FRIDAY NIGHT FUN FEST

Until I was about four, we lived in the downstairs part of my grandparents’ two-family house. The downstairs apartment had a kitchen, a living room, one bathroom and two bedrooms -- one for Mom and Dad and one for my brother and me to share. So we had to move out after my sister Elizabeth was born, because then we needed a girls’ bedroom. We ended up just a few blocks away, so we could still walk to my grandparents’ house and our childhoods were full of trips back and forth to visit, make deliveries, sometimes just to trade one set of grownups for another.

I’m not at all clear what that house had been like when my grandparents and their four children had all been at home. Probably they used both levels, and didn’t treat it as a two-family house. But I don’t know for sure. I think everybody lived in tighter quarters in those days. Growing up, I don’t remember many kids who had their own room. In my neighborhood, it was pretty rare to be an only child, so unless you happened to be the lone child of your gender in a family, you were going to be sharing a room.

Sharing a house wasn’t uncommon either. People sometimes get nostalgic today for that sort of multigenerational living. I’m not sure why. What I remember of it – and you’ve got to remember, I was very small during this period – was that there were a ton of people around all the time, there was the constant sound of footsteps around and above us, and there was a lot of yelling, at people, for people and about people who weren’t there. Later on, after we were living in our own house, Mom and Dad would sometimes marvel about the years literally living beneath Mom’s parents, where a closed door meant nothing and a locked one little more. I remember Dad joking that it was only through sheer determination that they made three babies in that house.

By the time I was born, all of my mother’s siblings had left home except for her youngest brother, Paul, who still lived upstairs with my grandparents. My brother Paul was named after him – something my brother was very proud of and I was very jealous of.

We never called Paul “Uncle.” He didn’t seem to have the gravity to deserve a title before his name. He was a gangly, goofy teenager. But he was our best friend and our hero, our favorite babysitter, a super-fun playmate, and a fixture at our kitchen table and in front of our TV. When my grandparents got to be too much for his teenaged brain to handle, my parents’ downstairs apartment was his refuge. He and Mom were close, despite a 10-year age difference. When the two households were together, which given the living arrangements was frequent, they traded conspiratorial looks and shot secret smiles at each other as the grandparents opined on whatever the topic of discussion happened to be.

Maybe it was just because of the close living arrangements, but Mom and Paul seemed to have a bond that was stronger than what they had with their other siblings, my aunt Theresa and my uncle Peter, who were between them in age. Uncle Peter was away at college during my toddlerhood and early childhood years. Aunt Theresa had gotten married to my uncle Bill shortly after I was born, and although they only lived a few miles from us, we didn’t see that much of them. Holidays and birthdays, an occasional Sunday supper. They went to a different church; I learned later that it was Lutheran, which didn’t sit well with Grandma or Mom, who didn’t really like Uncle Bill because of it, but that’s a subject for another day.

Because my brother and my uncle had the same name, there was occasionally confusion when my Grandma would call for Paul to help her with something. As my brother was generally a lot more eager than my 16-year-old uncle to assist Grandma in getting something off the top shelf or carrying a bag in from the front stoop, he would jump up from whatever he was doing and rush upstairs to see what needed doing, earning him a kiss and a tousle of his hair, while my uncle, turning up a few seconds later, would get a, “You should be as helpful as your little nephew” before being told to let my brother help him with the task du jour.

Being a favorite, our uncle occupied a lot of our attention. My brother Paul and I would wait eagerly every afternoon for “grown up” Paul to get home from school. We were allowed to play out front by ourselves as long as we didn’t go into the street or past the imaginary lines two house down on either side of ours, so it became a daily ritual for us to put on our coats as soon as “Rocky and Bullwinkle” was over, and head outside where we would stop at the imaginary line alongside the Connelly house so that we could get the earliest possible glimpse of Paul as he approached. We’d get piggyback rides, or airplane rides, or sometimes a piece of candy before Paul went inside to put his books down and get started on his homework. We weren’t allowed to bother him when he was doing that. Mom said he had to get good grades so that he could get into college, a notion that meant exactly nothing to my brother and me, although we left Paul alone as a result.

