The Irishman&Other Stories

By Stephen Hazlett

Tantalizing stories of people and family, of the lives, loves and tragedies of these Irish and Scots in America, and of their sons and grandchildren.

"The Irishman," a tale of a man with a youthful secret left behind in the auld sod of Ireland, and of his son who discovers the truth of it . "My Father's Son," a different take on the theme, tells of a boy who finds himself growing into the man who was his difficult father. "Of Dreams," the story of James Kelly and of Nikki, the lost love of his life, and of the tragedy that reawakens that love. "The Wall" is a meditative journey by a Vietnam veteran and his grandson to the memorial Wall in D.C. "The Western Girl," a tale told by an Army private of his fling with an Army nurse during the Vietnam War. "Montana," the voyage of a dying old Scots woman and her son to a newly discovered dream, a Montana of her imaginings. "Being Finn," a telling of an alcoholic young wastrel and the exotic new woman in his life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephen Hazlett
• Release date: Jul 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301995929

Stephen Hazlett

Stephen Hazlett was born and came of age in New Jersey. He served for three years in the Army Medical Corps, including a year in Vietnam, after which he began a long career as a computer professional in California’s Silicon Valley. He currently lives in New Mexico’s Land of Enchantment, where he is pursuing the craft of a writer of mainstream and mystery novels.

Book preview

The Irishman&Other Stories

Stephen Hazlett

Also by Stephen Hazlett

The City Different Series:

Book1: City Different, a Santa Fe Mystery

Book 2: Nina’s Time, a City Different Sequel

Book3: Finding Nina

A Private War

The Buddhist

Family O’Shea

The Way I Saw It – A Memoir

The Irishman&Other Stories

By Stephen Hazlett

Copyright © 2013 by Stephen Hazlett

Smashwords Edition

ISBN 978-1-30199-592-9

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the written or tacit permission of the author.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious.

Any similarity to real persons, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.

To the Irishman,

and to all the others

Contents

My Father’s Son

Of Dreams

The Western Girl

The Wall

The Irishman

Something To Do

Montana

Family O’Shea Redux

Being Finn

About the Author

My Father’s Son

My father’s voice came to me down the short hallway from the kitchen, through my open bedroom door, Just tell the boy I need to go away for a while. It was late and my parents were talking, probably sitting at the kitchen table. They must have thought I was asleep, though I couldn’t; I knew something was up. I was also wondering why he was calling me the boy.

I heard my mother say, What about me? What am I supposed to do for money?

You have your job. And there’s a little money in savings. I could picture my father saying this, a stubborn hangdog expression on his face.

My job, my mother spat back. A big two dollars an hour.

This was in 1975 and two dollars an hour was standard for an entry-level job in a factory, which is what my mother had, packing light bulbs into cartons. I was twelve and had a paper route, delivering the afternoon daily from a canvas bag hung from the handlebars of my Schwinn bicycle. It would be a help, my mother had said to me when I had first suggested it. My father’s job as a heavy equipment operator at a construction site had become history weeks before. They had fired him because of all his unexplained absences, those mornings he couldn’t bring himself to get out of bed.

I listened to more of their kitchen conversation, some of it indistinguishable when their voices fell to a murmur, and finally I did fall asleep. When I got up the next morning and went to the kitchen, still in my pajamas, I found my father seated at the table drinking his morning coffee. He was wearing a starched white shirt and a tie, and his suit jacket was draped across the back of his chair. It was the first thing I noticed, because he never wore a suit except on Sundays or when he was going somewhere important. He looked at me in the serious way he had, his coffee cup poised for a sip. Good morning, Jackie he said. I was named John, after him, and was Johnny to my friends, but in the family I would always be Jackie. You’re up early, he said. I thought you’d still be asleep. He looked at my mother, who stood with her arms folded, her back to the sink and her lips compressed into a thin line. It was a look she would wear whenever she wasn’t happy over something. My father said to me. I have to take a trip.

For how long? I asked, immediately thinking he was going back to Vietnam. He had spent my ninth and part of my tenth year there as a civilian worker, driving bulldozers and road graders, helping building roads and airstrips. The pay had been good and the year-and-a-half he’d spent away from home had allowed him to save enough to put a down payment on the small frame house in South Amboy, New Jersey where we now lived. That had been the reason for the Vietnam job, so I’d been told.

Not long, he said. A month, maybe.

