Assessing those years, a case can be made that Len’s Clothing Store was not the ideal environment for a young boy. What with middle-aged vixens whose buttocks were exploding out of their trousers and foulmouthed middlemen swearing like sailors and fat slobs who smelled like roughnecks from Kuwaiti oil fields stinking up the joint and decapitated skulls rolling around under the counter, perhaps I would have been better off if I’d signed up for a paper route or shined shoes or delivered circulars or stayed home. But until I met Len, my life was featureless and gloomy. The people who congregated around the store were all defective in some way; they were off-brands, marked-down merchandise, damaged goods, closeouts. But they made swell company, and they held out the promise of a better world, a world bristling with the unexpected. Most important, none of them were cruel. They provided a respite from the dark hegemony of my father. It was true that I wished away my childhood, working twenty hours a week; there was never any time for Little League baseball or Pop Warner football, no time for after-school activities, not much time for play. No matter. Without that job, without that sliver of self-respect my piddling wages provided, I would have gone down for the count. Len had hired me for the hell of it, not because he deliberately set out to save my life. He saved it anyway.
When I grew up and told friends about Len and Lieutenant Leto and our rogues’ gallery of exotics, they often reacted as if these people were grotesques. They were the kinds of weirdos and losers and head cases we go out of our way to shield our middle-class children from; the closest either of my children has ever gotten to a bona fide screwball is me. Perhaps my friends are right; perhaps these people were grotesques; perhaps they were in many ways pathetic. But when I see them now, gamboling across the landscape, they seem like commedia dell’arte characters who brought sunshine to my youth. They were certainly a whole lot more fun to be around than the hedge-fund managers and politicians and American Studies professors and editors of glossy magazines I would meet later. What’s more, they all possessed an unusual brand of courage. Unlike most of the interchangeably successful people I have met in my professional life, the oddballs who frequented Len’s Clothing Store had assembled their personalities from whole cloth. They were not generic; they had not been churned out on an assembly line; they were, to use one of Len’s stock phrases, the real McCoy.
Especially Kaye Sera. Kaye was a plain-looking woman with a gigantic ass who’d been cast adrift in a blue-collar neighborhood in a blue-collar town in an asphyxiatingly conservative era, but she risked everything because she wanted to look like Sophia Loren. To some, this may seem like a trashy dream. But it takes a million times more guts to be a working-class femme fatale who flaunts her fat ass in a straitlaced community that frowns on this sort of thing than to be a soccer mom tooling around the suburbs in a socially sanctified vehicle with a bumper sticker proclaiming her unswerving allegiance to a dink presidential candidate who got creamed four years ago. Some people have attitudes. Some people have balls.
This brings me full-circle back to Uncle Henry. Years passed after I stopped worshipping him on a daily basis—decades, in fact. Then, in 1984, my youngest sister, Mary Ann, got married to a tall, strapping Irish American named Tom Farrell. Tom’s father, a member of the Philadelphia Police Department’s bunko squad, did not drink. Neither did Tom. Neither, as far as I could determine, did anyone else on his side of the family. At the wedding reception, the libational schism between the two families was reflected in the seating arrangements: The Queenans faced the Farrells across a strategic divide—drinkers on one side, teetotalers on the other—with the neutral bridal party holding court nervously and, for the most part, abstemiously at the middle table connecting the two wings.
That afternoon, I was seated next to my mother’s younger sister, Cecilia. My aunt was an Irish-American beauty whose beloved husband died quite young; she never remarried, and there was always about her a sense of dreams gone awry, of the rose whose fragrance had been wasted on the desert air. My own theory was that she never found anyone to replace Bill Tierney, the love of her life, and accepted the fact that one love of your life was enough. I had always liked my aunt, and after everyone had a few belts, I asked her if she and my mother did not sometimes miss their brother Henry.
“No,” she replied unhesitatingly.
“You didn’t? I just thought . . . well, he was your brother. . . .”
“Why would we miss him? He was a bad actor,” she added, by way of clarification.
“What does that mean?” I inquired.
