Carole O'Malley Gaunt's new memoir starts with her older brother's reaction to the news that she planned to write a book about their tumultuous childhood in Springfield's Hungry Hill neighborhood. "Carole, why do you want to rake up all that family stuff?" he demanded.
It's a moment that will ring true for many who grew up in traditional Irish-Catholic families. The Irish have a well-deserved reputation as storytellers, with a soft spot for the sentimental. But underneath that flair for the dramatic, there is often a profound reticence, an unwillingness to delve too deeply into the uncomfortable terrain of emotions. And driving that fierce privacy, in many cases, is a strong dose of shame, often misplaced or unwarranted.
In Gaunt's case, it was shame about things no child could be expected to understand, much less control: her mother's death from cancer when Carole was 13, and her father's heavy drinking. Gaunt and her seven brothers were left to fend for themselves, finding ways to deal with their individual pain. For Carole, that meant assuming the role pressed on her by the adults around her: substitute mother. There was little room for grief in the O'Malley home; veer too far into anything emotional and you'd be branded, as Carole was, "the crazy one," she writes.
Gaunt's memoir, Hungry Hill (University of Massachusetts Press), is an affecting story about growing up in a family that was not without love, but that lacked the emotional tools to handle sadness and pain. It's also an evocative story of a time and a place: 1960s Hungry Hill, a neighborhood known for its Irish-immigrant roots, its proud working-class identity, its ascendance as a political power base. But behind those public legends were other, hidden stories, private family stories of grief and loneliness, disease and dysfunction—stories like the O'Malleys'.
Gaunt didn't know her mother was dying in the spring of 1959; her father had told her she was sick with mononucleosis. Like many families of the time, the O'Malleys tiptoed around the word "cancer," as if the term itself were poison.
"Medically, cancer was a taboo subject, a word that could not be said aloud," Gaunt writes; indeed, even her mother, Betty, was not told she was dying. "A 'spare the patient' dictum was in general use, as if the secrecy surrounding cancer was in itself a source of shame."
Then, one June morning, Gaunt's father packed his sons in the car and left his 13-year-old daughter home alone as her mother slipped in and out of consciousness in the bedroom. "The priest may come. Do whatever he asks. I'll be back before the, the. … Well, I'll be back," Joe O'Malley told his daughter as he headed out. Carole stayed behind, alone, to wait for the priest who was coming to administer last rites to her mother.
Before Betty O'Malley died, she secured a deathbed promise from Carole to take care of the family "baby," 2-year-old Tommy. Indeed, Carole quickly found herself thrust in the role of caretaker for the entire O'Malley household, a job description that included shopping for the boys' clothes and refereeing their fights. Her brothers, as she tells it, were an ungrateful, quarrelsome lot who treated her like a doormat.
Even at her mother's wake, Gaunt had little time to mourn; she had to take charge of her brothers. When, finally, she broke down sobbing, an aunt dragged her to the ladies' room. "You're going to have to pull yourself together," she told the girl. "It's what your mother would expect of you."
Like most of the adults around Gaunt, her aunt was not unkind; indeed, under their emotional distance was an undeniable familial love. Still, the adults had little idea how to help her sort out her own emotions, so accustomed were they to tamping down their own. Instead, they could only offer as example their own imperfect coping techniques, pushing the pained child to adopt the persona of a stoic, self-sacrificing adult.
It was a role Gaunt was willing to try. Heading back into the wake, her eyes dried and her red nose powdered from her aunt's compact, she promised herself, "I will never again give in to crying."
That, of course, didn't work. Gaunt was left alone to sort out her complicated reaction to her mother's death, the unresolved ambivalence any adolescent girl would feel about her mother. When a family friend told Gaunt her mother was a "saint," she felt angry.
"Now, because of him, because of the saint remark, I have to pretend that my mother is a saint," Gaunt writes. "I feel all tight inside because I am not ready to canonize my mother. For me, my mother was enemy territory. But now that she's dead, I can no longer enter that mother-daughter minefield."
Even before her death, Betty O'Malley was not the center of her family. That role, Gaunt writes, belonged to her father. Joe O'Malley "was ever the scene stealer, taking center stage the way alcoholics and addicts seem to do. Glib and sentimental, my father grabbed the spotlight in our lives, and his children were bit players, cast in roles his disease had determined for us. As in many families of alcoholics, those surrounding him … excelled at improvisational skills. In our chaotic home, there was never a formal script, never a sense of order for us. Everything completely depended on 'how he was' that day."
After her mother's death, Gaunt took on the exhausting job of trying to cheer her father, always hoping to coax out of him the charming, affectionate man he could be. It was a losing battle; Joe O'Malley had checked out. In one scene, Carole announces that she's made the honor roll. "What? I'm sorry. School's over already?" her father responds.
Within a year of his wife's death, Gaunt's father remarried. By Gaunt's description, his new wife, Mary, was the archetypal evil stepmother, a selfish, mean woman given to hysterical outbursts and slaps across her stepchildren's faces. Carole, as the "rival" woman in the household, bore much of her stepmother's ire.
So what does it mean that as an adult, long after her father's death, Gaunt still dutifully visited Mary in the Agawam nursing home where she ended up? Perhaps it was Gaunt's inability to shed her role as family caretaker—a role that, onerous and unfair as it was, also gave her an identity to hold on to. Recalling her mixed feelings as a teenager, Gaunt writes, "I do like the responsibility, being singled out, the specialness of being in charge"—a not uncommon sentiment for the adult child of an alcoholic.
There's no shortage of family memoirs by Irish-Americans, from Frank McCourt's popular Angela's Ashes to All Souls, Michael Patrick MacDonald's story of growing up in South Boston. Even the novels of Alice McDermott, while fiction, will evoke family history for many readers.
But for local readers, Hungry Hill has the added appeal of being not just about a place, but about their place. Carole graduated from Cathedral High and met up with friends at the East Longmeadow Friendly's. Her memoir is full of local (lost) landmarks—Johnson's Bookstore, the Forbes department store—and familiar Hungry Hill names like Hoar, Vecchiarelli, Sullivan. Billy Metzger might have grown up to be Springfield's longtime city clerk, but in this book, he's just the know-it-all neighbor kid who drops the bomb on Carole's younger brother that their recently widowed father has a new girlfriend.
Hungry Hill also touches on the neighborhood's rich political history. "In western Massachusetts in 1959, John Fitzgerald Kennedy's budding presidential candidacy conferred on the people of Springfield a sprinkling of validity, glamour, and meaning we did not have on our own," Gaunt writes. "With Kennedy's sandy-haired, blue-eyed, movie-idol looks and his sharp yet endearing wit, the city of Springfield, and soon the nation, held him in an awe bordering on worship. … The working-class city forgave him his eastern Massachusetts roots, his strange r's, and his Ivy League background. The years 1959 through 1963 were a golden era for Massachusetts politics." While Joe O'Malley worked at Aetna, he traveled in political circles; at his wife's funeral, the pallbearers included his childhood friend, Congressman Eddie Boland, and Matty Ryan, who'd just been elected district attorney.
In writing her memoir, Gaunt wasn't just exposing her family's secrets; she was inviting outsiders into a tight-knit and, in many ways, closed community. But, she writes, letting go of her self-imposed emotional asceticism was a necessity: "It was time for me … to talk, to shred the cords of O'Malley silence binding me and my seven brothers to the terror and chaos of my mother's early death and my father's alcoholism. My long silence, the programmed silence of the 'good girl,' the silence of the alcoholic's daughter, was finally over."
—mturner@valleyadvocate.com
