. I remember digging in the dirt yard with the bright-eyed hens all round dusting lice from their feathers. I remember rain. Rain clinking into buckets under the roof. And my shoes that burned in the oven trying to dry them. We lived with my father’s people who didn’t get along with themselves.

Apart from my mother’s sick to death of stinginess and bickering—our sour milk poverty— there were the bloody casings, the pork-gut, washing and stuffing and tying ‘em off t’ hang in the rafters over the oakfire in the pit house. Da at his printing til dark with towny Uncle Terrence who’d got trained in Edinburgh and—how did she put it? looked me askance. Just 19, with Da nearly that many years older than she when they married. A strong young woman, too soon the workhorse in a clan of aging brothers and sisters, sons and daughters gone, one of the girls to Woodston. Mother must have yearned to separate her fate from the chicken-scratch and black sausage of the O’Sullivan place. In The States, it might be possible. She had reasons enough. But always something more I couldn’t name. What unearthly power of hers could have persuaded my father into giving up his island? Reborn a stranger, unwelcome from the beginning, and at a squinty-eyed 42, when men are going shifty about their age.

Ending in Woodston would have been Da’s part of the bargain —a twig of family there, and not far off, the Press Machine Manufacturing Company, first of its kind in the world, still going strong in Philadelphia. City Of Brootherly Love, he’d soon be quipping darkly.

Da knew his fine small presses, but the modern street shops in Philly turned him down for young bucks–yanks who knew their way round the dealers and the trends and the latest machines. In short, your father’s a hopeless case. He swallowed disappointment and went to work for the foundry at the back of Press Manufacturing.

The summer I turned ten , mother in County hospital with Scarlet Fever on quarantine, Da steered me by the cavernous shed where the Company built their presses on which whole pages of books and newsprint could be inked. Unbearable clatter pounded my brain. A blast of heat, a sour taste. One of the ear-duffed sweaty fellows lifted his face, tired eyes startled by a young girl. In the back of the yard, Da’s job was pouring moulds for type and frames, stacking the trundle. No artistry wanted. Steering to the warehouse, unloading the lot. Intact. Damages coming out of his pay. “A man’s always in dread of a docking, Kate” But that day, I understood my mother’s dread—fumes and burns and racket. A few of the best machiners hired on deaf already. “Not a word to mother ” Da said when he took me to supper at Traver’s that day, “ or it’ll be Irish Soup for a month!”

