I was 15 when I found out my grandmother had a second husband, one that wasn’t my grandfather. My grandfather died when my mother was 12, but she had few memories of him. He was an engineer, employed at the Navy shipyard during WWII. My mother and her siblings always referred to him as Daddy, voices lowered as though in prayer, like they were children and not fully formed adults with families of their own. Except for my Aunt Elizabeth, the oldest, eternally single, a private school principal my grandmother claimed was married to her work. She had red hair like me, and I adored her.
I’d asked her once, before I knew better, why she lived with my grandmother, why she’d never moved out on her own. “I did,” she insisted. “I moved down to the Village with some friends.”
The Village! Even as I child, I aspired to one day run away and live there, become a struggling poet or actress, something edgy and rebellious. “Why didn’t you stay?” I couldn’t imagine abandoning the Village to return to the Bronx.
“Mother insisted I keep paying her rent. She couldn’t afford living alone.” Aunt Elizabeth had shrugged. “It would’ve cost too much, so I moved home.”
“That’s terrible,” I fumed.
“That’s Mother.”
I was angry at my grandmother for stomping on my aunt’s independence, keeping her on such a short lease. But, as is so often the case, I judged prematurely, unaware of all the facts.
It was Easter or Mother’s Day, one of those springtime holidays in the que of events obliging my mother’s family to gather. We were at the Upper East Side apartment she shared with Aunt Elizabeth. It had an elevator, a doorman, and a little balcony off the dining room, a slice of the East River barely visible between two high rises over on York. Two steps up from the South Bronx apartment they’d lived in until I was 10, the walkup where my grandfather died of a heart attack, leaving my grandmother a widow with four children, my two uncles under five.
The sun spilled brilliantly into the living room through the fifteenth story windows. I was on the floor with the babies, throwing a cloth diaper over my eight-month-old cousin’s head—Peekaboo!—causing her to emit a full throttled belly laugh as she tore it off and thrust it back at me.
“His family must be livid,” Uncle Dom gloated. “Knowing Mother is collecting his social security.” It always sounded so formal, them calling my grandmother Mother. The opposite of Daddy.
“Doesn’t matter,” Uncle Mike declared. He was a lawyer who, my parents swore, made more money than God. “It’s perfectly legal.”
“He was a lovely man.” My grandmother stood in the doorway to the kitchen, elegant, diminutive in the presence of her giant children, all but my mother over six feet.
“You’re the only one who ever thought that,” Aunt Elizabeth smirked.
“Who are you talking about?” I asked.
The adults looked vaguely in my direction. The rule in our family was that children should be seen and not heard, but at 15, I was getting harder to ignore.
“Bill Sweeney died,” my mother said. “Remember him?”
“Why is Grandma getting his social security?”
My mother blinked and opened her mouth to speak. But she had no words. The siblings exchanged glances. Seconds went by.
“He was my husband.” My grandmother’s hands rested on her flowered apron, smoothing invisible wrinkles.
“Wait.” I scuttled across the Persian rug toward the adults, abandoning the baby. “You were married to Bill Sweeney?” I poked my sister, but she continued flipping through her Cosmo.
Holly was 16, bored and indignant at being forced to spend the day with the lot of us.
“It wasn’t a secret,” my mother insisted. “I assumed you knew.”
I didn’t believe her. The air in the room was charged, vibrating with electricity. My grandmother slipped into the kitchen. My father made a comment about “the peanut farmer” and the presidential election, and the subject of my grandmother’s mystery marriage was dropped, order restored. I was a child once more.
I remembered Bill Sweeney. My grandmother’s Bronx apartment and the surrounding neighborhood had felt like my second home. She didn’t drive and we walked everywhere. To mass and the grocery store, the butcher, the park. She went out at least twice each day, high heels clicking up and down the hilly sidewalks of the Bronx. Every block, it seemed, we ran into friends and neighbors, people who referred to Holly and me as Margaret’s girls, exclaiming over my red hair, my sister’s height. They gossiped with my grandmother, standing on street corners for what seemed like hours, Holly and I bored and impatient, yet too well behaved to ever consider interrupting an adult.
Aunt Elizabeth was frequently out at meetings, away at conferences, and that’s when Bill Sweeney stopped by. My sister and I waited when my grandmother buzzed him in, dancing excitedly in the vestibule outside the apartment door, Bill’s footsteps echoing as he climbed the marble stairs, his hat bobbing on the landing below.
