Teresa McGarry, a toothy, handsome 74 year-old, tells me of her mother, Mary, walking 11 miles to town and coming back with a "hi-fi" on her back. Hi-fi? I wonder, before realizing she means a phonograph. Mary delivered her daughter Margaret the next day. Margaret muses that this must explain her affinity for music. Margaret, Teresa, and Agnes were the last of 11 children born of Mary and Anthony McGarry in a small village in Ireland. These three girls grew up together and moved to the United States in the late nineteen-fifties.
When asked how they saw their future they all respond, "I didn't think about it.” Apparently, there wasn't much time for daydreaming. "When we came home we had a lot of work to do," including chores, helping in their mother’s store, and tending the potatoes. “Oh the potatoes, I hated that!" exclaims Margaret. They toyed with being nurses (as their older sisters were), but the one option they never considered was staying put and living out the lives of their parents. Though not for any want of happiness. Despite their work and chores, "We had a lot of fun, too" insists Agnes. After fifty years, the memory of dances and socials still excites the girls and makes them laugh. "It was during the war and nylons were especially hard to find...There was nothing we wouldn't do for a pair of nylons to wear to the dance." (“We didn’t have the thongs of today,” Agnes adds later). Margaret, when asked to describe her first husband, whom she married before she was 25, can only muster that he was "a good dancer."
None of their marriages seem to have modeled themselves after their parents’. Teresa, who confesses to not having wanted to get married, tells me of her husband’s vices: “the jealousy is worse than the drinking. I hit the jackpot and I got both.” That marriage, which ended in a bitter divorce, seems to have soured Teresa on men in general––except priests, with whom she spent the majority of her life while working in rectories. She did have a boyfriend in her sixties, a rather wealthy man who seems to have been quite nice to her, but Agnes tells me on the sly that he was definitively “sexless,” if not “gay,” and this was the reason Teresa felt so comfortable with him.
Margaret’s marriage, too, was plagued by jealousy. “If someone even said hello to me, whooo.” Her husband––the dancer–– was a hard-working man with a penchant for smoking, which killed him, and wanderlust, which kept him from being happy. “He wanted to be in control,” Margaret told me. But once he became sick he had to trust her or accept his fears. Not long after his early death in 1982, Margaret used the money from his insurance to set up a beauty salon.
One anecdote the girls seem to relish sticks out in my mind. When they were children, the British sent a rough and untrained military force, called the Black and Tans, to tame the Irish. These men were of dubious moral standing and felt free in the countryside to take what they wanted, as one did when he entered the McGarry home. Mary stopped him and declared that he was not to go into the girls’ bedroom. Brushing her aside, he found himself unable to move. His foot had been pinned to the floor by a pitchfork. Mary was summarily arrested and charged with ‘Obstructing a gentleman.’ The judge imposed a fine, which she refused to pay, denying any wrongdoing. Her husband Anthony “must have gone through hell,” because he did pay his wife‘s fine, slowly and secretly.
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