CHAPTER FIVE
BETWEEN POP AND UNCLE TOM, AND THE SHEER QUANTITY OF alcohol they consumed, most of the time our house was something lost at sea, aimlessly floating and drifting, rocking gently back and forth like a cork in a bathtub full of gin.
It was an unholy baptism, Tom getting grotesquely drunk every month, submerging himself body and soul in the stuff, a full immersion, evangelical in its fervor, part of a weeklong ritual, passing out, coming to, drinking some more, passing out, drinking until his small government pension money ran out.
He kept his cash in a discarded peanut-butter jar under his bed surrounded by a moat of mousetraps, a familiar sequence of snaps, in quick succession, signaling his deposits and withdrawals. It was an intense operation. He used a cane to trigger each one, going in like a demolition expert. Bang. Bang. Bang.
“Tom must be doing his bang-king,” Pop said to Bing and me, eyes rolling upward in the direction of each tiny blast. It was early evening. We were in our mid-teens, sitting around the kitchen table eating an evening meal of vanilla ice cream, the only thing Pop knew how to cook.
“Look out, the world’s about to get shook. Bingo, there’s no choice, you’re going to have to sneak in there and take what’s left. You’re the only one allowed in the inner sanctum. If he insists on getting sloshed the way he does, he’s going to kill himself.”
Bing was trying to squirm out of it. He didn’t want to steal from the old reprobate even for a good cause.
“I don’t know,” Bing said. “It doesn’t seem right. He trusts me.”
“So you do have a conscience after all,” I said.
“I do not.” He frowned and, giving me the finger, headed up the stairs. Bingo resented any suggestion that he might possess character or integrity.
“You’ll need to stay hidden in the stable for a couple of days,” Pop said when Bingo, looking paler than usual, handed over the dough. “He’ll be gunning for you.”
“Here he comes.”
The stable was located on the acreage behind the house. I was perched at the window, eyes peeking above the ledge, as I caught sight of Tom and his drinking buddy Swayze heading in our direction, the pair of them making up an arthritic posse, not quite two men, more like front and ass ends of a donkey costume.
Before she married Pop, Ma was an equestrian, competing internationally, specializing in three-day eventing. She rode a big black Irish draft horse called Lolo, pidgin for crazy. He used to try to come in the kitchen, Ma encouraging and coaxing him all the way. No one else could go near him. Bing and I grew up thinking of him as a psychotic older brother, his teeth marks decorating my ass well into adolescence.
Bing, giddy, scared, and excited all at the same time, scrambled to hide himself under a pile of straw in Lolo’s box stall, Lolo mulling over a course of action, pawing the floor and snorting, tossing his head, thinking about turning in Bing for the reward. Lolo was staring at me, and I was staring back at him, hoping for the best—that horse had no moral center.
“Where is he?” Tom said, his face inches from my own, eyes taking on the color of malt liquor. “We’re here to perform a citizen’s arrest. He stole my money. He’s going to jail and he’s going to make full restitution.”
“I don’t know where he is,” I said, stepping away from him. “He’s probably with friends.”
“How would you like me to arrest you as an accomplice?” Tom said, grabbing the collar of my shirt.
“Uncle Tom, for crying out loud . . .”
“Swayze.” He turned to his tipsy deputy. “Cuff him.”
In the final analysis, there wasn’t much to choose between Pop and Uncle Tom when it came to their old buddy booze. “Those damn Dolan boys got me drunk,” Pop used to say to Bing and me—one way of explaining what happened on my fourteenth birthday when he crawled into a neighbor’s chimney, where he got stuck and passed out. He’d still be there except that Sykes, his white bull terrier, refused to come home and barked for hours at the roof in a high state of excitement.
I was the first to figure it out. Bingo scrambled up the eaves trough, waving madly when he reached the chimney, choking with laughter, shaking so he could hardly stand, and hollering that he’d found him.
“Pop says to call in the army,” he shouted. “He says he’ll need expert extraction. He doesn’t trust the locals to perform such a delicate operation.”
I argued for leaving him there permanently, but the nice old lady who owned the place wouldn’t be persuaded.
“It’s not right, Collie, he’s your father, and besides, think of the smell.”
“You’ve got me there.”
A few days later, Pop, a man of pure inspiration with a sanctimonious aversion to self-reflection, decided that Bingo and I were culturally deficient and needed exposure to the work of some of the great Irish playwrights. He also wanted to reward us for rescuing him from the chimney, so he took us into Boston to see a production of The Plough and the Stars.
For some mysterious reason, Pop hated restaurants. He loathed restaurants but loved hotels and longed to take up permanent residence in one.
“I could live in a hotel. As a matter of fact, I intend to retire to the city and live in a hotel suite, and then it’s a steady diet of plays, concerts, horticultural shows . . . no more homemade meals and nights in a rocking chair. Your mother is free to join me if she chooses,” he told us as Bingo scrunched up his face and looked at me, puzzled.
“Huh?”
“Crazy,” I whispered.
