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The Happy Childhood

WE WERE JEROME JR., AND MIRIAM, AND LIONEL, AND LES, and Katie, and Rick, and Violet Rue—“Vi’let.”

“Christ! Looks like a platoon.”

Daddy would stare at us with a look of droll astonishment like a character in a comic strip.

But (of course) Daddy was proud of us and loved us even when he had to discipline us. (Which wasn’t often. At least not with the girls in the family.)

Yes, sometimes Daddy did get physical with us kids. A good hard shake, that made your head whip on your neck and your teeth rattle—that was about the limit with my sisters and me. My brothers, Daddy had been known to hit in a different way. Haul off and hit. (But only open-handed, never with a fist. And never with a belt or stick.) What hurt most was Daddy’s anger, fury. That look of profound disappointment, disgust. How the hell could you do such a thing. How could you expect to get away with doing such a thing. The expression in Daddy’s eyes, that made me want to crawl away and die in shame.

Disciplining children. Only what a good responsible parent did, showing love.

Of course, our father’s father had disciplined him. Nine kids in that rowdy Irish Catholic family. Had to let them know who was boss.

One by one the Kerrigan sons grew up, to challenge their father. And one by one the father dealt with them as they deserved.

Old sod. Daddy’s way of speaking of our grandfather when our grandfather wasn’t around.

So much of what Daddy said had to be interpreted. Laughing, shaking his head, or maybe not laughing, exactly. Old sod bastard. God-damned old sod.

Still, when our grandfather had nowhere else to live, Daddy brought him to live with us. Fixed up a room at the rear of the house, that had been a storage room. Insulation, new tile floor, private entrance so Granddad could avoid us if he wished. His own bathroom.

Daddy’s birth name was Jerome. This name was never shortened to “Jerry” let alone “Jerr”—even by our mother.

Our mother’s name was Lula—also “Lu”—“Lulu”—“Mommy”—“Mom.”

When speaking to us our parents referred to each other as “your father”—“your mother.” Sometimes in affectionate moments they might say “your daddy”—“your mommy”—but these moments were not often, in later years.

In early years, I would not know. I had not been born into my parents’ early, happier years.

Between our parents there was much that remained unspoken. Now that I am older I have come to see that their connection was like the densely knotted roots of trees, underground and invisible.

Frequently our father called our mother “hon”—in a neutral voice. So bland, so flat, you wouldn’t think that “hon” was derived from “honey.”

If he was irritated about something he called her “Lu-la” in a bitten-off way of reproach.

If he’d been drinking it was “Lu-laaa”—playful verging upon mocking.

At such times our mother was still, stiff, cautious. You did not want to provoke a husband who has been drinking even if, as it might seem, the man is in a mellow mood, teasing and not accusing. No.

Fact is, much of the time we saw our father, later in the day, he’d been drinking. Even when there were no obvious signs, not even the hot fierce smell of his breath.

Mom had a way of communicating to us—Don’t.

Meaning Don’t provoke your father. Not right now.

This Mom could communicate wordlessly with a sidelong roll of her eyes, a stiffening of her mouth.

Your father loves you, as I do—so much! But—don’t test that love …

A painful truth of family life: the most tender emotions can change in an instant. You think your parents love you but is it you they love, or the child who is theirs?

Like leaning too close to the front burner of the stove, as I’d done as a small child, and in an instant my flammable pajama top burst into flame—you can’t believe how swiftly.

But swiftly too as if she’d been preparing for such a calamity for all of her life as a mother, Mom grabbed me, pulled me away from the stove, hugging me, snuffing out the fierce little flames with her body, bare hands smothering the flames, before they could take hold. And trembling then, lifting me to the sink and running cold water over my arms, my hands, just to make sure the flames were gone. Almost fainting, she’d been so frightened. We won’t tell Daddy, sweetie, all right?—Daddy loves you so much he would just be upset.

Comforting to hear Mom speak of Daddy. As if in some way he was her Daddy, too.

And so when Mom called Daddy “Jerome” it was in a respectful voice. Not a playful voice and not an accusatory or critical voice but (you might say) a voice of wariness.

Oh Jerome. I think—we have to talk …

The hushed voice I would just barely hear through the furnace vent in my room in the days following Hadrian Johnson’s death.

EVEN NOW. SO MANY YEARS LATER. THAT STRONG WISH TO CRAWL away, die in shame.

WHEN I WAS A LITTLE GIRL IN THE EARLY 1980S MY FATHER WAS A tall solid-built man with dark spiky hair, hard-muscled arms and shoulders, a smell of tobacco on his breath, and (sometimes) a smell of beer, whiskey. His jaws were covered in coarse stubble except when he shaved, an effort made grudgingly once a week or so by one not willing to be a bearded man but thinking it effeminate to be close-shaven too. By trade he was a plumber and a pipe fitter and something of an amateur carpenter and electrician. In the army he’d been an amateur boxer, a heavyweight, and while we were growing up he had a punching bag and a heavy bag in the garage where he sparred with other men, and with my brothers as they came of age, who could never, not ever, quick on their young legs as they were, avoid their father’s lightning-quick right cross. It was the great dream of my oldest brother Jerome—“Jerr”—that he might someday knock Daddy down on his rear, not out but down; but that never happened.

