All Souls by Michael Patrick MacDonald Read Free Book Online Page B

believed every word of these stories and was horrified when I saw Frankie or Kevin helping an older woman with groceries to her door. But they always got a quarter for their courtesy and still had their heads.
    Kids from all over Jamaica Plain started to hang out with us, because they liked our house and could do what they wanted there. My older brothers and sisters set up a clubhouse in the basement, inviting friends over to smoke cigarettes and play spin the bottle. Friends would stay overnight in the cellar, especially when they weren’t getting along with their parents, or were running away from home. Most of them started calling my mother “Ma.”
    On hot summer nights, we’d all sleep on mattresses on the front porch. The house was stifling and we didn’t have the air conditioners that others on the street had. Most families in the neighborhood seemed perplexed by our ways. Mrs. Schultz, an older woman from Germany who lived upstairs from us, used to wake us all up to send us inside the house. She was bothered by the idea of having to climb over loads of kids in their underwear, all wrapped in sheets like mummies. She seemed mean, speaking in German and shooing us into the house before we’d had a good night’s sleep. Our makeshift way of living seemed normal to us, but it opened us to harsh judgment, like gypsies.
    Any time any programs about gypsies were on, Ma would call us all to the TV to watch. She had a great fascination with gypsies, and especially with the tinkers in Ireland. When she’d traveled to Ireland as a teenager, she’d run away from her relatives and hung out with caravans of tinkers, playing the accordion for them. Her aunts wrote back to my grandparents telling them that she was shaming them all over Ireland by joining up with “the tribes.” I grew up with a romantic picture of the tinkers from my mother’s stories, and always wondered if we had tinker blood in us, blood that my grandparents would never mention.
    Looking back, it seems that early on I took over the job of trying to keep things looking whatever way they were supposed to look. I worried both about keeping up with the other families and their ways and about making sure that we looked poor enough for surprise visits by the social workers from welfare.
    Ma would get an unexpected call early in the morning saying that the social worker was on her way. She’d wake us all up in a panic about the state of the house. The problem wasn’t that the house was a mess, but rather that it looked like we owned too many modern conveniences for our own good. Poor people weren’t supposed to have a color TV. We’d all have to get up right away on those days to pull a fast one. I actually loved devising strategies for outwitting the inspectors. In no time flat, we’d be running in all directions, getting rid of anything of any value. Out went the toaster. It didn’t work without using a steak knife to pull the bread out, at the risk of electrocution. But a toaster might mean that there’s a man living in the house, giving gifts or money to my mother. Welfare wouldn’t allow for that; God knows a woman with eight kids shouldn’t have a man living in the house! But who needs a man in the home, I always thought, when you have the welfare office? A man would only be abusive, tear at Ma’s self worth, and limit her mobility in life. Welfare could do all that and pay for the groceries. No man ever did that in our home. But our interrogators seemed to be obsessed with the notion of some phantom man sneaking in during the night and buying us appliances. So out went the blender too. Really poor people have no time for exotic milkshakes. We thought it would be enough to put things in the cabinets under the sink, but the social workers got keen to that hiding place. They were shameless about going through cabinets and drawers. We had to resort to the crawl space under the front