Sometimes I’m surprised that I have such vivid memories of those days living in the same house with Paul and my grandparents. And I realize, my memories aren’t particularly pure – I’m often not sure what I actually remember and what I have pieced together from the stories my parents and my grandparents told, from photo albums and home movies, and from things that my older brother told me.

But nobody ever talked much about Paul after he left home, so I’m pretty sure that most of my memories of him are my own. I didn’t understand a lot of what was going on at the time, although thinking back on it today, as an adult, it’s pretty obvious. But as a four-year-old, there wasn’t any way for me to grasp the meaning.

I can’t remember why we were upstairs in my grandparents’ place that night. It doesn’t really matter, but it was a little bit out of the norm, since it would have been easier for Paul to put us to bed down in our own home. Upstairs, we would likely fall asleep in his bed, and Dad would have to carry us down to our room. But never mind. We were definitely upstairs. I know that. My grandparents’ place seemed old-fashioned compared to ours, just as cliché would dictate. Mom and Dad – or at least Mom, who was in charge of décor – liked modern furniture, with clean, simple lines. Grandma, on the other hand, had big, overstuffed chairs, frilly lace curtains and doilies, lots of doilies, which she purchased from the nuns and placed on the arms and backs of every chair, as well as on every flat surface in every room.

Their television was older than the one my parents had, and while the cabinet was bigger, the screen was smaller.

I also don’t know why my parents and grandparents were going out together. That didn’t happen very often. But they were doing something together, and Paul was babysitting. That I remember clearly, and although I may be imagining some details of how that night proceeded, the general outline is clear in my mind. I just want to tell the story the way my brain has put it together; it’s important to me to get it out here. You can decide for yourself what makes sense as the memories of a young child and what I must be embellishing. About an hour after my parents and grandparents left, Sam came over. Sam was Paul’s best friend from school. We knew him and we liked him, although not as much as we liked Paul, because he wasn’t family. But he was fun. He played with us the same way Paul did, and he was really good at pretending he was a monster. I remember him stalking us stiff-legged, arms outstretched in what I suppose was Frankenstein style, grunting hungrily, my brother and I giggling uncontrollably as we backed off from him or ran circles around the yard, until he caught up with one of us and pulled his victim to the ground for a thorough round of tickling. Sam came over a lot when Paul was babysitting, and when he arrived, he always announced that it was “fun time,” which set my brother and me to giggling uncontrollably in anticipation of the rough-housing that was sure to come.

It wasn’t at all unusual for Sam to be around at any time of day or night. He and Paul were, as Grandma used to say, “inseparable,” had been since they met in elementary school. Sam seemed to have dinner upstairs a couple of times a week, and he was often at our kitchen table with Paul, shooting the breeze with Mom as she cooked dinner for our family.

So I’m sure Sam had my parents’ and grandparents’ permission to be over at our house that night. It would have made perfect sense. He had brought over some books, as if he were going to do homework, but I doubt they ever moved from the table he set them down on when he walked in. The image I have in my mind is of us watching TV, the four of us spread across the couch and the floor in front of it.

There was always banter when Sam and Paul were together, and I suppose that night would have been no different. They would have kept up a running commentary about whatever we were watching on TV, interspersed with recounting of hilarious incidents involving their other school friends, some of whom my brother and I knew and some were would have been just names to us. I have one indelible memory of some monkeyshines too, that now seems significant to me, although I’m sure at the time it would have just set me off on a bout of giggles.

My uncle Paul had gone to the bathroom. When we heard him open the bathroom door, Sam put an index finger to his mouth conspiratorially, signaling us to keep quiet, for purposes unknown. That of course set my brother and me off. We stifled giggles, pretty unsuccessfully, and shot glances at Sam, waiting for his next move as Paul re-entered the room. When Paul had just made it to the rug, Sam pounced. He grabbed Paul by the waist and tackled him to the floor, subjecting him to the kind of tickling onslaught that he had so frequently done to my brother and me. We’d never seen that before, and we thought it was hilarious. We loved hearing our uncle squeal and gasp for breath and watching him struggle to cover his stomach with his hands and his shirt and his knees just the way we did when Sam unleashed his tickle fingers on us.

It probably only went on for 15 or 20 seconds, but they were some of the most memorable seconds of our young lives, seeing our uncle helpless with laughter. It’s an image of him that I will always have and always treasure, especially because of what came later.

