by Lynn Austin
Death will be a wonderful surprise.”
I swallowed a knot of fear. “Our Sunday school teacher said we’ll go to heaven when we die if we know Jesus.”
“Oh, what a sweet thought,” Connie said. “You hold on to those words if they help you, sweetie. Leonard’s always telling me that religion is a drug for the masses, and I can see how he’s right. It has given you a happy feeling, hasn’t it, wiping out all your fears. You go ahead and use that drug, Kathleen.”
Connie rambled on and on about nuclear war and “darling Leonard,” and the more she talked, the more I began to doubt that she was the committed Communist that my uncle believed her to be. I got the feeling she was more interested in marrying Leonard than in helping the Communists take over the world. I wouldn’t mind having cheerful Connie for an aunt, but I couldn’t see how she and my uncle would both fit on our sofa at night. She was fairly plump.
Connie had been a Girl Scout, and as we walked along she reassured me that she knew how to survive in the woods. “If the nuclear fallout doesn’t kill us or poison all this wonderful vegetation,” she said, “I’ll show you how to live off the land. It’ll be so much fun. I can make a lean-to and cook over a campfire, and I know how to use leaves and herbs to cure common ailments, too.”
I wanted to ask her if she had a home remedy for radiation sickness, but she seemed so happy and carefree as we ambled along the path, hand-in-hand, that I hated to spoil her mood with a dose of reality.
When we got back to the car, Uncle Leonard had his transistor radio pressed to his ear and was listening to the news. “Has the nuclear war started, honey?” Connie asked as she slid across the seat to cuddle beside him. “We didn’t hear any missiles falling, did we, Kathleen? But then, I’m not really sure what a nuclear missile sounds like.”
“I never heard one fall, either,” Uncle Leonard said, “but I guarantee we’ll know it when it does.”
Connie laughed and squeezed his arm. “Oh, you know so many things, Lenny.”
We drove down the picturesque main street of the village and parked in front of a florist’s shop. Uncle Leonard shut off the engine, and the car shuddered to a stop. “This is it,” he said.
“You’re buying flowers for your mother?” Connie asked. “What a sweet idea, Lenny.”
“No, I’m not buying flowers. This is where she lives. It used to be a hat shop. Mother ran it when Eleanor and I were kids, and we lived in the apartment upstairs. She still lives there.”
This was news. Not only did I have a grandmother but she was a capitalist. No wonder Uncle Leonard left home. We took our grocery sack “suitcases” out of the trunk and walked around to the rear entrance, climbing a rickety set of wooden stairs to a tilting porch on the second floor.
Grandma Fiona met us at the door, enveloping my uncle in a long, warm embrace. “It’s so lovely to see you, Leonard… so lovely. I’ve missed you so!”
I had never seen my uncle behave so tenderly. His eyes misted over, and he looked almost human as he hugged her in return and said, “I’ve missed you, too, Mother.” Then he cleared his throat and he was grumpy old Uncle Leonard again. “I’ve brought company. This is my comrade, Connie Miller… and this is Eleanor’s daughter Kathleen.”
My grandmother’s face lit up when she heard who I was, and she moved right past poor Connie to take me into her arms. Her hug was even more wonderful than one of my daddy’s hugs because it lasted so much longer, and she made a contented purring sound as she rocked me back and forth in her embrace.
“Kathleen…” she murmured. “Oh, Kathleen…”
Grandma Fiona had a creamy Irish accent, and I loved the musical sound of it. She did something wonderful with her tongue when she said my name—“Kathleen.” It seemed to roll from her mouth like a marble on glass. She was beautiful and elegant, even at age sixty, with the same air of money and privilege that I saw in Cynthia Hayworth. I’d call it class. Fiona had class. I couldn’t believe that my frumpy, bedraggled mother was her daughter. How could two such opposite people be related?
Fiona was slender and graceful and sweet-smelling. She dressed in silky dresses and feathery, gossamer shawls and satin slippers. She wore tinkling bracelets and sparkling earrings and bright red lipstick, even when she wasn’t leaving the house. Her lips made a mark on my cheek when she kissed me.
