Piper (3 page)

The driver, a black man with dreadlocks, was slumped over the wheel. His passenger, a white woman who'd been thrown from the car, kept standing up and falling back down on the pavement. Although lots of people ran out of their shops and stopped their cars to gawk, everyone but Mom seemed to be in a daze.

“You watch her and I'll see about him,” she shouted. “Just keep her on the ground.” The woman's face was scratched and there was a raspberry on her elbow, but otherwise she seemed okay except for her insistence on getting back in the car. I hooked two fingers inside one of the belt loops on her jeans and pulled down hard, trying to mimic the law of gravity. Her arms were tattooed with flowers and swans and a vine-draped heart that said “Cecil.” She was wearing a T-shirt with no bra and her thick nipples were erect, probably from shock.

It was like Mom and I were in the circus, her in one ring and me in another, and everyone else was just watching our act. Mom didn't disappoint. She stripped off her blouse (fortunately,
she
was wearing a bra), folded it into a bandanna, and wrapped it around the gash on the man's forehead, making no attempt to cover herself with her arms or cower behind the wing of the door she'd managed to push open. She just paced back and forth in the street between me and the man in the car until the ambulance arrived and the driver offered her a sheet to cover herself, which she refused. Afterwards, when people talked about what had happened, nobody mentioned the fact that it was Jesse Little's dead-drunk dad who had run the red light and rammed the VW. What they remembered was Mom stripping off her blouse.

“What was I supposed to do,” she told me afterwards, “wait for Jesse Little to sew stitches?” Sometimes I thought she didn't give two spits what people thought of her.

Another time she created a public stir when we were in line at the pharmacy behind Carmela, the Mexican woman who later rented Grandpa Willard's house over on Socket Street. Carmela, a beautiful woman with luscious black hair, was struggling to make herself understood to the pharmacist. He was a bald man whose only body hairs were nose whiskers and he kept looking over at his assistant in her matching starched smock for help.

“For God's sake, Fred,” Mom finally said, “she wants something for her husband's hemorrhoids. Piles! Is that so difficult?”

It was hard to tell by Carmela's cinnamon skin whether she was blushing, but she turned to Mom with a kind smile and they hugged right there in front of the vitamins.

In a small town people talked, Mom too. “There's only one thing worse than being talked about,” she used to joke, “and that's not being talked about.” Still, she had her limits, like the time we attended the ecumenical dialogue Father Tombari arranged with the Presbyterians.

“Is it mandatory?” I wanted to know. I was already having trouble maintaining my enthusiasm for church. In most things we had a democratic household and everyone did what they wanted with their time, especially Mom.

“Till you're eighteen or living on your own, you'll go,” Dad told me. I suspected the whole thing had been cooked up between Dad and Father Tombari as a way to show Mom how close their two religions were. Even though Mom had never converted to Catholicism, she let Dad have free rein over me in that department.

The ecumenical mass included a hand-holding episode, where Father Tombari made every Catholic grip a Presbyterian and vice versa while we sang “Amazing Grace.” Afterward there was a reception in the church basement with sugar cookies, purple punch, and coffee in silver urns as big as garbage cans. Mom and I were cornered by Twyla Morrison, the minister's wife, who was wearing a brown felt hat with a cluster of baby's breath on the brim. Twyla made the mistake of talking about John Carlisle's younger sister, Ashley, who as far as I knew had never set foot in Stampede since we'd been there. The rumor was she'd run away and become a street person back east.

“I wonder how they ever put up with that little slut,” Twyla said.

Mom exploded with a slap so hard across Twyla Morrison's cheek that it knocked her felt hat with the baby's breath sideways. “You're in no position to judge that woman!”

I'd been taught that if you struck a priest or even a nun your chances of living for eternity at the right hand of God were about as remote as the odds of winning the Irish Sweepstakes. Watching Mom's lower lip quiver, I could only pray that a Presbyterian minister's wife wasn't so sacred. I was completely taken aback at the intensity of Mom's reaction. Why defend someone like Ashley Carlisle?

