You’ll notice I didn’t say “piece of brown paper” but merely “paper,” which was a product of my journalistic training to get at what is essential in the world.
The hiccups stopped immediately.
During her next hiccup attack I told Dana again, “Why don’t you put a paper behind your ear?” Hic, hic, hic.
“You didn’t say it right,” she told me. “You have to say ‘Why don’t you put a paper behind your ear.’” So I said it that way and the hiccups went away.
On our way to New York another attack erupted. I looked at her and said, “Why don’t you put a paper behind your elbow?” Very funny. Hic, hic. “Why don’t you put a paper behind your paper? … Why don’t you put an ear behind your elbow? …” Hic, hic.
“Say it right!” she screamed, and so I did, and the hiccups went away.
She got them later and grew furious when I failed to say “Why don’t you …” etc.; but I didn’t even know she had them. When I said it they vanished. Again, at a party, she had them and couldn’t get my attention casually, so she came over and said, “I have the hiccups.” And I said, “No you don’t,” and she didn’t. She got them again when I was reading, and I heard them and looked at her, and before I said anything they stopped, so we then moved into the postliterate control stage, where language no longer mattered.
Of course the news of this miracle cure traveled widely in our set and was widely disbelieved. The power of suggestion … drawing on the right side of the brain … belief in an authority figure … self-hypnosis, etc., were offered as facile explanations.
Then our friend Tom Smith developed an unbelievably loud and intractable case of hiccups at a party, underwent the sugar, water, fright, and other cures without effect, decided to ignore them and told a story, at which point they erupted so frequently he could not finish the story, a tragic event for Tom. And so Dana came over to him and told him to lie down on the couch. She put a piece of brown paper behind his ear and his hiccups went away.
Dana cured our daughter Katherine’s hiccups over the phone, and when our daughter Dana’s five-year-old son, Casey, was about to drink some sugar water to cure his, I said, “You don’t need that, Case. Just put a paper behind your ear.” And my wife said, “Yes, Case, why don’t you put a paper behind your ear?” And Casey looked at us in terror, on the verge of flight: my grandparents have gone bananas. But we only smiled and noted that he had stopped hiccupping.
Dana cured a supermarket clerk at the checkout counter, our friends took up the cause and cured themselves and their friends, and Vera Gagen declared, “It’s a movement!”
We were walking in Rome when Dana got the hiccups and when I looked at her she said to me, “Don’t say anything. I like my hiccups and I want to have them for a while.” And I said to myself, This is the completed circle. But I was wrong. Dana walked on ahead and I stopped to take a note on her behavior. She turned and saw me writing and said, “Oh no,” and lost her hiccups.
Last week Dana was all by herself when the hiccups arrived. She smiled and received them with great pleasure. Old friends, seldom encountered these days. She thought of paper but cleared her brain of it immediately in order to erupt for a while with diaphragmatic joy. Hic, hic.
“But then,” she said, “it all flooded back to me. Brown paper, ear, why don’t you …” And all by herself, without prompters, without casual hypnosis, without resort to the right side of the brain, or serious paper, she divested herself of windpipe occlusions.
Nevermore, alas, nevermore.
As for myself, I recall having hiccups only once during all this time and Dana cured them by saying you know what. But then I had an uncharacteristic sneezing attack—four is usually my limit and I had already counted sixteen sneezes—when Dana said to me, “Why don’t you put a paper behind your ear?” and the sneezes stopped immediately. I decided this had happened to me because I was on a self-imposed deadline to write this piece and needed closure that was still scientific but different.
Then late one evening I was telling Dana all the messages I’d received for us during the day and she yawned. I mentioned another message, she yawned again.
“I’m boring you with these messages,” I said.
“Not at all,” she said, and she stopped yawning. I then remembered another message and here came another yawn. I laughed.
“I’m not bored,” she said, “and stop saying I am.”
