“He has all those jobs,” Maddy said.
“Those jobs don’t pay much,” Coyle said. “And it’s expensive here. And then there’s the house. We rent it. It’s being sold in the fall. Mom and Dad were saving to buy it, but you need a big lump of money to buy a house. But now they’re going to have to use that money for the IRS.”
Maddy looked between Coyle and me, only half understanding.
“When this house goes on the market in the fall, if we can’t buy it, and someone else does, we’ll get kicked out,” Coyle explained. “Mrs. Dobbs, who owns the house, offered to let us buy it. But we need the down payment. It’s seventeen thousand dollars. Dad had the money. But now we have to pay the IRS instead.”
“Are you sure?” I said.
“They’re talking about it right now,” he said. “Listen.”
We could hear the murmur of voices below, Dad’s voice rising, getting louder.
“How long do we have?” I asked.
“Three months,” Coyle said. “If not, we’ll have to move. Not that I care. We probably should move anyway. We’re too poor to live here.”
“What’s poor?” Maddy said.
“Didn’t you know?” Fergus said. “Poor is us.”
* * *
—
The next day Mom explained the situation to us as gently as possible. It was just like Coyle had said. We had been saving money for a down payment in anticipation of Mrs. Dobbs putting the house on the market, but now some of that money would have to go to the IRS. But it wasn’t hopeless. We had most of the summer to make up the deficit. If we all worked and pitched in she thought it was possible that we could raise the money, but only if we saved every penny. Our plan for the summer was to have everyone work together so we could stay in our house in Seneca.
We all agreed to help, though there were varying degrees of dedication to this plan. Coyle was indifferent. He didn’t really care if he went to New Trier or some other school. Wherever he was, he figured he’d play ball and get A’s. I was more invested in staying. I had just made the tennis team. I had my friends. I said I’d donate all my salary from my job if we could stay. I said if Coyle didn’t want to help, I would try to do double. Coyle gave me a withering look. In his mind, no matter what the situation, I always had to make it into some drama and competition.
“We’re proud of your dedication,” he said.
“Enough of the bickering,” Mom said. “We all need to pull together. And I need you two to be on your best behavior tomorrow with your grandmother. She could alter the situation significantly.”
“Will she help?” Maddy asked, and Mom got a sullen expression.
“What do you think?” she said.
* * *
—
Granny Bernice, my father’s mother, was a tight-fisted, cautious, lonely, spiteful woman who’d inherited a small fortune from her father. That inherited money in Bernice’s tight fist was a dream of future riches for our father, and at least once a month we piled into our rumbling, half-broken-down station wagon and drove across sprawling western Chicago to her yellow-brick house on Sacramento Avenue. We never felt more suburban than on those visits to the Southside, which was foreign territory for us, with its small stoops, American flags, chain-link in the backyard with dogs barking all up and down the block, all punctuated by Bernice’s pointed, sarcastic Southside manner.
“My house might not be all fancy like you’re used to, but at least I own it,” I’d heard her say about eighteen times.
On our visits we’d mow her lawn and clean her gutters, paint the fence, organize the garage, change storm windows, and do whatever else she wanted us to do, and at the end of the visit, if she was pleased and in a good mood, she gave Dad some money, usually two or three hundred dollars, which was a lot for us. But if she was in a bad mood, she berated my father for having four kids and for moving to the fancy suburbs with his college-educated wife and not being able to afford the life he led.
On this day, early June 1981, a week after the IRS guy showed up at our house, we drove to the Southside to do Bernice’s favorite chore, which was cleaning her parents’ mausoleum at the Lithuanian National Cemetery. Stukas was her maiden name. She had dumped her Irish husband after a few years, and ever since, Bernice hated the Irish. She hated that we had an Irish name. She hated that Mom’s maiden name was Kelly. She hated that Mom had raised us as Catholics.
I was considered to be the one most likely to please Bernice, as I was the “best talker,” and I was also not as instinctively loyal to the nuclear family, which Bernice appreciated. On that day, as soon as we arrived, everyone else was sent to rake leaves and I stayed with Bernice at the mausoleum.
“Oh, you clean in five minutes what takes me an hour,” she was saying as I polished the marble. “I’d think you wouldn’t know how to do it, you living in that fancy place, with all the luxuries.”
“Yeah, it’s all maids and butlers at our mansion in Seneca,” I said. “You should come by sometime, see how fancy it is.”
“Listen to you,” she said. “Making fun of your granny.”
“Caviar and country clubs for us in Seneca. And when we’re not playing golf we’re eating oysters and brushing down our ponies.”
Granny Bernice waved a hand at me.
“Oh, you’re making fun, but I know the easy life you live in that fancy place. And you never come to visit Momma and Papa. Look at this marble. Dirty tree dripping sap all over it. Dirty birds flying over. And no one to clean it. I tried to cut the tree. That gardener came running. He watches me now. He knows what I’m planning.”
A dark shape with a wheelbarrow near the stone office for the cemetery—the gardener did seem to be watching us.
