All the adults were excited about George Wallace’s visit. Some of the little kids got excited with the parents, like the boy whose sign I’d help make at St. Augustine’s. Some of the older kids went to the fundraiser the local politicians held for Wallace on Broadway, but most of the teenagers couldn’t be bothered. The Lithuanian Club was all decked out in the usual banners: STOP FORCED BUSING and STICK TO YOUR GUNS SOUTHIE. Ma brought her guitar and accordion up to the Lith Club and took the stage to do her own antibusing anthems, and she said she never saw Jimmy Kelly so excited as when he finally got to meet George Wallace.
George Wallace spoke against busing, against the government controlling the lives of the little guy, and against the media. That’s when I heard the loudest cheers as I listened outside the Lith Club. Everyone loved to hate the media. As I eavesdropped from the sidewalk out on Broadway, it seemed as if we were all feeling a little more power now that George Wallace was speaking up for us. But it didn’t last long. In the end, the newspaper reporters said Wallace didn’t have a chance, except maybe in places like Southie. And there weren’t too many places like Southie. But at least he would win in our neighborhood and maybe bring back the unity we’d felt when the buses first started to roll.
I turned ten the year of the bicentennial. And it was the first time I remember thinking I was depressed. The antibusing movement was disappearing on us kids. It was more of an adult thing now, with all the political events. I was also left out of the teenage wheeling and dealing on the streets, because I was too young. I couldn’t hang out with Kevin and Kathy anymore, because they were doing things they didn’t want me to know about, with my Irish whisper.
So on the day I turned ten, I decided to call my father. I was home alone minding Seamus, and Ma had told me that she’d seen my father at the Emerald Isle Pub in Dorchester, and that he’d said he’d like to hear from me. I was the one who’d have liked to hear from him, but I looked up his mother’s number in the telephone book anyway. I knew her name was Gertie Fox, and I knew he lived with her in Dorchester. I finally got up the guts to call, and Gertie answered the phone with a cranky voice. I asked to speak to George. I told her that I was his son Michael and that she was my grandmother, as if we’d all be in for some kind of happy reunion. “He doesn’t have a son!” She yelled so loud I had to pull the telephone away from my ear. “Who put you up to this,” she said, “your mother? Get your mother on the phone!” I told her my mother wasn’t even home, and that I’d just called because it was my birthday—hoping now that I might get some kindness, as mention of birthdays usually did. That’s when a man’s voice came on the phone. “Michael?” It was the first time I’d ever heard my father’s voice. I told him it was my birthday. “Who put you up to this, your mother?” I hung up the phone then, and went back to minding Seamus.
Later in the day, Ma came home with a birthday cake. We celebrated my birthday along with Patrick’s, because his was a week later. Kevin’s was a week earlier than mine, and ever since we were little we’d celebrated all three birthdays together. But Kevin was thirteen now, and hanging out in the streets too much to be involved in a birthday with me and our dead brother. Ma played “Happy Birthday” on her accordion, and brought all the neighborhood kids in who wanted some free cake.
Nana took me out later that night. I told her all about my telephone call to my other grandmother, my wicked one. She told me I didn’t need two grandmothers anyway, and that made me feel better. It was her way of saying that I was her grandson. I got along great with Nana—much better than Ma did. It was all right for me to talk about George Fox being my real father, as long as we didn’t mention Ma getting pregnant without being married. And I didn’t tell Nana that Ma was pregnant again—and her and Coley still not married, I thought to myself.
In the eighth grade, the nuns took Kevin out of classes—with all his wisecracks—and put him in the basement with Louie, the janitor, hoping he’d get some interest in a trade while working in the boiler room. But Kevin figured he’d outsmarted the nuns, getting them to send him downstairs where he’d never have to study again. He said Louie liked him so much that every day he’d order Kevin a “spuckie,” Southie talk for “submarine sandwich.” Whenever Sister Elizabeth came down the stairs in her noisy wooden clogs, Kevin said he’d start looking busy with his head under some pipes, and a wrench in his hand. As soon as she left, he said he’d go back to eating spuckies with his feet up on the table and telling Louie his wild stories about the legendary James Whitey Bulger. “Imagine all the loot he’s making!” Kevin said after telling me what he did all day at St. Augustine’s. “Betcha he never went to college.” Kevin often made fun of me for carrying so many books home from school.
