Our Cousin Claire

                                        Our Cousin Claire

                              A Short Story by Frank Sperry

         My Mother and Father were Irish and came from big families and when they all got married they had a bunch of kids. Back in those days that’s how you could tell who was Catholic and who wasn’t. There was just one thing that could mix you up. The black families who never lived closer than three blocks away also had a lot of kids who sometimes came to our park and tried to act as if they owned our grass. My cousin Randy said God gave them dark faces and short hair to keep us from getting confused and mistaking them for Catholics.
         I could never keep track of all my aunts and uncles and their comings and going. I only knew that Randy who bragged that he could count to a hundred before I could get higher than twenty-seven, told me that we had forty-two first cousins.
         Claire was probably the first of our cousins to get married. She was only seventeen when she ran away to Maryland where you could get married without your Mother and Father saying it was O.K.. She ran away to Maryland with some guy named Fulton who was at least old enough to steal his Father’s car. We weren’t sure if Fulton was even Catholic or worse yet, even Irish.
My Father said he must have been both because he was named after the Bishop our family watched on television every Thursday night. My Mother said if Claire didn’t meet Fulton at the Irish Center her marriage was probably doomed from the start.
My Grandfather said she was acting like a prophet of doom, but it turned out my Mother was right. Not too long after Claire’s twin boys were born, all forty-one other cousins found out that Claire was getting a Divorce. My Father said he thought that if she couldn’t handle Fulton’s drinking, she should get “Annulled”, which was what Catholics usually went for instead of a Divorce. He said the Irish rarely got Divorced and Catholics never did. My Grandfather said the Bishop, the real Bishop not Claire’s Fulton, would look at the twins and tell her she should get Counseled to save her marriage. That seemed to make my Father mad and almost want to turn Protestant. He said Bishops always wanted married people to stay married to misery, as long as the misery belonged to someone else.
My Father seemed to be the only one in our family, beside my Grandfather who had any sympathy for Claire. Randy said all of her cousins who were old enough to have a phone called Claire and tried to talk her out of getting a Divorce. None of them went to see her. It was if they thought she had a bad flu and they were afraid to catch it.
My Grandfather must have believed that he and I were both vaccinated. He took me with him when we both went to see Claire.
Claire didn’t say much, but she cried a lot. The one thing I remember her saying was that Fulton didn’t want her to divorce him. He told her divorce was a sin and God would punish her. When she stopped crying she said that she wasn’t afraid of God but she felt bad because she had hurt Him,
My Grandfather told her that she was a good person, and that God would never punish someone like her. It didn’t matter whether she was Catholic or Irish, it only mattered that she was a good person who was young and one of His children who had made a mistake. He told Claire a mistake you didn’t intend to make is never, ever a sin.