“I try to scare the birds away, but when I come back I find shit on the steps. Shit on the sidewalk. They were in the road last week. I pretended I didn’t see them as I drove up. Oh, look at you with your wide eyes. Think your granny’s a saint.”
“I don’t think that,” I said.
“Well, good for you, Willie, you’re the only honest one in the family. But you won’t help me. Not how I need it.”
Granny Bernice’s station wagon was pulled up on the curb in front of the mausoleum. The middle seats were pushed flat. The back held a bag of birdseed.
“Those dirty birds are always shitting on Momma and Papa. Always coming around here, making a nasty mess.”
Furtively, Granny Bernice took a box from beneath the front seat, tore off the top, and dumped the entire contents into the birdseed. It was rat poison. She twisted the neck of the sack with the birdseed and poison and shook it.
“Papa never had a blade of grass out of place on our lawn. Never a crack in the sidewalk. Once I painted the wood board between the bathroom and the hallway. He always stepped over that board. Never on it. Because he had respect for work. Now I got the tree, the birds, sap and shit on the marble. Papa doesn’t deserve that. But I can’t do it on my own. And you and your father come once a year to help.”
“We come every month.”
“Not to the cemetery,” she said in a maudlin tone. “I try to do the right thing, but that gardener’s always giving the evil eye. He’s not gonna look at you, though.” She nudged the sack of birdseed toward me. “Go on. You want to help your granny, give that to those dirty birds.”
Coyle came up behind us with the push mower.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
“I’m killing the birds,” I said. “Granny Bernice put poison in the birdseed. The birds shit on Momma and Papa,” I added.
Coyle thought I was kidding at first.
“Go on,” Granny Bernice said. “You can help Willie.”
“I’m not helping him poison birds,” Coyle said. “That’s just stupid.”
“You’re weak,” she said to Coyle. “Just like your
father.”
“Yeah, you’re weak,” I said. I lifted the sack. Since Coyle said he wouldn’t do it, I figured I would, particularly if Granny Bernice was going to keep calling him weak for not helping. “I don’t care,” I said. “I want to.”
Coyle gave me a skeptical look.
“Are you really going to poison birds?”
“Sure,” I said. “If she wants me to.”
Coyle raised his fist like he’d hit me. I just looked at him.
“What?” he said. “You deserve to be hit. You’re being an idiot.”
Bernice laughed with gleeful maliciousness.
“Are you doing it or not?”
“Watch for the gardener,” I said to Coyle, and walked off with the bag of poisoned seed slung over my shoulder. I went down the hill to a small pond where the geese gathered. They saw me coming and started toward me. They must have been accustomed to being fed. They were squawking and twisting their necks and flapping their wings. They jockeyed with one another and waddled closer. I put a gloved hand in the bag and ran it through the poisoned seed. I dropped a handful of seed in the grass. The geese moved to snap it up. I reached for another handful and felt someone coming. It was my father. He closed his fist around the neck of the bag.
“Is there really poison in that?”
“Yeah.”
Dad got an exasperated look and swatted me.
“Have some sense, Willie.”
Dad jerked the bag from my hand. He kicked at the geese so they flapped away. He dumped the seed in the trash. We walked back to the station wagon. Bernice was waiting for us with a derisive expression.
“You’re weak,” she said to my father. “It’s always been your problem. You and all your children are weak. That’s why you fail.”
“Sure, Mom. Whatever,” Dad said. “Thanks for the pep talk. Grandfather John wouldn’t have wanted you to kill birds. You know that.”
“Careless and weak,” she said. “Learn how to support your family.”
“Get in the car,” Dad said to me.
A minute later all of us sat waiting while Dad and Bernice argued, Dad defending himself and trying not to beg for money, and then begging a little, and Bernice berating Dad for being a failure, for putting himself in the position to lose his house. Mom sat in the passenger seat, looking out the window.
After a few minutes, Dad walked back to the car.
“Did we get the money?” Maddy asked.
Coyle laughed. So did Fergus. Dad didn’t answer. He put the car in drive.
“We should have poisoned the birds,” I said.
“We don’t poison birds for money,” Dad said.
“It was us or the birds,” I said. “What’s more important?”
“We’ll find another way. We’re Brennans. We do what’s right,” Dad said.
As Dad drove, Mom kept looking out the window. I’m not sure she didn’t think it would have been better to put the poison out and get the money for the house, but if she thought this, she didn’t say it.
* * *
—
The next week Dad took a temporary renovation job and got the maintenance contract for a second building on Central Street in Seneca. If we finished the renovation before the end of the summer we would have enough money for the down payment, but it meant we would have to work crazy hours over the summer. There was the janitor work and the renovation work and the paper route in the morning, and Dad was also teaching tennis about fifteen hours a week and he was supposed to be writing a thesis for his teacher’s certificate. He was sleeping three hours a night, at best, and the rest of us weren’t sleeping much more. It was our summer of drudgery. But I have to admit that along with the endless work there was also a sense of camaraderie and accomplishment. We kept tabs on how much money we’d made. We watched the savings accumulate bit by bit. And there was a feeling of satisfaction in thinking we were all contributing. More than anyone else, I was invested in those moneymaking schemes. I bragged to my friends that I had to work to help buy our house. I walked around with ripped jeans covered in paint speckles, talking about the down payment like I knew anything about it.
