Where the Light Fell

by Philip Yancey

  A few of the neighbors call me over. “Hey, kid, where you from?” When I tell them Georgia, they ask me to say something “in Southern” and make fun of how I talk. “What comes after nine?” they ask, and when I say ten, they laugh as if I’ve told a joke. “That ain’t how you say it. It’s ten, not tin.” When I say y’all, they laugh harder, slapping their knees and pointing at me as if I’m a stand-up comic.

  Southwest Philly assaults the senses. Horns blare, police sirens wail. A truck rolls by with a vendor calling through a scratchy loudspeaker, “White corn, six for a dollar, Jersey cantaloupe, bananas…” At dusk, lights twinkle along the span of the Walt Whitman Bridge, and I can see orange gas flares pluming from smokestacks in New Jersey. Smells—sulfur from the refineries, roasting coffee, fresh-baked bread from the German bakery, sausages grilling in someone’s backyard, a neighbor’s cigar—mingle together. My nose works harder in Philadelphia.

  On a foldout bed in a screened-in porch, I lie awake at night, squinting against the streetlights outside. My uncle Jimmy sits in the living room till midnight, watching two TVs and listening to a radio, all tuned to different sports shows. After he finally heads to bed, I worry about neighborhood gangs. I hear the clack of footsteps approaching, closer and louder, and hold my breath until they pass by. Just as I drift off to sleep, the milkman drops bottles into the metal box on the front steps, and all the nearby dogs bark at once.

  The row house on 67th Street gets boring fast. A creaky wooden staircase leads to the upper floor, and Marshall and I slide down the bannister or bump down the stairs on our bottoms—thump, thump, thump—until Uncle Jimmy makes us go up and down the stairs thirty times as punishment, taking all the fun out of it. “That’ll teach you,” he says with a wicked laugh.

  Food is unrecognizable. Instead of white bread, the Diems eat rye bread with seeds and a crust that bites back. They serve strange meats, such as liverwurst and scrapple. They slather mayonnaise on boiled potatoes and cook all vegetables to mush. For lunch, my grandmother serves a chicken salad lumpy with gelatin and gristle. As a Southerner, I’m shocked to see her serve iced tea made from an instant mix, unsweetened. My uncles flavor it with artificial juice from a plastic lemon-shaped container. I wonder how my mother survived childhood.

  Uncle Jimmy walks around the house in a droopy, sleeveless undershirt, with his bear-fur chest half-exposed. He drinks ice water straight out of a yellow Tupperware container, and milk directly from the carton. Marshall and I gawk. Rules are different up here.

  * * *

  —

  Two adult uncles live in the tiny row house with my grandparents. I dread staying with these boors, who take delight in picking on Marshall and me. On the drive home after each trip, Mother gives more details about her family, filling in the blank spaces.

  “Jimmy’s troubles started in the Korean War,” she says about her brother. “He fell in love with a Korean gal who worked as an interpreter for army intelligence. Jimmy wanted to marry her, and she got clearance to come over here with him, not so easy in those days. When he told your grandmother, she said, ‘I’m not going to have one of those slanty-eyes in my family!’ and he’s never been the same since.”

  Almost completely bald, Jimmy has a thickly furrowed forehead and tired, deep-set eyes, which make him look menacing. Hairy round shoulders bulge out from his tank-top undershirt. Every weeknight he retires to the one-bulb bathroom and shaves with a straight razor, a chore that requires forty-five minutes and leaves specks of blood on his undershirt.

  Uncle Jimmy responds to questions in a way that seems more retort than answer. If I ask whether the Phillies won last night, he says, “What’s it to you?” If I ask him to turn down the TV volume at night so we can sleep, he says, “You and how many marines?” Then he repeats it several times. “Like I say, you and how many marines? Did ya hear me—you and how many marines?”

  Jimmy wears a watch that doesn’t work. When I ask why he wears it, he thinks for a minute and says, “It’s right twice a day, ain’t it?” Ballpoint pens lie scattered around the living room, but I can only find one that writes. Jimmy knows which one, though, and if I don’t replace it in the exact spot, he corrects me. He demands that Grandmother serve him dinner promptly at 4:30 each day, in case he decides to go bowling that night. On Friday night he breaks the routine by going out for a Philly steak sandwich. “They know what I want as soon as I walk in the diner,” he brags.