Your father needs a rest, my mother said from her position at the kitchen sink.

In fact I have to be going right now, he said, standing and donning his jacket.

He picked up a small suitcase sitting next to him and went over and opened the front door, which led directly outside from the kitchen. He looked at my mother and then at me. I’ll be back in a month or so, he said and held out his hand for me to shake. It was after he’d returned from Vietnam that he had decided I was getting too big for kissing goodnight or goodbye.

I already knew this rest excuse was some kind of crock, and I felt a sudden anger at him. Still I stepped forward and took his dry hand and shook it, mine feeling small and weak in his. Then he dropped my hand and was through the door, closing it behind him. I pulled back the curtain on the door’s four-paned window and watched him walk off down the cement walkway leading to the sidewalk, bypassing our car parked in the driveway. Was he walking to wherever he was going? Knowing I’d be watching, he turned once to wave and then went off down the sidewalk. I opened the door and ran after him, barefoot and still in my pajamas. He stopped and turned, saying, You’re not even dressed. Go back inside.

But where are you going?

Don’t worry about it. I’ll be back in a month or so, just like I said. Now go back inside.

But I didn’t and each time he started off, I followed, a small distance behind. When he reached the bus stop at the end of the block, he turned, without setting down the suitcase, and gave me a disappointed look. Go on home, he said, but I just stood there about ten feet away until the bus arrived and stopped for him, and he stepped aboard. Finally, I started back to our house, trying to ignore the looks I was getting from the few passersby, who must have been wondering what a barefoot boy in pajamas was doing walking down the sidewalk.

He’s depressed over Vietnam, my mother said to me as soon as I entered the kitchen. It’s why he had to get away for a while. All the things he saw and did.

But he wasn’t even in combat, I said, already knowing the Vietnam angle was another excuse. For as long as I could remember, my father had had his bouts of depression, seemingly coming from nowhere.

* * *

The month or so he had promised to be gone dragged into a second month, and then a third, and my mother finally sold the house, unable to keep up the payments because his mysterious absence had used up all the savings. Perhaps I was more naïve or accepting of circumstances than other twelve year olds, but all I knew at the time was we were moving somewhere else after months of my father’s absence. The new house, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, was owned by a man named Bill. My mother told me, was an old friend. She hadn’t yet told me she’d started divorce proceedings against my father.

I was clueless about some things, but not so much that I didn’t know who Bill really was. I refused to call him Uncle Bill, as she suggested. Finally, after more than four months, she told me my father was living in a rented room in Plainfield, New Jersey. I asked, Is that where he’s been all along?

No, she said, leveling her compressed-lipped gaze at me, showing her unhappiness, not at me I knew, but at my father. He called one day.

When did he call?

You were at school. She was a stay-at-home mom by then, having quit her job at the light bulb factory after we’d moved in with Bill, who had his own business as an electrical contractor. Anyway, he’d like to see you, she said. You can take the bus there and he’ll meet you.

You can’t just drive me?

No. Her no had seemed a little too forceful, but then she explained, If I drove you, then what would I do? You would be there a few hours, and I’d have to be waiting for you, driving around or parked someplace. No, the bus is better.

I had naturally thought my visit with my father would include my mother, but now I realized what I suppose I had suspected all along without recognizing it: that his time away from us meant they were separated, not just inconveniently apart.

He had relayed to my mother the intersection in Plainfield where he would wait for my bus to arrive. She had written it on a piece of paper for me, which I showed to the bus driver, telling him to please call it out when we got there. After an hour’s ride, as the bus was roaring its way up a hill, after passing a sign announcing we were entering Plainfield, I was feeling nauseous from the jostling and lurching and the stuffy overcrowded interior. Through the huge windshield I spotted my father ahead of us, standing at the corner at the crest of the hill. I was already out of my seat and making my way down the aisle, holding on to the backs of the seats because of the swaying, when the driver called out my stop. He opened the folding doors and there stood my father, framed in the doorway, wearing the same suit and white shirt and tie he’d worn the last time I’d seen him. I descended the three steps to the sidewalk, and he held out his hand for me to shake, his face wearing an over-bright smile that seemed false, coming from him. The smile faded when he looked at me closely. What’s wrong?

