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Chapter One – Peggy
The attic in her family home was little Peggy’s favorite playground. Boxes, trunks, and chests of long-forgotten memories left behind by generations of McIntyres filled the days of her youth. It was like a family museum echoing the history of her ancestors.
Family lore was important in their clan, as the Scottish call it. Starting with the history of her Irish great-grandmother Maggie and her Scottish great-grandfather Mac, she heard many tales of their Irish and Scottish homelands and how they came to America. Imbued by the legacy of all the McIntyres who came before, her mother Suzy and father Red filled her impressionable head with their bigger-than-life legends.
Her father often said, “With an Irish grandmother and Scottish grandfather, I have the best of the Old World pumping through my veins.”
Even though they passed before she was born, through the stories of her heritage and her attic inheritance, she always felt a strong connection to Maggie—the backbone and spirit of the McIntyres.
Little Peggy often spent hours on the attic floor surrounded by boxes of hidden gems. Wearing Maggie’s yellowed straw hat with its faded silk flowers, Peggy’s orange-red hair and gleaming green eyes were nearly hidden by its brim. She pushed it up out of her face and buttoned up the vest she found in an old box and tied the Clan McIntyre Scottish family tartan kilt around her waist a few times until it fit and cinched it with a green leaf pin. Then she carefully slipped on some long aged satin gloves that had clearly once been white.
From a tot, Peggy’s fiery green eyes and red hair made her a striking twin of her namesake great-grandmother. She loved to pretend that she was the spunky seamstress her father revered and never stopped talking about. He told her all the yarns about Ireland that Maggie spun for him when he was a wee lad.
When Peggy herself was a bern, her father Red would read to her from an old Irish storybook he had as a child and sing her to sleep with songs of the Emerald Isle and especially the tale of Tír na nÓg. He said Maggie used to tell him the story of the young Irish warrior Oisín, who fell in love with the flame-haired maiden Niamh, the daughter of the king of Tír na nÓg. They crossed the sea on Niamh’s white mare together to reach the magical land, where they lived happily for three hundred years.
“I always thought she made up the story about herself, but later I found it was a common Irish folktale. I still see her as the flame-haired maiden Niamh—after all, she made her own journey here to America,” Red told her when she was a small girl.
The attic was a treasure trove of endless possibilities for adventures, one that could be held back only by her burgeoning imagination. It was truly a wonderland for her creative mind.
An invaluable find of an old Victrola transformed a cane into a conductor’s wand, waving pixie dust of musical notes in the air, dancing to the symphony of her heart and mind. In spite of the awkward crackling sound of the high-pitched records, little Peggy only heard the melody of beautiful music.
She twirled the cane around while pulling the satin gloves up her tiny arms and hummed a sweet tune as if she were a songbird on the long-gone vaudevillian stage.
And as she grew, she combed the scrapbooks and letters she found, daydreaming about the lives beyond the attic that her parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents made for themselves. The narratives combined to become her own personal storybook; she read of the girlfriends who came to America and parted, betrayed and hurt, never to be reunited. The love stories of her parents and great-grandparents spun a tapestry of romance that wrapped around her young imaginative senses.
Musical gifts came easily to Peggy—another legacy from the past. Her mother, Suzy, showed her postcards and scrapbooks from her days in the USO and sang her songs, day and night.
Suzy taught Peggy to sing like her, cook like her grandmother, and sew like her great-grandmother Maggie. Peggy loved to don costumes from the old steamer trunk and play her mother’s recordings from when she was a USO singer during the war. She treasured the few reels they kept of Suzy’s appearance in a movie and some of her shows. Gifted with Suzy’s talent, Peggy learned every song and emulated her mother.
And when she was eight, her father bought her a guitar and taught her how to play. Many nights he would play as Suzy sang to Peggy, eventually turning into a family sing-along tradition.
As she grew up, Peggy honed her skills and came by her families’ talents honestly. Though one family trait that her family regretted was her restless soul.
She embodied the spirited personality, Red said mimicked his grandmother. The spitting image of his grandmother Maggie inside and out, Peggy inherited Maggie’s driving passion for what could be, never accepting the status quo, spending many school days in the corner as punishment for marching to her own drummer—something teachers deemed disruptive.
