As I parked in the dark of Brownell Street and turned off the lights, I could see the faces in the window: time to take my medicine. I hoped their seeing me alone would make it unnecessary to explain that I had failed, but Paul could be just behind me in his foreign car. Walter, my mother, and my aunts would not give up so easily. Perhaps my quite legitimate expression of defeat would help, assuming no one noticed my unsteadiness.
Like a jury they were waiting for me in the kitchen. Knowing my grandmother still lived, I was strengthened. Entering the back door, sole entrance for anyone but a priest, gave access to a hallway and the choice of going straight upstairs, to my bedroom, or into the kitchen, where I was expected. The great blue presence of my uncle Gerry opened the door for me. Walter, Dorothy, Constance, and my mother stared without a breath or movement. I could state that I had failed; I could indicate that I had failed; I could make a paper airplane with a handwritten statement that I had failed and sail it at those faces; but until I did I was still a worker of miracles and reluctant to step down. The silence lasted long enough that my uncle Walter elevated his chin sternly, more pressure than I could withstand. I shook my head: no.
I didn’t look up until Walter summoned me to the bookless library. His fingers rested lightly on my shoulder as though I might not be able to find my way. Once we were behind closed doors, he reached an open hand for his car keys, which I deposited therein. “Have you been drinking?” I nodded, meek but with rising surliness, concealed in the booze that was now thrumming in my eardrums. “I suppose it was a condition of your negotiations.” I nodded again, this time modestly. “Well,” said Walter, “I would like to know exactly what Paul said.” I felt reluctant to convey this information, perhaps out of lingering loyalty to my favorite uncle, who had so often thrown the baseball on the tenement rooftops for me to field, but in the end I felt it wasn’t mine to keep.
“He said to tell you all that . . . that sick people depress him.”
I returned to my room reconciled to my lost sainthood. For now, there was the OK Corral and its several possible outcomes. But that night, my grandmother died at last and nothing in the story of Wyatt Earp suggested an appropriate response, as he of course was dead too.
For the several days of the viewing, the wake, the funeral Mass, it was as if we were troops following orders. My mother kept slipping off, trying to check on my father’s progress. First it was a flat, then they wouldn’t take a check for gas, then a distributor cap, then the magneto, and later, when she told Uncle Gerry about the bad magneto, he said, with all his big-cop innocence, “Jeez, Mary, they haven’t had magnetos in twenty years!”
My father arrived on the day of the wake, a hot day more like August than late September. Greetings were fulsome, given the gravity of the occasion, Dorothy frayed with grief and worry and Constance somehow politicizing it and making the demise of my grandmother refer mostly to her own need for importance despite having married a Protestant. My father always seemed extraordinarily brisk, compared to my mother’s relatives, and more capable of defusing social awkwardness with sunny confidence. He hugged my mother so long that her sisters grew uncomfortable and abandoned the porch. As the baby of the family, she might be more “advanced,” but it was not their job to bear witness to the decline of standards. It was my turn with my father, and my mother followed her sisters indoors.
“Come here, Johnny,” he said, leading me to the trunk of his big sedan, which he opened with a broad revelatory gesture. There was his leather suitcase with its securing straps and, next to it, a ten-horsepower Evinrude outboard motor. Looking over his shoulder left and right as though fencing loot, he said, “These worthy folk are all indoors men, unlike you and me. They see the sky about twice a year. Now that the inevitable has come to pass, we’re going to rent a rowboat, attach this beauty to the transom, and run down to Fog Land for some floundering.”
I told him I could hardly wait, and he mussed my hair in approval. Later, I felt a pang at omitting to suggest that Grandma’s departure was an impediment to floundering. I helped my father take his bag to Paul’s old room and stayed with him for a short time because he seemed to forget that I was still there. He hung his clothes carefully and placed a bottle of Shenley’s blended whiskey on the dresser. He lined up three pairs of shoes, in the order of their formality, walked to the window overlooking Almy Street, and heaved a desolate sigh. I left the room.
