Alice McDermott’s third novel, At Weddings and Wakes, is set in the early 1960s, soon after the assassination of President Kennedy. It is the story of the four Irish Catholic Towne sisters and their complicated relationship with their “Momma,” as seen through the eyes of one sister’s three children.
Twice a week, in every week of the summer (except for the last week of July and the first week of August), Lucy takes her children (who are unnamed until late in the novel) from their suburban Long Island home back to the family apartment in Brooklyn where the sisters and “Momma” live, mother and daughters in a figurative if not literal sense. The daughters are actually Momma’s nieces, for “Momma,” an Irish immigrant, married their father in a “marriage of convenience” immediately after her sister, their real mother, died in childbirth. Then, the girls’ father died suddenly, of an aneurism.
If not for “Momma,” who was widowed when she was pregnant with John, her only child, the girls would have been orphans, wards of the state. Out of a sense of obligation to her beloved sister, and because it had taken eight years of hard work in Ireland to get to America in the first place, Momma married a man she hadn’t chosen, nor particularly loved. When he died, she became a single parent to five children, four of whom she hadn’t borne, and the children were raised in the Brooklyn apartment where their mother had died in the bedroom, and their father on the landing right outside the front door.
Nothing, it seems, can tear “Momma” and the women out of the Brooklyn apartment, though Bob, Lucy’s husband, tries. For the last week of July and the first week of August, Bob takes Lucy and their three children for a vacation, alternating cottages year after year to keep his family from becoming, like their mother, overly attached to any one place. John early on made his escape—but the girls never do. John is her natural child, but the girls owe Momma too much. The only way they can try to repay her is to live depressed, unhappy, resentful lives of their own. It would be disloyal to Momma to be happy.
“Lucy’s children (Margaret, Bobby, Maryann) sit at the windowsill in Momma’s bedroom and listen to their mother in the living room, complaining in a stifled and frustrated tone she used only here” (18), that their father “is not the man I married” (25).
Agnes is the pretentious “career woman” who sets herself up as an authority on most everything, and is resentful that she has no husband and has to make her own way in the world. Then there is Veronica, her skin ruined by a medical mistake, who turned out to be most aptly named by her dead mother for the biblical Veronica, who “had offered (her) veil without hesitation to comfort the face of our suffering Lord” (90). Like her half-brother, the ne’er-do-well adult John, Veronica is an alcoholic and hides her suffering not only in the bottle but in the gloom of her dark bedroom.
Though “what about me?” is the question that Lucy, Agnes, and Veronica continually ask, May never does. It is May who left the convent because she thought she’d become complacent, May who has come home to care for Momma, May who is determined to forget their tragic history (“all that is past” [107] is her reply to her sisters’ laments) and be as happy as possible.
And it is May, to Momma’s and the other girls’ great annoyance and jealousy, who unexpectedly, and so late in life, falls in love with Fred, the mailman—an Irish bachelor who has just lost his own mother and is quite alone in the world. May wonders if “God was not sometimes as foolish, as childish, in His love for us, as we are when we first discover our love for one another” (70).
It’s May’s wedding to Fred that is at the heart of the novel. For a brief time, the children see that “Momma” and their aunts, and even their mysterious Uncle John—whom they usually see only in the Brooklyn apartment at Christmas—are happy in each other’s company. And it amazes Lucy’s children that Uncle John has a wife and children too, cousins that Lucy’s brood has never met.
It is as if, in getting out of that apartment, the whole family has been given a new opportunity to get to know each other. But it hardly lasts, for four days after May and Fred’s wonderful wedding, May dies—of an aneurism. The happy family, dancing at the wedding, comes together once again at May’s wake.
It would be nice to think that May’s sudden death made the children realize the futility of rehashing the past, that they’d appreciate May’s wisdom in enjoying every minute of the life that was lent to her, that they’d reject the notion of their family as cursed. Nice—but doubtful.
Sources
McDermott, Alice. At Weddings and Wakes. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992.