Gallatin Canyon

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.

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.”

The fact that Paul and I got on so well would be remembered during my seventeenth year, when I was called upon to perform one more miracle. By my humoring him during his Irish spells, I had earned his faith. He’d taken me to see the Red Sox, Plymouth Rock, Bunker Hill, and Old Ironsides; he bought me lobster rolls at Al Mack’s diner, a Penn Senator surf-casting reel, coffee cabinets and vanilla Cokes by the hundred. He made me call a drinking fountain a “bubbler,” in the Rhode Island style.

Eventually, Paul moved back to his digs at Mohican House, evicted by Uncle Walter, who had replaced my grandfather for such duties. My grandmother was also a disciplinarian, but when it came to her youngest son she reverted to type and viewed him as troubled, broken by the war, while the rest of her offspring were expected to follow clear but inflexible rules. Irish tenors were replaced by radio broadcasts of ball games. For every holiday and the whole of summer, my mother continued to drag me from what she viewed as our place of exile in the Midwest to Brownell Street, which I might not have liked but for our almost daily trips to Horseneck Beach, where I had the occasional red-faced meeting with a girl in a bathing suit. I also made a new friend on Hood Street next to North Park, Brucie Blaylock, who could defend me against Meatball and his allies. Brucie was a tough athletic boy with scuffed knuckles and a perpetually runny nose whose beautiful eighteen-year-old sister had just married a policeman. The couple was still living in my friend’s home awaiting an apartment and, while snooping through their belongings, we discovered a gross of condoms which we counted, being unsure how many were in a gross. “This cop,” said my friend, gazing at the mountain of tiny packages, “is gonna stick it in my sister a hundred and forty-four times!” My mind spun not altogether unpleasantly at this carnal prospect, and my fear of bathing-suit girls at Horseneck Beach rose starkly. From time to time, we would re-count the condoms; by the time the number dropped below a hundred, my friend was suffering and I wandered around as if etherized by the information.

My aunts continued to adore and pamper me while reminding anyone who would listen of my capacity for working miracles. This would have been long forgotten but for the fact that their incentive came directly from their mother, especially my aunt Dorothy, who waitressed long hours at the Nonpareil diner downtown, and my aunt Constance, a substitute teacher who lived two houses away with her husband, a glazier. My uncle Gerry, who had joined the Boston mounted police solely to acquire a horse, was rarely around. Uncle Walter said the horse was all the family Gerry ever wanted. Dorothy’s husband, Bob, made himself scarce, too, finding the constant joking around my grandparents’ house exasperating. Theirs was a mixed marriage, the first in our family, as Bob was a jick, an English immigrant. It was customary for those of Irish extraction to mimic the accents of such people by singing out, “It’s not the ’eavy ’aulin that ’urts the ’osses’ ’ooves. It’s the ’ammer, ’ammer, ’ammer on the old ’ighway.” My grandmother outlawed this ditty out of deference to Bob, who, after all, might one day convert.

I seemed to have been forgotten during the early moments of the crisis, even by my mother. I seized on my brief obscurity to cook up reasons why I was now exempt from the miracle business: one, I was not the same boy who had stirred my grandmother to rise after the death of her husband; and two, it was not a miracle in the first place, except in the minds of my mother and her crazy sisters. I now sequestered myself in my room with Road & Track, Dave Brubeck Fantasy label 45s, and True West magazine. I was greatly absorbed by the events leading up to the gunfight at the OK Corral. No longer able to enchant me with accounts of the big baboon by the light of the moon combing his auburn hair, my mother tried upgrading my reading habits by offering me a dollar to read Penrod and Sam. I declined. But all this was distraction; I feared my call would come and I worked at facing it. I worried that by keeping to myself and playing the anchorite, I gave credence to my imputed saintlike powers; it behooved me to mingle with my relatives and strive to seem unexceptional, even casual. Being incapable of grasping the possible demise of my grandmother, I had no problem sauntering around the house seeing to everyone’s comfort. No one suspected the terror in my heart. At one point, as I suavely offered to make cocktails, my mother jerked me aside and asked me if I thought this was the Stork Club. Thereafter, my attempts to disappear consisted of idly scratching my head or patting my lips wearily as I gazed out upon Brownell Street, where every parking spot was taken by my relatives’ cars, all except Paul’s, which he called a “foreign” car. Anyone pointing out that it was a dilapidated Ford was told, “It is entirely foreign to me.” That car was not here, and if it was not over at the Mohican it could be as far afield as New Bedford or Somerset, whose watering holes provided what he called “acceptable consanguinity.” These were terrible stewpots mentioned in the paper from time to time in an unflattering light, the one in New Bedford being, according to Uncle Walter, a bucket of blood haunted by raving scallopers and their molls.

