Piper

by John E. Keegan

  On the car ride home from Seattle once, when it was just Mom and me and she was a little tipsy—I must have been fourteen at the time—she told me about meeting Dad when he was at Loyola of Chicago and she was at Northwestern. “I was still coming off Lloyd then,” she said. Lloyd was the vague title given to that period in Mom’s life when she was into rock singers, motorbikes, and recreational drugs, something I knew she’d told me not as encouragement but as parable. I remembered praying then to Saint Anthony, the patron saint of the lost and found, hoping she’d not damaged too many brain cells from the drugs.

  “Your dad courted me with herbal teas and protein,” Mom said. “He’d go to the store and stock the refrigerator in my apartment with chocolate milk, Swiss cheese, and yogurt. If I hadn’t eaten enough protein by the time I saw him again, I’d pour a little down the sink or flush it in the toilet so he wouldn’t be disappointed. He’d do the laundry and give me massages even before we were sleeping together. Best of all, he read to me. Every word of Crime and Punishment, half of Anna Karenind”—she smiled when she said this—“that’s when we, well, you know, ended the abstinence.”

  Dad had invited his brothers to Mom’s funeral. I was standing next to him when he called Seamus, his younger brother in New York, and he let me listen to the answering machine message, which said he was off sailing with a woman friend in Nova Scotia. At least with Seamus you didn’t get misdirection. Dad’s older brother Colin, a doctor in Minneapolis, was too tied up at the hospital to get away for the funeral and sent a huge wreath in the shape of a horseshoe. It seemed as if Dad and his brothers were victims of mobility, the way they’d scattered to different parts of the continent to make families with strangers. Now, they were as much absent from each other’s lives as Ashley Carlisle had been from her brother’s.

  Most of what I knew about Dad I’d learned from someone else, including Seamus, who stayed with us one night on his way to Alaska to work on a fishing boat when I was in eighth grade at Saint Augustine and I sat on the floor of my bedroom pumping him with questions. Seamus was good-looking like Dad, with a fetching Rugby jaw and unruly hair, but most important he treated me like an adult. He had those thick Scanlon eyebrows and devil’s bumps on the tops of his ears that he said were a sign of intelligence.

  “Your dad didn’t have brain one when he was your age,” he told me. The way he said it, of course, I knew he meant just the opposite. “Our mom was always getting up and going to six o’clock mass so we’d grow up to be good boys. She wanted Tom to be a priest so bad she could taste it.”

  “Why Dad?”

  Seamus rolled his eyes and hoisted his eyebrows. “Tom always made the nicest doilies for Mother’s Day, I guess, all put together so the paste didn’t show.” We both laughed. “And he composed little prayers that he’d read at holiday dinners. Tom always had a freaky mysticism about him.”

  “What do you mean, mysticism?”

  “You know, contact with deeper truths.” Seamus shook his head as if disbelieving my dad could really be his brother. “Tom liked words. Me, I’d rather squeeze it between my fingers or suck on it, but Tom wanted to write about it. Mom had an old Royal typewriter, one of those black jobbies that weighed fifty pounds, and he typed his prayers on the back of handbills and crammed them into a brown expando. Like some junior Gutenberg in cutoffs. Course, Mom didn’t know he was pounding out adolescent erotica in between his dinner prayers. Colin folded one into her missal once, but she refused to believe it was Tom’s.”

  Seamus paused and looked around my room at the bulletin board with my Blessed Virgin bookmarks and ribbons from spelling bees, and I thought he’d remember he was talking to a child and cut me off. I probably should have stopped him, knowing that it wasn’t fair to hear these stories without getting Dad’s version, but Seamus mesmerized me. This was real life and I hungered for it. Finally, he took a deep breath, ruffled his hair, and plunged ahead again.

  “We had this pimply babysitter named Judy who used to come over on Saturdays when Tom was working as a box boy and Tom would sneak home on his lunch hours and neck with her on the couch.”

  “My dad?”

  “He’d get his hair all mussed up and have to reattach his little black clip-on bowtie before going back to work.”

  “Did you ever tell your mom about it?”

