Within Arm's Reach Read Online Free Page A

are not. You must treat her with respect.”
    I gasped. I was never reprimanded. I never did anything wrong. I couldn’t bear for him to think I did. “I love Mother,” I said. “I do respect her.”
    But the second part was a lie, and I never got over feeling badly about that. I tried to make up for the lack of respect by loving her even more. I concentrated on how to love her better. I showed her my love every day by running errands, by buying a single yellow daisy to sit in a cup on the windowsill. I gave orders to and fielded complaints from the hotel maids, because I knew Mother hated to look at or talk to black people. I kept her company while my father was downstairs in the offices. I stayed home long after my sisters had married and left. It seemed clear that I would have to give up my entire life in order to prove I respected my mother. And I was prepared to do that.
    But then Patrick appeared, and he offered me a way out.
    I met Patrick McLaughlin in the dining room of the hotel. I knew my father had engineered the meeting. Patrick was a young lawyer from New Jersey, in town on business. He met my father’s qualifications for a son-in-law: He was Irish and he could support me. His parents were poor immigrants who ran a grocery store in Paterson and had sacrificed everything to put their sons through school. But there was no Paterson and no grocery store in Patrick McLaughlin’s walk. He was cocky. He carried himself like he thought he was the President, the cat’s meow, and the next in line for the throne all rolled into one. I didn’t think much of him, until I saw him with my mother.
    The first evening he visited our hotel suite, my mother told a story about her home (a story she started reciting before I was born, and which seemed to go on for as long as she was alive, without end) and in the middle Patrick joined in. He spoke about Ireland, too, even though he had never been there. He said his mother was from County Wicklow, and my mother beamed. She leaned forward, her hands folded over her heart, and told him she had spoken to her old next-door neighbor Diandra that morning over tea. Diandra had sat right there—and my mother pointed at that damned empty chair I wished every day someone would take a match to. Patrick nodded; his eyes lit up. I gave him a sharp look and saw that he understood that Diandra had not really been here. Like my father, he was playing along, not missing a beat. Patrick told me later that at that moment he had felt like he was home.
    I never saw Patrick drink during his stay in St. Louis, so it was only in his interaction with my mother that I noticed his Irishness. I thought of what my father had told me ten years earlier, and knew that Patrick was crazy Irish in the same way my mother was. Yet he was smart, too, a lawyer, and sensible. He had a down payment on a house in a town called Ridgewood in New Jersey. He was thirty years old. He was ready to marry. I couldn’t get over the fact that he was equally comfortable talking money with Father and leprechauns with Mother. He presented a package in which I could accept the traits he shared with my mother. I realized, the first evening he sat in our suite, his hat on his knee, that the answer I had never even imagined existed lay in Patrick McLaughlin. I would be able to love, and, most importantly, respect my mother through him.
    We married three months later, in front of thirteen guests, at St. Paul’s Church, two blocks from the hotel. Patrick wore white gloves and a morning suit. I wore a floor-length dress with tiny buttons running from the nape of my neck down to the hem. We left for New Jersey the next morning in the middle of a thunderstorm. My father drove us to the train station, and as we pulled away from the hotel I waved out the back window of the car in the direction of the suite’s windows, even though I knew my mother would be nowhere near the window in this kind of weather. She would be deep in the closet