Moonchasers and Other Stories

Bless Us O Lord

I usually think of Midwestern Thanksgivings as cold, snowy days. But as we gathered around the table this afternoon, my parents and my wife, Laura, and our two children, Rob and Kate, I noticed that the blue sky and sunlight in the window looked more like an April day than one in late November.

“Would you like to say grace today?” my mother said to four-year-old Kate.

Kate of the coppery hair and slow secretive smile nodded and started in immediately. She got the usual number of words wrong and everybody smiled the usual number of times and then the meal began.

Dad is a retired steelworker. I remember, as a boy, watching fascinated as he’d quickly work his way through a plate heaped with turkey, sweet potatoes, dressing, cranberry sauce and two big chunks of the honey wheat bread Mom always makes for Thanksgiving and Christmas. And then go right back for seconds of everything and eat all that up right away, too.

He’s sixty-seven now and probably thirty pounds over what he should be and his eyesight is fading and the only exercise he gets is taking out the garbage once a day — but he hasn’t, unfortunately, lost that steelworker’s appetite.

Mom on the other hand, thin as she was in her wedding pictures, eats a small helping of everything and then announces, in a sort of official way, “I’m stuffed.”

“So how goes the lawyer business?” Dad asked after everybody had finished passing everything around.

Dad never tires of reminding everybody that his youngest son did something very few young men in our working-class neighborhood did — went on to become a lawyer, and a reasonably successful one, too, with downtown quarters in one of the shiny new office buildings right on the river, and two BMWs in the family, even if one of them is fourteen years old.

“Pretty well, I guess,” I said.

Laura smiled and laid her fingers gently on my wrist. “Someday this son of yours has to start speaking up for himself. He’s doing very well. In fact, Bill Grier — one of the three partners — told your son here that within two years he’ll be asked to be a partner, too.”

“Did you hear that, Margaret?” Dad said to Mom.

“I heard,” she said, grinning because Dad was grinning.

Dad’s folks were Czechs. His father and mother landed in a ship in Galveston and trekked all the way up to Michigan on the whispered rumor of steel mill work. Dad was the first one in his family to learn English well. So I understood his pride in me.

Laura patted me again and went back to her food. I felt one of those odd gleeful moments that married people get when they realize, every once in a while, that they’re more in love with their mates now than they were even back when things were all backseat passion and spring flowers.

Of course, back then, I’d been a little nervous about bringing Laura around the house. Mom and Dad are very nice people, you understand, but Laura’s father is a very wealthy investment banker and I wasn’t sure how she’d respond to the icons and mores of the working class — you know, the lurid and oversweet paintings of Jesus in the living room and the big booming excitement Dad brings to his pro wrestling matches on the tube.

But she did just fine. She fell in love with my mom right away and if she was at first a little intimidated by the hard Slav passions of my father, she was still able to see the decent and gentle man abiding in his heart.

As I thought of all this, I looked around the table and felt almost tearful. God, I loved these people, they gave my life meaning and worth and dignity, every single one of them.

And then Mom said it, as I knew she inevitably would. “It’s a little funny without Davey here, isn’t it?”

Laura glanced across the table at me then quickly went back to her cranberry sauce.

Dad touched Mom’s hand right away and said, “Now, Mom, Davey would want us to enjoy ourselves and you know it.”

Mom was already starting to cry. She got up from the table and whispered, “Excuse me,” and left the dining room for the tiny bathroom off the kitchen.

Dad put his fork down and said, “She’ll be all right in a minute or two.”

“I know,” I said.

My six-year-old son, Rob, said, “Is Gramma sad about Uncle Davey, Grandpa?”

And Dad, looking pretty sad himself, nodded and said, “Yes, she is, honey. Now you go ahead and finish your meal.”

Rob didn’t need much urging to do that.

A minute later, Mom was back at the table. “Sony,” she said.

Laura leaned over and kissed Mom on the cheek.

We went back to eating our Thanksgiving meal.

Davey was my younger brother. Five years younger. He was everything I was not — socially poised, talented in the arts, a heart-breaker with the ladies. I was plodding, unimaginative and no Robert Redford, believe me.

I had only one advantage over Davey. I never became a heroin addict. This happened sometime during his twenty-first year, back at the time the last strident chords of all those sixties protest guitars could be heard fading into the dusk.

He never recovered from this addiction. I don’t know if you’ve ever known any family that’s gone through addiction but in some ways the person who suffers least is the person who is addicted. He or she can hide behind the drugs or the alcohol. He doesn’t have to watch himself slowly die, nor watch his loved ones die right along with him, or watch them go through their meager life savings trying to help him.

Davey was a heroin addict for fourteen years. During that time he was arrested a total of sixteen times, served three long stretches in county jail (he avoided prison only because I called in a few favors), went through six different drug rehab programs, got into two car accidents — one that nearly killed him, one that nearly killed a six-year-old girl — and went through two marriages and countless clamorous relationships, usually with women who were also heroin addicts (a certain primness keeps me from calling my brother a “junkie,” I suppose).

And most of the time, despite the marriages, despite the relationships, despite the occasional rehab programs, he stayed at home with my folks.

Those happy retirement years they’d long dreamed of never came because Davey gave them no rest. One night a strange and exotic creature came to the front door and informed Dad that if Davey didn’t pay him the drug money he owed him in the next twenty-four hours, Davey would be a dead man. Another night Davey pounded another man nearly to death on the front lawn.

Too many times, Dad had to go down to the city jail late at night to bail Davey out. Too many times, Mom had to go to the doctor to get increased dosages of tranquilizers and sleeping pills.

Davey was six months shy of age forty and it appeared that given his steely Czech constitution, he was going to live a lot longer — not forgo the heroin, you understand — live maybe another full decade, a full decade of watching him grind Mom and Dad down with all his hopeless grief.

Then a few months ago, early September, a hotel clerk found him in this shabby room frequently used as a “shooting gallery.” He was dead. He’d overdosed.

Mom and Dad were still working through the shock.

“Is there pink ice cream, Grandma?” Kate asked.

Grandma smiled at me. Baskin-Robbins has a bubble-gum-flavored ice cream and Mom has made it Kate’s special treat whenever she visits.

“There’s plenty of pink ice cream,” Grandma said. “Especially for good girls like you.”

And right then, seeing Kate and my mother beaming at each other, I knew I’d done the right thing sneaking up to the hotel room where Davey sometimes went with other junkies, and then giving him another shot when he was still in delirium and blind ecstasy from the first. He was still my brother, lying there dying before me, but I was doing my whole family a favor. I wanted Mom and Dad to have a few good years anyway.

“Hey, Mr. Counselor,” Dad said, getting my attention again. “Looks like you could use some more turkey.”

I laughed and patted my burgeoning little middle-class belly. “Correction,” I said. “I could use a lot more turkey.”