I told him I wasn’t feeling so hot, and then I threw up on the sidewalk, some of it spattering on his shined shoes, which caused a look of disgust to cross his face. For some reason the bus behind me had not moved on, and the driver inside was looking down at this little drama through the open doors. My father’s look became stern, and he led me away, pulling me by the arm while wiping my mouth with a handkerchief, which he always carried in his inside coat pocket. We’ll get you some Seven-Up. That should settle your stomach, he said, the disappointment clear in his voice. He stopped once, about a half-block along, to wipe the spatter of vomit off his shoes before throwing the handkerchief away into a public trash bin.

My visit, after we stopped at a soda shop for the Seven-up, which did make me feel better, consisted of him showing me the sites of Plainfield, none of which made an impression on me, and then taking me to see his rented room. It was at the top of a flight of stairs in an old house on a tree-lined street, the house having apparently been converted from one large residence to a number of rooms for rent. My father’s room had a bed and dresser, a nightstand with a lamp and an alarm clock, and a straight-backed chair set by the one window, where you could sit and enjoy the view of the street below. A small radio stood on the floor next to the chair. The bathroom, he told me, was down the hall and shared with another tenant, which seemed odd, but his room had a door he could lock with his own key. For some reason that one fact impressed me, maybe because I had never had a room I could lock with a key. Then I noticed there was no television, and of course he had no kitchen. When I asked about these things, he said, I never was much for television anyway, and there’s a diner I usually eat at. I can sit at the counter and that way I don’t have to leave them a tip.

The subject of tipping had always been a sore one between my father and my mother, on the rare occasions when we went out to eat. He would say, Why is it my fault they can’t find a job making a decent wage? But then he would grudgingly dole a meager tip when my mother insisted, so she wouldn’t feel embarrassed. Now all that seemed from long bygone days. Now he could eat at the counter at the diner all the time and not have to worry over the part about the tip.

Later, at the same diner, where we ate meatloaf, mashed potatoes and stringed beans, with a Jell-O dessert, he told me he’d gotten a job driving a truck for a vending machine company, making deliveries to factories and motels and other places with vending machines, stocking them with chips and candy and such. It struck me as odd: why hadn’t he gotten another construction job driving heavy equipment, which would surely pay more money than this menial work? So I asked: Is it better than what you used to do? Doesn’t construction pay more?

He thought for a minute before answering: I didn’t care for the stress. It’s a demanding job. Besides, I don’t have such a hot employment record. You take what you can get.

I didn’t know what the stress part was about. All I could imagine was him driving big monster earth-moving machines, which seemed glamorous, but what he told me next made me forget that. He said my mother had asked for a divorce, which I hadn’t known until then. A separation was one thing; there was the implied possibility they could still get back together. But a divorce was final. I didn’t say anything, but I realized what I had been seeing in my father that day that’d been different, that I hadn’t been able to put a name to: he seemed relieved, and it had to be over the divorce. He was getting rid of a wife and a son who had become burdensome to him. I held back the tears, but he must have read the expression on my face and placed a hand on my shoulder. It was one of the few shows of affection I ever remembered from him.

The bus ride home went a lot better. It was late and the bus was half empty and I took a seat next to a window and opened it to let the cooling night air wash over my face, keeping away the nausea. Arriving home, I could see my mother reading my expression. I must still have been showing the effect of what my father had told me. So, Jackie, I guess he said some things to you, she said. So now you know.

I wasn’t sure what I knew, but it had to be about the divorce. I said nothing.

Someday you’ll understand about your father, she said.

Understand what? I asked, not sure what she was talking about. I’d always felt I was just like him in a lot of ways, in the way he craved neatness and order in his life, and in his abhorrence of any hint of a mess—witness his mortification over the embarrassing display of me puking on the sidewalk in front of him, and it being viewed by the bus driver and, I suppose, the passengers on the bus. Like him, I too had been mortified. And like him, I instinctively sought out moments of solitude in my life, and perhaps I was realizing it for the first time. I had immediately seen it in him that day—the way he looked and carried himself—that he liked the solitude of his new life; that he craved it. He was fussy in his appearance—construction worker or not, he always wore a suit and a white shirt and tie for special occasions, even if we just went out to eat. I began thinking of being more careful with my own appearance. He was a notorious penny-pincher, and his explanation had always made sense to me, if to no one else: he hated waste, and wasting money was the worst kind of it. Still, I waited for my mother’s explanation of what I would someday understand about him. But she only said, I trust he fed you. It’s time for you to get ready for bed.

