Remembering Magoo

I was recently asked to write about someone who “shaped” me. My parents being too close, too complex for me to analyse, I tried to think of someone else. Days later, in a clear moment of instant certainty, I thought of Magoo.

Margaret Gray, but known to us as “Magoo”, was my parents’ Irish maid who came to work in 1936 and stayed with our family for over two decades. Though she ironed, cleaned, cooked, served at table and child-minded, she was much more than a maid.

Born in County Cork, Ireland, around 1890, she lived on the land in a large family. Their living conditions were hard. However, not once did a doctor visit their home. “Why not?” asked my mother, thinking perhaps no doctor would come that far, or for some crazy Irish reason doctors were taboo. “Because,” said Magoo, “we ate raw turnips straight out of the ground. There is nothing so good for you.”

In the early 1900s America sold itself as a land of opportunity. There were myths about gold cascading into the pockets of those bold enough to make the journey. Irish parents with limited resources encouraged their children to emigrate.

So in 1907, at seventeen, Magoo and an older sister set sail for the USA. Her first employer, a hard-driving, “poison neat” housekeeper, must have increased her initial homesickness. She “cried every night for a year, so hard the bed shook up and down,” she confessed, “up and down.” One can imagine how lonely this new life must have been for an inexperienced country girl.

But her independent spirit, accepting nature and her ability to see humour even in hardship helped her to contend with those early years. When she came to my mother she was married with two daughters, having lost an infant son. She worked for $7 a week.

In my mother’s words, “we grew fond of her easy, gentle, humorous nature”. She had endless time for everything. “Her capacity for creating a relaxed atmosphere amounted to genius,” said my mother, for whom, with her anxiety and depression, serenity was important.

Magoo became a fixture in my parents’ early and middle married life—and like a second mother to my brother and me.

On Saturday nights, when our parents were out, we dressed up in tea towels and oven mitts and danced the Irish jig. Magoo shared her childhood in County Cork, superstition, myths and the darker bits of Irish history—though we weren’t aware of it then. When my brother and I fought she would recite:

Birds in their little nests agree

’Tis a shameful sight

When children of one family

Fall out and chide and fight.

Hard names at first

And threatening words

May turn to clubs

And naked swords …

To murder and to death.

Many years later I saw this as a reflection of Ireland’s own internal violence and extended conflict. And discovered later too, Magoo’s bitter hatred of Cromwell and the English.

After the music, stories, dance and forbidden orange juice, my brother and I raced to bed just minutes before our parents returned.

Our parents were not long fooled and for a time they tried to apply rules that would curb Magoo’s “permissiveness”. But they soon decided that her benefits outweighed any harm done.

In fact, when my mother wrote of the three women that she herself was “bits and pieces of”, Magoo was one of them.

We were not only allowed to be wholly ourselves with Magoo, she delighted in what we were. She told my brother, and believed, he would be President of the United States one day. Although we copied her brogue, discovered her false teeth, teased her for modestly undressing in the closet, and gently mocked her, she took it in good spirit.

She fished with my brother and me on vacation, all in the rowboat together at dusk, Magoo trawling a hopelessly knotted line over the side. “I think it reminded her of her childhood, but she still loved it simply for itself,” says my brother, and adds: “She was more of a companion than an authority figure. She seemed to inhabit our world.”

She was not only a “shaper” but a prism through which I witnessed the world outside. Here was another country. Here was a religion. Atheist though my parents were, we all ate fish on Friday. My father drove Magoo to and from Mass on Sundays. In the way that small children can be, I was fascinated by holy water, rosary beads, the naked baby Jesus, stained-glass windows. I became aware of her belief that things happened the way they were meant to.

She was also a benchmark of the changing times. Her rolled-up waist-length hair was cut short to a bob. Her stout black shoes and white uniform gave way to comfortable coloured dresses. I observed her fear on her first aeroplane flight. She progressed from living in a slum to a neat brick apartment in a middle-class neighbourhood. Her daughters became professional women. But perhaps the biggest leap was the fact that her grandson was admitted on his own merits to Yale University, a fact she never knew but would have been immensely proud of. She, who learned only the rudiments of reading and writing.

Inevitably, as we grew up and left home, Magoo’s duties, and her interest, waned. It was never the housework that held her. My mother’s life was not as pressured. She kept in touch, and continued to bake and deliver apple pies. On vacation and trans-Pacific visits, we saw her when we could.

Years ago she sent my brother a photo of the three of us with her reading (improvising?) Babar on the couch. “I won’t be needing this now,” she wrote, “Didn’t we have wonderful times together?” My brother, assuming she was cleaning out and moving, took too long to answer.

We are “bits and pieces of the people we love and admire”, philosophised my mother. She was right.