by Jacki Lyden
It was understood that I was a confidante in my grandmother's house, that I was not to repeat the blitzkrieg curses I heard there. I could pull out the forbidden True Romance magazines stored underneath the twin beds in Mabel's room. It tantalized me that my mother hated for my grandmother to read them. To Dolores, the magazines were tawdry in their cheapness and thin paper and gaudy stories, featuring tormented women betrayed by their men and devious blondes. I remember reading a line in which a housekeeper says, "Your husband phoned and he wants you to wear your red dress. Only this time, don't put a scarf in the neckline." She must have worn a cowboy bandanna, I thought, probably the wrong choice for evening cocktails. Mabel would open True Romance with an air of Lana Turner abandon and prop her sandals on the table, while I looked at the Martian attire of peekaboo babydolls and tassels on the bullet-shaped breasts in the Frederick's of Hollywood drawings at the back of each issue. "Midnight vixen," they said. "Coco-quette. Fringed Fantasy." Mabel wept loudly as she read, but by the time Dolores returned, the magazines were shoved back under the bed, crinkled from perspiration and the lake's humidity. And I was sated in the momentary feeling that the world out there was as palpable as a piece of her sugary red rhubarb pie, a piece I could just about taste as I watched Mabel wipe the back of her hand on her mouth.
I thought we were honest with each other in that house, but of course I was wrong about that on many levels, and Mabel would not have been the head of our matriarchy had it been otherwise. Mabel had a secret that had its own sacrament in her notions of sacrifice. And like all sacraments, it brought eternity closer, perhaps dulling my grandmother into the curious passivity through which she endured both fate and my mother, yet seldom challenged either. Mabel's father's name was Red Taylor and he had come from somewhere Celtic and slate gray and cold. England had been his last port of call. No one knows where he started from because he wouldn't say—Northern Ireland or maybe the north of England. Red existed when he set foot in America, and not a minute before. Mabel speculated when she was small that her pa had killed someone over there in the prehistory he referred to as "that bastard place." He hated anything English. He bent to unload the railroad cars on the dock beside the track in Pewaukee, where his coworkers called him Red because of his hair, like a glowing brand, and his igneous temper, which kindled at any slight. When I knew him he was so old and incontinent that Mabel spread plastic sheets on the furniture. Still she doted on him. When Mabel knew Red best as a man she was twelve. I think of us as "sisters" of secrets then, engaged in homely rituals that dispel chaos. Mabel had seven younger brothers and sisters. Her mother was busy with all those children, and she allowed Mabel to quit the fourth grade and start drudging for the family. Red was working one day down at the switchyard and probably drinking and certainly cursing, and he kicked the hitches of two railroad cars he was putting together. I imagine he saw the boxcars coming toward him like rolling caskets, pinning him to the track, slicing off his foot. In his mind, that foot lay there on the tracks always to remind him that he was no longer complete.
After that, Red used a wooden leg or lived on his knees, and Mabel would take the suds pail to the tavern in the morning and return after lunch. She returned again at midafternoon and "afore supper," telling the other children to pick themselves up, get on their coats, get on with it. Somehow she had learned piano, and she played, even giving some lessons herself, she said, holding up the hand now so curled with arthritis that it looked like a baby's trying to reach for a rattle. She played when Red was so stone-drunk he could not hear her, played after he'd cursed Jesus and Mary and all the saints. Mabel kept two odors, two essences, in her head. One was the smell of Red's inner exile. She swabbed Red's room daily with bleach, a room saturated with his vomit and urine and worse, the whole house stained with his ignorance. The other smell was the summer perfume that evening brings even to a dilapidated railroad shanty full of what is missing.
In the nighttime, free, Mabel went with the boy next door to lie under the honeysuckle bushes in an overgrown garden, the petals of peonies drifting over the ground, an Edenic grove not twenty yards from her fathers bedroom. Amid this garden, she surrendered her rage and transformed it. There was no more stifling stink in her nostrils. I can imagine that the neighbor boy had skin like clean white sheets and hair that nestled into her mouth like taffy, that she felt in the redemptive comfort of the darkness and his flesh a lambent happiness none of us is allowed to keep.
