Closing Time (3 page)

On the positive side, it was nice to know that his antipathy toward us wasn’t personal; he had simply suffered through so many calamities that the only way he knew how to respond to adversity was to brutalize those closest to him. Happily, his preference for victims shorter than forty-eight inches kept my mother out of the line of fire. Like many Irish-Catholic men of his generation, he would never dream of raising his hand to his wife, not only because he feared that it would have brought down the curtain on their marriage, but because men like him had an unwholesome reverence for their spouses, viewing them as domestic stand-ins for the Virgin Mary, with the one notable difference that, unlike the Madonna, they also cooked and cleaned. My mother was not a Madonna; she was an emotionally inert woman who had injudiciously brought four children into the world with no clear idea of how henceforth to proceed. While my father was skinning us alive with his trusty old belt, she would entomb herself in her bedroom, surrounded by newspapers she never seemed to learn anything from, pretending not to hear what was going on downstairs. But the walls were not thick and the sound must have carried, if not into her conscience, at least into her cochleae.

Armed with this abundant exculpatory material, my sister Ree and I tried to construct an elaborate moral apparatus that would exonerate our father of his misdeeds. My younger sister Eileen, three years my junior and far and away the smartest member of the family, was having none of it; compassion was not her long suit. Ree and I were less vindictive, less intransigent, less bright. The way we assessed the situation, to admit that Dad was the person he appeared to be was to concede that his cruelty was deliberate. This was unthinkable. Instead, we decided that violence was a bent he could not control, but that through medication or a confidence-boosting job that would reverse the emasculation he had undergone after losing his house, or perhaps simply through good, old-fashioned divine intervention, everything would one day work out for the best.

I was not above concocting my own theories that even the tiniest amount of alcohol could interact with his metal plate, generating a chemical chain reaction that instantaneously triggered impossibly subtle psychoneural responses and impelled this otherwise lovable man to knock his kids around the room and tear the fixtures out of the walls. This sent the reassuring message that our troubles were essentially mineral in origin; it was all the result of some weird electromagnetic process that made it impossible for him to function properly. Like Ree, I derived solace from these daft theories, if only because they conferred upon our oppressor an aura of tragic romance and mystery, which were hard to come by in that part of Philadelphia.

This being our mind-set, we began sifting through the data to prepare an
amicus curiae
brief should he ever be hauled before the authorities and asked to explain his passion for brutalizing the prepubescent set. We did this because for the longest time we still loved him and refused to accept that he was beyond redemption. But we also did it because no one wants to spend the rest of his life reviling a person who once viewed his birth as a blessing. We did not believe that he did the things he did because he was evil. We believed that he did them because he was damaged goods. That, at least, was the approach Ree and I adopted; Eileen felt otherwise. She had him sized up early.

For years, Ree and I reasoned that if our father would only stop drinking, he would immediately reemerge, frog-prince style, as the most wondrous of God’s creations, the very flower of Christian manhood. When we were small, when we did not yet wish him ill, we used to chat among ourselves about how affectionate and funny he could be when he was not drinking, when, like Henry Jekyll, he truly was a capital fellow. My mother, who never seemed especially fond of the man she ultimately spent thirty years living with, would thereupon remind us that if the good side of his personality had ever existed, it would never have allowed the dark side to take over. It was a valid point, but as we enjoyed his company more than she ever had—he took us to the movies, he played Monopoly with us, he let us take days off from school—we did not want to hear it. We were still too young and guileless to understand why he drank with such implacable fury, much less to understand that Henry Jekyll and Edward Hyde were one and the same person, that Jekyll had indeed created Hyde.

As a child, hamstrung by the sense of guilt that all Catholics are born with, as if it were a side effect of the obstetric procedure, I often wondered if it was something we had done, or said, that made him beat us. He would regularly tell us that we would never amount to “a pimple on an elephant’s rear end,” as if the repetition of this prophesy would ensure that it came true, or aggrandize the size of the pimple he himself had amounted to. Our mistreatment, both verbal and physical, was baffling, for we were excellent students, devout Catholics, attentive, respectful progeny, and had long been in possession of solid documentary evidence that we were not vermin.