“It just burns me,” Mom said afterwards, “the way nobody's willing to spend two seconds in someone else's skin around here. Being rich doesn't mean you're not human. Every step those Carlisle kids took, it was never good enough.”

That didn't exactly explain why Ashley ran away, but the vehemence of Mom's reaction left no question on whose side she stood.

When I begged her, Mom took me on her sorties into Seattle for art supplies. For unusual merchandise, Seattle was where everyone went. From hints she'd dropped, I figured that's where they'd gotten me. Mom was always in such a good mood at Daniel Smith's, fingering the rag hemp, mulberry bark, banana stalk, and grass paper the way I'd seen other women stroke lingerie. The trays of pastels were precious gems. She drooled over the Senneliers, a pastel made by a third generation family company in France. A single stick cost as much as a paperback book. She tested out the brushes on the veiny part of her wrist and then painted circles on her cheeks with her eyes closed. Sometimes, she'd bring her paints along and take a class there or she'd teach one and I'd sit in the aisle doing homework or reading a novel, listening to the laughter she always managed to squeeze out of the student artists who surrounded her with their sailcloths like so many sloops.

After Daniel Smith's, we sometimes went to the Pike Place Market and wove our way through the produce and fish stands, then up the metal stairs on the outside of a triangular shaped building to the deck of the Copacabana, where we could look out over the flower boxes on the main Market building and watch the throngs of people on the brick street below us. Mom introduced me to foods I'd never heard of—saltenas, shrimp soup, and paella. If she'd taught a class, Mom would order a glass of Bolivian wine and I'd toast my ice water with her.

“Someday, both of us will be doing art,” she said, and I had this lump of regret that she was so good at something I had absolutely no aptitude for.

When it was sunny, men in dark glasses with extra rings on their fingers, gold chains around their necks, and studs in their ears came by the table and asked if they could join us. I felt that it was my job to mention Dad somewhere in the conversation just to make sure they didn't get the wrong idea. Mom always wore her Irish claddagh ring with the hands holding a crowned heart that the men must have mistaken for something besides a wedding ring because they often lingered at our table and asked her where we were staying. Mom seemed to enjoy the challenge, never telling them to beat it, but never asking them to stay either. I'd watch for drug deals down on the street with one eye, enjoying the hubbub and anonymity that was impossible in Stampede, and watch Mom with the other, ready to beat the stuffing out of anyone who touched her. While I always envied her easy sexuality, I was also scared of it.

Where Mom was my sail, Dad was the anchor.

When he handed me a paperback copy of
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, he said “You're almost finished with high school. Time to discover the Irish version of a hero.”

We kept the book on top of the toilet in the downstairs bathroom, so that we could both read it, him for the third time. When his marker passed mine, I told him he was spending too much time in the toilet and he laughed. Dad treated the bathroom like a sacred chamber, always locking the door to do his business, rolling the toilet paper back so that you couldn't tell where the last square ended, and spraying potpourri from the can in the medicine cabinet before emerging.

I loved it when nobody was home and I could leave the bathroom door wide open, something I found deliciously liberating, then crank up Janis Joplin on the stereo. Sometimes I'd read the erotic Anais Nin diaries that Mom kept under the magazines in the wicker basket next to their bed. Much better than
Portrait
. The diaries started out as a letter to the father who had deserted her and ended up as thirty-five thousand handwritten pages describing her most intimate thoughts over a lifetime.

Dad was fiercely proud of his Irishness, even though he had none of the swagger and brashness I associated with the Irish. He seemed too cerebral, too disciplined, too even-tempered. But say the wrong thing and I'd seen him ready to come to blows, like after another one of those exposes on the Kennedys came out and I overheard the guy at the service station who was running Dad's charge card through the register. “That Kennedy couldn't keep his pecker in his pants, could he?”

Dad clenched his fist and bristled. “Leave the man alone. Don't you think one assassination is enough?” It shouldn't have surprised me; they had to pull him out of a fight at the Comet Tavern over Mom.

When Dad came to the Pike Place Market with us, we went down an alley to Kells instead of the Copacabana. Kells was an Irish pub that served soda bread and thick, chewy clam chowder that Mom and Dad washed down with Guinness. On these visits, nobody came up to our table and asked us where we were staying.

