The Lynches, whose dour, roly-poly son no one liked, rarely visited the housing project, so if Rita was taking time to call my mother, it was probably to stir up trouble. We did not have a phone most of the time we lived in the project; if relatives needed to reach us, they would call the Dengels’ house next door. Because of this, the Dengels always knew what my mother referred to as “all our business.”
My sisters and I viewed the Dengels as ambulatory fossils, though they were probably only in their fifties at the time. Even by the standards of marked-down humanity that flourished in the project, they looked a trifle shopworn. Mr. Dengel was a short, stubby, serious man with a stooped back, who wore his trousers up around his chest like an unhappy dwarf treading water in a pair of 46-long waders. He drove a puke-green Studebaker, the first unapologetically hideous car I can ever recall seeing on the streets of Philadelphia. He himself was uncompromisingly ugly; he looked like Richard Nixon’s Scandinavian cousin Blingen the Troll.
His wife was a chain-smoker who used to perch her jumbo-sized buttocks against a rail at the foot of our cul-de-sac and run her mouth all day long. I never saw Mrs. Dengel wear a dress; she always left the house cosseted in a loose shift called a muumuu. For all intents and purposes, she spent her entire adult life lounging in her pajamas. My mother did not approve of her, as she was vulgar and a smoker and forever had her hair up in curlers and talked like Lauren Bacall. My father liked her well enough but always maintained that the childless Dengels were closet gentry, the kinds of well-heeled individuals who did not have to live in a housing project but did so because they were cheap. Mr. Dengel’s not having a job reinforced this perception.
Anyone who could support himself without going to work every day my father suspected of being closet gentry, a sponger who sucked at the public’s copious teat. The Dengels lived next to us for four years, and we were never once in their house, nor they in ours. They did not care much for children. This was during the Sputnik era, when America was terrified that the Russians might catch us off guard during the World Series or the season opener of
The Honeymooners
and drop the H-bomb. The Dengels looked kind of foreign, as he, in particular, was quite the hatchet face and she was no bathing beauty herself. A lot of people in our cul-de-sac thought the Dengels were communist spies, though why they would have gone underground to gather information about losers like us was anybody’s guess.
Whatever their relationship with the Soviets, the Dengels did have a phone, and, so long as we did not overdo it, they would allow us to receive calls in case of an emergency. The night of my unexpected furlough from Ravenhill Academy, Aunt Rita called to get all the details about that morning’s service, having heard on the radio that the new archbishop had celebrated mass there. And so he had, assisted by a pair of eighth-graders handpicked for this most blessed event. When my mother told me this, I refused to believe it. Or let us say that, while I had no trouble believing that the priests at Saint Bridget’s had stabbed us in the back, I would not accept that the sweet little Filipino nuns were complicit in such treachery. They knew that I had my heart set on being a priest; they knew that my life was short on surprises; they knew how much a once-in-a-lifetime chance to serve mass for the archbishop would have meant to me.
When Jackie and I resumed our duties the next day, I asked the tiniest, youngest nun about the service the day before. Her English was impenetrable; she had no idea why we had been given the day off; she did not understand the question; it was not her fault. We had no way of finding out whose fault it was. It was all some sort of mix-up; lines had gotten crossed somewhere; these things happened. As usual, she brought us juice and coffee and raisin toast after the early mass, then a hearty breakfast after the later service. We left without eating that day, and perhaps even the next day. We were angry, humiliated, disappointed, ashamed. We would have loved to vent our fury on someone, but it was hard to hold a grudge against these cherubic creatures in their divine little costumes, and those breakfast banquets were unimaginably tasty; so by the end of the week we had lost our nerve, swallowed our pride, and gone back to enjoying our early-morning smorgasbords. After all, we adored the little nuns, and they adored us.
It would be nice to say that we never ate breakfast again after realizing that we had been betrayed, or that the meals never tasted half as good. But this was not the case. Poor people have dignity, but not much of it, least of all children. We continued to serve mass at Ravenhill Academy every day for the next three weeks. We dutifully honored our commitment. Then the summer came to an end, and we returned to school. I never went back to Ravenhill Academy, and I doubt that Jackie Godman ever did, either. The wonderful little nun, as always, brought us breakfast that final day, and, as always, we ate it. But when we left that morning, we did not say thank you and we did not say goodbye. At the very beginning of the summer, our parents had warned us about accepting treats from strangers. And now we had learned our lesson.
