cried—and Wanda felt like it. But she didn't. Her instincts told her that crying would not endear her to the members of this family, where she'd be lucky to be noticed at all. She wisely recognized she'd be far more likely to secure a place of standing with these people as a peacekeeper, even if that meant giving up certain things.
So it was that Wanda O'Casey, aged six (she did not become Wanda Schultz for another ten years, when everyone finally accepted the fact that Michael O'Casey would not be coming back, and Uncle Artie and Aunt Maureen legally adopted her), abandoned her own childhood to take on the oversight and management of her cousins'—becoming, one might add, a godsend to her aunt Maureen. In this way, she took her initial step toward the first of her illustrious careers, as a highly successful and much sought after professional stage manager—a job which, in Wanda's mind at least, essentially paid her to continue doing what she'd done for most of her life: guide and negotiate truces between children. Big ones, to be sure, and card-carrying members of Actors Equity Association. But still: children.
The next morning, when Aunt Maureen arose at five a.m. as usual, a surprise awaited her. Her niece was asleep on the kitchen floor, surrounded by plates and bowls which she had apparently been trying all night to repair; there was a bottle of family-sized Elmer's glue still clasped in her hand.
It would be another thirty years before Wanda would revisit this memory and recognize that it contained all the elements that would compel her to discover her second career—the career that would eventually make her famous.
Five
A Sacristan's Life
I f Margaret had been inclined to talk about her childhood, she would have said that it lasted far too long— until 1946 to be exact, when an old man came into her father's shop and put a curse on her family. Until then her life had been a fairy tale that did not end with "happily ever after," but rather, began with it.
She lived in a young city at the top of a great hill in a palatial house with a view of mountains and lakes. A castle, really. The castle of the great King Oscar, her father.
"Papa O!" she called him, and truly there was a roundness to every aspect of her world then, a plump bounty that was everywhere: in the fat upholstered settees and ottomans in her bedroom; in the popovers bursting with jam that Cook brought still warm to the breakfast table each morning; in the perfect, spacious dome that graced Holy Names Academy, where she went to school; and of course in the suitcases and trunks Papa brought home whenever he returned from the land across the ocean, bulging with marzipan and marionettes and costumes like kimonos and always, always a new porcelain figurine to add to her collection. To be encircled by Papa O's arms was to know love and generosity.
Oh yes. He was a generous man. Everyone knew that. And everyone in his kingdom, save one, was happy: butlers, maids, gardeners, cooks; the private tutors who gave Margaret lessons in singing and French; the partygoers who danced in the grand ballroom all night and waved gaily from their porches and automobiles during the day; even the doctors who made house calls, sometimes summoned from their beds in the middle of the night to tend sudden fevers, rattling coughs, or the bewildering, chronic ailments that plagued the mistress of the house.
King Oscar could make everyone smile. Everyone except Margaret's mother, who was composed of the darkness and mystery which fairy tales require. It is perhaps no wonder that she would reappear in Margaret's life sixty-three years after her death—not as a ghost exactly, but as a symptom, a noisy headache. As the chief manifestation of Margaret's pain.
She was beautiful. Famously beautiful in the way of long-legged, athletic girls in the 1920s and '30s, daughters of the new class of wealthy Americans who'd been blessed with an abundance of refrigerated milk and
So it was that Wanda O'Casey, aged six (she did not become Wanda Schultz for another ten years, when everyone finally accepted the fact that Michael O'Casey would not be coming back, and Uncle Artie and Aunt Maureen legally adopted her), abandoned her own childhood to take on the oversight and management of her cousins'—becoming, one might add, a godsend to her aunt Maureen. In this way, she took her initial step toward the first of her illustrious careers, as a highly successful and much sought after professional stage manager—a job which, in Wanda's mind at least, essentially paid her to continue doing what she'd done for most of her life: guide and negotiate truces between children. Big ones, to be sure, and card-carrying members of Actors Equity Association. But still: children.
The next morning, when Aunt Maureen arose at five a.m. as usual, a surprise awaited her. Her niece was asleep on the kitchen floor, surrounded by plates and bowls which she had apparently been trying all night to repair; there was a bottle of family-sized Elmer's glue still clasped in her hand.
It would be another thirty years before Wanda would revisit this memory and recognize that it contained all the elements that would compel her to discover her second career—the career that would eventually make her famous.
Five
A Sacristan's Life
I f Margaret had been inclined to talk about her childhood, she would have said that it lasted far too long— until 1946 to be exact, when an old man came into her father's shop and put a curse on her family. Until then her life had been a fairy tale that did not end with "happily ever after," but rather, began with it.
She lived in a young city at the top of a great hill in a palatial house with a view of mountains and lakes. A castle, really. The castle of the great King Oscar, her father.
"Papa O!" she called him, and truly there was a roundness to every aspect of her world then, a plump bounty that was everywhere: in the fat upholstered settees and ottomans in her bedroom; in the popovers bursting with jam that Cook brought still warm to the breakfast table each morning; in the perfect, spacious dome that graced Holy Names Academy, where she went to school; and of course in the suitcases and trunks Papa brought home whenever he returned from the land across the ocean, bulging with marzipan and marionettes and costumes like kimonos and always, always a new porcelain figurine to add to her collection. To be encircled by Papa O's arms was to know love and generosity.
Oh yes. He was a generous man. Everyone knew that. And everyone in his kingdom, save one, was happy: butlers, maids, gardeners, cooks; the private tutors who gave Margaret lessons in singing and French; the partygoers who danced in the grand ballroom all night and waved gaily from their porches and automobiles during the day; even the doctors who made house calls, sometimes summoned from their beds in the middle of the night to tend sudden fevers, rattling coughs, or the bewildering, chronic ailments that plagued the mistress of the house.
King Oscar could make everyone smile. Everyone except Margaret's mother, who was composed of the darkness and mystery which fairy tales require. It is perhaps no wonder that she would reappear in Margaret's life sixty-three years after her death—not as a ghost exactly, but as a symptom, a noisy headache. As the chief manifestation of Margaret's pain.
She was beautiful. Famously beautiful in the way of long-legged, athletic girls in the 1920s and '30s, daughters of the new class of wealthy Americans who'd been blessed with an abundance of refrigerated milk and
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