In the Court of the Cork Lane King

My grandma Molly “Cookie” Keating would cross the Pittston Bypass and walk down William Street from Cork Lane to meet me after I suffered a rough day in fourth grade at St. John the Evangelist Grade School. She had silvery white hair mostly worn in a pristine bun. She wore bright floral dresses and ornate hats like an Irish Carmen Miranda.

She led me downtown to a retail boutique— the ABC Shoppe on Main Street. Its tall, wide storefront windows trapped omnipresent vapor trails of Chanel and Chant D’aromes inside the space. The saleswomen fawned over my grandma while I sat on carpeted steps leading to the second floor. I always wanted to sneak up there but its eerily idle dimness and dry decaying-cardboard odors seemed like a spot from which a nine-year-old kid might never return.

My grandma bought more hats and dresses. I was patient. I didn’t care to be anywhere else. And my patience was always rewarded with some trinket from Kresge’s on the way back to William Street.

During that summer, she and I flew for the first time. We traveled to Falls Church, Virginia, for the fiftieth anniversary of my Aunt Helen and Uncle Ray Keating, a big band leader who regularly packed Baltimore’s Biltmore Hotel and played with Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey. The looming flight had me asking all sorts of questions and suffering spontaneous queasiness.

When it came time to board, one look from my grandmother’s calm blue eyes eased my fear. I figured she’d be more afraid than I was, but she maintained that lace-curtain Irish composure.

We arrived in Dulles Airport without incident on an Eastern 727 Whisperjet, although during the visit my older cousin tried to teach me why Ho Chi Minh should have taken Saigon and Washington. I had no idea what on Earth he was talking about. Only after I’d read certain books myself in the next decade did I realize my 13- or 14-year-old cousin by 1972 had already torn through someone’s manifesto. He unloaded on the Nixon administration even as his father, Air Force Colonel Raymond Keating, drove us to the Pentagon for a swim in its indoor pool on a rainy and didactic D.C. day. I didn’t know what to think then. But he made me think. And still I think. And I wonder where my cousin is and what he thinks today.

By the time my grandpa, Edward “Brick” Keating, had been married to our Cookie for fifty-six years, he didn’t always experience the same aura of calm that I did. Occasionally, he referred to my grandma as “The War Department,” mostly because she stashed her cigarettes away and found clever hiding places for a lone bottle of Canadian Club. And there were those Joan-and-Darby disagreements now and then. 

My sister Molly often acted as a scout for our grandpa. She knew where my grandma kept her cigarettes—typically buried low in the satiny ribbon-candy pink holds of a gold-clasped black handbag embroidered with fading red roses, creamsicle peonies and white jasmine. On my mother’s shoulder I’d seen that genteel hand-me-down purse so many times it joyfully destroys me to even think about it.

When my grandmother climbed the stairs, Brick motioned to my sister from his high-backed chair, tapping his lips with middle and forefinger. Off Molly went on her loving duty to find a Kent filter for our king of Cork Lane.

Brick knew about my grandma’s penchant for a smoke now and then, but my no-nonsense Uncle Ned didn’t. She somehow managed to conceal the habit from her son, who demanded physical fitness and praised the nutritional benefits of honey and wheat germ. Firing up a cig was the one thing you did not want to do in my uncle's presence.

When he sat around the living room, he had one of those contraptions you squeeze to strengthen your forearms and your grip. Thankfully, he wasn’t one of those guys who tried to break your fingers when he shook your hand for the first time.

Along with Dick Clark of American Bandstand fame, he co-earned the title of the “World’s Oldest Teenager”. The label applied in part to his obsessive exercise and jogging habits. Uncle Ned approached life in a serious manner; he scolded me for eating Doritos. As a small boy, heck, even as an adult, I knew not to challenge the man. It wasn’t so much about opening a can of worms as it was unsealing a 55-gallon drum of cobras who meant well.

Since I never had any luck hitting a baseball or softball, he tried teaching me to hit a golf ball when I was 19 in an open and wide field laying up against a small strip of scrub birch and beech and spruce. That lesson, or any instruction since, didn’t take, as my current partners on the links know all too well.

 “I wanna get ahold of one,” I said.

