I Was a Dancer - Jacques D'Amboise [7]
In the late nineteenth century, conditions must have been dreadful in northeast Canada, as masses of French Canadians migrated to the U.S. To this day, French Canadian names pepper the states of northern New England.
Around 1908, my mother’s family left their little farm in Île Verte and joined a group emigrating to Lewiston, Maine. My mother was eight years old. She told me that all the boys in the family had already left home by then; when they reached twelve or thirteen years old, they found work as bonded laborers on more prosperous farms.
David and Marie must have migrated to Lewiston with just the girls—Alexina, Emélia, Adèle, Georgiana, and Jeanne. (“You would have loved our sister Jeanne. She was the best of all of us—but she died young.”) The girls’ lives were knit together. They grew up, married, and clustered in Lewiston, which was 90 percent French Canadian. I had relatives all over town.
I never knew David, but I remember my grandmother Marie as an old lady, lying ill in a bedroom on the second floor of Emélia’s house in Lewiston. I toddled up the stairs to peer at her, then, giggling, bounced on my butt back down.
I knew of my uncles only from snippets of family gossip. One uncle did visit Lewiston from time to time, dapperly dressed, smoking Havana cigars, and driving a Cadillac. He was THE GANGSTER (“Nobody knows what he does. He hangs out with a bad crowd. Someday he’ll die of a bullet!”). Another uncle was THE SAILOR (“Oh, we never see him, he’s always at sea! He could be drowned, and we’d never know it!”). Then there was THE SOLDIER (“Oh, our poor brother, his lungs were scarred by mustard gas in World War I. That awful army! They took everything from him, even his breath!”). The last of the quartet, THE ORDINARY, escaped the hyperbole (“He lives in Massachusetts somewhere with his family. You have cousins there”).
LOVE AND INCOMPATIBILITY
My mother did not finish elementary school. At twelve, she started working in the shoe factories of Maine, and later found employment as a cleaning girl in the fancy hotels in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, or at bed-and-breakfasts on the coast of Maine. She was never without work.
Boss on a rock while hiking in the White Mountains in New Hampshire, 1917 (image credit 1.3)
My father, Andrew Patrick Ahearn, was born in Boston of Irish immigrants from Loughrea, Galway. His father, Joseph Ahearn, worked as a hostler,5 a cabbie, picking up fares with a horse and carriage. His mother’s name was Mary Gavin, and that’s all I know about either of them. My father told me nothing. He spoke as if his life started after high school, when he found employment with the Associated Press as a telegraph operator. Soon, he was assigned to the Lewiston Journal in Maine.
One summer, while eating lunch in a restaurant at Old Orchard Beach on the coast of Maine, Andy, the dashing, six-foot Irishman, espied the tiny, vivacious waitress, Georgiana. He was smitten; so was she. “Your father was so stylish, always dressed well, and he had such beautiful hands, with long, elegant fingers!” As it turned out, stylish clothes and slender fingers were not enough. Boss and Pop were essentially incompatible.
A brilliant activity director, my mother would tackle a problem by deciding what she and everyone else should do, and without qualms coerced all to execute her commands. Endlessly busy, she disliked seeing anyone unoccupied. “I can do it myself, and I will … but you should be doing it with me. So get up!” Frugal, she would take my father’s paycheck, put aside money for rent and utilities, and then, with the few dollars remaining, go to the markets and shop for food bargains, creating menus for a week out of beans, tough cuts of meat, beet tops, and cabbage leaves.
Looking up past the bloodstained apron of the butcher, she’d charm him, “Oh, those beautiful bones and scraps! Don’t throw them away! Put them here in my shopping bag.” Food most people