Chapter 5.
Semper Fidelis
From the time I was small, I kept my eyes peeled for role models I could substitute for my unsatisfactory father. They did not have to be breathing. One day when I was five years old, I stumbled upon a curious object in my parents’ bedroom. It was a wooden-and-glass box with a silver crucifix poised atop it and pint-sized candleholders squatting on either side. On the front was a glass viewing screen, through which, by rotating a lever, I could gaze at colorful images of the fourteen Stations of the Cross, imprinted on a sheet of cloth. Here was Christ arraigned before Pontius Pilate. Here was Christ on the road to Calvary. Here was Christ having nails driven into His hands by executioners who looked almost blasé, as if they were civil servants punching the clock.
The box had tiny hinges on the back, which I soon pried open. Out spilled a cornucopia of religious paraphernalia: oil, water, cotton swabs, a prayer book, a silver plate. Rifling through this unexpected haul of swag, I unearthed a gold pocket watch and a tiny leather book. The book proved to be a missal, the Catholic vade mecum. It was difficult to open because the pages were caked together by a congealed maroon substance. The substance, I would soon learn, was dried blood.
At some point during this unauthorized reconnaissance, my mother entered the room, displeased that I had unearthed these household icons. But unlike my father, who would have knocked me clear across the room had he caught me prowling about the conjugal suite, my mother sat down and explained the provenance of these strange items. In olden days—actually, as recently as a decade earlier—people often died in their own beds; the oil, silver plate, and candles were stored in receptacles such as these to be used by the visiting priest when he came to administer the Last Rites. The oil was to be dripped on the forehead, as was the holy water; the silver plate was a “paten” used to catch the Holy Eucharist should the priest drop it. The Eucharist, I already knew, was the body of Christ, or a reasonable facsimile thereof; for years I had looked forward to the day I would swallow the host for the first time, because the gifts children received when they made their First Holy Communion constituted the single biggest payday for fledgling soldiers of Christ in the entire liturgical calendar.
My mother now revealed that the gold watch and pocket-sized Bible had belonged to her brother Henry, who died in Alaska in 1949, a year before I was born. She was less than forthcoming with the details at the time, but when I prodded her over the coming weeks and months, she told me that her brother had run off to the state once known as Seward’s Folly and landed a job as a longshoreman. She even had letters he had sent from Seward, Alaska. According to these missives, he was having a swell time of it up there in the frozen north, with no imminent plans to return to the East Coast. But then late one night, shortly after her marriage, she informed me, he was ambushed by faceless, nameless thugs and cut to ribbons in a dark alley. The body was shipped home along with Henry’s personal effects, which included the gold watch and the blood-soaked missal, and was buried in a North Philadelphia cemetery. My mother did not explain what a longshoreman was, but it sounded fabulous.
Over the years, as my mother dolloped out snippets of information about her brother’s tragically abbreviated life, I came to believe that my uncle Henry—clearly an urban maverick in the rambling, gambling, hell-for-leather Jack London tradition—was a lone wolf who had ditched Philadelphia, seeking a better life elsewhere, ultimately setting his sights on our remote, wide-open forty-ninth state. There he had many wondrous adventures. One night, or so I gathered from my mother’s piecemeal account, he sprang to the defense of a black man who was being harassed by two other saloon patrons, the proverbial tough customers. But Henry, handy with his fists and always poised to defend the underdog, was not intimidated. The malignant racists were sent on their way, whereupon the badgered Negro fell to his knees and expressed his heartfelt gratitude to this Celtic Samaritan, a most unexpected champion in that benighted era. But later that night, upon exiting the saloon, Henry was pounced upon by this very same tandem of racist curs, stabbed in the liver, and left to bleed to death in a dark alley.
