Strong Boy

Two months ago, I rode up the elevator to meet my maker. He lived on the thirteenth floor in a duplex apartment with his queen, Margaret. They had two cats, a day maid, and cook. They were childless, except for me, and I hadn’t lived with them since the winter of ’25, when a blackout turned the Mister murderous, and the Missus was the only one he could stand. We bumped into each other in the dark. I was five and moved all the way down to my aunt’s house on the mezzanine level. I snuck out before the lights came on. They’d trip over me, lying prone or standing up, and my nerves were never the same.

In the mezzanine were Aunt Alice and Uncle Bill, my cousins Eddie, Mary, Isabel, and little Hamlet. Another runt would make no difference, or so I thought, as I hauled down a diaper bag with my blanket and pillow, and two sets of overalls, a jersey, and baby shoes on my feet. They had to take me in when I mentioned we were family, although the two in the penthouse paid a visit to the cellar only once a year, on Easter Saturday, for a highball, and some one-sided talk.

I was an accident is what I heard, but they all had a different version. Mother was in her fifties and had had a brace of miscarriages. Dad was sixty, but looked ninety, with his pure white hair and horseshoe back. His head was at my level, but I had a better deal, because he had to twist his, and sometimes fell over. I looked down until, “Don’t you be looking down on me, squirt!” is what I heard. “Peace,” I said, and I hauled him up with my good arm. The bad one had been twisted in my delivery, or deliverance, as I heard someone call it. Mother had everything wrong with her, and getting out in one piece, no laughing matter.

Getting in, of course, was the accident. Here’s what I heard from Aunt Alice: on a train trip to Miami, Dad’s back only a half or quarter moon, they’d booked a Pullman, locked the door, and couldn’t get it open for love or money. There was nothing else to do, and all they had to eat was a two-layer box of chocolates from the New Haven RR (Dad was the under-chief), and a quart of Old Crow. Mother was a nerveless wonder, who’d never met a person she didn’t like, and made only one decision she regretted: marrying her cousin Adalbert. She still had her black silk pajamas with one pink stork running up the pantleg, and a little pink cord looping around the collar and under the buttons. You can imagine how cute they were on my beautiful mother, with her platinum-blonde pageboy, and black-cat glasses. But, they were bored, and he was beside himself with rage. Heads would roll, but before that, my mother had him dead to rights, and the train pulled out of the station, with two turned into three—his miracle, Da, as I called him, or Sir—and whisky into water, for they had to gargle, with a mouthful of tooth powder and a mouse on their tongues. Da says “fur,” I say mouse; mother Margaret says, “If you don’t pay attention, it’ll go away,” which is what she always said.

So, she grew a belly on top of a belly, hardly noticeable, since I was the product of spirits and cocktail olives, petits fours, and cream cheese on date bread—so small, I might have snuck in, and no one notice, but it was full summer and they were at the beach house playing pinochle with the maiden aunts, who lived next door. Mag (as they called her) had a belly ache that wouldn’t go away, no matter how many Tums she sucked, or cups of black tea with honey, so she called it a day and retired with a sleeping pill, then another, until I...