Her apartment was as lovely as she was, filled with beautiful, delicate trinkets made of porcelain and crystal and silver, expensive-looking things that seemed as though they came from another era. It didn’t take a genius to understand why my brothers had never been invited for a visit.
Fiona must have been expecting us because she had prepared roast beef for dinner. We sat down to eat it at her dining-room table, which had been set with china and silver on a white damask tablecloth. I felt like I was dining in Buckingham Palace with the queen. It was the best meal I’d eaten in my whole life—even better than the food at May Elizabeth’s house—and I ate it slowly, reverently, the way people do in dreams. If the world did come to an end tomorrow, at least my final meal had been a wonderful one.
Afterward, I helped Grandma and Connie wash and dry the dishes while my uncle switched on his transistor radio again so he could hear the latest news of the missile crisis.
“Turn that noisy old thing off,” Fiona scolded when we were finished. “Why do you want to be upsetting yourself and everyone else by listening to that nonsense?”
“We’re in the middle of a world crisis, Mother.”
“Well, take your blooming world crisis outside. I don’t want to be hearing about it, and neither does Kathleen.”
He retreated to the second-floor back porch, taking a reluctant Connie with him.
“Now then, luv,” Fiona said with a girlish smile. “Let’s you and me listen to some music, shall we?”
She didn’t own a television set, but she did have a wonderful old phonograph and stacks and stacks of records. The music had an oldfashioned, muffled sound, as if the orchestra had been seated inside May Elizabeth’s fallout shelter for the recording session. Some of the records were so scratchy from overuse they sounded as if the musicians were playing in the shower.
“Can you dance, Kathleen?” I shook my head, and Fiona’s beautiful smile faded. “If I were younger I would teach you all the old dances: the waltz, the foxtrot, the Charleston. …”
“I’m really clumsy, Grandma. Even my gym teacher says so.”
“Nonsense. A willowy lass like you? Why, I’ll bet you would make a wonderful dancer with a few lessons.”
“Did you used to dance when you were young, Grandma?”
“Aye, you should have seen me, Kathleen. I was the belle of New York. And Arthur had wings on his feet. He could glide across the dance floor so smoothly that his feet barely touched the floor. I could have danced with him all night. And I did, too.”
“Who’s Arthur?”
Fiona looked indignant. “Didn’t your mother teach you anything about your ancestors? Shame on her! And what’s wrong with Leonard that he doesn’t tell you these things?” I shrugged, not knowing where to begin when it came to describing what was wrong with my loony uncle.
“Anyway, Arthur is your grandfather,” Fiona continued. “We lived in Manhattan at the time, and we used to take a boat out to where the ships would anchor—miles offshore—so you could get something to drink. It was Prohibition, you see. And there would be music and food on board and… well, never mind. But we would dance beneath the stars until the band played the very last note.”
I could see it all in my mind, and when she put more music on the record player, I closed my eyes and pretended that I was on that boat, dancing with Arthur with the wings on his feet.
Later, Grandma brought out an album filled with sepia-toned photographs and showed me pictures of her and Arthur. He looked old, even back when Grandma looked young. He always wore a suit and tie, and Grandma wore fancy jewelry and furs. I could see expensive cars and elegant furnishings in the b
ackground.
I saw photos of my mom and uncle when they were fat-cheeked babies, being pushed in a “pram,” as Grandma called it, in Central Park. Near the end of the album, I saw my mom and Uncle Leonard as older children, living here in Deer Falls. My uncle looked just as morose when he was a child as he did as an adult, but Mommy looked young and pretty—and happy. I never knew she had such a nice smile. I saw pictures of her sitting beside the lake in a bathing suit, laughing with her friends, and I wondered how she had changed into the woman I lived with.
The life that Grandma Fiona showed me in that album was so different from my family’s life now that it seemed made up. I wondered where that beautiful world had gone—because it had certainly vanished, as surely as our present world would vanish if the Russians dropped their bombs.
Grandma Fiona sipped sherry while we talked, and after a while she got weepy. “You have Arthur’s eyes,” she told me as she took my chin in her hand and gazed into them. “Such deep, deep brown eyes. Looking into them was like looking down a well.”
