St. Patrick's Bed (Ashland, 3) Read online

  "Jeanne's got something she wants to show you, Phil."

  These were her mother's words, so the story went.

  He was sitting in the big blue easy chair in the living room—the one that's still there—watching the six o'clock news.

  Jeanne brought the laundry basket out of the bedroom and set it on the carpet at his feet.

  "This is your grandson."

  Nobody spoke.

  "His name's Adam."

  Phil Berney looked at the baby, at his daughter, his wife.

  Claire Berney put her hands over her mouth. Without sound, she began to cry.

  Jeanne looked at her father. "I'm sorry, Dad. I should've told you."

  He still said nothing.

  "I was afraid." She looked at her mother. "We were afraid. Of what you'd do, of what you'd say. I thought I was going to give him up for adoption, but I've changed my mind."

  She held her ground. Standing in front of him. The baby at his feet.

  The silence was a chasm. He was searching for the pieces, trying to understand. Nobody could tell what he was feeling, what he was thinking. And when he spoke, finally, softly, there was no explosion, no anger. "He can't sleep in a laundry basket," he said. He looked at his wife. "He needs a proper crib."

  "Dad was nearly always right," Jeanne told me years later. "I can see it now."

  The next day Phil Berney went out and bought a crib, and spent the hour after dinner assembling it. It had baseball players painted on the headboard, a ball and glove on the footboard. They think that's why Adam loves baseball so much.

  I only knew Phil Berney during that first year I was seeing Jeanne. He died the next summer, when Adam was eleven.

  People were still marking his words, even when I knew him.

  II

  Jeanne and I were married Friday, September 2, 1988, at the Graceland Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas. It was the Friday before Labor Day, before Adam had to start back to school. He was fourteen. He was my best man.

  We'd been talking about getting married for over a year, but couldn't figure out exactly how to do it. Neither Jeanne nor I attended any church regularly—still don't— so that was a problem. There was which city to do it in—Ashland or Toronto. And then there was the cost—the paraphernalia, the attendants, the hall, the reception, the debates about the guest list, the gown, the tux. It went on and on. We got a migraine whenever we talked about it, so it became a topic we didn't know how to deal with.

  But there was the fact that we'd been living together, both in Ashland and whenever she and Adam came to Toronto, and the fact was that we were both becoming more conscious of Adam in the middle of our cohabiting. He was a teenager. He knew what was going on. Maybe he had always known, but at age ten or eleven he still seemed to think of Leo only as Mommy's Friend. At thirteen and fourteen, he knew I was more than a friend. What kind of example were we setting? We weren't sure. New territory for both of us. And what the hell. We couldn't stay away from each other. Couldn't keep our hands off each other. Why not get married?

  But how to do it.

  City Hall was a possibility. It seemed more and more like the logical thing to do. But there was something about being so logical, so conventional, that we stalled, eddied, procrastinated.

  It all changed one evening in July of '88.

  "Read this," I'd said, sliding the newspaper across the kitchen table to Jeanne.

  "What is it?"

  "Read it."

  It was in the Sunday Toronto Sun, one of those features that you only find in weekend papers. Not news. Human-interest stuff. The headline was "Goin' to the Chapel." It was datelined Las Vegas.

  Jeanne read it quietly. A Toronto couple who had lived together for seventeen years had won a trip to Vegas. Something in the Nevada air, in the cascade of blue and orange neon, had made them decide, after all that time, to tie the knot.

  I watched Jeanne's face. She frowned, smiled, frowned again.

  "Jesus," she said.

  "What?"

  "Says there were over eighty thousand weddings there last year. There are forty-two chapels. They take up thirteen pages in the Vegas yellow pages."

  I waited a minute. Then I said, "What do you think?"

  She looked up, met my eyes, thinking. That bit of smile came back.

  The next day, after work, I went to the Metro Reference Library near Bloor and Yonge and photocopied thirteen pages from the Las Vegas yellow pages.

  "Your mother and I are thinking of getting married in Las Vegas. What do you think?"