My father’s pay was enough for the needful. To give us the extras, mother cooked. She was terrific at it, all the rich ladies said so. When I turned twelve, I went along in the afternoons to the big gloomy houses and hired out to clean for half wage. For a time we took in three livings. And still we were short.

~~~

Grimy from the foundry, Da climbed the stairs at six to a long wash-up in the tub with its black smudge never wholly erased by my mother. Red-faced and quieted, waiting for his tea, he’d read aloud from finely printed books whose bindings he petted and adored. Like sleeping cats he lifted them tenderly murmuring their names, stroking the spines.. He’d go through them hundreds of times, the same few ones. Adventurers who came to sad ends. Ghost stories. An obscure tale by Yeats, just a pamphlet really, all the man could spare us—The Wild Swans At Coole gone to MacMillan. His lips worked as he read, a finger brushing the lines. And when his stomach was filled, he’d doze off with a book across his knees, refusing bed, until my mother nudged him a sharp one in the ribs.

Patrick Conlon— known as the Irish Burns—was Da’s favorite. The liltin’ genius of the man…. I asked him “ Da why don’t you get yourself a new one, you told us there’s a dozen you never got hold of back home”, but he waved me off claiming he was satisfied with what he owned, he could quote whole paragraphs of Conlon. Like the evergreen oak, you ne’er forsook me….and on like that. A few volumes, including the Yeats, printed himself at Gilverhan’s , dragged over in their own locked trunk with a clever little key kept in his shaving kit. .

“Except for his workboots and what he had on his back, your father tossed his breeches into the ditch to make room for the paper and glue!” mother blurted once while she took down a hem on the skirt of my uniform. I was at St. Anne’s by then.

“But there’s never surprises for you, Da” I protested, “you know exactly what’s going to come.”

“You’ve tooched it, right there”, he said, “never cared for surprises.” He tapped his Conlon. “I won’t be let down.” An irritating answer. Worse than my mother’s opinion that money was for saving, not piddling away on fripperies like beaded barrettes for my hair. I was

a piddler. And a lover of surprises.

What I liked best about school was the jaw-drop of a new idea. The constant small shocks of history, biology, astronomy. When I came home with a new word, a new bit of thinking to try out on mother, it was fierce disappointment. In no time my prize would be slapped down by her laughing skepticism. On Mr. Darwin’s theory she had this say. “ Anyone with half a brain can see the man doesn’t know what he’s on about! Apes changing to men? Rubbish. A million years?! The Almighty God is an artist, not a fumbler. If He wanted a man to be made, he would not go about it in such a meandering fashion. He’d go straight to it. And I’ll be more than happy to tell your Mr. Gordon so to his face.” She studied Da’s workshirt collar just scrubbed with bleach and a toothbrush, then clapped down the iron, twisting it over the blue cloth like a fish in shallow water.

Mother and father would mutter the tongue—Gaelic—when they spoke of things I wasn’t to know. Delving into one of my balky streaks. Skipping class. Or my campaigns against Mass on Sunday and on Thursday evenings, begging to stay on my own, then running the streets with Frances Cappione . Mother blamed my defections—Church, school, her— on Frannie,

my best friend. A swarthy muscular girl, a laughing-eyed girl, an untamable Catholic who’d dropped confession before she sailed from Italia.

One day, clearing up while my mother steamed the kitchen with custard tarts for Mrs. Lem, we were blathering on. “In Salerno”, Frannie said, “the aunts and the uncles squawk if you give it a try to change a hair. In America, who cares?”

My mother cocked her ear at this, disapproval twitching her lips as she tapped and let go, tapped and let go, with just the right pressure on the rolling pin to stretch her Crisco and icewater crust shining-thin without tearing. This deftness caught Frannie’s eye and she twirled away from me close to the breadboard.

“Mrs. Sullivan? You could do this?” Frannie pointed to a cookbook ad in the Herald my father’d left behind from breakfast. Mother did not look up. “You write down your pie and your soup and your bread, you make a lot of money!” She stole a pinch of dough, rolled a moustache and stuck it to her upper lip.

I snorted. Still my mother tap-tapped. But faster. “Maybe Frannie’s got a brainstorm, do you think?”

She threw back her head a little. “Me? Books?” She frowned and slid her grey eyes, her rough grey eyes, in my direction. “You must be thinking of your father.”

~~~

That year, two weaknesses came to light in my mother. Two as far as I know. And though she was passionate on the Church, both of them went against her religion. I was to blame for the flowers, true. But the oracle. That was Frannie’s doing.

It started with the rose. The white rose for her birthday like a ruffled moon with its own light inside . When she finally pried out of me where it came from, she surprised me by asking to be lead there. Just for a glance at the rooses. Rush Park in mid-May, about-to-fly-away green. A green that made your eyes burn. And the roses, white and coral and scarlet, all lushed and jewelly from a sprinkling. Bending down to them, her hands cupped one of the white ones, angel-faces, then went to her throat. Behind her back, I snapped off a twig with tiny blue flowers and a knock-out scent. I held it under her nose. She swooned a bit on her heels, then shook herself awake, upset with me.” These’re not ours, Kate! It’s stealing…”

“Whose are they, then? That Mayor Corrigan you’re so fond of says Rush Park belongs to the people who use it.” I turned a cartwheel on the grass. “That’s us!”

“Don’t be smart” she threw me a dark look, but took the branch from my hand.

And back home the blue flowers went into a jelly jar beside her dark-wood Mary from Burren, in County Clare.