He was unremarkable, not particularly endearing, but nice enough. There are pictures of me sitting on his lap, on the couch beside my parents and uncles, but I have no memory of this. He never indulged us with stories or games.
“He’s Grandma’s boyfriend,” my father informed me once when I’d insisted on clarification. I was mortified. Whoever heard of a grandmother with a boyfriend? The idea was absurd. He was a distraction, keeping her from her real job of doting on us.
She kept her heels on when Bill came over. Didn’t change into her housecoat and slippers or take her teeth out after dessert. There were no bedtime milkshakes or dinners on TV trays in the living room. Instead, we ate with them in the dining room, kicking each other’s legs under the table while they talked. After dinner Bill sat in the living room, smoking a cigar, sipping a tiny glass of Drambuie while my sister and I were trundled off to bed.
It never occurred to me that he spent the night. Did my grandmother rush him out before midnight like Cinderella, worried Elizabeth might discover he’d been there, or did he sneak away early the next morning while it was still dark? And what happened when we weren’t there? I had so many questions.
I pummeled my parents from the back seat that spring night on our ride home to New Jersey. “If he was Grandma’s husband, why didn’t they live together?”
“They did,” my mother replied. “But she asked him to leave.” Like that answered everything.
“Leave?” I had friends whose parents were divorced. But I didn’t know anyone who stayed married without living together, merely stopping by for an occasional dinner. What was that about?
“It’s a Catholic thing,” my father observed from behind the steering wheel.
“A what?”
“They were devout.” He shrugged. “You didn’t sleep together if you weren’t married. And you certainly didn’t get divorced.”
We went to church every Sunday. I’d fulfilled my childhood sacramental obligations, making both my communion and confirmation. But the thought of marrying just to have sex, or sending a husband away without getting divorced, was as inconceivable to me as my father’s suggestion that the Pope was God on Earth.
At home, my mother fluttered about the kitchen, cigarette in hand, irritated at my interrogation. “I was married and long gone by then.” It was never a good sign when she smoked in the house. “All I know is Elizabeth and the boys didn’t like him.”
Elizabeth and the boys? Banishing a husband because your grown children didn’t approve was even more absurd than the idea of her having a boyfriend to begin with. I challenged my grandmother the next time she came to stay for the weekend.
“Did you really ask Bill Sweeney to leave?”
“I did.” My grandmother sat needlepointing. She was a gifted seamstress who for years made all her family’s clothing, elegant suits, coats, hats, even clothes for our dolls. She had a Singer sewing machine with a foot pedal, but she did plenty by hand, flashing a silver thimble on her middle finger. She taught me to embroider, so patient and hopeful that by age ten I knew the difference between a running and a back stitch, how to make satin, chain, daisy, blanket, and French knot stitches.
“But your last name isn’t Sweeney.”
“It was. For a while.” She poked her needle through the cloth. “I went back to your grandfather’s name when Bill left.”
“Didn’t you love him?” At 15, I was convinced there was nothing more important than romantic love. Daydreaming about Roy Santini from my sophomore geometry class took up 90 percent of my waking and sleeping brain capacity. I couldn’t imagine having him in my clutches and then telling him to go.
“Of course, I loved him.” She set the embroidery hoop on her lap. “But I loved my children more.”
It was either the saddest or the most beautiful thing I’d ever heard. My adolescent heart surged with disappointment at my aunt and uncles. Why were they complicit? Didn’t they care that their mother was lonely? She’d devoted her entire life to them. Enough was enough.
Except it wasn’t. It never is.
“Bill Sweeney! Jesus, that was so stupid,” Aunt Elizabeth sputtered when I dared to bring up his name. “The marriage was a joke. They acted like children. Thank God he moved out right after I came back home.”
It wasn’t hard to connect the dots. Elizabeth got left behind when my mother married and my uncles moved out. She wanted to leave, but even more she’d wanted Bill out of my grandmother’s life. Enough to give her an ultimatum, enough to pay the price and return home. No one makes a deal with the devil and walks away unscathed.
Bill evaporated into the ether, his visits tapering off well before I was a teenager. Until the day I found out not only was he dead, but that he’d been my grandmother’s husband, my mother’s stepfather, and my step-grandfather—sort of.