I suppose he was nearly forty by then and wore his liberation from what he considered the ghetto Irish with a kind of strutting pride. The circumstance of my grandmother’s death was such that he would be forgiven for being a Republican and for condescending to the family with his obviously mechanical warmth. He was still remembered bitterly for summoning the family to the Padanaram docks to admire a Beetle Cat with a special sail emblazoned with I LIKE IKE. He now received news of Paul’s disgrace with a serious, nodding smile. Aunt Constance, rushing about to prepare the funeral dinner for the family, brusquely and with poorly concealed malice gave him the job of opening a huge wooden barrel full of oysters. Standing next to me in the backyard, he confided in me. “Here I am in fifty-dollar Church of London shoes, a ninety-dollar Dobbs hat, a three-hundred-dollar J. Press suit, shucking oysters. When will I ever escape all this?”
I was afraid to tell him that I was enjoying myself. He pointedly reminded me that he always made note of whose side I was on. “This group”—they were always a group—“ain’t too keen on getting out of their familiar tank town.” He liked bad English for irony but was normally painfully correct about his diction. He viewed himself as an outdoorsman, almost a frontiersman, based solely on having taught canoeing at summer camp in Maine. “You’ll find this outfit,” he said, gesturing to my grandmother’s house, “in street shoes.” For my mother’s family, the outdoors came in just one version: a baseball diamond. But his view of my mother’s family could be infectious, and I went to our first meal with him now viewing them as a group, nervously calibrating the array of forces around the table.
My father never seemed particularly interested in me, except when my alliance offered him some advantage, or at least comfort, in disquieting settings like this household. My grandfather thought he looked like an Indian and once greeted him with, “Well, if it isn’t Jim Thorpe! How are your times in the four-forty, chief? Leaving them in the dust?” Or, more succinctly, “How.”
My grandfather drove the back wheels on the majestic American-LaFrance hook-and-ladder. “A good place for him,” said my father. “Well to the rear.”
I knew his stay here would be a trial, though it seemed the only voice that carried up through the floor, causing him to flinch, was Father Corrigan’s. Religion was an empty vessel to him. When my mother compelled him to attend Mass, he did so with the latest Ellery Queen wrapped in the cover of the Daily Missal.
“Now the keening begins,” he said. “Your grandmother was a fine woman, but all the noise in the world isn’t going to get her anywhere any faster. When you hear them in the parlor tuning up, you may think they’ve gone crazy. This stuff’s about to go the way of the Model T. You’ll be able to tell your kids about it. The sooner it’s over, the sooner I can go back to America and try to make a buck.”
“Will I see Grandma again?”
“That’s the sixty-four-dollar question, isn’t it? Ask Father Corrigan. Old Padre Corrigan never had a doubt in his life. He’ll tell you it’s only a matter of time. Me, I’m not so sure. He’ll have Grandma crooking a beckoning finger from the hereafter even if you can’t see it and he can. Poor fellow spent his life making promises to weavers with TB and loom mechanics with broken bodies. I guess he started believing it himself. You ought to hear him describe heaven. It sounds like Filene’s department store.”
Then he went off on the Irish. “Among the many misconceptions about the Irish,” he said, “is that they have a sense of humor. They do not have a sense of humor. They have a sense of ridicule. The Ritz Brothers have a sense of humor”—I had no id
ea who the Ritz Brothers were but he held them in exalted esteem— “Menasha Skolnik has a sense of humor. You think the Irish have a sense of humor? Read James Joyce. You’ll have to when you go to college. I did. You’ll ask yourself, ‘Will this book never end?’ ”
I always tried to agree with my father, even when I didn’t understand him. “I see what you mean,” I said, with an aching sort of smile.
“Here’s a famous one,” he said, as the wailing started downstairs. “ ‘If it weren’t for whiskey, the Irish would rule the world.’ Do I like this. They’re only charming when they’re drunk. When they’re sober, they’re not only not ruling the world, they’re ridiculing its hopes and dreams.” This was entirely true of my father himself. He was a merry boozer but a bleak observer of reality when sober. The present moment was a perfect example. He saw no legitimate grief in the response to my grandmother’s death, only posturing and inappropriate tribal memory. “Rule the world, my behind,” he added. “ ‘If it weren’t for blubber, Fatty Arbuckle would set the world record in the high jump.’ ”
My relatives were certainly not ruling the world, and they went about their lives with high spirits. While their certainties like everyone else’s were soon to be extinguished by the passage of time, their ebullience was permanent, and I say this having seen two of them expire from cancer. My father, on the other hand, was grimly obsessed with his health, and for some reason I associate this with his flight from his origins. I recall him explaining to my mother that he had missed making his Easter Duty on the advice of his eye-ear-nose-and-throat specialist to avoid crowds.
