Closing Time (11 page)

You didn’t need to have much on the ball to see that my uncles were supplanting my father as my heroes. They were independent, they were flashy, they made their own hours, they had yet to meet any crap they were prepared to take. Whippersnapper-protégé that I was, I got into the habit of asking them tons of questions, not because I cared all that much about the answers but because it enabled them to assume the enviable role of the wise old patriarch, sagaciously explaining to a callow youth who was who and what was what. After which they always bought me soda pop.

One Saturday, Uncle Charlie rounded me up to help out with his undefined duties as a ward heeler. We spent the morning stuffing hundreds of envelopes with fliers beseeching voters to get out and support the Democratic ticket. Then, after lunch, we delivered the envelopes to houses throughout his neighborhood. My uncle smoked cigars all day, bought me some ice cream, and then, at the end of the afternoon, rewarded me with a few bucks for my efforts. I told him that I would put the money toward the purchase of a jet-black English racer that I’d had my eye on for some time. About a year earlier, I had purchased a used bike at the Salvation Army for $12 with cash I had saved up from birthdays and my confirmation, but the vehicle was a dud whose steering wheel would never stay in place, causing me to regularly go flying off in all directions. To work my way back to the house after a spin around the project, I had to pedal past a playground teeming with inclement white trash, so relying on a bicycle with a defective steering wheel was a bad idea. The bike I’d been dreaming about was going to set me back $33, though I never really expected to make that purchase, because as soon as I had $33 amassed—a princely sum that was probably half what my father was earning each week back then—I knew he would requisition it for some dubious emergency, like stocking up on blended whiskey in case the state of Tennessee got nuked by the Russians. My father was the Internal Revenue Service writ small; he was the physical embodiment of all those tax-and-spend Democratic legislatures that Republicans have always reviled, in that he made it pointless to work hard, because the money was only going to end up getting confiscated by lazy sons of bitches who had their own ideas about how to spend your hard-earned cash. He, like them, was a master at demoralizing the workforce.

Two Saturdays after the outing with Uncle Charlie, my mother dispatched a search party and told me to come home immediately, as a fantastic surprise awaited me. I could not imagine what this surprise could be, but as surprises were in short supply back then, I ran home as fast as my little legs could carry me. When I nipped through the front door, my uncle Charlie was kneeling on the living room floor, clutching a wrench, putting the final touches on the assembly of a magnificent jet-black English racer. The bicycle had been manufactured by a German company called Hermes, after the god of speed, though, technically, he was also the deity responsible for watching over anyone involved in shady financial transactions. No matter how long I lived, no matter how radiantly fortune shone upon me later in life, I never got a better present. I rode that bicycle every single afternoon until the day I went to college. I rode it up hills, down hills, past gangs of hoodlums, through gangs of hoodlums. I loved that bicycle the way a mother loves a son. More, in the case of my mother. It was the only toy I ever owned that I took care of: I washed it, I waxed it, I polished it, I adored it. That bicycle symbolized triumph; that bicycle symbolized escape. I never forgot that afternoon, and I never forgot my uncle Charlie. He was a man who had cash burning a hole in his pocket, and men who had cash burning holes in their pockets could make little boys’ dreams come true.

In theory, he could have made little girls’ dreams come true as well, but this did not come to pass that day. Forty years later, when I was reliving the events of that unforgettable afternoon at a family gathering, my younger sister Eileen, in her inimitably direct fashion, told me what it felt like to sit there and watch me take possession of that bicycle while she and my two other sisters slowly came to the realization that there would be no bikes for the girls, no dolls for the girls, nothing whatsoever for the girls, as they were not the apples of their uncle’s eye. I had not previously examined that day from their perspective, enthralled as I was by my own good fortune. But my good fortune was not theirs, and none of them would ever forget it.

 

Uncle Charlie and Uncle Jerry treated us just swell, as did their wives. Cassie became my sister Ree’s surrogate mother and inseparable companion, while Charlie’s bride, the serene, loving, and long-suffering Aunt Marge, dutifully adopted the role of the grandmother none of us ever had. My grandparents, immigrants from Ireland, were all dead before I was born, and for a time I thought I had missed out on something. Then I heard stories about how the men liked to knock around their kids, and I decided I was better off without them. Aunt Marge and Uncle Charlie would do just fine.