It isn’t hard to see why Uncle Henry would immediately assume the role of my personal knight in shining armor. For years I carried his watch in my pocket and kept his blood-drenched missal secreted away in my chest of drawers. Given that I had already gobbled up juvenile versions of
Kidnapped
and
Treasure Island
, this rip-roaring saga was incredibly inspiring. From the time I first heard the word “elsewhere,” I fashioned dreams of running away from home—to the Sahara, Tahiti, the Scottish Highlands. In my teens, I settled on Paris, then New York. But there was never any question of remaining in dull-as-dishwater Philadelphia. The ideal destination could be just about any port of call on the planet, so long as my father wasn’t there. This would, of course, include Alaska.
My mother did not immediately tell me every relevant detail about Henry’s early life, but over the years, the facts trickled out. Did he drink? Yes, but not to excess; unlike my father, he could handle his liquor. Was he a good student? No; people who grew up to be longshoremen rarely were. Did he get along with his father? Not really; in fact, they despised each other. While he was growing up, there had been numerous beatings, plenty of bad blood, the usual bevy of threats and execrations. As was so often the case in an ethnic group determined to populate the entire Eastern seaboard with children that at least one parent didn’t really like, his mother may have been in his corner, but his father was not. Fusing this array of facts with my own adolescent conception of heroism, I fashioned an image of my uncle as a swashbuckling figure of gallantry and romance. If I couldn’t have a living father I respected, the next-best thing was a dead uncle I adored.
At the time, there were only two other males in my extended family who were serious candidates for the retroactive homage I bestowed on Uncle Henry. The first was another dead relative, a man my mother referred to as Uncle Q, who had taught at West Point. West Point, to my ears at least, also sounded intoxicatingly mythical. Uncle Q, a considerably more tragic figure than Henry, was a confirmed bachelor gassed by the Germans in France during the First World War. He never recovered from this crime against humanity and eventually grew so weary of gasping for breath that he took his own life. I once compared photographs of the two men: Henry was a saucy lad cut from the
Captains Courageous
mold, Uncle Q a severe old Irish gent. Had Henry not existed, had he not insinuated himself into my existence with such fanfare, I perhaps would have adopted Uncle Q as my hero. But given the circumstances, and taking into account how much more picaresque a knife fight with subarctic scum seemed by comparison with a Hudson Valley suicide stemming from decades-old war wounds at the hands of the barbarous Huns, Uncle Henry beat Uncle Q hands down.
A somewhat less obvious candidate for full-bore adulation was my father’s brother Johnny, still very much among the living. Strapping, not yet thirty, even better-looking than my handsome father, Johnny could lay claim to all kinds of handyman skills his older brother could not. He was also good around children. On the negative side, he had spent most of his adult life in the hoosegow. He would often materialize out of nowhere right around Christmas, laden with gifts purchased with the suspiciously large sum of money he had earned during his latest stint in the calaboose. This cash, we later learned, came from participating in medical experiments that would drastically shorten his life. No slouch, he was forever acquiring impressive new skills: One year it was carpentry, the next year, plumbing; the next year, the fruits of his diligence in electrician’s school would shine forth. During his woodworking phase, when he found himself emulating the early stages in the career of his Lord and Savior, he produced a set of ornate, almost chic, wooden crucifixes he then dispensed as Christmas gifts. And if anything in the way of roofing or gutter repair needed to be done, Johnny was your man.
Uncle Johnny was the prototypical youngster who fell in with the wrong crowd at age fourteen or fifteen and henceforth was always in Dutch. In his case, the wrong crowd was the United States Navy, whose ranks he joined in 1944. Most of his offenses were petty: breaking into cigarette machines; walking off his bartending job at rush hour and leaving the watering hole completely unattended; routinely violating parole. Incapable of straightening up and flying right, he was always on the wrong side of the law.
On occasion, my father would take me or Ree along when he went to visit Johnny at nearby Holmesburg State Penitentiary, sometimes leaving us to cool our heels in the waiting room, sometimes leaving us outside in a nearby street unattended, with strict instructions to avoid talking to strangers. I was never sure whether he liked having company on his way to the Big House or thought it would cheer up his brother to know that his nieces and nephews were just a few hundred yards away and had not yet entered the recidivist mode. It was creepy waiting there inside the ominous fortress Uncle Johnny called home, but it was even creepier waiting outside. Here was yet another example of my father’s idiosyncratic approach to family outings: Some kids went to see the lions in the zoo; we went to see Uncle Johnny in the slammer.