Patti M. Walsh

1956

Excerpt from Chick Stories—A Memoir of Adventures Lived,
Laughter Shared, and Lessons Learned with My Girlfriends

Come to think of it,
I’ve been telling stories since my first fib.

Huddled together in the dark, Marty and I were six- and seven-year-old cousins on a sleepover. Not in the predictable safety of the bedroom I shared with two younger sisters on the first floor, but somewhere we’d never been before—in a neglected bedroom on the third floor of an old house in the old city of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Originally, it was my grandparents’ house. My father’s parents had settled on Black Rock Avenue shortly after they arrived from County Cork, Ireland, around the turn of the 20th century. My father and his three sisters had slept in the attic, where Marty and I found ourselves.

When Dad and Mom married, they moved into the spacious five-room, one-bathroom flat on the first floor. It lost its spaciousness, however, by the time my youngest brother arrived a decade later. Emmett, number six of six, slept in my parents’ room. I was the oldest girl and shared the back bedroom with two sisters. At night, a Castro Convertible transformed the living room into a bedroom for two brothers.

Nana died before I was born. Gramp Walsh lived on the second and third floors with Marion, his youngest daughter, and her husband, Bill. They had no children and didn’t like children, yet the empty third floor was their domain and off limits to my super-sized family.

“So why were we sleeping there?” Marty asked many years later. No one can answer that question. Everyone’s dead.

Yet, there we were. Early summer mugginess drifted through the open windows. The mattress sagged, dust flittered in the moonlight like bugs, and the redolence of cigarette-infused mustiness clings still to my nostrils.

“Shhh.” Marty held a finger to her lips when we giggled. “We’re supposed to be asleep.”

A scant year older and a stickler for rules, Marty was in charge. I, on the other hand, never knew a rule I didn’t challenge. So, I covered my mouth with chubby hands and snickered anew. Too excited to sleep, we wiggled our pajama-clad shoulders, and hugged each other.

***

My grandparents’ faded Victorian was typical of the simple multi-family houses built in Bridgeport fifty years earlier. The upper eaves sometimes attracted bats that often flew out at night toward Park City Hospital, a Civil War–era Gothic mansion that anchored the block.

The South End neighborhood was the brainchild of one-time mayor Phineas T. Barnum, co-founder of the Ringling Bros. Barnum & Bailey Circus, otherwise known as The Greatest Show on Earth.

“There’s a sucker born every minute,” he’s been quoted as saying. He made a fortune on that observation—his circus starred hoaxes like borrowing a baby and passing it off as belonging to his circus star, General Tom Thumb.

“I don’t believe in duping the public,” Barnum offered in self-defense. “But I believe in first attracting and then pleasing them.”

His planned community in Bridgeport continued to attract more immigrants, who arrived from Europe, Mexico, and the Caribbean in the mid-20th century. Most of the neighbors worked on assembly lines at nearby defense factories. Others were office, postal, and retail clerks. There were nurses, like Mom, and firemen, like Dad.

And, like Mom and Dad, many neighbors held multiple jobs, housed multiple generations, and had multiple kids. We ran in and out of unlocked doors and cluttered living rooms, where there was always a game to play, something to celebrate, and food to share. We all walked a few blocks to Sacred Heart School and played outside until the bells at the Congregational Church chimed five o’clock. When I wanted to be alone, I crawled into the back of a closet with a flashlight and a book.

“I liked coming to visit,” my cousin Susie, Marty’s sister, once said. “There were always enough kids for a game of kickball.”

I preferred their new, single-family house in a young neighborhood about five miles away. Unlike the paved back lot where we played, they had a real backyard with grass and a front yard with a rock garden, which I thought was exotic.

Although Marion and Bill complained about kid-centric commotions, they created their own with alcohol-fueled brouhahas that amused the neighborhood kids, but not the parents. The grownups all told us to mind our own business. But, in a neighborhood where you could smell everyone’s dinner and see everyone’s underwear hanging on the clotheslines, everybody knew everybody’s business.

Marion, Bill, and Gramp were also heavy smokers, hence the stench that infused the bedroom where Marty and I found ourselves.

***

According to my baby book, Marty’s first birthday was my first outing and she was my best friend. She still is. Raised Irish Catholic, we celebrated First Communions, Confirmations, Holy Week, and other ecclesiastical events.