That was the start of my mother’s fall into questionable behaviors. Afterward she’d often stray to Rush Park for loooks. But like as not she’d tuck a scissors into it’s holster and come back with Sweet William, or some nameless gem, for the glass beside Our Lady.

~~~

Frannie knew nothing of my mother’s history. What I was sure of was not much more. The three of us were kneading dough for half a dozen rosemary loaves, Mrs. Langley’s favorite . Da droning Conlon in the front room. Mother caught the tail of something Frannie said that riled her. What it was I can’t recall.

“Y’ don’t look to marry then, Fran? “ She twisted on the taps and the hot water steamed up into her face. The ease of the oil furnace still pleasured her ages after it finally went in.

“Oh no not me” Frannie blurted, “ I want to love too many. Too much!” Giggling, she pulled the wavy black hair off her hot neck, covering her mouth and nose so just her eyes showed. Then she caught my mother’s back going stiff. “Did you? Want a husband? I mean, when you …”

“Now that’s a pearsonal question, Frances…” a wound in my mother’s voice.

I stood on tip-toe, shook my head, teeth showing, in Frannie’s direction, my mother missing the show.

“But weren’t you in love?” Once Frannie got going she couldn’t be stopped. That might have been the heart of what my mother feared in her.

Mother turned around then, her arms wide on the counter behind. Nettled. She made a slit-eyed study of Frannie who was pressing her lips into a round smile I didn’t recognize— trying for innocence?

“That’ll be enough….. impertinence from you. Yooong lady” The words whispered til she got to the strange one we didn’t recognize, young lady a last minute swerve away from anger.

“Impertance. Da’d like that word.” I said to mother. Just as she turned her back I sealed my lips at Frannie who was gnawing a thumbnail and blinking too fast. Out of the need to touch her, I pretended her apron wanted doing up. I came to my mother and did the same. “Likes the fancy ones, Da does.” I jerked the bow tight. “What does it mean exactly?”

“Never you mind what it means, miss, just quit. Or I’ll do to y’ what Mam did t’ me when I talked back to ‘er”

“Your mam? What’d she do?” I leaned around to catch the words, greedy for a scrap of her bringing up.

“Stuck a clothes peg on my tongue, that’s what!” Her face could not decide—was such a thing cruel or amusing?

“Outh. Oooth!” with a finger and thumb, Frannie trapped her own tongue, making a painfully hilarious face.

I rolled my eyes and waved her down.

“Well,” mother said, definite now, “ it did make gabbling when you should be kneading a bit rare, I can tell you…” She shut off the taps. The tiniest smile flashed and vanished as she murmured a handful of Irish syllables I couldn’t grasp.

Not long after that, The Mystik Fan came into my mother’s life.

~~~

Out of a worn bag, Frannie slid a little black roller-box. It was painted inside to look like a lady’s fan, YES NO SOON ASK-AGAIN NEVER inscribed beside 5 painted-on eyes where a steel pellet could show you your answer. “For her” Frannie said, with a flirty tilt of her head at the kitchen. “She’ll have to make up with me…”

“You don’t know my mother, she’ll hate it. It’s so….pagan, look at those beasties and wheels on that fan! Look at those sickles—“ But I was wrong.

My mother’s eyes lit up, though she said not a word as Frannie announced her offering, swirled the box and demanded a question to test its powers. All in a single go. That was Frannie for you. The little steely already rolling, rolling, its oily rattle over the smooth cardboard, excited— trying to come to rest.

Mother fished out the sponge in the sinkful of dishes and got back to scrubbing jars, but her shoulders kept twitching with the up-and-down burrrr of that ball like a Sullivan bee. Then she startled us. “STOP!” Frannie did and the ball clicked into its slot..

“The Mystik Fan has your answer! Ask your ques-tion, lad-ies and gents, ask it now!” Frannie played her voice like a barker.

“I will not” said my mother. She shot me an accusing glance, then turned away from us again.

“Then I can ask for you” Frannie soothed with her usual volume.

No, Frannie!” I warned, and my hands reached out to take the box away.

“Leave ‘er alone” said my mother, arms crossing over her chest. “I’ll ask. But not for your ears”

“You can do that.” Frannie purred. “ No peeks until you say ready.” She covered the glass with her palm and grinned at me— so I don’t know your mother, uh?

Silence. My mother’s breath blown out like dousing a candle. “All right, then. What’s it say?”

Frannie lifted her hand. “ SOON”

