The curtain rises on our
stage. Looked at from the street, Comedy and Tragedy are relatives, who—for reasons
of economy—live side by side.
For now, all you really
need to know about the characters depicted in the unfolding drama is that two
families have been cast here by Fate. The set consists of a duplex dwelling
that was converted from a carriage house early in the twentieth century. Our
family purchased their property in 1970, the year my brother was born. We live
on the left, at number 139, my grandparents on the right, at 137.
On the right side, you will
see a victory garden. It is less ambitious than the one tended by Mr. Crockett
on PBS, perhaps, but full of treasures nonetheless: cucumbers, peppers,
rhubarb, carrots, parsnips, tomatoes, onions, and chives. This is where I dug
up a crusty dime minted in 1857.
Beside the garden, there
is a pleasant patio full of potted plants, all sheltered by a large corrugated
aluminum awning. Here, men with aquamarine anchors tattooed to their hairy
forearms are invited to smoke—veterans of campaigns in the Pacific—exiting with
a discrete cough through a side door.
They would never be left
alone with their cigarettes, however. They were always attended by my
grandfather. He would excuse himself from the living room like this,
“If all you gals are going to do is gossip,
I’m going outside to smoke with Jim.”
“Francis, one of these
days, I am going to hit you over the head,” my grandmother would hiss.
Francis was not a smoker
himself, or a drinker, or a veteran of anything, actually, except for my grandmother’s
rolling pin, Chinese Checkers, and the vinyl chloride vats of Goodyear.
(Enlarged heart, flat feet, 4F. Sorry, son.)
It is possible that—in
revenge for the rolling pin—my grandfather broke my grandmother’s nose at the
time of The Cuban Missile Crisis: the fatal day when Florence snuck up, leaned
over Francis’ silent figure, and she shouted, “Boo!” as he was dozing on the
davenport.
I don’t think any malice
was intended. From the way my grandmother rolled her eyes when he told the
story, I gathered that he accidently struck her in the face with his fist when
she frightened him out of his wits.
Violence would have been
completely out of character for him, if not for my grandmother. She was a
different sort of person. Florence once threw a croquet mallet at my mother as
she ran out of the happy home they inhabited during the Eisenhower years.
When I asked her why
anyone would want to throw a croquet mallet at her, my mother looked up from
the jaws of the ceramic shark she was painting (a bank, a future Christmas
present for me, it turns out) and she said that she didn’t know. She said that she
was a perfect child. She invited me to ask my grandmother about the incident.
I stomped out of the
kitchen and ran across the yard. I rang the bell (which I never did) and my
grandmother answered the door. She was pickling beets. Her hands were red. She
led me up the back stairs.
“Why did you ring the
bell?”
“Why did you throw a
croquet mallet at my mother?”
She turned and bent and squinted
and looked me straight in the eye and she said very solemnly,
“Because she deserved it.”
Having been spanked with a
wooden spoon by my mother on more than one occasion, I could accept that. I sat
down on the steel and rubber step stool my grandmother used to reach the upper
shelves in her pantry —where she kept mason jars—as she decanted a can of Spicy
Hot V-8 into an orange juice glass. She gave it to me and went back to stirring
her cauldron.
My grandmother might have
made a spectacular witch, if this were a fairy tale. Too bad this is Niagara County.
We have no witches here, as far as I know. Or fairies.
No, my grandmother was
just a terrible shot and she had no sense of timing: the mallet crashed through
a pane of glass in their old screen door instead of hitting my mother. (I also
adore Spicy Hot V-8 juice and did as a child.)
My grandmother will die of
a stroke in church. My grandfather will succumb to cancer twenty years earlier,
while I am holding his hand.
With that same hand—on a
rickety gardening table, beside the clean blade of a spade my grandmother used
for transferring her plants to larger pots—he would habitually place a chipped
ashtray decorated with tiny, indeterminate flowers. On the reverse side, the
glaze bore the legend, ‘Made In Occupied Japan.’
This was the one ashtray
that my Uncle John refused to use. He preferred another one, one that my
grandfather generally reserved for his butterscotch candy wrappers.
For some reason I could
never fully fathom—maybe because he had a reputation for being more ornery than
everyone else—the only visitor allowed to smoke in my grandparents’ house was Uncle
John, a recently retired shoe salesman. I loved him for that. When he insisted,
nobody resisted.