My aunt Constance functioned as a kind of hall monitor. She had no legitimate authority, but she enforced the general rules as laid down by her mother, and at a time like this she saw to comings and goings, the hanging of visitors’ hats, and the drawing of blinds and the pulling of draperies; she liked to catch me out in little infractions, since I had, besides the unearned affection of my grandmother, the fewest accrued rights around the place. This had to be undertaken discreetly or there would be my mother to contend with, younger than Constance but spoiling for a fight with her. I’d once heard my father say that Aunt Constance’s ankles were thick. One day she came to my room where, out of quiet desperation, I was committing self-abuse in consideration of the rate condoms were being consumed up on Hood Street by the homeless cop and his teenage bride. She told me through the door that she would be taking me to see my grandmother. There was a platitudinous tone she used, even when she addressed me as Elvis or when she reminded me that others needed the bathroom too or wouldn’t it be nice if I picked up a few of my things so that others didn’t have to do it for me. When I emerged, she gave me a stare that insinuated either that she knew what I’d just been doing or that I was unaware of the gravity of the situation. Is it Miracle Time? I wondered. I already had enough to fear, because I couldn’t grasp what was happening to my grandmother. Well, I told myself, we aren’t there yet.

As if I lacked sufficient power in my legs, Aunt Constance gave me a last little push into my grandmother’s bedroom then followed me inside. My mother was already there, red-eyed and helpless. She was far the prettiest of the sisters and had been indoctrinated somehow in the idea, perhaps by the whole family, that handling crises would not be her strong suit. Years later, she would tell me that at the moment I’m now describing she wanted to curl up on the floor and break down completely; however, even semiconscious, her mother still had strong authority, and such behavior could fall under the proscribed category of shenanigans.

My grandmother spoke my name with groggy satisfaction, her face lit by the candles surrounding a figurine of the Virgin Mary that rested on her bedside table, a cheerful statue, trophy-sized and a lovely Bahamian blue. My mother appeared to have been there awhile, and sorrow transfigured her face in a way that I’d never seen it before, which upset me thoroughly. Aunt Constance fidgeted around, disturbed that my grandmother’s mouth remained open. My mother caught Constance’s briskness, and when she gently tried to close my grandmother’s mouth, my mother hissed under her breath, “Don’t touch her!” Constance’s hand rested in midair, her eyes meeting my mother’s with a kind of warning. It was like one of the showdowns I’d been investigating. Our awkward vigil didn’t last much longer, as Uncle Walter soon arrived and shooed us out. We waited on the first floor for half an hour until Walter came down. He walked straight through us, speaking only as he went out the door: “I’ll get the priest.” He had a deep voice, and everyone in the family knew he was the law.

It was summertime. Our parish priest, Father Corrigan, had gone to the Cape for a few days, so we wound up with some alien in a round collar, Father Cox, whom Walter kept on call in the parlor, reminding us that Extreme Unction did not reside in persons. Meanwhile, a bulletin was sent out for Corrigan, who appeared the next morning with a raging sunburn and loftily dismissed his surrogate. Father Corrigan took me aside, to a quiet spot past the stove. I was alert. He looked at me gravely and asked if I had noticed that Birdie Tebbetts had been promoted to starting catcher for the Cleveland Indians. I admitted ignorance in a way that suggested that at another time I would have been better informed. Father Corrigan reminded me, “Birdie went to Providence College with your uncle Paul — say, where is Paul?”