When Sam finally let up on our uncle, we settled back down on the couch and returned to watching whatever we had on TV, maybe “The Addams Family.” Probably my brother and I fell asleep in front of the TV. I’m guessing, but I have no memory of Paul putting us to bed that night.

What I do remember was being awakened by a commotion – yelling and slamming doors – in the living room. Running to the doorway, I saw Paul hurriedly pulling up his pants. Sam was sitting on the couch -- naked, I’m pretty sure -- with a look of shocked horror on his face. And my parents and grandparents were encircling them, shouting and waving their hands and pointing at the two boys. I wasn’t too young to understand that Paul and Sam were in serious trouble.

I watched, frozen in place, as Sam roused himself off the couch, grabbed his underwear and clothes, which were scattered on the floor close to where we had all been sitting, and quickly dressed, all under the rapid fire of the adults’ hurled words. He threw a sad, desperate look at Paul, but didn’t say anything to him, as he slumped toward the door, slipped into his coat, picked up his books, and made his exit.

That’s when the hitting started. It really was just Granddad, I think, but because the adults were all still in a tight circle around Paul, with everybody yelling and waving their hands, it might have looked like the whole gang was beating on him. By this time, I suspect the adults were hollering at each other, not just at Paul. Paul was sobbing, crying for it to stop, and I heard the loud crack of slaps in between his cries. That scared me, I guess, and I must have started crying, because that’s when Mom rushed over to me. “Now look what you’ve done,” I heard her shout, and I wasn’t sure whether it was at Paul or Granddad or me. It made me cry louder and only when my brother started crying too did I realize he had been standing right behind me watching the scene play out.

Mom kneeled down on one knee and gathered my brother and me in her arms, pulling us tight against her bosom and muttering that we shouldn’t be exposed to things like this. Although I wouldn’t have known what being pregnant was at the time, thinking back on it I’m sure Mom must have been pretty far along with my sister, so that kneeling down and shielding us must have taken some effort. The only reason I bring that up is that she must have really wanted to protect us. What I do recall is that she shepherded us along the wall toward the front door, being careful to keep us away from the action in the middle of the room. I’m not sure where Dad was by that point. Maybe he’d gone downstairs to open up our apartment. As Mom ushered us out the door, spreading her full skirt in an effort to block our views, I saw Paul huddled on the floor, his arms covering his face as Granddad’s belt slapped down over and over on him, the blows landing wherever they might.

I don’t know what happened upstairs the rest of the night. My brother and I were distraught, and it probably took Mom and Dad a couple of hours to calm us down and get us to sleep. I remember that in the morning I asked if I could go upstairs, and Mom told me no, that Paul and I needed to let things “settle down.”

A little bit later, my uncle Paul appeared in our doorway, looking sheepish, and apologized to Mom and Dad for exposing my brother and myself to his bad behavior. Mom responded with a hug, Dad with a handshake, and no more was said about the previous night. But as I think back on it, this began the change in Paul’s relationship with us. He spent less time downstairs – it seemed that he always had to study so that he could graduate on time – and asked Mom and Dad to get Colleen down the street to babysit for us when they went out. Actually, if my timeline is right, we moved into our own house a couple of months later, after Mom gave birth to Elizabeth. So we naturally saw less of Paul. I may not have even noticed that he didn’t often drop by our new house, no longer spent hours sitting in the kitchen chatting with Mom.

Paul graduated from high school that spring. I remember Mom getting dressed up and going to the ceremony, while Dad stayed home with the three kids. A few weeks after that, on a visit with my Grandma, I noticed Paul wasn’t around. I had peeked into his room and saw that a lot of his stuff wasn’t there.

“Paul’s grown up now. He’s gone off to make his fortune, just like the boys in the stories,” Grandma said when I asked her about his absence. When I asked about when he was coming home, and when we would see him again, Grandma started responding with wistful, “I just don’t know, honey, I just don’t know. Paul has a lot of things to figure out for himself.”

I got the same evasiveness at home. Paul had to go away, Mom said. We don’t know when he’ll be back, both my parents said. Enough “we don’t knows” and my brother and I just stopped asking. After months went by, it was pretty clear that Paul was just gone. He just wasn’t there, was no longer part of Saturday chores or Sunday football or even Christmas dinner. And his absence wasn’t talked about.