When Mabels pregnancy became the talk of the neighborhood, she retreated indoors, back into the squalor. Pa Taylor, goaded by the local priest, sobered up and suddenly one morning the two of them boarded the Milwaukee Road for Chicago with a baby in a basket. Mabel never saw the baby again. It was a girl. Mabel was fourteen and had named her Beatrice. I think of that baby as if she had floated down a meandering river, like Moses in his basket of bulrushes, and that Mabel's father, unlike the nursemaid, had come to steal the baby in the middle of the night.
The baby who disappeared into time belonged for only a moment to a fourteen-year-old girl, who, when she was fifty, looked into the face of the distant locomotives each weekday on that very same railroad track: we picked my mother up only a mile away from where Pa Taylor had boarded the train. If Mabel was looking for the face of another woman as she searched for Dolores among the descending passengers, if that is why she looked and planted her feet until the roaring train engine became her whole life, rushing past, I never knew.
"Sometimes Mabel did say," my mother told me after Mabel's death, "that you can get over any hurt. That you can make a mistake and not die. She said that she made a mistake once, and that she thought her life was over." And sometimes, when she was ill, Dolores would draw pictures of phantom women who might have been her real mother and curse Mabel and pierce her with the stigmata of righteousness. Mabel had a baby. Mabel had some trouble once. When I think of my grandmother now, I think of how those she loved had the habit of vanishing. Mabel learned early the finiteness of mortal love, and yet Mabel and Dolores together proved this much to be true: You can survive your heart cracking into a thousand pieces, and even if your once-loved enemy parades the pieces of your heart on sticks, you will not die. They will wave the sticks in your face and mutter Ha! and poke at you. You will not die. You will survive even the loss of your child, though surely this is the worst loss I can possibly imagine.
The first thing that Mabel and Dolores survived together was the death of Ray, the lost husband, the vanished father. I never met Ray, my grandfather. The events of his life, always told with a dizzying rapidity, a rush of adoration, played out before I was born. Conjuring Ray, they said how strong he was, how tall, with his wavy golden brown hair and square shoulders. He could sing, tell jokes. He had muscles like the hauler and stacker he was. Mabel, sweat-larded, dough on her hands and squirrel blood on her apron, glowed like coal light, and said, "Ray treated me like a queen." And indeed, to marry the young woman with an uncertain past, Ray had told his own family to go to hell. He'd met Mabel when he commandeered her from another boy in a park by saying, "I'll be taking her home tonight, Ruben." For the next forty years, they were never apart. Ray's views were authoritarian and quashed all argument. He was a Christian Scientist who believed that only God healed, that only God affirmed the flesh, and for that his children suffered. He also believed in silence, and Dolores was not allowed to speak to him unless he spoke to her first.
"His motto was that children should be seen and not heard," my mother would tell us in front of her vanity, and we girls screamed with disbelieving laughter, trying to imagine anyone gagging us, unaware how soon silence would come to claim our lives. Descending to their basement apartment in the alley, Dolores had to be invisible if her father were home. "He just didn't want to hear my voice, my chattering. He didn't want to hear nonsense. If we had a guest, he'd call on me to perform a little dance or a little song, and then let me sit on his lap. He never hit me, though he threatened to many times." Yet her brother, Ray Jun
ior, was free to say whatever he liked and sit with the grown-ups.