  Everything was riding on Adam's reaction. If he turned thumbs down, it was off. Our life was good. We didn't need marriage. At least, we didn't think so.

  It was dinnertime. Simple routines had emerged: decisions and food just seemed to go together.

  He didn't keep us waiting.

  "I think it's cool," he said. Then he added, "My friends will think it's cool."

  "Will you be my best man?"

  "Sure." He smiled now, pleased.

  Jeanne relaxed visibly. You could see it in her face, her shoulders. Her eyes came alive.

  That night, at the kitchen table, with Adam and I listening, Jeanne called a handful of the chapels in the photocopied pages that I had brought home. They had 1-800 numbers to make it almost painless. Silver Bell ("Don Johnson, Diana Ross"), Litde Chapel of the Flowers ("Elegant Reception Center"), Candlelight ("California Checks Welcomed"), Little White Chapel ("50 Years in the Business of Love!"). There were drive-in weddings, weddings in a plane flying over the Grand Canyon, weddings in a hot tub inside a limousine.

  We were more sensible than all that. We selected Graceland ("Home of the 'King'!"). It was the lady on the other end of the phone who swayed us. No pressure, easygoing, honest, funny. Jeanne asked all the questions, and liked her. We booked it.

  We opened a dusty bottle of cabernet sauvignon, poured two glasses, even offered a glass to Adam. He made a face, got a can of Coke from the fridge instead.

  When I told my father, later, that we were going to get married in Vegas, that there were eighty thousand weddings a year performed there, he said, "Yeah. And how many divorces."

  My father.

  Jeanne's taste in music contained a curious twist on Kentucky rockabilly. She had once told me that she preferred music by singers who had died violently in a motorized vehicle. I had to admit, there were plenty of them.

  Elvis didn't quite qualify. But he was close. He was close.

  For a hundred bucks you got Elvis to sing at your wedding. We splurged. Why not the King? Why not.

  Jeanne bought herself a little white dress. Her mother, Claire, was her maid of honor. The four of us went: me, Adam, Jeanne, and Mrs. Berney. We picked the Hacienda Hotel. I sprang for a room for her mom, one for Adam, one for us. Claire Berney had never stayed in a hotel in her life. She thought she had died and gone to heaven.

  Graceland did a good job. Seriously. Elvis was great. I remember that the minister's first name was Rudy, and that he was sensitive and kind about the whole thing. Cost, including Elvis, the limo ride to and from the hotel, flowers, video—the works—was three hundred and some dollars. Of course, that's not counting the air fares, which backed up my Visa card for a couple of years afterward.

  Jeanne keeps a five-dollar casino chip from the Hacienda Hotel in her purse as a memento. My hair was thin even then. I bought a hat at a shop in the Hacienda, to protect my head from the Nevada sun—an ivy cap that I wore till it fell apart. The one I wear now is a replacement.

  A couple of years later, back home, on the six o'clock news, I watched them detonate the Hacienda, watched it collapse in a cloud of dust, onlookers roped back at a safe distance.

  THREE

  I

  When I was twenty-two or twenty-three, my Uncle Jim, Dad's younger brother, took me to a Legion Hall that he frequented for a couple of beers and a game of pool. I liked Jim. He drove my father crazy.

  In his youth, Jim had gotten into trouble with the law an
d with his parents and with my father and mother. There were streams of stories. We'd heard how, in the thirties, he and a group of teens from Northern Vocational stole a car to drive to a dance at Lake Wilcox north of Toronto, how they drank, argued about who would drive home, how the keys got thrown into the bush. The details of his arrest are blurry, but he ended up in the Don Jail. The end of the story has Nanny, his mother, making him turkey sandwiches, and Da, her father, his grandfather, getting sent home with the sandwiches after trying to deliver them.

  "He's in jail. What're you, crazy?" The man at the front desk hadn't blinked.

  When he was caught skipping school, Nanny threw him out and Da threw him back in. Nanny bought him a violin. He sold it. When my mother married my father she went to live in the Nolan family home on Maxwell Avenue. Jim was still there. The pram that my mother had bought for my sister Anne went missing. It came out later: Jim had sold it.

