Piper

by John E. Keegan

  “You look like a skinhead,” Dad told me next morning, which I knew from his moral compass was the wrong direction to go. That night, he called me downstairs and I could tell by the narrow set of his eyes that something was wrong. “I’m taking you to see Father Tombari,” he said.

  “I’m fine, Dad. Some people are doing tattoos and rings in their lips. It’s just a kid thing.”

  For the next several nights, I could hear his footsteps on the stairs and see his shoes darken the crack under my door as he checked up on me, which I obliged by taking long audible breaths until the full length of the crack lit up again.

  Dad was the one we had to worry about. Besides his longer hours at the paper, he’d taken to fixing himself a drink when he came home—gin, vermouth, and marinated onions. He didn’t even measure the ingredients, just glugged them into a glass, and swigged them down. Nor was his drinking confined to the house. One night a police car pulled up and two policemen practically had to drag him up the sidewalk to the front door. Next day I found out he’d gotten into a fistfight at the Comet Tavern when someone asked him if it was easier to keep track of his wife’s whereabouts now.

  Some days he seemed to revere her memory, like the night I heard rustling in the attic and found him sitting on the floor in his underpants and socks surrounded by rows of family photos. One morning I came down for breakfast and he was out back stoking a fire in the barbecue grill that turned out to be Mom’s brushes and oils. Later, I noticed he’d hauled one of her unfinished canvasses out of the attic and hung it in their bedroom. He put paintings up and took them down, sometimes both on the same day.

  I couldn’t blame him for wanting to stay away from the house. Every room was marked by her absence—the candle chandelier over the dining room table, the bean bag chairs in the living room she’d saved from college, the unframed canvas over my bed of the wobbly fawn in the long corridor I’d chosen as my own while she was still alive. Dozens more unsold paintings leaned like dominoes against available walls throughout the house.

  I didn’t know if it would help more to talk with Dad about her or to totally ignore the subject. I thought we should be making visits to her gravesite, kneeling and wailing together on her stone, but as far as I knew Dad hadn’t gone out there since we buried her. He certainly hadn’t volunteered her name in a conversation, which was unnatural because it was obvious she was the main thing on his mind.

  Through notes I’d left on his bathroom sink, I tried to plan meals together and then he’d come home late and I’d eat alone anyway. He was always at the newspaper or a city council meeting or school board and I was usually in my room reading. “The best stories never break on day shift,” he told me. I wanted to scream at him for acting as if nothing had happened, but what was the use? We were practically strangers to each other and, without Mom, we’d lost our broker.

  You’d have thought I had bird shit on my head the way everyone stared at me the first day back at school. I wanted to interpret their silence as respect for the dead, thinking they couldn’t criticize me without criticizing her. Even though Dad’s newspaper article had finessed around the deeper implications of the story, the sheer horror of how she’d died had rocked everyone back on their heels. For some, the drowning had made her a martyr. The grace period at school, however, was short-lived. Behind locker doors and in the cafeteria line the grapevine bristled with thorns.

  “She had hinges on her heels,” someone said.

  Condon Bagmore at least had the temerity to speak to my face. He was the kid who’d lost an older brother when his chute didn’t open while skydiving at Harvey Field. He was one of the people I’d thought of when Mom died. I couldn’t ever look at Condon Bagmore without thinking of how his brother had died, but rather than soften him the loss had made him bitter. I’d always been attracted to Condon in grade school, and not just because of the wavy Adonis locks that slipped over his forehead like honeysuckle. He had a rawness that refused to be haltered.

  I was on my way to sociology class and the crowd around Bagmore was blocking my path. There was always a crowd around him, the kids whose lot in life was to inherit his cliches and hand-me-down girlfriends.

