http://www.romancatholicism.org
|
Some
Portraits Of Early Ideas Leonard
Feeney, S. J. (Sheed and Ward, 1941) IV. SUNDAY
EVENINGS 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. |