Stories from Down Cellar

When I was a boy, my father sometimes told me family secrets: how his older brother had eloped with his high school English teacher, how one of my uncles had had his first marriage annulled, which of my mother’s sisters had been pregnant when they reached the altar, and the uncle who led the charge to drop the “Mc” from McNerney in the early 1920s. My father would mimic his uncle’s brogue—“I don’t want to be a cop on the beat all of me life,” and then add sardonically, “he dropped the Mc and sure enough he became chief of police.”

Looking back, I realize that many of these stories, like those of other Irish- American families, had become secrets only in my generation. They were common knowledge to our parents or grandparents. I don’t know if Irish people keep more secrets than others; it feels as if they do. I do know that I smiled in agreement when, a few years ago, I read a line in a novel that said, in Ireland, “no family worth the name is without its secret.”

The first time my father told me the family murder story we were in the basement of our Dutch Colonial home built by my father’s parents—Grampa Joe and Gramma Ellen—in the industrial town of Attleboro, Massachusetts. The basement, or what we called “down cellar,” was dry and the concrete walls and floor were painted blue-gray. Standing at the bottom of the stairs, I could see my mother’s laundry, the black-and-white octopus furnace, my father’s workbench, some old wooden shelves loaded with canned goods, two rows of bookshelves and, next to them, a locked white metal cabinet where my father kept our guns. Whenever my father unlocked the gun cabinet, he stood by it like a guard, controlling the movement of each rifle or pistol as if it were a precious gem.

One Saturday afternoon when I was eleven, and we were supposed to be out raking leaves, my father and I were down cellar with the gun cabinet open. I spotted a shiny revolver with a black handle that he had never shown me. “What’s that pistol on the top shelf?” I asked.

“It’s nickel-plated, .38-caliber,” Dad said. “I bought it from Ted White up the street when I was eighteen.” He held its tan leather holster in his right hand and slipped the gun out with his left, and, as was his habit when removing or replacing a gun from the cabinet, he pushed the cylinder open with his index finger and checked to see that it was empty. As he closed the cylinder, he turned the revolver over in his hands, studying it as if it were a family heirloom.

“When I got home with this,” my father said, “my mother was standing at the stove cooking dinner. She had seen lots of guns, but when I drew this revolver out of its holster, she blanched, clutched the back of a kitchen chair and eased herself onto the wooden seat. She said, ‘Sit down, Jim; I have something to tell you.

‘One day when I was thirteen, my oldest sister had a row with her husband. He accused her of adultery. She had done nothing of the kind and demanded that he apologize, that he give back her good name. When he refused, she threw him out. I heard about all this when I went over to her apartment. We were sitting in the kitchen having tea when her husband came back with a gun he bought that afternoon, just like the one you’ve got there. He came right in and shot my sister twice, point-blank, and killed her. He pointed the gun at me but it misfired.

‘I was the only eyewitness and I testified against him. He was convicted and they executed him at Sing Sing in the electric chair. When the doctors did the autopsy, they found a brain tumor the size of a golf ball, so he must have been crazy.’”

I was...