—Mary Carol Reilly
The most memorable Christmas in the extraordinary life of Mary Carol Reilly—who has experienced seven decades of yuletides from Baltimore to China to post-Katrina New Orleans to Hollywood—was spent in the convent.
It was 1962. Mary Carol, who grew up near the racetrack in Pimlico and graduated from Seton High School, was a novice with the Sisters of St. Cyril and Methodius in Danville, Pennsylvania. She was 20 years old and had never lived away from home.
“It was one of the sweetest Christmases I ever had,” says Mary Carol, 68 and living again in Baltimore after years hither and yon that included being a Romper Room teacher in Chicago, driving a taxi in Los Angeles, and co-starring with the Pillsbury Doughboy in biscuit commercials.
In the convent that 1962, the weeks of Advent leading up to Christmas Day were observed with anticipation and solemnity. None of the nuns and the novices in their charge was allowed cards or presents.
“After prayer on Christmas Eve, right after midnight, we all came into the [common] room. We ate around a long table, always so sweet and quiet and reverent,” remembers Mary Carol.
“And the table was piled high with mounds of presents and cards from our families. It went from sweet and reverent to joyous.”
Her time in the convent was brief—less than a year—but the memory lingers like the watery glow of bubble lights on a Scotch pine.
Sitting in one of the many Baltimore diners she favors—Valentino’s in Hamilton, the Towson Diner on York Road, the Broadway just east of Highlandtown—Mary Carol wells up at the 50-year-old memory
She wells up a lot, a tough Irish-American as willing to tell off a stranger as give them half of what she owns; a woman who frequently says, her voice choking with emotion, that someone “saved my life.”
Her face—which simultaneously gives off and absorbs light—is lined with the map of Eire. Behind it, an inherent sense of drama that has served Mary Carol in front of a class of delinquent girls, as well as cameras filming hamburger commercials.
And it came in handy at a young age when, just 10 years old, she weathered the first of the sad Christmas days that inevitably separate the good ones; back when she’d lie in bed at 4005 Belvieu Avenue—now a vacant lot—and fall asleep to dreams of being a movie star.
“Daddy was in the hospital for the first time that Christmas,” says Mary Carol of her father, Edward J. Reilly Jr., who died in 1967 and, with his brother, Philip, ran Reilly’s Leather Store next to the old Trailways station downtown on Fayette Street.
In late December of 1952, Mary Carol’s father was hospitalized for alcoholism and depression after a drinking spree that left him unable to eat or get out of bed, a condition a fifth-grader can barely fathom.
“He came home for the day on Christmas. It was very awkward,” she remembers. “He bought my mother Chanel No. 5 and, after Christmas, she took it back to the store to get the money back. She was always worried about money.
“I think I had a tie for him. And it felt like we were all tippy-toeing around. He was quiet that year. He wasn’t the daddy that loved to tell stories.”
Mary Carol has long since put down the bottle herself. It has allowed her to keep the narrative of the Reillys of Baltimore alive.
Contact Rafael Alvarez at orlo.leini@gmail.com.
Latest Comments
Rememberng Mary Carol Reilly
Posted by Norma Steven January 22, 2012 21:26:20
"...whew, what a ride!!!
Posted by Nancy and Bob Kiehl December 04, 2011 17:04:19
As Mary Carol Is My Witness
Posted by tegory November 29, 2011 17:14:24
The rest of the story.
Posted by George Waldhauser November 26, 2011 08:14:18