My Life as a Rat. Joyce Carol Oates

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      If we asked our mother what had happened she might say evasively, “Oh—ask your father.” She did not want to become involved in our father’s feuds because a remark of hers might get back to him and anger him. Personal questions annoyed our father and we did not want to annoy our father whom we adored and feared in about equal measure.

      For instance: What happened between our father and Tommy Kerrigan, an older relative who’d been a U.S. congressman and mayor of South Niagara for several terms? Tommy Kerrigan was the most prominent of all the Kerrigans and certainly the most well-to-do. He’d been a Democrat at one time, and he’d been a Republican. He’d had a brief career as an Independent—a “reform” candidate. He’d been a liberal in some issues, and a conservative in others. He’d supported local labor unions but he’d also supported South Niagara law enforcement, which was notorious for its racist bias against African Americans; as a mayor he’d defended police killings of unarmed persons and had blatantly campaigned as a “law and order” candidate. Tommy Kerrigan was a “decorated” World War II veteran who supported American wars and military interventions, unquestioningly. He supported the Vietnam War until the U.S. withdrew troops in 1973 and it was his belief that Richard Nixon had been “hounded” out of office by his enemies. Naturally Tommy Kerrigan was critical of rallies and demonstrations against the war which he considered “traitorous”—“treasonous.” He defended the actions of the police in dealing roughly with antiwar protesters as they’d dealt roughly with civil rights marchers in an earlier era. After a scandal in the early 1980s he’d had to abruptly retire from public life, narrowly escaping (it was said) indictment for bribe taking and extortion, but he continued to live in South Niagara, in a showy Victorian mansion in the city’s most prestigious residential neighborhood, and he was still exerting political influence in circuitous ways while I was growing up. It was speculated that there’d been bad blood between Tom Kerrigan and our father’s father and so out of loyalty our father was permanently estranged from Tom Kerrigan as well. When a softball field was built in South Niagara and given the name Kerrigan Field no one in our family was invited to the dedication and the opening game; if our brothers played baseball at Kerrigan Field, they knew better than to mention the fact to our father.

      Carefully Daddy would say of Tom Kerrigan that there was no love lost between our families though at other times he might shake his head and admire Tom Kerrigan as the most devious son of a bitch since Joe McCarthy.

      And if anyone asked us if we were related to Tom Kerrigan, Daddy laughed and said, tell them politely No. I am not.

      WE LIVED IN A TWO-STORY WOOD FRAME HOUSE AT 388 BLACK Rock Street, South Niagara, that Daddy kept in scrupulous repair: roof, gutters, windows (caulked), chimney, shingle board sides painted metallic-gray, shutters navy blue. When the front walk began to crack, Daddy poured his own cement, to replace it; when the asphalt driveway began to crack and shatter, Daddy hired a crew to replace it under his direction. He knew where to buy construction materials, how to buy at a discount, he scorned using middlemen. In the long harsh winters of heavy snowfall in South Niagara Daddy made sure our walk and driveway were shoveled properly, not carelessly as many of our neighbors’ walks and driveways were shoveled; in warmer months, Daddy made sure that our (small) front yard and our (quarter-acre) backyard were kept properly mowed. My brothers did much of this work, and sometimes my older sisters, and if Daddy wasn’t satisfied that the task had been done well, he might finish it himself, in a fury of disgust. By trade he was a plumber and a pipe fitter but he’d taught himself carpentry and he dared to undertake (minor) electrical work for he resented paying other men to do anything he might reasonably do himself. It wasn’t just saving money, though Daddy was notoriously frugal; it had to do with pride, integrity. If you were a (male) Kerrigan you were quick to take offense at the very possibility that someone might be taking advantage of you. Being made a fool of was the worst of humiliations.

      As long as I lived in the house on Black Rock Street, as far back as I could remember, a project of Daddy’s was under way: replacing linoleum on the kitchen floor, replacing the sink, or the counter; repainting rooms, or the entire outside of the house; hammering shingles onto the roof, building an addition at the rear of the house where for a few difficult years, Daddy’s elderly, ailing father would live, convulsed in coughing fits that sounded like gravel being rapidly, roughly shoveled.

      Daddy was a perfectionist and could not walk away from anything he believed to be half-assed.

      Daddy kept a sharp eye on neighbors’ houses, properties. He did not much care that lawns at other houses were scrubby and burnt out in the summer but he did care if grass wasn’t mowed at reasonable intervals, if it grew tall enough to look unsightly, and to go to seed; he cared if trees were allowed to become diseased, and to shed their limbs on the street. He cared very much if properties on our block of Black Rock were allowed to grow shabby, derelict. Particularly, Daddy grew upset if a house was allowed to go vacant, for bad things could come of vacant properties, he knew from his own boyhood with his brothers and cousins raising hell in places not properly supervised.

      Back of our house was a yard that seemed large, and deep, running into municipal-owned uncultivated acreage on the steep bank of the Niagara River. There were trees of which Daddy was proud—a tall red maple that turned fiery-red and splendid in October, an even taller oak, a row of evergreens. (But Daddy was unsentimental about cutting down the oak after it was damaged by a windstorm, and he feared it might be blown down onto the house; he’d cut it down himself with a rented chain saw.) My mother tried to cultivate beds of flowers, with varying degrees of success: wisteria, peonies, day lilies, roses assailed by Japanese beetles, slugs, black rot and mold, that often defeated her by mid-summer for Mom could not enlist her older children’s help with the property as Daddy could.

      Our house was at the dead end of Black Rock Street above the river.

      I cried a lot when I was sent away. Any river or stream I saw, even on TV or in a photograph, tears would be triggered. You have to get hold of yourself, Violet. You will make yourself sick. You can’t—just— keep—crying … My aunt Irma pleaded with me.

      The poor woman, I was not nice to her. She could not bear a broken heart in a child impossible to heal by any effort of her own.

      No matter how far away I came to live from the Niagara River, it has gotten into my dreams. For it is not like most other rivers—relatively short (thirty-six miles), and relatively narrow (at its widest, eighty-five hundred feet), and exceptionally fast-moving and turbulent. As you approach the river calls to you—whispers that become ever louder, deafening. The river is turbulent like a living thing shivering inside its skin. Miles from the thunderous falls like a nightmare that calls—Come! Come here. Strife and suffering are absolved here.

      That morning in December when you wake to see that the river has frozen all the way across, or nearly; corrugated black ice with a fine light dusting of snow over it, the eye registers as beauty.

       But I had a happy childhood in that house. No one can take that from me.

       Best Kisses!

      A GAME. A HAPPY GAME. THE WAY MOM WOULD STOOP OVER to kiss me, suddenly.

      When I was a little girl. Best kisses come by surprise!

      Lacing her (strong) fingers through my (smaller) fingers. Securing my fingers with hers. Preparing to cross a busy street. Ready. Set. Go!

      A long time ago when Mommy loved me as much as Daddy did. When I knew (without needing to be told) that Mommy would take care of СКАЧАТЬ