Apologize, Apologize! - By Elizabeth Kelly Page 0,2
I never really knew what to talk to him about.
Ma and Pop, despite their compulsive vividness, might as well have been partners in an accounting firm when it came to public demonstrations of affection. Bingo and I always knew, even when we were little, that a certain unresolved tension existed between them.
Pop would disappear for a few days, and Ma would grow quiet. She used to run the water in the upstairs bathroom so we wouldn’t hear her cry. We’d stand outside the door, waiting, using our fingers to chip away brittle strips of cracked white paint, and we’d look at each other until she turned off the tap and then we’d scatter.
When Pop finally showed up, he’d bring Ma an amaryllis bulb. Terra-cotta pots filled with amaryllis lined the iron shelves in the greenhouse next to the stable. There were so many of them, Ma finally ran out of room and reluctantly started keeping them at my grandfather’s conservatory.
One time Pop went away to New York for a weekend, claimed it was a business trip—“dirty business,” Ma said, showing us his empty briefcase. Pop was always taking so-called business trips when we were little. As we got older, they relaxed into overdue vacations.
“So what? Pop’s always carrying around an empty briefcase,” I said, shrugging, earning a mild cuff on the back of the head. It wasn’t until I was twelve that I finally realized what the amaryllis bulbs signified.
“Pop’s trying to make up for going around with other women. He’s got a guilty conscience,” I said to Bing, who looked unconvinced.
“This is interesting,” Ma said to Pop late Sunday night as Bingo and I eavesdropped in our pajamas from our hiding spot on the second-story landing. “Two amaryllis bulbs.”
“Yeah, well.” He kissed her—we recognized the significance of the little silence. “I know how much you love them.”
Ma loved to proclaim her need for beautiful things, as if it put her in a special class of elite human beings, the rest of us content to be surrounded by irregular profiles and sidewalks. She had three ideals of male beauty: Pop, Bingo, and Rupert Brooke. She even became president of the Rupert Brooke Society and made occasional pilgrimages to his grave in Greece. She’d come home dressed in black, swaying back and forth and clutching her heart.
“Jesus,” I once heard Pop mutter, “I swear there’s more than a little Italian in that woman.”
Bing and I grew up in the only house in the modern world where a long-dead poet was a daily source of tension.
“Why can’t she just have a crush on Tom Jones like all the other mothers?” I asked Bingo, the two of us peeking around the door as she sat by the hour at the pine desk in the library—Ma had a thing about pine, called it the people’s wood—staring at his photo, when Pop spotted her and hit the roof, shouting:
“How’d you like it if I took up with Virginia Woolf?”
What did my parents see in each other? In Ma’s case, I think it was a simple matter of aesthetics and disorder. Pop was a good-looking anarchist who appeared to believe in everything and nothing at the same time all the time.
Of course, I might be overthinking the matter.
“It’s good to have a man around,” she said. “In case the sewage pipe ruptures.”
They used to get into fistfights, Ma and Pop, for Christ’s sake, Uncle Tom taking bets from Bing and me on the outcome— collecting on them, too, once threatening to kneecap me if I didn’t pay up. But I spent a lot of time studying them, watching them, searching for clues, and they had a way of looking at each other.
In addition to his improbable Irish beauty, talent for canine coloring and marrying well, Pop had one other minor gift: He knew a lot about magic. Before he met Ma, he used to perform as Fantastic Flanagan at fairs, second-rate nightclubs, and nursing homes. Afterward, he pretty much confined his act to our living room—it took me until puberty to figure out that these were tricks he did. His greatest illusion was convincing Bingo and me that he was some sort of special being endowed with extraordinary powers. We made an exception for him. To us, the drunkenness was a form of penicillin, his way of coping with the burden of an ordinary existence.
“Ah, boys, I wasn’t meant for this world,” he used to tell us as we helped him up the stairs and into