Miracle Boy
We always went back to my mother’s hometown when someone was about to die. We missed Uncle Kevin because the doctors misdiagnosed his ruptured appendix, owing to referred pain in his shoulder. Septicemia killed him before they sorted it out with a victorious air we never forgave. The liverless baby was well before our time — it would have been older than my mother had it lived — but my grandfather’s departure arrived ideally for scheduling purposes in the late stages of diabetes; we drove instead of taking the train and en route were able to stay over for an extra day at the Algonquin Inn in western New York, taking advantage of Wienerschnitzel Night, and still make it in time for the various obsequies while reducing prolonged visits by priests. (My father was an agnostic and fought sponging clergy with vigor, remarking that he had “fronted his last snockered prelate” and adding, “Amazing how often it’s Crown Royal.”)
Before I relate the death of my grandmother, I have to summarize that of my grandfather, because that was where I acquired my short-lived reputation as a worker of household wonders. Ever since I have had great sympathy for those identified as seers or healers; my heart even goes out to those merely called lucky. Like someone drifting lazily down the Niagara River, the big fall is just a matter of time.
My grandfather, though a diabetic, went on occasional sweet binges, cherry pies at Al Mack’s diner, and he injected himself with insulin daily, to our agog fascination. He held in reserve giant sugar-filled jawbreakers in his pocket, and when I was too pressingly talkative a single one of those hunks would keep me silent for almost three hours. He was a quiet man, a volunteer fireman who played checkers in the open-fronted firehouse down whose brass pole I was sometimes allowed to slide. In his youth he had read in a newspaper that “Many people persist in making the cemetery a place of recreation, generally a foreign element prompted by ignorance,” and thereafter he was a tireless promoter of public parks.
On the Fourth of July, while most of the family was at the parade on North Main Street and after a midday meal of quahog chowder, swordfish, beet greens, and corn, he lay down on his big brown favorite couch and died. He’d never taken up more room than he needed, and in an essentially matriarchal household his death was mostly seen as foreshadowing my grandmother’s, though it was widely celebrated among “the foreign element.” This was not long after little boys were given dresses to wear, and my mother and aunts sent me off dressed as a hula girl for the Fourth of July parade, a debacle that ended in my breaking a white plastic ukulele with its Arthur Godfrey “automatic” chord changer during one of many clashes with Azorean native Joao Furtado — later known as Meatball — who called me, with sensible directness, “little girl.” When I got home from the parade, my grandfather was dead. I studied the adults for clues. They were studying my grandmother for clues. She took to her bed. Three days later, she was still there.
Her absence brought the household to a standstill. My mother and aunts seemed entirely helpless without her ordering them around. She did not even seem to acknowledge them when they visited her room, and a meeting was called where it was decided to send me in. Her idealization of children was counted upon to bring her around before the house and its contents sank into the earth, an eventuality I could imagine to include the opaque projector in the attic with its pictures of long-dead baseball players, the cabinet full of Belleek china in the priest parlor, all the wildly squeaky beds and creaking stairs, the bookless “library” reeking of cigars, and even the souvenir Hitler Youth knife my uncle Paul had given me. As it happened I was the only child available for idealizing, standing around with my mouth open. And so I headed to my grandmother’s bedroom, which was on the second floor, and there I acquired my reputation as a performer of miracles, setting myself up for a fall whose effects would never end. (When my father learned of my success, he began calling me Miracle Boy, later M.B.)
I let myself in without knocking, closing the door behind me. From her bed my grandmother followed me with her eyes. I started to say something in greeting but the impulse died, and instead I looked around for a place to sit. The ornate brass bed was to the right as I entered; to the left was a vanity with its silver brush and mirror carefully arranged. At the far end of the room was a door to a small porch over Brownell Street, access to which we were all denied, as it sagged dangerously with dry rot. I took the chair from in front of the dresser, pulled it up beside my grandmother’s bed, and sat down. I was perfectly comfortable. My grandmother had turned her head on the pillow to look directly at me, upon me, and I could tell that my presence was welcome. After a while, several formulaic remarks on the death of my grandfather passed through my mind, since even then I was capable of a modicum of glibness in the little-old-man style encouraged by my aunts. But those thoughts vanished and I gazed at my grandmother’s long hair, gathered around her face in silver braids. My mind wandered again, and then I spoke.
“I was wondering,” I mused, “if Grandpa left me any jewels.”
My grandmother stared at me, sitting on my hands in her vanity chair, knocking the toes of my shoes against each other as the silence lengthened. Suddenly she began to laugh, from some deep place and loud enough that the scurrying of my mother and my aunts could be heard outside the door, where they must have been eavesdropping. Then my grandmother sent me away so she could rise, dress, and make our supper. Thus was born my reputation as a child healer, my personal albatross, Miracle Boy.
The house was a typical triple-decker on a very small lot, hardly bigger than the footprint of the house itself, with a tiny yard bound by a severely rectilinear and humorless hedge. Any game in the yard had to involve the roof, usually winging a ball up there and guessing which side it would fall off. My uncle Paul, a veteran of World War II, was always willing to do this with me for hours on end; he never really seemed to have a job. Otherwise, all you could do in the yard was stand there and stay clear of the hedge. This being a corner lot, the windows on two sides gave a point-blank view of the faces of pedestrians, and the second-and third-floor windows were ideal for the launching of tomatoes, stink bombs, and rotten eggs. Once when my constant adversary, Meatball Furtado, had chased me all the way from North Park, Aunt Constance was able to pour boiling water on him from the second floor, melting the cast on his recently broken arm. This unambiguous Irish-Portuguese skirmish pretty much reflects the fortress quality of the small neighborhoods of the town, with a church at the center and a pocket park for escalating ethnic conflict. In time, jicks, Portagees, and harps would be partners in law firms and especially in local politics. Then they’d move away and just be Americans — consumers, parents, drivers of minivans. I suppose it’s a good thing.
Here in this small yard, on his reluctant and occasional visits from the Midwest, my father sat, reading Yachting and contemplating a global circumnavigation, though, he often told me with a conspirator’s wink, he would not necessarily return to the same spot from which he’d gamely set sail — by which I guess he really meant he hoped one day to leave us. The closest he came to circumnavigating was a steel cabin cruiser that never left the dock and came with an oil painting of a busty woman walking through a crowded church. It was entitled A Big Titter Rolled down the Aisle. This vessel sat in a rental slip on a stagnant lake, and served as a platform for cocktail parties. At the height of these gatherings, my father would start the engine and then look with authority over the transom to make sure the water pump was sending coolant out the exhaust. The feat was performed in silence and suggested that behind the revelry lay a serious world, the world of the sea.