I was making breakfast for my husband and me on a beautiful morning at the end of April, 1985. I had no inkling that it would be one of those days that change your life.
My fourteen month-old daughter, Emily, was eating her breakfast of banana pieces and Cheerios. She picked up this mess up with her fingers, since she now refused to eat anything from a spoon. My sweet baby was turning into a little girl, and I was not ready. A couple of months before this morning, right around Emily’s first birthday, I had thought that I might be pregnant again. When it turned out not to be the case, I was surprised to find that I felt sad. It didn’t help that my gynecologist and my therapist, the two women I counted on most at this stage of my life, were both pregnant.
Another baby would complicate our little family, but I found myself longing for that complication. My husband, Richard, appeared from upstairs. I had his poached egg in a slotted spoon when the phone rang. He answered. It was his father. I saw his face change, then he put his hand over the phone and turned to me. “My mother’s dead, ” he said. “She jumped off the balcony of their apartment. ” I took the poached egg and threw it in the garbage. Richard took the shuttle to Boston to be with his father. I stayed in Brooklyn to make arrangements for Emily before I joined him there. And I tried to wrap my head around what had happened.
My mother-in-law, Jane Hogan Culliton, had always been a troubled person. When she met Richard’s father, she was an Irish-American girl who liked to play the piano and have a few jars and a good time. She loved to dance and go to the movies, and she used to brag that she had never lost a friend. But she also had a dark, melancholy side. Richard’s father, Jim Culliton, was a construction worker’s son who was completing a Ph. D from Harvard. Jane was urged to marry him by her dominating older sister, Gertrude, who reminded Jane of who Jim was and who he would be. To Gertrude’s way of thinking, the Cullitons were a step above the shanty Irish Hogans. When their first year of marriage had produced no children, Jim and Jane made a novena. Three boys followed in short order.
Six years after the last of the three was born, Jane became pregnant again. This was the child she had promised to dedicate to the Blessed Virgin if Mary helped her get the older three in school without losing her mind. Jane hoped for a girl that she wanted to name Faith Frances, an ally in her house full of men. But she gave birth to another boy that she and Jim named Richard Eugene. Within a few years after Richard’s birth, Jane’s beloved brother and two sisters had all died. And, due to a hormone imbalance that occurred in menopause, she developed a condition called alopecia and lost all of her hair permanently. Jim was Dean of the Business School at Notre Dame by then, and he went on as if nothing had happened and expected Jane to do the same.
Jane became two people. For weeks or months she would be a sober, pious Catholic matron who kept house and served bridge luncheons to the Ladies of Notre Dame. And then something would set her off and when Richard came home from school, she would be drinking straight out of the bottle. She became a binge drinker who would disappear into the bedroom for two or three weeks. During these binges, she would rage at Jim and at Richard, the only son left at home. Jim’s career was progressing along with Jane’s drinking. He was appointed to the Tariff Commission by President Kennedy and the family moved to Washington. At the end of his term, Jim went to work for the Ford Foundation and was made the President of the Asian Institute of Management in The Phillipines. I met and married Richard during this period.
As a mother-in-law, Jane was pretty much of a horror. It seemed to me that she wielded her drinking like a terrorist uses a hand grenade, we knew she had the power to destroy any occasion at any time. She was drunk at christenings, during visits to her sons’ homes and even at funerals.
When she was drunk, everyone covered for her. When she was sober, no one talked about what it had been like when she was drinking. When I was pregnant with Emily, Jane got drunk instead of coming to visit us for her birthday. Richard finally had enough. He told her that he wouldn’t have any more to do with her unless she sought help and stayed sober. Jane was furious with this ultimatum and their relationship had disintegrated during the last year. But it never entered my mind that Jane would take her own life. As I settled into the taxi that was taking me to the airport the next day, I felt the twinge that I had learned to recognize when I was trying to become pregnant with Emily. I was ovulating.
Richard met me at the airport and crushed me in his arms. He was so thankful that I was there because it had been an awful twenty-four hours. Jim was handling Jane’s death like he handled any emotional crisis, by not talking about it. We went back to the apartment and sat there with his father and his brothers and their wives. Jim hadn’t wanted a wake of any kind, so it seemed as though Jane had just gone on a trip or something.
After dinner, Richard and I went back to our motel room and finally had some privacy. When we got into bed, he reached for me, and I recalled the twinge I’d had that day in the taxi cab. I decided there was no reason to say anything. After all, it had taken me two years to get pregnant with Emily. A few weeks later, Richard and I waited for a home pregnancy test to do its thing. It confirmed what I was already pretty sure of. What had taken two years with Emily had taken fifteen minutes this time. We were pregnant. When I saw my gynecologist, the first thing she said to me was, “When’s the due date? ” She knew that I still remembered how to compute it. January 21st, I told her. Jane’s birthday. Our daughter, Kathleen, decided to have her own birthday. She arrived on January 25th.
As I joyfully held my red-haired, fair-skinned baby for the first time, it was obvious that the Irish genes had won out by a landslide. Who would she be, this little girl who was conceived the night before her grandmother’s funeral and was due on her birthday? In many ways, Kate is very much like Jane. She has her blue eyes and her long legs. She’s like her in other ways, too. When she was about three, she was out for a walk with her dad. They saw a homeless man drop an enormous plastic bag filled with soda cans, which rolled all over the sidewalk. Kate suddenly pulled her little hand out of Richard’s and wouldn’t move on until they had helped the man pick up all his cans. Like Jane, her heart always goes out to the under dog.
And she must have been channeling Jane when, at about the age of seven, she developed a fondness for what she called “black and white movies. ” She judged her own world by the “Thin Man” movies she watched over and over again. She thought it only took a nickel to use a pay phone and was sure that her father, like Nick Charles, always carried a gun. In Junior High, her favorite movie star was William Holden. At any card table, she is Jane all over again. She knows when to fold when she’s playing poker, and she instinctively knows where every card in the deck has landed. We taught her how to play bridge when she was about eleven and she’s never made a bad lead. She has a natural affinity for math, and Jane was a math major. And she’s funny in the same earthy way that Jane could be funny.
But it’s not all wonderful. Like Jane, Kate hates change. And there is no grudge too small for her to hold on to. She’s shy about boys and she was a foil for the power games of adolescent girls, which made her depressed and miserable in Middle School. Richard and I saw Jane’s dark well of sadness in our own child and, because of Jane, we knew that we had to acknowledge it and do something about it. We found Kate a new school, and she spent the last three years of high school in therapy.
I was worried when she went away to college. Like Jane, she was very attached to her family and not sure if she could handle the separation. I’m happy to report that she did fine. It wasn’t always smooth sailing, but she made friends and she loved many of her classes. She seemed to see that she was not moving away from us so much as moving into a world of her own making, she seemed to find that idea scary and wonderful at the same time. She studied Italian and spent half of her junior year in Tuscany. When the family travels to Italy or France, it is Kate who speaks for us to waiters and shop keepers and hotel employees.
Unlike Jane, she seems to have no interest in using alcohol to cope with her feelings. I would venture to predict that she will never define herself through the man she marries, or have children because it’s expected of her. It occurred to me that if Jane hadn’t died on that day in April, Richard and I would have probably decided in a more rational way when to have our second child. That would have been easier on all of us, but that child would not have been Kathleen. Through her, I learned that life goes on, and that sometimes you have a second chance to do it right.
The End
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