“Typical Willie,” Coyle said. “Always a fucking drama.”
In his view I’d spent my freshman year hanging out with Robert Dainty, pretending I was a rich kid. Then suddenly I was acting like I was some street urchin out of a Dickens novel. I think I single-handedly convinced Coyle to get a haircut because he saw how ridiculous the blue-collar affectation was on me.
So the summer passed. We all worked all the time. And for a while it seemed as if we would save enough to buy the house, but in the end there were the normal setbacks that always seemed to happen to our family. The car broke down and needed a new water pump and then the IRS demanded an additional payment, and there was interest on our debt that Dad hadn’t expected, and by the time school was approaching it became clear that, despite all our work, we weren’t going to make it. In the last weeks of the summer there was a sense of diminishing enthusiasm as we understood that our sacrifice had come to nothing. And then one day in August, the week before school started up again, Dad drove into the driveway towing a sailboat.
* * *
—
“What is that thing?” Fergus said.
Coyle, Fergus, Maddy, and I had all gone out to the porch. Dad got out of the car, grinning.
“It’s a boat,” Dad said. “It goes in the water. Often they float.”
“Apparently, not this one,” Fergus said.
He walked down and put his hand through a rotted part on the hull.
“Big deal,” Dad said. “That’s why we could afford it. We put on a little fiberglass. Some patching. Then we have ourselves a boat. You guys worked hard all summer. We’ll fix it up. We’ll learn how to sail.”
Coyle, Maddy, and I had followed Fergus down and were looking up at the old, battered but pleasing sailing vessel.
“I guess we bought this with all our spare cash?” Fergus said.
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” Dad said. “It’ll work out. And you kids deserve it.”
Deakins, one of our neighbors, wandered over, tugging a hose. He was a red-cheeked Irish guy, dean of a Catholic high school. He stopped to look at the boat.
“What is that? A yacht?”
“Sure. Why not?” Dad said in his most casual manner. “I just figured the kids are old enough now to appreciate something like this.”
“You’re getting fancy!” Deakins yelled. “We gotta get you a little captain’s hat.”
Dad beamed. That’s exactly what he had in mind.
The front door burst open and Mom appeared. Deakins turned away, pretending to water his garden. Mom walked up.
“What have you done?” she said.
“I got a boat. For the kids. They worked hard all summer. It wasn’t expensive.”
“Alex,” Mom said in a warning tone.
Dad made a puffing sound.
“Doesn’t really matter at this point, does it?”
“It does matter.”
“Come on. It was fifteen hundred dollars. It’s not going to change anything. And the kids worked hard. Look at them. They’re excited.”
Truthfully, we were more bewildered than excited.
“We cannot afford this,” she said.
“What’s it matter? We’re not making the deadline. And now we have a boat.”
“We’ll be living on it soon,” she said.
“We can if we have to,” he said with enthusiasm.
Mom gave him her famous withering look.
“And where did you plan on putting this monstrosity?”
“In the backyard,” he said. “Until it’s in the water. Which it will be soon. The kids deserve it,” he said again. “And I already paid for it. You kids wa
nt a boat, right?”
“Definitely,” Fergus said. “But I want one that works.”
Coyle looked worried, same as Mom. He was old enough to know it was insane. “What about you, Willie? Do you want a boat?”
“Sure,” I said. “But not in place of a house.”
Mom turned and looked at Dad.
“See?” she said.
“It’ll work out,” he said. “And it’s done, ok?”
Mom always made a point of not arguing with Dad in front of us, so without another word, she went inside.
“She’ll get used to it,” Dad said to us.
“Not sure about that,” Coyle said.
* * *
—
All through the next month, whenever there was a nice day Dad and the rest of us clustered around that boat, fixing it up. It was a Hughes Cruiser, a sloop with a rounded rudder and a rust-colored hull and a white deck. Dad worked on the rotten part of the hull. He cut away the damaged area and applied wax remover. Then he put on the Formica, the fiberglass fabric, and the resin. He applied the gel coat and the seal-up, and filled in cracks. Meanwhile, the rest of us repainted the deck, revarnished the exposed wood. We all understood that the house we were living in was going on the market in a month and we could be evicted at any time, and we knew that if we got kicked out of that house it was very, very unlikely that we’d find another house we could afford in Seneca or anywhere else in the New Trier school district. Our imminent departure from the fancy suburbs loomed on the horizon, but on the other hand, we had that boat, and that was a consolation. Mom viewed the boat as the concrete representation of Dad’s impracticality, but for the rest of us, particularly for me, it was something nice that we worked on together. I became as invested in the rehabilitation of the boat as I’d been in working for the down payment on the house. I brought my friends over and talked about sailing it to Mackinac Island and taking it on a “crossing” to Europe. Other kids at school heard about it and exaggerated its size and worth. One day Robert Dainty, who hadn’t talked to me for six months, walked up to me and said, “Hey, Brennan. Is it true you got a boat?”
The Brother Years Page 12