Autobiographical Essay by Rob Couteau
If my mother could be earmarked by a single defining quality, empathy is the word that would first come to mind, followed by simple kindness. For she lacked any trace of that malicious cruelty that defines so many that we encounter on our existential journey, and she nurtured those more honorable qualities to her dying day. So unlike her husband, whose pessimism and disappointment with life led him to view things rather darkly. And God forbid you should display some joie de vivre along the way! Arthur would take it as a personal affront and make it his mission to disown you of such rosy-tinted “illusions.” But despite his nihilistic predilection Bridget always held firm to her feeling for the wonder of life, and she never failed to exhibit it. “Songs of Innocence” versus the dirge of “Experience”!
The West Twelfth Street that we called home – a cradle endlessly rocking between antipodes of stark reality and alluring reverie – ran in a straight line between Kings Highway, at its northern end, and Highlawn Avenue, at its southern corner. But this is mere geography; for the nexus of one’s earliest joy and sorrow anchors the soul to an inexplicable thing that we call the homeland.
Built with the mortar of the 1910s, the street was composed of two-story brick rowhouses, attached or semi-attached, which were privately owned by working-class or middle-class families. Waves of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century immigrants had transited these quaint environs – Dutch, German, Irish, Italian – not to mention the Native American Lenape, whose land had been pilfered by the invaders.
My father’s paternal side didn’t stem from any of these nationalities. His ancestors were mostly English, Welsh, and Scottish, with a distant French line from which we’d inherited our surname. They were among the earliest European settlers of New England, including several that hailed from aristocratic lineages stocked with somber-looking coats of arms.
More recently, in the 1790s, a Spanish bride had married into the French line in Paris, and the couple set sail for the New World. Residing first in Havana and then in Philadelphia (at that time, the nation’s capital), their descendants eventually hunkered down in woebegone Gravesend, Brooklyn. But Arthur’s maternal branch was working-class Irish; his grandfather, a mason and carpenter, had built the wooden porch and stairway leading to our backyard. Likewise, my mother also hailed from Irish peasant stock; her parents were farmers from County Mayo.
Having inherited this genealogical mélange, it’s no wonder that I never identified myself as being a staunch member of any particular ethnic group. And least of all did I consider myself to be an American: a citizen – or vagabond – of the world was more to my liking. But many of our Sicilian neighbors were profoundly chauvinistic and regarded anyone who hailed from any other enclave with various degrees of suspicion.
Most of our neighbors were Italian Americans whose parents or grandparents had expatriated from the bottom of Italy’s “boot.” Native- born Sicilian grandparents, who spoke little or no English, often occupied the top floor of a rowhouse; one of their daughters and her husband the ground floor; with a granddaughter and her future groom moving into a refurbished basement. I was told it was a tradition adopted from the villages that dot the white cliffs of their hardscrabble homeland. But when enough money was scrimped and saved, everyone would pile into a station wagon and drive as far east as possible – shuttling into a monotonous, all-white suburb of Long Island.
A three-story apartment building loomed at the corner of Kings Highway, beside which were nestled a pair of garages. In one of my earliest memories, perhaps from my fifth year, I’m walking beside my mother, rounding the corner and returning home, when we approach the garage doors, which are tilted open.
Inside, a couple of thugs from a local gang are polishing the hubcaps of souped-up hot rods and fiddling beneath the hoods. Their hair is greased back; their biceps bulge from sleeveless T-shirts. Graffiti festoons the whitewashed cinder-block walls. There’s something both ugly and powerful about the scrawled lettering; and, as I would later realize, it contains a rich variety of “bad words.”
My watery blue eyes continued to dilate as I absorbed this sinister display. With my blond hair and Catholic school uniform, I must have resembled a cherub lost in transit through the Inferno.
“When I grow up,” I announce with an exuberant smile, “I want to be just like them!”
Bridget’s cornflower-blue eyes narrow until she appears to be horror- stricken. Impulsively squeezing my fingertips, she marches me past this squalid circle of hell that Dante had neglected to write about, being so far removed in this hinterland known as Gravesend. I can’t recall her exact words, but she lost no time in chastising me for my mistaken ways.
Next we approach an alley that runs behind the apartment building and the stores on Kings Highway. In the local vernacular it’s known as the “Chinese alley,” as one of the stores abutting the passageway is a Chinese laundry. Billowing steam, jetting from the back of the shop, marks the setting with an ominous flavor.
