Now my grandmother was dying, the death of a monarch. My father was going to have to visit my mother’s cherished hometown and all his in-laws, a dreadful prospect, as he viewed my grandparents’ house as a lunatic asylum; its bubbling humanity trained a cold light on behavior that had its roots in his own days as an Eagle Scout and piano prodigy in a four-block area south of Scollay Square, where he was the only pianist, thanks to his iron-willed mother, half paralyzed by an early stroke brought on by her terrible temper. My father hated to play the piano, hated even to see one, and forbade me to join the Boy Scouts.
Between my grandmother’s first and second strokes, my mother and I set out in the Nash for this old lunch-bucket city and its mosaic of neighborhoods, the house-rattling trains and worn-out baseball diamonds; my father told my mother he would follow “in due course” for the funeral. She looked him in the eye and asked, “What if she recovers?”
I was inside my grandparents’ house on the occasion of her second cerebral hemorrhage. My reputation as a wonder worker had lingered in the years since my grandfather’s death, and at each crisis I worried that I would be asked to perform again. As the house filled with family members, including my physician uncle Walter, all gathered hopelessly around the door to my grandmother’s bedroom, which seemed to glow with ominous beams of light. Walter came and went wearing a stethoscope, which he had never before done in this house. He was so handsome it sometimes made his sisters gasp, and with all power now in his hands he seemed like a god.
My mother ordered my father to get on the road immediately, and I worried that if his opinions got loose in this atmosphere every one of us would suffer. I was less focused on the impending demise of my grandmother than on seeing my favorite uncle, Paul, my grandmother’s youngest, a man in his fifties who sold the occasional insurance policy from his bare office in the Granite Block. He lived in a rooming house named Mohican House after the old Mohican Hotel, and his habits had changed little in many years, consisting as they did in day drinking and reading odd books from the public library. He collected printed mazes; some, he told me, were quite famous, like Welk’s Reflection, Double Snowflake, and Jabberwocky. He was keenly interested in the tea clippers and had an old painting that he claimed to have fished out of some Yankee’s garbage pail, a portrait of a Massachusetts sea captain dressed in embroidered robes like the emperor of China.
On our drive across Ontario and western New York, I listened again as my mother recited the saga of my grandmother, both hands on the wheel, cigarette in her mouth: the Saga of the Displaced Gael. Orphaned at twelve, Grandma worked a life-devouring job in the textile mills but managed a happy marriage to a fellow she met on the narrows (Grandpa) between North and South Watuppa ponds, where young people gathered. They were to enjoy fertile parenthood, modest gentility, economic sufficiency, and religious security only a block from their parish church; she did, however, occasionally cross the Quequechan River to attend Mass with French Canadian girlfriends she’d met in the spinning room at the Pocasset mill. My grandfather supplied special groceries to the side-wheelers of the Fall River Line including the Commonwealth, the Pilgrim, and the fabulous Princess. His was a tiny business based on special arrangements with a fruit boat that brought bananas from Central America. My grandfather told me of the deadly spiders that sometimes arrived with this cargo, hinted at Spanish treasure from Honduras (probably the origin of my previously mentioned interest in “jewels”), and described the three great steering wheels in the pilothouse of the Princess and the chandeliers in its engine room. Even my grandparents’ Yankee neighbors, who ranged from mill owners and bankers to broken-down fellows who delivered firewood by horse and wagon, accorded grudging admiration to this honest couple, especially as immigrants even more peculiar than the Irish began arriving from warmer and warmer seas, smaller and browner by the day. If my mother got too caught up in her story, she allowed me to drive on my learner’s permit while she kept smoking or chewed her thumbnail.
The children grew up and took their respective places: teacher, policeman, physician, waitress, and finally occasional insurance salesman Paul, who came home from the war having lost to a German booby trap his best friend, a boy from President Avenue with whom he’d enlisted. Paul emphasized that the device was a Leica camera, which seemed to undercut the disparaging term for the thing that had killed his friend. After that Paul began to decline, and the gossip was that he wouldn’t have taken the loss of his friend so badly if the pair of them hadn’t been queer. But he was smart and resourceful and he managed to go on, usually by selling a policy to one of his drinking buddies. He was tall and well dressed, his auburn hair combed back straight from a high forehead in an elegant look that spoke of success. By evening, the look would change to something wild and slipping.
My mother had always seemed fearless; if she wasn’t, she concealed her fear with spontaneous belligerence. But she strove for obedient perfection under my grandmother’s eyes and when she fell short, usually in household matters like cooking or cleaning or religious matters like forgetting First Fridays, she responded to my grandmother’s well-concealed wrath like an educated dog, performing as directed but with the faint slink of force training. This behavior was disturbing and made me ambivalent about my grandmother, who treated me like a prince. Behind the geniality of this tiny woman, I saw the iron fist. I wasn’t sure I liked it.
Paul moved in and out of the house over the years, even had temperate spells. I remember some very pleasant times when my mother and I visited: he threw a baseball onto the complex of roofs for me to field with my Marty Marion infielder’s mitt and tried to instill in me his passionate Irish sentimentality and diasporic mythology. The rest of the family was feverishly American and did not care to celebrate the Irish connection; in fact, Uncle Walter on traveling to Ireland announced that the place was highly disorganized and insufficiently hygienic, and that the garrulity of the people was annoying, especially the sharp cracks that were mechanical and tiresome and always about other people.
But Paul had archaic Gaelic jigs on 78s that he played at tremendous volume from his room next to his mother’s, and, when drunk, he could roar along to various all-too-familiar ballads—“Mother Machree,” “The Wearing of the Green,” “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” and so on — giving me a whack when I accompanied the great John McCormack with such invented lyrics as “my vile Irish toes” or “God bless you, you pest, you, Mother Machree.”
Sometimes he tired of his old records and said it wasn’t the potato famine that had driven the Irish from the land; they had left to escape the music. It really depended on what the Bushmill’s was up to. He also used me to practice his insurance pitch. “Good morning, Wilbur,” he would begin — not my name — and it was always morning in these pitches even though he was incapable of rising early enough to make a morning pitch. Wilbur was an imaginary Yankee farmer, dull, credulous, yet wily. “Wilbur, we’ve known each other a good many years and, God willing, more to come with, let’s hope, much prosperity and happiness. I know you to be a man, Wilbur, whose family stands just below the saints in his esteem, a man who thinks of everything to protect them from. . from—Christ! — protect them from, uh— the unforeseen! Christ, of course! The unforeseen! —But ask yourself, Have you really thought of everything?” Here is where the other shoe was meant to drop, but, more often than not, Paul allowed himself an uncontrolled snort of hilarity before refilling his “martini.” This was never a martini; it was invariably a jolt of Bushmill’s, but he called it a martini, and the delicacy of the concept compelled him to hold the libation between thumb and forefinger, which uncertain grasp sometimes caused the drink to crash to the floor, a “tragedy.”