Photo by Clare Heffernan
For KWH on her 100th Birthday
Out of the tree of the Walsh family a hundred years ago
Fell tomboy Kate, the apple of Tim Walsh's eye.
With mother's milk you drink at first the golden rays of California,
Where your beloved Pa had gone to settle briefly,
To design with his unerring hand
The homes of clients living on the rugged coast.
At three you're brought back East, to the home you'll call your own,
At 135 St. Paul Street in Brookline, Massachusetts.
At four or five you stand upon your sturdy legs
And gaze up at the sky,
And dream of sailing up there in a great balloon,
And dancing with the clouds.
Just wait, dear Kate; in ninety years or so, you'll get your wish.
Meantime you grow up inch by steady inch right here on earth.
And soon you're caught in profile, posing for the camera,
Lined up with your siblings in a stair-step row,
Standing tall in crisp white ruffled pinafore
With big red ribbon tied around your thick black mane of hair.
You have your girlhood treasures,
Like the white chest crafted just for you,
The chest that came a little late but proved worth waiting for,
Because you have it still, right in your own kitchen.
At Lawrence School you learn your abc's,
Teasing little Edith now and then
When she comes down with Lawrence-itis,
The dread disease that keeps her out of school,
And you strive to satisfy the teacher
Who tells you with fastidious precision, "Don't be vague."
At Brookline High you make a host of friends
Whom you will see again for fifty years and more at class reunions.
Then off by bicycle to Bouvé-Boston, the old B.S.P.E.,
Where Stratty rules supreme.
There Mr. Orion gives you lessons in posture and carriage
That not even eighty years have made you forget.
For even with cane in hand you still can stand up straight.
Under the eye of Miss Celia Hall you learn how to dance.
You and a classmate named Ryan stand shyly by the wall
Just because you feel you are too tall--
Not knowing yet, it seems,
Just what it means to be a long-stemmed rose.
You exercise each day your legs and arms,
While carefully preserving female charms;
If any man should dare to call you muscle-bound,
You knock him smartly right down to the ground.
For the beach you dress from head to toe;
And ride the waves with great black pleated bloomers
Swelling up around you like inflated crows.
Struggling with subjects like physiotherapy,
You still find time to howl at the antics of Spike
And cavort with friends like Whit and Tek and Gay
Who sometimes come back home with you to 135.
Charles Dana Gibson, The Gibson Girl (1890s)
In time you make yourself the very model of a Gibson girl:
Athletic, trim, you swim and ski and whack a tennis ball,
And when your bloomers start to slither in a tennis match one day
With some young swain now long and well forgot,
You slip the damn things off and keep on swinging--
But haven't yet got round to telling us who won.
You weren't quite old enough or male enough
To man the trenches in the first great war.
But when the war is done,
You hear a call from devastated France
To help pick up the pieces left by German guns and bombs.
So off you sail at twenty years of age,
And make your way to Soissons, north of great Paree.
You teach gymnastics in the public schools by day,
And in the evening show the older boys to dance:
To do the fox-trot, waltz, and two-step too.
Whatever did those gangling, raw garçons think of
la belle américaine
Who taught their stumbling feet to trip the light fantastic toe,
And gave their shell-shocked ears the sound of music once again?
You learn to speak their tongue, la langue française,
To drive a Ford and change a blown-out tire;
You do your part to help restore a broken land,
And even now you treasure your reward:
A framed certificate from the Comité Américain
pour les Regions Devastées de la France,
Presented to Madamoiselle Kathleen Walsh at Soissons
on December 20, 1920,
And decorated with a silver medal
In recognition of your services to France.
But after all your hard work for a devastated France,
Your parents summon you to Sicily
To see the sights with them: Palermo, Monreale, Cefalu.
(I know you didn't get to Cefalu but I love the sound of it anyway.)
Crossing the water, you slowly climb the boot of Italy itself:
Amalfi, Napoli, Roma, Firenze, e bella Venezia, La Serenissima,
With all the glories of Italian art:
Raphael, Leonardo, Botticelli, Michelangelo.
But what Italian eye could fail to see the beauty
You brought them--the beauty of la bella Katerina?