* * *

The place where my father had gone when I was twelve was called Blue Hills Hospital. Over the years I had heard it mentioned by my mother a few times, always spoken with the scornful tone she reserved for any mention of my father or his doings. To me just the name had made it sound like an idyllic place, and I imagined rolling, tree-covered hills, a babbling stream and pretty nurses in white uniforms. But my father, being a secretive man, had never talked about it, and I could never bring myself to ask. Finally, though, I did learn of it in an oblique fashion.

I had just turned twenty-one and was a student at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, and to celebrate the occasion of my officially becoming an adult, my father picked me up in his car and took me out for a drink, which turned into a few drinks, at a local watering hole near where he now lived in Morristown, New Jersey. By then he had worked his way into a supervisory position at the vending machine company and no longer drove the delivery truck. My mother had married and then divorced Bill, and she too was living alone, back in South Amboy in an apartment complex. Maybe I was thinking they had more in common than I had thought, or maybe I was still harboring the secret boyhood dream that my father and mother might get back together again. But I couldn’t just put it that way to him, so instead I said, A few times Mom said someday I’d understand something about you, but she never said what. It had seemed a lame thing to say, since, over time, I had come to an understanding of my father—that he could be distant and moody, that he sometimes came across as unfeeling, that he was stern and taciturn, a perfectionist who expected the same from others. But of all of that, so what? Didn’t I, more and more as I grew older, have the same feelings? Didn’t I see myself whenever I looked into his Irish mug? Still, I had said what I had said, and now was embarrassed over it. Maybe it was just the beer talking; I’d had several on an empty stomach. My father had started with a boilermaker—a shot of Rye whiskey with a beer chaser—and was working on his third beer. I wondered if he might pretend not to know what I was talking about, something he would sometimes do when he didn’t want to answer a question. Instead he said, with a faraway look in his eye I thought of as expansive, Your mother and I are just two different people, who probably never should have been married in the first place. That stung momentarily, because, if they had never married, I wouldn’t even exist. I was still young enough to think that way.

He went on, gazing past the array of whiskey bottles doubled in the mirror behind them, stretching the length of the back bar. Maybe he was watching himself, but it seemed he was looking beyond that with a faraway gaze. Your mother has a good heart. She’s really a good person and probably deserved somebody better than me. She certainly needed somebody different than me. He chuckled. I gave her a hard time in those days, but it was really all on me. I just couldn’t accept the way my life was going and thought I was losing my mind. I’m talking about the time just before I had to go away to that place. He turned to look me in the eye. Blue Hills, it was called, and what a name that was. There were no blue hills there or hills at all that I ever saw. It was an old, gray-stoned hospital that started out as a lunatic asylum way back in the nineteenth century. It’s not that now, and it wasn’t when I went there. He wound down suddenly as if it was all there was.

What did you do there?

Therapy. That’s what they called it. Sometimes group therapy, sometimes one-on-one with a doctor. You talked and you talked until you began to wonder if you were saying what you really felt or just saying what you thought they wanted to hear. And then there were the electroshock treatments.

That must have been awful. In my imagination I pictured electrodes attached to his skull and he writing in agony while strapped down to a table. Maybe it was something I had picked up from some movie.

I don’t know, he said, swirling his half-full beer glass in small circles. He did it, he would say, to get a little head back on the beer, but I always thought it was just a nervous habit. I don’t remember the sessions themselves. Maybe it’s just the way it works. You don’t remember, or maybe you block them out over the years. I only remember people standing around me, and then having something put into my mouth, so I wouldn’t bite my tongue off, so they told me. And then I would wake up back in my own room feeling tired.

Didn’t it scare you?

No. I looked forward to it. I thought it might knock out the demons in me?

I knew immediately what he meant by demons; didn’t I have some of my own? But I asked the question anyway. Demons? Like devils? I was kidding him a little, and I could see he knew it.

No, he said, still with the faraway look in his eye, but with a small smile now. Of my own making.

Did it work?

I thought so, but now I’m not so sure. Sometimes I feel like they’re still there. He still wore the smile. But it’s not like that movie about the girl who’s possessed and turns her head all the way around and throws up green vomit.

The Exorcist.

That’s the one. I never saw it, but I saw previews once at a movie house. It was enough for me.

