Chapter One
The World of My Father
MY FATHER DIED WHEN I WAS FIVE, AND ALL MY LIFE, I HAVE WONDERED if he
ever thought about how it would all turn out.
What I know of him is skimpy and cobbled together from the obituary in the local paper, his
yearbook from college, a few letters sent to my mother during the war. After he died we had no
contact with his side of the family. My mother explained that both his parents were dead, which
was not entirely true: his mother was alive, though hospitalized, incapacitated in some
mysterious, unspoken way. We had a blurry hunch that there had been some kind of friction
between my mother and his only sister. There were other Blaises in Holyoke. It was a common
name, like Shea in Chicopee. When we were asked, as we sometimes were, if Leo or Clement or
Roland Blais was any relation, we were schooled by our mother to answer no, emphatically, and
to offer no further explanation, though chances are we weren't telling the truth and we were part
of an intense cousinry that my mother, for some reason, wished to deny. We dodged discussions
of the cause of death, and if people assumed, as they often did, that our father died of a heart
attack, we were to nod in agreement. Cancer was in those days even more frightening because it
was shameful, a judgment. My mother believed in euphemisms. We were taught to say he was
"deceased," because it sounded more genteel, but which, in our agony to get it right, as often as
not came out "diseased," adding to the confusion and prolonging the discussion.
Of course our mother mentioned him from time to time, but what she offered were scraps of
memories, drained of any real substance. Your father liked pea soup, or, he enjoyed a round of
cards. One time he brought home a hand-crafted pine chair from the Eastern States Exposition.
He liked golf and football and fishing. Once, in an expansive mood, he brought home four Easter
dresses for his four little girls. He and a couple of his pals sponsored a middleweight boxer who
had done well in a couple of appearances at the Valley Arena. He was a man's man and even the
men cried at his funeral.
One time I talked to someone who'd gone to dental school with him at the University of
Maryland, and he said that when they car-pooled home, they had a favorite Italian restaurant they
stopped at somewhere in Delaware. When I must have betrayed in my expression an eagerness
for something of greater substance, he added, "The guy who took over your father's office on
Maple Street wasn't nearly as good. He ended up," and here he paused, as if to hammer home just
how low my father's successor had sunk, "at the mall." A friend of my father's has told me that
every November on the anniversary of his death he arranges for a mass to be said in his memory
in Fort Lauderdale.
Holidays were always a big deal in our house, a marker against the march of days, but we
were not always sure what they meant. "Happy Ash Wednesday," we would say, or "Merry
Armistice Day."
At Christmas the year that my father died we had an unbelievable bounty, an avalanche of
dolls and wagons and nurse's kits. Grief and greed commingled in my mind, mutual parasites.
The more you lose, the more you want. My toy of choice was not found under the tree. Instead, it
was a paper bag filled with the cards that came to our house after my father died. I could not
read, but I liked their glossy feel, the big letters, the indisputable importance that attached to any
envelope with a two-cent stamp. One day, the bag disappeared. So, instead of playing with the
cards, I looked for them. Had Lizzie, our housekeeper, stored them in the pantry? The laundry
hamper? Had my mother put them in the linen chest in the back hallway upstairs, the same
hallway that would later contain her moldering collection of unused gowns and rarely worn
suits? There were so many places to check. Maybe my older brother Raymond had hidden them
in the cellar, that musty series of rooms made of stone, one of which had a Dutch oven in which
occupants of the house had probably cooked meals in the summer a century earlier.
The search became a game and occupied me for hours. I prayed to Saint Anthony, patron saint
of lost objects, for a reunion with those cards. Over the years, I have had the impression we
abused his goodwill, praying to him at the slightest hint of something's being missing, even the
most humble object, someone's misplaced hairbrush or pogo stick or Halloween candy. To this
day missing objects rattle me: when for some reason the scissors fail to materialize in the scissors
drawer, I can feel a rage and despair totally at odds with the loss. Before any major trip or
vacation, I enter a state of high distractibility in which I become convinced that my good watch
or my favorite earrings have disappeared for all of time. When I find something I really like at a
store, I am often tempted by an impulse to make a duplicate purchase. Once, during a
reconstruction, a window was boarded up in a house where I lived, and for a long time afterward
it recurred to me as an image in my dreams, restored and gleaming. In another dream, the house I
live in has a whole extra house inside it but no one will acknowledge it.
"You were five when he died," people always say. "Five," as if involved in some complex
computation. And then they ask the question I have come to loathe, "Do you remember him?" I
experience it as an impertinence-what right does someone have to ask something so
personal?-and at the same time it stirs up a feeling of inadequacy.
What little I may have known about my father once upon a time has been both overexposed
and undernourished. Long ago, my father began to fade in the way a desert plant, rinsed by too
much sun, denied its share of rain, eventually grows vague and dry.
Do I remember him?
The answer is yes and no.
Yes, maybe.
No, probably.
His obituary appeared on the front page above the fold in the Springfield Union on Monday
morning, November 17,1952:
Dr. R. E. Blais, Granby Dentist, Dies in Holyoke
Had Practiced in Paper City for 12 Years;
Served in Navy.
Holyoke, Nov. 16 - Dr. Raymond E. Blais of Center St., Granby, practicing
dentist in this city for about 12 years and well known in professional circles, died
today at the Holyoke Hospital after an illness of about two weeks. He was a
veteran of World War 11 and served in the Navy.
Born in this city he was the son of Mrs. Annie (Nolin) Blais and the late Phileas
Blais. He was educated in the local schools and received his Bachelor of Arts
degree from Holy Cross College in Worcester in the class of 1934. Dr. Blais
entered the University of Maryland Dental School from which he graduated in 1
93 7. He took a postgraduate course at New York University and interned for one
year at the Jersey City Medical Center.