“He couldn’t make it,” I replied impulsively, based on no particular knowledge. Everyone was relieved that Paul had declined to be here, although Aunt Constance had conveyed my grandmother’s condition to him by a note to his landlord.

“What’d you do that for?” my mother demanded.

“Ma asked me to,” said Constance contentedly.

Father Corrigan, handsome enough that his departure for the seminary had sown heartache, was a priest of old-fashioned certainties who saw nothing cheerless in the present circumstances. He had gone completely bald, not even any eyebrows, but he wore a wig, a small vanity that was considered to have humanized him. He had a redhead’s complexion and the wig was auburn. It didn’t fit particularly well: the hairline was too emphatic around the front, and when he bent over, as he was usually careful not to do, it pried up from behind and exposed an eerie sanctum of white scalp.

As my grandmother’s confessor, he knew she was bound for the ultimate destination, a place whose glory was beyond the descriptive powers of the most effusive travel agent. We fed off his optimism, sort of. He and Uncle Walter consulted away from the rest of us, who tried to read their lips from across the wide kitchen. Uncle Walter worshiped his mother, and it could not have been easy for him to recognize that she was ending her life in his professional hands.

Aunt Constance now brought her two girls, my cousins Kathleen and Antoinette, who viewed me as a corrupt hoodlum because of the then ubiquitous blue suede shoes I wore. My uncle Gerry finally showed up too, in his glossy black trooper boots and Boston police uniform, which seemed thrillingly archaic, like something Black Jack Pershing might have worn. But Gerry was so shy and sweet, he could barely speak. “He gets it from the horse,” said Walter. I retired quietly to my room, where I resumed my study of the Old West, a place where do-gooders and mad dogs alike lived free of ambiguity and insidious family tensions. At the moment, the Earps and the Clantons were beginning the open movements of their mortal ballet.

By evening, our two authorities agreed that my grandmother would not live much longer, though she was conscious enough to make one thing clear: she wished to see her baby, Paul, before she died. My mother got on the phone and confirmed that my father had set out by automobile. “He’ll be here in no time!” she said into thin air.

Uncle Walter departed for the Mohican. Bickering the whole time, Aunt Dorothy and my mother made a desultory attempt at cooking supper on the big gas stove from which my grandmother had so long and so majestically ruled: this time, macaroni and cheese. We were seated before our identical platters, my cousins studying my deployment of the silverware, when Uncle Walter returned and, entering the dining room, announced to us all, “He says no.” After a suspicious glance at the macaroni, he turned significantly to the adults, who rose as one and left the dining room, leaving me with my cousins. We heard “bloody bugger” through the door.

Kathleen, who had snapping blue eyes and jet black hair in tubular curls that hung alongside her face, announced, “We’re awfully sad over at our house.” Antoinette, a plainer brunette with a thin downturned mouth, looked on and remarked, “It’s too bad your father isn’t here to help. Why is it he never comes?”

I couldn’t tell her that the household melodrama was unbearable to him or that he was busy, in my mother’s absence, making the two-backed beast with his secretary. Instead, I replied, “He has a job. He’s on his way now. How fast do you expect him to drive?” Both smiled: Anyone who couldn’t broil in an old mill town all summer long was to be pitied. I remembered with satisfaction the day this pair appeared at Horseneck Beach. They looked like two sticks in their bathing suits, no butts but the same superior smiles. Naturally, they started a shell collection, everything lined up according to some system.

I was preoccupied, having just reached the point where Doc Holliday was moving silently behind the corral planks with his sawed-off shotgun. Distantly, my mind was moving to the eventualities facing those men in that dusty patch of earth when the door opened and Uncle Walter summoned me with a crooked finger. I rose slowly to go out. My fears were aroused by the hauteur in the faces of my cousins, then confirmed when I saw my mother and my two aunts. I first pinned my hopes on the slightly skeptical expression of my aunt Dorothy, but when I saw my mother’s pride and the phony look of general forgiveness on the face of my aunt Constance, I knew I was cooked. It was miracle time again. Father Corrigan gazed with detachment, wig tipped up like a jaybird: the services this family expected of me probably struck him as verging on sacrilegious.

