Legacy by Marilyn Horan

A few years ago I began to think of my family as having a particular vulnerability, a fatal relationship, with public transportation. There was Aunt Aneila who, while running to catch a bus, was hit and killed by a post office truck on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn long before I was born. “Mowed down like a dog,” my mother always used to say. “The damn driver never even stopped,” she would add every time, shaking her head and renewing her outrage. Uncle Ernie had a heart attack and died on the subway on the way home from his job as a limo driver in Manhattan. When I went to a small town in Ireland a few years ago, I met the Nolans, neighbors of my grandmother’s family, who told me that it was too bad I hadn’t been there a year earlier--I would have met my Uncle Patsy, the last member of the Horan family--unfortunately run down by a bus in Dublin just the year before.

There were other close calls that, while not causing death, nevertheless suggested that the curse was real: my mother’s being sent to the hospital for as a result of a smash up with a livery cab; my Uncle Alphie’s losing the use of his right hand when he slammed it in the door of the huge truck that he drove; the report, later refuted by the facts, from my elementary school principal that my grandmother had been killed when a plane crashed into Seventh Avenue. The principal apologized for her hasty pronouncement, but the effect of doom lingered in my subconscious. There were other transportation incidents, too, and they confirm my belief in the especial dangers of getting around as far as my family is concerned. The most memorable incident was what happened to my Uncle Johnny.

The day Uncle Johnny was run over by the RR train coming home from his weekly bowling league, I was in the hospital having my tonsils removed. It might have been the next day. I’m not sure, but I know we were in the hospital, although different ones, at the same time. I came out of the Methodist Hospital with the promise that I would be suffering far fewer sore throats and painful episodes of swollen glands. Ugly memories also followed me home and stayed with me: the excessively perky and solicitous nurse who asked me in the elevator if I liked the circus and I said yes, lying so she wouldn’t get angry and do something horrible to me once I was alone with her and her true nature was revealed; another nurse who told me to shut up as she pressed the orange-red rubber ether-smelling mask onto my face, my arms and legs tied down and uselessly straining against my bonds on the icy operating table; the image of a witch with a huge nose, holding a giant saw, spiraling around trying to cut my throat as I succumbed to the anesthesia. “Shut up! Shut up!” she shrieked, going round and round in a green and yellow funnel.

Uncle Johnny never made it out of St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, although he did manage to stay alive for eight days. His legs had been amputated by the train. That was a new word to be added to my eight-year-old lexicon, “amputated,” and I still cannot hear it without picturing my uncle, a torso in a hospital bed, blood seeping through his heavily gauzed stumps.

My father was the oldest and Johnny the youngest of my grandmother’s three remaining sons. I only vaguely remember Johnny. Recently, while looking at a wide-angle photograph of my Aunt Adele’s 1948 wedding at Prospect Hall, Brooklyn, which included almost every member of both my mother’s and father’s families, among about one hundred strangers, I spotted a tiny head next to my grandmother that I didn’t recognize. I called the only surviving relative of my parents’ generation, my eighty-year old Aunt Helen, and she confirmed it was Johnny. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “That’s Johnny. He was a very handsome man. Women were crazy about him. Everybody was. He was your grandmother’s favorite. She never got over his death.”

We children were not permitted to visit him in the hospital deepening the mystery of the event. We got all our scanty information by eavesdropping on conversations among the adults who were solemn and shocked, and who spoke quietly and nervously to one another. Snippets of conversation were all we heard:

“. . . stop the bleeding,” “. . . never walk again,” “. . . no life insurance,” “His poor mother. . . “ “My God, my God. . . “ “What will Audrey do? And that poor child!”

Feeling left out, and overwhelmed by the dense tragic atmosphere, my sister Janet and I devised our own gruesome recreation.

“What do you think happened to his legs?” Janet started. “Did one cop have to tell another one: “Go get the legs?”

“You’re sick! You’re disgusting!” Hysterical giggles rose in my throat, still raw and loose from the tonsillectomy. “Do you think his feet still had shoes on?”

Jamie screamed with laughter. “I’m disgusting? You’re disgusting! If he dies, will they put the legs in the coffin? Will they attach them under his pants? Maybe he can hold a leg in each arm.”

We laughed hard enough to make our stomachs hurt and loudly enough that my mother stomped up the stairs to ask us if we had gone crazy--laughing at a time like this. We tried to turn our animated, uncontrollable smiles into grimaces to prove that we were indeed sorrowful, but wound up just covering our mouths with our hands and praying that our infuriated mother would leave before another hysterical outburst overtook us.

When our mother did finally talk to us, she revealed that she had never seen her mother-in-law, my grandmother, cry until then, at Johnny’s bedside. He had become conscious, but delirious, and was complaining that his legs hurt, or were burning, or itchy. Grandma pretended to rub them, or salve, or scratch them, soothing him in comforting tones she had never used before, even to her grandchildren. That’s what my mother said, anyway. I, for one, never remember Grandma kissing us, but I do remember that she was always entertaining, lots of fun. Not like other grandmothers who baked cookies and brought presents, Grandma, who would boil frankfurters until they were triple their original size to be sure they were “cooked through” and who worked cleaning offices until she was seventy-eight, was a story-teller and a joke-teller, a talented grandmother far above all others.

We knew Grandma had a hard life. She came to the United States as a young girl with no relatives to go to. Shortly after she arrived, she married my grandfather, about whom we knew little, except that he was tall, good-looking, and prematurely gray. She had four sons, the youngest of whom, Leo, died at age one.

