Survival Till Seventeen

Our house was always ablaze on Sunday evenings. We invariably had at least three roomsful of visitors, and what with music, laughter and oratory, I do not know what the neighbors thought of us. It must have seemed as if the Feeneys were putting on a perpetual bazaar. As far as I can remember we never visited anybody. People always visited us.

If we are bankrupt today — and we nearly are — it was my father’s gargantuan sense of hospitality that is responsible. The first thing my father asked you when he met you in our home was to stay all night. My mother needed continually to keep extra food on hand against the sudden overnight invitations issued by my father to guests who had merely dropped in to say Hello. If you came from out of town, it was absolutely impossible to get away from us. I have often got up in the morning, and peeking into our spare rooms on the way down to breakfast, found sleeping in our beds people I never knew existed. Our borrowed-pajama bill was enormous.

We domesticated at different periods at least a dozen of our relatives, and they lived with us until they either (a) died, (b) married, or (c) entered religion.

My father was an incorrigible cenobite. He detested solitude and had a positive horror of silence. He delighted in noise in any form. He particularly liked to hear others sing. The worse you sang the more my father applauded, and the more he urged you to an encore. He had an extreme fondness for the noises made by musical instruments. There was McCarthy who came with his clarinets, and would squeal on them till two in the morning, but never too long for my father. There was Clancy who played marathons on the violin.

Clancy was an ex-tinker from Ireland. His family was a troupe of musicians and Clancy was born out of doors at one of the crossroad fairs. He claimed to have ten thousand tunes in his head, and it seemed to be my father’s greatest ambition to hear every one of them before Clancy’s nimble fingers succumbed to arthritis. I have known Clancy to play continuously for a stretch of six hours in our parlor, and to be fed by my father while he played. However, I must say that Clancy was worth listening to. He had the most delicate sense of cadenza I have ever heard on a stringed instrument, and could pizzicato like nobody’s business.

Yet for all his virtuosity, Clancy was shy in his art, and needed to be coaxed into a performance. I have seen him sulk through a whole Sunday evening, refusing to play a note. This would invariably happen if there were a single person in our parlor whom Clancy disliked. Hostility of any kind petrified him, for he was sensitive in the manner of great genius. My father hit upon a nearly infallible device for getting Clancy to play when he was disinclined to. It was to take up the violin himself and saw a few notes on it badly. Then my father would give a feeble imitation of Clancy himself, playing one of his favorite hornpipes. This would amuse Clancy enormously, but after one bad round of the hornpipe by my father, Clancy would begin to fidget, and commence lighting and relighting his pipe. He would twist nervously in his chair and wince at every note misplayed by my father. Finally, unable to stand it any longer, he would shout: “Give me that thing, Tom!” He would then wrest the fiddle out of my father’s hands, retune it to his own desires, limber his fingers with a few scales and flourishes, and then he was away on his own. And he might never stop until the milkman arrived in the morning.

When there were no musicians or orators around, my father would read — by which I mean to say, he would read out back Nothing suited my father better than a spell of quiet among the company while he recited “Robert Emmet’s Speech from the Dock,” or one of the political orations of Senator Jim Reed. If a crowd were lacking, one person would do, provided he would let my father read to him. The auditor need not necessarily listen, as long as he kept quiet and did not interrupt my father. I have known my father to read the whole of Enoch Arden to Guy Pelosi, an Italian tailor, to whom every line of the poem was unintelligible. Pelosi had merely sauntered in to gather some pants to be pressed, but my father took the afternoon off to treat him to Tennyson and the extensive art of narrative poetry. Pelosi was very fond of my father, secretly believing him to be an Italian in disguise, and patiently listened to yards and yards of English literature dramatically delivered to him by my father’s voice. “Your father has a darn gooda voice,” was Pelosi’s invariable comment when my father had polished him off with an epic or two. This poetic influence of my father on his friend, Pelosi, was bound to be felt, and my father keeps in his scrapbook one of the cards Pelosi issued in advertisement of his trade. It is written entirely in verse, and runs as follows:

Read this from beginning to end,
And you’ll find out I’m your good friend.|
If you wish to know my nationality
I came from Italy.
From the time I left Naples City,
After twelve days I reached New York Liberty
I began to get acquainted in this country,
And I found the people in the shade of the apple tree.
Everybody treated me kind,
Now, don’t leave me behind,
Don’t be sorry to come and see me,
I’ll give you first-class fit and good quality,
If I make you a suit
Among your friends
You will look like a beautiful posy
And I am Yours Truly, Guy Pelosi.

I have a suspicion that my father helped Pelosi in the composition of this poem, but my father says “No,” and Pelosi refuses to answer.