And Lionel, Les, Rick. He’d made them all “spar” with him, laced big boxing gloves on their hands, gave them instructions, commanded them to Hit me! Try.

We watched. We laughed and applauded. Seeing one of our brothers trying not to cry, wiping bloody snot from his reddened nose, seeing our father release a rat-a-tat of short stinging right-hand blows against a bare, skinny, sweating-pale chest—why was that funny? Was that funny?

Try to catch me, li’l dude. C’mon!

Hey: you’re not giving up until I say so.

Girls were exempt from such humiliations. My sisters and me. But girls were exempt from instructions too. And Daddy’s special glow of approval, when at last one of our brothers managed to land a solid blow or two, or keep himself from falling hard on his ass on the cement floor of the garage.

Not bad, kid. On your way to the Golden Gloves!

Daddy’s girls had to suppose that Daddy was proud of us in other ways, it wasn’t clear how just yet.

He wanted us to be good-looking, which might mean sexy—but not too obviously. Staring at Miriam—her mouth, lipstick—not knowing what to think, how to react: Did he approve, or disapprove?

He’d seemed to be impressed by good grades but report cards were not very real to him, school was a female thing, he’d dropped out of high school without graduating, never read a book nor even glanced inside a book so far as I knew, pushed aside our textbooks if they were in the way on a counter, no curiosity except just once that I remember, pushing aside a book I’d brought home from the public library—The Diary of Anne Frank.

What was this, he’d heard of this, vaguely—in the newspaper, or somewhere—Anne Frank. Nazis?

But Daddy’s interest was fleeting. He’d peered at the cover, the wan girl-face of the diarist, saw nothing to particularly intrigue him, dismissed the book as casually as he’d noticed it without asking me about it. For always Daddy was distracted, busy. His mind was a kaleidoscope of tasks, things to be done, each day a ladder to be climbed, nothing random admitted.

And what pride we felt, my sisters and me, seeing our father in some public place, beside other, ordinary men: taller than most men, better-looking, with a way of carrying himself that was both arrogant and dignified. No matter what Daddy wore, work clothes, work boots, leather jacket he looked good—manly.

And the expression on our mother’s face, when they were together, with others. That particular sort of female, sexual pride. There. That’s him. My husband Jerome. Mine.

To their children, parents are not identical. The mother I knew as the youngest of seven children was certainly not the mother my older siblings knew, who’d been a young wife. Especially, the father I knew was not the father my brothers knew.

For Daddy treated my brothers differently than he treated my sisters and me. To Daddy the world was harshly divided: male, female.

He loved my brothers in a way different from the way he loved my sisters and me, a fiercer love, a more demanding love, mixed with impatience, at times even derision; a hurtful love. In my brothers he saw himself and so found fault, even shame, a need to punish. But also a blindness, a refusal to detach himself from them.

His daughters, his girls, Daddy adored. You would not have said of any Kerrigan that he adored his sons.

We were thrilled to obey him, we basked in his attention, his love. It was a protective love, a wish to cherish but also a wish to control, even coerce. It was not a wish to know—to know who we were, or might be.

Yet, Daddy behaved differently with Miriam, and with Katie, than he did with me. It was a subtle difference but we knew.

He’d have claimed that he loved us all equally. In fact, he’d have been angry if anyone had suggested otherwise. That is what parents usually claim.

Until there is a day, an hour, when they cease making that claim.

TWO FACTS ABOUT DADDY: HE’D FOUGHT IN VIETNAM, AND HE’D come back alive and (mostly) undamaged.

This was about as much as Daddy would say about his years as a soldier in the U.S. Army, when Lyndon B. Johnson was president.

“I enlisted. I was nineteen. I was stupid.”

We knew from relatives that Daddy had been “cited for heroism” helping to evacuate wounded soldiers while wounded himself. He’d been awarded medals—kept in a box in the attic.

My brothers tried to get him to talk about being a soldier in the U.S. military and in the war but he never would. In a good mood after a few ales he’d concede he’d been God-damned lucky the shrapnel that got him had been in his ass, not his groin, or none of “you kids” would’ve been born; in a not-good mood he’d say only that Vietnam had been a mistake but not just his mistake, the whole country had gone bat-shit crazy.

He’d hated Nixon more than Johnson, even. That a president would lie to people who trusted him and not give a damn how many thousands of people died because of him, Daddy shook his head, speechless in indignation.

Most politicians were those blood-sucking sons of bitches. Cocksuckers. Fuckers. Even Kerrigan relatives who were involved in local, western New York State politics were untrustworthy, opportunists and crooks.