We roamed the old-world lobby of the Steinbeck, Pop turned out like the Prince of Wales, heads swiveling to look at him, everyone trying to figure out who he was—people always said he looked like a movie star. He was winking at every attractive woman in the place. We had dinner at Heliotrope, a formal dining room, where he got exasperated with Bingo for insisting on having a giant steak and nothing else. He just wanted one big, juicy steak on a plate. After we finished eating, Pop left us to our own devices in the lounge while he disappeared into the bar for an hour or so, looking like the Red Planet when he finally emerged, spinning wildly on his axis, his disheveled hair the victim of crazy weather patterns, toxic vapors spewing into the solar system.
Once at the theater, the other patrons cleared a path as Pop, leaning to the left and teetering to the right, attempted to find us our seats, loudly losing his temper with one of the ushers. It was at that point I began to scuff the carpeted floor with my shoe, focusing all my attention on the vast sea of cabbage roses under my feet.
The play was set to begin at eight o’clock. By quarter past eight, Pop stood up and hollered, “When will this performance begin?” as Bingo, thrilled at the commotion, looked over at me and giggled, field of freckles glowing against his pale skin, while I quietly burned away on a pyre of mortification.
At eight-thirty, Pop, radiating impatience, rose to his feet, shining like a beacon, and began to sing the Irish national anthem, his clear tenor voice ringing out like a church bell as stunned members of the audience shifted in their seats to stare, one giant set of eyes in one huge head on one enormous craning neck. Bingo was incandescent with joy and excitement, gasping and laughing, and me, well, I was somewhere on the ceiling looking down on the lifeless body I’d abandoned, pupils fixed and dilated, respiration and heartbeat ground to a skittering stop, skin the color of chalcedony, inner voice a dying squeak.
Bing adored Pop. As for me, well, Pop had a way of testing the fragile limits of my humor—there’s something about being a teenager and bringing your friends into a house where they’re met by a middle-aged man sunning himself in the living room window in February and bragging about his tan. All the while he’s wearing a skimpy bathing suit and scuffed black brogues with no laces, his ample stomach glistening, and he’s making elegant, expansive gestures with his long, perfectly manicured fingers, sporting sunglasses and a wide-brimmed lady’s straw hat, big turquoise chiffon bow tied under his chin.
“So much for the so-called experts who say you can’t get a tan through glass, well, I’m living proof the experts don’t know what they’re talking about. Everyone asks me if I’ve just come back from Florida. An hour a day in front of a sunny window is all you need to give Nat King Cole a run for his money.”
We were back at home—the embarrassment I endured at the theater days earlier still working its way through secondary skin layers—and I could hear Pop in the next room delivering one of his famous daily affirmations.
“Oh, my God, look at that,” Ma said. “Charlie, please stop talking such nonsense and step away from the window. Tom, come here quick before you miss it. Collie, you too.”
Ma got up from the sofa and stood next to Pop, who had his back to the window, as Tom slowly ambled in from the kitchen, feigning annoyance. Curious, I abandoned the TV in the study that adjoined the living room and joined the crowd gathered around the window.
Bingo and one of his favorite dogs, a young Leonberger called Mambo, were playing a game. There was a small tree near the stable with a single branch that extended for a long way and hung about seven or eight feet off the ground. Mambo was running to the tree and leaping into the air, twisting midway through his jump, a giant, growling, furry corkscrew. He clamped his teeth into the branch and hung there for a couple of seconds.
After repeating the same jump sequence five or six times, Bingo joined him, and then the two of them would take turns snarling and spinning and hanging from the branch; sometimes they’d even perform their little trick in unison.
I could hear Bingo laughing and Mambo barking, and for a moment it felt like fun, the four of us assembled around the window to watch, the sun pouring in.
“Say, this is better than a fireworks display,” Uncle Tom said as Pop chuckled and Ma agreed. Agreed! Ma!
“The woman is an aphid,” Ma said, interrupting the moment, confusing me with her remark. “She was born pregnant.”
It was then I realized that we were looking at different things. Ma and Uncle Tom were deep in discussion, enjoying a rare conviviality, sharing their mutual contempt for the woman down the road. The Conceiver, Tom called her. She had seven kids under the age of ten and was expecting her eighth. I welcomed her pregnancies since they tended to produce a sitzkrieg in the war between Uncle Tom and Ma.
“That creature sets the cause of women back by generations,” Ma said, leaning forward, squinting to get a better look.
“The size of her, she looks like a Guernsey,” Uncle Tom said. “It violates the laws of natural science.”
“Have a little respect,” Pop said. “She’s doing God’s work. What else are we good for except to repopulate the world? I consider the boys to be my greatest achievement.”
“I know, Charlie. I know. You are an absolute bore talking about it,” Ma said wearily.
“Having kids is nothing. Chimpanzees have kids by the barrel. I once found a toad inside a hailstone,” Uncle Tom said. “Now there’s an achievement.”
“Wow,” I said under my breath as Mambo and Bingo jumped, soaring so high that they seemed to touch the edge of the sky, Bingo’s triumphant hoot blending in with the noise of the seagulls and the calls of the blackbirds as they scattered from the adjacent trees and circled overhead.
“What’s that, Collie?” Pop said distractedly, looking my way. He and Ma and Uncle Tom were still focused on the Conceiver.
“Oh, nothing,” I said. “You missed it.”