Bridget would often send me to the laundry to deliver or retrieve my father’s starched white button-down shirts. Always white, for it was the era of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a time when such conservative habiliments were de rigueur for businessmen or civil service executives like Arthur. The tickets pinned to the clothing fascinated me, with their pastel hues printed on tissue-thin paper and overlaid with a palimpsest of red stamps and ornately embellished Chinese characters.
Handing over a bundle of wrinkled clothing to a harried-looking woman at the front counter, I’d carefully watch as she opened a beaded curtain and entered the back of the shop – a steaming crucible where bare- chested men, covered in sweat, raised and lowered lids of massive steel casks that pressed everything into shape while the diabolical vapors hissed through mounds of fabric.
For a brief period in the late Fifties, after sunset, the “bad boys” would move from the garages to the back of the alley. They’d sit in a circle around a fire, sniff glue fumes, swallow barbiturates, pass around a cheap bottle of wine, or imbibe some other form of intoxication. In their leather jackets and grease-stained jeans they emulated gangs portrayed in contemporary films like The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando.
One lad even owned a vintage Indian motorcycle, circa WWI, which he proudly parked in front of his mother’s house across the street. But Georgie was an anomaly among this dubious group, in that he wasn’t a violent type and was known for his mild manner: a trait reflected in his kind but troubled hazel eyes. Rumor had it that he was damaged inside, having never recovered from being abandoned by a girlfriend. He’d eventually shift gears and adopt the talismans of the Sixties generation: growing his hair long and wearing “love beads” and bell-bottom jeans – something unusual in that neighborhood, even in the late 1960s.
A few houses farther down the street there lived a barrel-chested teenager nicknamed “Tiny.” In typical Sicilian fashion, the moniker denoted an ironic reversal of reality, for Tiny was a towering figure of rippling muscle and brawn, endowed with a handsomely sculpted Michelangelo countenance. Perhaps I remember him so well because, come winter, he’d pack his snowballs with lumps of ice and toss them at us like speedballs, even though we were mere children and so much younger than Tiny and his goofball crew.
Years later, when I returned to the block one day, I ran into Tiny’s younger brother, Paulie, who’d moved to Colorado to work for the National Park Service. He was also there on a family visit, and we’d bumped into each other outside his parents’ house. When I asked about his brother, Paulie smiled and said that he’d eloped with a Black woman named Lola. When they’d first started dating, his Sicilian father had threatened to disown Tiny; so, to spite his old man, he settled on the West Coast, as far away from his family as he could manage. Thus he was even more of an anomaly than Georgie, for an interracial couple from Gravesend was unheard of.
Paulie related all this with an infectious grin and a sparkle in his eye that signaled his palpable pride and unwavering approval of his brother’s actions. But he spoke softly, because the front windows were opened, covered only by screens, and he didn’t want his parents to eavesdrop.
One of Tiny’s pals who’d remained imprisoned by that rearguard Fifties mentality was a maniacal hooligan named Sal, who lived in the middle of the block with his younger brother, Mike Abruzzi. Mike and I went way back: he was my first childhood friend. We’d crawl around on our hands and knees beside the curb, playing with Carpenter ants that frenetically chewed on the bark of the Norwegian maples, which embowered the street in an emerald-tinted shade.
Like many other brothers from this period, Mike and Sal personified a steep cultural divide. Sal was the embodiment of a Brandoesque “Wild One” whereas, by his teenage years, Mike was a mellow acidhead whose profligate use of LSD soon became legendary. Perched atop his stoop, he’d smile beatifically while tripping on various concoctions of lysergic acid known as Orange Sunshine or Purple Haze. He wore his frizzy hair tied back in a ponytail – not the safest thing to do in that neighborhood – while Sal, who was prematurely balding, sported a completely shaved scalp. In Gravesend, based merely on hairstyles, Mike would be derisively labeled as a “hippie” while Sal would be regarded as a “hitter” – a ruffian who might be provoked into brutality if you looked at him the wrong way. And in Sal’s case, the label was befitting.
While Mike pursued his psychedelic adventures, his brother was busy driving a truck for a wine company. Sal spent most of his time at a racetrack, whizzing round in a jet-black Corvette Stingray. But one day he came zipping up the block while seated inside a maroon twelve-cylinder Jaguar. How could he afford such an expensive acquisition? He boasted that he’d won it at the track, beating a local champion in a winner-take-all wager. He stored it in a rented garage across the street from my house, where he washed and cleaned it almost every day.
