Irma spoke solemnly. Probably she hadn’t glimpsed my father’s querulous father in many years, and (probably) she’d been my mother’s confidante, in Mom’s bitter complaints about the old man who’d come to live with us when I was a little girl, in an addition to the house at the rear that Daddy had built for him.

Grandpa Kerrigan—“Joseph Kerrigan”—had never remembered my name. “Mir’um?”—he’d stare at me, frowning. And Mom would say, careful not to seem to be correcting him, “That’s ‘Violet,’ Dad.” Grandpa would continue to stare rudely at me as if assessing the name, or me; but next time, he’d have forgotten.

He’d been a handsome man many years before. In old photos, he’d resembled Daddy with stiff dark hair lifting from his forehead, heavy eyebrows, an “Irish look”—it was said of all the Kerrigan men. But now Grandpa’s face had slid downward. Folds of flesh hung beneath his chin. He rarely shaved, whiskers sprouted from his jaws at crazed angles like wires. And he’d become smelly: menthol, tobacco, whiskey, soiled clothing, unwashed feet. That particular dark, sour smell that made me gag, the odor of dentures not kept clean.

Miriam was his favorite granddaughter—the pretty one. As a young girl she’d known to squirm away from Grandpa as he ran his hands over her body, disguising her revulsion by giggling. Grandpa hadn’t liked it when he teased me by tugging at my hair and I’d shrieked and flinched away like a cat.

And Mom, he’d ordered around like a servant, barely remembering her name—“Hey: Loo-loo.”

Sometimes he’d winked lewdly at her—“Hey: Missus.”

I’d wondered what it might be, to be so old that you neither knew nor cared who people were. Like a container filling up, and beginning to spill over. Unlike other, older persons in the family Grandpa Kerrigan made no effort to be “nice”—he didn’t give a damn if you liked him or not.

Daddy had never gotten along well with his father he referred to as the old sod. Both father and son were short-tempered and thin-skinned, too much alike.

Yet, Daddy had insisted upon bringing his father home to live with us when Grandpa became too arthritic and forgetful to live by himself in the falling-down house in Niagara Falls where Daddy had grown up. His wife, our grandmother, had died before I’d been born. In the family it was said that Grandpa had worn her out, he’d bullied and beaten her, yet after her death he grieved for her and drank heavily. Quarreled with his children, became belligerent, paranoid. He’d had an old feud with his cousin Tommy Kerrigan, couldn’t say enough crude obscene things about the politician of which the mildest was “God-damn cocksucking crook.”