There were a few other relatives who occasionally stopped by East Falls for short visits, perhaps because they preferred our company to that of their children. My uncle Jim, a foulmouthed, chain-smoking insurance salesman, and his wife, Mary, my mother’s nicotine-drenched older sister, who also swore like a sailor, lived in Drexel Hill, a modestly affluent suburb just outside the city limits. The very words “Drexel” and “Hill” evoked a grandeur and an aura of poshness that would have been unattainable for Irish Americans a generation earlier. The Burkes, however, were not posh.

Mary and Jim didn’t go overboard on their trips to the project—they popped in perhaps once a year—but from time to time they would invite me for overnight trips to their house, where Jim would exhume his trusty old tape recorder so we could listen to the entire fourth quarter of the Philadelphia Eagles’ triumph over the Green Bay Packers in the 1960 NFL championship game. The game ended with the immortal linebacker Chuck Bednarik (who played all sixty minutes, as he was also the Eagles’ center) wrestling the Packers’ star running back, Jim Taylor, to the ground on the eight-yard line and pinioning him there. “You can get up now, Jim,” the neolithic Bednarik is reported to have said to the likable Taylor as the final gun went off. “This fucking game is over.” It was the last championship the Eagles ever won.

I liked Uncle Jim and loved being around my aunt Mary, because she was volcanically crude, one of the few women I have ever met who
did
know how to swear. Every third person she talked about was a “son of a bitch,” which quickly grew to be one of my favorite expressions, as Chuck Bednarik used it and my dad did not. Mary’s son, who would eventually go into the same line of work as his dad, was the first bona fide hale-fellow-well-met to enter my life. Endowed from childhood with the gift of gab, this silver-tongued sharpie buttonholed me at a family gathering when I was twelve and smooth-talked me into buying a life insurance policy. My mother, appalled when she got wind of this, made him cancel the policy. From my point of view, falling prey to Little Jim’s ethical slovenliness was a small price to pay for his dad’s company, as every year Jim senior would take me to an Eagles game at venerable Franklin Field on the University of Pennsylvania campus in West Philadelphia. Eagles tickets were hard to get and did not come cheap, as is true to this day.

Usually the game was a dud, as Jim did not care to waste his best tickets on a kid who was still wet behind the ears, though I did once get to see the Eagles’ fleet-footed wide receiver Ben Hawkins score three touchdowns against the hapless New Orleans Saints. Hawkins was famous for refusing to do up his chin strap, and though he was never much of a receiver, his renegade idiosyncrasies played well with Philadelphia’s blue-collar fans, who imagined that in the gridiron melee of the mind, they too would enter the fray with their chin straps dangling impudently. At the time, the Eagles used to shuttle three quarterbacks in and out of the game. One couldn’t pass (Jack Concannon), one couldn’t run (Norm Snead), and one couldn’t play (King Hill). Be that as it may, King Hill was quite a hit with the fans, because he had crafted himself a superb nickname, as had King Corcoran, the star of an upstate minor-league ball club called the Pottstown Firebirds, who kept trying to make the Eagles’ squad, but always got cut in preseason. The young men who attended Eagles games in that era, the slightly paunchy ones who were just starting to go to seed, were never delusional enough to imagine that they could have played in the NFL. But suiting up for a third-rate squad like the Pottstown Firebirds—a blue-collar outfit filled with lunch-pail Vercingetorixes like themselves—did not seem entirely outside the range of possibility. I saw King Hill play once, but only for a few downs before he got yanked back to the sidelines, and never saw King Corcoran at all. The reign of the Kings was short.

Jerry and Cassie and Mary and Jim were the relatives who kept us treading water as we struggled through what we hoped was only a temporary reversal of fortune. They would usually break open their wallets during their visits and were always generous on birthdays and at Christmas. They knew better than to bring over hand-me-downs, as we were already pretty well set in that department. But there was an entirely different type of relative out there, mostly on my mother’s side of the family. These were the ones who did not come to see us, the ones who thought they were better than us. Foremost among them was Uncle George, the husband of my mother’s older sister Nora, and a figure of mythological primness and Caledonian parsimoniousness. He came to visit us only once in the four years we lived in East Falls, and said nothing. He spent the whole visit in a state of apprehensive self-quarantine, cowering inside a disintegrating armchair over on the far side of the room, as if he feared that he might contract dengue fever if he came too near us. He made no attempt to disguise how much he hated being there, but at the same time he looked a bit frightened, fearing perhaps that a quartet of hungry but determined children might machete loose one of his legs and cook it up in an impromptu fondue.

