we had done all day and I would announce that we spent the whole afternoon in a saloon, and she would upbraid my grandpa in a shrill voice.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, in a tavern, Pat? You have to take the boy into a tavern? What on God’s earth is on your mind, taking him into those filthy places?”
Her tone troubled me, as did her obvious anger with my beloved Grandpa, but what was most vexing was her sudden renunciation of taverns, since I knew the two of them went on occasion to a tavern on a Saturday evening and more than once I’d heard them come home singing.
One night he stayed out later than usual, and when he returned, his face was flushed and he was sporting a ridiculous-looking smile and a gash over one eye. He had fallen on the sidewalk. She took him into the bathroom to clean him up, assailing him all the while with her opinion of the low estate to which he had fallen. She called him names, questioned his sense, and generally laid down a barrage of verbal artillery that had my head spinning, and I wasn’t even the object of the assault. When he’d been patched up, he made his way to the kitchen and sank onto his accustomed chair, where he lit up a Camel and stared out the window, drumming tar-stained fingers on the table as Grandma continued the evening’s homily. Finally, he turned and squinted at her and caught her in mid-sentence with “Bejesus, woman, will you shut up!”
Of all the many avenues open to him, this was not his best. I would have pretended to collapse on the table, for example, or claimed stomach trouble and scurried back to the bathroom. But he told her to shut up. And she hit him with a pan. It was a large black cast iron skillet she used for bacon and eggs and to create the little lake of rendered lard that was required before she could make chicken or pork chops. She took hold of it in both hands and whacked him on top of his head.
Amazingly, it made a loud “bong,” as if this were a scene in a Popeye cartoon. He winced, rubbed his head, and puffed on the cigarette. She replaced the pan and left the room, red-faced and teary with anger. For the rest of the evening they said nothing to each other, but after they put me to bed, I was aware that they sat together in the living room watching a show with Julius LaRosa, one of their favorites.
She was vigilant about my budding morals and questioned me about the places where Grandpa took me. Often we went to visit what she called “his cronies” in the neighborhood: a blind man named George who fed me caramels that he kept in a bowl in front of him. I was fascinated by George, for Grandpa had once told me that George had lost his sight in the ’20s when a hoodlum had tossed acid in his face. The attack had been a mistake, the acid meant for another man. We also visited a little round Italian man in the projects named Tony. He made his own wine, either in his tub or in the basement, and frequently sent a bottle of it home with us as a sop to Grandma. And we went to taverns.
He considered himself something of a sharpie but was no match for her. Once when I was perhaps six, after we’d spent a lovely afternoon in a cool, dark tavern, him watching the ballgame and me playing with the saloonkeeper’s new litter of dalmatian pups, he coached me on what to say to Grandma’s interrogation.
“Don’t tell her we went to a tavern.”
“But we did.”
“Oh, sure, but you can say we visited Gerry. We did see Gerry, didn’t we?”
“Yes. He was in the tavern.”
“There you have it.”
And so, when she came home from the knitting mill, she asked me what we’d done and I announced that we’d visited Gerry. “Did you go to the tavern?” she asked, and when I said, “No,” she quietly asked if I’d been able to play with the new Dalmatian puppies at the tavern, to which I answered, “Yes, I got to play with them all afternoon.” It was this and similar experiences which taught me that in this lifelong contest, he might hope to outlast her, but he was no match for her as a tactician.
At times, to avoid dragging me into godless places, my grandpa took to bringing home his liquor, usually pint or half-pint bottles of wine or bourbon. When finished, he would hide the bottles, and it was his choice of hiding place that sometimes made me doubt his sanity. An empty bottle might find itself under the cushion of the big red armchair in the living room, or under one of the sofa cushions, or behind a vase on a shelf in the dining room, and once he hid his spent bottle inside the body of the Victrola.
It is plain that on some level he intended her to find the bottles—“Dead soldiers,” he called the empties—that they were his shiny glass emblems of defiance, a skull-and-crossbones trail to show he was still running his own life, when of course illness and boredom had taken it over. So she found his little bottles effortlessly, and each discovery produced a scene that might have been scripted.
“What is this?” she would say, holding the bottle by two fingers like a dead rat and staring at it as though she’d never seen one before.
“Oh, now what does it look like?” he would mutter, looking at the television.
“You’ve been drinking this poison again.”
“No,” he would say. “That’s an old one.”
“I reversed the cushion on this chair last week, and this filthy thing wasn’t there then.”
“Well, I don’t remember when I drank it. I’m not even sure it’s mine,” he would say with a shrug.
“And whose is it, then? Mine?”
And my grandfather would turn to me and give me a long, slow squint, and this would set her off.
“Oh, for the love of God, you know very well it’s not his,” she would say, and march off to the kitchen, and then it was her turn to mutter, a couple of people who had learned to communicate both directly and indirectly after thirty years of unarmed conflict. “A moron I’ve chosen to live my life with,” she would say, “an amadan I’ve got for a husband, without the sense to come in out of the rain, pouring poison down his throat and dragging a tiny boy along with him.”
There would follow the sound of the bottle being tossed violently into the garbage can.
“A brainless idiot I’m joined to for life,” she’d say loudly.
Still facing the television screen he would mutter something like, “A little drink never hurt anybody I know,” and she would hear it, as she was intended to, the softness of his voice notwithstanding, and this would launch her like a missile into a short but violent burst of anger and general name-calling, a performance that would in Shakespeare’s day have earned her the title of Village Scold.
And then she would be all right. A few minutes would pass, marked by the sounds and smells of Grandma putting dinner together, and after allowing her a short while to calm down, my grandfather would call out, “What’s for dinner?”
“God knows you don’t deserve one.”
“Probably not, but I’d like to know anyway.”
“Pork chops and boiled potatoes.”
He would nod, pleased with the answer, and I would nod along with him. She was making good things, and that meant she wasn’t holding a grudge.
Good things they were, always, she could cook anything and make it taste like food on a picnic, but it was not necessarily the menu a doctor would have put together. The salient characteristic of my grandmother’s cooking was lard. “Shortening”
