The Roof

Abstract

The Roof James Murphy In February 1967, my mother died, at the age of fifty-three. It was a shock; she went all yellowish, was sent to Midwood Hospital in Brooklyn, New York, the same place she had given birth to the three of us. She never left it. In three weeks she was gone. From the outside, Midwood Hospital wasn’t like a hospital at all. It blended in with a long street of apartment blocks. Maybe that helped convince us she wasn’t really that sick. But once inside, all the smells of the place came at you. It was way too soon for her to die, age fifty-three. She should have been able to go on and on. On her first day in the hospital, she said to my little sister, “It’s only yesterday I was here with you, Eileen.” Another day she said, “They should keep the new babies in some different place; I can hear them crying sometimes.” We called it cancer, and maybe it was. Fair enough, as they say; she had taken to the wine more and more in the past few years, and maybe that did it. “My medicine, it helps me sleep,” and it did that for sure because she would often drift into sleep on the couch as the TV played on and on. Hard to know, even now, what caused it all. When Dad and I had a visit with the doctor in the hospital, he was blunt: “Did she drink?” He was all business, no room for our usual evasions, but we tried anyway. “A bit, now and again,” Dad said, “only wine, nothing heavy.” And we left it at that. The doctor may have raised an eyebrow, then he checked some boxes with his pen, forms to be filled. “I don’t think she’ll make it,” he said, “her liver’s gone,” and we were numb. I think we all, except maybe Mom, expected some medicine, maybe a few days in Midwood, then home, safe and sound. “I’m sorry,” he said, shook our hands, and left the two of us alone. “Doctors,” Dad said. “Bastards.” I waited for him to say more, not knowing what to say myself. It seems now forever before he said, “Okay, then, let’s go up and see her.” She is buried with all the Murphys in St. Charles Cemetery on Long Island, where the Brooklyn dead were going, the Catholics, anyway. We lived only three blocks from Holy Cross Cemetery, a place we all played in as kids, the only place around with trees to climb, but there was no room in the inn there. Maybe St. Charles is full now, too. I don’t know because I haven’t been there since my aunt Catherine joined the family crowd in 1977. [End Page 9] “I’m all alone,” Mom used to say when the clouds came over her. At her wake, her pal May Cullen, from our days in the old apartment on Newkirk Avenue, said maybe it would be good to have her buried at home in Mayo. May was crying and holding Dad’s hand as if she would never let go, and she was looking at me and Joan and Eileen, holding onto us one at a time, and she kept looking over at Mom lying there in the casket. I tried not to look. “God, she was like a sister to me, Joe, you know that.” Dad was uncomfortable in her grip and the way she looked at him. “It’s a pity she never got home. Joe, where’s she to be buried?” “She’ll be in St. Charles.” “Wouldn’t you think of sending her home? The poor thing.” With Mom lying there so peaceful, May’s idea seemed almost to make sense. I don’t know about the others, but I was haunted by Mom’s Mayo, and, in that moment, it seemed to make all the sense in the world. “I’ll take you home again, Kathleen,” the moonlight, and all that. I remembered that in another of our Mayo songs, a dying lad sings, “Take me home...