My most vivid memory of Sal dates back to my twelfth year, when we were playing stickball on a hot day in July. Home base was a cast-iron manhole cover, set in the center of the asphalt beside the Abruzzi house; while a manhole in front of my house, near the southern end of the block, marked second base. Sal’s most precious commodity – his beloved Jaguar – was parked in front of his house, blaring rock’n’roll from a built-in transistor radio. He’d just finished waxing and polishing the hood, so now it was sparkling under the harsh sunlight.
Louie Aquavella – a short, squat, roly-poly kid with far too much belly fat – was up next. Thanks to the bountiful provisions of his father’s fruit and vegetable stand on King’s Highway, his well-nourished form reminded me of a ripe melon; his jowly face a ruddy persimmon.
Louie gripped a homemade bat (a reconverted mop handle, with duct tape wrapped around the end), tossed a ball into the air, and swung with all his might.
We watched in trepidation as the pink rubber Spalding (pronounced spaldeen) bounced off the hood of the Jaguar – rather harmlessly, but that didn’t stop Sal. He leapt off his stoop and, grabbing Louie by the fat of his stomach, dangled him upside down: a punishment meted out by a living, breathing Cyclops. I conjure this ancient Greek monstrosity because Sal’s features were endowed a severe Cyclopean savagery: in particular, his ovoid face, terrifying gaze, and taut beer belly, which hid an impressive array of muscles earned as a result of constantly lifting weights.
By the early ‘70s Sal was the last member of that tough-guy crew to still be lurking around. A distraught housewife in a tenement overlooking the alley had called the cops one night, to complain about the besotted gang members who were bawling out doo-wop tunes. While butchering a chorus of “In the Still of the Night,” they were hauled into a station house and told to abandon the alley unless they wanted to be arrested for pyromania and disturbing the peace. The term “pyromania” flew right over their heads, but the boys caught the general drift and regrouped at a Microsoft Word local pub, the Homestretch, around the opposite corner of Kings Highway.
By then Tiny had decamped from Brooklyn, Georgie was hanging around Manhattan’s West Village and engaging in serious drug abuse, and most of the other goons were either in jail or dead from gang violence or drug overdoses. Eventually Sal moved into his own flat, but he returned one day for Thanksgiving – and for one final fight.
I was relaxing on my stoop when I noticed that, diagonally across the street, several of the “old men” were gathered around Sal’s father, who had wandered down the block. (As teenagers, we often referred to middle-aged men as “old men”!) They were standing beside the alley where Sal rented a garage.
Because of his hatchet-shaped nose and spindly legs, Mr. Abruzzi was also known as “Charlie Chicken.” His diminutive shape stood in sharp contrast to Sal’s powerful build, but both father and son shared a profound mean-spiritedness. I don’t believe I ever saw Charlie smile or act in a manner that might be regarded as empathic. This was a word that remained completely removed from the equation. Instead, sneering, grumpy, and grumbling were the adjectives that best served to limn the contours of his crusty character.
Mike’s mother, Regina, was cut from a different cloth. Her countenance often appeared to be dispirited and browbeaten, perhaps because she worried about protecting Mike from both his father and his brother. She’d even arranged for him to live on the top floor of the house, under the benign gaze of his maternal grandparents.
In any case, on this particular “day of thanks,” Charlie had rounded up his compadres because there had been some sort of altercation with Sal – by no means the first or only one – and he was either planning retribution or strategizing to protect himself.
Then I noticed an oddly shaped object dangling from his hand: a black leather wrestler’s belt. Bejeweled with gaudy red rhinestones, it was the type that expands into an oval shape in front and tapers to a slender belt at the sides.
Moments later the men were joined by “Big Jack,” a gravelly-voiced longshoreman whose forearm bore the tattoo of a jagged knife. After absorbing Charlie’s diatribe, Jack opened the trunk of his car to retrieve a crowbar. While Charlie continued to grumble, Jack pointed the bar toward the far end of the block. Glancing around, we spotted Sal emerging from his house. Boiling with rage, he marched directly toward his father.
Sal approached the group and stood there defiantly, just an arm’s length away. As their eyes met, Charlie gritted his teeth and swung the belt.
Sal took a step back as it swooshed harmlessly through the fragrant, autumn air. Then he leaned forward and clocked his father with a single, powerful punch. The uppercut sent Charlie Chicken flying off his feet; then he crumpled to the floor.
Instead of defending Charlie, the men knelt beside their fallen comrade. Cradling his figure as if it were a corpse, they slipped their hands under his limbs and delivered him back home, unconscious.