I clapped both hands over Uncle Walter’s car keys as they lightly struck my chest. “The Blue Roadmaster in front. Bring your uncle Paul. You’re the guy that can get this done. Get Paul now and bring him here. ”

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?’ ”

I always tried to agree with my father, even when I didn’t understand him. “I see what you mean,” I said, with an aching sort of smile.

“Here’s a famous one,” he said, as the wailing started downstairs. “ ‘If it weren’t for whiskey, the Irish would rule the world.’ Do I like this. They’re only charming when they’re drunk. When they’re sober, they’re not only not ruling the world, they’re ridiculing its hopes and dreams.” This was entirely true of my father himself. He was a merry boozer but a bleak observer of reality when sober. The present moment was a perfect example. He saw no legitimate grief in the response to my grandmother’s death, only posturing and inappropriate tribal memory. “Rule the world, my behind,” he added. “ ‘If it weren’t for blubber, Fatty Arbuckle would set the world record in the high jump.’ ”

My relatives were certainly not ruling the world, and they went about their lives with high spirits. While their certainties like everyone else’s were soon to be extinguished by the passage of time, their ebullience was permanent, and I say this having seen two of them expire from cancer. My father, on the other hand, was grimly obsessed with his health, and for some reason I associate this with his flight from his origins. I recall him explaining to my mother that he had missed making his Easter Duty on the advice of his eye-ear-nose-and-throat specialist to avoid crowds.

I went downstairs and sat among my relatives, some of whom hadn’t seen each other for a long time, especially the ones from Lawrence, who seemed to have in common straitened finances and sat in their overcoats watching the circulation of plates of finger food. My aunt Dorothy, from Providence, wept copiously and in a manner that reminded everyone, I was sure, of the melodramatic nature so annoying to my grandmother that she pretended that Taffy longed to star in a soap opera. The Sullivans were there from across the street. Uncle Gerry, wearing his mounted policeman’s uniform with its crossed straps and whistle deployed just under his left shoulder, stared straight ahead and moved his lips in authentic prayer. My physician uncle Walter maintained a look of dignified pragmatism, and I’m sure he knew we looked to him for deportment hints. We believed he understood life and death through actual experience and, unconvinced by Father Corrigan’s merry certainties, wished he would say something about the afterlife.

Saddest of all was Aunt Dorothy, because her household meddling had expired with my grandmother and she was now wandering about without a self to give meaning to her acts. I thought of her with white holes for eyes, as in the standard depiction of zombies. She looked blank and confused and made clueless efforts to find chairs, answer the phone, and offer horrifying comfort to people she barely knew. Finally, Walter commanded, “You need a rest. I’m sure everyone will excuse you.” At this she let out a somewhat lunar cry that made poor Mr. Sullivan, a surgical arch outlining the former position of his cigar, grab his wife and run for the door.

Aunt Constance served the funeral dinner with a kind of pageantry, abetted by her daughters, the two little shits Kathleen and Antoinette. Watching their stately entrance for each course, learned in that narcissistic training ground of First Communion, I could have, as Josef Goebbels once remarked, “reached for my Luger.” The meal was a tribute to my grandmother and featured all her favorite dishes — swordfish (my father confided these small steaks were doubtless from a skillygallee, an obsolete term for the less desirable white marlin), corn on the cob, parsnips, and apple pie — and represented a maudlin idea of grieving. “They’re gonna milk it,” he said, when he heard the menu.

We were seated, Walter at the head of the table, my mother, father, and I in a row, Dorothy sniveling into the canned consommé preceding the main course, Kathleen and Antoinette, half crouched in their pinafores and ready for duty, Gerry upright as a man of the law. As Walter said grace, I watched my mother closely; her melancholy smile was less occasional than chemical, produced by the pills she took, ostensibly to raise an abnormally low blood pressure, as well as straight shooters from the vodka tucked in her suitcase. Like many of their generation, my parents believed in the absolute odorlessness of vodka and applied to its consumption none of the restraint of the blends whose broadly familiar aroma marked the user like a traffic light. My father sported his customary deniable supercilious smile. When cornered, he’d lay it to gastric distress or the unaccountable prelude to heartbreak, as when my mother walked out on him and he couldn’t wipe the grin off his face and had to explain it.

