At Weddings and Wakes by Alice McDermott

First published: 1992

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: The 1960’s

Locale: Brooklyn and suburban Long Island, New York

Principal Characters:

• Robert,
• Margaret, and
• Maryanne, the children, focal characters from whose memories the story is told
• Lucy Towne Dailey, the children’s mother, apparently unhappy in her choice of a husband and the place where she lives
• Bob Daily, Lucy’s husband, the children’s father, who learns to live among the Towne women
• Momma Towne, Lucy’s stepmother, who married her sister’s husband and cared for her children
• May Towne, one of Lucy’s three sisters, a former nun
• Agnes Towne, another sister, a business woman with cultivated tastes
• Veronica Towne, the fourth sister, an “unfortunate” one, a “stayathome”
• Donald Towne, Momma’s son, spoiled as a child and later disowned by his mother because of his drinking
• Fred, a middle-aged mailman who marries May

The Novel

Momma Towne ruled the roost when she received it from her sister, who died in her fourth childbirth leaving an infant, Veronica, and three other little girls—Lucy, May, and Agnes. Perhaps Momma gathers the children closely to her because she feels guilty about taking a ready-made family from a dead sister. Perhaps she feels remorse from being angered by the killing hand of God after she waited seven years in Ireland for the chance to come to her sister in the United States. Perhaps the guilt is the result of her deliberate and successful attempt to tempt her sister’s husband into marriage not by attracting him physically but by seducing him with arguments, substituting mindplay for foreplay. When she finally has a child of her own, a son, she spoils him; while he is still a young man, she dismisses him from her house and from herself so thoroughly that he appears, hat in hand, only at weddings and wakes.

Lucy is the only one of the girls who marries and leaves home, but she is so closely tied to her stepmother and her stepmother’s house that she makes arduous and frequent visits home in the summer, bringing her three children. Twice a week, they make the journey from their house in Long Island, which is ten blocks from the nearest bus stop. The bus takes them past the cemetery, the churches, and out of suburbia, where they have to transfer to another bus in a crowded multiethnic neighborhood. Once there, they proceed to the subway station, where surroundings seem to the children even more bizarre. They take a train that rushes them through Queens and on to Brooklyn, then transfer to another train. The children notice their mother’s confidence growing until, finally again in her old neighborhood, she settles from a hurried to a relaxed pace, sending the message that she is again at home.

Waiting for Lucy and her children are the aunts. May left a convent because she had come to realize that she loved the life of a nun too much to think of it as devotion, duty, or sacrifice. May returns to her stepmother’s house and settles into the routine of caring for Momma and looking forward to the visits of Lucy’s children. Veronica, the youngest of the sisters, is always at home, her face still disfigured by early skin problems, sipping cocktails that have become her nourishment. Agnes, a career woman, though able to leave the house to work as an executive secretary and to separate herself by means of her finely tuned tastes, is a stern and brittle woman.

Together, stepmother and sisters indulge in ritual complaints. Lucy is foremost in her never-ending litany of vague protests against the man she married, who dutifully drives to Brooklyn after work to fetch his family home. In the house of his mother-in-law, he performs for Momma the rites of a businessman, and he speaks politely and gently over cocktails and dinner to each of the sisters who have waited for his arrival.

Another of the ritualistic journeys that Lucy, Bob, and children take once a year is the two-week vacation, always to a similar place but never the same one. The destination is always a place with green trees, stretches of beach, and the smell of the sea, a place where Bob hopes to instill in his children a sense of wonder and beauty.

Interspersed with daily living are the weddings and the wakes, occasions that give rise to immense gatherings of family and friends in the Irish community where the Townes live. The most splendid wedding is that of May, who one day almost literally runs into Fred, the mailman, who is new to the neighborhood. Small chats become conversations, and friendly dates lead to commitments. All are happy save Momma, who insists that Fred cannot husband his resources, since the roses he sends to May in the first part of the month become daisies by the end of the month.

The children’s memories of the family’s joy in the wedding is allowed to overshadow, for a time, their memory of May’s inexplicable death four days after her wedding; their knowledge of mortality is buried for a while as the happy event is recounted. The high point is the discovery that Fred can dance with extraordinarily nimble feet, his joy bringing life to the dance floor in song after song, couple after couple, until the dance floor is filled with a living celebration of marriage that is only later to be turned into a wake.

The Characters

In At Weddings and Wakes, McDermott filters what is known and discovered through the minds of the Towne-Daily children, most often through a composite consciousness that seems to mesh with the point of view of the author. Sometimes a particular child is chosen as a focal point, and readers are thus able to distinguish between the boy, for example, and his sisters. Robert, well-behaved and introverted, is an exemplary altar boy who rises in the mornings in time to attend early mass. He is a good boy, the priest says, prompt, courteous, with pressed cassock and shined shoes. When his sister Margaret decides to emulate his behavior and go to early mass herself, Robert is glad for her company and seems pleased to point out to her things that give him pleasure—pinkish clouds left in the sky, a last star, a hedge filled with sparrows in the morning dew. Try as she might, however, Margaret is unable to match her brother’s generosity and selflessness. The gladioli that she finds in the cemetery and identifies as her own treasure, separate from her brother’s, have to be a special gift, the child thinks, perhaps an offering to her teacher, Miss Joan. The flowers, the child thinks, would transform the teacher from ugly duckling to blushing bride gliding across a dance floor in the arms of a new husband. Margaret’s joy turns to shame and humiliation, however, when Miss Joan spurns the flowers, which came from the dirt of a freshly dug grave.