For a moment I felt as if I were ensconced in a deluxe opera loge viewing a riveting, unparalleled performance. As they carted Charlie away, the stage-set shifted and I flashed back to the days of early childhood. In my mind’s eye my brother appears to be five years old, so I must have been about eight. We were playing games on the street when, suddenly, all the kids – and there were plenty of us, since it was a “baby boom” era – were ushered back into their respective abodes. My mother sent us to play downstairs in the basement, to prevent us from peeking through the living room curtains at what was now transpiring.
A top-hinged basement window was set just above ground level, facing the street. According to my father, who had grown up in the same house, it was once the entrance to a coal shaft. Though it was closed and was too high for us to see outside, we could still hear the ruckus. Steel garbage cans were flying through the air, hurtling like cannonballs that bounced, rattled, and skittered across the pavement as Sal and Charlie engaged in their death-defying combat.
Then it grew quiet. We later learned that Sal smashed a can over his father’s head, delivering a patricidal knockout.
It was all part of the enigma of growing up in Gravesend. Normally a congenial, tranquil, residential stretch – considered to be safe at any time of day or night – you could easily be lulled into dropping your guard and imagining that you’d stumbled upon a sweet urban paradise. But then, violence might be sparked by the shortest of fuses, and scenes more befitting the mean, ornery streets of Sicily would run their desperate course.
The comparison isn’t just fanciful. The most crime-infested corner of Europe by the nineteenth century, Sicily had spawned a terrorist Mafia both at home and abroad, there in Gravesend, where every storefront for miles around paid “protection” money to La Cosa Nostra. And woe to him who refused to hand it over!
Baseball bats were not only used as sportive accoutrements. They were employed as weapons to be cracked over skulls and to break arms and legs.
***
My grandmother’s sudden death at the age of forty-four had ruined everything for her son. Arthur was only twelve years old, the youngest of three boys, when her passing left the household bereft of that reassuring maternal presence that young lads need to blossom into a fullness of being. A brain aneurism, a stroke, and then a coma had whisked her away – all within a few hours.
A child’s natural sense of wonder was eclipsed at this tender age, never to be retrieved. And instead, to be replaced by a steady creep of cynicism and despair. These were the cosmic twins that shined with an eerie light from Arthur’s anxious eyes in the decades following that ill-fated tragedy in 1941.
But as Christmas approached, my father’s habitual nihilism would be temporarily suspended. Instead of grumbling like Scrooge, he would accommodate the holiday spirit as my brother and I piled into his gunmetal-blue ‘56 Chevy, to cruise the potted asphalt in search of the biggest, most bountiful Christmas tree that would just barely fit into our living room.
When he set his mind to accomplish something, Arthur was nothing if not determined. But it seemed as if the only task he could perform smoothly, effortlessly, with nothing impeding or distracting him – which is to say, with his full-throttled will intact – was reading a book. Anything that hovered in the realm of pure intellect comprised his natural terrain. But alas! tasks that drew from a more practical, mundane sensibility – like wielding a hammer or screwdriver – drove a wedge into his soul. Thus, while driving determinedly forward, the other half of his being would be fighting and fuming against the task, riven by fear that he might err – and the stack of cards come crashing down. All of which led him to focus with even greater determination, but in such a way that he grew so irritable that it was impossible to be near him: porcupine prickly, and liable to vent his rage at whoever stood within arm’s length.
So now, cruising along the crunchy, snow-slathered lanes – icy, slithery, streaked with dark, syrupy slush from the continual car exhaust – he’d be cursing at the wild drivers zigzagging all around us. By the time we parked a mere seven blocks away, on West Sixth and Kings Highway, I felt as if we’d survived an asteroid-dodging transit to the moon. But instead of fuel blazing from a space rocket, I envisioned steam jetting from Arthur’s big floppy ears.
Parked in front of a train station, we’d inspect the first group of tree vendors: a sorry lot that my father referred to as “dropouts.” Indeed, they were a scraggly-looking bunch. Even with my juvenile vision I could detect something “off” about these men, especially the older ones, who were marked with the countenance of shipwrecked pirates and whose eyes glowered into a sinister penumbra. As they tilted their brows and squinted at you, you could almost see the dollar signs spinning up or down in their pupils. For, in true Mediterranean fashion, everything was based on bargaining, or, shall I say, on one man getting ripped off while another prays – and preys – for illicit gain.