Every day after school, Kevin and Kathy became part of something bigger than anything the politicians were going on about through their loudspeakers on trucks that came through Old Colony every night: “Attention South Boston Residents! Please attend a meeting at the Gavin School tomorrow night at 7 P.M. sharp. The lives of our children are at stake!” They were talking about the blacks taking over someday and changing our way of life.
Kathy belonged to a group of teenagers that always looked busy out on Patterson Way, walking up and down the streets, going into hallways, darting across rooftops, jumping into strangers’ cars, and settling down by nightfall on East 8th Street, at the end of Patterson. Ma called them “the 8th Street gang.” Kathy was in the ninth grade at Cardinal Cushing High School, along with most of the other Southie girls who’d fled the busing but were still going to school. But the general feeling in the neighborhood was that school was for suckers. The dropouts were the ones who said that the most, and of course they usually looked as if they were having the most fun, wearing the best clothes, and making the most loot from drugs and petty scams. Ma said Kathy was starting to get into the drugs, but I already knew that. She said she’d heard that the 8th Street gang was getting into angel dust. “That’s why they’re all as nutty as the day is long,” she said. Ma said she didn’t like the looks of that Frank McGirk, who led the group and was said to be selling the dust. Kathy’s best friends now were Frank McGirk and Julie Meaney, who all of us little kids in the neighborhood were afraid of because she and her mother were supposed to be into witchcraft.
Later in her freshman year at Cardinal Cushing, Kathy wasn’t going to school at all. She was fifteen, and sometimes she was staying out until three in the morning. Other times she wouldn’t come home at all. One night Ma came home, after walking down East 8th, bringing the groceries from Broadway. “You wouldn’t believe that fuckin’ place,” she said. She looked exhausted from the long walk.
“Mother of God, it’s like Las Vegas down there! The street’s dark as hell, and everyone’s lights are on, with speakers blasting out of the windows.” She said that she’d had to weave her way through people staggering around “all dusted out,” while others tried to disco dance on streets, sidewalks, and rooftops. She’d walked down East 8th looking for Kathy, who’d been missing for two days, and everyone said they didn’t know where she was, if they could talk at all. “For Chrissake, one of them was even dancing with a stop sign that’d come loose from the sidewalk.”
Ma told me to go up to East 8th and knock on Mrs. Meaney’s door. I’d never seen Julie’s mother, and I was scared. Everyone had stories about the strange things she’d done, levitating teenagers, and controlling the minds of her Doberman pinchers with ESP to attack anyone she didn’t like on East 8th Street. They said Julie Meaney could do that too, and that one day when the black kids were coming out of Southie High, she’d just looked into the eyes of her Doberman, and that he’d taken the signal and lunged right for a black kid’s throat.
When I got up to East 8th, I saw what Ma was talking about. Everyone was having a great time, dancing with whatever objects could hold them up. I saw the one with the stop sign. Like most of the stop signs in Southie, BUSING was spray painted under the word STOP, so it was a STOP BUSING sign. One guy a
bout Ma’s age had his two hands stretched out onto the hood of a car while his knees did some bouncy thing to the beat of the Bee Gees. The teenagers were imitating the dances from Saturday Night Fever and mouthing the lyrics to “Staying Alive.” They were out of breath, and a few beats behind the song: “I’ve been kicked around since I was born / And now it’s alright, it’s ok, we’ll live to see another day.…”
I dodged some of the teens who were beckoning, calling me “little MacDonald.” I kept a distance and asked them where Julie Meaney lived. One of them took me to the door and then ran because she said she owed the mother “a fin,” Southie talk for five dollars. When I knocked on the door, a voice screamed “Come in,” and dogs started barking and throwing themselves against the door. When I heard the wicked voice and the Dobermans I wanted to run with the girl who owed the fin, but then the voice screamed again, “I said come in!” Whoever it was told the dogs to go fuck themselves and they shut right up. I poked my head in the door and saw the dogs lined up, sitting on the couch and staring at me, as if they were waiting for their orders from the witch, whose voice was shouting “Who’s that?” from the back room. Mrs. Meaney appeared before me, hunched over, wearing a bathrobe that was too big and long for her bony body, and with long raggedy white hair that looked just like a Halloween witch’s wig. I began to sweat; the apartment was hotter than the hottest project apartments I’d been in. I was stunned and just stared at Mrs. Meaney. I believed in witches, too, because Ma and Nellie had talked about a few people in Ireland who they said put curses on people. I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect Mrs. Meaney to look like a Halloween witch.
