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We still jump when we hear a key pushed into a lock, hard, snap to the right, slight pause, door pushed open with a warning creak. Even the memory of that sound makes us jump.
It was the herald of his arrival back in the house. Late at night, mid-dinner, middle of a sit-com, Thanksgiving meal, Christmas Eve. Any time we heard that sound we braced. And waited.
Sometimes we held our breath and said a quick prayer, like Oh God. Sometimes the moment passed with a few grunts while he hunted in the refrigerator calling out: Any grub? He would retreat to the basement where he’d listen to music or play his guitar. If he plugged into his amp, a fight was sure to ensue if Mom or Dad was home. If no parent were home, then the whole house was his, no matter what the rest of us were doing. He’d turn up the amp or the stereo. Sometimes the windows would rattle. If we complained he’d accuse us of being as bad as Mom and Dad—square, that is, and too stupid to appreciate good music.
But that was years ago.
Gene was invited to our youngest brother Gerry’s home this past Thanksgiving, the brother who was just a toddler when the climate shifted in our family. We had been a happy full house of six brothers and sisters and two parents who seemed cut out for the baby boomer ideal. Mom stayed at home while Dad joined the parade of people who worked in ‘the city’ striding down our block to the Long Island Rail Road station. He worked for the City of New York as an attorney, earning enough to send us all to Catholic school and get us around in a station wagon.
This Thanksgiving was different because our father had a stroke in the beginning of October and our schedules, our lives, revolved around visiting him, hoping for small signs of improvement while waiting to hear that another stroke took him in the night and he was gone. Seven weeks of waiting and visiting and anticipating were wearing on all our nerves.
Gene called Gerry’s house from the nursing home where he was visiting Dad and asked for a ride, but he called when everyone was getting ready to sit down, when it was most inconvenient on this Thanksgiving evening. He got directions for the train, but he never made it. He couldn’t awaken our father and he couldn’t manage to get to his brother’s house for dinner. So he went home, back to the city from Long Island, back to the room where he lived alone.
If truth be told, there was a small sigh of relief. There had been too many years when his absence from a family holiday gathering meant that for the moment we could eat, breathe, pretend, while we waited for him to turn his key in the door and then all pretence at peace would be gone. His presence meant fighting, yelling, angry silences, maybe broken dishes. The rest of us would slip away, up to a cold bedroom to read a book, escape from the fractured fairy tale that Norman Rockwell didn’t bother to paint. No, he spent that Thanksgiving evening in the nursing home, trying to talk to his father, feeling his last real connection to his family was leaving him and his loneliness would be complete.
In the early years, though, before any of us were out of elementary school, the Thanksgivings and Christmases were good. We had the grandmas and great-aunts and a great uncle over. All six of us would be dressed in our Sunday clothes, the house filled with the smell of roasting turkey. Dad would mix Manhattans and we would serve cheese and crackers to our silver-haired family and they would re-tell stories of their youth. Uncle Charlie always cast himself as the Tom Sawyer of turn-of-the-century Brooklyn and all the ancient women, exuding a sweet scent of powder and perfume that must have been issued with the grandmother shade of red lipstick, would call us ‘dear’ because they couldn’t keep our names straight. We would laugh at Aunt Loretta’s red polished toenails squeezed into the open toed shoes that may have fit her once upon a time, but now her more generous feet were squeezed into obedience. Family history was passed down, so naturally, so easily. Later, Gene worried that the six of us would end up separated, only seeing each other occasionally on holidays, like my parents’ brothers and sisters, like all the children who grow up and start their own families. He was afraid of that.
Gene was the oldest child of a beautiful dark haired couple. Women told the young father he resembled Tyrone Power, movie star of the 1940s, and his lovely wife held herself, slightly aloof, slightly above the crowd, like a model, an actress, an enigma. He was a beautiful baby, with the dark Irish look of his parents, black hair, pale skin, beautiful blue eyes. And so intelligent. And talented. A musician, an artist, a student. A thinker. A rebel. And, like the Irish rebels of every generation, a questioner, a troublemaker, a rabble-rouser. When God was dispensing gifts to this child, he forgot to add the one talent that would have smoothed these traits over: the charm the Irish have developed to keep their adversaries on their toes, and the lasses smiling. No, his brutal honesty was never tempered with amiable propositions. He had no patience for phonies, for pretenders, for Philistines. He had no patience for weakness and stupidity. He had no patience for the ordinary concerns of life. He had no patience for us.
And so he was alone.
