by Greg O'Brien
“Anything else I can do for you?” I would ask with a handful of plunder in one palm, the prospective stickball bat in the other.
“Yeah,” she always replied, “stick that broom up your ass and sweep the floor!”
When Bridie’s stock ran out, we looked to Jim O’Rourke, the guy from Killarney that looked two decades beyond his age; the priests had hired him to cut the lawn. Jim loved to drink, and usually began about 10 am, walking down to McGuire’s Market, owned by Jerry’s dad, for a morning Bud, while most in the store were looking for the cream. By noon, O’Rourke was usually sleeping it off in the janitor’s room; so we’d sneak in and steal a broom. He lost a lot of brooms on the job.
But we never lost the bases on Brookdale Place. We didn’t need to take them home at night. The field was the street, long and narrow like the fairways at St. Andrew’s. First base was the birch tree on the curb lip in front of Pappy Langeloh’s house; second base was the large, sweeping oak in front of Lou Kelly’s home; and third base was the blunt edge of Ronnie Buckie’s driveway. Home plate was chalked in the middle of the street, batter’s box and all.
As often as we could, we’d have Hungarian born Zena Kelly, Lou’s trophy wife, throw out the first ball for special effects. She was Zsa Zsa Gabor incarnate to us kids. She had some big casabas, knew it, and always obliged us. Al Wilson frequently dropped the ball when handing it to her for the opening toss. I don’t know if he was just nervous like Hermie in the Summer of ’42, or he was just looking for Zena to pick it up. Al was no fool.
Mom often watched from the kitchen window, her fixed position over time, as she gazed out, taking it all in, sorting out what it all meant or what she thought it to be, as she often talked to herself or to an imaginary friend. The conversations continued. Over the years, the neighborhood stickball players came and went, depending on age. If you could swing a bat and stood taller than a tricycle, you could play.
The regulars included my brothers Paul, Tim, and Andy; my tomboy sister, Lauren, a pretty good hitter, also played from time to time. My sister, Maureen, a “Hot Lips” Houlihan-type, frequently watched from the sidewalk, as did sisters Justine and Bernadette from their scooters.
Stickball, a variation of a Northeast inner city game invented in the 1750s, takes ample coordination, but if you hit the sweet spot of the broom handle, you could drive the pink Spalding high-bounce ball, the Spaldeen, almost to Monument Park in Yankee Stadium. The crowd always cheered as the ball lifted, like a Project Mercury rocket, above the canopy of trees—prompted by a din from deep inside the throat of the slugger, as he mimicked the roar of a standing ovation, pushing gusts of air up the esophagus, then instinctively limping into a Mickey Mantle trot, aping the weak knees of “The Mick,” head cocked to the left for balance.
“Holy cow! Did you see that?” we mocked in our best Phil Rizzuto.
We commonly ran out of digits counting the scores. Games were often called on account of the bell, not a lost ball, weather or darkness, but the bell.
We all lived by bells; I often felt like a cow. On the back porch at 25 Brookdale, Mom would ring a cowbell the size of a grapefruit with a long cord that my dad had hung from the porch ceiling. The knell was a summons for all the O’Briens, no exceptions, to head home. Game over!
Da-ding, Da-ding, Da-ding!
The clangor was a directive for the other kids to go home as well, a dictate from my mother that neighborhood parents relied on to gather their flocks. Brookdale Place was an extended family. Mom was the bell ringer, the arm of authority on a dead-end street with a tidal brook at the end that meandered to Long Island Sound. We never had to worry about speeding cars, other than some of the relatives after too many whiskey sours over the holidays. Brookdale parents watched out for every kid. We had group cookouts, block parties, and in the summer time, the neighborhood kids roamed freely through back yards playing flashlight tag or catching fireflies. Bernadette Burgess, who lived across the street, had the best swarm of fireflies.
There were few organized sports in those days; pickup was the rule: stickball, wiffle ball, stoop ball, basketball, and of course, slow-motion tackle football in the fall and winter after Pappy Langeloh had cut down his corn stocks in the field next to us. The most fun was plowing through the snowdrifts of December on fourth down and short yardage, and giving the ball on a fullback drive to four-year olds, bloated in their puffy snowsuits like the Pillsbury Doughboy.