  In time, life sours for my uncle when he makes his first visit to a doctor in years. I will later meet that doctor and hear his report firsthand. “So, I ask your uncle Jimmy to step behind the curtain and put on a gown. The room fills with a horrible smell, like a hamper full of dirty diapers. He comes out, and I swear to God his right leg is crawling with maggots. It has necrotic tissue, blood poisoning, gangrene, you name it. He probably has neuropathy from diabetes so he doesn’t feel much pain, but how could you not notice a leg like that?! We sprayed Lysol, Pine-Sol, anything we could find, and the smell in my office still didn’t go away for weeks.”

  The day after that visit, a surgeon amputates the leg just below the knee. Uncoordinated to begin with, Jimmy never really adjusts to a prosthetic leg. He clomps down those creaky stairs in the morning and sits in his chair all day, with a chamber pot for his toilet. No more bowling, no more driving. He watches sports on TV most of the day and reads three daily newspapers, cover to cover.

  Whatever in life my uncle Jimmy misses out on, his younger brother, Bob, makes up for. Oversized, loudmouthed, blustery, he wears his prodigal-son reputation with pride. On our early trips to Philadelphia, the teenager Bob tormented me relentlessly. “Hey, I’m coming to Atlanta, so book me a suite in the General Sherman Hotel, OK, little Rebel?” he said, and laughed loud and long at the joke that will be repeated several times a day. “Oh, and if that one’s full, try the Ulysses S. Grant Hotel.”

  He would twist my arm behind my back and say, “Repeat after me: ‘The South lost the Civil War. I love Yankees.’ ” If I refused, he’d lock me out of the house, even in the pouring rain. I spent hours huddled under a tiny awning, shivering, upholding the honor of the Confederacy. “Hey Jimmy, I hear there’s a Rebel running around here somewhere—have you seen one? No? Well, I guess we’d better keep the door locked. Can’t be too careful, you know. We wouldn’t want any Rebels in this house.”

  Uncle Bob claims he played professional football, though I can never find any record of his name on a roster. At his heaviest he weighed 325 pounds, and nobody messed with Bob Diem. “I got called for holding once and yelled at the ref, ‘What do you mean, holding?’ He said, ‘Well, Bob, I didn’t see you smash him in the mouth with your forearm, so I knew you must have been holding.’ ” He lets out a deep belly laugh. “My philosophy is, stick it to them before they stick it to me.”

  Bob’s large ego matches his size. “This is the best thing you do, coming up here every year,” he says, “because maybe some of my qualities will rub off on you. I’ll make a man of you.” When he learns I want to be a writer, he says, “Good. You couldn’t find a better subject. My life story will make a bestseller.”

  My uncle relishes his role as the black sheep of the family. In the years to come, he will live out his reputation in ways that scandalize the rest of the family. He divorces his first wife and disowns his only son for being gay. A second wife commits suicide, shooting herself in the shower. He squanders any money he makes on gambling and files more bankruptcies than he can count.

  I ask him one time, “Do you have any regrets?” He hardly gives it a thought. “Nope. I always did exactly what I wanted.”

  Like his older brother, Jimmy, Bob also has a tragic end. He takes poor care of himself and ignores his diabetes, even after losing a couple of toes. On Christmas Day 2009, the county sheriff, alerted by neighbors who smell something awful, breaks into his house. He finds Bob’s body lying on his bed, where it’s be
en for several days. Crazed with hunger, his pet Rottweiler has eaten off one foot and much of the other. The sheriff has to shoot the dog and then calls in a biohazard team. They find thousands of roach eggs: in the stove, in lights, in radios, in the ceiling fan, in any warm place.

  * * *

  —

  I have few memories of my grandfather, Albert Diem. Mother always speaks fondly of him. “He kept the family together, working two jobs to get us through the Depression. Then he did double shifts at the General Electric factory during the war. After all that, GE laid him off at the age of fifty-six.”

