Chapter 3

1925

It was a warm spring evening, the kind of evening where you wanted all the windows and doors open so you could smell the flowers, feel the warm breezes, and hear the crickets chirping. Ten-year-old Vivian McGinty was doing all three of those things while setting the table in the dining room. She was also lifting up each of the empty diamond-patterned water glasses, peering into them, shaking them lightly in the air next to her ear, and then setting them back down on the table. Uncle Frank and Aunt Emma and the Cutter cousins were driving up in the Sheridan from Apple Creek for Friday Night Fish Fry and, as usual, Vivian was full of excitement and dread. Excitement to see the relatives, and dread about eating the fish. The Fish Fry was a tradition Vivian’s Pawpy had brought back to Ohio after visiting the Michigan and Wisconsin McGintys.

The McGinty ancestors had sailed to the United States all the way from County Tyrone, Ireland, sometime in the early nineteenth century. They’d arrived in port at Philadelphia and then scattered like blown dandelion seeds all over the mid-Atlantic and Midwest regions. Uncle Frank and Aunt Emma weren’t McGintys, but they were kin, they lived within driving distance, and they enjoyed the Fish Fry.

Aunt Emma was Vivian’s aunt on her mother’s side. The Lancaster County German Mennonite side. The Kurtzes. “Happy as a pot of mice, are we?” was just one of the weird things Aunt Emma would say to Vivian’s mother, speaking in Low German while poking her in the side, trying to coax a smile out of her sister. Myrtle Kurtz McGinty never seemed as happy as a pot of mice. She always seemed about as happy as the mice that Zipper the neighbor’s cat dropped in a mangled heap on their doorstep. Myrtle needed to be coaxed into a smile. The McGinty side never needed coaxing.

“Paddy, how are you? How’s the railroad business?” Uncle Frank asked, as he clapped Vivian’s father on the shoulder.

The way Uncle Frank said it you’d think Patrick McGinty owned the railroad, but he just punched tickets. Vivian had once heard Uncle Frank call her father a “wickedly charming Irish robe,” and she’d wondered if the robe was anything like Joseph’s coat of many colors from the Bible. She’d asked Vera about it later, and Vera had laughed long and hard.

“Rogue, dummy, not robe. God, you’re stupid.”

As usual, Vera hadn’t been helpful. Whatever it meant, robe or rogue, Vivian was proud that people talked about her Pawpy. He was popular around Wooster, and people liked him. She’d once heard a neighbor say, “Oh, that Paddy. He’s got a ready wink in one eye, and the reflection of a passing woman’s backside in the other.” Vivian had squinted at his laughing blue eyes the next time she looked him in the face. She didn’t see either of those things.

What she did see was her Pawpy trying to talk her mother into converting to Catholicism, and her mother refusing. She’d just shake her head slowly back and forth, grumbling under her breath. To Myrtle, church was church, and having to do a lot of standing up and kneeling during services didn’t change that. And going to confession? She waved a rough, dismissive hand at the thought. She didn’t have anything to confess anyway. Forest Chapel Methodist was just fine for their purposes. Pawpy didn’t go with them on Sundays. He claimed he went to Mass at St. Mary’s, but Myrtle and the McGinty children thought it more likely that he prayed to the Patron Saint of My Wife and Kids Are Finally Out of the House from the comfort of his living room armchair.