Closing Time Read Free Page A

harmless Eye-ties in his custody were not terribly likely to escape, he was denied a pass to attend either parent’s funeral, and his volcanic response to that rebuff—deserting his post at a time when going AWOL was punishable by death, and getting into an ill-advised slugging match with a pack of MPs back in Philadelphia—landed him in a military prison in Georgia. There he languished for three years, from 1944 until 1947, a slender young northerner of the Irish-Catholic persuasion in a prison manned by beefy, middle-aged men of the Johnny Reb persuasion.
    Mitigating Circumstance Number 5 was that he had never finished high school, even though he was far brighter and considerably more gifted than most people who did. Six, he was a fine-looking chap who was emotionally traumatized by losing his hair in his early thirties. Frankly, I never understood how that one made it onto the list, but it kept popping up anyway. Seven, he never recovered from the 1958 recession, which cost him the only white-collar job he ever had. Eight, he never recovered from the disgrace of losing our house in 1959, as a result of losing his job, as a result of the 1958 recession, a disaster for which Dwight D. Eisenhower was personally responsible.
    Nine—and this was the real haymaker—he had been shot in the head at age twelve, when a friend accidentally fired off his father’s service revolver and the bullet ricocheted off the kitchen ceiling and into his skull, where it remained until a grizzled army surgeon motored all the way down from West Point to excise it, as it was lodged so close to the brain that no jerkwater Delaware Valley sawbones would dare take a crack at it. The surgeon, legend had it, thereupon inserted a metal plate in the back of his head; legend also had it that the plate was still there. If this was true, and we had no reason to believe it was not, it was the sort of H. P. Lovecraft development that in and of itself might account for my father’s explosive, unpredictable behavior.
    Justification Number 10, as if all that preceded it were not enough, was that his baby sister Betty had died under mysterious circumstances when he was still a small child himself, and this tragedy had haunted him for the rest of his life. The circumstances were murky; he may have been playing with matches, then run away and hidden in a neighbor’s house while his two-year-old sister burned to a crisp, but there were also suggestions that the luckless toddler had tripped and fallen down the stairs while he was supposed to be babysitting. No one could ever say for sure how Betty perished, only that she did, and that he was in some way responsible. Speaking for myself, I always felt that the infant sibling’s death should have taken the top spot on this cavalcade of rationalizations, but within the family, it was the metal plate in the head that occupied pride of place. Little Betty’s death might explain why he was depressed. The bullet in the head explained why he was crazy.
    Given this phenomenal curriculum vitae miserabilis , there was no point in our bellyaching about a handful of character-molding flayings here and there, or a few nights going to bed without a proper meal, or my sister and I being left to fend for ourselves out on the street in a raging blizzard when she was eight and I was six while he was somewhere nice and toasty getting juiced to the gills, and while his wife was giving birth to his fourth child, or having no food in the house and three cavities and a manic-depressive mother who had been missing in action since Shrove Tuesday. No matter how sorry you might feel for yourself initially, you would eventually pull up short and come to your senses, realizing that you couldn’t outpoint an opponent holding as many high cards as him. He was tough in the self-vindicatory clinches; no one in the history of urban misfortune had ever experienced more setbacks, emotional trauma, and all-purpose injustice than our very own