And then it all came out. Uncle Henry had, indeed, fled Philadelphia for Alaska, but not to fulfill any burning ambition to start a new life. He’d fled because he owed money to the wrong people, and the wrong people wanted it back. Yes, he had found work in Alaska, but he hadn’t died there; he perished in a knife fight somewhere in Washington State. And he hadn’t died while defending a Negro; he’d apparently been killed after confronting one. He was bad news, and the world was better off without him.
One afternoon a few years later, when I was driving down to Atlantic City with my mother, then in her eighty-sixth year, I asked her to tell me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about her brother. She did, at least to the extent that she could recall all the relevant data. Bit by bit she filled me in on the missing details about Henry’s life, the ones she had suppressed for so many years. He had been a troublemaker. He had been a bum. He had been murdered, and there was nothing heroic or romantic about his demise. He had sired a child out of wedlock, then left his wife behind in the City of Brotherly Love. The woman never saw any of the insurance money after he died; my mother and her sisters pocketed it. Times were tough; funerals were expensive. The common-law wife got stiffed.
Many years after Henry’s death, Aunt Cecilia discovered that she had the same last name as an executive at the factory where she worked. Buttonholing him one day, she learned that he had never known his father, who had died out in Alaska when he was still an infant. A family reunion was organized. Henry’s widow, still living, did not attend. By the end of the family gathering, Henry’s son had a somewhat clearer idea of who his father was and how he died. Shortly thereafter, my aunt lost her job. There were no more family reunions.
From the time her parents passed away in the mid-1940s, my mother had always known that Henry’s number was up, because her mother was the only family member willing to “stay in his corner.” My mother was not surprised when she learned that her brother was dead, having long ago resigned herself to the fact that sooner or later he would come to a bad end. Like her own husband, Henry had gone absent without leave.
“He was always in some kind of trouble,” she explained as we headed toward Atlantic City, where she could work the slots and forget about her marriage. “He just wasn’t going to play ball.”
When all the facts were in and the exact sequence of events was set in stone, it was clear that Uncle Henry had not been the hero I had taken him for as a child. If anything, he was a hood, a ne’er-do-well at best. Still, I was amazed at how quickly his sisters had been able to jettison his memory. He was disposable. A lot of young men were back then. The Depression and the war had hardened these women. They had married well to good men who died too soon, or married badly to bad men who died too late, or married safe, uninteresting men and then led long, safe, uninteresting lives. From the start, these women understood that life was not going to be a bed of roses. You had to batten down the hatches, cover up the windows, and get on with it. Man overboard.
None of this changed my feelings about my dead uncle. The legend of Uncle Henry had served me well through the darkest of times. And so, for my purposes, whatever his failings, he will forever remain the dashing, romantic figure who came to the defense of a harried black man in an Anchorage bar and paid for it with his life. In my mind’s eye, he is like the Empire State Building: No matter how many overwrought skyscrapers hammy plutocrats erect in Chicago and Malaysia and Canberra and Battery Park, the Empire State Building will always be the tallest building in the world. And Henry will always be the daring young man who ran off to Alaska to start a new life. Just because something isn’t true doesn’t mean you shouldn’t believe in it.
Chapter 6.
The Parting of the Reed Sea
Throughout grade school, I had few second thoughts about entering the seminary. Admittedly, I was under unrelenting pressure from nuns and priests and relatives to don the Roman collar; they were forever pulling me aside and asking, “Do you still think you have a vocation?” as if it were possible to respond, “No.” Still, it would be dishonest and self-serving to say that I entered the Maryknoll Junior Seminary because of prodding from adults. I did it for the aforementioned reasons: a craving for prestige, an aversion to working at a nine-to-five job, and most important, an all-consuming desire to get out of my father’s house forever.
When I was in eighth grade, I won a citywide diocesan contest for an essay in which I defended the Latin mass and cautioned the Church about the perils of tossing tradition overboard. The Church chose to ignore my warning. The Cassandra-like essay itself has long since disappeared; no one in my family would be sentimental enough to hang on to such an extraneous oddity. But they did keep the trophy, a nifty marble-and-gold affair with an engraved image of a disembodied hand grasping a stylus and pressing down on what appeared to be papyrus. That my father never hocked it to some shady pawnbroker is one of the great surprises of my life; what stayed his hand was probably fear that filching a quasi-iconic object awarded by the Church might constitute some variation on the sin of simony and result in his spending an additional thirty-five centuries burning in Hell. Catholics were superstitious about these things.