Maryanne has a similar experience with a teacher, Sister Miriam Joseph, who, unlike Miss Joan, is tall, dark, and beautiful. Filled with love for Sister Miriam Joseph and trying to impress her, Maryanne tells her teacher about Aunt May, who died four days after her marriage and who had once been a nun. What happened to Aunt May becomes a sign of foreboding for Sister Miriam Joseph, and she dismisses Maryanne, relegating her back to the group, indistinguishable from the other children. In her mouth, the nun holds gum that replaces saliva caused by an illness that will, before long, kill her.

The particular point of view chosen by the author provides the magical aura that pervades the text. Entrance into the minds of the children and incidents surrounding the children not only help define their individual characters but also act to reinforce themes and images. These occur and recur until a reader becomes aware that beside every birth is a death, beside every child is an adult facing perhaps an early knowledge of death, and behind every wedding is a wake.

Since the view of every character and situation is somewhat skewed by its refraction in the consciousness of the children, every character and situation seems transformed from the usual to the unique, from the spiritless and timid to the heroic, from the commonplace to the incredible. For example, Bob Dailey, who is the subject of his wife’s complaints when she is within the bosom of her family, is in the children’s eyes hero and benefactor, the driver of the automobile that carries them home and to and from their annual vacations. Rather than being made angry by the constant complaints of the women of the Towne family, Bob understands that his wife’s family provides for him the routine of daily life, the constant recognition that beneath all who are alive is an undercurrent of the lives of the dead.

Critical Context

At Weddings and Wakes is Alice McDermott’s third published novel, following That Night (1987) and A Bigamist’s Daughter (1982). Though her novels have similar themes, they are startlingly different from one another. Some critics hailed A Bigamist’s Daughter as an excellent first novel that begins as satire of authors who seek a vanity press and moves skillfully to an analysis of the protagonist herself, who is editor-in-chief of the vanity press. Gradually, the editor’s cynicism turns to acceptance of women like herself who spend their time waiting for husbands and fathers to arrive. That Night, like At Weddings and Wakes, is about growing up in the 1960’s, but McDermott’s penchant for the evocative and ambiguous is stronger in her second novel, in which prose captures time, place, and social status in a heightened poetic style.

Bibliography

Baumann, Paul. “Imperishable Identities.” Commonweal 119 (May 22, 1992): 15-16. Baumann sees the Towne women as characterized by their adherence to family, history, and intergenerational identity, all of which are shown to be permeated with loss. He praises McDermott’s meticulous attention to the details of the family’s Irish American rituals and traditions, drawn as grand weddings and wakes and as bland as the daily wheeling out of the cocktail cart. The Towne women, he asserts, find a corporate identity in their flawed family, their roots and history, far more powerful than the “contemporary promise of self-determination” in Long Island. Baumann concludes with a comparison of the novel to James Joyce’s short story “The Dead,” both in style and in strategy.

Booklist. LXXXVIII, March 1, 1992, p. 1197.

Chicago Tribune. March 29, 1992, XIV, p. 1.

Commonweal. CXIX, May 22, 1992, p. 15.

Cooper, Rand Richards. “Charming Alice.” Commonweal 125 (March 27, 1998): 10-12. Cooper reviews four of McDermott’s novels and calls At Weddings and Wakes “a nostalgic and immaculately detailed valedictory to a vanishing corner of Iish Catholicism,” Cooper admires the vivid characterizations and luminous prose.

Donovain, Denise Perry. Review of At Weddings and Wakes, Booklist 88 (March 1, 1992): 1197. Donovain’s one-paragraph review calls At Weddings and Wakes “charming,” “pensive,” and “poignant,” qualities that both involve the reader and leave him or her feeling like an outsider. The stream-of-consciousness insider’s view of Irish New York that McDermott creates is characterized by a darkness centered on the brightness of May’s characters, according to Donovain.

Klinkenborg, Verlyn. “Grief That Lasts Forever.” The New York Times Book Review 97 (April 12, 1992): 3. In one of the more complete reviews following the publication of At Weddings and Wakes, Klinkenborg characterizes the novel as the present memorialized, accomplished by a primary focus through the children, who collectively and individually underline the ambiguities and reverberations inherent in the book’s themes. The continual laments of the Towne women become instant memories, extant in the past and the present and projected into the future. Klinkenborg is also one of the few reviewers who comments on McDermott’s writing style, which employs formal and phrasal patterns that have a harmony of their own.

Library Journal. CXVII, April 1, 1992, p. 148.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. April 12, 1992, p. 3.

McDermott, Alice. Interview by Wendy Smith. Publishers Weekly 239 (March 30, 1992): 85-86. McDermott discusses her life and work, with particular reference to At Weddings and Wakes.

The New York Times Book Review. XCVII, April 12, 1992, p. 3.

Newsweek. CXIX, April 13, 1992, p. 69.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXIX, January 27, 1992, p. 88.

Smolowe, Jill. “Dancing on Graves.” Time 139 (April 20, 1992): 96. Smolowe argues that McDermott’s third novel secures her reputation as a storyteller of great talent. The world of At Weddings and Wakes is haunted, Smolowe says, conjured from the dead to the living in the same way that the vitality of the Towne-Dailey children offsets the demise of parts of the family. The children, Smolowe states, offer a “life-affirming lesson” that overcomes the family’s despair.

Time. CXXXIX, April 20, 1992, p. 95.

The Wall Street Journal. April 30, 1992, p. A10.

The Washington Post. April 15, 1992, p. F2.