To reveal her name would be to violate a trust: her aura of privacy is singular among her very few assets and comforts, and she guards it with the silent passion of withdrawal. That she is my godmother and aunt will suffice to identify her for the purpose at hand. And although she is very much alive, my describing her from this moment on by use of the past tense is deliberate, appropriate, and painful: the woman as I once knew her no longer exists.
From childhood on, she loved the opulent ambience of Marshall Field’s State Street store; after the premature death of her husband and at a stage of life when others are preparing for leisure, she chose–out of necessity–to work there in accounting. She grew to enjoy it so much that she stayed there for many years, until she was forced out by retirement law.
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Yet, like my mother, she could not walk past most tin cups or extended hats without digging into her purse for coins, refusing only the most outrageous of charlatans, and sometimes not even them. Her rare inadvertent failure to meet the weekly parish stipend immediately prompted a private act of contrition and a doubling of the next week’s allotment–with interest, of course. And whether she ate at a Formica Woolworth lunch counter or a fluted table in Field’s Walnut Room, she labored to compute the rightful tip and offered it to the penny, often when the service did not warrant it.
She was street-smart to be sure, but in a pristine, utilitarian sense, knowing how to get from here to there to anywhere and back home again; knowing what street was named after whom and why; knowing what to avoid and when, although this last sense was to fail her in the end. And all of this faculty was so much the more remarkable in that she never in her life drove a car and was seldom a passenger in one. Her safety she entrusted utterly to her God and to His Mother, to whom she prayed more than just daily.
But the 1948 job market for a former military spy, even one with a cigar box brimming with medals of valor and two Purple Hearts, was the same as for a guy who avoided conscription altogether for whatever reason. So while my aunt went about creating cozy castles out of rented flats, her husband quietly returned to his prewar job in a machine shop, where the only item of less significance than the tiny industrial springs he coiled was the paycheck he brought home. Yet they managed and soon bore two children, raising them with love and care, assisting them through college, and sending them successfully on their ways.
One week before Christmas, late on a crisp, bright Sunday morning, she attended high mass as usual at Saint Hyacinth’s, then decided to celebrate her 77th birthday in her own typically private way. She took the bus and subway downtown to her beloved Marshall Field’s for an elegant brunch and some holiday shopping for herself and the kids and guests. Her mood, I know, was ecstatic.
She turned the final corner and walked the short span to her entranceway in the direct center of the two-story yellow-brick building, which was flush with the sidewalk’s edge and stretched almost one-half block long, from a cross street in front to an alley at the rear.