  “Hey, Scanlon, come here,” he said, leaning against the lockers, glancing behind as if pretending to make sure no one would hear him. He looked down at his crotch and my eyes couldn’t help but follow his. There was a noticeable bulge in his pants that I figured had to be ping-pong balls to enhance what nature had probably cheated him of. He cupped himself to adjust things. “The hair’s gotta come back, kid.” His boys tittered.

  “Why’s that, Bagmore?”

  He looked around again to make sure everyone was listening. “’Cause swear to God, it’s the only way anyone’s gonna know you’re a dame.”

  You, nonstarter, I thought. He put his fists against his chest where a woman’s breasts would be, and his boys tittered again. I couldn’t help myself. I kneed him in the ping-pong balls and watched him buckle over in disbelief. I knew I wasn’t really being fair because even Bagmore wasn’t going to hit a girl in public, but I couldn’t have cared less. As I walked away, I asked myself what Mom would have done and, of course, the question was ridiculous from the get-go because nobody would have questioned her sexuality. Me, I was gangly, undernourished, over-read, cheeky, now bald, and pissed off at the whole world.

  2

  When I was still small enough to sleep in the sleigh bed Mom had used as a child, she would climb under the covers and tell me bedtime stories about her and Grandpa Willard when she was young.

  “When the circus unloaded from the train in Everett, Daddy and I would be there, watching the elephants parade and poop down the street.”

  “Did Grandma Carol go?”

  “Crowds gave her heartburn.” That was something I could understand, even as a child. After all, the most frightening part of the world was the other people. “We’d get in these tug of wars where she didn’t want me riding horses because of what happened to someone she knew as a child. My mother always had a doom and gloom story to go with everything. People choking on fishbones, ladder rungs collapsing. And Daddy would nod his head and tisk tisk along with her. Then the first lonely cow we’d see in a pasture, he’d stop the car and climb through the barbed wire to pet it.”

  “No way.”

  She stroked my arm. “Don’t act so surprised. You’re just like him.”

  Grandpa Willard covered for her when she had a boyfriend by saying she was over at a girlfriend’s doing homework. “‘Kitty,’ he liked to call me Kitty, ‘I know the boy’s father and I’ll beat the stuffing out of him if that kid so much as touches you.’ Not that I was going to tell him.” She laughed and I wondered even as she was telling me these stories whether this was good parenting. Wasn’t she worried I’d take these indiscretions and coverups as invitations to try the same thing on her? But Mom seemed to glory in making me feel I was missing out on my youth by not fooling around more. The picture of her childhood that emerged was a conspiracy between her and Grandpa Willard against her stick-in-the-mud mother. It seemed strange to me at the time that a young girl would buddy up to an old man when she could have had her mother, but the idea of a co-conspirator of any sex had obvious appeal.

  When I turned ten Mom took me downtown to Marge’s Cafe for a club sandwich with a toothpick and a flag in it. I blushed when Marge brought over a wedge of peach pie with candles blazing on top. Mom started singing happy birthday and everyone else in the restaurant joined in. As we were coming out, somebody hit a putty gray VW bug at the only signal in Stampede and spun it around right before our eyes. Shards of glass sprayed across the asphalt and the front of the VW ended up wedged under the elevated boardwalk. If it had careened in the other direction, it would have decapitated the landmark drinking fountain with the brass foot pedal that said “Brock Manufacturing, Cincinnati, Ohio” on the lever.

  The driver, a black man with dreadlocks, was slumped over the wheel. His passenger, a white woman
who’d been thrown from the car, kept standing up and falling back down on the pavement. Although lots of people ran out of their shops and stopped their cars to gawk, everyone but Mom seemed to be in a daze.

  “You watch her and I’ll see about him,” she shouted. “Just keep her on the ground.” The woman’s face was scratched and there was a raspberry on her elbow, but otherwise she seemed okay except for her insistence on getting back in the car. I hooked two fingers inside one of the belt loops on her jeans and pulled down hard, trying to mimic the law of gravity. Her arms were tattooed with flowers and swans and a vine-draped heart that said “Cecil.” She was wearing a T-shirt with no bra and her thick nipples were erect, probably from shock.