Since Arthur’s diplomatic skills were even less developed than his practical acumen, he didn’t hesitate to rudely interrupt those ludicrous harangues about how valuable a particular tree was and what a top price it would command. In response, he’d either roll his eyes; rattle off a brisk, snippy counteroffer; render a snide remark; or simply turn his back on the scrawny Fraser firs and crooked sheared Balsams – and walk away in a huff. As I later realized, all this was more than mere ill-temperedness. Arthur was aware that he could be gullible at times, especially when called upon to pay attention to pragmatic details, so this was how he guarded against his inherent nature.
Shrewdly enough, we never entered these lots at the beginning of the season, during late October or early November. Instead, we’d wait until the sales were drying up as Christmas approached, when we might grab a gorgeous Douglas fir at a greatly reduced price.
But if the salesmen who were stamping their boots to stay warm had nothing of interest for sale, we’d venture farther east, to MacDonald Avenue – a broad thoroughfare under an elevated train line – where additional heaps of fir, spruce, and pine trees cluttered the slippery pavement. If Arthur still wasn’t satisfied, then we’d cross Ocean Parkway and continue to Coney Island Avenue, where we might finally strike gold and haul one of the sweet-smelling evergreens back home. But first, he’d cut away a bristly net of jute twine that garlanded the boughs like a packaged ham, just to make sure there weren’t any faults hidden beneath the wobbly mass of supple green needles. Then we’d fasten it to the roof of the car with a thick cotton rope, of the kind that my mother used in the backyard, for a clothesline.
Thus we’d get to see Arthur wield his old army knife: a leftover from his service in postwar Germany, where he was stationed with the Counterintelligence Corps, as a spy.
“If your mother had only agreed to settle in Bad Hersfeld and marry me there,” he liked to say with a wicked grin, “then you’d all be speaking German by now!” A prospect that intrigued me, since I continually dreamed of escaping the narrow confines of West Twelfth Street.
Once he slid the blade back into a leather holster on his belt, it was as if another life were now being placed into storage. And that continent called “Europe” … What was it like, I wondered. I couldn’t even begin to imagine. Might as well ask an evergreen about Gravesend while it was rooted in the pristine soil of Nova Scotia or Saskatchewan.
As we hauled our treasure up the front stoop and into the porch, my mother would emerge from the kitchen as wide-eyed and excited as we were. Our small black terrier, Sparky the Wonder Dog, would be prancing back and forth, wagging its tail and leaping around, its animal instincts triggered by the sweet smell of sap oozing from the pores of this majestic creature.
My brother and I would run downstairs to retrieve a carpenter’s saw with a hand-carved wooden handle, fashioned by my great-grandfather. Arthur would slice off a few inches from the bottom of the trunk; then we’d tilt it up, slowly and carefully, to see if it fit between floor and ceiling.
True to his word, Arthur always procured an oversized beauty that just barely managed to fit into these modest dimensions. Standing on a painter’s ladder, he’d measure how many more inches still needed to be removed from the upper branches before sticking a five-pointed star on top. Then we’d slip the base of the trunk into a red-and-green metal sconce, balanced with four L-shaped legs, into which we’d pour some water to nourish this new member of our family.
Returning to the basement, we’d open the creaking door of a turquoise closet fastened to a brick wall. The “Christmas closet,” as we called it, housed all the magical tidbits that we’d hang on the tree or assemble into a village beneath the branches. Iridescent glass balls, coated with a phosphorescent filigree, were stored in fragile old cardboard boxes, along with painted lead or ceramic figurines – elves, reindeer, an impish-looking Santa riding a sleigh – that were fashioned in nineteenth-century Vienna. They were all part of Arthur’s Old World heritage, passed down through generations; and, as I handled them, I felt as if I were entering another time and place. This cornucopia also included a string of colored light bulbs from the 1920s: one of the first sets ever manufactured for newly electrified households, which we spun round the tree in a luminous spiral.
Bridget would spread a snow-white blanket under the boughs, a virginal landscape soon to be encircled by a Lionel train set. The locomotive’s smokestack whistled when you pressed a red button on a control panel; and if you inserted a smoke pellet, it would huff and puff with ersatz clouds of “steam.”
The severed stump that had been hacked away by my great- grandfather’s saw would not go to waste. It would serve as the four-inch throne of a stout white polar bear: a ceramic beast that had been handled so often its engraved features were gradually disappearing.
Seated on this stubby pedestal, the bear would gaze contentedly from a snowy hilltop – complete with bales of cotton – surveilling the train tracks as if it were a station master.
