4. Moe

When there were only five children in the Reilly family, my parents took the four older kids to Canada on vacation and left Kevin, the baby, at home with our grandmother. They visited Quebec and Niagara Falls, but the stories they came back with didn’t involve any of the sights. Apparently, Dad never wanted to stop until everyone was good and tired. Maybe he was hoping for some quiet from hour after hour of rowdy togetherness in the car. The result, though, was that by the time he was ready to stop, there weren’t many options.

One particularly late night, they stopped at a motel with a vacancy sign. I imagine the Bates Motel from Psycho, but I’m not at all sure that’s what it was like. The desk clerk said he had two rooms. They agreed as though there were any other option, and the clerk took them to the rooms. My mother counted beds and children and said there weren’t enough beds. He said, Wait, I have something, and returned a few minutes later pushing a crib.

The three older children looked at Moe, five at the time, and began to tease her: Moe needs a crib because she’s a ba-by! Of course, she reacted the way any full-grown five-year-old would, wailing that she wasn’t sleeping in any crib! Mom told her it was just a bed with sides and much better than the floor. But Moe would not be consoled. Joe, who was there, remembers Maureen eventually relenting, but I imagine at best there was a compromise. She knew her mind.

At a seafood restaurant on the same trip, Moe insisted on ordering a lobster. Mom ordered a cheeseburger, thinking Moe would never finish the lobster. For the rest of the meal Mom watched as Moe ripped apart the lobster, devouring each tender bite after dipping it in melted butter.

Being faint of heart is not an option in a big family. Maureen was strong-willed but, like the rest of us, much of her strength was forged at the hands of her older siblings. When she was 13, she had a crush on a boy in her class at Blessed Sacrament. He was very cute, and she had not spoken more than three words to him that year. But Missy and Joe knew Moe’s secret and made good use of it.

One afternoon they picked up Moe at school in Mom’s car, a yellow, convertible Lincoln Premiere that was one of the only cars on the road most of us could fit in. You might wonder what a family with seven children was doing with a convertible. For that, you would have to ask my mother, who told me when I was six that if she had not been a mother, she would have been a race car driver. But I digress.

As the three of them headed home from school, Missy spied Moe’s crush walking down Northampton Street behind the community center. She told Joe to turn left. When Moe saw what was happening, she flung her body onto the floor of the back seat. Joe, undeterred, turned into the alley just in front of the unsuspecting boy and stopped. He reached behind his seat and opened the back door, exposing Moe who crouched on the floor of the car. 

Maureen had no idea how beautiful she was. She had coal black, curly hair and porcelain skin with cheeks that were just naturally rosy. Her eyes were on the green side of hazel, and she had a dimple in her chin. There was a crescent moon-shaped scar on her upper cheek that she had gotten falling into the hydrangeas at Aunt Mary’s lake house when she was two. Her boyfriend Billy told her it was the only indication that she was not perfect.

When she was in Ireland once, she remarked on how many people there looked like her. Years later, my brother Brian came home from Ireland and told me he had seen Maureen. I said, I know, so many people there look like her. No, he said, I saw Maureen.

When Moe was thirteen, we got a Kerry Blue Terrier and named her Maggie. We all loved Maggie, but it was Maureen who walked her every day and took her to obedience class on Saturdays. Maggie went with Moe everywhere. When Moe took me to the library for books or High’s for a butter brickle ice cream cone, Maggie’s furry terrier body would sit and wait for us outside, catapulting to Moe’s side when we reappeared.

It may have been her love of animals that caused Maureen to choose Mendel’s theory of genetics for her science fair project. The black and white mouse couple eventually reproduced ten wee mice: five white, four black and one brown. But that wasn’t what Mendel’s theory posited. Mom and Maureen stood at the bathroom sink, Moe holding that little brown fellow by the tail and Mom painting him with black clothing dye.

Later Moe worked at the Howard Johnson’s at Friendship Heights. Today there’s a Metro stop on that spot, but back then it was an orange-roofed restaurant that served club sandwiches and ice cream sundaes, a precursor to MacDonald’s. Moe kept her tips in a metal strongbox under her bed, and I would sit on the bed, watching her count her cash after each shift. She would tell me all the exciting plans she had for those savings. She and her boyfriend talked about moving to Australia, or maybe California. It was the sixties, and the world was ripe for exploration. In the end it was San Francisco, not Sydney, where Maureen and Billy landed. But that’s a story for another post.