The front door was carelessly slammed shut and Uncle Paul walked in, wearing his drab woolen officer’s uniform with obvious moth holes, and commented that we looked a bit gloomy. Father Corrigan rose to his feet, held his napkin between thumb and forefinger, and dropped it to the table. With infinitesimal authority, Walter indicated with his eyes that Father Corrigan was to take his seat again promptly. Constance appeared behind Paul and, leaning around him, said in a shrill voice, “Just making certain there’s a place set.”

“Grab me a beer from the fridge,” said Paul. Constance froze but my mother leaped up and chirped nonchalantly that she knew right where it was. My father patted her butt, eyes half-lidded with private irony as she swept past, and Paul smiled at his favorite relative, my mother; Uncle Gerry, rendered huge in his uniform by the smallness of the room, strode to the sideboard to turn on the big Sunbeam fan. He’d begun to sweat. Seated again, he asked Walter about various old folks of our acquaintance. Most got good health reports, except Mary Louise Dwyer and Arthur Kelly, who had, he said in a significant voice, “been in to see me.” As to lip cancer Mr. Sullivan, “You couldn’t hurt him with a tire iron.”

“A corker,” Gerry agreed.

Once my mother had deposited the beer in front of a greatly relieved Uncle Paul, Aunt Constance began to send in my cousins with a steady parade of dishes. Noticing my father, Paul nodded and said, “Harold.” Constance shooed the cousins along from close behind, with no effect on their speed at all but reinforcing her position as culinary benefactress. She kept her husband behind in the kitchen as a kind of factotum and sous-chef; besides, he wasn’t comfortable in what he not altogether humorously called Harp Central. He could have said it more clearly because no one cared what he said, all part of Constance’s disgrace: she would have enjoyed greater standing if she’d been gang-raped by a hurley squad.

I’m not sure my father enjoyed much esteem either, and I think he knew it. He was well educated, hardworking, and ambitious, yet something set him apart, as though he had renounced a portion of his humanity to achieve his current station and had, moreover, abducted the baby of the family, my mother, to a dreary and stunting world where people made themselves up and were vaguely weightless. I realized with dread that, at this funeral meal, he was likely to take a stand.

“I wonder where she is now,” Paul said, slurping his consommé.

“Where who is?” Walter asked coolly.

“Ma. Where Ma is.”

Dorothy covered her mouth.

“Ma is in heaven,” said Walter.

“You, as a man of science, say she is in heaven?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, good. I hear great things about the place.”

Kathleen made a covert rotary motion with her forefinger at her temple; then, fearing she’d been observed, she pretended to adjust one of the tubular curls. She wouldn’t look at me.

My father half rose from his chair, rather violently, shifting all attention to himself, as he reached across the table for a dish of lemons. “It’s been a long time since I had a chance to enjoy a swordfish steak!” This fell discordantly upon me and anyone else who’d heard his theory of the skillygallee.

My mother said, “Wonderfully done, Constance, a beautiful meal.” Constance gave a self-effacing curtsy. Dorothy stared at her food with white eyeholes and a half-opened mouth, and Gerry rubbed her back consolingly until she picked up her fork and prodded a parsnip. Since I eat too fast when I’m nervous, my mother put her hand on my forearm to slow me down. I looked up at her helplessly, wide-eyed.

Walter smiled all round and said, “This would be a good time to remember all the happy times we’ve had at this table, especially when Pa would have been in my place. We saw very little of Ma then. She just came and went from the kitchen, long enough to look after us. She sure looked after us, didn’t she? Generations of us. Me, Connie, Gerry, Mary, and you kids, right, Antoinette?”

Antoinette stood up from her seat. “My grandmother is a saint,” she sang out, in a high mechanical voice. “She is being welcomed by the angels this very minute.”