* * *

I was forty years old when my father killed himself. He was sixty-eight. I was living in California, had been married and divorced and had a twelve-year old son, Jeffrey, who lived with his mother. Other than one visit my father had made to California, when Jeffrey was five and I was still married and still with a family, I hadn’t seen him since I’d moved to San Francisco, and the little I had heard from him since was mostly through the occasional letter he would send. I would call him from time to time, but he never called back; it was clear he’d never liked telephones. The thoughtful pace of letter writing, and perhaps the time and distance a letter implied, suited him better, so it seemed.

I learned of his suicide from my mother, which seemed strange and unreal, so much so that I couldn’t bring myself to believe it at first. Though I heard from her about as infrequently as I did from my father, I had kept in touch enough to know she lived in New York City with a man she called Fred, whose given name was Manfred, who was German born and ran an art gallery in Greenwich Village. It sometimes occurred to me, over the years, how little I understood of my parents, despite what I thought I knew.

Still, there were the occasional attempts at reaching out between my mother and me—on Christmas, when she would call me or I would call her—or on our birthdays. If I managed to remember hers, I would call her, and she always called me on mine. But it wasn’t one of those occasions when the phone rang one evening and my mother’s voice came across the line. After a brief hello, she said, You’d better sit down.

I didn’t, though. I was standing next to the wall phone in the kitchen of my small San Francisco apartment. I said, What is it?

Your father’s dead.

Maybe it was from the shock of hearing what she’d just said, but all I could think of was: how would she know? That was immediately followed by another thought: had they gotten together secretly, without them telling me? And what had happened with Fred, her Greenwich Village boyfriend? I dismissed all that; it just wasn’t possible. How could that be? I asked, which seemed a ridiculous question under the circumstances.

He killed himself.

I finally did sit on a chair at the kitchen table. What the hell?

Oh, the poor tortured soul, she said. I always thought he would do it. You know, he tried once before you were born. And then again when you were little. He made me promise never to tell you. But what difference does it make now?

It was beginning to sink in, and I began to believe it. But how did you find out?

He had a girlfriend living with him. Did you know that? There was a hint of amusement in her voice. "A Puerto Rican girl, Rose. No, Rosa, she said, with a hard s sound. That’s it, Rosa."

No, I didn’t know. How did you?

Well, I didn’t, but she called me. Apparently she came home from work and found him in the bathtub. He slashed his wrists and didn’t want to make a mess. A catch came into her voice. The poor man.

I was trying to avoid the images entering my head. But how did she know to call you?

He had my number, somehow. I must have given it to him for some reason when I moved, though I don’t remember. He had it written in a notebook with a few other numbers, including yours, but she said she was afraid to call you. She knew about you, and about me too. Your father obviously told her. I can’t imagine him having a Puerto Rican girlfriend. Can you? She sounded young too.

The information was coming too fast now. I asked, "How do know this is real? And how do you know she’s Puerto Rican?

She told me a little about herself. She was born in this country, but her parents came from Puerto Rico. I guess that makes her an American citizen. Puerto Ricans are citizens automatically, aren’t they? But then, being born here would make her a citizen too, no matter what.

My mother was rambling, and I was still trying to get it into my head that my father was no longer anywhere in this world. Then she said something that brought me out of my scatter-shot thoughts: He left a note with your name on it.

What did it say?

"It was in a sealed envelope and Rosa didn’t open it. Do you want me to give you her number? You can call her."

Her number would be my father’s number too. But then, it wouldn’t really be his anymore. I couldn’t imagine calling it now.

You’re going to come and take care of things, aren’t you? my mother said.

I hadn’t even thought about that. Of course. I’ll get on a plane and be there in the morning. I’ll rent a car and come pick you up. I was already thinking of a funeral and my mother being there. I wasn’t thinking of my father’s Puerto Rican girlfriend.

No, she said. Come by after you take care of things.

Well, where is he now?

"Rosa didn’t know what to do, so she called for an ambulance, and they took him away. He must be in the morgue in the hospital there in Morristown."

After we had hung up I was struck by two odd similarities with some inner connection I hadn’t yet gleaned: one was, I was the same age of forty my father had been when he had effectively left my life, twenty-eight years ago; the other was, I had a twelve-year-old son, the same age as I was when my father went away for his rest from which he never really returned.

* * *

Over the course of his life, there had been little that surprised me about my father. Not even his disappearance when I was twelve had come as a surprise. It had come more like a culmination of a pattern of his behavior.

Now