119. Visit

When we pulled into Ben’s driveway the next day, he was waiting for us on his front porch. The little man scampered down the steps and began talking before we were out of the car. He was still talking later when we were leaving … sooner than we’d planned, as it turned out.

Ben was a round chatty little fellow, an uppity know-it-all who to me was more than just annoying. On every visit to his home, Dad would dissolve in front of my eyes from a strong and decent man into a fawning subordinate who appeared overly anxious to please. I suppose reasonable people would say my father was just being sociable. But at sixteen years of age I observed Dad with a magnifying glass, searching more for his warts than his strengths, ready to pounce on his every fault. And the way I saw it, Dad was too agreeable with Ben, even when the little man was insulting.

It’s true that Ben and my father were from different worlds, and I suppose that put Dad at a disadvantage. Ben was from a Protestant family of substance. My father came from a poor Irish Catholic tribe. Growing up, he had slept with four brothers carefully arranged on a double bed and a cot in the living room of a decrepit old rented house, dreading his father coming home and falling down drunk in the doorway in the early morning hours. His mother sent the five boys and their two sisters out looking for the old man on payday, hoping to find him before the money was spent on alcohol. Home life was synonymous with hunger and violence, with broken furniture and sometimes broken bones. As a teenager, my father watched his mother die at a young age from poverty, coughing up blood and staining the kitchen table cloth that was all he had to clean her face.

Cousin Ben started out in his family’s successful insurance business right after college and was promoted to president of the agency within five years. He later inherited the firm and spent his days collecting the premiums from old customers and friends. He led a fairly comfortable life.

Although there was certainly nothing special about Ben, to my father he represented what can be called authority, that class of people who pulled the strings in society, who had the money and the power and who rated high in my father’s universe because they were the people who could get you a job or a loan or a promotion. If they noticed you at work or in the fraternal clubs or churches of that era, and if they wanted to help your cause, you were sure to be as agreeable as possible in return, to acclaim them publicly and to somehow pay obeisance when it was possible to do so. You were never listed as a friend, nor were you considered a servant. You were simply one of the grateful members of the choir that sang their praises and assuaged their egos.

At sixteen Dad left home and found menial work as the Great Depression spread across the country. He saved and proudly bought himself tools and workman’s clothing and then found better jobs. He thrust aside his self doubt, accepting without question the advice of employers, churchmen and older friends who helped him to reach his goals. He often sought the authority of others and sometimes their protection. It was good business, and may have substituted for the total lack of structure provided by his family. But as he listened to their advice and counsel, the ticking of his own clock became weaker.

On that Sunday afternoon, Ben got my hackles up right away when he complained about one of his business clients coming from “a long line of dumb Irish ancestors.” We were seated in the small sun room in the back of Ben’s house and I looked over at my father. He was watching me. His eyes told me nothing, but I knew he would prefer me to not react. He was probably thinking about a few weeks before when I told Ben that Martin Luther, practically Ben’s patron saint, was a lush and a whoremonger after Ben referred to the leader of my father’s church as “that Nazi Pope of yours.” I could not have cared less if Pius the Twelfth played Pinochle with Hitler. I was upset that my father didn’t defend his faith. And that he would allow Ben to speak to us in that manner.

Dad wasn’t timid, but he was a gentleman. At the time it didn’t occur to me that had my father answered Ben in kind, our social relationship would have ended and Grandma would lose the opportunity to visit the only other family she had. I think Ben probably knew that; it was part of his calculus for keeping the upper hand.

It must time to go a little over the top and I know just the woman who can take us.