Apologize, Apologize! - By Elizabeth Kelly Page 0,1
requisite bitch, according to Uncle Tom; otherwise it was an inelegant masculine settlement—even the dogs were male, the toys pissing on pillows, the giants drooling thick ropes of testosterone.
It’s safe to say that my mother and my grandfather had a curious relationship. She loathed him, and he coolly financed her contempt. Sometimes I think he stuck around only in the hope of unlocking the secret of their estrangement. Hating her father was my mother’s life’s work and study, her daddy doctorate. She’d been accumulating data on him as far back as I could remember, research piled on chairs, in stacks of paper high as the dining room table.
There were charts and graphs pinned to the walls, filled with the grousing of ex-employees, former friends, and jealous business rivals. There were black-and-white photographs, secret testimonies, and endless lists of her personal grievances handwritten in red ink and block letters, a perverse tapestry smeared across the walls of her office, all in support of a roman à clef she claimed to be writing entitled The Bastard.
The protagonist, an enormously wealthy and powerful newspaper mogul, murders his wife and gets away with it. Then he devotes the rest of his life to destroying his daughter’s happiness.
My grandfather always assumed a wry and world-weary tone when referring to his only child. Whenever Ma’s name came up, I half expected him to ask for a last cigarette while waving off the blindfold. Ma raised us to believe that she was interesting, in the same way that Stalin’s family was no doubt encouraged to think of him as an eccentric. It took me a long time to realize that my mother was crazy, her baseless vendetta against the Falcon one of the ways she told us the true tale of all that churned around inside her.
Pop was a stray, a drinker, and a womanizer, professionally Irish, a guy of mixed pedigree that Ma plucked off the streets because she was mad for his hair color, the same shade as a ruby red King Charles spaniel.
“There’s not much that money can’t buy,” she used to tell us. “I knew the moment I laid eyes on him, his hair glowing like the sun and the moon and the stars, that I’d give over my whole fortune for the privilege of waking up next to that glorious head each morning.”
Ma never sounded so in love as when she was waxing in the abstract.
The first time she saw him was late at night. Pop was drunk and dressed as Carmen Miranda, clinging to a streetlamp for support, having come from a costume party. She was leaving a meeting of Marxist sympathizers. Ma collected Commies the way other women accumulate Tupperware.
Uncle Tom insisted that Pop married Ma on a dare. Said Pop was out on the town with the infamous Dolan brothers, otherwise known as “the Corrupters,” when he announced to everyone at the costume party that he’d marry the first woman to pass him on the street. Stumbling outside in his Carmen Miranda getup, barely able to stand, Pop looked up and there was Ma. Stretching out his hand, he offered her a banana from his headpiece and the spell was cast, according to Tom.
“Peachie ‘Pittsburgh’ McGrath almost beat her to the punch. What a wagon that one was—drawers the size of Cork. She’d just turned the corner and was lumbering up behind your mother. Charlie told me had it been Peach, he would have gone through with the ceremony to appease the Dolans and then killed himself right after. Married and buried on the same day.”
“Pop, is it true you married Ma on a dare?” I asked him, nine years old and starting to wonder about such things, staring down at my new running shoes from my spot on the stairs of the veranda. It was twilight, a summer night, deep in August; the beach was empty except for the ever-present purple martens darting in search of insects as the lap of the waves made a buttery soft sound.
“I married your mother because I loved her,” Pop said as if from a distance, not looking at me, but watching the water from where he sat still in a high-backed rocking chair, red hair shining like his personal sunset. For all of himself that he offered up—he was a torrent of words and emotions—I never felt as if I got to know Pop all that well.
I knew what he wanted to talk about, there was no shortage of topics, but