I went downstairs and sat among my relatives, some of whom hadn’t seen each other for a long time, especially the ones from Lawrence, who seemed to have in common straitened finances and sat in their overcoats watching the circulation of plates of finger food. My aunt Dorothy, from Providence, wept copiously and in a manner that reminded everyone, I was sure, of the melodramatic nature so annoying to my grandmother that she pretended that Taffy longed to star in a soap opera. The Sullivans were there from across the street. Uncle Gerry, wearing his mounted policeman’s uniform with its crossed straps and whistle deployed just under his left shoulder, stared straight ahead and moved his lips in authentic prayer. My physician uncle Walter maintained a look of dignified pragmatism, and I’m sure he knew we looked to him for deportment hints. We believed he understood life and death through actual experience and, unconvinced by Father Corrigan’s merry certainties, wished he would say something about the afterlife.
Saddest of all was Aunt Dorothy, because her household meddling had expired with my grandmother and she was now wandering about without a self to give meaning to her acts. I thought of her with white holes for eyes, as in the standard depiction of zombies. She looked blank and confused and made clueless efforts to find chairs, answer the phone, and offer horrifying comfort to people she barely knew. Finally, Walter commanded, “You need a rest. I’m sure everyone will excuse you.” At this she let out a somewhat lunar cry that made poor Mr. Sullivan, a surgical arch outlining the former position of his cigar, grab his wife and run for the door.
Aunt Constance served the funeral dinner with a kind of pageantry, abetted by her daughters, the two little shits Kathleen and Antoinette. Watching their stately entrance for each course, learned in that narcissistic training ground of First Communion, I could have, as Josef Goebbels once remarked, “reached for my Luger.” The meal was a tribute to my grandmother and featured all her favorite dishes—swordfish (my father confided these small steaks were doubtless from a skillygallee, an obsolete term for the less desirable white marlin), corn on the cob, parsnips, and apple pie—and represented a maudlin idea of grieving. “They’re gonna milk it,” he said, when he heard the menu.
We were seated, Walter at the head of the table, my mother, father, and I in a row, Dorothy sniveling into the canned consommé preceding the main course, Kathleen and Antoinette, half crouched in their pinafores and ready for duty, Gerry upright as a man of the law. As Walter said grace, I watched my mother closely; her melancholy smile was less occasional than chemical, produced by the pills she took, ostensibly to raise an abnormally low blood pressure, as well as straight shooters from the vodka tucked in her suitcase. Like many of their generation, my parents believed in the absolute odorlessness of vodka and applied to its consumption none of the restraint of the blends whose broadly familiar aroma marked the user like a traffic light. My father sported his customary deniable supercilious smile. When cornered, he’d lay it to gastric distress or the unaccountable prelude to heartbreak, as when my mother walked out on him and he couldn’t wipe the grin off his face and had to explain it.
The front door was carelessly slammed shut and Uncle Paul walked in, wearing his drab woolen officer’s uniform with obvious moth holes, and commented that we looked a bit gloomy. Father Corrigan rose to his feet, held his napkin between thumb and forefinger, and dropped it to the table. With infinitesimal authority, Walter indicated with his eyes that Father Corrigan was to take his seat again promptly. Constance appeared behind Paul and, leaning around him, said in a shrill voice, “Just making certain there’s a place set.”
