Closing Time Read Free

was going out of style in this great nation. By “beating” I refer not to generic spanking but to the ritualistic act of stripping your offspring and whipping them across the buttocks and thighs with a thick leather belt so that they scream and plead and bleed and stay marked for days and wish both you and they were dead. By the 1950s—the age of the progressive, though some said overly permissive, Dr. Benjamin Spock—even the reflexively barbarous poor were beginning to realize that inflicting severe, humiliating punishment on one’s children was inadvisable, if only because those same children might grow up to be large, muscular barbarians who would one day return home and inflict severe, humiliating punishment on their parents.
    As was so often the case, my father trailed far behind the pedagogical curve in this sphere of human relations. At some point in his life, he had decided that if he could not cast a shadow over the world, he would cast one over his family. And so he did. He beat us often and he beat us savagely. He beat us individually and he beat us together. The worst beatings were when he got spectacularly bombed, came unmoored from reality, and grasped the belt by the wrong end. Then the metal flange would wrap around my thighs and flail against my penis and testicles. It was no use protesting that the punishment was not being meted out in strict accordance with Marquess of Queensberry rules, as this would only make him more angry, and the normal level of rage he routinely, effortlessly attained was bad enough. He could go from zero to sixty in a hurry.
    Years later, I verified—through discreet inquiries—that none of my close friends was ever subjected to such a reign of terror. At the time, I had no way of knowing this: As youngsters, we were not aware of what went on inside our classmates’ homes, and these issues did not come up in conversation. Recreational mistreatment of children merely seemed like something expected of fathers, a prerogative of sorts, as working-men needed to let off steam at the end of a long, hard day. We knew that some of our friends’ parents were drunks, and that at least one of them had to be carted off to the loony bin from time to time to get his noggin reconditioned. But our friends did not live in fear of their fathers, nor did they want them out of the picture. We did.
    I never forgave my father for the way he treated us. I never fell prey to the tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner slant on dysfunction, the notion that if you assembled all the pertinent data about a malefactor’s childhood and reviewed it dispassionately, you would come to understand the forces that had shaped him and assign the blame, or at least a good portion of it, elsewhere. This put the victim in a position where absolution, previously an act of charity, was now deemed morally compulsory.
    Manufacturing excuses for my father’s behavior was a family industry. For as long as I could remember, an army of back-porch barristers—his sisters, cousins, aunts, even a couple of commiserating brothers-in-law—stood ready to cite chapter and verse to explain away his misdeeds, positioning his cruelty in a context that made him seem far less culpable. One, his father had been beastly to him, abusive in the generically horrific way that Irish males often are to their sons. Two, he had grown up during the Great Depression, when poor people literally peddled apples on street corners and many a night the entire Delaware Valley went to bed hungry because there was no food in the larder, and perhaps not even a morsel of stale bread left in the entire tristate area, because rats the size of ocelots had already gotten to it. Three, he had undergone a series of heartbreaking wartime experiences, with both his parents dying in their midfifties while he was just a few hours away, standing guard over Italian prisoners of war at Fort Knox. Four, despite being only a few hours away at Fort Knox, from which the