Primitive home movie cameras came into fashion in the early 1960s, and my uncle Jerry, always the first one on the block to be seduced by voluptuous new technologies, immediately went out and bought one. We were by far his favorite subjects, as we were, by common consent, remarkably well behaved, by no means moody or withdrawn, fun to be around. Whenever our families would convene, Uncle Jerry would haul out his equipment, set up the projector and screen, and present grainy footage of my sisters and I frolicking in the bouncy, rambunctious fashion that was our calling card. Even my father, who generally disapproved of anything we did that did not involve him, seemed amused by our antics. I only wish we had worked up the nerve to add a bit of commentary to these films, to help him better understand what should have been apparent to the naked eye. “See! We’re not ingrates,” we might have informed him. “We’re not failures. We’re not pimples on an elephant’s rear end. We’re your children.”

There can be no denying that my father possessed what my mother always referred to as “good qualities.” This was only to be expected, for while it was true that she had on their honeymoon night tactlessly informed him that she did not love him and had married him for practical reasons (she did not want to end up an old maid, two paychecks were better than one), he must have had a number of redeeming features when they met or else she would not have taken the ring he offered and spent the next three decades in his company. He did have many redeeming features, but they were mostly in the realm of intellect, not emotion. He had a great deal of personal charm, which enabled him to constantly land new jobs he would subsequently lose when the charm wore off. He had a highly developed sense of humor and knew how to spin a yarn. Strangers were invariably seduced by his wit, at least for a while; he was, by turns, mordant, puckish, irreverent. He had a smile that could melt the iciest heart, a treasure he did not bequeath to me. A charter member of an ethnic group one sage described as “a race of gregarious strangers,” he was typical of first-generation Irish-American males: monstrous to their progeny, sweetness and light to everyone else.

He had very good taste in motion pictures and even better taste in literature. His preferences ranged from heavyweights like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald to solid middlebrow authors like A. J. Cronin, John O’Hara, and Edwin O’Connor. He had read all the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, much of Shakespeare, and many books about Abraham Lincoln. He sometimes read twaddle (Erle Stanley Gardner), but he never read trash (Mickey Spillane). He belonged to a class that had once flourished: the working-class autodidact who reads good books because he understands that good books lift mankind out of the slime. This species is now extinct, wiped out by television or despair. Working-class people today do not read good books; they read offal churned out by churls, nitwits, and swine, if they read at all.

Even in his worst moments, my father never resembled the simpletons who masquerade as blue-collar heroes on television; in the darkest of times he never talked like Archie Bunker, the malignant sow dreamed up by West Coast millionaires as a mechanism for sneering at people who have to work for a living. Unlike TV’s prefab proletariat, self-congratulatory buffoons all, my father could tell you why Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, why Richard III killed the little princes, why Hannibal dragged his elephants over the Alps, and why one should think twice before venturing out onto the English moors at night. Hemmed in by ignorant men, he was not himself ignorant.

Nor was he vulgar, at least not in public. He was, in his finest moments, the best the working class had to offer. He was ceaselessly in the process of educating himself, not because he thought it might advance his career—he had no career—but because reading was a way to escape to a better world. This is the same conclusion I reached when I was young, poor, lacking in prospects. While some people, to borrow an insight from C. S. Lewis, read to know that they are not alone, the poor read to know that they are not condemned. It is often said that children are the wealth of the poor. This was not my experience. But books are without question the wealth of the poor’s children. Books are a guiding light out of the underworld, a secret passageway, an escape hatch. To the affluent, books are ornaments. To the poor, books are siege weapons.

My father’s attributes, laudable though they might be, did not alter the fact that once he took on the role of a parent, he had wandered out of his depth. By the time I was thirteen or so, I understood that whatever relationship I would have with my father in later years, it was going to be a salvage operation. I was going to get only one father in this life, and if this one was not up to the mark, then I would just have to pretend he was, to convince myself that his heroic performance in driving the truck with shredded fingers was the sort of thing he could do every day of the week, if only he wanted to.