The number and range and quality of our callers on Sunday evenings was prodigious. We have had guests from Nova Scotia, Central America and the Aleutian Islands. We knew a heavyweight wrestler, a symphony conductor, a roller-skating champion, and an ex-end man in Lew Dockstader’s minstrels. I have counted in our parlor, at a single sitting, a ventriloquist, a magician, an impersonator of animals, and a lady who told fortunes with the assistance of tea leaves.

My father’s chief office as host was to get everyone to perform, whether by way of musical instrument, in song, or in telling a story. My father believed solemnly in the Parable of the Talents. If you had only One Talent my father would find it, though you buried it in a napkin and hid it in the ground. My father was a splendid interlocutor, and few could resist him. My father had contempt for only one vice, and that was timidity. “Oh, what’s the matter with you!” he would say if you positively refused to contribute anything to the general amusement by way of song or recitation. My father, who is the most charitable man I have ever known, had one supreme condemnation: “He’s got no gumption!” It was the worst and only thing I ever heard my father say in dispraise of anyone.

So if you hadn’t any gumption, Feeneys’ on Sunday nights was the wrong place for you to go to. The fact that practically nobody we knew ever stayed away, is probably a proof that gumption had been rather largely distributed among our friends. Of course my father’s interpretation of the Parable of the Talents was, in the strict sense, open to criticism. You might have talent for other things besides songs and stories, and yet not fall under the censure of Our Saviour. But “talent” to my father, meant talent for entertaining. It meant that and nothing more.

How my father could be wrong, I propose to show in the case of one of our best-loved friends.

The same was Mary’s Joe. Mary was the wife, and Joe the husband. There were many Marys and many Joes among our callers and acquaintances, but there was only one “Mary and Joe.” “Joe’s Mary” or “Mary’s Joe” would serve to identify either of them in complete contradistinction to any others who had poached on the same names. And if you were referring to an incident that happened in their home, you would say that it happened “up at Mary and Joe’s.”

Mary and Joe were as opposite in disposition, temperament, taste, as any two persons could possibly be. She was all feminine, he was all man. It was their hardship that they were childless.

Joe was a plumber. Mary, who was given to euphemisms in his regard, used to call him “an expert mechanic.” But we knew he was a plain plumber, and loved him none the less for it. At any rate, among our incorrigible visitors, among those who were practically fixtures at every Sunday evening party — so much so that if they didn’t come, we called them on the telephone to ask what was wrong — were Mary and Joe.

Mary had talent, in my father’s sense. She could sing, she could clown, she could tell a joke. But Joe had none. Histrionically he was a complete flop. All he could do at our gatherings was sit and listen. My father tried to prod him into action for the first two or three years of our acquaintanceship, but finally gave him up as hopeless. “Joe has absolutely no gumption!” my father decided, and even Mary was forced to agree.

So there he sat, Sunday evening after Sunday evening, the strong, silent Joe, always taking the most uncomfortable chair, always getting up to give his seat to another, always carrying in furniture to supply repose where it was needed, always getting out of somebody else’s way. “I know I have no gumption!” I once heard him say; “Your father’s right! But what can I do about it?”

Yet there were many things Joe could do in other fields besides that of entertainment. He was the spare godfather for everybody’s baby, the spare pallbearer at everybody’s funeral. That is to say, if the godfather or pallbearer you had chosen didn’t show up at christening or wake, then, as the saying amongst us went, “You could always get Joe.”

Joe was a particular favorite of my mother’s. My mother was always saying that Joe had depths in him that nobody had sounded, qualities that nobody had appreciated. Joe, in turn, fairly worshipped my mother, and said boldly in the presence of his wife that my mother was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. In one of my mother’s illnesses Joe used to come to her sickroom, and just sit there and look at her for hours, never saying a word. He was always at my mother’s beck and call on Sunday nights. If something were lacking in the collation my mother was preparing, and someone were needed to run out to the store, Joe was invariably the messenger for that. There was hardly a Sunday night when we did not hear him say, “Here’s your change, Mrs. Feeney!” as he returned from an errand, and then deposited himself in silence in some distant chair, to gaze in wonderment at the general entertainment.

Joe was also a great favorite with us children. He was always quietly listening to things we had to tell him, always quietly approving of what we had to say. It was not possible for us to read his eyes then as we could read them now, and perhaps fortunate as well. For there is a hunger in the eyes of a childless husband — a bewilderment, a sense of defeat with no explanation — that would wreck the heart of every child he looks at, were it other than the heart of a child.

Mary went out of her way, so to speak, to compensate for Joe. Whereas he told no stories, she told an extra one in his stead. Whereas he laughed little, and that always undemonstratively, she roared to the point of slapping others on the back. Whereas he used bad English when he spoke at all, she polished up hers to suit the queen’s taste, and dealt it out in interminable chatter.