He told my older sister MaryEllen and me in those weeks since the stroke that he was very depressed about watching our father look like he was going to die, look so helpless. He predicted that when Dad died that would be the end of the family. He was upset that Dad was talking to our mother, who had died nearly four years before, as if she were there in the room with him and to our grandmother, who died more than forty years before. There’s reality and there’s unreality, and I don’t like it that Dad is living in unreality. It was not remarkable that he was depressed about our father, but it was remarkable that Dad’s stroke marked the first time in years that he said a civil word to either MaryEllen or me.
Over the years our father, who acted like he put logic first, emotions a lonesome second, had come to the point where he wept easily. He spoke of the importance of affection, of connection and of paying attention when you felt things, knew things, outside the realm of empirical evidence and facts. Its like receiving radio waves when someone is in real trouble, he said to me when we talked about times when I had known when my own children were in trouble and when his mother felt in her own body when he was shot during World War II, and you have to act on those feelings and not dismiss them. In the days before this Thanksgiving, defenses that had been crumbling over the last decade were being swept away.
Dad was extra solicitous of Gene since the stroke. He asked his sister to get a message to him. In the halting speech left to him he confessed to our aunt I could be mean sometimes. Let him know I’m… ‘Sorry’ seems to be what he meant, and my aunt conveyed this to Gene, leaving a message on his cell phone. ‘Sorry’ was not a word in my father’s vocabulary. Gene had a difficult year medically from a bleeding condition and heart problems, in and out of hospitals, in a great deal of pain and danger. Our father understood that with this stroke and with Gene’s medical history, either one of them could go soon.
Was it a testimony to a parent’s love that no matter how prodigal a child had been, how divisive and destructive, a parent would always take him back; try to pull him into the folds of the family? Just because. Because he was one of us. Because he was my father’s son. But our father would not claim any moral high ground in his role as father of the prodigal, because in many ways, it was too late. This son, this brother emitted an almost electric warning to be on guard, keep your distance, there is something contagious here, a void of suffering none but the brave dare encounter. The estrangement of this son, this brother, over the years, was a failure of understanding, of parenthood, of family.
Our middle brother, Peter, got the call from the police on the Wednesday morning after Thanksgiving. Gene was reported missing by co-workers. The police broke in to the Single Room Occupancy hotel he had lived in for years, New York’s way of keeping the lonely off the streets and hidden from view of the rest of us. He was lying in a pile of clothes, no bed in sight, surrounded by expensive guitars, a brand new laptop, a couple of thousand CD’s of the jazz musicians he studied and played in his head, his fingers often moving along the neck of an invisible guitar as he walked alone. The room had one light bulb, bare. It was dark and dirty and reeked of the pain of one who had alienated himself from his family and nearly everyone else over forty long years of fighting and ideology and wiring gone wrong. His pale skin was swollen, distended and black after five days of lying alone. The coroner listed his race as Negro. He had often told people he was ashamed of being white, because, he said, it was the white races that caused all the trouble in the world, all the unfairness and hardship. I think he would grin at the coroner’s designation, achieving in death what he could not achieve in life.
In life he spent his professional career working for city agencies that helped the homeless, crime victims and children whose well-being was endangered by parents and poverty. In life, he supported homeless shelters and women who couldn’t free themselves from the clutches of loan sharks, drugs and sometimes prison. In life, we learned at his wake from a woman he worked with, who seemed to understand him, he befriended women who had been abused and molested. His strong protective instinct could come into play only after years of subjecting his family to his own particular form of terrorism and abuse, both physical and psychological. We who were afraid of him for too many of our growing-up years discovered that his redemptive work was carried out in the shelters and streets of New York, far away from the little house we once shared. The black sheep became the good shepherd.
He started life as the delight of his parents. They married in the Catholic Church promising to have as many children as they could bear, as many as God would send them. After five years of marriage they had three children, by their tenth anniversary, five, and by year 14 a much wanted and loved sixth child. By no means a feat compared to other such families, but still, a respectable showing of fecundity and faithfulness. Gene was a protective big brother to us and our grandmother remarked that he would look out for traffic when they crossed busy streets, he the guardian seven-year-old keeping her safe from aggressive cars. Our parents, thinking this son smart and wise beyond his years, asked twelve-year-old Gene to be the youngest son’s godfather.