Paul blew up his cheeks and nodded.

“Kathleen?”

Kathleen rose and gazed around the room with her electric blue eyes. “Our grandmother—”

I knew I was next, and I felt the ironic expectations of my father, who loved to see me on the hot seat. I never really believed it was the test of character he claimed.

“—brought to our family the highest standards of piety and family concern, especially as to her devotion to Holy Mary Mother of God.” Even knowing they’d been prepped, I asked myself where the two little hussies had come up with this chin music. I hadn’t long to think about it, though; it was my turn.

“Johnny?”

I sat dumbfounded, a weird tingling in my scalp. My father looked at me with a faint smile and my mother gazed into her lap. Both seemed to understand I wasn’t up to this. I had the whirlies.

“Why don’t you stand up?” Uncle Walter said gently.

I rose slowly, the tightness in my throat making speech impossible. A glance at my father revealed ill-concealed hilarity. Uncle Paul was waggling his empty beer at Constance, who stood in the doorway bearing down on me with her eyes. The cousins looked like winners. Only a brief picture of my grandmother rescuing me from this, which she certainly would have, allowed me to break quietly into inarticulate tears.

Uncle Walter smiled sadly and said, “Thank you, Johnny. That’s how we all really feel. You’ve done us all a big favor— thank you.” As I sat down, my father’s glance said he could hardly believe I’d pulled off this stunt. I could almost hear him saying, “Fast one there, M.B.,” or, “Smooth.”

Uncle Walter turned his gaze to my father but quickly looked away; my father was fussing with the napkin in his lap and plainly intended to say nothing at all about the passing of my grandmother. My mother stared at the side of his head, and I knew that in more private circumstances she would have been ready to raise hell. He surely knew ahead of time how brittle any words of tribute might have seemed. My mother’s family were great at seeing through things, and he wasn’t about to walk into a trap. Paul stood a carrot in the mound of his mashed potatoes and hummed “The Halls of Montezuma,” satire that seemed somehow directed at my father. Kathleen and Antoinette were still smirking at me for crying, and I consoled myself with napalm fantasies as their mother stood between them, urging them to clean their plates while tossing me an artificial look of bafflement that suggested I’d lost a step or two to her darlings.

As Aunt Constance turned somewhat loftily to return to the kitchen and another unwelcome course, my mother, always ingenious when it came to defusing tension with her chaotic sense of humor, asked, “Where you going, Constance?”

She stopped but did not look back. “To the kitchen, Mary. Why?”

“Wherever you’re going”—she pointed to the uncanceled first-class stamp affixed to Aunt Constance’s behind—“it’s going to take more postage than that!”

So we got some relief, and Constance could do no more than smile patiently through the laughter before continuing to haul food. The cousins were bouncing their heels on the rungs of their chairs, and I hoped their waning patience would undo all their prissy decorum. In the past I had seen their pandering, obsequious grins turn into frustrated rage in a blink — ballistic in pinafores — and I could wish for that.

“Gerry, tell us about some crimes.”

“Oh, Mary, nothing so exciting. Mostly just blocking jaywalkers with the horse. Ran down a purse snatcher on Sunday.”

“That must have been satisfying.”

“Yes, yes, it was. They slam into the old ladies to get the purses. We get a lot of broken hips, nice old ladies who might not walk again. When we catch the snatcher we take him up the alley and give him the same, couple shots with a paver.”

We all admired this.

“What’s the horse’s name?” I asked.

Gerry lit up. “Emmett. From a farm in Nova Scotia.” It was clear Gerry preferred Emmett’s company to ours. Embarrassed to reveal so much emotion, he ran his finger around the tight collar of his uniform. “Seventeen-hand chestnut,” he said in a choky voice.

“This is real food,” Paul announced. “It’s certainly not K-rations and, by cracky, she’s no international cuisine.”

“What d’you mean, international cuisine?” said my father. The rest of the family regarded him alertly. He seemed aggressive.