  “No. I kinda liked the idea that Tom was aiming away from the priesthood.”

  “Was your mom disappointed he didn’t become a priest?”

  “Sure, then she thought he’d be a lawyer. Everyone did.”

  “What happened?”

  “He took a part-time job in college as a cub reporter for a local daily and fell in love with the newspaper business. ‘Why would I want to be someone else’s mouthpiece?’ he told me. ‘I want to write what they don’t want anyone to hear.’”

  It was no surprise the Scanlon brothers had drifted apart. They’d lost the glue when their mom died. Although she never smoked, she passed away from lung cancer that the doctors attributed to their dad’s chain-smoking. Then their dad married his former secretary, a woman who wanted nothing to do with the boys, which put Mr. Scanlon to a choice between the new wife and his three sons. I remembered Mom telling me how Mr. Scanlon was unable to make it to their wedding because of the reservations his new wife had booked on a cruise ship through the Panama Canal. So much for the family that prays together stays together.

  Most things involved in my rearing were Mom’s responsibilities. Dad was the master of the handoff as in, “Can you help your daughter with her homework?” And he could have added, with her manners, social skills, inferiority complexes, and delusions of grandeur.

  But Dad handled the allowance, for which I had to prepare an itemized budget on a sheet of unlined, pulpy, grammar school drawing paper. “If you want an increase, you’ve got to have a base to work from,” he said. My budgets included the kinds of things he’d go for like school supplies, family presents, donations to the Poor Box, and bike reflectors. Of course, once I had the money, I figured I could spend it on whatever I wanted. As I got older, the allowance increased but so did the things I became responsible for, like clothes. Because I grew about ten inches between ages twelve and fifteen, Dad’s laying off of the clothes onto my budget turned out to be a shrewd business decision for him. I couldn’t keep up, but so what if I had a few pairs of high-waters?

  For better or worse, Dad was the one who got me into reading, which I realized later also served as a surrogate for those otherwise awkward parent-child conversations. When he found out I still hadn’t taken biology by the end of my sophomore year, he put a textbook outside my door with masking tape all over the binding. The letters on the cover had been filled in with blue ink and changed from BIOLOGY to APOLOGY. On the inside, the last name not crossed out was “Tom Scanlon.” It was Dad’s contribution to my sex education.

  I started taking books with me when Mom and I went on painting expeditions into the country. She’d station herself in front of the root ball of a fallen pine tree or next to a lopsided barn and I’d read the books from Dad’s bookshelf. At first, the reading was a shield to make me seem engaged while all those silent hours passed without her saying anything as she slipped deeper into her work. Then I realized that reading satisfied the same appetite I had for Seamus’s stories. It allowed me into the parlors and bedrooms of real people with chinks in their hearts. I became two people: the reader who was the voyeur, the person who knew the meaning of words she’d never even said out loud; then there was the self-conscious Scanlon girl everyone else knew.

  It wasn’t as if Mom or Dad didn’t care what I was thinking. I remembered listening to them one night from the crawl space where we kept old hoses and trellises. I had one hand on the cold water pipe and I could feel the water rush through the grip of my fist. The other hand I pushed up inside the stuffing on the hot water pipe where the squirrels had picked away the insulation and squeezed it like someone’s esophagus. They were arguing over whether I s
hould stay at Saint Augustine’s for seventh grade or switch to public school.

  “For heaven’s sake, Tom, let her get immunized to the real world and away from all those Bible-bangers.”

  “Catholics aren’t Bible-bangers, Kate. How can you say that?”

  “Knee-benders then.”

  Instead of Mom, Dad came to my room that night. He looked awkward and, out of respect for my privacy, diverted his eyes from the dirty underwear strewn around the room. He didn’t tuck in the covers and there were no stories and no goodnight kisses. He just gazed at me with those earnest Irish eyes. “You know you can be anything you set your mind to, Piper.”

  It was a reassuring statement and one that I treasured in the days and months that followed, despite the fact I stayed one more year with the nuns at Saint Augustine’s. But Dad never repeated it, and I later wondered if he’d really come into my room that night at all.