There was one point in which Mary and Joe perfectly complemented each other. He was healthy, and she was unwell. It was not until a number of years had passed that her illness became tragic, but when it did, it became tragic indeed. She contracted the various diseases a woman, as woman, can be heir to. She was confined to her bed for years. Her fundamental ailment was put down in that most exasperating of all diagnoses: nervousness! And what can you do about that?

Joe waited on Mary hand and foot. He cooked the meals, washed the linen, scrubbed the floor. He paid countless doctor’s bills. He sat by her bedside endeavoring by every device he could employ to calm her excitement, to quiet her hysterical fears. She drooped one night, and died in his arms.

But I like to think of them most in the years before this catastrophe, when they were younger, more hopeful, when it was Sunday evening and they were ours; when almost the very first ring of the front door bell was a signal for one of us to say “Ah! I’ll bet that’s Mary and Joe.” And it very nearly always was!

I should like particularly to tell of the one night of triumph Joe enjoyed at our home, a night that was his so manifestly that not even Mary could enhance it by crowing about it or exaggerating its importance.

We were all gathered together one memorable Sunday evening. Our parlor and dining room were full. Andrew Philip Pumford Dunk, from Glasgow, was giving us Scotch jokes and imitations of Harry Lauder. Tom Murray, a tenor, built like a bass, was rendering the pitiable strains of “Mona,” a lady who, it seems, died and left somebody lonely after her. John Z. Kelley, chief soloist in our parish choir, had just finished one of his beautiful Ave Marias. He alternated between Gounod’s and Schubert’s with a slight preference for the latter. My mother had served an excellent collation, and in the periods of respite for eating and conversation, my father was winding the victrola. When suddenly we heard the sound of a big wind, blowing in the distance.

“Phew!” said somebody, while munching a sandwich, “sounds like a storm beginning!”

Louder and louder the wind blew, a torrential lot of it, bound to take off our roof if it kept on that way.

Finally the voice of our maid, who had gone to the attic to close all the windows, was heard screaming at the top of the stairs.

“Mrs. Feeney! Mrs. Feeney! The pipe has burst in the bathroom, and it’s flooding the place with water! It’s running down through the floor, Mrs. Feeney, and it’s ruining the ceiling in the kitchen!”

The fun stopped suddenly, and there was a great hush, while we listened to the falling water. Each of us looked at the other in consternation. Then all eyes turned to Joe. This was no moment for a nit-wit entertainer. This was the time we needed a plumber, and a plumber, thank God, we had!

Joe arose quietly and took off his coat. He was masterful in the way he assumed command. All decisions must be made like lightning, and like lightning his were made. Where did he rush to? To the bathroom, to see what was going on? Not Joe. But to the cellar, where never a Feeney would have ever thought of going.

“Have you got a candle?”

My mother had one.

“Do you know where the main line comes in?” My mother didn’t know.

“Doesn’t Mr. Feeney?”

“Oh, Heavens, no!”

“Well, we’ve got to find it!”

And candle ahead, we all went traipsing down to the cellar, with Joe leading us.

Quietly he surveyed the pipes, made a conjecture, and found it correct. Then down on all fours, disregardful of Sunday clothes, crawling amidst the coal, the cobwebs, the footprints of the cats, he found the necessary valve. It was rusty and would not turn. Not for one of us. But it would for Joe. He would make it turn! . . . Ugh! Ugh! Ugh! . . . Twist! Twist! Twist! . . . Turn! Turn! Turn! . . . Ugh! Ugh! Ugh! “One more’ll get it! There! That’ll hold the water for awhile! Now let us go upstairs for the repair.”

We were absolutely wide-eyed in admiration. Every action was a masterpiece. Even to the way he plugged the broken pipe with cork and rags until it could be soldered with lead in the morning.

A half an hour later found Joe seated placidly in the kitchen, being served hot tea by my mother, and wearing one of my father’s shirts.

About once a year my mother refers to my father as “Mr. Feeney,” by way of re-surveying the man she married.

“Mr. Feeney couldn’t have fixed that thing in a million years,” was my mother’s summary of our bathroom explosion. And we all knew it was a just one.

The guests departed a little earlier than usual that Sunday night, in respect for our upset nerves. You can be sure there was no further attempt at any kind of entertainment.

There was nothing to talk about while our friends were leaving except Joe, and how wonderful he was.

Mary epitomized our praise with a triumphant twinkle in her eye. “No gumption, eh?” was what the twinkle kept saying. And she led her husband by the arm to the door.

My father watched them descending the front steps.

And then Mr. Feeney went back and turned off the victrola.