charity case. I used to be Martha Grossinger.”
“She acts like Queen Elizabeth,” Bridey concurred. “Someone ought to knock her off her high horse.”
Released to our designs, Jonny and I played in reeds where minnows darted past, occasional sunnies tantalized—fish too swift totouch. We staged apple fights, climbed small trees, and collected horse chestnuts and rubber molds of cartoon characters from outside the pottery studio. Then we hiked with our parents through the forest to Nevele Falls. Eleven schoolteachers had discovered this site—the hotel’s name honoring their number spelled backwards. I loved to watch the water gather speed, spool white, and roar down rocks and explode in whirlpools. My brother and I threw sticks and bark into its stream.
When I look now at an old snapshot of us standing beside Nevele Falls, I wonder what became of our rubber boots and the toy gun lying on the ground. Jonny was asked to drop it for the photograph and tossed it aside unhappily because he wanted a cowboy look. They have almost certainly turned to pixels of gunk and rust and reentered nature untracked. They could be anywhere now—in the iron of someone’s blood or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or the soil of Mars. But they still exist. Someday the photograph will undergo degradation too and return to the common pool.
At Ivy’s Store in the hotel lobby we bought puzzle books, baseball newspapers, and magazines and lay on couches reading comics and solving picture games while Daddy took forever in his business meeting with Aunt Marian. In a tall red chair under a mirror Bridey wrote to her family in fountain-pen script.
She told us she came from a land where there was fighting and that’s why she was with us. We accepted such history as another game board like our one of the Civil War with its bearded faces. It was sad, her having to be away from her beloved sisters and nephews, Margaret and Siobhan, Patrick and Jimmy. She awaited their letters, aerograms with foreign stamps, and, after perusing them slowly and sometimes tearily, told us about their achievements in the much stricter schools in Belfast.
Yet Bridey was delighted to be in America, and steak dinners and vacation trips made up a bit for her exile in our mayhem. She wore floral scents, and on Saturday nights policemen rang our doorbell to take her to dances in the Bronx. Jon and I pranced around her, teased her, loved her like a second mother, and included her in our prayers at night: “God bless Mom, Dad, Jonny, Deb, Bridey…. ”Gradually, she became part of us, this stranger from “the place where the dark morn sweeps down to the sea.” She learned our secrets and was sucked into our cabal.
The third time Uncle Paul showed up after school he grabbed me from behind, calling out, “Richard the lion-hearted.” I was ecstatic, though I was anything but a lion.
He told the cabbie to make a U-turn and head uptown. We attended a brief business meeting, then caught another cab at rush hour. I thought he was sending me home but, to my astonishment, he said, “Yankee Stadium!” I had seen the Stadium only in the distance from a car. Now the colossus grew larger and larger until it towered before us, banks of lights gleaming against a violet sky. We passed the unlit Polo Grounds and crossed the Harlem River. Then we were in the crowd, entering through turnstiles, swathed in aromas of tobacco and fries.
We ate dinner at a restaurant in the ballpark where the manager knew Uncle Paul, addressing him as “PG.” After that we went to the souvenir stand where my father asked me to pick out anything I wanted. There was so much with “Yankees” on it I didn’t know where to begin. First I got a scorecard and a yearbook. Then I saw a pen-and-pencil set of wooden bats, the pencil the type that you put thin sticks of lead into, so I pointed to that. After Uncle Paul pulled dollars out of a wad in his wallet and set them down on the counter, I noticed
“She acts like Queen Elizabeth,” Bridey concurred. “Someone ought to knock her off her high horse.”
Released to our designs, Jonny and I played in reeds where minnows darted past, occasional sunnies tantalized—fish too swift totouch. We staged apple fights, climbed small trees, and collected horse chestnuts and rubber molds of cartoon characters from outside the pottery studio. Then we hiked with our parents through the forest to Nevele Falls. Eleven schoolteachers had discovered this site—the hotel’s name honoring their number spelled backwards. I loved to watch the water gather speed, spool white, and roar down rocks and explode in whirlpools. My brother and I threw sticks and bark into its stream.
When I look now at an old snapshot of us standing beside Nevele Falls, I wonder what became of our rubber boots and the toy gun lying on the ground. Jonny was asked to drop it for the photograph and tossed it aside unhappily because he wanted a cowboy look. They have almost certainly turned to pixels of gunk and rust and reentered nature untracked. They could be anywhere now—in the iron of someone’s blood or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere or the soil of Mars. But they still exist. Someday the photograph will undergo degradation too and return to the common pool.
At Ivy’s Store in the hotel lobby we bought puzzle books, baseball newspapers, and magazines and lay on couches reading comics and solving picture games while Daddy took forever in his business meeting with Aunt Marian. In a tall red chair under a mirror Bridey wrote to her family in fountain-pen script.
She told us she came from a land where there was fighting and that’s why she was with us. We accepted such history as another game board like our one of the Civil War with its bearded faces. It was sad, her having to be away from her beloved sisters and nephews, Margaret and Siobhan, Patrick and Jimmy. She awaited their letters, aerograms with foreign stamps, and, after perusing them slowly and sometimes tearily, told us about their achievements in the much stricter schools in Belfast.
Yet Bridey was delighted to be in America, and steak dinners and vacation trips made up a bit for her exile in our mayhem. She wore floral scents, and on Saturday nights policemen rang our doorbell to take her to dances in the Bronx. Jon and I pranced around her, teased her, loved her like a second mother, and included her in our prayers at night: “God bless Mom, Dad, Jonny, Deb, Bridey…. ”Gradually, she became part of us, this stranger from “the place where the dark morn sweeps down to the sea.” She learned our secrets and was sucked into our cabal.
The third time Uncle Paul showed up after school he grabbed me from behind, calling out, “Richard the lion-hearted.” I was ecstatic, though I was anything but a lion.
He told the cabbie to make a U-turn and head uptown. We attended a brief business meeting, then caught another cab at rush hour. I thought he was sending me home but, to my astonishment, he said, “Yankee Stadium!” I had seen the Stadium only in the distance from a car. Now the colossus grew larger and larger until it towered before us, banks of lights gleaming against a violet sky. We passed the unlit Polo Grounds and crossed the Harlem River. Then we were in the crowd, entering through turnstiles, swathed in aromas of tobacco and fries.
We ate dinner at a restaurant in the ballpark where the manager knew Uncle Paul, addressing him as “PG.” After that we went to the souvenir stand where my father asked me to pick out anything I wanted. There was so much with “Yankees” on it I didn’t know where to begin. First I got a scorecard and a yearbook. Then I saw a pen-and-pencil set of wooden bats, the pencil the type that you put thin sticks of lead into, so I pointed to that. After Uncle Paul pulled dollars out of a wad in his wallet and set them down on the counter, I noticed
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