Twentieth Century Limited Book One - Age of Heroes. Jan David Blais
listen to me.” She placed her hand on mine, “within every person are two forces, fear and love. Fear loses its power when the person ceases to be afraid. The person who loves, that person stays the course, he accomplishes great things. The Father Donnellys of the world, they rule by fear,” she said, shaking her head. “The world is cruel and men are weak, but never, never let those who carry Christ’s message tarnish it for you. It’s too pure, too fine to lose over the weakness of a few men.” Her eyes were ablaze. “A black robe is proof of nothing. The best priest is the one who steps aside and gets out of God’s way.”
The dripping had stopped. The pungent smell of coffee filled the room. “Some day you’ll understand. It’s sad, but the severest tests of your Faith may come from the very people God chooses to entrust with it.” She sat back and sighed. “But enough. You are young and this is your day. Just remember, your Faith can be a strength and joy, but the time may come when the price you pay for it is very dear.”
THE DAY STARTED OKAY. Sunny and warm, scent of flowers, young voices in song, even the organ playing was okay. Shirts and ties and those short pants they made you wear, the girls’ white dresses, Margaret, stomachs growling in the quiet moments. Only one thing went wrong but it was a beaut. I was returning to my bench after receiving communion and tried wetting the cardboard with spit so I could swallow it. Never, never chew! But now the warm soggy lump was glued to the roof of my mouth! I began twisting my jaw different ways, using my tongue to peel it off, but when I looked up there was Margaret Foley at the end of her row, laughing! Laughing at me! Seconds after qualifying for eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour, I wished I was dead. That was the only disaster I knew of. Nobody stood when he should have knelt or threw up or fainted, nothing like that. But then, what happened at home...
My mother started out planning a big affair with everyone we ever knew but, not so much for parties, my father put his foot down. For my part, the bigger the better – more cards, more money. In the end they invited a couple dozen, but the northerners threw everything off. The dining room was now too small for a proper sit-down dinner, even sticking us kids in the kitchen. Then there was the Great Ham War, though my mother recovered quickly, phoning her sisters who arrived after church with platters and dishes. In fact, she managed to transform our dining room table into a lavish buffet of roast beef, potato salad, cole slaw, hot rolls – you get the picture. And there, all by itself on a huge platter in the center of the table, the carcass, tied with a green ribbon and bow. Take that, Julien!
Tante Héloise was there, my father’s sister who lived in a tenement with her friend Tante Marie who wasn’t really my aunt. Tante Héloise was fat and jolly and never married. Though younger than my father, Tante Héloise had always looked old with her frizzy hair and shapeless dresses. She arrived with Uncle Antoine and Tante Roseanne. Aunt Moira and Uncle Eddie also, and of course my two dumb girl cousins, already holed up with Catherine. Grandmother Kelley came with my mother’s sister Aunt Mary Elizabeth Finnegan and Uncle Paddy and their two boys, my mother called them, cousins Steve and Terry, who weren’t boys at all but out of high school and out of work too, according to my father neither of them able to keep a job. They were tall and bulky, with red hair and freckles. Uncle Paddy used to work for the phone company but suffered an injury whose particulars nobody seemed to recall.
“Deadbeats, the whole bunch,” my father said, shaking his head.
Grandmother Kelley was extremely old and walked with a cane. She lived with the Finnegans – actually they lived with her – in the tenement she owned in North Providence. They said Grandfather Kelley made a lot of money during Prohibition. He’d been in the Merchant Marine in World War One and owned a boat I’d seen pictures of. For a time when my mother was young they lived well, part of the city’s burgeoning Irish elite, then came the Depression. One day they found Grandfather Kelley floating in the Providence River, his feet bound, one end of the rope frayed where the police said the weight broke away.
Having a taste for the good life, my mother had scratched and clawed to attain a position in local cultural circles, then everything changed when she met a handsome Canadian who with his brother owned a business which, by the day’s standards, was prosperous. Julien Bernard saw her picture in the newspaper for Hedda Gabler. A bouquet of roses appeared backstage and they were on their way.
“First play I ever went to,” I heard him brag more than once. “Last one, too.”
I guess she figured over time she could smooth the rough edges, small price to pay for security and a home and a base for her artistic ambitions. But then came the little ones, one, two, three, and her discovery that Julien’s unlettered coarseness was central to the man and beyond repair.
When we arrived home from church, my brother Jim volunteered to bartend. No surprise, there. More than once I’d caught him sneaking a beer to his room. Now he shuttled between house and the ice tub in the garage. My father had laid in a store of Hanley’s Ale for the Irish guests who preferred it to ’Gansett. He loved to provoke my mother by singing the Hanley’s jingle, same as “Rose of Tralee.” It wasn’t so much that he butchered it – everybody knew he couldn’t carry a tune – it was his slurring the words and wobbling as he sang. At least he had sense enough to back off when my mother set John McCormack on the Victrola for Grandmother Kelley. Whatever her mood, the sound of his voice would cause the old lady’s eyes to close and she would move her lips and hum, reliving happy times.
“Being this is a religious event we’ll be havin’ to shut your people off, Fiona. Three bottles and not a drop more,” my father said the day before as he and Jim lugged in the Hanley’s cartons, “three an hour, that is.” She didn’t appreciate that.
I hung around the front door greeting guests, accepting presents, mostly cards, which I didn’t mind at all. After a decent time I darted upstairs and spread the haul on my bed. Twenty three dollars! And more to come in the mail! By now everybody had a glass or a bottle and my aunts were herding people toward the food. Leaping in, I secured a large portion of roast beef. After stuffing myself, I went out to the screened porch where we sometimes set up cots for hot summer nights. Outside, Uncle Albert and Uncle Antoine were talking with my father under the basketball hoop he had built for Jim and me. They were smoking and sipping ’Gansett and looking gloomy, all of them. Uncle Albert was leaning against the post under the basket.
“Too bad, Julien, too bad... ” he was saying, shaking his head. I leaned forward to hear. “We was hoping you had some work for Pièrre. Hard as hell that boy works, honest and sober, he would do a good job for you, any job.” He sighed, “things are not good at home, mes frères. The farm don’t pay, there’s no other work. You heard they’re having a baby, him and Céline. I don’t want them to leave but I don’t blame them.”
My father shook his head. “It’s no picnic here, Albert. I laid off ten people last week. Machine tools went to hell after the war, no sign of them coming back. “By summer we’ll be laying off another fifteen, twenty people,” my father added, “skilled workers, them, machinists. That’s less jobs for everybody else.”
“What about the mills? You know the people run them.”
“The mills!” Uncle Antoine spat on the ground. “You come through Allens Avenue? Or Olneyville? Shut down, all of them, the windows broke, boarded up.”
Uncle Albert ground his cigarette in the dirt. “Eh bien. At least I tried.”
“How’s Mémère doing?” Uncle Antoine asked.
Mémère was sick with cancer. From the snapshots she was a small woman with white hair. She visited when I was born and had never returned. Uncle Albert shook another Chesterfield from his pack, tapping it against his lighter. “A matter of time. The pneumonia took it out of her last winter. We’re just trying to keep her comfortable.” Inhaling deeply he snapped the lighter shut. “One of these days you be getting a call.”
All of a sudden there was this loud crash from inside the house.
My father looked up. “What the hell...!”
I rushed back in. There in