Unforgiven

Huddled together in a neglected bedroom, we were seven- and eight-year-old cousins on a sleepover. In the attic. Not downstairs in the predictable safety of my bedroom, but somewhere we’d never slept before. Tantalized by adventure, we giggled. Early summer mugginess drifted through the windows. The mattress sagged, dust flittered in the moonlight like bugs, and the redolence of cigarette-infused mustiness clings still to my nostrils.

Who knows why we were sleeping up there. Can’t ask anyone—they’re all dead. Except my brother Bobby. But there’s no reason he would have any recollection of the event.

He wouldn’t have been included in the sleepover—that was girl stuff, unlike backyard games of kickball, which was boy stuff. Unless they needed extra players. Since there were so many kids everywhere that got mixed and matched by age and sex, he simply wasn’t in the amalgam that night.

Marty and I, however, were always paired. She’s a year older. Our younger sisters, who were born days apart, were always paired as well. Together, we were often a foursome. But when it came to a birthday party or the Fourth of July parade, well, it was a full-fledged hoopla of kids unpaired by age and sex. Six Walshes, as many as eight cousins, and dozens of neighbors.

While there was no mystery as to why Marty and I were paired for the sleepover, a question hangs over us. Why the attic? Why that night?

It was probably because downstairs, where I lived, was too crowded. My parents and six children over-filled a five-room flat on the first floor of a simple late-19th-century Victorian house—emphasis on simple. I didn’t like being in a big family, although I miss the commotion now. I preferred going to cousins’ houses, where kids had rooms to themselves. When I wanted to be alone, I settled into the back of a closet with a flashlight and a book.

The working-class neighborhood in the South End of Bridgeport, Connecticut, has always attracted lower-income workers and newly-arrived immigrants. My father’s parents settled there when they arrived from County Clare, Ireland, around the turn of the 20th century. They lived there until they died.

Even when I was growing up, it was an old neighborhood. The houses were all populated by assembly-line workers from nearby defense factories; postal, office, and retail clerks; nurses—like Mom; and firemen—like Dad. Many held two jobs—like Dad. And several had aging parents as well as  young kids—lots of kids—under one roof. Like Mom and Dad.

Ironically, the old stomping ground is now a national historic district. Adding diversity to the two-, three-, and four-family Victorian houses were clusters of row houses.  These laborers’ cottages were conceived by the showman P.T. Barnum, who made a fortune based on his observation that there’s a sucker born every minute.

Although the houses had individual personalities, they were all pretty much the same with “little pretense to architectural sophistication,” according to the documents certifying their historical significant. They all had porches, cellars, and attics. The upper eaves sometimes attracted bats that would fly out at night toward the hospital across the street that had been a post–Civil War gothic mansion.

I envied Marty, who lived in a new, single-family house in a young neighborhood about five miles away. Unlike the parking lot out back where we played ball, she had a real backyard and a front yard with a rock garden. I thought that was exotic. Her family visited regularly because my father and Marty’s mother were siblings—and good friends. Their father, Gramp, lived on the second-floor with another sister and her husband—they were all smokers, hence the stench that infused the bedroom where Marty and I found ourselves.

The extended family and their friends got together frequently to eat, drink, sing, and tell stories in what the Irish call a céili. After they had all drained at last a round or two of drinks, one uncle would kick off he entertainment by balancing a glass on his forehead.

Dad tried hard to be the ringleader—after all, he had kissed the Blarney Stone. Everyone called him Knobby because he was prematurely bald and looked like the boxing manager Knobby Walsh in the old Joe Palooka comic strip. But he was no match for it was Marty’s mother. Aunt Kay was the family seanchaí. As the keeper of lore, she recited stories, traced lineages, and sang songs. Meanwhile, we kids ran around sipping our parents’ drinks and choreographing our own dances.

So the attic sojourn was probably a last-minute concession by our worn-out parents.

Sometimes the sleepovers were connived. We would beg, “Please, please, please,” while a cousin hid under a bed. At other times it was arranged in advance—a swap, so to speak. I would stay with Marty while her sister stayed with mine. Or we would both would both stay with both of them, like the time we went to the circus. (Marty says that everything about our childhood was a circus.)

Anyway, Marty and I found ourselves in the attic of an ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood on what was probably an ordinary night. Maybe we had played with dolls, combed each other’s hair, or sang a song her mother had taught us. In a house of Irish mirth, however, a dark, dusty attic begged something extraordinary. A tale, of course. Something creepy.

I remembered that my father had swatted a roosting bat from under an eave. Bat are said to carry messages from the Otherworld, you know. Tucked away in tiny places, the tiny mammals announce themselves with squeaks and stains. Although there were none in that room, I’ve never let logic get in the way of a good yarn. I was raised in the Irish narrative tradition, after all. I’ve been a storyteller since my first fib, and I’ve told a few good ones.

Blame it on a message from the Otherworld. Or the blarney that my father was full of. Or the influence of Mister Barnum, himself. Or maybe I just wanted to be alone.

“Do you know why Dad is bald?” I whispered conspiratorially to my cousin, yanking my long braids down dramatically as I raised my eyebrows.  Wide-eyed, she shook her pixie-bobbed head. I lowered my voice. “Bats ate his hair.”

Horrified into wide-eyed tears, she screamed and bolted down two flights of stairs. In the end, I had no choice but to sheepishly follow. We ended up sleeping in a crowded bedroom downstairs after all.

It’s sad, really, that we can’t ask anyone why we slept up there that night. The céilis of our childhood evolved into bad habits that shortened so many lives.

But Marty and I stayed healthy. We remain the best of friends who, bats notwithstanding, still enjoy sleepovers. But to this day, she reminds me, I remain unforgiven.