  It was like Mom and I were in the circus, her in one ring and me in another, and everyone else was just watching our act. Mom didn’t disappoint. She stripped off her blouse (fortunately, she was wearing a bra), folded it into a bandanna, and wrapped it around the gash on the man’s forehead, making no attempt to cover herself with her arms or cower behind the wing of the door she’d managed to push open. She just paced back and forth in the street between me and the man in the car until the ambulance arrived and the driver offered her a sheet to cover herself, which she refused. Afterwards, when people talked about what had happened, nobody mentioned the fact that it was Jesse Little’s dead-drunk dad who had run the red light and rammed the VW. What they remembered was Mom stripping off her blouse.

  “What was I supposed to do,” she told me afterwards, “wait for Jesse Little to sew stitches?” Sometimes I thought she didn’t give two spits what people thought of her.

  Another time she created a public stir when we were in line at the pharmacy behind Carmela, the Mexican woman who later rented Grandpa Willard’s house over on Socket Street. Carmela, a beautiful woman with luscious black hair, was struggling to make herself understood to the pharmacist. He was a bald man whose only body hairs were nose whiskers and he kept looking over at his assistant in her matching starched smock for help.

  “For God’s sake, Fred,” Mom finally said, “she wants something for her husband’s hemorrhoids. Piles! Is that so difficult?”

  It was hard to tell by Carmela’s cinnamon skin whether she was blushing, but she turned to Mom with a kind smile and they hugged right there in front of the vitamins.

  In a small town people talked, Mom too. “There’s only one thing worse than being talked about,” she used to joke, “and that’s not being talked about.” Still, she had her limits, like the time we attended the ecumenical dialogue Father Tombari arranged with the Presbyterians.

  “Is it mandatory?” I wanted to know. I was already having trouble maintaining my enthusiasm for church. In most things we had a democratic household and everyone did what they wanted with their time, especially Mom.

  “Till you’re eighteen or living on your own, you’ll go,” Dad told me. I suspected the whole thing had been cooked up between Dad and Father Tombari as a way to show Mom how close their two religions were. Even though Mom had never converted to Catholicism, she let Dad have free rein over me in that department.

  The ecumenical mass included a hand-holding episode, where Father Tombari made every Catholic grip a Presbyterian and vice versa while we sang “Amazing Grace.” Afterward there was a reception in the church basement with sugar cookies, purple punch, and coffee in silver urns as big as garbage cans. Mom and I were cornered by Twyla Morrison, the minister’s wife, who was wearing a brown felt hat with a cluster of baby’s breath on the brim. Twyla made the mistake of talking about John Carlisle’s younger sister, Ashley, who as far as I knew had never set foot in Stampede since we’d been there. The rumor was she’d run away and become a street person back east.

  “I wonder how they ever put up with that little slut,” Twyla said.

  Mom exploded with a slap so hard across Twyla Morrison’s cheek that it knocked her felt hat with the baby’s breath sideways. “You’re in no position to judge that woman!”

  I’d been taught that if you struck a priest or even a nun your chances of living for eternity at the right hand of God were about as remote as the odds of winning the Irish Sweepstakes. Watching Mom’s lower lip quiver, I could only pray that a Presbyterian minister’s wife wasn’t so sacred. I was completely taken aback at the intensity of Mom’s reaction. Why defend someone like Ashley Carlisle?

  “It just burns me,” Mom said afterwards, “the way nobody’s willing to spend two seconds in someone else’s skin around here. Being rich doesn’t mean you’re not human. Every step those Carlisle kids took, it was never good enough.”

  That didn’t exactly explain why Ashley ran away, but the vehemence of Mom’s reaction left no question on whose side she stood.