With the largest family on the block, my folks ruled the neighborhood. There were a lot of big Irish families in Rye then. Birth control in the Catholic Church then was anathema. Judging from the size of families in Rye the “rhythm method” of birth control was working about as well in New York as Casey Stengel’s curve ball. Priests and nuns, presumably most of whom never had sex, instructed mothers of the parish to recognize the days of a fertile womb and avoid intercourse—a game plan gone with the wind after a few martinis. “I got rhythm,” as the Gershwin song goes.
Then bango, bingo! The wives got pregnant again. My mother gave birth to ten children and had five miscarriages—fifteen pregnancies in all. I’ve always considered younger brothers, Gerard and Martin, who died in infancy, part of the family, and always will. The miscarriages will remain nameless until Heaven. Large Catholic families were de rigueur in the day. The Caseys had eight, the Cunninghams seven, and my godmother Eileen Clavin had sixteen. Everyone used to call her, with Mother Goose distinction, the Old Woman in the Shoe:
…She had so many children.
She didn’t know what to do.
She gave them some broth.
Without any bread;
Then whipped them all soundly.
And put them to bed.
Not really. We never got whipped at home, nor did Eileen’s kids; she was an angel of a godmother. But the thought of a thumping kept us on the straight and narrow, and it was just a train ride away. My father worked in Manhattan in the old Pan Am building above Grand Central as director of pensions, a 25-minute ride on the express New Haven line. When I or one of my brothers or sisters stepped out of line, my mom threatened to place the call, and “The Belt” would be on its way. Infractions ranged from mouthing off, to failing to do chores, to bad grades, or in Lauren’s case, one of her virtuoso “drop-dead” looks. Lauren, third in the pecking order, had perfected a look of contempt with trademark Irish diplomacy—the ability to tell someone to go to hell, in a way that they looked forward to the trip. I was always impressed, but Mom was on to it.
“Wait ’til your father gets home, and you’re going to get the belt!”
The threat alone was sobering.
My mom, a Donna Reed mirror image, was petite, barely five-feet tall and all of 104 pounds, but she had the will, when necessary, to inflict one badass guilt trip. Her nickname in later years was “Boomer,” a moniker passed down from brother-in-law Carl, a reference to a hard-hitting Minnesota Vikings tail-back named Bill “Boom Boom” Brown with a reckless, almost violent running style. Like the late ’60s All-Pro tailback, Mom could bowl us over, knock us right off our feet, with the largesse of her great intellect, wisdom, and ceaseless love—good and tough, always justified and in abundant measure.
I never actually saw the belt, but envisioned it laid out on my parents’ bed, stiff like a corpse in a casket. The “belt” I dreaded, was a ten-foot long, four-foot wide strip of rawhide with sharp nails poking up and a belt buckle the size of a suitcase. But worse than the belt was my mom looking me squarely in the eye, cutting deep to the back of the brain stem, and declaring, “I’m disappointed in you. I thought you could do better.”
Please, I’d rather the belt. Just give me the belt. A few swings and it will be over. The sting of disappointment lingered. Ouch!
My relationship with my mother came full circle. Growing up as the oldest boy, early on, I received a disproportionate amount of attention from my father. I adored my dad; he was my exemplar, but I always looked to my mother for inner strength. She knew my heart an
d the souls of all her children. But I strayed in time, and being the “free lunch” of the family, a Prodigal Son in some ways, I disappointed her, pushing the boundaries selfishly in sophomoric ways, defiant of my parents’ munificence and limited resources. Mom and I didn’t have much of a relationship for a time; then we found each other in Alzheimer’s. End of life has a way of doing that.
Mom was big on confession. You always had to come clean with her. Confession as a youth was a ritual in our house. On Thursdays at church, you were directed to the confessional box, sort of a spiritual “time out,” for a weekly unloading of a bolus of sins, often defined as missing the mark. We sat inside a dark cubicle with a dividing wire screen and a phantom, ghostly figure behind it that had all the redemption of death row. Three Hail Marys, an Our Father, and Glory Be, and you’d be on your way, off sinning again, constantly reminded to tow the line. Praise the Lord, and pass the Playboys!