During the war, he served in the Navy and was commissioned lieutenant, senior
grade. After his discharge from the service, Dr. Blais resumed his practice here
and had offices in the Medical Arts building.
Dr. Blais was a member of the Holyoke Lodge of the Elks; Holyoke Council No.
90, Knights of Columbus; the Kiwanis Club; the Beavers Club; the Holyoke
Dental Association and the Holy Name Society of the Immaculate Heart of Mary
Church in Granby. He also had memberships in the state and national dental
organizations.
His leaves his wife, the former Maureen Shea of Chicopee Falls, a son, Raymond,
four daughters, Madeleine, Jacqueline, Christina, and Maureen, all at home; his
mother, Mrs. Annie Blais and a sister, Viola Kettell, both of Holyoke.
The funeral will take place at the John B. Shea funeral home Wednesday at 9 with
a solemn high mass of requiem in the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, Granby,
at 10. Burial will be in St. Patrick's Cemetery, Chicopee Falls.
Throughout my childhood, this flaking document was stored in the drawer of yet another piece
of furniture that we had to be careful not to dent or damage because it, like so many other
artifacts of dubious objective value in the house, might be Worth Something Someday. I
treasured this record in part because it relieved me of the misleading burden of dead-end
fantasies. We had not lost our father to a bitter divorce, to abandonment, to prison, all of which
would have been far more desirable. No, he was gone for good, gone for all of time, and here, for
what it was worth, was proof. On the left ear by the masthead the paper advertised itself as
costing "three cents everywhere." I have always liked that ambitious everywhere, the implied
conviction that this paper had a worldwide web of potential readers. On the right ear, the weather
was predicted as "partly cloudy today and tomorrow." There was a weight to the paper beyond
the mere ounces of space it occupied in the universe, a kind of gravity that linked my father's
death with all the other events of that day on the crowded front page with its eight columns of
news.
The United States government acknowledged it had been testing the H-bomb in the Pacific.
Korean truce talks bogged down at the United Nations.
Other people had died, including a woman from Bennington, Vermont, who left a daughter
named Edith, and a fifteen-year-old boy from Granby whose car rolled over on a country road.
The paper is filled with incidental sociology.
In the world my father left behind, race was as highly charged a subject as it is today. Black
people received two mentions. Under the headline "White Drummer to Wed Negress" we learned
that Louis Bellson, Jr., a musician in Duke Ellington's band, planned to wed jazz singer Pearl
Bailey. A photo shows the good-looking couple, heads resting cheek to cheek, with a caption in
which Bellson "denied a New York report he had jilted a white show girl, Iris Burton, of
Brooklyn" in order to run off to London to marry the singer. What the paper doesn't say is that
Bellson was Bailey's fifth husband, and it also doesn't say-how could it? the fullness of time had
yet to unfold-the marriage to Bellson lasted thirty-seven years, until her death at the age of
seventy-two.
The other black man who received attention on that day was Paul Robeson, the son of a slave,
who sang a signature version of "Old Man River." He had visited Hartford for a concert and
drew an audience of seven hundred along with two hundred and fifty policemen. His
inflammatory message on that evening was that in his opinion the "white ruling class" in the
United States sought to keep "Negroes in their place" and he refused to "go along with that."
In the world my father left, want ads were divided by gender.
Women could become clerks and typists or an undraped artist's model for museum classes at
Smith College. They could be a seamstress or a nurse. They could work as a waitress at the
Arcade luncheonette on State Street in Springfield or as a dining room maid at the Clarke School
for the Deaf in Northampton. They could be the housekeeper for two motherless boys. They
could be a feeder, a folder, or a shaker at the Wells Laundry on Franklin Street.
There were at least four times as many ads for men, who could be mechanics of cars or air
conditioners or furnaces or airplanes, assistant foremen, chauffeurs, grocery store managers,
gauge makers, plaster molders, TV repairmen, newspaper printers, chemists, draftsmen,
druggists, wood workers, tire and car salesmen, elevator operators, circulation managers,
haberdashery salesmen, bellmen, porters, short-order cooks, shoe salesmen, shipping clerks, tool
makers, truck drivers, time-study men. If a man had a way with words and a college degree, he
could work at an advertising agency. A "jolly man" was needed for about four hours a day from
November 28 to December 24 at the Forbes & Wallace department store.
In sports, among the schoolboys, Chicopee and Westfield both had good football seasons, and
someone named Pete Pippone of Greenfield was said to be a "slick kicker."
For amusement readers could go to the all-new 1953 Ice Capades and see Brigadoon at the
coliseum in West Springfield.
Or, they could tune into the new flickering hearth with its black-and-white fuzzy flames. They
could watch television. Three channels were available, with shows such as Guiding Light,
Howdy Doody, Gabby Hayes, Musical Mom, Owl Theater, Daily Prayer, and Nightcap News.
In the world my father left behind, readers could plan ahead and get a ticket to a flute recital
by Miss Margaret Hanford, who would be accompanied by a string quartet on the following
Monday evening at the Women's Club House on Spring Street. Selections from her upcoming
program included Mozart's Quartet in D, reported to be a favorite of Albert Einstein's, and the
seldom performed "Goldfinch Concerta" by Vivaldi, which, when executed with just the right
combination of deft touches and well-timed trills, at least according to the Springfield Union on
November 17, 1952, results in a kind of celestial warbling that might fool even a bird.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Uphill Walkers
by Madeleine Blais
Copyright © 2001 by Madeleine Blais.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Copyright © 2001
Madeleine Blais
All right reserved.
