Alice McDermott's novel, 'At Weddings and Wakes' and Iconic Realism: Doors

As my #37 bus passed by this section of Dublin, these doors always intrigued me.

From a paper presented at the American Conference for Irish Studies, Emory Univ., Atlanta, Georgia: 

Alice McDermott incorporates the iconic figure of a door, as a primary trigger of childhood memories in her novel, At Weddings and Wakes. Usually, a door is the iconic representation of a threshold, transporting either the characters or the reading audience to a new episode or revelation. However, McDermott’s doorways represent stability, a way for a child’s mind to capture a moment in time and hold it in place to reminisce or perhaps learn about oneself or the influential people who enter and leave via the strategically placed doors. For example, she begins the book with a vivid description of the narrator’s childhood front door: 

Twice a week in every week of summer except the last in July and the first in August, their mother shut the front door, the white, eight-panel door that served as backdrop for every Easter, First Holy Communion, confirmation, and graduation photo in the family album, and with the flimsy screen leaning against her shoulder turned the key in the black lock, gripped the curve of the elaborate wrought-iron handle that had been sculpted to resemble a black vine curled into a question mark, and in what seemed a brief but accurate imitation of a desperate housebreaker, wrung the door on its hinges until, well satisfied, she turned slipped away from the screen as if she were throwing a cloak from her shoulders, and said, “Let’s go.”   

On their odyssey through the city transportation system, the mother and her children encounter the subway entrance, described to reflect the child’s perspective: “And then bars, prison, bars, a wall of bars, and, even more fantastically, a wall of revolving doors all made of black iron (pp. 6-7).”  As they reach the Brooklyn apartment, another vivid description of doors provides the reader with a sense that this memory is one that the child paints in her mind to recall the important relationships of her mother. They connect the mother’s memory with that of the child’s: 

Key in hand, they climbed the steps again and let themselves in through the double glass door framed in heavy wood, across a tiled vestibule that held the cool stone smell of a church, and then into the dim hallway where the air was brown with the reflection of the dark wooden floor and the staircase, with the odor of stewing beef and boiled onions… 

One flight and across a narrow hallway with silent doors on either end, another flight, their mother’s shoes tapping on each tread and the dull yellow light now passing through an opaque lozenge of white skylight. An identical hallway (voices from behind the far door, again those rushed incomprehensible syllables struck throughout with startling exclamations), another flight, the light growing stronger until it spread itself like a blurred hand over the tops of each of the dulled and hazy light there was only a single door and the hallway on either side of it was filed with a clutch of cardboard boxes and paper bags…. (p. 1)

The single door gave off the purr and rattle that made it seem thick and animate to the children, with an internal life all its own. There was the scratch of the delicate chain, the metallic slither of its bolts, the tumble and click of its lock, and then, slowly, the creak of its hinges…. The face that appeared between the door and its frame was thinner than their mother’s and so, for the children, offered no resemblance – despite the same pale blue eyes and light skin and narrow mouth that was, as was their mother’s, fighting to resist a grin. ( pp. 12-13) 

Toward the end of the memoir, the father’s presence reveals a sense of humor in relation to a door, all the while, creating a puzzle in the children’s minds as he points out: 

She and her brother passed the corner parking lo of the Presbyterian church, crossed another side street, and then the catty-cornered doorway of a small bar (about which their father would say, with the same consistency that he made his cemetery joke but with a far more serious air, “ in all the years that we’ve lived here I’ve never passed through those doors,” filling his children with a vague admiration and a cautious sense of gratitude for what it was he had managed to avoid). (p. 151)

The iconic doors lend a sense of spirituality in McDermott’s novel as each door seems to have a personality of its own, a stability that intrigues and stimulates the childhood imagination that seems absent in the adults’ consciousness. This cognizance carved within the various slabs of wood, configured to keep out and keep in, actually create an experiential plane perceived by the children through their senses of sight, smell and especially sound, albeit occasionally, a dissonant harmony prevails between the squeaking movements of the doors’ hinges.