“Did Arthur die?” I asked her.
She nodded sadly. “Aye, a long time ago, luv.”
Connie and Uncle Leonard finally turned off the radio and came inside when the night air got too cold. He saw Grandma reminiscing and frowned. “That’s enough of the past, Mother. You can’t get it back.”
“I can bring it back in my memories.” She smiled faintly, and for a fleeting second I saw the beautiful young woman my grandmother had once been beneath the aging skin and faded hair.
“It’s almost midnight,” Leonard said, shutting off the phonograph. “We should go to bed.”
I slept in Grandma Fiona’s bed with her that night. The sheets were soft with age, just like her skin; they both smelled of lavender. But before we turned off the light for the night, she let me try on some of her costume jewelry—necklaces and bracelets and rings that were too big for my fingers.
“Aye, you’re a lovely girl,” she said. And as I sat at her dressing table and gazed at myself in her wavy, age-cracked mirror, I almost believed it.
I never wanted to go home. Grandma Fiona looked right into my eyes when she talked to me instead of looking through half-closed eyes, the way Mommy always did. Grandma listened to me—really listened—as if what I had to say was the most fascinating thing she’d ever heard. And the way that she caressed me—touching my face, stroking my hair, rubbing my back, holding my hand—made me feel more cherished than I had ever felt in my life.
But after a six-day standoff, the Russians backed down. President Kennedy had played the highest-stakes poker game of his life and won. I was probably one of the very few people in the world who hated to see the Cuban missile crisis come to an end. It meant that I had to leave my grandmother and the charming village of Deer Falls and go home to my miserable, unhappy family in Riverside.
“Come and visit me again, luv,” Grandma Fiona begged as she hugged me good-bye. She stood on her back porch with tears in her eyes, waving to us with a lace handkerchief.
“I will,” I promised. “I will come again!” I meant it, too.
But that was the last time I ever saw her.
Chapter
11
I endured yet another loss that autumn of 1962; the Cuban missile crisis dealt the final blow to my friendship with May Elizabeth. The crisis intensified the hatred and fear that people felt toward Communists, so even though a nuclear war had been averted, May acted as if it had been my fault that she’d spent a long weekend in her fallout shelter.
There were plenty of other reasons, too. We were in junior high now, and she had much more in common with Debbie Harris, who teased her hair and flirted with boys and listened to Peter, Paul and Mary records— than she did with me. May and I attended most of the same classes and our lockers stood right next to each other, but she acted as if I didn’t exist. I should have known that our friendship couldn’t survive. Hadn’t I heard anything Uncle Leonard had tried to preach to me all these years about the proletariat and the bourgeoisie? Sometimes I wished that the world had come to an end while I was eating roast beef in Deer Falls with my grandmother.
Our regional school district bussed kids into town for junior high and high school from all the neighboring villages. We now had 101 kids in our grade instead of forty-seven. May Elizabeth found a whole new set of friends to hang out with, cool girls who wore training bras and garter belts and nylons. Her Sunday shoes had tiny little heels on them now. I went back to being “Cootie Kathy” because I didn’t dress in the right clothes or wear my hair in a flip. It was hard to get my hair to do much of anything since we were always running out of shampoo and I had to wash my hair with a bar of soap in the rust-stained bathroom sink.
My daddy made parole that winter, and he stayed home for the longest period of time that I could ever recall. He supposedly had a job in Bensenville and rode there with Uncle Leonard every day. I didn’t ask him where he worked. I didn’t want to know. I was still mad at him for being an exconvict, and I refused to cuddle up with him or let him try to cheer me up. Besides, he had a full-time job trying to cheer up Annie. Whatever Daddy’s day job was, I don’t think he liked it very much because he came home tired and sad every night. It seemed like we all walked around for the next few years acting gloomy and woebegone. Mommy, Uncle Leonard, and Annie had always been morose, but now Daddy and I joined their pity party.
The gloom deepened a year later when President Kennedy was assassinated in November of 1963. I remember walking home from eighth grade and finding my mother sitting in front of the TV set, crying. “Somebody just shot President Kennedy,” she said.