Living much like an only child then, and one on an enchanted island of silence at that, my mother began to daydream. Wordlessness filled up the house like smoke. Sometimes, when Mabel allowed her to break the gloom in the kitchen at her child's table, Dolores would whisper out her secret plans to Billy and Junior, her best friends, who kept her company when she couldn't talk to anyone else. Billy and Junior were invisible to everyone else, but they had about a zillion outfits that my mother sewed in her head and they looked fabulous every day, even when she dressed them like girls, which she liked to do for a joke. Early one summer evening when Dolores and Junior were seven and Billy was five, they wanted to go back outside and play before it got dark, but they hadn't finished everything on their plates. That meant their fannies could sit there warming their chairs as long as they wanted to be stubborn. Usually, they were pretty good. Usually, they complied. "But that night," Dolores recalled, "my mother served us refried fish and refried oatmeal—the worst. Ray and Mabel ate it themselves. But I couldn't." So Billy and Junior zipped their little lips in solidarity and crossed their arms and that meant they couldn't leave the table. The sun went down over the kitchen prisoners, and my mother talked on to Junior about a surprise party for Billy, who was much shyer than either of them but an eternally good sport. Before long Billy nodded off at the table like an archbishop. In due time, Junior fell asleep too, and Dolores wanted to tuck them into bed, but of course she couldn't ask the adults in the next room to release them, unless she ate her refried perch, so she just sat at the table watching the lamps turn on in the alley the way country children might watch a moonrise. It was the longest day of her life. Eventually she dropped off too, and when she woke she saw that Mabel had gone to bed and that her father sat snoring against the paisley nap of his chair in the living room. Dolores tiptoed in and bent down quietly and tied his shoelaces together. Then she painted his fingernails as bright as the twinkling alley lights with her purple nail polish. Her father roared with laughter when he woke up.
She never defied him again that she could recall, abandoning, as he wished, the dreams of higher education, the perfect test scores, instead taking a job in a bakery the day after she graduated from high school, adopting his religious creed, and eventually marrying Patrick Lyden. Because her father wished it. In the mid-1980s when I was at home in Chicago, on a stunning winter day, two large brown envelopes arrived. One was from my mother. By amazing coincidence, the other envelope was from my father. These two people had scarcely spoken to each other for over twenty years. And the envelopes contained exactly the same thing: pages of their life stories, chronicles of personal history, large and small epiphanies about themselves. Why either of them had suddenly chosen to write these stories down and in what sublime synchronicity I received them, I wasn't sure. Memento mori, I thought. Remember you must die. My mother wrote on the occasion of her fifty-eighth birthday. My father's pages dealt deftly with his experiences as a paratrooper in Japan, his hunting seasons in Wisconsin, growing up in La Crosse. My mother's paraphernalia contained a long letter about her mental health, a defense of who she'd been and was. But her childhood biography contained only one page, which began and ended with the single sentence, "My father always said, children are to be seen and not heard."
It was on the night of August 2,1950, shortly before my mother was to be married at the age of twenty, that Ray called to Mabel and gave her the byword that ruled their lives: "Let's go down to the tavern." Dolores stayed at home, pleating and ruching her handsewn trousseau, and Ray and Mabel ascended to the street. It was a hot and velvety night in Milwaukee, and I expect the moon was up, pearlizing the city sidewalks as only a moon can. They walked hand in hand, two people solid in their middle age, but Mabel said she felt as young and alive and foolish on that night as she had when she was a girl, walking the same city blocks they had walked as teenagers. I am as in love with him tonight, Mabel thought, as on the day we met.
Ray and Mabel entered the tavern together. The place was called Gaynor's. From the descriptions I've read in the newspapers, I get a sense of a dark but cozy place, with red plaid wallpaper and the Schlitz sign, like another planet, over the bar, a globe imitating the wider world, spinning on a sea of midnight closing times. Underneath the globe is Ray Junior, who is tending bar. As it happens, he is twenty-seven, a fateful age, the age at which my mother told me a woman is at the height of her beauty, which must mean that a man of the same age is at the height of his vulnerability. Ray Junior is even more handsome than his father—it's the red hair again like Pa Taylor's, the deep brown eyes as soft as old sweaters. Only his skin is odd, chalk white, doughy, the pallor of the livid and untreated rheumatic fevers of his youth. God heals, not man. Ray Junior has never been to see a doctor in his life. His pulse is irregular, and often to steady it he takes a good long pull of hair of the dog, his hands trembling, and there are those who unkindly say that Ray Junior is working where he's living. But it's not too bad yet. There's something a little unfinished about Ray Junior, and for that there's hope.