Growing up, her hereditary Scottish stubbornness and Irish temper were trademarks of her ancestry, but made her feel she was moving away from the fabric of the McIntyre line. Peggy rarely agreed on anything with her parents. Many of her friends thought their parents were old-fashioned and didn’t keep up with the times, but for Peggy it was worse. She always sensed her true self was being hinged and constricted just like the corsets and bustles in Grandma Maggie’s trunk by her parent’s well-meaning, but narrow and predictable view of her life.
A budding musician with a rich alto voice, like her mother, Peggy relished the attic as her fortress of solitude away from her parents and the world. It was a place to write poems and play music in peace.
She picked through her family’s possessions to create an eclectic wardrobe and quilt bits and pieces to craft her own style, replete with rainbows of colors and free-flowing bohemian skirts, tops, and dresses.
She despised the constricting oppression of the day’s fashions for proper ladies—tight skirts and buttoned-up jackets over binding girdles and torpedolike brassieres, tiny pillbox and doughboy hats, and pointy kitten heels. And everything came in a limited palette of hueless pastel blues and pinks, white, or beige. It was like her life. Uncomfortable and conforming, she felt like she didn’t belong.
With only the streaming daylight of the sole window of her family’s Chicago bungalow and the bareness of a single bulb in a terrible old tacky wooden log lamp that her great-grandfather Mac made when he first came to America from Scotland, she spent endless hours in her attic sanctuary, singing, playing music, reading, writing poems and songs, and dreaming.
Family legend said tradesmen had to prove a skill to enter the US, to show they wouldn’t be a burden, so Mac made a lamp out of a log from a small tree chopped down in a forest near the tenement camps where he was housed. It was ugly but it still worked over a half-century later and won him his ticket to America, freedom, and the hope of a better life.
Just like the stories her parents told of her great-grandparents, Peggy considered herself confined to the place and time she was born into.
With her restless heart, she felt like a round peg trying to fit a dozen square holes around her, but nothing fit. She wasn’t satisfied with anyone or anything. She wanted a different life.
In high school, her sparkling green eyes, fair freckle-kissed skin, and light orange-red hair made her popular with the boys, but her bohemian ways often kept them at length from her, worrying her parents about her future.
Graduating with honors in 1963, Peggy finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel. She was an adult and could be free to embrace her music and explore life. But the problem was she didn’t have any money, and Suzy and Red wouldn’t relinquish a small nest of bonds Maggie left for her before she died.
Trapped, Peggy toggled between furiously voicing her objections and clasping her lips in silence, refusing to speak until she was liberated, retreating to her attic. As Red predicted, she had inherited more fire from Maggie than her red hair.
One day in her attic oasis, she was looking for a screwdriver to repair her guitar when she came across a small green fabric box that she had never seen before. It looked delicate and special, and when she opened it, she found a lovely lime green broach that looked like a leaf, a lace handkerchief, and a small leather-bound book.
The pin shimmered in the daytime sunny glow of the attic window. Peggy recognized the lace handkerchief as the Irish lace she knew from many of Maggie’s possessions in the attic and the tablecloths and linens Maggie gave her mother when she got married.
This handkerchief had Maggie’s initials and was beautifully embroidered… May you never forget what is worth remembering, nor ever remember what is best forgotten.
It was another personal message sent directly from Maggie to her. She often felt Maggie’s presence around her, imbuing her with wisdom and strength from the great beyond. Peggy believed in their spiritual, familial connection because of their similar appearance and often kept Maggie’s heirlooms around her for comfort. It was as if she held a mirror into the past and saw Maggie looking back at her.
The white leather-bound book was filled mostly with blank pages, but the first one contained an inscription.
To me darlin’ lass. May the road rise to meet you, May the wind be always at your back. May the sunshine be warm upon your face, the rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again, May God hold you in the palm of his hand. May God be with you and bless you: May you see your children’s children. May you be poor in misfortune,
Rich in blessings. May you know nothing but happiness from this day forward.
May the road rise up to meet you; May the wind be always at your back; May the warm rays of sun fall upon your home; And may the hand of a friend always be near.
May green be the grass you walk on, May blue be the skies above you, May pure be the joys that surround you, May true be the hearts that love you. I love ya, and now be free, me daughter.
Your loving mother, Katherine.
Peggy remembered that Red once told her of Katherine’s bravery, raising Maggie herself in service as a maid, after her lover abandoned her.
The book was a journal and a sign. She could use the blank pages to tell her story to Maggie and contribute her own piece to the generational legacy of McIntyre women. She takes the attached pen and thinks of how to begin.
