My grandfather had given me an old Hohner harmonica when I was about nine years old. It had come in a tidy black case with purple velvet lining, and on the side of the instrument was a small knob that, when pulled, changed the key a half step. I had little idea how to play it but I found that by rolling it slowly back and forth across my lips, moderating my breath in and out, pulling and pushing the knob, I could make sounds that were beautifully haunting to my young ears. It had a musty, delicious smell and when I wasn’t making music, I’d bring it down to the carpet among my Hot Wheels and pretend it was a shiny silver ferry boat, sailing sleekly through the blue pile carpeting.
The harmonica had belonged to my grandpa’s father, a man I knew as my great-grandpa Louis. My mother called him Pa. He’d died well before I was born, when my mother had been just a teenager. I used to imagine my great-grandpa Louis playing his harmonica as he danced in his kitchen—there had been a photo of him holding something up near his mouth that my young mind had always interpreted as the harmonica (I’d discover later, upon closer inspection, that the harmonica was in fact a pint bottle). Still, he’d lived on in my memory as a man to be loved and admired, a gentle soul who’d helped soften the jagged, rough edges of my mother’s young life. In photos, I can see that like the harmonica his hair is silver, like his son’s, his granddaughter’s and now, his great-grandson’s.
My own images of my great-grandfather had always been filtered through my mother and now, suddenly, I had a new picture of him coming at me through a journalist’s pen. It was my mother’s stories, her memories forced through the perspective of an adoring twelve-year-old girl that had created the man I’d known as Louis Dondino. Her wistful narrative combined the grinding organ melodies and thrill-drenched screams echoing from the carnival as she stood anxiously in the doorway waiting for her beloved grandfather to come, to take her from her drab house to the carnival, where the real excitement was. She told me how her fingers gripped the edge of the screen door, holding tightly to keep it still and quiet. It moved slightly against the weight of her body and a deep, smoky squeak echoed from the rusty hinges through the kitchen and into the living room, catching the attention of her mother, my grandmother Margaret.
“Nellie Rose, close that door or there’ll be more flies inside than out,” her mother had scolded. She’d always called her daughter by her first and middle names, a trait that she’d brought with her all the way from Gulfport, Mississippi, to their home in Edmonds, Washington. “He’ll be here when he gets here.”
It was Labor Day weekend and that meant the carnival was up and running on the campus of Edmonds High School, a few blocks from my mother’s home just north of the downtown core. It also meant that her grandpa Louis would be there to take his only granddaughter to the show. Sister, he called her affectionately, and she called him Pa. He was my mother’s savior and she was the apple of his eye. “This little girl is tough as nails,” he’d brag to his buddies at the Sail Inn Tavern. “She can shoot the neck off a beer bottle at forty paces.” And she could, too; first with a BB gun, then with the gift her daddy had gotten her on her tenth Christmas, a .22 rifle.
* * *
My mother would have no way of knowing it then, but she stood directly in the center of a tense, recurring battle between my grandpa Ray—her father—and her own grandfather. My great-grandfather Louis had been in the habit of spoiling his granddaughter as much as he could, and this fanned the flames of jealousy and paternal competition in his son Ray something fierce. My mother could never understand the explosive anger and disrespect her father showed to his own pa, the gentle old man whom everyone else in her life seemed to absolutely love. Insight would come in bits and pieces, usually in beer-infused diatribes from her father that were meant for both everyone and no one in particular. The emerging truth was that Ray could never reconcile how a man who had been so neglectful during his son’s upbringing could dare to present himself as a beacon of parental mores. Where had this jovial old man been thirty years earlier when his own boy needed a father, on those long evenings Ray spent on his knees scrubbing the orphanage floors and the early mornings in the sanctuary, forced to kneel in empty prayer?
“Get off your ass and do some work around here for a change,” my grandpa Ray would growl at his daughter whenever she’d return from doing some odd jobs for his dad. “I don’t understand why you got all this time and energy to do chores for that old man and not for me.” And there had been something more, something unspoken in the Dondino home. Even as a child, my mother could sense that there was something “really, really bad between Daddy and Pa,” though it never seemed to come to light.
* * *
She’d grown impatient, my mother who was that little girl, waiting for her Pa to take her to the carnival, for the sleepover afterwards on his wonderful, lumpy old sofa. She began to pace and complain, but a rattling sound caught her ear. She swung open the screen door to see her old Pa ambling up the alley, trudging behind his homemade wooden cart, his mutts Spotty and Teddy perched obediently inside. Alongside the dogs was her Pa’s shiny knotty cane, the one he’d made himself from the branch of an aged cherry tree. An old leg injury had made the cane his constant companion. My mother dashed back inside the house to gather her blankets for a sleepover with her grandpa, slamming the door shut.
“Now don’t be fillin’ up on candy and sodas,” my grandmother warned her daughter as she watched her pile blankets into the cart and scratch the rough fur behind the dogs’ ears.
“Oh now, Margaret,” Louis reassured his daughter-in-law, “it’s once a year.”
“And you,” she said, drying her hands on her apron and shooting a stern look at Louis, “don’t let me hear news that you took her gamblin’ again.” The previous year, Louis had shown my mother the mouse race at the arcade. The two of them had laid a bet on which color hole the mouse would run through when it was released. When my mother guessed correctly and came home with a pocket full of dimes, my grandmother was furious. Gambling in any form was a nonnegotiable for her. Her strict Southern Baptist teachings had forbidden dice or even a deck of cards in her house, a rule that would last until her dying day. When I stayed at my grandparents’ home years later I spent many tedious hours tearing paper into fifty-two scraps to create a playing deck of my own or labeling rocks with numbers for a decent roll of the dice. “Don’t worry, Margaret,” Louis assured my grandmother calmly. “I’ll be good.”
My mother grabbed on to her grandpa’s arm as they made their way to his tiny house, up the street toward town, just behind Brownie’s Café. Louis drew his hand from his pocket and reached toward his granddaughter. “Here ya go, sister,” he said. “You’ll need some spending change for the carnival.” Wisps of white hair lifted from the sides and top of his balding head; the characteristic crevasses that lined his forehead and formed bookends for his eyes deepened as his smile widened.
“I got my own, Pa,” she said proudly, beaming up at him. My mother had brought the change collected from days of combing the neighborhood for bottles. Beer bottles were worth a penny each then, sometimes a few extra cents if she’d kept them all neatly in the case. Quart beer bottles were more, three cents each, standard pop bottles were two cents, and a quart pop bottle was the big cash cow at a nickel each. She’d typically collect several cases of Rainier bottles from her own home, though her parents would only allow her to take a couple cases at a time so that people wouldn’t know how much her father actually drank (as if it would have been any kind of mystery in a small town like Edmonds). She also knew which other homes in the neighborhood were known to accumulate bottles and she’d wheel her booty to the back door of the Sail Inn Tavern and bang loudly, waiting for someone to come and open it. After inspecting her bottles (“You clean these out real good? I don’t want old beer stinkin’ up the place.”) the owner would pay her and she’d be on her way, briefly thankful for her father’s addiction.
Where her father was volatile, her Pa was gentle. Pa was good, where Daddy was bitter and angry. Pa was the calm in Nellie Rose’s otherwise unforgiving life and in his home she was safe and warm. In his house there was no need to