Enroute by train from Napoli to Rome
You catch the eye of un giovino.
Smitten, ardent, glowing con amore, he gets your Boston address,
Sails across to stati uniti, and appears one buona sera
At Via Sancto Paulo 135 (aka 135 Saint Paul Street)
to take you out.
Va bene. What happens now?
Do you two stroll a little awkwardly along the Charles,
Watch Charlie Chaplin tramp his way across the silent screen,
Inhale the scent of roses in the Public Garden,
Or take a dish of fresh ice cream at Shrafft's?
You don't recall, I see, but what you do recall
Is how the evening ended in the hall
Of 135 Saint Paul.
Down on both knees dropped your Valentino
To ask la bella signorina to be his for life--to be his sweet signora.
Madre mia! You don't remember just exactly what you said,
But luckily for all of us, you turned him down.
Where next for this young woman of the world?
You've come back home to finish at Bouvé,
Watch great Bill Tilden triumph on the courts,
And start to kick your heels up as the twenties--and your twenties--
start to roar.
You spend long summer days at old North Scituate,
Splashing your way out to Elephant Rock,
Building castles of sand designed by Maginnis and Walsh,
Walking gingerly barefoot over the loose hot stones,
Hearing over and over again the roar of the surf
Raking the sand and clearing its throat on the stones,
As you sit out at night on the moonlit terrace of Shinglemere
Talking with sisters and brothers and friends
And listening to your beloved Pa chuckle softly at your mother,
Who gathered so many shawls and scarves around her in the cool
night air
That he called her the artichoke.
When summer ends, you pack your gear and board a train
For motown, old Detroit
To work at teaching tough young city girls
Just how to build their growing legs and arms
For something other than the next gang war.
It's not exactly what the Gibson girl expected,
But like a doughboy in the trenches,
You do your tour of duty for a year.
Back home to Brookline, then, you go
To see what fickle fate will drop into in your hand:
A wedding invitation comes your way,
And someone says that if you go,
You'll meet your cousin Roy--
A man you'd somehow never met before.
Of course you go, and there amid the crowd he stands:
A man to put poor Valentino in the shade.
Tall, dark, lean, and debonair,
He wears a neatly-trimmed moustache,
A tidy wedge of black beneath his blue and sparkling eyes.
He makes you think of Ronald Colman on the silent screen
(Had you just seen him in The White Sister with Lilian Gish?)
Except that this guy talks, and says such charming things
That you at once agree to meet him soon again
And just as readily say yes when one month later
He asks if you will be his date for life.
Just two weeks into 1925 you say "I do"
And then head north with him--
Not south to Florida in flight from winter's cold,
But north by train to North Conway, then on to old Quebec,
Where you check into the Château Frontenac
With the great bend of the Saint Lawrence River at your feet.
Does it snow? Does it sleet? Does it blow? Who cares?
No matter how frightful the weather outside
There's always a fire crackling within,
Coffee and eggs in the morning, cocktails and dinner at night,
And love to keep you warm.
Roy and Kath in Quebec, January 1925
Now Mrs. RJH, you head on back to greater Boston, Dorchester,
And start to make your new man's house a home.
This overworked young doc has not had time
To put up curtains on the windows yet;
For privacy they're simply streaked with soap.
You wash the windows, hang new curtains, start in decorating
And also start to sand and polish your new man's rough edges,
To turn this rugged prince into a king.
And since for now he keeps his office in the house,
You help him with his patients in the waiting room,
Steering fat ones, when you can, away from spindly chairs.
You find, though, that you can't do much about the cold
On icy winter days, when you spend half the morning
With frozen feet stuck right into the stove like legs of lamb.
And what of little feet? In '25 comes little Roy,
The apple of his Daddy's eye,
And Mary Ruddy off the boat to help with him;
Then Joan in '27, the year that Lindy flies the Spirit of St. Louis
o'er the brine,
And Jolson gives the silent screen a voice.
With kids arriving one each year you know you'll need more room,
And find a handsome house out in Jamaica Plain,
With big back yard for games and garden too,
And just three minutes' saunter from Jamaica pond.
"Buy it," says your mother Marian, "and fill it up."
And so you do.