My mother, stricken, squeezed her eyes shut.

~~~

Wherever his death first spawned or why, it multiplied, launched free into his blood, settled firmly in his lungs. Like a clan of barnacles, the boy-faced Dr. Bryant said— half in admiration. For which I hated him. One of the ladies was marrying off her daughter that day and couldn’t spare my mother, so I went along with Da to the Company physician’s exam on orders to see they didn’t try and cheat him. Da had “the cough and liver troubles” like a few other Company men. There were dozens of papers to sign so he’d get his sick-pay.

Months later, Frannie and I climbed the stairs, unstrapped our books in the front room . There was Da asleep on the sofa, his belly humped under a fresh white sheet. Such an ordinary sight, him napping in his undershirt on a weekday, I wasn’t much alarmed. Mother was leaning out of a chair pulled up close to him, her cheek on the cushioned arm, snoring faintly. That morning we’d had words, hard words, my mother and me. About Frannie as usual. At least that’s where it started. She’d been pulling and pushing on all my free hours, accusing me of shirking, it’s Frances, Frances, Frances, ev’ry chance y’ get! And it was true, after class, before homework, I wanted nothing more than to be flying down the street with Frannie, slices of stale bread under our arms for the swans at Rush Park, maybe splitting a coke at the soda fountain. “You’re right, Ma, I don’t want to be doing nothing but scrubbing the rich ladies’ toilets or following you around the kitchen! I want a breath of freedom!” I’d yelled up at her, slamming down three flights of stairs, banging my schoolbooks against the banister.

My mother turned 32 last May. But there with my father she looked old . I dreaded so to wake her, to yank her back to the ordeal of getting my father through his illness. Up close, his eyes pouched, his chin bristles grey, we could hear the noise deep in his chest. I squeezed Frannie’s hand so I wouldn’t cry. His poor skin bronzed as a Puerto Rican. Which would have alarmed him —he was never one to admire the darkskinned races. We’d battled on that point. Now my father was a dark man himself. Face swollen smooth. Younger than my mother’s. That’s when I knew what was coming.

~~~

Mother got a tiny widow’s pension out of The Company, took on more cooking and cleaning, and insisted I finish school. Frannie spent more and more time at our place, my mother hot and cold with her, you never knew. She didn’t take losing my father like the other foundry widows—eyes filling up at their husband’s name, repeating stories, sighing how they missed the old man. For a while my mother’s calm dug at me and in revenge I picked at her—Frannie taking her side —for the frayed slip sagging below her skirtline, her coat buttons missing, her habit of saying Do you, now? It never struck me she might be too shocked to grieve him, leaving her with a trunk of books and a hard-hearted daughter.

But one day after school I came into their bedroom to find her on her knees, polishing Da’s black loafers, the ones carried him through Harry Best’s and Jay Moynihan’s funerals. I waved Frannie back into the hall and promised to meet her later at Shorgen’s . I saw for the first time she had his special books lined up on the shelf next to their bed, the one that used to hold nothing more than the little mahogany Virgin and a glass of flowers nicked from Rush Park. She was no reader of Conlon or Yeats, my mother, no lover of books, not Da’s or anybody’s. On her beside table, The Mystik Fan. I picked it up. SOON, it said.

“Set that down” She said, so sharp my hand shook the pellet out of its place.

“Sorry, Ma, I messed it up. I’ll get it back though…” I nudged the little ball going.

“Don’t be saying messed up Kate, do you get those phrases from Frances?” She spit on her rag and polished the toe of Da’s loafer.

“No, Ma, it’s the way we talk here…”

“And who would we be?” She squinted sideways at me, the huge loafers gleaming side by side on an old double page from The Herald. She followed my puzzled stare at the shoes. “They …they were going a bit dim, is all” she said, tipping them over to inspect the soles. She set the shoes back down and wiped her forehead with the back of an arm.

I waited. Out on the stairs, Taji was smacking his rubber ball against the banister.

”Did I tell you… the night before your father passed…ah I know it’s America and they can’t cross water or the custom gates but …” Her voice trailed off. She pursed her lips and blew a long sliding-down note. “ I did hear ‘em. The ones that sing y’ loose from whatever y’ life might be clingin to…” She blew again. A drawn out breath like wind in trees. “The Whistling Ones, my granma called ‘em…” She clapped her hand over her mouth.

Was she going to cry? I patted her arm. “Your gramma?”

“Mother’s mam. Minogue Brennan. That’s what she called herself.” Not teary at all. Proud.

“She picked her own name?” My ears pricked up. The whole orchard to wander in, unbound to a birth-tree.

“I never told y’ father.” My mother sighed and sat cross-legged on the floor like a girl. She pulled up the locket from around her neck and pressed it to her chin.

I studied her. Gray-green eyes. Glints of blue and brown and golden in them. Black hair, crimped and let down from its pins, wild around her small face and over her shoulders.. Your mother’s no great beauty, but she’s good to look on. Da’s phrase had always embarrassed me “What’d you never tell?”

She looked away. “Minogue…came out of a foundling home in Wales. The kind that leave you hungry all y’ life. They doled her out a lackluster Mary Kent which she detested. Soon as she could, she lifted two names from Last Sailor On Earth and made ‘em her own.”

