I could see the good in my father, but his alcoholism had a devastating impact on himself and his family. When he wasn’t drunk, he could be the sweetest, kindest man. He could stay sober for weeks and months, and remarkably, sometimes for a whole year. During those tranquil periods, he would get us up to go to mass every Sunday morning. He loved to read, especially books about Wyatt Earp and the Wild West and Abraham Lincoln.
He was also a man full of considerable wisdom and advice, which he’d share with Babby and me in a repetitious manner that made it stick. When we heard that familiar tone in his voice, we would roll our eyes and say under our breaths, “Here it comes again.”
“Gal, now, you know, you have to be careful,” he would tell us. “You’ve got to watch your reputation and your character. We don’t have much money and we don’t have many material things, but you’ve got a great reputation and a great character. People can take your money and your possessions, but they can’t take your good reputation and your character. You give that away.”
Perhaps, in the final analysis, his words to us had more impact on us than we could have imagined at the time. It is one possible reason among others why, despite the harsh poverty and other difficult circumstances, all ten of his surviving children (one of my siblings died before I was born) went on to lead very productive lives. I’ve used what I have learned in my life and as a parent of four children myself to look back and understand both my father and my mother with a clearer perspective. The sadness and disappointment I had in my early years diminished gradually with time. It has made it easier to regard them not just with forgiveness and compassion, but also with a degree of awe and admiration.
My father was dealing with a terrible disease, although it was hardly recognized as such back in the 1930s and 1940s. I know his condition really bothered him. But what could he have done short of abstaining? There were no twelve-step programs or other social services in our community that addressed this problem. Alcoholics Anonymous was only just getting started at the time.
When he was drunk, all hell would break loose. I couldn’t have been more than five or six years old when I first noticed that there was something terribly wrong. At that time, we were still living on the farm. One night, I heard my mother yelling at my dad. I snuck close by the door and looked in through the crack. My mother was standing by an ironing board, shaking her finger at him. My father was sitting in a chair in his long underwear. He looked so sick and so sad. Then he started to cry. Seeing my father in that condition was devastating. It just about killed me.
My mother, too, would drink with my father from time to time. On Saturday nights, they’d go uptown to a saloon. Babby and I would be outside waiting on a bench for them to come out. Invariably, once home, they’d get into a fight. I worried about my older sister Ilean, who was out on a date with a new boyfriend. “Ilean’s going to be home soon,” I’d say, going into the kitchen where they were yelling at each other. “He [the boyfriend] is going to hear you. He won’t like us. He won’t like Ilean. Please don’t fight.”
“Think nothing of it,” my mother snapped back in her customary rhetoric. “We’re fine. Just say your prayers and go to bed.”
My mother was not an alcoholic. She had more self-control. I think she went along with it just to try to cope with him. As crazy as it appeared to me, maybe it was their form of relaxation, a form of self-medication against the pressures and strains of their life together. They didn’t have the skills to channel it in a healthier way. Nevertheless, when my mother was drunk, usually on beer, I learned to stay out of her radar range. Years later, when we’d go out to a fancy restaurant, I’d cringe every time the waiter would ask her what she wanted to drink. “Bring me a beer. In a can.”
If things were not interesting enough, my father was also a moonshiner. He made a corn whiskey that was popularly known back then as white mule. During the years of Prohibition, my father told my older sister, “Pauline, gal, if anybody comes asking if we’ve got any white mule, tell ’em, ‘Yeah, it’s standing there way out in the pasture.’” He also brewed his own beer.
When my father would go on a binge, Babby and I would find empty bottles everywhere, in the house and piled in the garage. He could have a beer or two without a problem, but once he got a whiff of hard liquor it was all over. It was hard to say what would set him off. I once asked the great comedian Jackie Gleason about this issue when we were having lunch one day, and he brought up the subject of his problems with alcohol. “Yeah, I drink a lot,” he admitted. I asked him if there was any pattern to when he got drunk.