After sixty minutes of limiting me to soft chips with a pitching wedge, I took a full swing before he could intervene. I saw him on the periphery, shaking his head in disdain and a silent but emphatic “no, no, no” before the club’s face struck the ball. That side-to-side movement of his head was the way he began his lessons on anything, a stern and unreturnable warning volley fired off while he thought about how he was gonna lecture you.

Naturally, the ball landed where it usually does when I swing a club. Watching that dimpled little sonafabee slice like a scythe I looked back at my uncle for most definite disapproval.

“Yeah. You wanted to get ahold of one? You lost it, gol dangit.” The last part was a common Irish way to avoid taking the Lord’s name in vain. I’d always thought he owned the term because no one else I knew said it that way. “You won’t learn that way. Let’s pack it in.”

“It’s one ball,” I said.

The bowling bag full of balls he brought along was bursting with cut and dirty golf balls retrieved from woods and ranges all over a multi-county area. But I dare not point that out.

“One ball? They cost money, young man. Someday when you have kids and a family and bills, you’ll understand.”

Hoo boy. Would I ever. Did I ever.

 “Nothing’s for free, Tommy. What do you think your mom and dad are doing every day? You think they’re out there picking daisies? You could pitch in a little bit instead of spending it all in the bars. You’re not even of age.”

It was quite easy in 1982 to find places where you could drink booze underage. And one night he found me in one of them. He knew much about the Irish curse but effortlessly warded it off.

“You shouldn’t even be hanging around places like that. You should put your money in the bank.”

“I know. Sorry.”

“No sense apologizing for it now. The ball’s gone. You have to build up to that swing. First you hit it five yards. Then ten. Then twenty. And you go from there. That’s how I learned the game. I listened to your grampa. I watched your Uncle Paul. That’s the problem with you young guys these days. You don’t wanna listen. None of you wanna listen!”

“I just wanted to see how far I could hit.” 

“Uh huh. And you lost it, gol dangit.”

He’d forget all about it by the time my mom rolled out the roast beef and mashed potatoes on the dinner table.

And if he could only see how many times my shots are drawn to the woods now. I move Callaway stock up a bit with each good walk I spoil.

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In 1992, when my wife and I moved into the Cork Lane home where my grandparents once lived and where all our children were born, on the shelves of the kitchen cupboards Karen found a series of random charred-black ellipses, maybe the size of a jujube.

“Anne, what do you think these are from,” my wife asked. 

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” my mom replied with a smile and a sniffle. In moments like these my mom’s familiar sniffles held back a rising tide of tears bound for a salty pool in her heart. “Cookie stuck her lit cigarettes in the cabinet when Ned or Jimmie walked in the house. She didn’t have time to throw them out the window. And she didn’t want to listen to them.” 

That I could understand. I ate half of a lit Marlboro in a lounge one night as my Uncle Ned approached. Uncle Ned and I were a generation apart, but it appeared in those days we were searching for the same thing in some of the same synthetic places—something that’s coveted and rare and should be cherished if you’re indeed fortunate enough to find it. And keep it.  

My dad Mike Tracy said how wonderfully my mom's family treated him when he and my mom were newlyweds. If he came up a little short before a paycheck, help arrived. Regular Sunday roast beef dinners appealed to my father’s one-dimensional palate.

Some bumps in the road formed as time passed. My grandma baked and cooked every day, and sometimes she ran out of ingredients. She’d call my mom who sent my dad to the grocery store, local dairy, or both. If she needed milk or sour cream in addition to cocoa powder for her Texas sheet cake, my dad needed to make two stops: one at the market and one at Grablicks’s Dairy—a family-owned ice cream store with thousands of local devotees. My grandmother accepted no other brand of dairy products in her kitchen.

My father hadn’t been put out by the errands until he noticed a couple guys who hadn’t felt the least bit inconvenienced by my grandmother's demands. My Uncle Jimmie and his brother Ned lived at home with my grandparents. Ned never got married, and Jimmie got hitched at age 59. When my dad walked in the door from the Acme Market and Grablick’s, my grandmother frequently greeted him on cat’s feet.

“Ssshhh, Mike, sssshhh” she said. “Jimmie’s sleeping.”

Uncle Ned, in turn, had the TV’s volume on low. “Mike, will you keep it down?” he said. “I’m trying to watch a program here.”

On recalling his days in the court of the Cork Lane king, my dad could only shake his head, smile wryly and sweep from one page of the Scranton Tribune to the next. These days, I do much the same.