Although my brother and I were aware that Christmas was a “religious holiday,” our greatest spiritual joy – I’d even call it rapture – was triggered by an abundance of gifts that Bridget had carefully selected and placed, with equal care, around the tree. Celebrating the acquisition of this windfall remained our only true vocation, despite the jabberwocky of the nuns at St. Anne’s Elementary School, who constantly drummed it into us that Christ had died for our sins. But which of my transgressions was so terrible that it merited a bloody crucifixion?
After eight years of catechism indoctrination, I knew that Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday had something to do with the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus; but how exactly it all tied together I wasn’t quite sure. Nor did I care. Oddly enough, it was a Muslim who explicated the mystery many years later, after I’d expatriated to Paris:
“There’s something more than human about being a human being,” Mohammed said with a sad smile. “For when God enters into us, only then can he partake in the suffering and glory of being a man. Through the incarnation, he endures both our foolish sins and our naive wonderment. And by perishing along with us, only then can he experience what it is to be a frail, ephemeral creature. That is the mystery of the crucified god.”
From this I concluded that the Lord had died not just for us, but for his own amusement as well. Perhaps, he was slumming it.
Although Mohammed wasn’t certain about that, it led me to wonder how, on that jubilant Christmas Day, the divinity was enjoying himself by living vicariously through our vivacious juvenile eyes. Ripping open our presents with a savage fury, we dressed in brand-new cowboy outfits, blasted our shiny silver cap guns, or boxed with a life-size manikin named Joe Palooka: an inflatable rubber punching bag, weighted with sand at the bottom, that bounced back and forth with every punch. The shrieking locomotive belched smoke as it sped at top speed, nearly toppling over as it careened around the gleaming steel curves, while Sparky the Wonder Dog leaped and bounded, absorbing our infectious laughter and happily barking back at us.
As a French expression has it: “Ah, when our pleasures were still young!”
Such was our unfettered mirth that, as they say, things could only go downhill from there. For the ebullience of childhood is fated to transform into some other tincture. Therefore, the gods are also privy to that strange melancholy that creeps into our Christmases later on in life when, feeling a bit forlorn, we gather before a tree as if attending a wake, paying homage to ghosts from Christmas Past.
The evergreen begins to sag; its brittle needles shrivel and fade. Now we’re tasked with depositing it beside the curb, one of hundreds lying in wait for the maws of the garbage trucks.
As we lay it down, a gust of icy rain slashes our cheeks, while ragged strands of silver tinsel streak across the gutter and flutter in a harsh wind.
Back inside, after the needles are swept from the parquet floor, all that remains is a tree stump.
We repackage the decorations while Arthur retrieves a crayon and inscribes the year of this particular Christmas upon the base of the stump. It will then be stored on a shelf in the Christmas closet beside other carefully labeled stumps, like a private museum of intimate souvenirs.
For Arthur – a man so deeply devoted to words, concepts, and the bravado of the intellect – all that remains is this indecipherable hieroglyph of a nameless feeling.
***
I was in my early forties and completing my twelfth year in Paris when, abruptly and with little warning, Bridget passed away. A blood vessel had burst in her brain, then she drifted into a coma. A few hours later she was gone. Arthur was devastated – and perhaps doubly traumatized – because she died in the same manner as his mother had, nearly sixty years earlier.
Shortly after her death, I dreamed of a storage room containing a half dozen extra-large gift-wrapped packages. Bridget had prepared these presents for her children: an endowment that she was leaving behind. Strangely enough, it was a silent dream … and one devoid of action.
Unlike the intellectually combative Arthur with his penchant for endless logomachy, my mother excelled at communicating silently with her animate light-blue eyes. A bright canvas, they radiated all the feeling tones that shaped her humanity. They “spoke” so clearly of her ineffable delights or disappointments; they reflected the mystery of her modest personality; they scintillated with unconditional love. But occasionally they communicated wariness, incomprehension, or fear over the mystery of my own personality – especially when I was steering my canoe through uncharted terrain – just as they had on that day when we’d wandered past the “bad boys” of the garage.
Over the years I often pondered the symbolism of this delightful dream. Upon waking, I had been given to understand that these were not mere material gifts: they were spiritual endowments – talents, faculties, and sensibilities that had been passed down, directly from her innermost being. Therefore, not only had she helped to shape us as children; her gifts would continue to unwrap themselves into the future.
Arthur was truly blessed to have found her! Only Bridget could serve as a counterpoint to his terrific sense of alienation and despair. But once she was gone, a soul-shattering grief had realigned his heart and made him more human.
Perhaps, this was her final beneficence.
* * *