A Defining Moment

Audio: A Defining Moment * December 1953, San Jose (click arrow to listen)

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I don’t remember how I got there or who dropped me off, perhaps Daddy waited in a car across the street, or maybe the family I’d been living with brought me. Who knows? It didn’t really matter; I was coming to live with my mother! I bunny-hopped on her doorstep, the butterflies in my stomach on the wing. Not tall enough to reach the knocker, I rapped twice on the door. She would be so happy to see me!

The front door opened. Standing there, she glanced over my head. She stepped back and let me pass, then closed the door and turned. Picking up my small yellow and white, brown-striped suitcase, I trailed after her.

Working as a cook and housekeeper for two Irish Catholic priests, my mother lived in a small room off the church’s rectory. She led me to the dining room and pointed to a place at the end of the pew against a wall, then disappeared into the kitchen through the white Dutch-door.

Her voice tight, she ordered: “Be quiet and behave,” followed by, “sit there and don’t touch anything.”

With my Naugahyde case deposited on the floor under the pew, I dangled my feet, sitting very still on the hard bench, obediently folding my five-year-old hands in my lap. I studied the red-flocked wallpaper, the tatted doilies, the long rectangular dining table set for two: the wine goblets, silver spoons, the scatter of white plates, linen, crystal, and pewter… all waiting in silence, like me. Wondering how I got there and pretty sure I hadn’t done anything wrong, I’d wait most of my life for her to come back to me. She never did.