  When I begged her, Mom took me on her sorties into Seattle for art supplies. For unusual merchandise, Seattle was where everyone went. From hints she’d dropped, I figured that’s where they’d gotten me. Mom was always in such a good mood at Daniel Smith’s, fingering the rag hemp, mulberry bark, banana stalk, and grass paper the way I’d seen other women stroke lingerie. The trays of pastels were precious gems. She drooled over the Senneliers, a pastel made by a third generation family company in France. A single stick cost as much as a paperback book. She tested out the brushes on the veiny part of her wrist and then painted circles on her cheeks with her eyes closed. Sometimes, she’d bring her paints along and take a class there or she’d teach one and I’d sit in the aisle doing homework or reading a novel, listening to the laughter she always managed to squeeze out of the student artists who surrounded her with their sailcloths like so many sloops.

  After Daniel Smith’s, we sometimes went to the Pike Place Market and wove our way through the produce and fish stands, then up the metal stairs on the outside of a triangular shaped building to the deck of the Copacabana, where we could look out over the flower boxes on the main Market building and watch the throngs of people on the brick street below us. Mom introduced me to foods I’d never heard of—saltenas, shrimp soup, and paella. If she’d taught a class, Mom would order a glass of Bolivian wine and I’d toast my ice water with her.

  “Someday, both of us will be doing art,” she said, and I had this lump of regret that she was so good at something I had absolutely no aptitude for.

  When it was sunny, men in dark glasses with extra rings on their fingers, gold chains around their necks, and studs in their ears came by the table and asked if they could join us. I felt that it was my job to mention Dad somewhere in the conversation just to make sure they didn’t get the wrong idea. Mom always wore her Irish claddagh ring with the hands holding a crowned heart that the men must have mistaken for something besides a wedding ring because they often lingered at our table and asked her where we were staying. Mom seemed to enjoy the challenge, never telling them to beat it, but never asking them to stay either. I’d watch for drug deals down on the street with one eye, enjoying the hubbub and anonymity that was impossible in Stampede, and watch Mom with the other, ready to beat the stuffing out of anyone who touched her. While I always envied her easy sexuality, I was also scared of it.

  Where Mom was my sail, Dad was the anchor.

  When he handed me a paperback copy of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he said “You’re almost finished with high school. Time to discover the Irish version of a hero.”

  We kept the book on top of the toilet in the downstairs bathroom, so that we could both read it, him for the third time. When his marker passed mine, I told him he was spending too much time in the toilet and he laughed. Dad treated the bathroom like a sacred chamber, always locking the door to do his business, rolling the toilet paper back so that you couldn’t tell where the last square ended, and spraying potpourri from the can in the medicine cabinet before emerging.

  I loved it when nobody was home and I could leave the bathroom door wide open, something I found deliciously liberating, then crank up Janis Joplin on the stereo. Sometimes I’d read the erotic Anais Nin diaries that Mom k
ept under the magazines in the wicker basket next to their bed. Much better than Portrait. The diaries started out as a letter to the father who had deserted her and ended up as thirty-five thousand handwritten pages describing her most intimate thoughts over a lifetime.

  Dad was fiercely proud of his Irishness, even though he had none of the swagger and brashness I associated with the Irish. He seemed too cerebral, too disciplined, too even-tempered. But say the wrong thing and I’d seen him ready to come to blows, like after another one of those exposes on the Kennedys came out and I overheard the guy at the service station who was running Dad’s charge card through the register. “That Kennedy couldn’t keep his pecker in his pants, could he?”

  Dad clenched his fist and bristled. “Leave the man alone. Don’t you think one assassination is enough?” It shouldn’t have surprised me; they had to pull him out of a fight at the Comet Tavern over Mom.

  When Dad came to the Pike Place Market with us, we went down an alley to Kells instead of the Copacabana. Kells was an Irish pub that served soda bread and thick, chewy clam chowder that Mom and Dad washed down with Guinness. On these visits, nobody came up to our table and asked us where we were staying.