Yet another message, yet another yawn. Hilarious. But now she was furious at my laughter, and insisted vehemently she was yawning because she was tired and not out of boredom. I stopped talking and wrote notes on all this and she yawned throughout my note taking. I could not stop laughing, she could not stop yawning.
“Do you have any Tums?” she asked.
I gave her two and said no more and we both ended the evening with our mouths closed.
That ends the clinical part of this story.
My advice to newspapermen on the subject of courtship takes the form of a story that begins in 1956 in San Juan in the kitchen of a couple who were good friends of mine, and were also relatives of the very young and very beautiful dancer, Dana Sosa, who had just closed in a show on Broadway and had come to Puerto Rico to see her family. A party was arranged, a number of courtly males were invited, and, if I must say so, and I must, I was then in my courtly stage.
I was stunned by Dana’s beauty and, as soon as I could, I maneuvered her out of the large living room and into the small kitchen, where three was a crowd, four a mob. Soon I had the scene narrowed to two, Dana and me, and I was extolling her hair, her face, etc., told her I longed to know all about her life, on and off Broadway, and that since I was writing three columns a week for a newspaper in San Juan, why didn’t I write a column about her?
Dana, being a showperson not averse to publicity, agreed. And so I began my interview, which culminated in an extremely serious question four days later: How would you like to get married? To me. She took the question back to New York with her a few days after that, and in two weeks she was back in San Juan with the answer, which was: I’d like that. Twelve days later, thirty-six days after we met, we were married.
That was 1957 and ever since then she has been nagging me about that interview I never wrote. I insisted I’d write it one of these days, and so here it is, though it probably isn’t what she expected. But it is now May 1992, and we recently celebrated our thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, and her Broadway story (New Faces of 1956, Pajama Game, Me and Juliet), and her modeling and her magazine-cover-girl days, and her time with the Joffrey Ballet, and the fact of her enduring beauty, have been told scores of times. But has anyone ever written about her hiccups? Not until now.
This story is full of ironies, just like Robert Frost’s graveyard plot. Dana will now have to stop nagging me about the interview, and, through my three decades of private, dispassionate research, medical science has a vast new supply of data to analyze for the benefit of the human race. People always say that God works in strange ways, but so do newspapermen in love.
1992
Snapshots: Two Grandfathers
My grandfathers, George Kennedy and Peter McDonald, died before I was born. I came to know something of them through talks with my parents and other relatives, a few artifacts, death certificates and obituaries, and two photographs that defined them for me forever.
Both photos are working class portraits.
The portrait of George Kennedy is with three other men who are, I believe, from the Albany Water Department, these four pausing in their work on the granite blocks and water lines of an Albany street to pose with their tools: shovel, pickax, two-handed valve wrench, wheelbarrow, and George, second from left, holding a prybar. George has a stubble of white whiskers in the photo, looks hunched and grizzled, and was probably near the end of his life. He is wearing a vest and a gold-plated chain for his pocket watch. I inherited the chain, perhaps also the watch, but I can’t be sure the watch was his. The chain is functional, th
e watch (whoever owned it) doesn’t work.
George had come to Albany at age twenty in 1880 from County Tipperary, worked as a laborer, and risen to become yardmaster at the George H. Thacher & Co. foundry, which made railroad carwheels for the New York Central Railroad. He eventually brought over two of his brothers and two sisters, who all settled in Albany. He died in March, 1923, of lobar pneumonia at age sixty-three. His wife, Hannora Ryan (remembered as the sweetest of women, and who came from the next town over from George in Tipperary), had died in February, 1896, also of lobar pneumonia, at age twenty-nine. My father, William, said she never recovered from the birth of his sister, Mary, some months earlier.
The Kennedys lived on Van Woert Street, a long, almost solidly Irish block at the edge of Albany’s Arbor Hill, but considered part of North Albany, when my father was born in 1887. They later moved to a house next door to an ice house and, in 1890, when my father was three, somebody torched the ice house, the Kennedy house burned with it, and they lost everything. George moved from yet another home on Lawrence Street so my father wouldn’t have to cope with the horse and carriage traffic when he went to school, and, finally, he moved back to Van Woert Street and stayed there.