Later, when I had a family of my own, I would sometimes backtrack and reassess pivotal events, not from the perspective of a child but from that of a father. When I was still an infant, my father bought a set of Lionel electric trains and wrapped them around the Christmas tree. My mother later assured me that both father and son were enraptured by the trains, though for obvious reasons I have no memory of this. One night when I was around five, a hurricane hit town, our basement flooded, and the train set was destroyed. My memory of the trains is not of watching them chug their way round and round the Christmas tree but of playing with the rusty tracks and the corroded, water-damaged engine all year round, using them as substitutes for toys. My father never replaced the train set, because he interpreted the flood as an act of God, and once God had destroyed the trains, it would have been foolhardy—and perhaps even blasphemous—to try to undo the damage, let alone buy another set. And so he pouted, like an even less mature Achilles.

When I was eight, my father lost the only white-collar job he ever had, and with it our house, so we were forced to move into a housing project. The rusted trains came with us, corroded symbols of Paradise Lost, hanging around for years as an unmistakable memento of inadequacy and bad luck. One Sunday night, my uncle Jim stopped by the housing project on an unexpected visit. Uncle Jim, a prosperous sort, was laden with precious cargo that evening: In his hands he held a nifty set of American Flyer trains that my cousin Jimmy, now in college, no longer played with. Sleek, less ostentatiously “classic” than Lionels, American Flyer trains had a breezy, suburban feel to them, evoking little of the romance of the rails one automatically associated with their more famous competitors. But they were electric trains, and that beat no electric trains hands down.

One can readily imagine my excitement when I tore open the boxes containing the trains that evening. Clearing off the dining room table, my father, my uncle, and I hurriedly set up the track and attached the transformer. Then, slipping into the role of the gracious hostess, a role she was rarely called upon to fill, my mother told me to go out and buy some pound cake and cookies for our visitors. There were no stores in the housing project; the nearest grocery was a good fifteen-minute walk. I raced off with one of my sisters, then raced back. By the time we returned, my father had jacked up the transformer to full speed and sent the entire set of trains hurtling off the table onto the harsh linoleum floor. Some of the cars were merely chipped and scratched, certainly not damaged beyond repair. But the engine was kaput.

I suppose I cried that night; I suppose my father beat me, as he always beat me when I cried, because crying was not manly, and my misfortune paled by comparison with what he had endured in the Great Depression, when little kids would have cut off their right arms to have a set of busted, rusted electric trains to play with. My misfortune did pale by comparison with what he had endured in the Great Depression. But it was misfortune all the same. In theory, that engine could have been taken to the shop and repaired, or replaced with another engine, but that, I would come to realize, is not the way things work when the poor are involved. When things get broken in a poor person’s house, they get chucked out into the backyard or tossed into the basement or thrown into the trash. But they never get taken to the repair shop, because the very concept of “repair” attests to a confidence in the universe that poor people never actually feel.

Various incidents from my youth haunt me still: beatings, lies, gruesome dental experiences, hijacked piggy banks, being sent to bed on an empty stomach. But the saga of the electric trains abides with me, not because of what it did to a child but because of what it did to a man. My father went through his entire life expecting a flood to destroy the Lionel trains he had slaved away to purchase for his newborn son. He went through life convinced that if he ever got a chance to redeem himself in the eyes of his family, the good money said he would screw that up, too. He went through life believing that when the clouds did part and good fortune, on one of its pitifully infrequent visits to our neighborhood, did shine upon him, it would simply provide him with yet another opportunity to make a fool of himself in front of his wife, his children, and his brother-in-law, who had always looked down on him anyway. Yet tellingly, like so many Irish-American men, he had an amazing ability to make his victims feel sorry for him, for when I think back on my locomotively sabotaged childhood, I do not feel sorry for myself, but I still feel sorry for him.