“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 idea 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.