No one talked about the trouble. For weeks Jerr and Lionel were subdued around our mother and wary of our father, like kicked dogs. But cunning kicked dogs. They had 9:00 P.M. curfews. Jerr wasn’t allowed to drive for six weeks. Both boys had extra chores around the house. On the phone my mother said, incensed, “It was all that girl’s fault! She did it deliberately! Those Deavers better get her fixed! Before it’s too late.”

When my mother hung up I asked what “fixed” meant. I wondered if whatever the boys had done to her, Liza might need fixing like a broken clock.

Disdainfully my mother said, “Like a cat, spayed. So it can’t have kittens people have to drown.”

To Die For

GROWING UP, WE KERRIGAN KIDS KNEW THAT OUR DADDY would die for us. No one had to tell us, we knew. Of course, the concept “to die for” was not in our vocabularies. Still, we knew.

In our father’s big Irish Catholic family in Niagara Falls he’d been raised with the conviction that families stuck together. Irish immigrants had had a hell of a hard time coming to America, hadn’t even been considered “white” in some quarters, like Italians, Greeks, and Jews, until even the 1950s. And so, the Irish stuck together, in theory at least.

Not in theory, but in reality, and crucially, a family had to protect its own. You might quarrel with relatives, a brother or a sister, you might quarrel with your parents but essentially you stuck together, you never deserted or betrayed one another. You never went outside the family—that was unforgivable.

Inside the family you never lied when it really mattered, and you never cheated.

Siding with your brother against your cousin, but with brother and cousin against the stranger.

You would die for your family and you would (maybe) die for your (close) friends the way soldiers would die for their (close) buddies.

Something like this, Jerome Kerrigan had truly seemed to feel for his immediate family, if not all of the Kerrigans. And for the guys in his platoon in Vietnam, he dared not recall without his eyes welling with tears and his mouth working to keep still.

If Daddy was suspicious of strangers he was almost naively trusting of relatives and friends. Often he did household repairs for no payment, wouldn’t hear of being paid except in drinks, hospitality, reciprocal favors. That was friendship—loyalty, paying back what you owed. Being generous.

He lent money to people who, he had reason to know, probably wouldn’t be able to repay him; he lent money without interest, knowing that this was a disadvantage, for those to whom he’d lent money would repay the lenders who’d demanded interest, and not him. Yet, Daddy could not bring himself to lend money with interest—that was not how he saw himself.