In '28, the year that Hoover beats Al Smith, comes Peg.
In '29 comes Sheila and the Great Stock Market Crash--
I've always thought she was the one who made it fall.
Then 1930 brings a little tyke named Mike,
Who soon would prove, in spite of FDR,
That fear itself was not the only thing we had to fear.
The budget's tight just now, with precious little money going round,
But Dad delivers babies night and day,
And now and then his patients strive to pay,
And somehow, with the help of various hands--
With Austin, Agnes, Aldeeka, Mary Ryan,
You keep the family going. As times improve,
You find the time with Dad
To take up golf again (as if you ever put it down!),
Sip a highball with the Todds and Heflers now and then,
Have dinner at the Ritz,
And even catch a movie afterwards:
Charlie Chaplin's City Lights, perhaps,
Or Arrowsmith, with Ronald Colman and the lovely Helen Hayes?
And then one sunny Easter Sunday in the spring of '31,
You and Dad and all your brood but six-month baby Mike
Get dressed up in your finery to stroll along
The fine old avenue called Commonwealth,
Where you catch the eye of a photographer,
But of course! How could he miss you?--
And then you all appear on the front page
Of the Boston Herald Rotogravure.
Left to right: Kath, Joan, Cousin Paul, Roy Junior., Sheila, Roy Senior., Peg
Now it’s 1932, and April brings--along with FDR for president,
And crocuses and bright gold forsythia
Spilling out beneath the big bay window of the dining room--
A little boy who wears a large black bowl of hair upon his head
Who seems to have just arrived by boat from China.
You call him Tim, after your dear Pa,
And you begin to see how quickly you are filling up this house.
You now have six, and precious little time
To call your own. After dinner, perhaps,
When Agnes gets the children gently bathed,
And just as gently tucked in all their beds,
You sit down in your very own burgundy easy chair
And read the Boston Herald to yourself,
Or sit with Dad beside a crackling fire
And listen to the brand-new president
Explain his New Deal on the radio.
Nineteen thirty-four brings death and life:
Your dear Pa dies, but you give birth to David--number 7.
So here the kids are now, in 1938,
With all but little David lined up left to right,
Roy Junior looking every inch the gent,
Just like his dapper dad,
Then Joan and Peg and Sheila, Mike and grinning Tim.
Fast-forward now, past the fearful hurricane of '38
To that more fearful day in February '39
When you learn that your firstborn son has died.
Who else will ever know what you felt then,
When by your grieving heart there beat two unborn hearts--
The hearts of those you long had known were twins?
You bury little Roy, and Dad entombs his grief so deep inside
He cannot speak of Roy for months to come.
You bury one, with two more on the way.
But how can two or even two times twenty-two
Replace the one you lost?
You never lost him wholly; he lives yet in your heart.
But that dear heart has always made a place for each of us,
And each of ours.
In that great inn of yours there's always room for more--
Like James and Paul, who found in you a second mother
When theirs was gone.
And so we two arrive on April 22.
We play a numbers game on your own birthday,
For April's two times February, and 22 is twice 11.
We two, however, come out one by one:
Tom wriggles out ahead of me;
I linger, dawdling behind.
But nonetheless, before I leave the womb,
I turn out every light
For even then I know that Dad is looking on.
I see now that it's taken near two hundred lines
To bring the twinny boys into the light of day,
And you will want this dawdling boy of yours
To get a wiggle on before you fall asleep.
So forward march--right into World War II.
Not five months after Tom and I are born,
The German army plant their great jackbooted feet
On Polish soil, and thus it all begins.
Do you thank God that none of your five boys
Is old enough to fill a trench?
Do you wonder if your students of the waltz
Your onetime raw garçons in old Soissons,
Are marching to a different two-step now,
Or tripping onward to a dance of death?
With eight of us to tend, you have no time to think of them,
And war is just a game we play with sticks and stones,
A game that none of us was asked to play for keeps.
But I remember Austin going off to France in '43 (I think);
I see us crowding round the kitchen entry door to wish him well,
And wondering just why he had to go.
And I remember two young men named Dick and Al,
Who came one night in crisp new uniforms to call for Peg and Joan.