He taught me how to do the Twist while Chubby Checker played on the radio in the very early sixties when I was little bigger than a toddler. My young mother, with her thick dark hair, watched as we danced, drying her hands on a kitchen towel as she finished up the dishes. She clapped along and smiled brightly as we moved to the music, twist down, twist down to the floor, then up again, laughing, singing and doing it all again ‘til the song was over. Gene carried the bigger world of music and the rapidly changing culture into our home. He brought us the Beatles when he was in the eighth grade and I in the first. We listened to Meet the Beatles over and over so by the time Ed Sullivan introduced them to America we could sing all the songs, almost as excited as those screaming kids in the audience. The following year Gene’s band, Pickles in the Barrel, covered the Beatles and Dave Clark Five, the Kinks, the Animals and the Rolling Stones at the World’s Fair in the New York Pavilion. There they were, singing into the mike, just like Mick Jagger I Can’t Get No Satisfaction. We sat in the front row, all smiles and excitement, thrilled to see our big brother on stage playing guitar and singing with his band.
In 1964 Gene started at Archbishop Molloy High School, proud to be attending the best Catholic boys high school in Queens. Competition for seats in this school was strong from the baby boomers vying for entrance. It was a bit of a jolt when he got to Molloy because all the other boys were also top of their classes in their elementary schools and now all those smart kids had to scramble for placement.
The Marist Brothers were a tougher bunch than the sisters he had in St. Clare’s. When one of the brothers raised a hand he had the muscle to knock the boys around. He complained of Brother Ludwig, the Dean of Discipline, as a bully. Gene had detention almost every day of high school because he couldn’t seem to get out of the house on time. He’d run down the block, hair wet from a hasty shower, black raincoat and skinny black tie flapping, just catching the bus that would get him in a few minutes late each morning. He went to some dances, got a few phone numbers, but he never had a girlfriend. There was growing sense of anger surrounding him, his laughter was now sardonic, aimed at the foibles of those he considered less than: less intellectual, less sophisticated, less hip, less worthy. When he was a sophomore, the grandmother who thought he was wonderful, a young version of his father, her young guardian, died of a stroke. He had spent many weekends with her and she called him ‘sweetie pie’. Hers was the first real death of his life.
We joined a beach club one of the summers Gene was in high school, but after a few times out with us he declined to come. There was a group of teens that listened to the Beach Boys and they always seemed to be having fun, the kind of teens that Gidget and Annette Funicello might hang out with. They were tan and athletic; the girls laughed and the boys showed off. Not a place my fair-skinned intellectual brother belonged.
He started to skip mass during his high school years. This was a mortal sin to my parents and their generation, something worth fighting over. Not only for his own salvation, but because he was the oldest, the role model for the rest of us. How often had priests and nuns and the Catholic culture driven home the point that if your children fall away from the faith, nothing else you have done as a parent matters? This was a wedge that opened the door to the rest of his rebellion and disdain against the middle class, against the establishment, against anything conventional.
He was an uncomfortable fit in the world. The more time that passed the more rude and lewd his comments toward girls and women became. He’d embarrass us when department store brochures came in the mail, leering over photos of the women in the lingerie ads, pronouncing all women prostitutes. Mad magazine was a staple and at some point he started leaving Hustler in the living room and in the bedroom he shared with his two younger brothers. His talk and his behavior grew angrier over the years from high school into college. He did not want to leave home to go to college; he commuted to St. John’s, our father’s alma mater, a bus ride away.
He started college in 1968. He grew a beard, of course, like so many eighteen-year-olds. He switched majors from English to Psychology. Young men his age were being drafted. He had a student deferment and also a medical deferment because of his bleeding condition, which he wouldn’t talk about. One more thing to make him odd in a world where fitting in would have made such a difference. College girls didn’t warm to him any more than high school girls had.
By the time I was in the seventh grade and he was in college he began directing his lewd comments my way—noticing out loud that my adolescent shape was developing, sounding more like a stereotypical construction worker than an intelligent college student. By eighth grade I learned to play dead at night when he would come into my room and tickle me, annoy me, try to get me to wake up. I practiced not reacting both as protection for myself and to avoid another scene between him and my parents, who seemed oblivious to the sexual attention he gave me, but were ready to explode whenever he was at the center of any disturbance. Those fights were just a breath away, and no one wanted to be the one to set one off. I learned to get up in the morning, dress quickly and get out.
We came home for lunch during elementary school. One spring day I was in the kitchen with my younger sister and brother. Gene and my mother were in the basement. There was yelling. More yelling. The three of us sat frozen at the table. Gene used language toward my mother that I had only heard from him, words that my mother had never heard. Words no son should ever call his mother. Then, we heard this other noise. Fist hitting face. Mom came up the stairs, shocked, holding her cheek, swell rising under her palm. He continued his verbal assault while we three youngest kids were almost sick with fear. We didn’t know what this fight was about—it didn’t matter. Anything could set it off: laundry, music, dirty magazines in the house, attitude. We returned to school and pretended nothing happened. One more thing we were not supposed to talk about.