  3

  Several weeks after I’d shaved my head, Dad brought Grandpa Willard home with him.

  “I have some good news,” Dad said, which right away made me suspicious because I knew that good news was the bane of the newspaper business. People wanted scandals and roadkill. “Your grandpa’s going to live with us.”

  What was I going to say? Willard was standing right next to me in the hallway, hatless, fingering the brim of an old buttoned-down-at-the-peak chauffeur’s cap he held at his waist. I’d called him Willard for as long as I could remember. It was his idea. All my friends call me Willard, he’d said. He hated Will, because people assumed it was short for William and he was a Willard. He was looking up at me with those hard brown eyes that rolled around in the sockets like marbles in the palm of a sweaty hand. Willard always looked as if he’d just been caught at something the way he shifted his weight back and forth on his scuffed wingtips. He had nothing to feel guilty about. This was his house until Grandma Cooper died and he’d moved into a smaller place over on Socket Street that was walking distance to the drugstore where he bought his cigars. Dad had decided it wasn’t safe for him to drive, so his car was stored in the garage at the Socket Street house with a tarp over it.

  “How’s business?” Willard said.

  I faked a smile, trying to be polite.

  He chuckled and crushed his motorman’s cap in his hand. The subject of money always fascinated my grandpa. He grew up without much of it in Yakima, where he got up at four a.m. to cut asparagus with the migrants, then went to school with them at night until he dropped out and pumped gas. Somehow he’d saved enough to invest in penny mining stocks because that was the first section of the paper he turned to.

  “I thought it would be kind of nice to have your grandpa here.” Dad’s “Paperback Writer” tie with the impressionistic manuscript pages flying up and down the front had been pulled loose around his neck and there were tell-tale beads of perspiration on his forehead. It was three-thirty on a Thursday and I knew he was probably frantic to get back to the shop to meet his printing deadline. “Willard, you’re going to help Piper cook and take care of the house, right?” Dad raised his voice when he spoke to Willard even though as far as I knew he could hear as well as the rest of us.

  “Whatever you say, Tom,” Willard said, with a you betcha’ nod of his head.

  Groan. I didn’t like the direction this was heading. Willard had begun acting strange lately even by Willard’s standards. Earlier in the summer they’d found him walking out on the Horse Heaven Highway with his lunch bucket under a full moon, puffing on a rum-soaked cigar. He said he was on his way to Bonnie Holliday’s to adjust the carburetor in her Studebaker, which was a disturbing explanation. Bonnie was a spinster who everyone thought had her eyes on Willard long before Grandma Carol’s passing. Furthermore, she was deceased. But Willard wasn’t totally daffy. Even before Mom died he’d figured out that when it came to the big decisions, like whether he would drive his car, Dad was going to play a major role.

  I pulled at Dad’s sleeve to get him over by the bannister. Over Dad’s shoulder I watched Willard, who was still standing alone on the oval rug in the entry way surrounded by a hard suitcase with broken hinges that was wrapped with a bungee cord and two cardboard boxes criss-crossed with gray duct tape. He was working his cap through his fist like he was milking an udder. It was unusual to see Willard upright. Me and everyone else in Stampede were used to just seeing his legs, crossed at the ankles and sticking out from under a neighbor’s broken-down car, his fingers feeling out onto the curb for end wrenches.

  “I don’t need a babysitter, Dad,” I whispered.

  “I thought you’d like the idea. The house is too big for just two of us.” I knew what was going on and it had nothing to do with the size of the house. Dad was still freaked out that, left to my own devices, I was going to do something self-destructive. Willard was the suicide watch. But I wasn’t going to make it that easy for our detractors. Anyone who wanted to take a swipe at Mom was going to have to come through me first. “It’s what your mom would have wanted.”

  “You don’t know that,” I said, but I knew he was right. It was hard to argue against Mom when it came to Willard. I’d heard Dad try when they talked about putting him away in Mount Vernon. “There’s no way I’m going to let him be cooped up and shot full of tranquilizers,” Mom said. “You might as well shoot him.” I’d been to one of those places, to visit Willard’s older brother, before he died in the midst of the incontinence and gaping stares they called a nursing home. No wonder Willard trembled when they talked about it.

