where the ironworkers did their drinking; the Blue Eagle on Third Street, named after one of the symbols of the New Deal, where a friend from Belfast tended bar; a nameless place on Sixth Avenue and Ninth Street next to the Knights of Columbus. He was known everywhere, for his singing, his laughter, his Irish blarney. When he took me with him, he was always greeted with slaps on the back and glasses of beer. But there was another side to him: on the days when I followed at a distance, he often seemed lonesome and sad, heaving the wooden leg behind him, lost in some abyss of memory right up to the second that he opened the doors.
4
I N THE FALL of the year the war ended, we were suddenly poor. The ferocious winter came howling into New York, and so did a new kind of fear, replacing the old fear of Nazis and Japanese. One afternoon, my father came home to announce that he had lost his job at Arma. They were laying off thousands, he said, now that the war was won. So instead of a sense of triumph, we were filled with uncertainty and doubt. My father had always worked, even in the Depression that everyone still talked about in tones of horror; now he was out of work, and on some of the radio shows they were talking about the possibility of a return of the Depression and how this one might even be worse.
If Roosevelt hadn’t died, we wouldn’t have this problem,
my mother said.
Truman is just some damned haberdasher….
In the other rooms, while my mother and father talked about the layoffs, the bills, and the rent, Tommy and I whispered in the dark about what would become of us. We wondered if they’d have to put us in an orphanage, like Oliver Twist, who was on the back of the HO Oats box, begging the cook for more gruel. Tommy wondered if we’d be evicted, like the Murphy family, who ended up sitting on the furniture in the rain down on Twelfth Street, bawling in shame while the street kids jeered.
Don’t worry, I told Tommy, Patty Rattigan will take care of us.
And what if
he
loses his job?
He won’t lose his job, I said confidently. He owns a bar.
My father did lose his job. Now he was home every day. He no longer slept in the afternoons and went off to work through the night. He was here, waking late, going out to look for a new job, often coming home drunk and sour.
My mother wasted no time with either blame or consolation; she started working as a nurse’s aide at Methodist Hospital, leaving at three in the afternoon, coming home around eleven. Sometimes Tommy and I walked her to work, passing the bars of my father’s world, and watched her vanish into the hospital. On the way back, we often saw him through the windows, head lifted in song. If he was afraid, he didn’t show his fear to his friends. But I’d wonder: If there is no money in the house, if we are so poor that Mommy must go to work, then how can he afford to drink? He is having fun while Mommy works. When he
was
working, he couldn’t save enough money to take her to Broadway. Now the war is over, he has no money at all, and he still can go to Rattigan’s. My longing for him, my desperate need to know him, was turning into anger.
We had an account at Roulston’s, where the cost of food was entered in a composition book behind the counter, to be settled later when my mother was paid. When she went off to work, she left lists of groceries for me to pick up, and I learned to say “on the book” with confidence. My father never shopped. Nor did he cook. My mother left cooked food in pots: lamb stew and barley soup, mixtures of potatoes and carrots, potatoes and peas, potatoes and turnips. These were to be heated up at dinnertime. And so, while my mother helped feed patients at the hospital, Tommy and I did what we called “the cooking.” There was never any beef, of course. And that winter there was no butter. The war might be over, but the shortages were not. Into our kitchen came margarine. My mother told us the butter people wouldn’t
4
I N THE FALL of the year the war ended, we were suddenly poor. The ferocious winter came howling into New York, and so did a new kind of fear, replacing the old fear of Nazis and Japanese. One afternoon, my father came home to announce that he had lost his job at Arma. They were laying off thousands, he said, now that the war was won. So instead of a sense of triumph, we were filled with uncertainty and doubt. My father had always worked, even in the Depression that everyone still talked about in tones of horror; now he was out of work, and on some of the radio shows they were talking about the possibility of a return of the Depression and how this one might even be worse.
If Roosevelt hadn’t died, we wouldn’t have this problem,
my mother said.
Truman is just some damned haberdasher….
In the other rooms, while my mother and father talked about the layoffs, the bills, and the rent, Tommy and I whispered in the dark about what would become of us. We wondered if they’d have to put us in an orphanage, like Oliver Twist, who was on the back of the HO Oats box, begging the cook for more gruel. Tommy wondered if we’d be evicted, like the Murphy family, who ended up sitting on the furniture in the rain down on Twelfth Street, bawling in shame while the street kids jeered.
Don’t worry, I told Tommy, Patty Rattigan will take care of us.
And what if
he
loses his job?
He won’t lose his job, I said confidently. He owns a bar.
My father did lose his job. Now he was home every day. He no longer slept in the afternoons and went off to work through the night. He was here, waking late, going out to look for a new job, often coming home drunk and sour.
My mother wasted no time with either blame or consolation; she started working as a nurse’s aide at Methodist Hospital, leaving at three in the afternoon, coming home around eleven. Sometimes Tommy and I walked her to work, passing the bars of my father’s world, and watched her vanish into the hospital. On the way back, we often saw him through the windows, head lifted in song. If he was afraid, he didn’t show his fear to his friends. But I’d wonder: If there is no money in the house, if we are so poor that Mommy must go to work, then how can he afford to drink? He is having fun while Mommy works. When he
was
working, he couldn’t save enough money to take her to Broadway. Now the war is over, he has no money at all, and he still can go to Rattigan’s. My longing for him, my desperate need to know him, was turning into anger.
We had an account at Roulston’s, where the cost of food was entered in a composition book behind the counter, to be settled later when my mother was paid. When she went off to work, she left lists of groceries for me to pick up, and I learned to say “on the book” with confidence. My father never shopped. Nor did he cook. My mother left cooked food in pots: lamb stew and barley soup, mixtures of potatoes and carrots, potatoes and peas, potatoes and turnips. These were to be heated up at dinnertime. And so, while my mother helped feed patients at the hospital, Tommy and I did what we called “the cooking.” There was never any beef, of course. And that winter there was no butter. The war might be over, but the shortages were not. Into our kitchen came margarine. My mother told us the butter people wouldn’t
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