POORIRMA

Irma was the baby. She may have been borderline retarded, but we did not admit or allow such designations within the family. So my Aunt Irma was just Aunt Irma, and she was a charmer: tall, graceful as a poplar, with short brown finger-waved hair—I saw this in old sepia photographs taken during the Roaring Twenties—a slight hilarious cast in one eye that made her look knowing and sly, a mouth that quirked down on one side, a simpering sly and knowing voice, and a thought process that went directly to what she wanted with a certainty of aim that still astounds me in recall.

Irma was the one of them—of us—who knew how to get what she wanted.

When she was about forty-five—just when everyone thought she was past it—she set her sights on an Irish Catholic man named Francis Aloysius Byrnes from a farm near Elk River, and by God she got him.

I don’t know how Irma met Francis—at church, perhaps? at a bingo game? Irma loved bingo. Or did he come into the candy store on West Broadway where she worked part time? She met him, we can surely say, in one of the ominously accidental ways that people do meet and marry in this society.

After she was married to Francis, Irma decided that she wanted to adopt a child—God in His wisdom had made her sterile—and Catholic Welfare gave her Raoul, bright and quirky and delinquent.


I have a photograph of Irma that other family members—including Raoul—try from time to time to get away from me. It is a picture of her on her First Communion day. She seems in that picture to be somewhat older that the average First Communicant; well, this would have been true of course because the prerequisite for making your F.C. in those days was that you had attained “the age of reason” and could thereby be presumed capable of responsibly committing a sin. Age seven was formally considered to be the right age: by age seven you were a responsible thinking organism, not entirely finished, you understand, but good enough to sin.

It took Irma longer, apparently, to reach this coveted stage; generation after generation keens and clamors after that same apple, but Irma was too simple to understand that the mark of a full human being is to crave knowledge.

Irma—lucky—craved nothing that she did not have, or could not easily get. She was the baby girl, she was what they called “sickly”, she was dumb.

Because of being sickly, she never went to school, but instead picked up what literacy she had—never very extensive—at home with her mother, my grandmother.

In the photograph, she sits three-quarter-view on an ornate gilded armchair—the photographer’s prop—far from the solid square horsehair and oak parlor furniture of her real life. “Real life”—the designation does not seem to apply to that picture, in which a little girl, dressed in chaste white cotton eyelet, bends forward a little, towards the right of the picture, gazes downward forever, never looks up, will never look up at us. White veiling and lace cascade from her bent head; a boa of leaves—myrtle? ivy?—crowns all and descends along her arms to the arms of the ornate chair.

Her look is delicate, sensitive, serious, hidden; she is a child that never was; “too good for this world” is what they would say if such a child were real, were incarnate.

So obviously the camera does after all, in spite of the myth, lie: since Irma was quite real and not very good.

However did the photographer do it? I mean, that picture is something else, a work of high art, a knockout; it should belong, or course, to Raoul, but I will fight hand-to-hand anyone who tries to take it from me.

How do I happen to have it? Why, Irma gave it to me herself. I think she knew that I had to have it; she was the kind who would know such things.

She was also the kind who, for sheer random mischief, would keep from someone something that she knew that person had to have; essentially I am saying that she was cruel: there was that capability in her. In all the rest of us too: thus why not in her? she was as I said dumb, but not so dumb as to rule out cruelty and all the rest of the major human attributes.

But in the case of the photograph, she declared one day that it was to be mine. Raoul never entirely forgave me, never ceased to feel that he should have it. As of course he should; he is perfectly right.

I do not however give it up, even though I feel considerable guilt about it. I believe that the mark of an arrived adult is to be able to carry around a fairly large load of guilt without falling over.

I carry this guilt easily and I keep the picture.


Why did Irma give Joan her First Communion picture? says my Aunt Anna. Why did you, Irma?

Oh, well, she wanted it, says Irma.

Wanted it, says Anna: but why

Oh, well, my mother sticks in, Joan was always fond of Irma. When Joan was a child. Certainly you remember that.

Joan was crazy about me, says Irma. Simpers.

But she isn’t any more, says Anna. She wouldn’t give you the time of day now.

Oh that’s not true, says my mother.

Oh that is true, says Anna. Isn’t it Joan. (Yes, folks, believe it or not I am sitting right there, I am privy to this whole conversation.)

Well, I think I’d give her the time of day, Aunt Anna, I say.

But it’s basically true that you don’t like her the way you used to, Joan, says Anna.

Well, I say: I was a child. People change. They don’t stay children forever. Irma was like another child to me when I was a child: of course I thought she was wonderful, what could be more fun than being a child and having a grown-up child for your aunt?

I have always been a child, Irma says, and smiles, her crooked, crazy smile.