Mrs. Clayton's gift

...Clayton's recipe: one ounce each of oolong, souchong, and gunpowder assembled by the grocer at the A&P from bins along the wall of the store, black as coffee and served to us with milk out of Beleek cups sprigged with roses...

...Clayton came to this country from Limerick...

...Clancy conveyed the news to us, it was to tell my mother that although she was not one of the legatees according to the will, one of my older brothers could come to pick up something of sentimental value to the deceased...

...he wanted to know...

...Clayton's affairs...

...But Charlie had been a successful liquor salesman and the genial proprietor of a prosperous saloon on Lake Park Avenue, the owner as well of a great many little apartments in the same building...

...The cats ate rice and King Oscar sardines...

...Once he asked me my name and how to spell it...

...Clayton often, and because she felt more comfortable with something to hang onto, even the hand of a ten-year-old, I was the reluctant child chosen to accompany her to the house on Hyde Park Boulevard shrouded in dusty plum-colored draperies and portieres, filled with ponderous mission oak furnishings, the walls crowded with pictures brought from Ireland when Mrs...

...When Mr...

...Demetrios, called Jim, was unlike anyone they had ever known...

...He played poker and wasn't very good at it...

...My mother had been educated at a convent school conducted by Ursulines, where she learned to embroider the deep hems of linen pillowcases, to play on a mandolin the pieces Bach composed for his young second wife, and to speak a little French in the German accents of Mother Stanislaus and Mother Hildegarde...

...Commonweal 10 March 11,1999...

...Why does it begin with a 'K...

...You and the girl are my only friends," she would say...

...My father, on the other hand, while loving his children extravagantly, was unable to provide for them with any consistency, his feckless career changes rendered even more precarious by habitual gambling...

...It remained there when we moved to a smaller, darker place on Fifty-fifth Street...

...Charlie died well-off and his wife, my mother was sure, had inherited a lot of money...

...For my part, I Commonweal 9 March 12,1999 was polite and willing, running to the post office for two-cent stamps or to the store for tea and cat food...

...Clayton, my mother played the role of a cheerful, appreciative, helpful companion, willing to listen to repeated complaints and reminiscences, straightening antimacassars, plumping dusty sofa pillows...

...A guy with his head in the clouds," was the comment of one of my mother's pragmatic brothers...

...When I was older I used to wonder: Was it not, after all, my mother who was the poor soul...

...Thereafter she concentrated her resources—money she was able to wheedle from her brothers and secrete in a special account—on her most promising child, my brother Ed, whom she contrived to put through six years of college, including law school...

...Occasionally we would encounter another visitor, Mr...

...He did not marry until quite late in life, and was always good to his mother...

...After graduating she went home to wait for someone to come along and marry her...

...And answer the question rhetorically, "Why not us...

...For Mrs...

...But here we were now, a dozen years later, struggling in free-fall financial circumstances, the family's poor relatives...

...But this was a bad summer for my mother...

...Nothing remotely useful...

...Apparently the old woman was glad of our presence, even speaking euphemistically of her intention to be good to us when the time should come...

...My mother would ask herself and voice the question to me, "Who's going to get all that money...

...The Greek alphabet does not contain a 'C.'" As though considering the legal consequences of such a failure, Mr...

...He came to her house carrying long-stemmed roses and strawberries in the middle of winter, and leather-bound copies of Shakespeare's Sonnets and The Rubdiydt of Omar Khayyam, crafted in the print shop at Hull House...

...While waiting, it was customary to find good works to do...

...My brother Ed pulled his coaster wagon, the one that said Chicago Daily News on the side, a prize he had received for selling two subscriptions, to Mrs...

...Clancy, a lawyer who collected the rents and handled Mrs...

...My mother called Charlie Clayton's widow—elderly, frail, and housebound—a "poor soul without chick nor child...

...The picture was stored in the front hall, a startling apparition to anyone who opened the door and didn't expect to find this florid presence staring from the depths of a clothes closet...

...Every year in August we spent two weeks there, the happiest times of my young life: picking peaches, walking barefoot down a hot dusty road to the mailbox, crying over my Aunt Nancy's purple-bound copies of the life and hard times of Elsie Dinsmore...

...Clayton's home, my mother often reminded me that we must be good to this poor soul in the hope that she, a childless widow and not in the best of health, would be good to us...

...Clancy told us that there were nine women named Catherine in The Lives of the Saints, and all of them were spelled with a C. My mother was upset by this failure to comply, but she did take it as a good sign that he wanted to know how to spell my name...

...She learned from this experience that "you can't trust or depend on other people...

...Clayton's house, and was given a large flat package tied with heavy twine...

...Not a good sign, my mother feared...

...Clayton, as my father cynically observed, "up and died on us...

...She seemed to think that if we had been at home things would have turned out differently...

...My mother was an intelligent woman...

...They stared at mother and child as though they knew and scorned our subtle machinations...

...The tea was a mixture compounded according to Mrs...

...Not even the Beleek china or the wicker tea cart, my mother noted bitterly as she unwrapped the pastel crayon portrait of Father Kenny, the priest who had baptized Mrs...

...As a volunteer at Hull House she met a charming and handsome young man new to the city but apparently doing well, working for his uncle who owned a commission house on South Water Street...

...Clayton in Limerick...

...She was named for her Greek grandmother," my mother had to admit...

...Now it happened that one of my mother's brothers owned a great farm in Michigan...

...As we walked to Mrs...

...Died and was buried in our absence...

...She identified him as "a spoiled priest," a designation I did not understand, but it seemed to guarantee his integrity...