Two Sides of the Family

Jack Steele                                                                                                 2970 words

240 Regency Drive

Marstons Mills, MA 02648

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Two Sides of the Family

By

Jack Steele

     

He liked his father’s side of the family better than his mother’s.  On his mother’s side they were all country people, all hicks.  They knew nothing.  They talked in a way that was comical, similar to Ma and Pa Kettle.  His father often became impatient and irritable when they visited his grandparents.  His father’s face would turn red when his grandfather urged another piece of chicken on him or more mashed potatoes.  He would answer curtly that when he wanted more food, he’d ask for it, and Sonny knew what his father really meant by his answer.  His father thought his grandfather was stupid and his manners ridiculous, and his tone made that clear to anyone with half a brain, a message apparently lost on his grandfather, who never changed.  Later in the car, on the way home, he often heard his father tell his mother that if he wanted more chicken or mashed potatoes, he would ask.  He didn’t say, Why can’t the old bastard take no for an answer?, but Sonny knew that’s what he was thinking.

     At dinner was about the only time his grandfather seemed completely alive.  The rest of the time he seemed to be more or less in hibernation.  He would sit on a straight backed wooden chair in a corner of the living room, wearing dark glasses even inside, and watch television without comment or visible reaction, his arms folded across his chest, apparently indifferent to what he was watching, perhaps not even knowing.  He might or might not have been listening to the conversation going on around him.  He never entered into conversation, not even at the dinner table, except to urge more food on people. 

     He would answer a question politely, but as briefly as possible.  Not because he was taciturn or ill-tempered.  He was placid, at least on the surface.  His father used to say that Ernest was the only man he’d ever known to whom nothing had ever happened.  He grew up on a farm near Greenville.  He courted Jack’s grandmother in a horse and buggy.  He’d been in the infantry in the First World War.  He went to a Baptist church service every Sunday of his life.  He’d been a postman in Dallas for most of his working life.  He learned all that from his mother. 

     He did have one story, though, which Jack got out of him one day.  For God knows how many years, his route consisted of delivering mail in the same building in downtown Dallas, and for all that time he started at the top and walked down.  One day a customer asked him why he couldn’t vary his route a little, so that at times he could get his mail earlier, and Ernest replied, firmly, that he’d always done it from top to bottom, for God knows how many years, and that he wouldn’t change.  When he told the story, he got red in the face and laughed at the end of it indignantly.  The point of the story, it seemed, was that he’d held his own, but against what Jack was never sure.  Against an unreasonable request?  Against chaos?  Perhaps he thought that if he gave in to even a reasonable request, a fair one, politely rendered, it would start a trickle of disorder that would inevitably lead to an avalanche, and pretty soon the people in the building would have him hopping back and forth from floor to floor, trying to please everyone.  But his grandfather didn’t say.  That was his one story and all he had to say about it.

     His grandmother was completely different.  You couldn’t find two more different people.  Mamaw was never off her feet.  She was always cooking and serving and gossiping and laughing.  She was the life of the party and the perfect host.  At Christmas she would even drink a little egg nog with bourbon in it, courtesy of his father.  His father hated egg nog, but once he found out that Mamaw would drink it with bourbon, he brought it to the house every Christmas Eve, probably less to please Mamaw than to irritate Papaw, who, being a devout Southern Baptist, never had a drink in his life.  He didn’t seem irritated, though.  In fact, he even grinned a little at the jokes about “Addie getting drunk.”  He could be a good sport, even when his father turned the tables on him and tried to get him to try a little spiked egg nog.  “No, thank you.  I’ve never had a drink and never will,” he said.  “Not even in France?” his father teased.  “You mean to say you spent six months in France, went to Paris where all those madameioselles are, and never had one drink the whole time?”  “Not even in France,” he answered.  And no one doubted it.

     Christmas Eve at the Castle’s was raucous.  All the adults except Papaw drank, and there were enough young cousins running around for it to be a madhouse.  The cousins, actually, were a big part of the problem with his mother’s side of the family.  All girls, all younger than him, and all spoiled brats.  Invariably, they got better presents and more attention.  Even his mother hardly noticed when he opened his presents, which was just as well, since they were always stupid.  Clothes, usually.  Shirts he wouldn’t be caught dead in.  Hicks didn’t know how to buy Christmas presents.