As you can imagine, the
day Uncle John died was something of a disaster.
After dinner, I heard the
phone ring in the kitchen. I followed the fluttering apron tail of the comet my
grandmother formed as she whizzed by me—as she tripped, running up the stairs,
shouting,
“Dad, Dad!”
When she was forced to
complete her climb by crawling on her knees, bawling like a baby, I almost
laughed. I had never seen an adult behave like a child before.
I thought my grandfather
might have agreed. I am not sure that he did. He stood—dentureless—in a pair of
periwinkle pajama bottoms and a V-neck T-shirt on the second floor
landing—trying to make sense of things.
He was getting ready for
work. Third shift.
“Ma, Ma, what is it?”
He lifted her gently by
her elbows from where she knelt. While I am sure it only took a few seconds, it
seemed like an eternity had to pass before my grandmother could gather her head
together sufficiently to blurt out,
“Oh, Francis, John is
dead. He had a heart attack.”
I had no idea what a heart
attack was, but it sounded pretty serious to me—even worse than death.
I dropped the chain of
multicolored plastic monkeys I had painstakingly connected on the carpet and
was about to dispose of in their home—a brown plastic barrel.
Suddenly, I felt like
crying, too.
I had no idea what was
going on. Uncle John had never died before. Nobody in our family had ever died
until that day—not to my knowledge. What are you supposed to do under such
circumstances?
Once my grandfather had
inserted his clean teeth—grimacing in the mirror, pressing a thumb against his
upper plate, making sure it was sealed against his gums strongly enough to
resist the forces of gravity and permit difficult conversations—he closed the
door.
I plopped down on the
stairs where my grandmother had collapsed. I heard a tap gushing into the sink.
He emerged a few minutes later, clad in a pair of dark slacks, a white shirt,
and a sea-gray acrylic cardigan with a black Greek meander design dancing up
both sleeves. He smelled ever so faintly of Barbasol.
After making a few quick calls,
my grandmother drifted off to her bedroom, sobbing again, selecting something
suitable to wear to my aunt’s. My grandfather tied Kyle’s shoes while she took
her turn in the bathroom.
He shepherded us next door and explained the
situation to my mother, before driving my grandmother to stay with her sister,
Aunt Midge, and then on to work. He always kept an extra set of work clothes in
the trunk of his car.
As I had already eaten
dinner with my grandparents, I rejected the trembling dish of goulash that my
hysterical mother offered to calm me down. My brother was not a liver fan, so
he may have sampled some. That, I don’t remember.
I was confused. What did
the death of Uncle John mean for the blackberry bushes that grew next to his
garage? Would Aunt Midge allow me to continue to pick them? Would the owners
dim the pink and blue neon bowling ball at Rojek’s, two doors down the street
from the chilly house with the lemon trim where Uncle John had lived? Would
Principal Baker order the flag at Grant Elementary School to flap at half-staff
for a few days? Would President Ford address the nation? What kind of future
did I have to look forward to? Would there be nuclear war?
I wanted answers. Unable
to articulate my actual desires, I asked for a windmill cookie instead. Only my
grandfather ate those, of course, and he was carefully backing down the
driveway, trying to avoid the swing set he had once almost demolished with his
Buick. In other words, we didn’t have any windmills in our house. Or answers.
By way of a compromise, my
mother peeled a Ho-Ho and placed it on a plate, still half-wrapped in tinfoil.
It rolled to the edge, paused, and then rolled back to the middle, glittering
at the center of the Cosmos like a gilded turd.
I didn’t want a Ho-Ho. I
was told to stop being a brat or go to bed. I opted for brattiness and went to
bed. It was already after 8:00 p.m., anyway. I saw no reason to sit in the
kitchen and sulk.
The next afternoon, a whisper
in the funeral home informed me that my favorite uncle had passed away peacefully
on his porch, napping beneath the North
Tonawanda News, after eating a basket of fish and chips at Arthur
Treacher’s.
Mom did her best to
console us. Out of the air, she plucked a pen that seemed to be swinging rather
too freely in space and time from a chain of brass BBs fixed to a pulpit. She
signed for all three of us: Edwin, Kathleen, Eric and Kyle. She laid the pen to
rest in the shadowy valley between the pages of the Visitors Book before she
led us to Uncle John’s casket.
Dad was at work. Mom said that
he would be dropping by to add his name to the book later.
