Uphill Walkers: Portrait of a Family

Chapter One

The World of My Father

MY FATHER DIED WHEN I WAS FIVE, AND ALL MY LIFE, I HAVE WONDERED if he ever thought about how it would all turn out.

What I know of him is skimpy and cobbled together from the obituary in the local paper, his yearbook from college, a few letters sent to my mother during the war. After he died we had no contact with his side of the family. My mother explained that both his parents were dead, which was not entirely true: his mother was alive, though hospitalized, incapacitated in some mysterious, unspoken way. We had a blurry hunch that there had been some kind of friction between my mother and his only sister. There were other Blaises in Holyoke. It was a common name, like Shea in Chicopee. When we were asked, as we sometimes were, if Leo or Clement or Roland Blais was any relation, we were schooled by our mother to answer no, emphatically, and to offer no further explanation, though chances are we weren’t telling the truth and we were part of an intense cousinry that my mother, for some reason, wished to deny. We dodged discussions of the cause of death, and if people assumed, as they often did, that our father died of a heart attack, we were to nod in agreement. Cancer was in those days even more frightening because it was shameful, a judgment. My mother believed in euphemisms. We were taught to say he was deceased, because it sounded more genteel, but which, in our agony to get it right, as often as not came out diseased, adding to the confusion and prolonging the discussion.

Of course our mother mentioned him from time to time, but what she offered were scraps of memories, drained of any real substance. Your father liked pea soup, or, he enjoyed a round of cards. One time he brought home a hand-crafted pine chair from the Eastern States Exposition. He liked golf and football and fishing. Once, in an expansive mood, he brought home four Easter dresses for his four little girls. He and a couple of his pals sponsored a middleweight boxer who had done well in a couple of appearances at the Valley Arena. He was a man’s man and even the men cried at his funeral.

One time I talked to someone who’d gone to dental school with him at the University of Maryland, and he said that when they car-pooled home, they had a favorite Italian restaurant they stopped at somewhere in Delaware. When I must have betrayed in my expression an eagerness for something of greater substance, he added, The guy who took over your father’s office on Maple Street wasn’t nearly as good. He ended up, and here he paused, as if to hammer home just how low my father’s successor had sunk, at the mall. A friend of my father’s has told me that every November on the anniversary of his death he arranges for a mass to be said in his memory in Fort Lauderdale.

Holidays were always a big deal in our house, a marker against the march of days, but we were not always sure what they meant. Happy Ash Wednesday, we would say, or Merry Armistice Day.

At Christmas the year that my father died we had an unbelievable bounty, an avalanche of dolls and wagons and nurse’s kits. Grief and greed commingled in my mind, mutual parasites. The more you lose, the more you want. My toy of choice was not found under the tree. Instead, it was a paper bag filled with the cards that came to our house after my father died. I could not read, but I liked their glossy feel, the big letters, the indisputable importance that attached to any envelope with a two-cent stamp. One day, the bag disappeared. So, instead of playing with the cards, I looked for them. Had Lizzie, our housekeeper, stored them in the pantry? The laundry hamper? Had my mother put them in the linen chest in the back hallway upstairs, the same hallway that would later contain her moldering collection of unused gowns and rarely worn suits? There were so many places to check. Maybe my older brother Raymond had hidden them in the cellar, that musty series of rooms made of stone, one of which had a Dutch oven in which occupants of the house had probably cooked meals in the summer a century earlier.

The search became a game and occupied me for hours. I prayed to Saint Anthony, patron saint of lost objects, for a reunion with those cards. Over the years, I have had the impression we abused his goodwill, praying to him at the slightest hint of something’s being missing, even the most humble object, someone’s misplaced hairbrush or pogo stick or Halloween candy. To this day missing objects rattle me: when for some reason the scissors fail to materialize in the scissors drawer, I can feel a rage and despair totally at odds with the loss. Before any major trip or vacation, I enter a state of high distractibility in which I become convinced that my good watch or my favorite earrings have disappeared for all of time. When I find something I really like at a store, I am often tempted by an impulse to make a duplicate purchase. Once, during a reconstruction, a window was boarded up in a house where I lived, and for a long time afterward it recurred to me as an image in my dreams, restored and gleaming. In another dream, the house I live in has a whole extra house inside it but no one will acknowledge it.

You were five when he died, people always say. Five, as if involved in some complex computation. And then they ask the question I have come to loathe, Do you remember him? I experience it as an impertinence—what right does someone have to ask something so personal?—and at the same time it stirs up a feeling of inadequacy.

