'What Happened Before That is Myth'

I know remarkably little about my family and their history. The first sentence in V.S. Pritchett’s memoir, A Cab at the Door (1968), has always seemed self-evidently true: “In our family, as far as we are concerned, we were born and what happened before that is myth.” Whether this pervasive sense of mystery is peculiar to my family or generally the case among working-class families, or descendants of American immigrants, or among the Irish, I can’t say.

I know my mother, Edith Rose Kurp, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, on this date, March 10, in 1920. (She didn’t live to be a centenarian. Decades of smoking Raleigh cigarettes -- “Save the coupons!” -- ended her life at age seventy-four.) Her grandparents on both sides emigrated from Ireland, and for a while lived in Smethport, Pa. Her maiden name was Hayes and her mother’s maiden name was McBride. Her father and four of her five brothers were housepainters. The fifth, Clifford, died Feb. 2, 1931 at age twenty-one. He and his oldest brother, Kenneth, loaded the barrel of a rifle with scrap metal and pulled the trigger. The gun exploded, killing Clifford outright. I remember the scars on my Uncle Kenneth’s throat and chest. My parents married in 1950. That exhausts my knowledge of my mother and her life.

Hart Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, in 1899, and moved with his mother to Cleveland in 1909 after his parents divorced. Crane moved to New York City in 1916 but often revisited Cleveland. He was there on March 6, 1920, four days before my mother was born on the other side of the city. In a letter written that day, Crane tells his friend Gorham Munson:

“Well,--my mother is at length returned and the house open again. At present, however, the domestic vista appears a desolate prospect to me,--a violent contrast to the warm pictures that the former rooming-house room had conjured up as anticipations. I wrote you a while ago that I had gotten ’round to enjoy my mother’s companionship. That illusion, at least for the present, seems to be dispelled.”

[See O My Land, My Friends: The Selected Letters of Hart Crane, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1997.]