“Grab me a beer from the fridge,” said Paul. Constance froze but my mother leaped up and chirped nonchalantly that she knew right where it was. My father patted her butt, eyes half-lidded with private irony as she swept past, and Paul smiled at his favorite relative, my mother; Uncle Gerry, rendered huge in his uniform by the smallness of the room, strode to the sideboard to turn on the big Sunbeam fan. He’d begun to sweat. Seated again, he asked Walter about various old folks of our acquaintance. Most got good health reports, except Mary Louise Dwyer and Arthur Kelly, who had, he said in a significant voice, “been in to see me.” As to lip cancer Mr. Sullivan, “You couldn’t hurt him with a tire iron.”
“A corker,” Gerry agreed.
Once my mother had deposited the beer in front of a greatly relieved Uncle Paul, Aunt Constance began to send in my cousins with a steady parade of dishes. Noticing my father, Paul nodded and said, “Harold.” Constance shooed the cousins along from close behind, with no effect on their speed at all but reinforcing her position as culinary benefactress. She kept her husband behind in the kitchen as a kind of factotum and sous-chef; besides, he wasn’t comfortable in what he not altogether humorously called Harp Central. He could have said it more clearly because no one cared what he said, all part of Constance’s disgrace: she would have enjoyed greater standing if she’d been gang-raped by a hurley squad.
I’m not sure my father enjoyed much esteem either, and I think he knew it. He was well educated, hardworking, and ambitious, yet something set him apart, as though he had renounced a portion of his humanity to achieve his current station and had, moreover, abducted the baby of the family, my mother, to a dreary and stunting world where people made themselves up and were vaguely weightless. I realized with dread that, at this funeral meal, he was likely to take a stand.
“I wonder where she is now,” Paul said, slurping his consommé.
“Where who is?” Walter asked coolly.
“Ma. Where Ma is.”
Dorothy covered her mouth.
“Ma is in heaven,” said Walter.
“You, as a man of science, say she is in heaven?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, good. I hear great things about the place.”
Kathleen made a covert rotary motion with her forefinger at her temple; then, fearing she’d been observed, she pretended to adjust one of the tubular curls. She wouldn’t look at me.
My father half rose from his chair, rather violently, shifting all attention to himself, as he reached across the table for a dish of lemons. “It’s been a long time since I had a chance to enjoy a swordfish steak!” This fell discordantly upon me and anyone else who’d heard his theory of the skillygallee.
My mother said, “Wonderfully done, Constance, a beautiful meal.” Constance gave a self-effacing curtsy. Dorothy s
tared at her food with white eyeholes and a half-opened mouth, and Gerry rubbed her back consolingly until she picked up her fork and prodded a parsnip. Since I eat too fast when I’m nervous, my mother put her hand on my forearm to slow me down. I looked up at her helplessly, wide-eyed.
Walter smiled all round and said, “This would be a good time to remember all the happy times we’ve had at this table, especially when Pa would have been in my place. We saw very little of Ma then. She just came and went from the kitchen, long enough to look after us. She sure looked after us, didn’t she? Generations of us. Me, Connie, Gerry, Mary, and you kids, right, Antoinette?”
Antoinette stood up from her seat. “My grandmother is a saint,” she sang out, in a high mechanical voice. “She is being welcomed by the angels this very minute.”
Paul blew up his cheeks and nodded.
“Kathleen?”
Kathleen rose and gazed around the room with her electric blue eyes. “Our grandmother—”
I knew I was next, and I felt the ironic expectations of my father, who loved to see me on the hot seat. I never really believed it was the test of character he claimed.
“—brought to our family the highest standards of piety and family concern, especially as to her devotion to Holy Mary Mother of God.” Even knowing they’d been prepped, I asked myself where the two little hussies had come up with this chin music. I hadn’t long to think about it, though; it was my turn.
“Johnny?”
I sat dumbfounded, a weird tingling in my scalp. My father looked at me with a faint smile and my mother gazed into her lap. Both seemed to understand I wasn’t up to this. I had the whirlies.
“Why don’t you stand up?” Uncle Walter said gently.
I rose slowly, the tightness in my throat making speech impossible. A glance at my father revealed ill-concealed hilarity. Uncle Paul was waggling his empty beer at Constance, who stood in the doorway bearing down on me with her eyes. The cousins looked like winners. Only a brief picture of my grandmother rescuing me from this, which she certainly would have, allowed me to break quietly into inarticulate tears.
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