I ‘ve never been able to understand it. Yes, it was a long time ago, and yes, attitudes were different. I get that my grandparents couldn’t accept it. But I’ll never comprehend how my mother just let her youngest brother, her confidante, slip out of her life. I recently tried to ask her about it, and her answer wasn’t much better than it had been all those years ago. “You just don’t understand. Things were different then. Paul brought shame on our family, but at least your grandparents let him finish school before they told him to get out. That was pretty good of them. And they gave him some money. It could have been a lot worse.”

When people outside the family asked about Paul, my parents would say he was away at school. That was actually true. I learned later that Paul had used the money my grandparents gave him – the money they had saved for his college education – to pay for an apartment. He worked full time in addition, and was able to scrape together enough to pay for tuition at a state college not too far away.

Paul hadn’t totally disappeared. We knew where to find him. We just didn’t, not for quite a while at least. My uncle did well for himself, as they say. He worked his way through college and law school, and had a practice about 3 hours from us, in the western part of the state. In time my mother even started bragging about him to her friends, telling them how well her little brother was doing.

Paul came to my grandfather’s funeral, and after that we began to see him on occasion. He never participated in our family events – holidays, birthdays, graduations. But he stopped by from time to time when he was working on a case in the city. They were brief visits – a cup of coffee with Mom, a drink with Mom and Dad, not much more than a hug and a hair tousle for my siblings an me – and while he always was the recipient of a complete update about our family, I don’t remember hearing much of anything about his life now. Those visits stopped after a while, anyway. Paul had drifted tentatively back into our lives, then drifted out again.

I was in graduate school when I decided to drive over and see him. I called his office and arranged to meet him for lunch.

I’ve tried a dozen times to write about that lunch, but each time I end up deleting the whole thing. It was awkward, and there’s no way I could find to describe our conversation that wasn’t riddled with cliches. I really didn’t know how I should talk to Paul, and he didn’t seem to know how to talk to me. So many things had changed. I had two sisters that Paul had never really gotten to know. And we were all grown now. My brother Paul, who everyone thought would be a doctor, had become a priest, for God's sake! i went through the laundry list of family updates, as my parents had done on those visits years ago, and Paul responded politely, but disinterestedly. These names represented strangers to him, it was clear.

The best I can really say about our lunch is that when we got up to leave, we hugged and agreed that we should do it again. And we did. Over the next year or so, I got to know this man who had been the hero of my early childhood, up until the day he disappeared from my life.

Paul told me he was happy (I know that sounds like just about the most trite and lazy characterization I could make, but in that first conversation, I’m pretty sure that Paul actually said something like, “I want you to know I’m happy with my life.”) He had a partner with whom he had lived for the past 10 years. At this, I remember breathing a quiet sigh of relief; this was the early days of AIDS and it seemed to me that a stable relationship could be a life saver for my uncle. Gay life was something of a mystery to people like me, who lived in a world where we knew very few gay people and didn’t ask much about the lives of the ones we did know.

I met Paul for dinner a few weeks after our first lunch. He brought his partner Gary, and I brought my girlfriend at the time, who I thought I would marry but of course did not. The conversations became less awkward as we got to know more about each other’s lives. But we didn’t talk about our shared family much, and we never talked about that night in my grandparents’ home until one day when Paul and I decided to spend a casual afternoon wandering through a street fair that was happening near his house.

As we walked along the river esplanade, I asked him if he still kept in touch with Sam.

No, not for a few years. Sam’s parents had reacted very differently from my family, he told me. They kept him close, put him through college, helped him set up his first house. “It got painful for me to see,” Paul told me. “I realized how fucked up Mom and Dad’s reaction had been. Sam’s parents were always kind to me, always welcomed me into their home. They treated me like another son, or at least a nephew. And I knew I would never have that again with my own family. Except for you and Paul. There was a part of me that always knew I would reconnect with you two. But anyway, the hurt got to be so bad that I distanced myself from Sam. I shouldn’t have, I know. But I did and he stopped calling after a while. We moved on. It makes me sad to think about it, but I guess that’s life.”