He grinned at her and she touched his cheek, then lifted away, saying, “Peter, clear these school books and help me set the table... Michael, fetch your father. Tell him supper’s ready.”
The house was pale plaster, greens and yellows, against dark woodwork; his footsteps echoed off the hardwood floors. Not exactly a rich person’s house, but Michael knew he lived better than any of his friends. He loved the smooth feel of the banister as he ran up the stairs, palm gliding over sculpted wood.
On the second floor, at the end of the hallway, the half-open door of his parents’ bedroom gave Michael a view of his father at the mirrored dresser. Even without Mama’s summons, Papa was preparing for dinner — removing his cufflinks and placing them in a small carved wooden box with other personal items; taking off his striped necktie and turning to lay it on the bed as if placing a baby in its cradle; finally slipping out of his jacket, revealing the dark leather holster and the weapon under his arm.
The boy didn’t know it, but this was a Colt .45, army issue, a weapon that his father — Michael O’Sullivan, Sr. — had brought home from the Great War.
Gun — holster and all — was soon on the bed as well, and it wasn’t until O’Sullivan was removing his vest that he sensed his son, and flipped the vest on top of the weapon, concealing it.
Without looking at the boy, O’Sullivan said, “Michael, have you seen that pipe I threw out?”
Michael, startled, had already hopped back a foot at the first sound of his father’s voice. “No! No, sir.”
“Perhaps you didn’t hear me. I said, have you seen the pipe I threw out, Michael?”
“... Yes, sir.”
“Did I see you with it? Smoking it?”
“No, sir.”
Silence throbbed in the big house, the tick of the grandfather clock downstairs deafening; Michael felt like a bug, out in the hallway, hoping his father wouldn’t step on him and squash him.
His father’s voice, from within the bedroom, did not rise in volume as he asked again: “Did I see you with that pipe?”
“Yes, sir... Dinner’s ready.”
“Thank you.”
The boy scrambled away, down the hallway.
And in the bedroom, Michael O’Sullivan, Sr. — a tall, muscular man, pale, blue-eyed, with dark hair and regular features touched by a pencil-line mustache — looked at his own reflection. The man in the mirror — or was it three men, in the three panes of glass? — seemed to know that the boy required punishment; but the father did not like administering punishment... not to his son.
At the kitchen table, in a scene typically formal for this little family, the boys sat silent and scrubbed, Papa in his white shirt, Mama in her blue dress.
Michael was wondering why his father hadn’t said anything about the pipe yet; he hoped nothing would be said to his mother about it...
“Michael,” Papa said.
Just the faintest edge in his father’s voice.
Michael looked up sharply, and with his eyes begged his father for mercy.
“Will you say grace, please?”
Smiling, relieved, the boy bowed his head, folded his hands, and said, “Bless-us-oh-lord-for-these-thy-gifts-which-we-are-about-to-receive-through-the-bounty-of-our-Lord-Jesus-Christ-amen.”
They all said “Amen,” and as Mama began passing the food around, Papa said, “Michael, next time... ”
Alarmed, Michael looked up.
“... next time, speak more slowly. There is meaning to those words — it’s not ‘giftswhich,’ like a sandwich.”
Peter giggled, and Mama smiled.
Father continued. “And His name is Jesus Christ — not Jesus Christ Amen.”
“Yes, sir.”
And they began to eat.
Later, the boys were listening to the Lone Ranger on the radio in the parlor, and their parents were washing dishes in the kitchen — actually, Annie was washing, O’Sullivan drying.
“You’re a little hard on Michael,” she said, her brogue-touched lilt softening the words.
“I worry about him.”
“Do you?”
“He’s a little too much like me.”
She laughed. “Well, Peter’s not the baby anymore. They’re both growing up into young men. They both need a father’s affection.”
“And they have it.” O’Sullivan had not revealed to his wife the pipe-smoking transgression of her oldest son.
“Ouch!” she said.
“What is it?”
“Cut myself... ” She’d been washing cutlery, a carving knife.
O’Sullivan ran cold water and put her finger under it. Then he examined the wound, carefully.
“It’s not deep,” he said, fetching a scrap of cloth and wrapping it around her finger. He gazed into her china-blue eyes and kissed her hand, in a courtly manner, a knight and his maiden.
“All better?”
“The best,” she said, and nodded, and smiled.
They returned to their dishes, while in the living room, the parlor echoed with the radio’s gunfire.
Two
John Looney’s mansion was on 20th Street in the area known in those days as the Longview Loop — so-called because this bluff area had been made accessible by, first, horse-drawn trolleys and, later, electric streetcars. This was Rock Island’s Knob Hill — doctors, lawyers, and old money. Looney must have been considered an outsider, where some of these high-society types were concerned, though I certainly wasn’t aware of it.
My brother and I went to a private Catholic school — the Villa de Chantal — not far from the Looney mansion. My legs start to ache when I think of peddling my bike up that hill — and back then the streets were brick. At 16th Avenue and 20th Street stood the building where carriers would pick up their copies of Looney’s Rock Island News — Looney’s Roost, we called it. Several locations around town, including Looney’s drugstore, were sort of substations.
Wealthy though he was, Mr. Looney was a man of the people — a Catholic. Most of Rock Island’s wealthy Irish were Orangemen, Protestants, while most Irish Catholics were laborers, skilled and unskilled. My father was working-class poor and had grown up in the area known as Greenbush. He’d been in a gang in that rough part of town, though thanks to Sacred Heart Church there had also been a baseball team and other more wholesome recreational activities.
Still, looking back, I can see that my father — when he was my age — must have been a young roughneck. And when Mr. Looney took my father under his wing, he gave our family a life my real grandparents could never have provided.
The next afternoon, a Saturday, the overcast sky suggested the imminent arrival of an overanxious night. Young Michael could think of better ways to spend any part of a Saturday than at a funeral; but he knew not to object — particularly since Papa had said nothing more about the infamous briar pipe... and had obviously not shared his son’s dire misdeed with Mama.
Papa had gone out to pull the car around close to the house and get the engine going, to provide his family with a warm car on this cold day. And Michael was the first to join his father, scrambling into the backseat. Papa’s eyes probed him in the rearview mirror.
“Michael,” his father said.
“Yes, sir?”
“This is a solemn occasion. I don’t want to see those dice... all right?”
“Yes, sir. No, sir.”
“I don’t care if your godfather instigates it. No gambling.”
Papa meant Mr. Looney.
“Yes, sir,” the boy said, nodding. “Because it’s a funeral.”
“It’s a wake — that’s a little different. But I don’t want gambling because gambling is wrong.”
“How is a wake different from a funeral, Papa?”