Character Counts

Rarely one to mince words, my grandmother took one quick look at my mother's friend from next door and made her pronouncement in three clipped words - Drunken, trashy guttersnipe - and with that, she straightened her shoulders and shut the door behind her. My mother, woozy from an afternoon of drinking and card playing, wailed a protest and attempted to follow her but tripped on the carpet and fell heavily. Her icebox manhatten glass shattered on the edge of the stairs and when she pulled herself up, she stepped squarely into the broken glass, slashing her foot open in several places and embedding shards of glass between her toes. She began screaming and I ran for my room and locked the door. From my window, I watched my grandmother hesitate, look back, hesitate again, then stiffen her spine and climb into the Lincoln. She drove away quickly and didn't look back.

After several minutes, the screaming subsided and degenerated into a quarrel, loud and heated, over the need for medical attention, home first aid as opposed to to the ER. As neither was fit to drive - my mother disabled as she had stepped on her right foot and Betty whose polio had left her handicapped and crippled and able to walk only with the aid of metal canes - first aid won. When my daddy arrived home, he found my mother bleary eyed and mumbling, her injured foot wrapped in bloody towels, and no sign of Betty. He packed her into the old station wagon for the trip to the ER and my grandmother arrived to sit with me shortly afterward - both were grim faced and silent and I suspected that the worst was yet to come. Nana cleaned up the broken glass, scrubbed the carpet, washed the glasses and threw the empty liquor bottle (and two full ones) into the trash, then made me grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. Eat, she told me and lit a Kent, striking a wooden match on the scarred kitchen table, a most unladylike gesture which seemed to surprise even her. It flared and I smelled sulphur and smoke in the stale air - a bad omen, I thought dismally, a sign of things to come when my daddy got home, I was sure. It occurred to me that I could probably outrun my grandmother, maybe even get as far as St. Luke's, a nearby Catholic church whose doors were almost never locked - a scene from "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" flashed through my mind, Charles Laughton trying to escape a violent mob and pleading for Sanctuary! but I dismissed the idea. I had a sense that no priest in his right mind would actually dare stand up to my grandmother.

My daddy came home alone. It seemed that my mother's behavior at the ER had been on the erratic side and the doctors had thought it wise to keep her overnight for observation. She hadn't cared much for this decision, had fought it so adamantly that despite the alcohol in her system, she'd been sedated, so my daddy said. He had dark circles under his eyes, blood stains on his shirt and looked haggard and beaten up. Overiding his objections, Nana made coffee and more grilled cheese sandwiches, insisted that he eat, take a hot shower, and go to bed. She would stay overnight, she told him firmly, and would hear no argument - he was too tired to make one anyway and did as he was told. She and I cleaned up the kitchen for the second time, let the dogs out, and said goodnight. Not a word was said about the events of the afternoon, not then and not in the following days. My mother came home the next afternoon and for a time was sober, almost contrite. Weeks later, my daddy sat me down and talked to me about character, how it was formed, how it could be influenced by others, how important it was to maintain. It was, I thought, more of a frail and fraudulent attempt to clear my mother and convict Betty than a lesson in character but I knew better than to argue. More often than not, I was to learn, character comes with flaws.