A Hiding Place

It was a simple page, torn from an old composition notebook. At one time, it must have been used to record dictation from a French class, and contained passages like

Voulez vous donner le petit Thomas trois sous pour acheter du lait? Est-ce assez? Il est assez. On va-t-il l’acheter? Il peut l’acheter au marche. Tres bien.

The date at the top of one assignment read, “Mardi, Le dix neuf Decembre 1866.”

The page was folded in half, lengthwise. If it were not for the matter of what was contained inside, it would have been simply a page from the life of one Catherine Malloy, by now eighteen years of age and possibly still a school girl in the city of Chicago.

Whatever schooling this immigrant Irish child had received, as the daughter of a single parent, she had come far from any humble roots in County Limerick. Perhaps such refinements as these—facile handling of the language of culture, coupled with an appreciation of poetry and the arts—were the very aspects that one day, much later, would combine to encourage a daughter of her own to pursue the skills that mark a classical violinist.

But for now, the only daughter that was on Catherine’s mind—the only daughter she knew at the time—was a little cherub named Daisy. And within the folds of this borrowed sheet of composition paper, she had enshrined every trembling expression of her feelings about her loss.

Enclosed in the folded page were pasted bits of poetry—mostly published from local newspapers—that revealed a mosaic representing her own past. One poem mentions Daisy outright—a different Daisy, to be sure, but with a sentiment that resonated with this bereaved mother. Another hints of beauty sensed even through the isolation of loss. A third commemorates her own loss of homeland. And tucked within the packet, as we saw yesterday, her own hastily-jotted attempt to capture yet another poem that rang true to the feelings she was surely experiencing over her own daughter’s demise.

It is hard to piece together any timeline to represent when these bits of poetry became absorbed into Catherine’s being as sentiments of her own. Perhaps they were collected along the span of her daughter’s own brief life—simple remembrances of aspects of the child as she grew. More likely, given the somberness of hints within the poems, vibrations of ultimate loss rang true after the passing—or at least the onset of the final illness—became apparent.

Each of the three poems contains aspects that I’d like to review in turn, so for the next three days, I’ll take some time to reprint these poems, juxtaposed with discoveries and observations about Catherine Malloy Tully’s life.