What little I may have known about my father once upon a time has been both overexposed and undernourished. Long ago, my father began to fade in the way a desert plant, rinsed by too much sun, denied its share of rain, eventually grows vague and dry.

Do I remember him?

The answer is yes and no.

Yes, maybe.

No, probably.

His obituary appeared on the front page above the fold in the Springfield Union on Monday morning, November 17, 1952:

Dr. R. E. Blais, Granby Dentist, Dies in Holyoke Had Practiced in Paper City for 12 Years; Served in Navy.

Holyoke, Nov. 16 — Dr. Raymond E. Blais of Center St., Granby, practicing dentist in this city for about 12 years and well known in professional circles, died today at the Holyoke Hospital after an illness of about two weeks. He was a veteran of World War II and served in the Navy.

Born in this city he was the son of Mrs. Annie (Nolin) Blais and the late Phileas Blais. He was educated in the local schools and received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Holy Cross College in Worcester in the class of 1934. Dr. Blais entered the University of Maryland Dental School from which he graduated in 1937. He took a postgraduate course at New York University and interned for one year at the Jersey City Medical Center.

During the war, he served in the Navy and was commissioned lieutenant, senior grade. After his discharge from the service, Dr. Blais resumed his practice here and had offices in the Medical Arts building.

Dr. Blais was a member of the Holyoke Lodge of the Elks; Holyoke Council No. 90, Knights of Columbus; the Kiwanis Club; the Beavers Club; the Holyoke Dental Association and the Holy Name Society of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church in Granby. He also had memberships in the state and national dental organizations.

His leaves his wife, the former Maureen Shea of Chicopee Falls, a son, Raymond, four daughters, Madeleine, Jacqueline, Christina, and Maureen, all at home; his mother, Mrs. Annie Blais and a sister, Viola Kettell, both of Holyoke.

The funeral will take place at the John B. Shea funeral home Wednesday at 9 with a solemn high mass of requiem in the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, Granby, at 10. Burial will be in St. Patrick’s Cemetery, Chicopee Falls.

Throughout my childhood, this flaking document was stored in the drawer of yet another piece of furniture that we had to be careful not to dent or damage because it, like so many other artifacts of dubious objective value in the house, might be Worth Something Someday. I treasured this record in part because it relieved me of the misleading burden of dead-end fantasies. We had not lost our father to a bitter divorce, to abandonment, to prison, all of which would have been far more desirable. No, he was gone for good, gone for all of time, and here, for what it was worth, was proof. On the left ear by the masthead the paper advertised itself as costing three cents everywhere. I have always liked that ambitious everywhere, the implied conviction that this paper had a worldwide web of potential readers. On the right ear, the weather was predicted as partly cloudy today and tomorrow. There was a weight to the paper beyond the mere ounces of space it occupied in the universe, a kind of gravity that linked my father’s death with all the other events of that day on the crowded front page with its eight columns of news.

The United States government acknowledged it had been testing the H-bomb in the Pacific.

Korean truce talks bogged down at the United Nations.

Other people had died, including a woman from Bennington, Vermont, who left a daughter named Edith, and a fifteen-year-old boy from Granby whose car rolled over on a country road.

The paper is filled with incidental sociology.

In the world my father left behind, race was as highly charged a subject as it is today. Black people received two mentions. Under the headline White Drummer to Wed Negress we learned that Louis Bellson, Jr., a musician in Duke Ellington’s band, planned to wed jazz singer Pearl Bailey. A photo shows the good-looking couple, heads resting cheek to cheek, with a caption in which Bellson denied a New York report he had jilted a white show girl, Iris Burton, of Brooklyn in order to run off to London to marry the singer. What the paper doesn’t say is that Bellson was Bailey’s fifth husband, and it also doesn’t say—how could it? the fullness of time had yet to unfold—the marriage to Bellson lasted thirty-seven years, until her death at the age of seventy-two.

The other black man who received attention on that day was Paul Robeson, the son of a slave, who sang a signature version of Old Man River. He had visited Hartford for a concert and drew an audience of seven hundred along with two hundred and fifty policemen. His inflammatory message on that evening was that in his opinion the white ruling class in the United States sought to keep Negroes in their place and he refused to go along with that.

In the world my father left, want ads were divided by gender.

Women could become clerks and typists or an undraped artist’s model for museum classes at Smith College. They could be a seamstress or a nurse. They could work as a waitress at the Arcade luncheonette on State Street in Springfield or as a dining room maid at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton. They could be the housekeeper for two motherless boys. They could be a feeder, a folder, or a shaker at the Wells Laundry on Franklin Street.

