Ma

Ma’s defining role in the Birdsey family is that of a mother who repeatedly gives up comfort and security for her sons, while her care unfolds inside a household shaped by Ray’s anger and the twins’ vulnerability. Her efforts range from securing their education to trying to keep Thomas safe; after she dies, the promise Dominick made to her continues to govern his sense of responsibility for his brother.

Identity and Family Life

Ma is the mother of Dominick Birdsey and Thomas Birdsey and Ray’s wife. Her household is not presented as uniformly tender or uniformly cruel: she offers warmth and practical help, but the boys’ memories also include fear, punishment, and episodes of abandonment. In recalling childhood to Dessa, Dominick can summon the times Ray punished the twins and left them beside the highway after an argument, where they clung to each other and cried. He tells Dessa that it was not always bad, yet the painful scenes come most readily to mind. That imbalance helps explain why Ma’s care appears so consequential: it exists within a family where safety is uncertain and conflict often goes unspoken.

Ray later describes the difference he perceived between raising the twins. He says Ma looked after Thomas and doted on him, while the boys, though nearly identical in appearance, seemed like night and day. Ray admits that her attentiveness sometimes angered him and that he and Thomas never got along. This is Ray’s retrospective account, not a neutral measure of Ma’s love for either son; it nonetheless reveals how her care for Thomas became entangled with the strain between them.

Sacrifice and the Twins’ Future

When the twins graduate from John F. Kennedy High School in June 1968, Ma gives them a joint present: a portable Royal typewriter in a dark blue carrying case, with a duplicate aluminum key for each of them taped inside their graduation cards. She directs them to find the gift in the front hall closet. Thomas tests the machine with a typing exercise, while Dominick types an insult about his brother; Ma lets them enjoy the joke briefly, then draws the teasing to a close and kisses them both.

The typewriter embodies a choice Ma has made for their future. She had been saving S&H green stamps toward a handcrafted German grandfather clock, a purchase she wanted badly enough to visit the redemption store on Bath Avenue to hear the clock chime and touch its polished wood. After collecting nearly 150 books of stamps toward the 275 required, she changes her plan and redeems them for the typewriter instead. She explains that her sons’ success matters more than the clock. Dominick understands the gift as an investment in their safety as well as their prospects: Billy Covington, a boy who had spent time with the twins, was killed in Vietnam the year before. Ma had known Billy as a child who came to their home after school because his father had left and his mother worked. Her decision gives up a cherished private wish in favor of a tool she hopes will help her sons build a different future.

That commitment is tested when Ray objects to paying the twins’ college expenses. After he berates them as dependent and storms out, Ma argues with him behind their bedroom door. She threatens to earn the money herself and, when Ray insists no one will hire her, applies for a maid’s job at Howard Johnson’s. The possibility frightens her: she worries about taking orders, making mistakes, and having strangers judge her cleft lip. The restaurant offers her the job the afternoon she interviews, and she is due to begin the following Monday. On that first morning, she stands at the stove in uniform, visibly shaking as Ray taunts her about the people and messes she will encounter at work. Her willingness to take the job despite her fears makes the conflict more than a dispute over tuition: she is prepared to enter an intimidating world rather than let the boys’ education depend entirely on Ray’s approval.

In 1969, Ray eventually gives Ma a two-thousand-dollar check toward the twins’ tuition bills, which are due that week. She thanks him through tears; the narration observes that Ray enjoys being cast as the hero. Ma’s relief does not erase the earlier struggle or the unequal power behind it. Thomas promises to improve his academic habits, while Dominick privately resolves that his brother must now manage without his help. Ma has secured another chance for both sons, but their different responses to dependence and responsibility are already beginning to pull them apart.

Care, Protection, and Thomas’s Distress

Ma’s care is especially visible in her efforts to understand Thomas without being able simply to control what happens to him. When she asks Dominick to room with Thomas at college, she explains that Thomas is nervous about leaving home and would feel safer with his twin. She is also worried about the typewriter: Thomas is upset about it, and she wants the machine to remain in one room. Her appeal to Dominick is quiet and personal. She sees his confidence as something Thomas lacks and asks him to help make the transition easier. Dominick watches the tears in her eyes, caught between irritation at his brother and the obligation his mother is asking him to assume.

As Thomas’s condition worsens, Ma phones Dominick because she believes that something is wrong beyond ordinary nerves. Thomas refuses to see a doctor, and she recognizes that she cannot force him to go. She hopes he will stay out of Ray’s way and prays for that much, while also telling Dominick not to leave school or worry about home. Her reassurance that she can handle things coexists with her admission that she is deeply troubled. The call shows both the limits of her authority and her instinct to protect Dominick from the weight she is carrying.

Her everyday attentiveness also takes the form of food and routine. When Dominick is struggling, she urges him to eat and offers to fry peppers for sandwiches with the eggplant and grinder rolls already in the refrigerator, asking him to bring her the provolone. The practical specificity of the meal contrasts with the family’s larger distress: care is expressed through an ordinary task that Ma can still perform and share.

Faith, Vulnerability, and Memory

Dominick remembers Ma as someone who tended to endure mistreatment quietly, trusting that Jesus would come to her rescue. During a bus journey, a man touches her and follows her and the boys after they get off. Dominick recalls her sitting frightened and not speaking up. His recollection is critical as well as affectionate: he sees her meekness as a pattern of silence, not simply as a virtue. He has stopped attending Sunday Mass after returning from college, partly as a declaration of independence from the religious world represented by Ray, who has become a prominent church deacon. Thomas still attends, and Ma’s faith remains part of the emotional landscape from which Dominick is trying to distance himself.

When Thomas’s distress becomes unmistakable, Ma’s grief is visible to the whole household. At Christmas he gives no presents, cries while opening his own, and speaks of himself as a bad person who may not be alive the following year. Ma cries too; Ray leaves in disgust. A week later, Ma makes Thomas a birthday cake. As Thomas extinguishes the candles by pressing their lit ends into the frosting, leaving smoke and the smell of burnt sugar in the room, Ma begins singing a cheerful birthday song, as if normality might still be held in place by a familiar ritual. The gesture does not resolve the crisis, but it shows her effort to keep tenderness present when the family has little power to change what is happening.

Death and Continuing Influence

After Ma’s death, Dominick tells a social worker that he had promised his mother on the day she died that he would look after Thomas and make sure nothing happened to him. He explains that Thomas remains, in his eyes, like a little child, and that being an identical twin makes his brother feel like part of himself. This inherited promise is rooted in the care Ma had tried to provide, but it also becomes a source of strain: Dominick believes he must protect Thomas even in a place where he cannot make him safe by force or devotion.

The promise returns at Thomas’s funeral, when Dominick publicly accuses himself and Ray of having bullied Thomas to death. His words do not establish that Ma’s choices caused the brothers’ fate; instead, her absence sharpens the contrast between the protection she sought and the guilt the surviving family members carry. Ma’s legacy is therefore both material and emotional: a typewriter purchased at the cost of a treasured clock, efforts to secure tuition and medical help, meals offered in moments of distress, and a request that her surviving son continue caring for the other. What she could not control remains unresolved, but the promise made to her continues to shape Dominick’s understanding of love as both devotion and burden.