“Well, can you please fix the nail before anyone else goes cartwheeling down the steps?” She pauses and takes a deep breath, a hand to her side. “I need to go clean up before everyone gets home.” At the threshold, she lets out a little laugh and looks back. “And while you’re down there, can you please turn on the water heater? After all that, I completely forgot!”
By the time the children stampede back into the house after Mass, followed behind by Ferd and Emma, Lillie and Charley are finishing up breakfast preparations. After a quick kiss for Lillie, Ferd lugs the sleeping baby—solid at eight months and dead weight against his shoulder—up the long staircase to put him down in the crib, while Emma and Charley corral the stir-crazy and cranky children. The requirement to fast before the service means that everyone is ravenous by the time they arrive home. It is a challenge to quiet everyone down in their chairs long enough to say grace and to keep the boys from wolfing down all food within their reach.
Lillie is typically in the center of the throng, directing, commanding, or cajoling as the situation requires. At the moment, though, she is happy to leave much of that to the others. As Ferd lifts Jeanie onto the stack of books in her chair and swathes her in a dishtowel bib, Lillie sees Emma’s silent look. Lillie gives her a weak smile and nods toward the soda crackers that are still sitting out on the counter. This satisfies Emma, who continues to ladle out scrambled eggs with a definitive smack of the metal spatula against each plate. “Frances, would you like to say grace?”
Francie, the beautiful child with golden hair, whose sweet nature matches her looks, blushes slightly with pleasure to be asked. She clasps her hands and bows her head, as does the rest of the table, and she recites in a clear voice, “Bless us, oh Lord, and these, Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty, through Christ, our Lord. Amen.”
“Amen,” the room choruses, as everyone makes the sign of the cross, and the chaos of eight children at one table recommences.
Ferd clears his throat loudly, which does the trick of quieting the rabble. He looks at his eldest son and father-in-law’s namesake. “What was the gospel reading today, Charley Boy?”
He is ready for the question. “It was John, talking about Christ and the Jews.”
“And Johnny, what did your patron saint say about Christ and the Jews?”
“Don’t you remember, Daddy?”
Charley snorts and Ferd shoots him a look before turning back to Johnny. “I do, as a matter of fact. I’m wondering if you do.”
Margaret and Francie are both straining for the opportunity to answer; Eleanor knows just as well, but feels no need to show off.
“Margaret, please remind us what Saint John told us today.”
“He said the Jews were accusing Jesus of being a liar and possessed by the Devil. They didn’t believe anything he said, and then they threw stones at him.”
“And so what did he do?”
“He went and hid.”
Ferd looks meaningfully at Johnny, who squirms in his seat. “But, Daddy, she’s the oldest. She remembers better.”
“She has ears and uses them. You need to start doing that too.”
Dorothy and Bernie look at each other, glad to still be too young to endure the Sunday breakfast catechism. Church is bad enough: being forced to sit still and quiet seemingly for forever in tight and itchy clothes, while the fearsome old priest stands with his back to everyone and talks in a strange language; and constantly standing, sitting, and kneeling for reasons that no one ever explains. After what seems like hours of this, it’s finally getting close to the end when everyone stands up to get in the long, slow-moving communion line. At last at the front, the older kids and the grown-ups find an open place at the railing to kneel down, and it seems to Bernie that the priest must be saying, “Open wide and say ahhh,” to make everyone stick out their tongues at him, just like the doctor does. One time, Bernie sticks out his tongue too, just like Emma is doing, and on the walk back to their seats gets a smack on the back of the head for doing it. Bernie finally asks Charley Boy—the brother whose explanations he trusts—what the priest puts on your tongue, and Charley Boy explains it’s like a thin piece of cardboard, and you have to let it sit on your tongue until it’s soft enough to swallow. If you chew it, you go to Hell. Also, if you eat before Mass, you go to Hell. If you miss confession, you go to Hell. If you eat meat on Fridays, or say bad words, or touch a girl who isn’t your sister—the rules are endless, the outcomes identical. Bernie decides he is going to figure out a way to never have to eat the cardboard.
Thinking about this makes Bernie fidget, and Lillie reflexively reaches out to still him, as she gets up and goes to the pantry stove to put the teakettle on again. Standing is better than sitting anyway, and from the doorway she can see everyone collected at the table. Even Emma is finally sitting down, if only for one minute. Ferd cuts Jeanie’s sausage for her and tries to get her to use a fork instead of her fingers. Eleanor describes a recent tennis match to Charley, who chuckles at her description of wiping the court with some braggart who thinks that girls can’t play.
“Charley Boy, eat your eggs; they’re getting cold.”
“I am, Gramal,” Charley Boy says, though his plate of congealing eggs begs to differ. He has smuggled a pencil and paper to the table and is diagramming a math problem that’s due tomorrow.
Lillie’s mind wanders off again, back into the parlor, and burrows once more into the box. Earlier this morning she opens her old diary to the first entry, written just as Ferd is starting to wheedle his way into the fringes of her affection, and laughs out loud at the coincidence that it is dated on another Passion Sunday, eighteen years before. Eighteen years that seem like a heartbeat, and yet here they all are.
The kettle whistles behind her on the stove, and she realizes that chairs are pushing away from the table as breakfast finishes. Charley leans back with a pick in his teeth, and pats his stomach with a sigh, content. “Thank the Lord for that small morsel. Many a poor divil would call it a meal.”
Charley Beck’s Happenstance
Charley Beck cracks himself up. He is perhaps the funniest person he knows. It doesn’t matter that his grandkids don’t always appreciate the humor of jokes they have heard practically every day of their lives. These days, Charley saves time by skipping over the buildup and going straight to the punch line; it’s just as funny that way anyway. His all-time favorite comes from one of the Nativity minstrel shows he, Ferd, and the other fellows used to put on to raise money for the parish. Charley, in blackface, tells jokes and sings comedic songs. One year there is a courtroom scene that sticks with him such that, almost every night at supper and at dinner on Sundays, he declaims the final line: “Your Honor, he sopped his bread in my gravy, and I hit him!” This invariably causes him to laugh so hard that he leaks tears and sometimes spittle. Then, more dependable than grace, he finishes his supper with a sigh and says, “Thank the Lord for that small morsel. Many a poor divil would call it a meal.”
A slightly built, sinewy man with a permanent walrus mustache, he is both quick and surprisingly strong, his grip impressive, even in an affable handshake. Charley is everyone’s friend and nobody’s enemy, and he is a wizard when it comes to building and fixing things. There is nothing he can’t make out of concrete, and the house and yard at 741 is the proof of it: ponds, fountains, retaining walls, the foundations for the pump house and barn, the floor for the garages he rents out to the apartment dwellers across the road who have no other place to park their cars. At home, if Charley Beck isn’t reading the newspaper, he is working in the garden; if he’s not in the garden, he’s building something new or fixing something that’s broken. If he is doing none of these things, he is rubbing under his battered fedora at the divot in the back of his neck, considering what to do next. A born farmer, a natural mechanic, and a modern-day homesteader, Charley Beck is a self-taught Renaissance man.