“So we don’t even know… …”

“…if she were Irish a tall,” my mother let out a laugh. Then her eyes slid to the shoes. “That was your father’s concern, not mine. I always loved Minogue…” She was a strange little thing. Her own daughter, my Mam said that about her.” Mother undid her locket and pried the round brassy halves apart. Her lips moved as she looked into it, then she turned it round and gave it to me.

A lock of salt-and-pepper hair. Minogue’s hair. I glanced at my mother, one finger poised before touching the relic. “Can I, Ma ?”

She didn’t answer. Straight into my eyes she leapt, I’ll never forget it, as though delivering the strength of her heart by pure force. Her voice startled me. “You…you’ll make no terms…” unfamiliar, quavering between speech and song ” …with the spirits of fire and earth and air and water.”

“Minogue?” I whispered the name.

She shook her head and went on. “You have made the Darkness your enemy. We…we exchange civilities with the world beyond.”

I waited. “Who then?” And handed the woman in the locket, my great grandmother, back to her.

“Yeats” my mother sighed. “There’s the ones who hear and the ones …who refuse to. I haven’t known which … which of the two I were…” She snapped the locket shut and squeezed it tight inside her fist. “Minogue…was always sure a that.” She lowered her eyes. “ Kate the things she told me… every day in that place was…she stole bits of bread and hid them under her pillow for when she couldn’t bear her hungers. Some night the whistlers sang through the walls. Next day one of the children would die. She was a woman… unafraid of her own mind.”

She stopped. And in that silence I saw the blood in her throat pulse hard. “Anyway. I got ‘er name, made-up or no. And …” she said, with a little of Minogue in the thrust of her chin, “ I passed it on t’ you.”

A hot wakefulness flooded me and spread out into the air encompassing everything—my mother, the ironwork of their bed, the dusty window with its bit of sky.

Then she broke the spell. ”But Da…! “ She addressed the shoes as though he stood there in them. Then she spoke in my direction. “ Oh now, he’d say, Minogue is a pearfectly respectable Irish name!” Her eyebrows rose. “ To comfort me.” First she laughed and then her eyes spilled. She bent her hands into her face.

I rolled the pellet —it slipped away, then rocked straight in to YES.

~~ ~

When I got to my own bed behind the curtain, a package waited in the middle of the blankets. My birthday months away. Wrapped in butcher paper cut with her pinking shears. Inked all over with five-pointed stars, the kind I’d seen her draw so many times— a quick flourish without lifting pen from paper. She’d covered the newspapers with them, dreamily listening to Mrs. Moynihan or Mrs. Hampton recalling some habit of their husbands they hated at the time but missed now. The string that bound the gift, my mother had saved and dyed . Rit Lavender, Number Three— left over from brightening a blouse she’d worn since before I was born.

On the edge of my bed, I cradled her package . A minute passed. Another. I thought about Da’s black loafers. I thought about The Whistlers. Voices melted into the twilight and mixed with the trees. A line from Wild Swans I’d heard a thousand times—it had taken root in my brain. I tore into the paper, regretting my carelessness halfway through, salvaging the scraps, pressing them smooth, saving the twine for another use.

Recipes From County Clare. My mother’s careful letters leaned across the book’s cloth cover glued to sewn pages. I opened to theTable Of Contents, ran my finger slowly down like Da, to the line I wanted. There it was. Among the mildness of milk and butter and potatoes, the tangy brace of bladderwrack and garlic, a tonic of bitterness.

3 Cups of greens. In the spring, I prefer the stinging nettle, wilted, to take the sting from it. In the old days, nettles were known as Devil’s Clover. But nettle is nourishing to every part of the body and the soul—especially during illness. Put on gloves, fill a large cloth bag, scissor the tops no more than halfway down, leaving the roots to resurrect after the next rain. If nettles do not grow nearby, chard or kale will do very nicely…

Irish Soup. My mother’s peace offering. To books themselves— my father’s first and greatest love. To death and change and America. To Frannie and me.

©Maia, 2008
My first word was not mother or milk, but bird. I fell in love with language, ie the English and Spanish syllables flying around my ears, because I did not understand most of them, and was therefore free to make up meanings and weave them into stories. At 13, I stayed up all night composing my first real poem To A Sunflower . My first published poem (a sonnet about the sea) appeared in the Edgewood High School newspaper, chosen by Mrs. Clegg my tenth grade English teacher. The Spirit-Life Of Birds, a manuscript of poems inspired by Charlie, my life-partner who died in 2005, will be published next year.