Father admired son, and son admired father at Gaynor's, where the patrons' voices meshed in heavy harness, plying together from bets to drink, from the laugh to the curse, all of it a daily and familiar syncopation. There was the sour, yeasty smell of Milwaukee's breweries, which steamed a dank yellow cloud after the hops were fermented in the afternoons, mingling now with the disinfectant that Ray Junior had splashed about. On the walls hung the usual paraphernalia, the Arlington Park racing forms, a 1949 World Series betting lineup, Yankees versus Dodgers, and a photograph of Ray in a moment of glory, brandishing a royal flush from a poker tournament. One barstool is Ray's and Ray's alone, by unspoken consent.
At Gaynor's, Ray has his boasts and his supporters, men to whom he is fraternity. He nods to his friend Dietrich, a housepainter, and Tetzlaff, a mason. "My kid brother finishes high school and now he's too good for me, the little mutt. Too good for a man the likes of me. But work for a living like I do, like my own kid here is doing, pulling you guys your brew, and you never forget who you owe your thanks to." He grins and throws out his arms. "My own two hands," he says, slapping one down on Mabel's ass. "Ray," she says moodily, but gives him a hard pinch underneath his jacket. It is after all what Ray believes and the patrons here believe too, and the proof is at the end of his arms. Ray's hands are enormous mitts the texture of leather. They have unloaded trucks in the maw of winter, shoveled anthracite into furnaces, shown his lessers who's boss. His mitts double up or unclench quickly according to the tides of emotional weather. They can raise up against wife or daughter in a threat, and the women of her circle respect this as my grandmother tips her glass of draft to him, the man she so plainly adores. So when a stranger enters, one who does not take part in the toast, whose own hands don't look like they could ever perform the herculean tasks by which Ray has kept the blood sausage on the table, no one takes any notice except Mabel.
He's a slender young man whose delicate posture is all wrong for Gaynor's. He's a player, not a worker, you can tell that from his coat and just by the way his arms crook on his hips, like he might draw silk stockings from his pocket. There's something wrong with the cant of his shoulders, which jut forward slightly into his sharkskin jacket. And the other men's voices bounce off him as if he were no more than a child or a woman, an insignificant stranger in their midst. The patrons bubble with the canards of old stories.
"Sure, Wally's a pecker, but Jesus Christ, didn't we know that? I wouldn't trust him with an ace if it was dealt by St. Francis. When that loudmouth is not lookin', I'm gonna swipe that deck because I swear on my mother's grave if I find anything funny you're gonna meet Mr. One Hung Low."
"Didja hear Kovack's kid popped his cherry with Bartz's widow?"
"It's more than Bartz could do for her."
"Hallelujah, rest in peace, Bartz."
"Get over, this is a stickup," someone says, almost singing, and
it's only then that the men look around to see what Mabel sees. A white fedora hovers over there, and under that a pair of pale eyes. A feline-looking man in two-tone shoes carries a .32 revolver. The Schlitz world glows and turns so imperceptibly that no one realizes that in one revolution they have been overtaken by chance. It is 1950, after all, and these patrons are more accustomed to orders from the boss, the drill sergeant, even their wives, than from a small and insignificant kid, armed or not.
"I said, 'Get over, get over,'" screams the trembling gunman, waving the pistol as the others step back against the wall. "Wallets out one at a time on the bar. Open the till," he shrieks. He is not from around there. He is from another and unimaginable planet. Irv Dietrich's wife decides to take him for human. She throws a handbag, and then a few wallets plop on the bar like dead carp tossed in a barrel. Mabel's coin purse bounces off the glowing mahogany wood and hits the floor, and as Ray Junior makes to open the till Ray Senior comes to life again, egging on the gunman.
"Rum at the job, sailor," Ray baits him. "You think this is money. This is just suds change, this is just I-bet-Irv cards money. You light in the head as well as light in the feet, fella? A cheese-baller, are yeh, fairy?"