My parents, greatly influenced by scripture, frequently read passages to us, particularly when trying to make a point on Christmas Eve, Easter, or when the spirit moved. They gave us all strong biblical or Irish names: my brother Paul for Saul of Tarsus; Timothy and Andrew for the apostles; Gregory after the writer pope, Gregory the Great, who took office in 590 AD, although I never lived up to the name; Bernadette for the miller’s daughter, born in 1844 in Lourdes, France, who asserted to have seen the Virgin Mary in a cave grotto; and so on. Sometimes, Dad would let us vote on the names of new arrivals in the family, a majority of one vote; however, we did nix my dad’s choice of the name Thaddeus, a disciple and close friend of the Apostle Jude, not to be confused with Judas. Like an oversized diaper, the name was too much for an infant. My mom and the voting siblings were all in agreement on this. There was no division.
Division generally is the rule in a large family, which has become a dinosaur of our culture, a Tyrannosaurus of tradition. Either by birth order, intent, or a shuffling of the deck, or just dumb luck, my parents divided the brood into “the older kids” and the “younger kids,” a classification that would appall most child psychologists today, but one that sticks, with some of the siblings retaining their birth-order roles, as do others in Boomer families. The older kids, by my parents’ declaration, were consecrated to be: Maureen, me, and Lauren; the younger kids: Justine, Paul, Bernadette, Timothy, and Andy, the baby. Ironically, the baby, now an EMC Corporation executive in Manhattan, is the big breadwinner, probably making threefold the rest of us, with the exception of brother Paul, also an EMC honcho.
The family expanded exponentially over time to the point that my folks in the summer had to rent two cottages off Thumpertown Beach Road in Eastham on the Outer Cape. A colleague at Pan Am had introduced my dad to the Cape when he was in his early 30s. The older kids were dispatched to the snug, yellow cabin, next to the gray mothership of a cottage where the younger kids were kept near my parents. Maureen, Lauren, and I will never forget the night, in the early ’60s in the early morning hours, when someone tried to break in the back door next to our bedroom. Looking back, I suspect it was my dad, just trying to make sure we didn’t become too independent from the family. No chance of that! We all relied on one another. Maureen, a nurse to be, was the second mother, “Mother Superior,” as we called her; Lauren took no prisoners in family disparities. I was initially relegated to lawn duties with a manual push mower, trimming the front hedge with sheers, and snow shoveling the driveway. The younger kids stepped up as we stepped away, in some instances, doing a far better job. Then I stepped away to pursue the low fruit of the world. No one seemed to notice.
My parents, for the most part, were exceedingly close, fully romantic in the early years, but with the heaviness of life, they became more distant, then intimate again in the final days. They were like blueberry bushes that seem to grow better in pairs. My parents were typically competitive, too, and instilled stiff competition among us, a rule of family law that kept us lean, mean, and hungry for our grades in school, and always competing for the cleanliness of the four-floor, six-bedroom stucco home we occupied. We all had Friday cleaning chores, from the finished basement to the attic. And when it came to our “marks” in school, my folks were cutthroat, particularly with the older kids. In grammar school, if we brought home a 95 percent overall academic average on a report card, it simply wasn’t enough.
“You can do better,” Dad would say, holding out the prize of his affection for the highest grades.
And so we were pushed to bring home 98s and 99s, which we did, and then moved on to private Catholic high schools, most of us, where we studied logic, philosophy, and learned to translate from Latin Cicero’s letters and Virgil’s Aeneid, sometimes with the help of a black-market translator called a Trot.
The CliffsNotes of our family life read like Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. My dad was indeed George Bailey; my mom in the role of Mary Hatch. In Rye, we had our various Uncle Billys, Ernie Bishops, and Bert the cop, even an Aunt Bee and Roger the Dellwood milkman, who delivered three times a week 12 to 14 glass bottles of milk to our house and stacked them in our refrigerator. And we were surrounded by guardian angels; Clarence Odbody, I swear, lived down the street.
