Closing Time Read Free Page B

Quaker City Jean Valjean.
    On the positive side, it was nice to know that his antipathy toward us wasn’t personal; he had simply suffered through so many calamities that the only way he knew how to respond to adversity was to brutalize those closest to him. Happily, his preference for victims shorter than forty-eight inches kept my mother out of the line of fire. Like many Irish-Catholic men of his generation, he would never dream of raising his hand to his wife, not only because he feared that it would have brought down the curtain on their marriage, but because men like him had an unwholesome reverence for their spouses, viewing them as domestic stand-ins for the Virgin Mary, with the one notable difference that, unlike the Madonna, they also cooked and cleaned. My mother was not a Madonna; she was an emotionally inert woman who had injudiciously brought four children into the world with no clear idea of how henceforth to proceed. While my father was skinning us alive with his trusty old belt, she would entomb herself in her bedroom, surrounded by newspapers she never seemed to learn anything from, pretending not to hear what was going on downstairs. But the walls were not thick and the sound must have carried, if not into her conscience, at least into her cochleae.
    Armed with this abundant exculpatory material, my sister Ree and I tried to construct an elaborate moral apparatus that would exonerate our father of his misdeeds. My younger sister Eileen, three years my junior and far and away the smartest member of the family, was having none of it; compassion was not her long suit. Ree and I were less vindictive, less intransigent, less bright. The way we assessed the situation, to admit that Dad was the person he appeared to be was to concede that his cruelty was deliberate. This was unthinkable. Instead, we decided that violence was a bent he could not control, but that through medication or a confidence-boosting job that would reverse the emasculation he had undergone after losing his house, or perhaps simply through good, old-fashioned divine intervention, everything would one day work out for the best.
    I was not above concocting my own theories that even the tiniest amount of alcohol could interact with his metal plate, generating a chemical chain reaction that instantaneously triggered impossibly subtle psychoneural responses and impelled this otherwise lovable man to knock his kids around the room and tear the fixtures out of the walls. This sent the reassuring message that our troubles were essentially mineral in origin; it was all the result of some weird electromagnetic process that made it impossible for him to function properly. Like Ree, I derived solace from these daft theories, if only because they conferred upon our oppressor an aura of tragic romance and mystery, which were hard to come by in that part of Philadelphia.
    This being our mind-set, we began sifting through the data to prepare an amicus curiae brief should he ever be hauled before the authorities and asked to explain his passion for brutalizing the prepubescent set. We did this because for the longest time we still loved him and refused to accept that he was beyond redemption. But we also did it because no one wants to spend the rest of his life reviling a person who once viewed his birth as a blessing. We did not believe that he did the things he did because he was evil. We believed that he did them because he was damaged goods. That, at least, was the approach Ree and I adopted; Eileen felt otherwise. She had him sized up early.
    For years, Ree and I reasoned that if our father would only stop drinking, he would immediately reemerge, frog-prince style, as the most wondrous of God’s creations, the very flower of Christian manhood. When we were small, when we did not yet wish him ill, we used to chat among ourselves about how affectionate and funny he could be when he was not drinking, when, like Henry Jekyll, he truly was a capital fellow.