When he was thirty-one, my grandfather fell off a ship. As with Uncle Johnny, we didn’t know whether he was pushed, jumped on purpose, or fell drunk or sober. The story goes that when my grandmother went to the morgue to identify her husband’s body, bloated from three days in the ocean, she fainted.

Stranded in New York City in 1921 with four little boys, Charlie, my father, Donald, Johnny, and Francis, Grandma was desperate. From my mother I got another story. Grandma, having no money to feed her children, took my father, eight years old, to an orphanage for placement. The reason she chose Charlie was that he was the oldest and least in need of a mother’s care. Standing at the director’s desk at the St. Vincent’s Home for Boys, and ready to sign him over, Grandma noticed his hands shaking badly. She changed her mind on the spot. “I’m sorry. I can’t,” she said and walked out holding my father’s hand.

Years after my father was dead, my mother told me that he never spoke to his mother, unless necessary. I don’t know if his anger had anything to do with the adoption attempt, or if he just hated her for his poor, fatherless life, or for the hardship he had to endure because of her bad luck. It was the saddest story I had ever heard, about my father’s almost being put into a home, and no matter what he did wrong, or how angry I got with him, despite his distance and silence, I could always recall that image of his shaking hands, and I could pity and love my father.

Grandma stayed on a cot in Uncle Johnny’s room the whole eight nights he survived. Audrey, his wife, visited every day, but left at night to take care of their daughter Maureen. Audrey and Maureen lived only three blocks from us, but we rarely saw them. Daddy didn’t seem close to Johnny particularly, and my mother was preoccupied with her own relatives. Family ties being loose as they were, after Johnny’s death, we hardly ever saw my aunt or cousin. To this day, I can’t remember what they looked like.

At the funeral, the body was, of course, in a half casket. During the wake, a co-worker of Uncle Johnny, distraught and sobbing, went to the coffin and embraced him, nearly taking him out of the coffin altogether, stopping only when the undertaker and several male friends and relatives pulled him away in shock and horror. Janet and I had another agenda. We stared at Uncle Johnny long and hard looking for cuts and bruises the undertaker might have missed, might not have covered completely with makeup, wondering, “Where were the
legs?”

It was 1959 and Shelly Fabares’ single “Johnny Angel” was on the Top Ten. One line, “Together we will see how lovely heaven will be,” was perfect for our purposes. We sang it to each other all through the days and nights of the wake, never, of course, letting any of the adults hear us, but titillated at the possibility that they might. When it was absolutely impossible to talk, such as during prayers led by the priest at the casket, we would use our fingers to do a chacha to the tune and that provided us the distraction and amusement and relief we ached for. Throughout the funeral Mass, we alternated between feeling wretched and giddy, crying at the melancholy hymns and giggling at every mention of “heaven” or “angel.”

Besides a terrible fear of hospitals and the habit of standing well back from the edge of the subway platform, there was another legacy left to us by Uncle Johnny. Janet and I were given, why I do not know, his bowling bag, ball with “JD” on it, tan bowling shoes, men’s size ten, a leather glove, and a book called Bowling for Beginners. These things had been with Uncle Johnny on the night of his misfortune, causing much speculation and not a little squeamishness on my sister’s and my part as to whether the bag and its contents fell onto the tracks with him.

“Do you think they had to hose the bag down? Y’know, the cops?” I asked, surveying it.

Janet responded, “Of course. What? Were they going to give it to us all bloody?” Closely examining the ball, she continued, “See that chip on the ball? That’s probably where the train hit it.”

“Nah! If the train hit it, it would’ve been in the bag and the bag isn’t ripped,” I told Janet, proud of my own sharp reasoning skills.

“Oh!” she conceded.

“I think I see blood in the zipper. Look--that brown spot.”

“Get outta here! Hey! Maybe he had his bowling shoes on when he got run over,” she exclaimed, hoping, I suppose, to give the nondescript shoes more character.

“Don’t be stupid. You don’t wear bowling shoes outside the bowling alley.”
“I’ve seen people do it,” she said.

“Where? You’re lying,” I stated, and that ended the conversation for the moment, but such colloquies continued for months afterward.

Because she was enormously thrifty by nature, schooled and molded by the Great Depression, my mother couldn’t stand to see good sports equipment go to waste. She seemed to view this bequest as a sign from God that her children should bowl, or perhaps she just wanted us out of the house. Every Sunday afternoon for two years, with the exception of summers, Daddy, obediently and reluctantly, took us bowling at Maple Lanes. He would sit at the bar drinking whiskey and soda and smoking unfiltered Camels down to the end, sometimes until they burned his fingers and lips. When his patience ran out, he would rush over to our alley urging us with “C’mon. C’mon. Finish up! Let’s go. I don’t have all day for this.”

At the beginning of our weekly bowling trips, Janet and I had to share Uncle Johnny’s bowling shoes, money being tight, and Mom always looking for ways to save a buck. As soon as Janet would finish one frame, she would quickly slide the shoes off and I would put them on, complaining that she either had not untied them or that they were hot and smelly from her feet. She did the same when I took them off to give to her. Of course, the shoes had to be stuffed with socks to make them fit at all. When our interest in bowling really took off, Mom finally relented and we were given money to rent our own shoes.

Uncle Johnny’s shoes and glove always remained in the bag even though we no longer used them. We felt, somehow, that it would be sacrilegious to violate the integrity of the bowling ensemble as it had been left us. Janet, having the initials “JD” claimed the bowling ball as hers, although it was too heavy and the holes too big, so she stopped using it too.

I read and reread Bowling for Beginners. I decided to adopt the straight arm, straight down the alley, “shaking hands” approach, rather than risk the curve delivery. To this day, even though I only bowl every few years, I’m pretty good, and I have Uncle Johnny to thank for it.