     Nevertheless, it was not possible to dislike Mamaw, no one didn’t like Addie, but he didn’t like it that she favored his cousin Susan.  He knew he was being unreasonable and unfair.  She raised Susan.  Susan was like a daughter to her.  He knew that, but he still didn’t like it.  The story, told by his mother, was that Susan’s mother left when Susan was a baby.  Vernon, Susan’s father, moved back in with his parents, so it fell to Mamaw to take care of her.  That was plenty for a reason, but he was only a kid and still resented it.                          

*****

     He felt more at home in the house on Marlborough Street than he did at home.  It was just him and Dee, his father’s mother, and she left him alone.  She didn’t even speak to him, except to answer questions, or tell him dinner was ready, or that it was time to pull out the bed.  She never hugged him or fussed over him.  She rarely smiled or laughed, except with other grownups or at something on television.  She wore shapeless print dresses that all looked the same and old-fashioned glasses like Franklin Roosevelt had worn, with small round lenses and wire rims.  She worked the TV Guide crossword puzzle every week.  She made sure when he visited that the refrigerator was stocked with Dr. Pepper, and not having a machine or anyone to crank it, she made her own version of homemade ice cream for him, putting it in the freezer in bread pans and stirring it now and then as it froze.  By far, she was his favorite grownup.

     During and after supper he watched television with her.  She preferred variety shows to dramas and knew everything about everybody.  Arthur Godfrey, Garry Moore, Dave Garroway, Sid Caesar and Imogence Coca, Ed Sullivan, anyone who’d ever appeared on Ed Sullivan, John Daly and all the panelists and mystery guests on What’s My Line.  She could answer any question about them and had an opinion, when asked, about all of them.  Artie Shaw, she thought, had been married more than anyone.  Nine times.  Arthur Godfrey showed his true colors when he fired Julius LaRosa.  He liked to hog the spotlight.  He couldn’t allow anyone to take it away from him.  Jack Paar was smart, but he wasn’t as refined as John Daly or Bennett Cerf.  He squirmed too much and went too far.  Jack Benny was Jack Benny, like Bob Hope, or Bing Crosby.  They’d always been around and always would be.  That went without saying.

     Sometimes he spent all day reading, from morning until night, switching now and then from the sofa bed to the floor to D’s bed as the spirit moved him.  In the summer, the time when he was there the most, he liked the damp straw smell of the swamp cooler, and he would often lie on the floor directly in front of it not just to be cooler but to take in more of the smell.  The windows and doors were kept open, but the curtains were always drawn to keep out the light, and revolving table fans helped out in the other rooms.  He read boys’ books.  Sports.  Biographies.  The Hardy Boys.  He also read all of D’s movie magazines from cover to cover.  And he sometimes brought All-Star baseball with him and his baseball cards.  Or he might be briefly obsessed with another board game, or something similar.  He liked a little hand held device with red and white tiles that could be moved around to make different sequences of numbers.  And D showed him how to play solitaire, which took hold of him completely for several days.

     D rode the street car with him the first time or two, to show him how, and then she let him ride by himself down to what she called, for a reason he never thought to ask about, “Boundary,” the shopping area around the corner of Marlborough and Jefferson.  He never quite got over the anxiety of deciding exactly when to pull the cord for stopping, how soon or how late, the dread of calling attention to himself always with him, of seeming like someone who didn’t know what he was doing, or like someone, as his father would have said later, who had his head up his ass, but he liked riding the street car so much that he accepted the anxiety as a price he was willing to pay.  And being at the movies, the main reason for riding the streetcar, he liked perhaps more than anything.  The Bison theater, named after the mascot of Sunset High School, where his mother went, was not very big.  It had a “loge” instead of a real balcony, but that was okay, and the movies it showed were all drenched in color and so forgettable that he sometimes couldn’t even remember the title when he got back to D’s, but that was okay too.  It was cool and dark in the theater, and hardly anyone came to the matinees in the summer and sat in the loge.  And he liked to eat popcorn and have a Pepsi with ice in it.  He especially liked chewing up a big wad of popcorn and keeping it in his mouth until all the flavor seeped out of it.

      Boundary was where his aunt had her dance studio.  “The football coach at Sunset sends his players over here to learn tap,” his aunt told him.  “It makes them more agile.”  She was trying to coax him into taking lessons when he visited D.  “It doesn’t mean you’re a sissy,” she added, which was the point of course of mentioning the football players, and he showed up once or twice just to please her, but he had no feel for it or interest in it.  It was too hard to remember the steps and listen to the rhythm at the same time, and he didn’t like to look clumsy in front of people.  Not to mention that he saw no point in it. 

