Page 52 - WTP VOl. X #6

Oh You Can’t Get to Heaven (continued from preceding page)
“Yes?”
“Mind if your pop sits there?” It seemed all wrong, him sitting on the back stairs. He looked tired and sorry, but still edgy enough to flare up again, and still drinking from a nearly head-less glass of beer, the way he liked it. I couldn’t quite understand what he was talking about, something about sailing and tacking against the wind. He had pretty, almost girlish lips, but a big, slightly crooked nose that had been broken. It was a family joke, the different ways it got so big: he fell on a lumber pile when he was a kid; he broke it playing football. Or did he break it more than once?
“Don’t pick your nose,” he warned when catching us in the act. “You wanna get a nose as big as your father?” Or he’d say, “You like eating snots? We could give you a plate of boogers for Christmas.”
It was my father’s brand of humor. Such was his sober side, a kidder yet still domineering, his nose jut-
ting forward aggressively, daring someone to break
it again, his size 13 feet thudding on the floor as he walked. But he could also be dreamily entrancing, re- calling his days sailing on Lake Michigan or describ- ing the latest Ellery Queen mystery he was reading.
Whenever he talked about Ma, she was always “your wonderful mother” or “your lovely mother.” His rhap- sodies wrapped her in a gauzy aura of saintliness, and that became my usual way of seeing her.
But if he worshipped her, why would I find her crying by the coal bin in the basement? Why was she afraid to go out in public because he’d given her a black eye? It all mixed up with those stories of the martyred saints so revered by the nuns who taught us cat- echism and pious lessons in life at school.
McKinley Boulevard was where I became conscious of how often explosions rocked my family. Pa would slap my mother, kick her, punch her, throw her to the floor, and we watched her take it. Once he threw a pewter cup at her and she was quick enough to duck. The thick oak beam it hit was left with a per- manent gouge.
One minute Pa was raving about what a talented ath- lete Ma was as a young woman. She was good at ev- erything, swimming, baseball and tennis. “And hockey and Lacrosse” we kids would add, yukking it up. And the next minute he erupted with a violent assault, knocking her off that pedestal.
We were all on guard for changes in Pa’s mood, and 45
his choice of swear words was a barometer of the prevailing emotional winds. It was “goddamn son- of-a-bitching bastard” when he was maddest, with “goddamn son of a bitch” less angry, “goddam it” a further step down and “son of a bee-atch” his unique creation that offered less to worry about. Only
when God was damning things did everyone make themselves scarce, though there was soon a call for “Anne!” which inevitably meant she needed to solve or be blamed for whatever problem had arisen.
When Pa was sober, we could laugh at the “holes” in his head, the two places where his brush-cut hair receded the most, leaving a Mohawk-like advance at the center, echoing the forward-thrust of his nose. When Pa was jolly with drink, he’d respond to kidding with a roguish “Oh, I’ll give ya the back of my hand.”
But the joke had an ominous undertone, for we often saw that phrase in action, even when he was sober. Sitting in the back seat of the Packard, we might sud- denly get smacked by the back or front of his hand, whichever got there more easily, because we were too loud.
“Oh, Irv, not the face,” Ma said. He turned to her: “You want it, too?” That shut her up, and the kids stifled their crying, for fear of triggering another outburst. We all shrank into ourselves, as Pa’s expanded pres- ence seemed to suck all the air from the car.
In the sudden silence you could sense conflicted feel- ings in him, pangs of regret mixed with smoldering anger at us for provoking him. He wanted to be bet- ter, but we made him do it, dammit.
We kids never discussed these incidents, even by ourselves, which Pa dismissed as one of those times he “blew his top.”
And Ma never revealed her feelings, always seeking a secret place to cry.