  I knew him as a thin, kindly man who sat in a Naugahyde recliner turning the pages of a newspaper with nicotine-yellow fingers. His doctor forbade him to smoke because of a heart condition, and Marshall and I reported to Mother whenever we caught him sneaking a cigarette on one of his walks around the block. Secretly, I liked watching the way bluish smoke curled up from his nostrils. So that’s what sin looks like, I thought.

  We were in Georgia when my grandfather Diem died. One day Mother got a postcard informing her that he was in the hospital. The next day, we were eating a pork-chop dinner in our trailer when the phone rang. Uncle Jimmy said three words, “Well, he’s gone,” and Mother started crying loudly, “Boo hoo, boo hoo,” just like they do on television. She ran to her bedroom, and Marshall and I sat mute and bewildered, staring at our half-eaten meals.

  After arranging to leave us with our Yancey grandparents, Mother caught a train to Philadelphia for the funeral. No one met her so she took a cab to the house, where she found the family gathered around the dining-room table arguing about how much money to spend on the casket.

  My grandmother Sylvania was the main force in the Diem family. As a child I feared her, with her filmy eyes and white chin hairs and clicking dentures and a dour expression on her face. Her lower lip protruded and her cheeks got in the way when she talked, which made her difficult for me to understand. I sensed she didn’t much like children, especially noisy or active ones.

  From Mother, I gradually learned Sylvania’s own story.

  She was born in 1898 into a working-class family, the eighth child of ten, and went by the nickname “Sylvie.” Her father, William, a butcher and a coal stoker, earned enough to feed them all—until he started drinking. According to Sylvie, he was a “mean drunk.” She used to cower in the corner as he kicked her baby brother across the linoleum floor, like a football. She hated him as only a child can hate, especially after she learned he was visiting her older sister’s bedroom at night.

  One day, after a loud argument with his wife, William announced that he wanted her out of the house by noon. The ten kids crowded around their mother, clinging to her skirt and crying, “No, Mom, don’t go!” But nothing could soften their father. Holding on to her brothers and sisters, Sylvie watched through the plate-glass window as her mother walked down the sidewalk, a suitcase in each hand, growing smaller and smaller until she disappeared from view.

  Some of the children soon joined their mother, and others were farmed out to live with relatives. Sylvie and the two youngest boys stayed with their father. Only seven years old, she took over the mothering duties, cleaning the house, cooking, getting her brothers bathed and dressed. All through childhood, she harbored a hard knot of bitterness against her father. When she turned fourteen, he kicked her out of the house, and for years she lived with other families, cleaning their homes to earn her keep.

  As an adult, Sylvania reconnected with her brothers and sisters. Like her, they had dropped out of school early, either to work or to join the army. Eight of them settled in Southwest Philly, within a few blocks of 67th Street. All but one—a lifelong spinster—got married, started families, and tried to put the past behind them. Their father, William, had vanished. No one knew where, and no one cared.

  Many years later, to everyone’s shock, the father resurfaced. He had guttered out, he said. Drunk and cold, he had wandered into a Salvation Army rescue mission one night. To earn a meal ticket he had to attend a worship service. When the speaker asked if anyone wanted to accept Jesus as Savior, William thought it only polite to go forward with some of the other men. It surprised him more than anybody when the Sinner’s Prayer actually worked. The demons inside him quieted down. He sobered up. For the first time in his life he felt loved and accepted—by God, if no one else. He felt clean, able to make a new start.

  And now, he told his children one by one, he was seeking them out to ask for forgiveness. He couldn’t defend what had happened, nor could he ever make it right. But he wanted them to know he was sorry, sorrier than they could possibly know. He had taken a job at an icehouse not far away and was forging a new life for himself.

  The children, now middle-aged and with families of their own, were wary. Some expected him to fall off the wagon at any moment. Others figured he would ask them for money. Neither happened, and in time the father won them over—all except Sylvie.