     His aunt was a lot younger than Dee and completely different.  She was the life of any party.  She was tiny, had orange hair, smoked Old Gold’s constantly, and drove around in a not new but not too old green Oldsmobile with power windows.  He called her O.  He didn’t know why and never thought to ask, even though unlike Dee, it wasn’t short for anything that he knew of.  Her real name was Maedelle.  She had a son named Ron, who was nine years older than him and fat and freckled, and a husband named Freddie, a man he saw only in the evenings, around suppertime, sitting in front of a little magnified mirror, doing something with his face.  He was a musician.  Their last name was Freeman, and for a while they lived in the other part of the house on Marlborough Street, a duplex with two front doors.

     It also had a little house in the back, a converted garage, and until she died, Mama, his great-grandmother, lived there.  She actually lived in the back of the house in back, right on the alley, in a room so small that there was just enough space for the single bed, her chair, a table and a place to stand up and talk to her.  He was never forced but always asked to go in and say hello to Mama, and she was always in her bathrobe in the chair.  She told him that she read the dictionary every day, that it was a habit she recommended.  “I learn something every day,” she said.  “Did you know, for example, that ‘noggin’ is a real word, not just slang.  I always thought it was slang.”  She showed him the Webster’s paperback she kept beside her on the table.  To her he was “little Jack,” Sonny’s boy.  When he told her, in answer to the question that all old people ask children, that he wanted to be a writer, she told him he ought to send in something to the Readers’ Digest, to the section called “Life in These United States.”  “Send them a funny story,” she said.  “It shouldn’t be more than a couple of paragraphs.”  She showed him the section, then gave him a back copy to make sure he’d have the adddress.  She quoted Mark Twain to him, via Readers’ Digest:  “Cauliflower is cabbage with a college education.”  He smiled but he didn’t like it as much as she did.  He got it.  He understood why it was funny and had no problem with the populist, Will Rogers-like sentiment, but he was such a serious boy, and he wasn’t sure that he liked that kind of cleverness.

     Only once did he get mad at D.  It was when Luther died.  Luther was on the other side of the family, one of Mamaw’s brothers.  He owned a barber shop on Greenville, way on the other side of town, not Oak Cliff, and once in a while he went with his mother and father to visit Luther and his wife Nina.  They were famous in the family for saying “my how you’ve grown” every time they saw him and his brother, and Nina was famous later for attending funerals.  They had no children, and aside from remarking on his growth and patting him on the head, they had nothing to say to him.  But Luther was friendly.  All of MaMaw’s brothers were always smiling and friendly, easy going in a mischievous country sort of way.  He was “Addie’s grandson” or “Mary’s boy” in their house.  They always had hard candy in cellophane wrappers on the coffee table, in a heavy glass bowl, and he was welcome to help himself, but he didn’t like it much.  Nor was he much interested in their round screen television.  It was hard to see anything for all the snow in the picture. 

     He endured the visits to see Luther and Nina, a social obligation of his parents that included him, but he didn’t really know either one of them, and there was nothing to do while he was there.  Even listening to the adults talk, which he usually liked, was boring at Luther and Nina’s, which probably explains why he didn’t go with his parents to visit them the day Luther died.  But he talked to Luther that day.  He called the house around noon to find out if his parents would be back in time for lunch, and Luther answered the phone.  He sounded perfectly normal, except that he didn’t know who was calling him.  “It’s Jack Jr.,” he said.  “Little Jack.  Mary’s son.”  But Luther still didn’t know who he was.  And it must have been right after that, according to what his parents said, that Luther walked out to his car and dropped dead.

     Are you sure it was Luther?  Yes.  Are you sure you dialed the right number?  Yes.  Did you tell him who you were?  Yes.  No one could explain it, but he overheard D say to his parents, “He probably didn’t insist.  You know how Jack is.”  Of course he knew already that he was shy, painfully so at times, but he didn’t know that D knew it, or thought it important.  Thought less of him for it.   That was the hard part to take, since he heard that in her voice.  And to make it worse, it contradicted what he knew to be true and had told them.  For once, he had insisted, both to Luther and to them about what he’d said to Luther.  He’d been so amazed at Luther’s inability to understand who he was, that he forgot to be shy.  Two or three times, louder than normal, speaking slowly and clearly, he had explained who he was, who he was related to, how he was related to Luther, all to no avail.  And D didn’t believe him, or at least doubted it, “knowing him.”  He didn’t think that she didn’t like him in general for being shy, or even for that specifically.  But it was something she knew about, and it was a flaw, and on top of that, and perhaps more important, she didn’t know how honest he was.