In George Kennedy’s photo with the work gang, his days of authority as yardmaster are behind him, as is his time as foreman at the Rathbone, Sard foundry (five hundred men employed, among them my father, who did piecework as a stove mounter but quit when the wages per piece dropped from $1.35 to $.55). The iron and steel business went west toward the coalfields, and the coal stoves my father was mounting were made obsolete by the advent of gas. The times turned against George Kennedy and in his late days he was again a simple laboring man.
I have a younger photo of George with his daughter, Mary, taken in 1917 when she was twenty-two. George is at his social best: clean-shaven, hair tidily combed, wearing a dark suit, striped shirt with white collar, dark tie, and the watch chain. He looks strong, is square-jawed and handsome in this photo, but there is a grimness to his mouth and his eyes are sad. He lived the last twenty-seven years of his life without his sweet wife, without a woman in the house, except when one of his sisters came by to clean the place. He could not raise the baby Mary and also work, so he raised only my father, a wild, electric boy who was nine when his mother died. Hannora’s maiden sister raised Mary until she married.
The street photo of George came to me from Mary in the 1960s, and I was so moved by it that I thought of having it blown up to poster size as a way of advertising my origin; but that seemed as pretentious as trying to deny an origin, and so I let it go unsung until now, when the chance to write about it thrust me into a search of the family archives, and led to my first conversation with Mary Craig Hurley, eighty-nine, who is almost my in-law, and who lived on Van Woert Street, directly across from George.
Mary remembers George from eighty years gone. She sees him about 1912, when she is nine and he is fifty-two, at a Van Woert Street house party—“all of Van Woert Street would be there”—and again at the annual clambake in Donovan’s backyard; and George is always dancing and singing “The Stack of Barley,” an Irish reel.
“He did a marvelous dance,” Mary said, “and he had a good singing voice. I remember the words that he sang: ‘Oh my little stack of barley was the cause of all my misery …’ He was a wonderful man, a good-livin’ man.”
I am sure George Kennedy knew my mother’s father, Peter McDonald, who was born in Albany and lived on Colonie Street, a block away from Van Woert.
Peter’s photo, which hung in reverential space in our kitchen all my early life, is with a train and track crew, all standing with Engine 151 of the Central. (Everybody in the family played 151 when Clearing House, the numbers game, was vogue.) Peter is fifth from right, handsome, wearing a stylish scarf under his jacket and overalls, the only man in the photo so garbed. Swift Mead, an old-time boxer and saloon keeper, said of Peter: “He was a dressed-up guy, always with a clean uniform. A hard-workin’ man.”
Peter began as a laborer and rose to become passenger locomotive engineer on Engine 151. He was given a medal for making a record-breaking run with the Twentieth Century, the Central’s greatest train, from Albany to Buffalo. The medal has been lost and the record of the run I haven’t yet found. But I believe it was a true record, for his children, my mother, Mary, my uncle Peter, and my aunt Katherine, would not have invented such braggadocio.
Peter fathered five children, two of whom did not survive infancy. He took sick in April, 1916, the sickness lingered, and he died in January, 1918, of pleural pneumonia and myocarditis at age forty-three. His widow, Annie Carroll, the only grandparent I knew, lived with us, and helped raise me. She died of complications after a stroke in 1951. I can’t remember her mentioning Peter, but I believe they had a very good marriage.