Daddy would only talk about Vietnam with other veterans. He had a scattering of friends who were veterans of Vietnam, Korea, and World War II he went out drinking with, but never invited to the house; our mother did not know their wives, and our father had no interest in introducing her. Taverns, saloons, pubs, roadhouses—these were the gathering places of men like Daddy, almost exclusively male, relaxed and companionable. In such places they watched championship boxing matches, baseball and football, on TV. They laughed uproariously. They smoked, they drank. No one chided them for drinking too much. No one waved away smoke with prissy expressions. Who’d want women in such places? Women complicated things, spoiled things, at least women who were wives.

Returning home late from an evening with these men Daddy was likely to be heavy-footed on the stairs. Often he woke us, cursing when he missed a step, or collided in the dark with something.

If one of us left something on the stairs, textbook, pair of shoes, Daddy might give it a good kick out of pure indignation.

In our beds, we might hear them. Our mother’s murmurous voice that might be startled, pleading. Our father’s voice slurred, abrasive, loud.

A sound of a door being slammed, hard. And though we listened with quick-beating hearts, often we heard nothing further.

Katie had hoped to interview our father for a seventh-grade social studies project involving “military veterans” but this did not turn out well. Calm at first telling her no, not possible but when Katie naively persisted losing his temper, furious and profane, threatening to call the teacher, to tell that woman to go fuck herself until—at last—our mother was able to persuade him not to make such a call, not to jeopardize Katie’s standing with her teacher or at the school, please just forget it, try to forget, the teacher had only meant well, Katie was in no way to blame and should not be punished.

Punished was something our father could understand. Punished unfairly, he particularly understood.

Katie would remember that incident for the rest of her life. As I will, too.

You didn’t push Daddy, and you didn’t take Daddy for granted. It was a mistake to assume anything about him. His generosity, his pride. Dignity, reputation. Not being disgraced or disrespected. Not allowing your name to be dragged through the dirt.

There were many Kerrigans scattered through the counties of western New York State. Most of these had emigrated from the west of Ireland, in and near Galway, in the 1930s, or were their offspring. Some were closely related to our father, some were distant, strangers known only by name. Some were relatives whom we saw frequently and some were estranged whom we never saw.

We would not know why, exactly. Why some Kerrigans were great guys, you’d trust with your life. Others were sons of bitches, not to be trusted.

We did notice, my sisters and me, that girl-cousins with whom we’d been friendly, and liked, would sometimes become inaccessible to us—their parents were no longer on Daddy’s good side, they’d been banished from Daddy’s circle of friends.

If we asked our mother what had happened she might say evasively, “Oh—ask your father.” She did not want to become involved in our father’s feuds because a remark of hers might get back to him and anger him. Personal questions annoyed our father and we did not want to annoy our father whom we adored and feared in about equal measure.

For instance: What happened between our father and Tommy Kerrigan, an older relative who’d been a U.S. congressman and mayor of South Niagara for several terms? Tommy Kerrigan was the most prominent of all the Kerrigans and certainly the most well-to-do. He’d been a Democrat at one time, and he’d been a Republican. He’d had a brief career as an Independent—a “reform” candidate. He’d been a liberal in some issues, and a conservative in others. He’d supported local labor unions but he’d also supported South Niagara law enforcement, which was notorious for its racist bias against African Americans; as a mayor he’d defended police killings of unarmed persons and had blatantly campaigned as a “law and order” candidate. Tommy Kerrigan was a “decorated” World War II veteran who supported American wars and military interventions, unquestioningly. He supported the Vietnam War until the U.S. withdrew troops in 1973 and it was his belief that Richard Nixon had been “hounded” out of office by his enemies. Naturally Tommy Kerrigan was critical of rallies and demonstrations against the war which he considered “traitorous”—“treasonous.” He defended the actions of the police in dealing roughly with antiwar protesters as they’d dealt roughly with civil rights marchers in an earlier era. After a scandal in the early 1980s he’d had to abruptly retire from public life, narrowly escaping (it was said) indictment for bribe taking and extortion, but he continued to live in South Niagara, in a showy Victorian mansion in the city’s most prestigious residential neighborhood, and he was still exerting political influence in circuitous ways while I was growing up. It was speculated that there’d been bad blood between Tom Kerrigan and our father’s father and so out of loyalty our father was permanently estranged from Tom Kerrigan as well. When a softball field was built in South Niagara and given the name Kerrigan Field no one in our family was invited to the dedication and the opening game; if our brothers played baseball at Kerrigan Field, they knew better than to mention the fact to our father.

Carefully Daddy would say of Tom Kerrigan that there was no love lost between our families though at other times he might shake his head and admire Tom Kerrigan as the most devious son of a bitch since Joe McCarthy.

And if anyone asked us if we were related to Tom Kerrigan, Daddy laughed and said, tell them politely No. I am not.