Dear Maggie,
I’m told we are alike. To me, that’s my fabulous inheritance from you and an unbreakable bond between us across space and time.
I don’t understand why my parents won’t let me be free. They did it. Mom was a USO singer and in a movie. She moved to New York when she was only eighteen to be a singer. Dad toured the Pacific on his own at the same age—the same age I am now. But every time I ask them why I can’t go and find myself, all they say is that there was a war. And it was different.
And that’s the point. I am different… than them, than everyone. I see all the colors of the world through a kaleidoscope of texture and light. Not just what’s there but what it can be. Music is my passion and I want to find my way, just like they did. Why won’t they let me?
They want me to follow in their footsteps with a family and a home. But I hate the constraints of four walls. I want to put my feet in the oceans, run through fields, see the pyramids, and bring my music to others. I’m so frustrated!!!!
***
Peggy sighed and put everything back in the box and took it back to her room. She would write to Maggie again. When she walked down the attic stairs, Red and Suzy were waiting for her in the hallway.
“Honey, we know you don’t see things the same way we do, but we want you to be safe and well in life,” Suzy said.
“Then let me do things the way I want. I want to go to New York and become a folk singer. It’s my calling, just like you wanted to be a singer,” Peggy pleaded.
“It’s a dangerous world out there now. Your mother wasn’t alone and there was a war on… people were friendlier and more considerate. It’s a grittier, meaner place now and you’d be on your own. We don’t want something bad to happen to you,” Red explained.
“So becoming a wife and a mother is my only option? I’m not you. I don’t want the same things. And what’s my guarantee that I’m going to have a whirlwind romance like you two did? It doesn’t happen for everyone, you know,” Peggy argued.
Red and Suzy glanced at each other and smiled. They did have a special romance that began in a tornado of love and war and lasted forever, and they wanted the same wonderful life for their daughter.
“It could happen to you too. Mr. Right could be out there waiting for you,” Suzy said.
“Then let me go find him,” Peggy urged.
Red handed her a brochure. “We have a proposal for you—Fox Secretarial School. It’s downtown and will teach you skills to get a job.”
“I have skills. I’m a musician,” Peggy insisted, folding her arms in opposition.
“These are skills that can earn you money,” Red said. “Your mother had to wait tables until she got a job as a singer. This offers you a strong foundation to earn money and then if you want to play music on the side, you can.”
“And there are lots of successful men in offices, so you may find someone, even if you’re not looking,” Suzy added.
“Do it our way and we’ll release the bonds your great-grandmother left for you,” Red promised.
Peggy had no choice.
With the deal in place and seeing no other option, Peggy reluctantly enrolled in the Fox Secretarial School in Chicago, where she would learn shorthand, typing, and dictation.
***
Week after week, she trudged through each boring day in the stale windowless classroom listening to the incessant tap tap tap of 20 typewriters in the same room, all keying the same thing.
While musing one day, she listened to the musical cadence of the keys. It permeated her senses until it became the soundtrack in her mind on a never-ending loop.
At home, she found herself unconsciously clicking her fingernails with one hand on the Formica kitchen table, creating a musical symphony with her fingers.
“What are you tapping?” Red asked. “Is that a new song on the radio?”
Peggy looked down, not realizing what she was doing.
“Nah, it’s just the noise I hear every day of all the typewriters in the classroom. It’s persistently playing in my head and now I guess on my fingers,” Peggy said. She stopped the clicking.
“Do it again,” Red urged.
Puzzled, Peggy thought hard, listening to the sounds in her head, trying to replicate them on the tabletop.
Suzy smiled as she heard the rhythm and began humming. Red grinned and joined in. Peggy added her other hand and got into the beat. They all laughed and created beautiful music together. It was a fantastic family moment that reminded Peggy of the nightly sing-alongs of her youth.
That night, with the music still circulating in her head, Peggy went to the attic and picked out the beat on her guitar. She loved playing syncopated jazz beats mixed with soothing folk melodies and lyrics.
The rhythm cycled through her, so every fiber of her being was electrified to the beat. She didn’t just play with her fingers, but with her whole body. She worked on the song all night until she got it right, then fell asleep in the attic and awoke abruptly to the blaring sound of her alarm in her bedroom below.
Music was in her body, her blood. No matter how she had to get there, she was going to be a musician. She’d have to play it their way first, but her destiny was music and she knew without a doubt her path was New York.
SUZANNE RUDD HAMILTON 