  One of Jim's legs was shorter than the other. He had operations on his hip, grafting bone from there to his leg. I heard how when he was a kid, the other kids playing outside, he had to lie on a flat board in the kitchen.

  Jim. My father would shake his head. "I used to park my car down at the docks at night," he'd say, "get on the cruise boats, play in the band all night, come back, and be puzzled why I had so little gas left in the tank. One night I came back a little early, the car was gone. I phoned the police. We're standing there filling out the report, up drives Jim. He'd had a key made, took the car most nights."

  Jim, he'd say. And shake his head.

  "We were all surprised when he married your mother." Jim leaned against the pool table, taking the pressure off his bad leg.

  I chalked my cue, looked at him. My uncle. My godfather. Usually he made me laugh, always had a funny story.

  "He'd been going with another girl. We all thought he was going to marry her. Then he turned around and married your mother."

  It was information that confused me. I wasn't sure I wanted to know.

  "He used to go out with a girl down at Port Dover, where he played in the bands in the summer. That was the girl. You ever hear about this?"

  "No." I missed my shot, stood back.

  "He was quite a ladies' man. I always thought maybe he had other women even after he married your mother. What do you think?"

  "I don't know." It was all I could think of to say. Such a thing had never occurred to me. My father was a mystery. All fathers are mysteries.

  I never knew what to make of Jim after that. I had trouble understanding why he had told me that story. True or not, there was nothing I could do about it. But why would he tell me such a thing? He was talking about my father.

  I've thought about it a lot, and I have an idea now. It's taken me years. I had to get older, have my own set of unfathomable experiences, have life boot me around a bit.

  I'd heard another story about Jim, this one from my mother. I'd heard how he and his wife tried and were unable to have children, how when my mother brought me home from the hospital after I was born, he had held me in his arms and said to my mother, "He's beautiful. Can I have him?" No, he couldn't have me. But he could be my godfather.

  Jim and Anna Mae had eventually adopted two beautiful boys of their own, raised them strong, fine. Jim remained the likable con man. But he knew how to be a father.

  In 1991, when we knew Jim was dying, I took Dad to the hospital to see him. Jim was delirious, had a respirator over his nose and mouth, lungs full of pneumonia. But when I held his hand, he focused, startling blue eyes, stared at me, knew who I was, squeezed hard, and I squeezed back. Hard as I could. He still wanted me. Wanted to be my father. That's why he'd told me the story.

  On the way home, in the car, Dad began talking. "Poor Jim," he said. "He had to wear one of those built-up shoes when he was a kid. He hated it. He used to sit on the curb, take it off, and throw it across the street.

  "Jim." My father shook his head. I glanced sideways at him. His cheeks were wet.

  "Those shoes were expensive," he said.

  Heading south back into the city, I could still feel the hand. Squeezing. Hard.

  II

  Tommy Nolan, my father, married Margaret Radey, my mother, on November 30, 1929, and they lived in his family home—the semidetached house at 55 Maxwell Avenue in North Toronto—until she died in 1984. Dad lasted there one more year without her, selling it in 1985.

  I grew up in that home. It was crazy. But I now understand that I didn't see the wildest years. They were before my time. Dad was one of five. Three of them as well were still there—Jim, Eleanor, and Loretta—along with his father (Bampi), mother (Nanny), and her father—Dad's grandfather—Da. My sister Anne was born in 1930, my brother Ron in 1932. Eleanor married and left in '32. But Loretta didn't marry until '36, and Jim was there until the early forties—he and Anna Mae weren't married until 1943. My sister Judy came along in 1939. And I forgot to mention my cousin Jacquie, who was born in 1928 and spent most of her youth at Maxwell Avenue, raised by Nanny and my mother, after Jacquie's mother's marriage fell apart (her mother was Berna, my father's sister, who married in 1926, before my father did).