I’d come home from school to find my mother sitting in the living room or the kitchen nursing a cup of tea, silent. Once in a while we’d talk around the subject of Gene, talk around the hurt and confusion, wondering how things had come to this. I think she spent her days when everyone left the house barely able to move, crying, praying, confounded. Her child had become so full of rage, had removed himself so far from what she and my father expected of a son. She never revealed that she took any blame for this; it was all his doing. She didn’t seem able to see the kind of pain he was in, the pain of feeling that his parents did not love him, that whatever he did was a disappointment. She told me she thought Gene got the wrong parents, parents who didn’t understand music and rebellion. But Gene got the right parents; he took after both of them in his stubbornness and righteousness. They created a triangle of immovable objects that the rest of us had to learn to avoid. I wanted to tell her to just go and hug him, smile at him when he comes home, praise him once in a while. But I was mute.
On my mother’s birthday during one of those dark years, she pronounced that after much thought, she couldn’t, she wouldn’t, change. Change had to come from us, that it was our job to conform to her, and to my father. I sat at the table, remnants of birthday cake in front of me, hoping I would never be so stubborn as to refuse to change, to refuse to understand things in a different light.
But, change came. There was no leniency from any of them. The five younger kids were stuck between blaming Gene and trying hard to ignore that it was not all his fault. He was the scapegoat, the black sheep. All the responsibility to change was on him. But he wouldn’t change any more than our parents would. He was as stiff necked as they on all subjects that for some reason held higher value than love. Their ideology on religion, politics, control, and freedom were mirror images of each others, though they bristled when any one pointed out how alike they were. They’re going to do the same thing to you, they’re going to try to control and manipulate you. Just wait, he warned. No, I’m not like you; it will be different with me. I was to remember my protest to his prophecy in the coming years.
I wondered how the family could hold together after he threatened to beat up Dad and we all gathered around him, protecting our father as we were unable to protect our mother. Or when he ripped the kitchen phone from the wall when a fight escalated to threats to call the police. I wonder if it would be easier to deal with a death than to keep dealing with this, my mother said to me that terrible night. I sat up with her in the living room, just the two of us. All these years later I don’t know if she meant her own death or my brother’s. I would never ask her to clarify. I hoped some of the relatives could see what was going on in our house and rescue us.
Many mornings Mom didn’t get out of bed. More headaches. More days when we’d come home from school, breakfast dishes still in the sink, Mom lying down, unable to move. She’d retreat for a while and we’d tiptoe around, making excuses to friends as to why we couldn’t play at our house. A few times Mom would land in the hospital with heart problems. Broken heart problems that came through as chest pains, floppy valve syndrome, exhaustion.
Dad went to work every day, no matter how he felt. Or how Mom felt. Evenings often meant meetings at some organization that needed his attention, like the Democratic Club, the Holy Name, or the Catholic Lawyers.
Some expert told my parents that a form of excommunication would be an effective tactic to use on Gene to get him to conform to life in our family. So we were instructed not to speak to him. The logic of cutting off a son, a brother, who was in so much pain and so obviously lonely made no sense to me. His face was a mask of anguish. So I talked to him. Or listened. Listened as he talked about death and how frightened he was, talked about wanting a real relationship with a girl, not just sex like all his friends wanted. I was young, twelve, thirteen, fourteen. I didn’t really know what he was saying, I just felt bad for him. He expected me to understand things that were way over my head or experience. He expected way too much. One morning as I was reaching for a box of cereal, dressed in my tweed uniform skirt and blue blazer, Gene was sitting with a coffee cup getting cold on the table. He said he needed to talk to someone; he needed to talk to me. I told him that he needed someone professional, someone who knew much more than I did. He told me that he loved me more than anyone else ever could. Something in me froze. All his comments, innuendos, and inappropriate behavior of the last few years, I could no longer slough off. I was afraid, afraid for my life, for some part of my existence. I had to pull away. I was fourteen years old.
MaryEllen, my oldest sister, suggested family counseling. This was rejected. No one who thought he knew more than my parents was going to pass judgment on our family, on their parenting. They did not want to ever have to apologize or admit they were wrong. They didn’t want to hear how the fighting with Gene was hurting us all, how the energy directed there stole from the rest of us. The family was going down in a sea of denial, stubbornness, and blind anger, and we were supposed to pretend everything was okay.