On the car ride home from Seattle once, when it was just Mom and me and she was a little tipsy—I must have been fourteen at the time—she told me about meeting Dad when he was at Loyola of Chicago and she was at Northwestern. “I was still coming off Lloyd then,” she said. Lloyd was the vague title given to that period in Mom's life when she was into rock singers, motorbikes, and recreational drugs, something I knew she'd told me not as encouragement but as parable. I remembered praying then to Saint Anthony, the patron saint of the lost and found, hoping she'd not damaged too many brain cells from the drugs.

“Your dad courted me with herbal teas and protein,” Mom said. “He'd go to the store and stock the refrigerator in my apartment with chocolate milk, Swiss cheese, and yogurt. If I hadn't eaten enough protein by the time I saw him again, I'd pour a little down the sink or flush it in the toilet so he wouldn't be disappointed. He'd do the laundry and give me massages even before we were sleeping together. Best of all, he read to me. Every word of
Crime and Punishment
, half of
Anna Karenind
”—she smiled when she said this—“that's when we, well, you know, ended the abstinence.”

Dad had invited his brothers to Mom's funeral. I was standing next to him when he called Seamus, his younger brother in New York, and he let me listen to the answering machine message, which said he was off sailing with a woman friend in Nova Scotia. At least with Seamus you didn't get misdirection. Dad's older brother Colin, a doctor in Minneapolis, was too tied up at the hospital to get away for the funeral and sent a huge wreath in the shape of a horseshoe. It seemed as if Dad and his brothers were victims of mobility, the way they'd scattered to different parts of the continent to make families with strangers. Now, they were as much absent from each other's lives as Ashley Carlisle had been from her brother's.

Most of what I knew about Dad I'd learned from someone else, including Seamus, who stayed with us one night on his way to Alaska to work on a fishing boat when I was in eighth grade at Saint Augustine and I sat on the floor of my bedroom pumping him with questions. Seamus was good-looking like Dad, with a fetching Rugby jaw and unruly hair, but most important he treated me like an adult. He had those thick Scanlon eyebrows and devil's bumps on the tops of his ears that he said were a sign of intelligence.

“Your dad didn't have brain one when he was your age,” he told me. The way he said it, of course, I knew he meant just the opposite. “Our mom was always getting up and going to six o'clock mass so we'd grow up to be good boys. She wanted Tom to be a priest so bad she could taste it.”

“Why Dad?”

Seamus rolled his eyes and hoisted his eyebrows. “Tom always made the nicest doilies for Mother's Day, I guess, all put together so the paste didn't show.” We both laughed. “And he composed little prayers that he'd read at holiday dinners. Tom always had a freaky mysticism about him.”

“What do you mean, mysticism?”

“You know, contact with deeper truths.” Seamus shook his head as if disbelieving my dad could really be his brother. “Tom liked words. Me, I'd rather squeeze it between my fingers or suck on it, but Tom wanted to write about it. Mom had an old Royal typewriter, one of those black jobbies that weighed fifty pounds, and he typed his prayers on the back of handbills and crammed them into a brown expando. Like some junior Gutenberg in cutoffs. Course, Mom didn't know he was pounding out adolescent erotica in between his dinner prayers. Colin folded one into her missal once, but she refused to believe it was Tom's.”

Seamus paused and looked around my room at the bulletin board with my Blessed Virgin bookmarks and ribbons from spelling bees, and I thought he'd remember he was talking to a child and cut me off. I probably should have stopped him, knowing that it wasn't fair to hear these stories without getting Dad's version, but Seamus mesmerized me. This was real life and I hungered for it. Finally, he took a deep breath, ruffled his hair, and plunged ahead again.

“We had this pimply babysitter named Judy who used to come over on Saturdays when Tom was working as a box boy and Tom would sneak home on his lunch hours and neck with her on the couch.”

“My dad?”

“He'd get his hair all mussed up and have to reattach his little black clip-on bowtie before going back to work.”