  My parents had nine children, but only five of us survived. There were a couple of stillbirths and twins that died at birth. Mom only named one of them—Anthony, in 1931. He was her second baby, the first boy, and she carried him around in a secret place inside herself as long as I knew her. There was even a statue of St. Anthony on a dressing table in her bedroom, which I used to study as a child. When you lose something, you pray to St. Anthony, she told me. He's the patron saint of lost things. Then the story would come out. St. Anthony, I came to understand, stood for the other babies too—and for everything else my mother had lost.

  Nineteen thirty to 1949. She had babies for nineteen years, from age twenty to thirty-nine. By the time my brother Dennis and I appeared in the mid- and late forties, the place had virtually cleared out. In comparison to the thirties, the house must have seemed either like a ghost town or like paradise. Nanny, my father's mother, was still there though, a fixture as I grew up, sitting in the green, cloth-covered chair in the living room, watching The Edge of Night every afternoon on the RCA black-and-white TV. She didn't die until 1974, age eighty-nine.

  The house had three bedrooms. The basement was full too. The place was crazy.

  Like I said, when Mom died, Dad lasted a year in the house alone. Then he sold it, moved to a senior citizens' apartment on Yonge Street. He was there for three years—1985 to '88.

  In the spring of '88, I went to see him and made a pitch.

  "Jeanne and I are going to buy a house together. Here, in Toronto."

  Dad now occupied the green, cloth-covered chair, only now it was in his apartment at Fellowship Towers. The arms were more frayed than ever. He was watching TV. He always watched TV.

  "Oh? You getting married?"

  I was married a long time ago. It ended after three years. My one and only try. Fran. I shrugged. "Not yet. We've talked about it. Probably. But right now, we just want to do this."

  "Mm." He pondered. "Adam?"

  "He'll start high school here."

  He looked at me. "It's a big step."

  "I know."

  "Living together."

  I nodded.

  "Don't see what's wrong with people just living together. Couldn't do it in my day." Then he thought about it. "Well, you could do it. But it wasn't easy. Most people looked down on you, like you were doing something really wrong."

  "Like Berna." I mentioned his sister. She had died in '78.

  "Like Berna. Ma nearly had a fit." He shrugged. "Doesn't matter now, does it?"

  "No, it doesn't."

  "Where you going to buy? Got a place picked out?"

  "That's what I wanted to talk to you about."

  He waited. Even though he was looking at me, I knew he wasn't seeing much of me, just like he wasn't seeing much of the TV. His eyes were going. Macular degeneration. Still, he manage
d to get around. Good instincts, I thought. Good sense. Radar.

  "You could come to live with us."

  He paused, surprised. Then: "Nah. Wouldn't work. Besides, I like it here. It's a good spot."

  "I know that. The thing is, though, we could do each other a favor."

  He sat back.

  "Jeanne and I can buy a place of our own. That would be fine. But if you come to live with us, we'd buy a bigger place so that you could have your own quarters, as separate as possible. You just pay us the same rent as you're paying here. Your finances stay the same. Hell, they'll be better. It'll include food too. Room and board."

  He was quiet, thinking.

  "Meals . . . We'll work it out. We'll work everything out. It'll be a work-in-progress."

  A long silence.

  "What do you think?" I waited.

  "What's Jeanne think of it?"

  "She likes the idea."

  "Really?"

  "Really."

  More silence. Then: "And Adam?"

  "Adam likes you. You like Adam."

  He nodded. "Mm. I don't think these things usually work out. Your mother didn't like living with Nanny." He had a small reverie. "I made a mistake not getting our own place as soon as we were married." A pause. "Suppose it doesn't work out. Suppose we get on each other's nerves. What then?"

  "Good question. I don't know what to say. There are no guarantees for anything, this included. Let's just say that it's not a one-way street." I looked at him sitting there, my father, in his eighties. "If it doesn't work out, you can come back here. Things can be reversed. Not without a few scrapes, but certainly without any major damage. We wouldn't let anything get that far."

  He was still thinking. Then aloud: "I'm not going to get any better, you know. I'm only going to get worse."

  I ignored him. "Adam could use a grandfather. You'd have a role. There'd be somebody in the house when we were out. I'd like that."