Gallatin Canyon (14 page)

Constance piped up. “He
is
your favorite uncle.”

It was a straight shot to Mohican House, and at that hour there was enough room to park a thousand cars. The entire way, I was plagued by mortifying visions of unsuccessful parallel parking, but I was never tested. Spotted by pedestrians my own age— three swarthy males with ducktails—as I climbed out of the car, I adopted a self-effacing posture I hoped would make clear that I was not its spoiled young owner. Once it was locked, I plunged its incriminating keys into my pocket.

Paul answered the door to his apartment promptly, greeting me with the phrase “Just as I expected,” and showed me in with a sweep of his arm. He wore a surprising ascot of subdued paisley foulard that complemented a sort of smoking jacket. His was what was once called a bed-sitting room, which perfectly described it. A toile wall covering with faded merriment of nymphs and sparkling brooks failed to create the intended atmosphere. “How’d you get here, Walt’s car?”

“Yes,” I said, as though it was obvious. Paul had a faint brogue this evening, a bad sign. I glanced around: his bed was beside the window that looked down into an alley and was made with military precision, including the hospital corners he had once demonstrated. There was a battered but comfortable armchair nodded over by a single-bulbed reading lamp, and on the other side a night table that held the only book Paul owned, his exalted Roget’s thesaurus, which he called “the key to success” and which Uncle Walter blamed for his inability to speak directly on any subject. A gray filing cabinet a few feet from the foot of the bed supported an artillery shell that served as a vase for a spray of dried flowers.

Paul poured each of us a drink, and when I courteously declined mine, he said, “Why, then, our evening is at an end.”

“I don’t think I should drink and drive,” I said defensively.

“Do it all the time,” he said, “an essential skill. Never caught unprepared. Learn it while you’re young. Bluestockings have given it a bad name.” He used the same voice on me that he employed in testing insurance pitches, brusque shorthand best for indicating the world of valuable ideas he had for your future, take it or leave it.

I had a sip and, after little pressure, finished my strong drink; whereupon I was coerced to accompany John McCormack and my uncle Paul in “Believe Me If All Those Endearing Young Charms,” a performance that, under the responsibility of my family assignment, I found so disturbing that I accepted Paul’s offer of another drink. Next Paul recited a poem about Michael Collins, how he left his armored car to walk laughingly to his death, after which a silence made it clear that Paul was ready to hear my pitch. I was emboldened and terrified by the alcohol, and not entirely sure who Michael Collins was or why walking to his own assassination cheered him up. I suppose this contributed to my disorientation. The record playing in the background was scratchy, and the orchestra accompanying the various tenors sounded like a bunch of steamboats all blowing their whistles; at the same time, I could see the appeal of being drunk.

There was no use telling Paul his mother was dying. Walter had already said that. Not only did I feel utterly burdened, but being here gave me such an enduring case of the creeps that, years later, I voted against Kennedy, switching parties for the only time in my life. I now admit that I feared the loss of my standing as a miracle worker and longed to find a way of preserving my reputation, partly because it was so annoying to my father, who considered my mother’s first home a hotbed of mindless nostalgia and an impediment to her conformity and compliance. I couldn’t appeal to Paul’s values because I didn’t know what they were and because I suspected that beneath his lugubrious independence lay some kind of awful bitterness that, if uncovered, might turn my world upside down.

I had no strategy, and my heart ached. It was important to my grandmother that I deliver Paul to her side, and the only thing I could think to do was to tell him what she meant to me. I began with a head full of pictures, my grandmother folding her evening paper to rise from her rocker and embrace me when I returned from a day in North Park, of the harmony of her household, the smell of pies arising from her second kitchen in the basement, the Sunday drives after Mass when she was taken around the perimeter of her tiny kingdom and to the abandoned mills where she had once worked. I even thought of our life in the Midwest, when I’d longed for her intervention in a family slow to invent rules for their new lives. I was with her on the first visit to her husband’s grave when, looking at the headstone of their little boy right next to my grandfather’s, she said, “I never thought they’d be together so soon.” A half century between burials: “so soon.” She bent to pat the grass in the next space. “No keening,” she had warned her children at my grandfather’s funeral. And indeed, it was a quiet American affair.

I imagined I could touch on a few of these points and move Uncle Paul to accompany me back to Brownell Street, but I barely got started. I was seized by some force I’d barely suspected and astonished myself by choking on tears that spilled down my face while Paul watched impassively.

Once I pulled myself together, Paul stood and turned off the record player. He looked at me with chilling objectivity and then stated his position clearly. Moving to his filing cabinet, he began to rearrange the dried flowers in the artillery shell, awaiting my departure.

Driving the Roadmaster I became immediately hysterical. I saw myself rocketing through the railings of the Brightman Street Bridge and plunging into the nocturnal gloom of the Taunton River below. But the Buick rolled along like a ship and my panic abated.

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 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?’ ”