Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading by Maureen Corrigan

Author:Maureen Corrigan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780307431356
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2009-04-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THREE

“They’re Writing Songs of Love, but Not for Me”: Gaudy Night and Other Alternatives to the Traditional “Mating, Dating, and Procreating” Plot

Weddings are inherently comical events—mine certainly was—that’s why Shakespeare’s comedies routinely end in a marriage. The vast effort expended trying to “put on the dog” for the Big Day frequently backfires and produces moments of absurdity. By the time I was in my mid-twenties, most of my old gang of girlfriends from Sunnyside were getting married. Because they were, like me, Irish Catholic, their nuptials were distinguished by mediocre food, free-flowing liquor, pre-Riverdance-style step dancing, and their own peculiar strains of Gaelic piety. When my best friend, Mary Ellen, announced her engagement (a Catholic doctor! Bingo!), she was fêted at a bridal shower where one of her aunts, a nun, presented her with a macramé crucifix, complete with droplets of blood sewn in red yarn. When another close friend from St. Raphael’s, Cathy Sullivan, married Jim O’Brien, who was then a fireman at Kennedy airport, the wedding was held at Our Lady of the Skies Chapel at the airport (since demolished), where over the altar an aluminum statue of the Blessed Virgin stood on a propeller whose blades were positioned to form the shape of the cross. The wedding party was then raucously escorted to the reception in nearby Astoria, Queens, by a cortège of fire trucks, their sirens blaring. And on it went. Most of my college friends were married within a few years of graduation by the Jesuits who had taught us at Fordham University. I envied the apparent seamlessness of my friends’ lives—especially those of Cathy Sullivan and her sister, Pat, whose large Irish Catholic family I’d always half yearned to be a part of growing up. Everyone in their extended family was Catholic, and with the exception of a few abashed Italians, everyone was also Irish. They were like Sunnyside’s version of the Kennedys—insular, good-looking, and proud of their ethnic and religious identity. Indeed, pictures of President Kennedy and Pope John XXIII hung side by side over the couch in the Sullivans’ living room, as they did in Catholic living rooms across the country in the 1960s.

It’s a gift of tranquillity when your adult desires mesh with your childhood background. I don’t quite know why mine didn’t, although I think books, again, are partly to blame. I thought my mom and dad were tops, and I liked being Irish-Polish Catholic, but I do think my avid reading left me vulnerable to the temptations of what memoirist Kate Simon dubbed “the wider world.” Getting a fellowship to grad school at Penn placed me, nervously, into that wider world where, when I turned twenty-eight, I found my life’s partner and he found me. But, precisely because of where we found each other—in an Ivy League grad school rather than at my Catholic college or the neighborhood bar or political club—there were problems. He was Jewish and an atheist. In addition, we were both loner types prone to overintellectualizing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.