Classmates knew that I was laying the groundwork for early canonization, but they did not hold it against me. To the extent that it was possible, given my aggressively publicized dreams of being decapitated or crucified, I tried to fit in. Though I did not swear, abstained from shoplifting, and rarely got into fights, I did do many of the other things that school-age children did: trespassing on private property, ringing the doorbells of the superannuated to scare the living daylights out of them, egging windshields. But I never got into any real trouble, the kind of trouble that would permanently seal off escape from an economic class whose charms had long since worn off.
Others did. Behind Saint Benedict’s church was a playground/parking lot where boys were allowed to play softball after school. Because the rear of the church, which faced the schoolyard, housed a set of ornate stained-glass windows, we were not allowed to swing away toward left field. Since most of us were right-handed, this was a great inconvenience but one we grudgingly accepted, as there was nowhere else in the neighborhood to play baseball. When the pitch came in, we would dutifully aim our bats toward right field or lay down harmless bunts that wormed their way up the third-base line. One of the boys in my class was an abysmal athlete, but he participated in our games anyway, as he reveled in the camaraderie. We liked him well enough during school hours but didn’t welcome his presence on the playing field afterward, because we feared that he would one day take a full cut and blast a softball right through Saint Anthony’s stained-glass testicles, bringing down the curtain on our games forever.
I did not rat out the hooligan when he took one uppercut too many, and this probably reassured my classmates that, at least in this instance, I was not yet working on the side of the angels. I was also present and accounted for when two altar boys locked a tipsy Father Aloysius inside the walk-in safe where the parish’s chalices and monstrances and ciboriums—as previously noted, my favorite vessel—were stored, and again I held my tongue when he sobered up and started banging on the vault door, bawling his eyes out, wondering who could possibly derive pleasure from such a heartless prank. I was reasonably certain that God would ignore my complicity in these transgressions, as the alternative was to be shunned, spat upon, or pummeled senseless by my less devout peers. Throughout my childhood, during which I remained adamantly short and stringy, with a physique the texture of noodles, discretion always seemed to be the better part of valor.
I served as an altar boy straight through grade school, during which time I continued to interact with a series of uninspiring clerics. A German-American parish priest, one of those addled anti-Semites who seem to be unaware that Christ started out life as a Jew, had received a dispensation to use white wine, as opposed to red, when serving mass; apparently he suffered from some offbeat oenological allergy. Altar boys habitually quaffed a swig or two of the celebrant’s wine before mass, and I was no exception, but I was shocked the first time I chugged a few ounces of his personal reserve; consulting the bottle, I found that what he was guzzling was some sort of Riesling or Chablis.
Oh, dear: Father Fancy-Pants!
The notion that Christ’s Most Precious Blood could have a sweet taste to it had never occurred to me; it was probably the moment I began to suspect that the concept of transubstantiation might be grounded in metaphor.
The priest, who lived to be ninety-one, had a habit of giving rides to teenaged girls on their way home from high school, a practice that was frowned upon by everyone except the teenaged girls, who gleefully pocketed the twenty-five-cent bus fare they would otherwise have had to shell out. He used to say the nine o’clock mass on Sunday mornings, which was the service every student was required to attend, because otherwise the nuns would have had to monitor all the other masses, from six in the morning until noon, and count heads to make sure no one was playing hooky. He always jump-started his homilies by informing the adults in the room that he would have nothing to say to them, that he was only interested in talking to the young people, because this was their mass, not their parents’. After this contemptuous introduction, he would deliver his rambling, incoherent sermon in a weird, high-pitched voice, serving up a needlessly effusive mixture of high dudgeon and baby talk. He had gotten it into his head that this gibberish was a crowd favorite, as was the man who spouted it, though in fact we all hated his guts.