  “So do we have consensus?” Dad said.

  “I’m thinking.” Willard winked when he noticed me looking at him. There was no mistaking he was Mom’s father: same hook in the nose, the cowlick on the backside of the crown, and a twinkle in the eyes. They weren’t spectators, they were doers. And they were damned if they were going to just do what everyone else was doing. A fire burned in the Coopers and, without Mom, maybe the only way I was going to get any of it was to be near her father.

  “Help the old man get settled in the basement,” Dad said, patting me reassuringly on the shoulder. “I told him he could keep his dog.”

  The debate was over.

  The spare bedroom in the basement was full of bundled newspapers, back issues of the Herald, and empty Mason jars that had been there since Willard lived in the house, the flotsam and jetsam I associated with older people. Mom had used the jars to clean her brushes, but I’d never seen her put fruit in them. Willard and I hauled the newspapers and boxes of jars into the furnace room and stacked them against the walls. The edges of the bundles were shredded where mice had nibbled off nesting material and the papers on the top of the stacks had miniature piles of rodent dung that rattled onto the floor as I picked them up.

  “At least they’re paper-trained,” Willard joked. I knew from Mom’s stories that Willard loved animals of any species and I doubted he’d ever set a mousetrap in his life. One of Dad’s worries was that a solicitor was going to come to Willard’s door asking for a donation to the Audubon Society or Greenpeace and he’d write a check big enough to wipe out his bank account. Willard was one of those people who would handcuff himself to the winch of a factory trawler to prevent it from killing the dolphins.

  “I can’t believe you’re going to actually sleep down here,” I said. “It stinks.”

  He pushed up the bill of his cap. “The aroma of life.”

  With a broom, I whisked the cobwebs out of the corners of the room and off the windows that peered into concrete wells outside. It occurred to me as I was sweeping the dung off the mattress that maybe Dad didn’t really want Willard to live with us after all and this was a way to make him accept the idea of the nursing home. After a night in this god-forsaken space, he’d be begging for a ride to Mount Vernon. When I brought in the vacuum cleaner though, you would have thought I was the maid at the Hilton.

  “This is gonna be dandy,” he said, “real dandy.”

  I went up to the linen closet and picked
out a serviceable but never used set of lime-green contour sheets and the Mexican blankets Mom had bought from a roadside stand on our way back from the Tulip Festival one Sunday. Dad kept trying to tell her, “Bargain, Kate, they’re not fixed prices,” but she wouldn’t and when she explained afterwards in the car how the man was sending the money back to his family in Chihuahua Dad let the subject drop. I left the sheets and blankets on Willard’s mattress and went back up to find a couple of couch pillows. When I returned, Willard was on his hands and knees on the floor smoothing out the sheets over the top of the blankets.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Making a dog bed,” he said, without the least bit of apology.

  Jesus. It was as good of a time as any to set some rules, I thought. He was seventy-seven years old, he’d lived through the Great Depression, fought the Japanese in the South Pacific, and volunteered for Vietnam, but if I was going to have a life I had to contain the situation. “Willard, listen. Let’s get a few things straight.” I motioned for him to take a seat on the bed, but he crossed his legs and sat on the floor instead. “I’m seventeen years old. I don’t need a caretaker. Dad didn’t do this for me. He did it for you.” Willard stroked his knuckles but paid me full attention. “You remember the Monroe Doctrine?”

  “’Fraid that was before my time.” There was a smirk on his face and I had the eerie feeling Willard was as lucid as any of us, that he was just play-acting.

  “I’m not kidding. We’re making a bargain. The basement is yours, the upstairs is mine, we share the main floor.” He raised his hand to interrupt and I cut him off. “Outside the house, we travel separately. I don’t mess with your extracurriculars and you don’t mess with mine. Okay?”

  He was nodding his head up and down, all serious and contrite. No wonder Mom couldn’t stomach the idea of sending him off. “Makes sense to me,” he said.

  “I’m working through a lot of crap these days and it’s nothing you’d be interested in.” I deliberately spoke a little coarsely, to cut off any inquiry.