I inherited Peter’s scuffed black leather wallet in which he kept a record, during his illness, of his 107 visits to and by an Arbor Hill doctor, Marcus D. Cronin. In the last seven days of Peter’s life Dr. Cronin came to the house twice a day. The doctor bills came to $96, which my grandmother eventually paid in two installments, in May and December, 1918. At the time of Peter’s death, both of his daughters were working in an office, and supporting their mother and rambunctious young brother, Pete. I have very few memories from any of the three about their father. They were effusive in their love for him, but his death was four decades gone when I began to ask questions. I did inherit that wallet and his railroad pass for 1913, and military enrollment papers for World War I; also a postcard he sent to my mother in 1913 when she was at Camp Tekakwitha on Lake Luzerne in the Adirondacks. “Howdy toots,” he wrote her. “Don’t get drowned.” He said he was taking an engineer’s exam Monday and he signed it P.A.P.
A clipping with his obituary was also in the wallet. “Mr. McDonald was stricken with an attack of pleural pneumonia about six months ago and it greatly weakened his heart. He had made a wonderful fight against great odds for the past four months, but his condition had been gradually growing worse up to yesterday when his heart finally gave out.”
They don’t write obits like they used to.
The photographs of Peter and George are close to being terminal images: George, old in his sixties; Peter in his prime, at his career summit, a few years from a wasting early death. If you block off the chin stubble George looks like my father. As is, Peter looks like his son, Peter. My father inherited from George the love of song and dance (he was a prize waltzer), and Peter and his sisters inherited the wit that kept me laughing all my life. Neither inheritance shows up in the photos, but what is there are starting points for a continuity of family and meaning. These men—widower and widow maker—are emblematic of what their children became, and of what they passed onto us, the next generation: a veneration of ancestors, an appreciation of the working class, a bemusement with genetic gifts.
We really can’t know how guardedly, how limitedly they lived, any more than they could have imagined life in the Space Age. Even my father didn’t believe it when men walked on the moon. “You damn fool,” he told me, “you can’t get to the moon.”
The streets and houses and people my grandfathers knew, the jobs they held—most are gone now, or obsolete. But George and Peter aren’t. There they are, standing for their portrait photos, offering up the gift and the challenge of creative memory. They look into the camera and say to us, “We were, now you are.” Anything after that is found gold.
1992
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The author herewith extends his gratitude to the editors of the publications in which the articles in this book originally appeared, first for the work they originally gave him, and second for the chance to see the work in print a second time.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The idea of publishing a collection of my interviews, book reviews and other nonfiction writing is more than twenty years old, but other work always took precedence over it. The problem lay in the beginning: how to find the time to wade
through a lifetime of writing and come up with what had survived, what had died on the shelf. Last year an erstwhile newsman, constant reader and good pal of mine offered to do the wading; choices were then made, and so the book began to take shape. For that reason I am most grateful to that early editor, Joseph F. Gagen.
I must also tip my hat to Al Silverman, venerated bookman and my splendid editor at Viking.
About the Author
William Kennedy (b. 1928) is an American author and journalist. Born and raised in Albany, New York, he graduated from Siena College and served in the US Army. After living in Puerto Rico, Kennedy returned to Albany and worked at the Times Union as an investigative journalist. He would go on to write Ironweed, Very Old Bones, and other novels in his celebrated Albany Cycle, and earn honors including a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and a New York State Governor’s Arts Award.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Some of the selections in this book first appeared in the following periodicals: The Atlantic, The Carillon, Esquire, GQ, Life, Look, The Miami Herald, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mirabella, National Observer, The New Republic, Newsday, Quest, The Recorder, San Francisco Examiner, The San Juan Star, and Vanity Fair.
“Jiggs: ‘What’s the Matter with Father? I Saw Him Drink Water’” was originally published as the introduction to Jiggs Is Back by George McManus, Turtle Island Foundation. “The Making of Ironweed” appeared as “(Re)creating Ironweed” in American Film and later as the introduction to the book The Making of Ironweed, Viking Penguin. ‘The Capitol: A Quest for Grace and Glory” was published in The Capitol in Albany, photographs by William Clift and Stephen Shore, Aperture. “Baseball at Hawkins Stadium: ‘Here’s Your Son, Mister’” first appeared in The Birth of a Fan edited by Ron Fimrite. Macrnillan.
Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction Page 52