Irish American himself, arriving in the world with no more advantages than my parents, Uncle George felt that my father was a wastrel; that my mother had married beneath her station, and that because she had married beneath her station, she had gotten what she deserved. For many years, he worked in a reasonably important position for the Radio Corporation of America in a New Jersey office complex directly across the Delaware from his home, which was located in a mildly upscale Philadelphia neighborhood called Mayfair. This was an impressive achievement, given that he had all the charm of a culvert. Upon retirement, he moved to Florida, where he lived until a squadron of harpies came to claim his soul. He and his wife, Nora, never had any children. Good thing, too. Uncle George resembled the prissy grump—also named George—who was the child-loathing neighbor in the popular TV program
Dennis the Menace
. But whereas George Wilson was a harmless old fussbudget, George Aitkin was a prick. I could understand his despising my father, but why us? We hadn’t done anything to offend him. We hadn’t squandered any opportunities for advancement. We hadn’t married beneath our station. We were only 11, 9, 6, 1½.

Most of our other relatives fell into the same general category. They rarely visited, and when they did come, they didn’t stay. The lone exception was my mother’s younger sister Cecilia and her husband, Bill. Like my father, Bill had lost his job—as a typewriter salesman, of all things—when he got caught in an economic downdraft and was forced to take refuge in a housing project. Luckily for the Tierneys, the Hill Creek Housing Project was a much classier operation and was miles and miles away in that up-and-coming, semisuburban district called the Great Northeast. Even though their puffin-scale house was cramped and dark and ugly as sin and was much gloomier than the starter hovel we lived in, there was no gainsaying its chic address on Adams Avenue. Uncle Bill, who died of lung cancer in his early forties, was a lovely man with a quick, mordant sense of humor. He never lorded it over us. Aunt Celie, on the other hand, never let my mother forget that she was living in a project demonstrably inferior to the one the Tierney family called home. My mother said that this behavior, while reprehensible, was understandable, as it was “only human nature.” We later found out that my mother had strong-armed her beautiful, vivacious, spectacularly popular younger sister and erstwhile roommate into quitting high school a year early and taking a job, thereby denying Celie the opportunity to be the prom queen, the belle of the ball, the girl most likely to succeed. My mother did this, so the story went, because she needed to clear the decks in order to marry my father. Aunt Celie, forced to finish high school by night, never forgave her.

The third beacon of light throughout these dark times was the public library, and particularly the bookmobile that came around every Friday night. The bookmobile, a sort of cultural bread truck, was filled with materials that enabled us to travel to foreign lands in our minds. Card-holders were allowed to borrow five books at a time, though I would have much preferred to borrow ten, because even at an early age I understood that if I wanted to grow up to have a dainty little Colonial home with a white picket fence and a collie, I’d better read a lot of books. I read books about the Greeks, the Romans, the Vikings, the Moors. I taught myself the causes of the French and Indian War, the latitude and longitude of Timbuktu, the composition of the Spartan phalanx, the philosophical underpinnings of the bicameral legislative system. I taught myself who Sennacherib was, what he was famous for, and how the reign of Ashurbanipal fit into the grand scheme of things, dead certain that this information might one day come in handy.

 

I was never jealous of rich people when I was young, because I didn’t know any. Poor people tend to resent those in the economic stratum directly above them, so I grew up ferociously jealous of the lower middle class, a group that rarely attracts such ire. I grew up wishing that I lived in the slatternly houses adjacent to the project, not the stately mansions that lined prestigious Lincoln Drive, several miles down the road. I was never jealous of children who went to private school, because I was unaware that they even existed. Not until I read
A Separate Peace
in high school did I find out that there were prep schools out there loaded with bashful psychopaths who liked nothing better than to push one another out of trees. We all had a great laugh when our teachers assigned us these coming-of-age tearjerkers; from our perspective, the more boys named Phineas who got pushed out of trees, the better. We had not made a separate peace; we had not even been invited to the war. We could identify with the characters in
David Copperfield
and
Oliver Twist
. But why would any of us care about someone named Phineas? Much less Holden.