In photos, my grandmother is always laughing, surrounded by friends and family, at the dinner table or on the beach, floating out in the waves. She loved to dance and was rumored to do a killer Charleston in the 20’s. She brought Holly and me Flamenco dolls from a trip to Spain, delighting us by Flamenco-dancing her way across our kitchen floor, stomping her heels, arms raised, clacking imaginary castanets.
“My goodness, I better stop.” She flung one hand dramatically against her forehead, the other fanning herself, a gray curl dangling over her blue eyes. “The people downstairs will be beating on the ceiling with a broom.”
“Grandma,” we’d squealed, “there are no people downstairs.”
And she’d opened her eyes wide with amazement, like the fact of our suburban single-family home was news to her.
There is a brief period in the old photos when my grandmother gazes at the camera with empty eyes, and I am amazed that the weight of her stylish hat and the burden of her grief haven’t felled her to her knees. My mother and Aunt Elizabeth stand beside her, hair severely plaited off their serious young faces, my uncles clutching my grandmother’s skirt. A record of their family, incomplete as it was, the year my grandfather died, attempting to hold themselves together, at least while the camera clicked. And my grandmother did it, held them together. But not well enough, it seemed, to warrant a few years of happiness with Bill Sweeney.
The last time I saw Bill my sister and I were cutting out paper dolls in the living room. Our grandmother’s legendary parakeet, Micky Mahony, was parked in his cage on the floor beside us. We never knew when Micky might speak, belting out: my name is Micky Mahony, or sleep tight, or I love Lorraine, that last one taught to him by Uncle Dom when he dated the girl who later became his wife.
In my never-ending quest to entertain my sister I stuck the scissors between the bars of the cage, hoping Micky might jump on them or start talking. But they fell in, and, when I opened the cage, out flew Micky. Holly and I screamed, chasing him around the apartment, while my grandmother, furious, ran room to room, slamming all the windows shut.
Into this strolled Bill Sweeney. “Close the door!” we commanded in unison. Bill assessed the situation, pulling off his hat and coat like a surgeon preparing to cut, placing his cigar in an ashtray before sprinkling seed into the birdcage. “Come on, Micky,” he coaxed. Then he whistled. He whistled. Extending his hand in the air beside the cage. And Micky fluttered down from the crown molding, perched fleetingly on Bill’s finger, and hopped into his cage.
I stood there, transfixed. “How did you know he would come?”
Bill ruffled my hair. “Magic,” he said. And I believed him.
My Uncle Mike, now almost 80, had us over for a screening of the old family movies he’d recently digitized. Uncle Dom transported Aunt Elizabeth from her assisted living facility in nearby White Plains, a shrunken terror in her electric wheelchair.
Holly was absent, residing halfway across the country, more distant than ever, and I sat on the couch with my son, beside my cousin, the one who’d once enjoyed diaper-peekaboo, now a cardiologist with a family of her own. And there on the screen, still young and alive, were my parents, laughing. And me, self-conscious, mouth loaded with metal hardware.
“Ah,” Uncle Mike observed, as a man appeared on the screen in that stop-motion jerkiness of old movies. “This is Mother’s honeymoon with Bill Sweeney.”
Honeymoon? The existence of an 8-millimeter record lent legitimacy to this marriage I’d never quite come to terms with. I recognized him now, Bill Sweeney. Tall and fit for his late 60’s, standing shirtless next to a pool, palm trees swaying by the sea. Even in a bathing suit, he sported the derby hat, grinning around his cigar.
“Jamaica, I think,” Uncle Dom said.
“Wow.” I nodded approvingly. “I can see why Grandma liked him.”
“What a stupid marriage,” Aunt Elizabeth muttered, with self-righteous anger a half century old.
“Ridiculous. I can’t even watch.”
My grandmother appears on the screen, preening for the cameraman, obviously Bill. She is 60, maybe 65. In a periwinkle one-piece swimsuit, sucking her stomach in, hair tucked away beneath a frilly pink bathing cap. There is no sound, but her head is thrown back as she laughs and laughs.
She is radiant.
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Maureen D. Hall is a writer/poet, mother of three, and small-town librarian. Her work has appeared in numerous publications including, Paterson Literary Review, Hospital Drive, Journal of New Jersey Poets, Nursing, Avalon, American Journal of Nursing, Mothering, Vineyard Poets, Island Quintet, Hopscotch For Girls. Her short fiction has appeared in Isele Magazine and Alma Magazine. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in New England.
© 2023, Maureen D. Hall
Halfway Down the Stairs 