****
My mother was a living angel; she loved the primary color yellow. Yellow angel rays, we were taught, represent the enlightenment that the Lord’s wisdom brings to the soul. Social in every respect, my mother attended all the gatherings of the day. She met my father at a college dance in New Rochelle. He was a Fordham University student at the time and a Naval officer candidate. Dad was the rudder of the family; Mom was the mainsail, and stood out among the Greatest Generation of women of her day—wives and mothers who helped shape and define their spouses and children in diverse ways, both in what they were in life and are today in memories. These women gave selflessly in child-rearing years, then later as caregivers for their war-hero husbands, never receiving a medal for it.
And in the end, the Greatest Generation of men, independent conquerors of world evil, clung to their spouses in old age; survivors still do. This generation of women has never received the accolades it deserves.
My dad needed mollycoddling Losing his parents to tuberculosis as a young boy, he never fully recovered from the loss. An athlete, thinker, a man of letters, and a Roosevelt Democrat, my father found comfort in excelling beyond his means with a Gaelic will to succeed and sustain his passions. He was once asked at a Fordham University oral theology exam, seated before a table of schooled clerics in the shadows of high Gothic walls that seemed to reach to the Heavens, to prove there was a God. He answered with great clarity, faith, and Jesuit logic, pointing to the world around him. And today, he has the irrefutable evidence.
Holding court with us one day on the beach, he reflected on the imperfections of life, likely quoting another academic. “Life is like a river,” he intoned, “You need to study it as it goes by, then decide the right time to put your feet in the water.” Dad was a man who got right to the point. He once told one of my brothers: “Don’t get me wrong, Greg’s a nice guy, but he’s like medicine; you have to take him in small doses.” Yet, Dad was loving, like my mom, in what one might call marital photosynthesis: they emitted love and life to each other.
Still they were strict, always pursuing the narrow road. At times, they lost their way; as years passed, my mom, given her Alzheimer’s, more so than my dad. We began to notice over the years wholesale lapses in memory and continued engagement with conversations with people and objects that weren’t real. At first, we ignored it: phones left off the hook because she couldn’t figure out how to end a call; wearing shoes that didn’t match; those distant, vacant stares; and, at times, an out-of-body persona, a mix of aberrant rage and adolescent fancy. Still, the distractions of a large family, all the school, sporting, and church events camouflaged her illness, as well as the routine of teaching duties at parochial Most Holy Trinity in nearby Mamaroneck and St. Gregory the Great in Harrison.
In time, the symptoms wo
rsened, more so after my parents retired to the Outer Cape in 1998, a place of further isolation in winter, a precursor to Pluto, a venue where she went from clothes shopping at Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan to Brown’s Superette for baloney in Eastham.
Mom departed from Rye reluctantly, following my dad as she had done instinctively from the day they met. She brought with her a quilt of long-term memories to last a lifetime that was now measured in short years, not decades.
I couldn’t imagine until now the isolation she must have felt.
Mom left a dead-end street for a dead end in her life. As peaceful and bucolic as the Cape was, the lights were growing dimmer in the late 1980s.
Da-ding, Da-ding, Da-ding!
Bye-bye, Miss American Pie, on to a dead-end street.
Forget me not.
11
DEAD-END STREET
CESTARO WAY IN NORTH EASTHAM IS HARDLY A PROPER name and easy to remember for a narrow lane on Cape Cod, lined with dense patches of scrub oak and scrub pine on the fringe of the Cape Cod National Seashore, about two miles from the frothing Atlantic. It’s a dead-end choice, on a dead-end street. But developer Arty Cestaro wouldn’t have it any other way after he bulldozed a swath of sandy forest off School House Road in the late 1960s, sold my parents two lots for a summer house, then dug a drinking well down “sixty tree” feet.
A burly, stubby Italian with a touch of Genoa in his voice, Arty was a man for all seasons on Cape Cod, all three of them. Spring arrives for a day in June.
Since the Pilgrims first arrived in these parts, year-round survival on this narrow land has required a range of cunning and skill. Depending on the time of year, Arty—who sported a face of peppered stub—cleared lots, built homes, fished for bass and blues, and baked a cloistered family recipe of thick lasagna and crusty Italian bread to sell to the tourists—all under the banner of Cestaro.