I couldn’t believe it. “Why?” I asked.
That question continued to occupy the nation for years. We were all sad, even Uncle Leonard, who had disliked President Kennedy long before the Bay of Pigs invasion. “Still, it’s a shocking thing,” he murmured.
“Shocking.”
We watched TV for days it seemed, feeling numb and listening to the news commentators talk on and on about the Texas Book Depository and the grassy knoll and Lee Harvey Oswald. We saw rerun after rerun of Jackie Kennedy in her pillbox hat and blood-splattered pink suit, looking grief-stricken and hollow. When Lee Harvey Oswald’s Communist ties were discovered, Uncle Leonard feared a backlash and worried that he would have to leave town again.
I went to church one Sunday morning and came home to find Daddy wild-eyed and raving, pointing to the TV set and shouting, “Somebody just shot Lee Harvey Oswald! I sat right here and saw it live on TV! They shot him right in front of me!”
We watched the president’s funeral procession, deeply moved by the riderless black horse with the empty boots turned around in the stirrups. The poise and courage of his young widow, Jacqueline, inspired us; the tragedy and poignancy of little John-John’s salute touched us. I mourned, not only for John F. Kennedy, but for all that he had represented. He had been a man of power, handsome and strong, blessed with a beautiful wife, adorable children, wealth, and respect. My family was nothing at all like his, and I would never have any of the things he had. But for a little while, I had almost felt as if I did. The Kennedys were the all-American ideal, our nation’s shining First Family, and in them we had tasted perfection. Now that ideal had been violently destroyed, the perfect life I so longed for cruelly snatched away by an assassin’s bullet. It had been only a dream.
For most of the young people in Riverside, the gloom finally lifted a few months later when the Beatles landed in America in February of 1964. By then, our TV was so decrepit that Ed Sullivan looked as though he was stranded in a raging blizzard, buffeted by gale-force winds that blew him up to the top of the screen, then tossed him to the bottom again. But when I watched his show one Sunday night and saw the Beatles singing “IWant to Hold Your Hand,” I fell in love with Ringo Starr. Yeah, yeah, yeah!
The next day, all the boys came to school with their hair combed down over their foreheads. The girls starting buying Beatles re
cords and listening to their music on transistor radios and reading all about John, Paul, George, and Ringo in fan magazines. I didn’t have a record player or a radio, let alone money for fan magazines. Any knowledge I had of the Fab Four had to come secondhand through the scraps of information I overheard in the school hallways. I lay on my mattress at night, fantasizing about how I would miraculously meet Ringo Starr and be whisked away to live happily ever after in his mansion in England. But I would be magnanimous with my newfound wealth; I would buy my family a new TV set as a parting gift.
I started high school in 1964 and entered an entirely different world from junior high. Nevertheless, it was still a world in which I was shunned and excluded. During our high school years May Elizabeth’s life and mine took two entirely different courses, as if we lived in parallel universes on The Twilight Zone. May and her friends were cheerleaders and had boyfriends and went steady. She was voted homecoming queen and rode to the football field in a convertible, holding a bouquet of roses and waving her gloved hand like the Queen of England. I didn’t actually see this performance since I never went to football games, but her picture appeared in the school newspaper.
May’s brother, Ron, was the star quarterback, the captain of the basketball team, the prom king. He drove a red V–8 Mustang, and pretty girls swarmed all around him. My brothers drove the town constable to drink, and the only things that swarmed around Poke and JT were allegations. If anything was missing, demolished, dented, looted, or burned, the blame fell on the Gallagher boys. They had turned into regular hoodlums: shooting out streetlights with slingshots, soaping car windows, exploding firecrackers in mailboxes, stealing candy and comic books and squirt guns from the Valley Food Market and Brinkley’s Drugstore.
“The nut doesn’t fall far from the tree,” I heard people saying. “The father is no good and neither are the sons.” And they were right. I was old enough and wise enough to understand what was going on when Poke and JT would go “shopping” in Bensenville with Daddy. He had trained them well. The poor store clerks were so busy keeping an eye on the two little street toughs that no one noticed Donald Gallagher stuffing all kinds of things up his sleeves and inside his coat.