There were at least four times as many ads for men, who could be mechanics of cars or air conditioners or furnaces or airplanes, assistant foremen, chauffeurs, grocery store managers, gauge makers, plaster molders, TV repairmen, newspaper printers, chemists, draftsmen, druggists, wood workers, tire and car salesmen, elevator operators, circulation managers, haberdashery salesmen, bellmen, porters, short-order cooks, shoe salesmen, shipping clerks, tool makers, truck drivers, time-study men. If a man had a way with words and a college degree, he could work at an advertising agency. A jolly man was needed for about four hours a day from November 28 to December 24 at the Forbes & Wallace department store.

In sports, among the schoolboys, Chicopee and Westfield both had good football seasons, and someone named Pete Pippone of Greenfield was said to be a slick kicker.

For amusement readers could go to the all-new 1953 Ice Capades and see Brigadoon at the coliseum in West Springfield.

Or, they could tune into the new flickering hearth with its black-and-white fuzzy flames. They could watch television. Three channels were available, with shows such as Guiding Light, Howdy Doody, Gabby Hayes, Musical Mom, Owl Theater, Daily Prayer, and Nightcap News.

In the world my father left behind, readers could plan ahead and get a ticket to a flute recital by Miss Margaret Hanford, who would be accompanied by a string quartet on the following Monday evening at the Women’s Club House on Spring Street. Selections from her upcoming program included Mozart’s Quartet in D, reported to be a favorite of Albert Einstein’s, and the seldom performed Goldfinch Concerta by Vivaldi, which, when executed with just the right combination of deft touches and well-timed trills, at least according to the Springfield Union on November 17, 1952, results in a kind of celestial warbling that might fool even a bird.

Chapter Two

5 Center Street

THE HOUSE WHERE I GREW UP SITS TOO CLOSE TO THE ROAD FOR SOME tastes, as old New England houses so often do, but it has a certain shopworn grace. It is across from the library and looks out on a small patch of grass in which a large rock with a plaque memorializes the town’s veterans. This knoll was the annual destination of the Memorial Day parade, all those Scouts and trumpeters and aging men in hard-to-button uniforms, a spectacle made all the more endearing because the marchers always outnumbered the audience. When we were children, we felt honored in some morbid way that the house had a front row seat on a pivotal American ceremony in which the living salute the dead.

There were ghosts even before we moved in, though naturally we added some of our own. These invisible intruders were accepted as only normal in a house built (if the records are right) in the late eighteenth century. Their noises, the unexpected rustling sound in a remote hallway or the odd guttural half laugh from behind a curtain plumped by the wind, joined the noises of children at play, as we fought one another in mock battle, armed with all kinds of weapons, especially cap guns and feathered arrows aimed at each other’s heartbeats.

The purchase price of twenty-two thousand postwar dollars was a pretty and an optimistic penny in 1950. The heavily mortgaged deal included a red barn and a grape arbor and a private well, more fetching in concept than in actuality because of the skittishness of the pump. The four acres divided themselves into a front yard, side yard, backyard, and garden yard, and beyond all that, a wild unkempt field demarcated by the fierce, sweat-filled, labor-intensive barrier of an old stone wall. The house had five thousand five hundred square feet. By the cramped urban standards of my father, born as he was in the most depleted part of Holyoke with the sense sometimes that everything is rationed, even clean air and sunlight, this was opulence indeed.

My parents met at a New Year’s Eve party during the depression. My mother had finished her four years at a state teachers’ college and was living at home with her parents. They met because someone told a joke and when my mother threw back her head to laugh, my father asked, Who is that lovely woman? The joke and the punchline are of course long forgotten, but from that fleeting laughter flowed a dense series of repercussions: marriage, children, a Maytag dishwasher, the freezer from Sears, Lincoln Logs and Tinkertoys and Betsy Wetsy and Tiny Tears dolls, velveteen dresses with lace collars, Pontiacs, Ramblers, and Chevelles. There would be loss and sorrow and even a few more laughs. But what if on that day he hadn’t been moved by her bounce, by the unusual lightness of being, the long neck thrown back, the cascade of dark hair tossed without thought? That lovely woman, wishing even then for a life with more expansive borders, told a wishful lie about her circumstances and said that she was pursuing a graduate degree in English at Columbia, thus postponing their courtship while he waited for her to finish this mythical spring semester before calling on her that following June.