  * * *

  —

  Long ago my grandmother Sylvania made a vow never to speak to “that man,” which is how she referred to her father. His reappearance rattled her, and old memories of his drunken rages came flooding back as she lay in bed at night. She resented her brothers and sisters for forgiving him. “I don’t believe in last-minute forgiveness after living a bad life,” she said. “He can’t undo all that just by saying ‘I’m sorry.’ ” She told her children, including my mother, “I have no father, and you have no grandfather.”

  Sylvania’s husband, Albert, had a softer heart. Several times he sent my mother, then a little girl, on a secret mission to the icehouse to check on her grandfather. William always insisted he was fine, although Mother noticed he was missing a few fingers from chopping ice.

  William may have given up drinking, but not before alcohol had damaged his liver beyond repair. He fell seriously ill, and for the last five years of his life, he stayed with one of his daughters, Sylvania’s oldest sister. They lived eight houses down the street from my grandmother, on the very same block. Keeping her vow, Sylvania never once stopped in to visit her ailing father, even though she passed her sister’s place whenever she walked to the grocery store or caught a trolley downtown.

  Pressured by her husband, Sylvania did consent to let her own children visit their grandfather occasionally. Nearing the end, William saw a young girl come to his door and step inside. “Oh Sylvie, Sylvie, you’ve come to me at last,” he cried, gathering her in his arms. The others in the room didn’t have the heart to tell him the girl was not Sylvie but her daughter Mildred, my mother. He was hallucinating grace.

  When William died, my grandfather insisted that his wife, Sylvania, attend her father’s funeral. As an adult, she encountered him only then, as he lay in a casket.

  Hard as steel, Sylvania never apologized and never forgave. My mother remembers coming in tears to apologize for something she’d done. Sylvania responded with a parental Catch-22: “You can’t possibly be sorry! If you were really sorry, you wouldn’t have done it in the first place.”

  That scene would come back to me in later years, as I sought to understand the woman who is my mother.

  The greatest burden a child must bear is the unlived life of the parents.

  —Carl Jung, Alchemical Studies

  CHAPTER 12

  MOTHER

  Something happens during all those trips to Philadelphia. For the first time I begin to see my mother as a person in her own right—a girl named Mildred, a child and daughter, a sister, a teenager—not simply Mother.

  Stories spill out as we walk around the neighborhood, past the GE factory where she worked and the stately brick high school and clapboard church she attended in her youth. I hear more accounts as we sit around the dinner table with her brothers, Jimmy and Bob, who delight in telling me details that make Mother say, “Oh, stop!”

  The Diems’ firstborn child,
Mildred grew up during the Great Depression. She remembers bad clothes, bad food, and her mother’s bad moods. Sylvania gave birth to five more children, each one another mouth to feed on her husband’s meager income. In the crowded row house, kids were always underfoot. Sylvania would lie on a couch with a rubber ice pack on her head. “Keep it down!” she’d shout. “I have a splitting headache.”

  More than once, she grumbled, “Why did I ever have you kids? You’ve ruined my life.” Some nights she gave them whippings just to make a point: “I know you’ve done something wrong even if I didn’t catch you in the act.”

  As I probe Mother for memories of her childhood, I hear no happy ones. “It wasn’t easy” is all she’ll say. She must have been unusually naïve. She learned about deodorant when a friend slipped her a note with a drawing of a container and three scrawled words, “You need this!” Once, her prankster brothers talked her into soaking her hand in a pail of water and then grabbing the metal chain that hung from a basement light fixture. The electric shock worked far better than intended, and they had to knock her free of the chain with a body block.

  World War II defined my mother’s high school years. Many of her classmates quit their studies to join the army, some of them never to return. Sylvania insisted that after graduation the Diem daughters had to get a job and live at home, handing over their weekly salaries. When Mother begged to go to college so that she could study to become a teacher, Sylvania shut her down: “Never mention that idea again. If you go to college, all the others will want to go.”

  Without telling anyone, my mother plotted a break from the family after her twenty-first birthday. She lined up a place to stay in downtown Philadelphia, with a family she’d met at church. For a sheltered, timid young woman, it was an audacious move. One of her sisters noticed her packing clothes in a suitcase and alerted the parents.