from their childhood, the one that promised something slightly naughty.
“Surprise,” she says. And he just nods. “What are the chances of you letting me in?”
“Slim to none,” he says as he reaches for his jeans and whatever T-shirt he had thrown on the floor the night before.
When he swings open the front door, he is relieved to see that she looks so much better. A year ago, as the eight O’Connor children gathered in Buffalo to bury their father, something had been seriously wrong, but she wouldn’t speak about it. She had reminded him of pictures he had seen of hollow-eyed people, dying of malnutrition. And then there was that strange woman who arrived with Ellen, spoke only Spanish, and never left his sister’s side.
Now he can see she’s gained back some weight, not a lot, but enough so she doesn’t look like she belongs in Darfur. And he can see that her expression is more animated, there’s the promise of some fun in her eyes that reassures him she’s much closer to the Ellen he had grown up with, the Ellen he had relied on to get him through. It wasn’t just the scant eleven months that separated them that made them so close. It was their unspoken pact that they both saw the same thing—the perpetual calamity that was the O’Connor family.
Once Jamie left Buffalo and had some distance, he often wondered if all large families shared the O’Connors’ habit of carelessnessand neglect. Was it just that there were too many children for any two parents to really ride herd on? In his family, the struggle was to get through each day with everyone dressed, the older kids off to school, and with some kind of food on the table at dinnertime. Figuring out which child needed what specific attention or taking the emotional temperature of any one of them was way beyond the scope of either his mother or father. Hugh Sr. was too busy drinking and his mother, Carrie, was too busy, period, simply tending to the maintenance of so many bodies.
But there was more, and Jamie came to understand this only as an adult. There was his father’s narcissism and casual cruelty. How he got pleasure from calling his sons “you little shits.” How, in the privacy of his own house, the words were hurled with scorn and derision, often accompanied with a back-of-the-hand slap, almost an afterthought, that always landed across a cheek or tender lip. How, in public, he’d announce with a broad smile and sometimes a hand clapped across a listener’s shoulder, “I’ve got so many of these little shits running around, I can’t remember all their names.” There’d be laughter. A joke, Hugh was always ready with a joke. Nobody minded that in one sentence he’d managed to label his sons as worthless
and
obliterate their identities. Nobody, that is, except his sons.
What it took Jamie much longer to understand was his mother’s complicity, her complete denial of the raucous damage inflicted on each of them by her husband. Jamie’s childhood battles were all with his father, but as an adult now, at the beginning of his forties, he’s come to realize that it is his mother who never, not once, stepped in to protect him against his father’s assaults. He’s certain now that Carrie O’Connor’s crime was the greater one.
Jamie has figured these things out for himself. Moving across the country to the West Coast helped. Knowing people who hadbeen analyzed and therapy-ed gave him some language, but he has never discussed his conclusions with any of his siblings—about their childhood, the damage done, the most culpable parent. It’s not that the children of the O’Connor clan don’t talk to one another. They do. They shout, they argue, they discuss people they know, but they never delve beneath the surface. They skirt “judgment” as ungenerous. And any discussion of another’s behavior is labeled judgment. So all eight of the O’Connor siblings have their own version of what life was like growing up in that narrow