As we grew older however, our paths diverged. We went to different state colleges. She taught special education; I taught English. I left the profession after five years; she retired after 25 years. Marty married Paul a year after graduation and raised two boys; I traveled, shacked up, and had no children. I’ve lived in Colorado, Louisiana, and Florida; she remained in Connecticut.

“Why can’t you be more like Marty?” my mother would plead. I loved my cousin, but I wanted to be me.

We both left Catholicism. I studied yoga and she joined the Mystic Pilgrims, a non-denominational prayer group. From different directions, we arrived at the similar practice of gratitude and acceptance as cornerstones of our lives. We talk about that a lot. We also talk about our mothers, who were best friends more than sisters-in-law.

“You sound like your mother,” Marty or I will tease in some blend of compliment and taunt, like when we bicker about who is going to treat the other to lunch.

We’ll often ask the other if she remembers someone or something.

“I’m older than the Pope,” Marty proclaimed after Pope Leo was elected on May 8, 2025. “I’m allowed to forget things.”

That explains why neither of us can remember why we were in the attic that night.

***

Because my father’s family grew up in the house, it was the homestead, a natural gathering place for extended family and lifelong friends in what the Irish call a céilí. Such events are characterized by eating, singing, dancing, storytelling, and drinking—lots of drinking.

After the adults had drained a round or two of drinks, one uncle would kick off the entertainment by balancing a glass on his forehead. Dad tried hard to be the ringleader—after all, he had kissed the Blarney Stone. Everyone called him “Knobby” because he was prematurely bald and looked like the boxing manager Knobby Walsh in the old Joe Palooka comic strip. A simple man who barely made it through high school, he nonetheless liked Shakespeare, especially Macbeth.

“Double, double toil and trouble.” he’d quote his favorite play in the midst of the commotion. “Fire burn, and cauldron bubble. Eye of newt, and toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog.”

But he was no match for Marty’s mother. An elementary school teacher, Aunt Kay was the clan’s seanchaí, the storyteller. As the keeper of lore, she dramatized stories with candles, traced lineages with melodramatic dialogues, and roused everyone into singing traditional songs. Meanwhile, we kids ran around sipping our parents’ drinks.

Sleepovers were common. Sometimes they were arranged in advance to coincide with the céilí—a swap, so to speak. I’d go to Marty’s house while her sister Susie stayed at my house with my sister Eileen, who was a mere ten days younger. More often than not, however, the sleepovers were spontaneously connived.

“Please, please, please,” we would beg, while a cousin hid under a bed. Our parents usually conceded.

***

Finding ourselves in an old bed in a gabled bedroom of an old house in an old neighborhood, Marty and I had probably played with dolls, combed each other’s hair, or said our evening prayers. In a house of Irish mirth, however, a dank and dusty attic begged something extraordinary. Something creepy.

I must have remembered that a few days before the sleepover, Dad had heroically armed himself with a broom and swatted a bat that had roosted in the eaves of a second-story porch. It had terrified the household with tell-tale urine stains and high-pitched, squeaky clicks.

“Damn bat,” Dad muttered, swinging the broom. My siblings and I huddled several feet behind him, gasping as he swore. He forced the winged mammal into a swoosh toward the eerie-looking hospital across the street.

Although there were no squeaks or stains in the room I shared with Marty, I’ve never let logic get in the way of a good yarn. I looked out the window to the porch where Dad had evicted the bat. It cowered in the shadows, shadows that hid things—like secrets, or ghosts, or bats.

Maybe I had inherited the blarney my father was full of. Or I was influenced by the spirit of Mister Barnum. Or maybe, having been raised in the Irish tradition, I just wanted to tell a story. I lowered my voice.

“Do you know why Dad is bald?” My six-year-old imagination was fever-pitched. Yanking my long braids dramatically, I widened my eyes and raised my brow. Marty’s eyes ballooned in response as she shook her pixie-haired head.

“One night, Dad was up here. All alone. He heard a noise on the porch.” I pointed out the window. Her gaze followed. I paused. “Then,” in a whisper that forced Marty to lean in further, I dropped the bomb.

“Bats,” I said, stressing the plosive nature of the letter B. “Bats ate Dad’s hair.”

Horrified, she screamed and bolted down two flights of stairs. I had no choice, but to sheepishly follow. We ended up sleeping in a crowded bedroom after all.

I remain unforgiven, though we laugh about the episode now. While we don’t know why we were sleeping in the attic that night, we do know for sure that I’ve been telling stories since my first fib.