Each of us pulled away in our own attempts at survival. Our father had his meetings and his work. Some of us had school and social lives. Some retreated inward and were unable to move forward, stuck somewhere between childhood and adulthood. All of us seemed to be waiting for the day that would never come when our family life turned, like Cinderella’s pumpkin, into its better self.
I went on with my own life. I married, had children. Eventually we moved across the country. The move got us away from scrambled family life. Living in the past had become a bad habit, with its attendant addictions of anger and blame. I was glad for the chance to get my children away from the tensions, but, still, I missed something.
I missed the connections, I missed the good times, because, of course there were good times, when our guard was let down, when we could just be, when the tension was at low tide. I missed when my family made a fuss over my small children, when we could laugh about the fun things we did as kids, little things and silly things. I missed the family that could have been, the family hidden somewhere beneath the messy cover of things gone wrong. I missed the family that I wanted, the family of promise and potential fulfilled, I hoped, on another track, in an alternate universe that exists within us.
My mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s soon after I moved. I’d go back for visits to see how they were doing. With this condition of forgetfulness, my mother was softer, long since over having her children conform to some template of perfection she held up for us in the early days. Three of my siblings had not moved and they were well into middle age. There was so little progress with their lives, but the clock kept ticking, marking fortieth, forty-fifth, fiftieth birthdays and still, the same address. My parent’s age was obvious. My mother’s forgetfulness, my father’s increasingly crippled back. Gene, who had been expelled from the house years earlier, would come home and sleep on the living room floor on weekends. He would only talk civilly to my father and occasionally to my brother Peter, as long as it was about guitars and music. When my oldest son became a musician Gene would talk to him. A favor conferred. The rest of us he ignored or was very rude to.
Once in a while when my mother would fall as her illness progressed, Gene would help pick her up, he spoke a little more kindly to her, but then he would pull back, retreat to the familiar role of angry son, years out of date. Over the years, both he and my father mellowed, had come to a mutual respect and caring that was demonstrated in small ways, in tones of concern, in conversations of respect for what they shared: intelligence. He brought books and articles on politics, religion and economics, to share with my father, but those topics he chose were all they could converse about. He respected my father for his sharp mind and would only relate intellect to intellect. Anything deeper was off limits.
After my father’s stroke the six of us pulled together, the first time in years. We sat down for a meal and discussed what each of us could do to help Dad. Tensions were not eliminated, but they were greatly reduced while we had this purpose higher than our own complaints to focus on. Gene spoke to me, to my sisters, more than he had in years. The one brother he had been close to, he pushed away almost violently. It didn’t make sense, but we figured we had time, time to start talking over the course of Dad’s treatment, time to weave other parts of life into conversations to make our relationships more normal, more like a family. There was a glimpse of the brother he could have been, could still be. A glimpse of the siblings we could be to each other, the family we might still be capable of. But our time was up.
That last night, that Thanksgiving spent alone, traveling from his father’s bedside to the sad little room he called home, did he see or think anything that would bring a smile to his face, a light to his heart? Did he see a little child sleeping on his mother’s lap, a little girl playing with a doll on noisy, dirty train? Did an old woman acknowledge his presence and remind him of the grandmother who called him “sweetie pie” so many years ago? Did he know what was coming in just a few hours? Did he sense that his heart, broken over the years, would just stop beating that night? Perhaps his mother sat by his side as he went to sleep in the pile of clothes that was his penitent’s mat. Did she soothe his forehead and hold his hand, like he needed her to? Did he apprehend that the fierceness of a mother’s love transcends any breach? Did he finally understand that his father wasn’t out of touch with reality when he spoke of seeing her in his room? That reality is bigger than our tight imagination and faith, even if it’s not your own, can pull you through any darkness?
And now our father, nearly immobile in a bed in a nursing home, speaks to his oldest child as if he is there in the room. He asks for him, he misses him. Gene has died, but still, at times, our father speaks to him. There’s reality, and there’s unreality, and now my brother lingers between the two.
Sometimes Gene sits with me while I drive down to Dallas and listen to my son’s CD, listen to him play the guitar, that’s my baby boy, isn’t he good? I ask my brother, looking for common ground, looking for something to launch all those discussions we didn’t have, but could have if, if we had more time, if we weren’t all so thick headed, holding to old roles of defense and offense. If. If we were a little less protective and a little more vulnerable. If we were a little less afraid, had a little more faith. I believe in the communion of saints, and in the communion of the not-so-saints. I want to believe that there is still time, time to raise a toast to the family that we could have been, the family of our better selves. Sláinte!
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