Ma fights to secure college tuition for the twins

Ma’s campaign to secure college tuition for Dominick and Thomas turns a family argument over money into a test of who has authority over their future. Ray controls the household finances and expects the twins to work or enlist; Ma, despite fearing employment outside the home, applies for a job so her sons can go to college. Ray finally provides four thousand dollars, but the settlement comes only after Ma makes her willingness to work impossible to ignore—and after she has already been made to bear the humiliation of asking.

The stakes of college

Ma’s determination had been shaped in part by the danger she associated with the Vietnam War. After Billy Covington, a young man four years older than the twins, was killed, she mourned him and prayed for his soul. Dominick later understood that Billy’s death had made the war feel like a possible future for her sons: if someone she regarded as strong could be killed, they could be, too. In her view, college might keep them safe.

Ray saw the choice differently. Although his graduation cards could give the appearance of congratulations, he had opposed the twins’ going to college. He said that he and Ma could not afford two tuition bills and insisted that he, as the person who paid bills and managed savings, knew what the family could afford. He also distrusted colleges, believing that many teachers were Communists and many students used drugs. His objections combined financial control, suspicion of student life, and a conviction that two healthy young men should earn their living rather than continue their education.

Ray’s alternatives and Ma’s decision

Ray proposed work or military service instead. He had served in World War II and Korea and regarded military service as a viable career; in his view, enlisted men had choices even as draftees were being sent to Vietnam. He also suggested that the twins might find work at Electric Boat as apprentice pipe fitters, electricians, or welders. Some shipyard jobs carried deferments, and submarine construction, he argued, supported the war effort while putting food on the table. The options made sense within Ray’s ideas about work and security, but they did not answer Ma’s insistence that college mattered.

After Ma challenged him at supper, Ray struck the table hard enough to make the dishes jump, accused the twins of taking without giving, and left the house. When he returned, he spoke to Dominick and Thomas only in single syllables and refused to speak to Ma for days. The dispute continued behind the couple’s bedroom door. Ma threatened to work if that was what it took to pay for school. Ray told her she would not be hired; she answered that prediction by applying for a maid’s position at Howard Johnson’s. The restaurant called her for an interview and offered her the job that afternoon, with a Monday start date.

The job becomes a turning point

Ma was frightened of working outside the home. She worried about taking orders, making mistakes, and speaking with strangers who might look at her strangely because of her cleft lip. On her first morning, she cooked breakfast in her yellow acetate uniform, visibly distracted and with shaking hands. Ray taunted her about the people and messes she might have to deal with at work, including a disturbing newspaper story about a maid. Ma set his eggs down and told him that her sons were going to school.

Only then did Ray agree to contribute four thousand dollars toward the twins’ college educations and allow Ma to stay home. His concession resolved the immediate tuition dispute, but the terms exposed the pressure that had produced it: Ma had to make a real job offer—and the prospect of her cleaning strangers’ toilets—part of the argument before he yielded. Ray’s opposition also rested on a hierarchy of work that demeaned the maid’s job in racist terms. The episode therefore turns not only on whether the family can afford college, but on the unequal costs each family member is expected to bear.

The cost of the compromise

Being spared the job did not leave Ma simply relieved. She was ashamed not to appear after accepting the position, so she asked Dominick to return her uniform to Howard Johnson’s. A man at the desk mocked the empty uniform. Dominick did not object on his mother’s behalf and may even have smiled, but he was angry. Outside, he kicked Ray’s Fairlane hard enough to break his toe; as he later recognized, the kick was aimed at Ray, not at the car or the clerk. His reaction registers both his failure to defend Ma in the moment and the resentment he directed toward the stepfather whose pressure had put her there.

The four thousand dollars did not cover everything. Student loans and money Dominick and Thomas earned from part-time work also helped fund their education. Ma’s persistence secured Ray’s contribution and kept her from taking the job, but it could not erase the cost of having to beg for the money or the burden of Ray’s control over the family’s savings. Dominick remembers the bargain as a victory with a residue of humiliation and anger, rather than as a clean reconciliation.

What the tuition makes possible

After their first year away at college, Dominick and Thomas returned home for the summer. Ma was glad to have them back, worried that Thomas had become too thin, and tried to feed them well, preparing meals and packing lunches. She added sandwiches to Thomas’s lunch pail and handwritten notes telling him how proud she was. Jobs were scarce, but the brothers found seasonal work with the Three Rivers Public Works Department. The work was difficult and paid the minimum wage, yet it gave them paychecks and kept them out of the house during the day while Ray was home.

Their return to college after that first year makes the practical outcome of Ma’s intervention visible: they had gone, and the summer’s earnings became part of the means by which they continued. The remembered episode also marks a conflict between Ray’s authority over money and Ma’s determination to secure a different path for her sons. She does not win by persuading him that his objections are wrong; she changes the stakes by showing that she will accept the work he insists she cannot get. His money follows, but so do the student loans, their labor, and Dominick’s lasting awareness of what Ma had been made to endure to obtain it.