I see them standing now just inside the living room at '46,
Genial, gracious, beaming, grateful for your hospitality,
Looking forward to their night out with the girls,
Perhaps their last before their date with Hitler's guns.
A few months later I came home one day from kindergarten
To find Peg in the sunlit dining room,
Reading a letter that had just arrived from Al
To say that Dick had died in battle.
That was really all I knew of World War II
Until one day I saw a big black headline on the kitchen table:
THE WAR IS OVER.
Those were the first words I can remember reading,
Though long before,
While shells rained down on France and Germany,
You read us tales of Uncle Wiggily, Babar the Elephant, and Winnie,
The one and only Pooh.
Enough of war! Return to the domestic front:
The sunsuits you put on us when the sky was blue,
The birthday suits you let us wear for hailstorms,
The butterfly kisses you made with your fluttering eyebrows
When you tucked us in bed;
The swanboat rides you gave us in the Public Garden,
The roses climbing on the trellis of your garden gate,
The afternoons of skating on Jamaica Pond,
The tinsel we threw down upon the great big Christmas tree,
With presents piled up under it in heaps;
The playroom door on Christmas day, the gateway
To a world of brand-new toys,
Where Tom and I stood first in line each year
With bated breath, and older brothers panting on our necks;
One year Mike nearly trampled us to death
When opening the door we suddenly revealed to him a wrestling mat.
And I remember summer days of swimming out at Ponkapoag,
With cold root beer for lunch and hot dogs from the grille;
And summer weeks at Shinglemere,
"By the sea, by the sea, by the beautiful sea."
That was the song that Tom and I sang in January '45
For the costume party you gave on your twentieth anniversary,
When you wore a great black fitted dress that flared out at your heels
Like the Spanish dancer in Sargent's painting at the Gardner Museum.
What else? You scrubbed our ears and bandaged up our wounds,
You fed a crowd of ten for dinner every night,
And twice that many for high days and holidays;
You bore with all the mayhem in the house,
The spills, the messes, once a midnight waterfall
That filled the living room (my humble contribution to domestic bliss).
You bore it all, and somehow kept the house at '46
A place of light and grace and order,
Banishing dirt, tidying rooms,
Scraping once a month great gobs of ancient dust-encrusted oatmeal
From the backside of the kitchen radiator,
And using your own hairbrush on our backsides
Whenever you perceived we needed it.
In summer '47 you wave goodbye to Mike
As he heads off across the continent
In a 1932 Ford that seemed hardly spry enough
To chug once around the block.
Should you allow a kid of not quite seventeen to drive
Three thousand miles and back in that jalopy
With just a pair of friends to keep him company?
Why not--if he can do it?
You see in him your own lust for adventure,
And something in you cannot bear to hold him back--as if you could!
As we kids all grow bigger, you find more time for gardening and golf,
But keep a steady watch on what we do.
In 1950, the magazine called Life proclaims a national disaster:
Juvenile delinquency has come to plague the land.
Children now and then are misbehaving,
A thing unknown to all the ages past.
You take your stand against this dreaded new disease:
To one and all of us you roundly say,
"I will not have juvenile delinquency in my house!"
Your word is law; of course we all obey,
And from that moment on we never stray.
Never? Well, as Dad was fond of saying, hardly ever.
Distinguished doctor's wife, mother of eight,
Queen of endless hospitality,
You nonetheless find time to swing a club
With Dad on Sunday afternoons,
And Saturdays with good old friends like Mary Dalton.
At Wollaston you swing so well
That you become the champion of all the women there eleven times
And twice the Women's Senior Champion of Massachusetts.
You loved the game of golf,
But you made sure you played it by the rules.
One day you played with Boston's Mayor James M. Curley,
A man of something less than perfect probity
Who would not hesitate to bend or even break the law
To get his way.
When your ball landed onetime in the rough,
He picked it up for you and set it on the fairway,
Doubtless thinking he had done a gallant deed.
But little did he know of gallantry.
You put your ball back in the rough and told him firmly,
"Mr. Curley, that's not the way I play this game."
