MARY FITZSIMONS'S WEDGWOOD CHINA
"Kids see right through adults and don't like the bad ones; she was a good one...."
When I first started nursery school apparently I did not want to stay and didn’t want to interact with any of the kids. I’m the oldest of four, and I guess I didn’t want to leave the world of my house and my block. My mother, who is from Ireland, had a friend, Mary FitzSimons, a lovely neighbor whose presence is hard to describe. She had hair of soft gray curls, bright red lipstick, she smoked and drank and had a huge laugh. Kids see right through adults and don’t like the bad ones; she was a good one, you trusted her and she took to you in a gently amused way.
She once gave me money to go buy her cigarettes when I was maybe 8 or 9, and I told her it was against the law, to which she laughed and replied, “My god, what’s the point of having children?”
She was a civil rights lawyer for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Washington, D.C., where we lived, and she brought us Whitman’s Samplers on Halloween. She loved the supernatural, The National Enquirer, and far-fetched cures for diseases. Her house was filled with life-sized glass dogs, china sets, cabinets of curiosities.
When I wouldn’t stay at nursery school, somehow it was arranged that Mary would come with me every day and sit in a chair in my classroom. My memory of this is vague, but I do see her from the angle of lying on my green and white towel on the marble floor during nap time. Eventually my teacher reported that I had “a little interaction in the woodpile” at recess and in due course I got used to going to school without Mary.
My dad died in the late 1970s, suddenly and prematurely, of a heart attack. This hugely tragic and disruptive event brought all kinds of odd and untrustworthy adults trying to help (in the case of the odd ones) or profit (in the case of the untrustworthy ones), and it was so important to have Mary as the opposite. One day she showed up unannounced with a full set of expensive Wedgwood china. She told my mom that my dad had appeared to her in a dream and told her to give this to me. I was only 12, so I was a bit flummoxed, but my mom quickly found a use for it at her many uproarious dinner parties.
The year after my dad died, Mary and her husband John left Washington and bought the Schermerhorn mansion outside Schenectady, New York. John had grown up in Schenectady and it was his dream to return in style. They never quite finished unpacking; the house was huge and the task was overwhelming so they just unpacked as needed, put the clothes boxes upstairs, and it became a kind of permanent project. We visited them for summer vacations where we had the full run of the house trying on Mary’s clothes, typing on typewriters, and scrutinizing the handprint in the kitchen stairwell, which Mary assured us could only have been made by a ghost.
Mary died in 1990, of liver cancer, even though she tried many National Enquirer cures. I have always missed her greatly and wish I could have experienced knowing her when I was an adult. I still use her Wedgwood, but only occasionally because we are all so casual now.
—Maureen O’Leary
Maureen O’Leary is a painter who also makes books of photography. She’s represented by Cristin Tierney Gallery in New York City.