8 million stories
MARILYN HORAN lives to bowl another day My family has a particular vulnerability, a fatal relationship really, with public transportation. Aunt Aneila, running to catch a bus, was hit and killed by a postoffice truck on Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn long before I was born. Uncle Donald had a heart attack and died on the subway on the way home from his job as a limo driver in Manhattan. My father’s father drowned at 31 when he fell off a ship in New York Harbor.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: My Uncle Patsy, the last member of the Horan family, had been run down by a bus in Dublin just the year before.
Other close calls, while not causing death, suggested that the curse was real: My mother was sent to the hospital for three weeks as a result of a smash up with a livery cab; my Uncle Alphie lost three fingers of his right hand when he slammed them in the door of his huge truck; my dog Augie was killed by a sanitation truck. Doom lingered in my subconscious as a cumulative result.These accidents confirmed my belief in the dangers of my family getting around the city. I was fearful of traffic, always crossing at the light, trusting no driver and saying a small prayer every time I made it alive to the other side of the street.
The most memorable incident, however, was what happened to my Uncle Johnny.The day he was run over by the RR train returning home from his weekly bowling league, I was in the hospital having my tonsils removed. I came home, but Uncle Johnny never made it out of the hospital.The train had amputated his legs.That was a new word to be added to my 8-year-old lexicon, “amputated,” and I still cannot hear it without picturing my uncle as a torso in a hospital bed, blood seeping through his heavily gauzed stumps.
We children—my older sister, brother and I—were not permitted to visit him in the hospital.We got our information by eavesdropping on adult conversations: “Stop the bleeding;” “Never walk again;” “No life insurance;” “His poor mother.”
Feeling left out and overwhelmed by the tragic atmosphere, my sister Janie and I devised our own gruesome recreation of the accident, coming up with imagined bizarre and horrifying details. “What do you think hap pened to his legs?” Janie 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?” We laughed hard enough to make our stomachs and my still-raw throat hurt, and giggled loudly enough that my mother stomped up the stairs to ask us if we had gone crazy—laughing at a time like this. When our mother finally talked to us, she revealed that she had never seen my grandmother, a tough and unsentimental 65-yearold widow, cry until she was at Johnny’s bedside. He was now conscious but delirious, and he was complaining that his legs hurt, or were burning, or itchy. Grandma, who slept on a cot in his room the whole eight days he survived, pretended to rub, salve or scratch them, soothing him in comforting tones she had never used before, even with her grandchildren.
Besides a terrible fear of hospitals and the habit of standing well back from the edge of the subway platform, Uncle Johnny left us another legacy. Janie and I were given, why I do not know, his bowling bag, his ball with “JH” on it, tan bowling shoes, 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 squeamishness on my sister’s and my part as to whether the bag and its contents fell onto the tracks with him. Being enormously thrifty, Mom couldn’t stand to see anything go to waste, even sports equipment. She viewed this bequest as a sign from God that her children should bowl. Every Sunday afternoon for two years, Daddy took us bowling at Maple Lanes. He sat at the bar drinking whiskey and soda and smoking Pall Malls down to the end, sometimes until they burned his fingers and lips. At the beginning of our weekly bowling trips, Janie and I had to share Uncle Johnny’s bowling shoes, money being tight. As soon as Janie finished one frame, she quickly slid the shoes off and I put them on, complaining that she either had not untied them or that they were hot from her feet. She did the same when I took them off to give to her. Uncle Johnny’s shoes and glove remained in the bag in the closet even though we no longer used them. 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.
It’s been years since anyone in my family has fallen victim to any moving vehicle, so I am reasonably confident that the curse has dissipated.Though still cautious, like every other native New Yorker, I cross the street in the middle of the block, lean over the subway platform to see if the train is coming and view driving in Midtown as competition. Still, when I get to my destination, be it home or just the other side of the street, I know disaster has yet again been avoided. At least this time.
Marilyn Horan recently retired after 36 years as an English teacher and assistant principal in NYC.
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