She screamed at me then, “Who the fuck are you?” I didn’t say anything, and that’s when the Dobermans pinned me into a corner, snapping their jaws at my face. I could hear the music blasting and people partying outside on East 8th Street: “Whether you’re a brother, or whether you’re a mother, you’re just stayin’ alive, stayin’ alive.”
“I’m just looking for Kathy MacDonald,” I told the Dobermans, and then begged Mrs. Meaney not to let them bite me. She kicked the dogs away—she didn’t do the ESP thing—and said she didn’t know where Kathy was, but that she “must be out gallivanting with that whore of a daughter of mine.” I left the apartment pretty fast, my heart pounding as I raced home past all the people on angel dust singing along: “Life goin’ nowhere, somebody help me …”
When I got home Kathy was already there, sitting on the floor “dusted out,” as they said in Old Colony about the slow motion movements of those who were on the drug. Kathy was wearing short shorts and had her shirt tied above her stomach, her spike heels on the floor next to her. Ma had the scissors pointed at Kathy and was screaming and crying that she was going to cut off all Kathy’s long wavy hair. And then she surely wouldn’t be out all night sleeping with boys. Ma was afraid Kathy would get pregnant like the other girls in the neighborhood, and figured a bald head might keep guys from liking her. I butted in and reminded Ma that her own mother had done that to her when Ma was just sixteen and hanging out on the corners too much in her leopard dresses. Ma had told me that Nana was jealous of her long red hair and looks, one of the reasons why they’d never got along when she was growing up. She always bragged that she was a rebel back in the fifties. But things were different now, she said, with all the angel dust out on the streets and all the girls getting pregnant. When I tried to stop Ma from cutting Kathy’s hair, she told me to mind my own business. “You shouldn’t even be listening to this stuff,” she said. “Go out and play with the kids your age instead of being all ears.”
Ma never did cut Kathy’s hair. She asked the older boys to talk to Kathy, and told her she’d better not see her hanging around with Frank McGirk and the 8th Street gang again. But it didn’t work; no one could keep Kathy from doing what she wanted to do—her friends were everything. I never did get to tell Ma my wild story about Mrs. Meaney and her long white hair.
“They’ll be talking about me all over Ireland,” Ma said, as we all pulled up to the church a half hour late for Nana’s funeral. Stevie, our youngest brother, was four months old now, and Ma had him and Seamus on her lap. She’d fought with Joe the whole way about his shitboxes breaking down all the time. “Imagine, missing your own mother’s funeral.” By the time we got into the church in West Roxbury, all the lace curtain types were filing out. We just pretended we’d been there the whole time, and filed out with the rest of them. “Ah, ’twas a great send off, though, wasn’t it?” some of our old Irish neighbors from Jamaica Plain were saying to Ma. “It was,” Ma said. “She lived a good life.” Later on Ma complained about all the people who said Nana went so young. “For Chrissake, she was seventy-three!” Ma said that after losing a baby, anyone would think that seventy-three years was plenty. Ma only seemed sad that so many things weren’t understood between the two of them. She’d had a feeling Nana was going to die, though, ever since Nana had dreamt that a man wearing all black came in from the rain and stood in the corner of her bedroom. Nana woke up wondering where the man had gone. She told Leena and Sally that she’d given the man a place to rest for the night up in the attic. When Grandpa told Ma the story on the phone, that’s when I heard Ma say, “You know what that means don’t you?” Sure enough, two weeks later Nana went to bed, said her nightly Rosary, and never woke up again. “You couldn’t ask for a better death,” all the lace curtain Irish were saying now, “with the Rosary beads in her hands.”
