This is a story about a wake and a matchmaking opportunity.
My friend Joanne’s mother Madeline died the day before Palm Sunday. Joanne is my friend from high school at the Academy of the Holy Angels. My friend Ann –who’s been my friend since first grade at St. John’s in Bergenfield –called me from North Carolina to make sure I knew about Madeline’s passing. Ann is married to Joanne’s cousin Brian, the son of Madeline’s sister.
My husband Jim attended the wake on his own early in the afternoon. He is kind of a celebrity and he actually is a very energizing presence at wakes. It’s one of his gifts.
My 17-year-old son Tom and I arrived later, having just spent time helping to set up my son Matt’s and daughter-in law Melany’s new household in Sparta.
When you step into a wake, you immediately do a kind of triage, scanning the room for the relatives of the deceased and other connected people you may have known in the past. My high school friend Louise Cook came up to me, and pointed me in Joanne’s direction.
Joanne was seated in the middle of the room, holding court. Truth to tell, Joanne is a kind of celebrity by force of her personality. She has always exuded an outsized dynamism. She was Miss School Spirit at Holy Angels. She is a flashing, rotating ball of jokes and laughter and twinkling eyes and heartfelt compliments. She was kind enough to include me –a true nerd—in her social circle in Fort Lee when we were teenagers. That was where I met my first boyfriend, Jim Forte.
Joanne pointed out others who had been in our long-ago circle of friends: Lucian and John DeLuca and Jim Cook.
I offered condolences and asked about her mom’s last days. Madeline had Parkinson’s and was a shell of herself in the last few months. But, said Joanne, “She always rallied on Sunday, the day she would visit her sisters at the old house on Summit Avenue.” It was the house where Madeline was born. When she could no longer go to her sisters on Sunday, they came to her.
I had just been talking about genograms –family trees of family dynamics – with my niece-in-law Jane Marie, who is pursuing a doctorate in social work. I believe we all come into the world with our own idiosyncratic spark of divinity, but we are poured into the mold of family. We are shaped by our parents and our siblings, our grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, our spouses and our children, and by our family story. (And those who believe in reincarnation believe we repeat those patterns over many lives and many centuries.) When you are at a wake, you are looking at and honoring a genogram during a rite of passage.
Joanne’s mother Madeline was a tough mother when we were in our teens. She had the Irish-American gift of “telling it like it is” (remember Maureen O’ Hara as John Candy’s mother in the 1991 film “Only the Lonely?”). Madeline had a throaty chuckle when she might say something completely on point but potentially devastating to the immature adolescent ego. She kept maybe 10 boxes of Entenmann’s cakes in her kitchen at all times so that none of her family would become alcoholic. Madeline felt sugar and carbs would deter the Irish urge to imbibe. (Nobody drank, but Joanne says the Entenmann calories were no good for her figure.)
And she really was a great beauty, always well-coiffed and well-dressed.
My own mother was equally tough. She once told me I could get a fever in my brain that would take away my intelligence, which she knew was the only thing I had going for me at the time.
But my mother was more tomboyish, so I never really had to try to match up to the whole “being-a-lady” thing. (Although she was furious that I didn’t want to wear nylon stockings when I was in the eighth grade and she accused me of “not wanting to compete with other girls.” I still don’t like to wear hosiery.)
At the wake, Joanne introduced me to her daughter Tara. This is where the matchmaking opportunity comes into play.
I first met Tara when she was in a stroller and was less than a year old. I was pregnant with my second son Mike.
I remember Tara at age 3 when Joanne came over to our house for dinner, and in her typically exuberant way, remained chatting until late in the night. Tara said, “Joanne [not Mom, Joanne], it’s time to go. Right now.”
The last time I saw Tara was at her First Holy Communion party at age 7.
But here was Tara, at age 25. She was in graduate school for social work. She had presence and was unafraid to interact with her mom’s friends. Like her grandmother, she was a straight shooter. She seemed to have a sense of humor and a sense of fun.
She was still bossing her mother around. “Mom, we are going out to dinner IMMEDIATELY after we leave here.”
She was beautiful, with a very mobile expressive face, like the comedic actress Katherine Heigl.
And I thought of what Joanne had said to her daughter Tara after Joanne read some funny blog entries from my son Mike about my son Matt’s wedding. Joanne wrote me and said, “I was very touched when I read Mike's blog on the wedding rehearsal. He writes beautifully, just like his mother. After reading Mike's blog on the rehearsal, I told Tara, ‘I want you to marry someone like Mary's son, Mike.’"
Hmnnn, I thought, looking at Tara. It would be nice if Mike and Tara met. My son Mike the law student is funny and caring. He likes to talk and brooks no fools. But I have no idea about how to stage a meeting. It would never have occurred to me to do this.
My mother always fancied herself a match-maker. Deep in her dementia, when she no longer remembered her four daughters were already married, she asked every doctor who treated her, “Are you single? I have a girl for you.”
I mentioned how Tara and Mike might like each other to my husband Jim. I swear he has Asperger’s, the inability to interpret social cues and social norms, because he immediately called Mike and said, “Your mom wants you to go on a date with Joanne Quinn’s daughter Tara.”
When he told me he had told Mike this, I said, ”Do you have no filters? You don’t just blurt this out. You set up an ‘accidental’ or group get-together and see how things go.”
Now I’m stymied. And Tara specifically ordered me not to write about her. Oh, well.