One Saturday you get the yen to ride a motorcycle at the club
For Costume Day. You wear a nylon stocking for a mask,
Dress up like a bandit on the run,
And ride Dave's Harley Davidson around and round the clubhouse
Because you can't remember how to make the damn thing stop.
And I suppose you'd still be chugging round that house
If David hadn't somehow intervened
And found a way to set you on your feet.
At fifty-four you get a special treat:
Your first grandchild, Kathleen, a girl named just for you.
Excitedly you pose one day by the seawall at Shinglemere,
With Mike and Betty and your octogenarian mother
And little Kathleen.
"Four generations!" you say, captured by the camera all at once.
And little Kathy's just the first of what in almost twenty years
Will number thirty-two grandkids in all.
Meantime, as your fledglings start to fly the nest at 46,
You find on Brush Hill Road a gardener's house,
Looking out across a sweeping field to the Neponset River.
You give the stucco walls outside a subtle hue of pink;
You give your special warmth and color to the rooms inside,
With touches here and there of purple, the color you love best.
You have your own Elysian fields of gladioli stretching to the river.
And with Austin's help you plant new gardens on the rolling lawn:
The great green rug where scores of your dear grandchildren will play
At the unbirthday party every year,
When ponies take them round the lower field,
And flying frisbees cleave the golden air.
With all you do for all your children and their children too,
You find the time to be a loving, patient daughter
To the mother who raised you.
You treat her like a queen
When she appears to stay a week or two or three . . . .
You bring her breakfast every day in bed,
And when you've got the great big painted wooden tray
All loaded up with hot oatmeal, and eggs, and fruit,
And toast, and coffee too,
And everything, it seems, that she might want,
You draw the curtains in the music room, where she's been sleeping,
Unveil the emerald lawn that stretches out before her in the sunlit dew,
With all the flowers and the trees in bloom;
You plump her pillows, help her to sit up,
Set the breakast tray upon her lap,
Wish her a hearty good morning, and never flag in your devotion--
Not even when she says to all of this, "Well, where's the marmelade?"
As fifty leads to sixty in your life,
And you make winter quarters down in Florida,
You feel the spirit of your father's artful hand touching your own,
And start to paint in watercolor.
You study line as well as color,
You study shading, symmetry, perspective,
You learn from Emile Gruppé down in Naples,
And from Alva Glidden here at home.
But whatever you may learn from others,
You send your own vitality and grace
Right through the bristles of your brush
To swim and shimmer on the watercolored page.
Before you sign a picture with your famous monogram
We know it's yours because we know your touch.
In January 1960 you go with Dad to Washington, D.C.
To see John F. Kennedy sworn in as president,
And in a long white gown you make your way through snowy drifts
To dance at the Inauguration Ball.
Did you feel you could have danced all night?
What pictures you have made, what wonders you have seen,
Since first you craned your neck and dreamed of flight.
The pictures swim before your eyes:
At Kitty Hawk, the brothers Wright took flight when you were three,
A little girl just gazing at the sky.
With little Roy and Joan a babe in arms, you thrilled to learn
of Lindbergh's solo crossing,
And just a few years into your grandmotherhood,
A man named John Glenn orbited the earth.
Then weeks before your last granddaughter's birth,
Neil Armstrong put his foot upon the moon
And made you catch your breath for what mankind can do.
But what of womankind and of her dreams?
At 95 you make your lifelong dream come true:
You board a basket tethered to a great balloon,
And take your long-planned voyage to the sky.
You dance with clouds and laugh with angels
And blow a kiss to each of your dear Roys.
Then down you come and land right here on earth
But with a look the camera catches for us all:
A look of exaltation and delight
As if the little girl within you had come out once more to play.
That little girl is now a woman blessed
Not just with years, but with the scores of lives
You’ve brought into the world, and touched with grace and love.
Beyond, far far beyond, the ancient Biblical decree,
You have increased and multiplied;
You’ve lived to see the children of your children’s children,
Who number forty-four just now, I think, with no end in sight.
Had I a hundred years to tell the story of your life,
Of what you’ve done for all of us, and ours,
I could not tell the hundredth part of it.
And so I end with just six simple words
That now will have to stand in for the rest:
Happy Birthday, Mom, and much love,
Jim
James Heffernan February 11, 2000