When we went to Grandpa’s house after the funeral for the usual food and drink with all the guests, we got kicked out. Grandpa didn’t want Seamus and Steven in the house with all the Irish there, who would be asking where they came from. Grandpa and Nana had kept that story away from their friends, for the shame. And here was Ma carrying the two of them into Nana’s house, wearing her black miniskirt and fishnet stockings, with no husband and no shame at all. Before I could even eat one of the chicken salad sandwiches that were laid out, it was time to leave. We all piled into Joe’s souped-up shitbox and went back to Old Colony, where there were plenty of other kids whose mothers and fathers weren’t married.
When Nana died, I was sad. I was the only one in the house who was close to her, even though I had to ignore her frowns when my mother was brought up for discussion. She and Grandpa always made me feel a connection to Ireland and to a world bigger than what I had in Old Colony. I started to feel alone, especially since no one else in the family was talking about Nana’s death. Kevin and Kathy had gone their own ways; Frankie was off at the gym; Joe always had his head under the hood of a car; Johnnie was off at Tufts University—the only one “making it out” as Grandpa said about him—and at eighteen, Mary was now pregnant and moving into Old Harbor Project with Jimmy the Greek. I stayed around the house a lot, minding Seamus and Stevie—and studying Davey.
Davey was walking in circles again out in the front courtyard. I went downstairs to watch him, going in opposite circles with Stevie in the baby carriage. I just stared at Davey when our circles crossed. It broke his concentration a few times, and he jerked his head to look at me, startled, as if I’d interrupted something. “What—are you fuckin’ trying to torment me?” he said. When Davey got mean, I’d make it worse, trying to turn it into something funny. I’d tease and “torment” him, hoping to bring him out of the trap he was in. It was August, and every August when his doctor at Mass Mental went away for two weeks’ vacation, Davey lost it. When our circles crossed the next time, I aimed right for him with the baby carriage. I’d only wanted to help, but now I felt frustrated and angry at the sickness and suffering taking him over. I needed to attack Davey—to attack whatever demons were overpowering him. That’s when he ran down the street, looking back at me as if I was the enemy.
None of us knew Davey when it was August. Normally, he would pace the streets and come up to the women on the stoops, or to the kids on the corners, and tell a joke, getting everyone laughing. They loved him. The little kids all wanted him to
do his famous impersonation of the Incredible Hulk, right at the moment he transforms into a huge superhero. But in August, Davey’s transformations were too scary, and too religious, for anyone to relate to. One time he said he was an ordained priest, and was going to save the “poor souls” of Old Colony Project. He went around in a black shirt, repeating, “The first shall be last and the last shall be first.” No one really got that one, I suppose because most of us would not imagine ourselves, ever, as among “the last.”
After chasing Davey away, I lugged the carriage, with Steven in it, backwards up the three flights of stairs, one step at a time, as I’d learned to do by now, coming and going every day for my walks in circles. When I burst into the house, I was out of breath and excited to tell Ma what I’d just figured out. “Ma, I think I know what mental illness is!” Ma was lying on the couch, with Seamus asleep on top of her so she could feel that he was still breathing. “Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” she said. “Are you at it again? Will you just go out and play or something?” I told her I thought the reason the doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong with Davey or find a cure was because they were focusing too much on his brain, in a physical way. “I think it’s his spirit that’s sick,” I said. “And the spirit is just too much of a mystery for them to figure out.” I added that the spirit and the brain are somehow connected, and that the spirit must be located more up there, rather than somewhere in our chests, which was what the nuns at St. Augustine’s motioned to when they talked about the soul. “It’s just that the spirit is invisible, and the doctors are all confused, focusing on what they can see: the brain.” I wasn’t really making sense, I thought, but I knew what I was talking about. The brain took things in, analyzing them, “all the shit in the world,” as Davey said; but it was the soul that carried the sickness, since the brain had to move on and think about other things. Ma made a face like she couldn’t believe what was going through my head. She told me I was smart, and that I should be a psychiatrist when I grow up so that I could help people; but in the meantime she wanted me to go outside and play with the other kids my age, like an eleven-year-old. “And stop being such a goddam worrywart!”
All Souls Page 14