To be of Canadian ancestry, as he was, and to be all-Irish as she was, made them fiercely ethnic in their time. It was my father who married up. He was the son of a factory foreman from Holyoke, though for years I had the vague notion that his father was a bricklayer—hard, even boring, facts were sometimes difficult to come by in my childhood. My father was born in the flats of Holyoke, the established landing place for the lowliest of the newcomers in that traditionally divided town, the French having replaced the Irish who have currently been replaced by Puerto Ricans. In that low-lying warren, filled to this day with grim buildings and clotheslines dangling ever weary garments, he grew up speaking Canadish, which is what we children came to call the spotty French you used to hear more commonly in the Connecticut River Valley. His bride-to-be was the daughter of a doctor in Chicopee who had gone to Georgetown and spent a postgraduate summer in Vienna. Only a few letters from him to her survive their courtship, containing the trivia of his schoolwork and their logistics intermingled with avowals of undying love:

I’ve got to give my first injection for anesthesia this week. I don’t know how it will be, but I’ll be hoping and praying. It should be a lot of fun though.

The dance is definitely set for April 23, and after the initiation next week, I shall be able to give you every detail.

You know what I would like to do right now. Just hold you and squeeze the breath right out of you. Really, I can think of nothing better. Darling, I think you better get working on a trip to Baltimore this fall. Anytime would be fine, and the sooner the better, so get going, honey, and we’ll be together again.

I think that is all for now, my sweet, and I’ll write more soon. I love you (if I were a poet or a romanticist, I might be able to put it in a more delightful manner.) However, it still goes.

Love, Ray

They married in October of 1941 to the strains of Panis Angelicus. Maureen Shea wore a gown of duchess slipper satin made in classic princess lines; Irish lace edged the sleeves and the sweetheart neckline. Her veil was fastened in a scalloped Tudor bonnet, and she carried a cascade of bouvardia, roses, and orchids. The ceremony was followed by a wedding breakfast, and the couple left later on a motor trip, the bride traveling in a brown wool suit with Persian lamb trimming, headed for a honeymoon at Crocker Lake Camps in Jackman, Maine, where they stayed for a fee of four dollars per day per person. A brochure that survives says, This is an excellent camp for ladies, also a good place to send your family during the summer months. Meals are served in a clean and pleasant dining-room, overlooking the lake, with fresh eggs, milk and cream, berries, and fruit, and vegetables from our garden. The drinking water was from a high mountain stream. Fishing and hunting (partridge, deer, bear) licenses were available.

Their first child arrived in the spring in 1944, during a war, marking him as a child of hope. Our father was stationed at a land facility, the U.S. Naval Training Center USS Burston. Telegrams were sent: SHIP RAYMOND JUNIOR LAUNCHED SMOOTH SAILING AHEAD and MOTHER AND SON DOING WELL. But within days my mother was worried. The baby had been born premature, weighing only five and one quarter pounds, and he kept spitting up the milk he was given to drink. At three months he was only eleven pounds. For several months, he lost weight rather than gained it. All her life, she remembered this statistic with a panicked clarity. Was he suffering from a case of what they now call failure to thrive? Why wouldn’t the doctors help find something that would satisfy those colicky outbursts? It was an image that would not leave her consciousness: the robust fat-legged newborn she had envisioned was small and puny, shrinking before her eyes into a pale and listless creature. Finally, a formula was found. The baby began to prosper. (She never stopped searching for an explanation. In 1987, the Springfield Union ran a Washington Post wire-service story entitled: Infant Psychiatry: Birth of a New Specialty, which she saved and pored over.)

After the war, my father chose to move to Granby because it had been a summer retreat when he was a child, deep country where you could ride horses and be paid to pick corn and beans and tomatoes as well as to bale hay. In those days the chief product was meadowland; later, after the war, it would seem to be quickie houses, or perhaps children. It was such a quiet sort of place that when the Public Works Department decided to stencil the words, Stop, Look, Listen, at several intersections, a photographer was dispatched from the local paper.

The family home on 5 Center Street was once visited by a columnist from one of the local papers for one of those At Home with … feature stories:

Last Sunday we stopped at Dr. Blais’ lovely Granby home to accept a long-standing invitation to view his collection of Currier prints and found that the Blais home not only contains many unusual relics of prints but a wonderful assortment of other items of early Americana as well.

The house was originally a colonial house of the late 1700’s which has been skillfully expanded with wings and additions which faithfully preserve the beauty of the original old homestead. Its cheerful red window shutters and spotless white clapboards proclaim it as a house where happiness and comfort abound.

The first change my parents made was to the goldfish pond in the garden yard. My mother thought goldfish were fascinating: their fat gleaming bodies, urgent with allegory, growing as big as their environment permits. But she could not shake the vision of one of