though, the time I was to spend with Grandpa that first summer without my parents provided me with some reassurance: we did the same kinds of things we had always done together, nothing had changed, at least about these times. My days with him tended to the nomadic: as a retired streetcar conductor, he was entitled to a lifetime of free rides on any of Chicago’s transportation systems, whether El train, streetcar, or bus, and he seemed to know every single driver or conductor we ever met—they all called him “Pat” or “Irish.”
Sometimes we rode the troublesome trolley buses that ran hooked to a dark tangle of overhead wires: a trolley that came loose from its wire could snarl the traffic to all the points of the compass for a half hour. On our rides, we took a window seat near the driver. Some of them would let me have stacks of unused transfers and the transfer punch they used, and I’d sit and clip and punch away ’til I was covered in bus-transfer confetti, all the while listening to Grandpa and the old-timers joke and trade tales of the old days, of blizzards and great storms that shut down the city, and fights, and men with razors and guns.
We scoured the city: he took me down to Haymarket Square where he knew a Greek who ran a produce company, and they fed me strawberries while they talked. Sometimes we went to visit his friend Herb, an embattled instructor at the Moler Barber College. This was a small institution on West Madison Street that took in young men of dubious dexterity, ostensibly to turn them into barbers. Sometimes Grandpa got a haircut or shave, and on rare occasions he let them cut my hair, though my grandmother would raise hell with what they did to my head. These were, after all, young men who merely wanted to be barbers.
My mother had still been alive the first time Grandpa had taken me to the barber college for a haircut, and the nervous young barber-in-training had shorn me too close on one side. I was amused by the bizarreness of it but my mother had shrieked when she saw me.
“Good God,” she’d said. “What happened to his hair?”
“It’s only a haircut,” Grandpa said.
“It’s all bare on one side. My God, Dad, what did they use, an axe?”
“They’re just young fellas learning, and it only costs a dime there,” he argued.
“Oh, honey, they butchered you,” my mother said, looking at me ruefully. I was puzzled by her reaction: my religion books were peopled by monks with tonsure, and I fancied that I resembled the Norman knights in my book about England. I also wanted to tell her I’d gotten off easily: while I was there, another incipient barber had cut a man’s ear with the straight razor and made him howl with the clippers.
Sometimes Grandpa took me to Hamlin Park and watched me play, sitting on a long bench painted a sickly green and chatting with men his age. At such times I believed the world was overrun with old men. When it rained, we settled for a visit to his friends at the firehouse on Barry, and they let me climb all over the pumper truck while they shot the breeze.
He was not perfect. In a family burdened by a love of drink, he was as troubled as any, and as the terrifying prospect of endless leisure opened its dark maw to him, he had developed a more urgent need to drink, even though such a course was bound to involve him in almost constant conflict with my grandmother, which contest he would necessarily, inevitably, lose.
He took me to taverns and bought me cokes with maraschino cherries in them, and little flat boxes of stick pretzels. When she came home from the knitting mill, my grandmother would ask me what 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.