“Let me give you an example, Harold.” Paul bounded back with startling volubility. “I was taken to a French restaurant in the city of New York with, if memory serves, a five-star rating from acknowledged experts in the field, and I don’t mean Dun-can Hines. Because there were four of us, all friends, I was able to sample each celebrated entrée, and I can report to you without prejudice that they all smelled like toilet seats. It gave me the fan-tods. I prefer a boiled dinner.”

My father seemed ostentatiously bored. I had noticed the faint ripple of cheek muscles as he violently suppressed his yawns. His boredom became so pronounced it looked like grief and was probably taken for that. I knew better. I’d heard an argument start in his bedroom with my mother before dinner in which he stated that my grandmother was being “impetuously canonized,” a claim my mother made no attempt to refute. She just called him a son of a bitch. “Ah,” said he, “the colorful household vernacular.”

Uncle Paul began to wail at the end of the table. It was astonishing. He looked around at his family and sobbed, not bowing or covering his head and face. A theory about traditional keening may have lain behind this, perhaps giving it a somewhat academic tone that didn’t make it any less alarming.

“What’s the matter, Paul?” my mother asked softly, which only raised the volume. I’d never seen anything like this before. I was thrilled at this splendid racket. Uncle Walter stood and placed his hands on Paul’s heaving shoulders, giving them rhythmic squeezes, as the campaign medals tinkled. That seemed to calm Uncle Paul somewhat. Aunt Dorothy had begun a contrapuntal snivel, and Walter gently raised his palm for it to stop. Constance ran to the table with a glass of water, taking the position that Paul had something stuck in his throat. My mother held her cheeks, which streamed hot tears. Dorothy lowered the window, then the shade, and turned the Sunbeam fan up several notches until napkins began to flutter. Paul struggled to his feet, and Walter steered him slowly to the door as though fearing Paul would buckle.

My father jumped up and threw out an arm in Paul’s direction with startling emphasis, a mariner spotting land. “For Christ’s sake, tell him to pull himself together!” He was nearly shouting. There was something experimental in his exasperated tone.

Walter stopped, his back to us and his head bowed. He turned slowly, his head still bent, but when he was faced our way, I saw his eyes blazed.

“You would do well,” he said to my father levelly, “to mind your own business.” A terrible quiet followed.

Once Walter had steered a gasping, heaving Paul from the room, my father sat in the ensuing quiet and wiped his lips with his napkin in thought. “Exactly,” he said, as he rose and walked out of the room.

Constance soared in with the hot apple pie. I wondered why she always described things as being fresh from the oven, as she did again now. My mother had a terrific sweet tooth and fell on her slice with relish. Cocking her ear to a slight sound, she said, “He’s heading up the stairs,” and, at a series of thuds, announced,

“He’s packing his bag.” She began to race through her pie. At the last mouthful, she grabbed my hand and stood me up. “We’d better see him off, or we’ll never hear the end of it.”

It was a moonless night, and the three of us gazed into the trunk of the sedan. My father slung his leather bag in and gave the Evinrude a comradely wiggle, looked at us, and smiled at the shabby building behind. “Goodbye,” he said.

I thought my mother really had no chance to absorb the death of her own mother as long as my father was around. His general disapproval of her family and the ongoing need to argue about it must have drawn a veil over her feelings. I noticed too that though she had fallen nearly silent after my father’s departure, she was also more efficient now in getting things done around the house, cooking and cleaning. She went to Mass every day, St. Joseph’s, a short walk, and she usually brought me some little treat on the way home. She even had a carpenter come in to see to the sagging second-floor porch. Whatever tension was brewing between her and my aunt Constance must have come to a head, because Constance stormed out on her familiar slogan—“This is the thanks I get!”—and was not seen again before we left for home. Silence was not my mother’s strong suit, but we spent a nearly wordless day where the Westport River opened onto the sea, wading in the salt mud for quahogs. “This is what I loved best when I was a girl” was nearly all she said. The clouds on the horizon made a band of light on the deep green Atlantic, and the breakers that lifted and fell with such gravity might have drowned our conversation, if there had been any. We must not have felt the need.