Talking through the Door

JOSEPH AWAD

from “A Novena for My Mother”

Flashing on my window through the night,

Her waving spectre followed when we went

To live with Sithee. Cramped and recondite,

That third floor room was never meant

For dad and me. There was a curtained door

To a roof and a clothesline’s creaking din.

On stormy nights the wind would howl and roar

And pound on the door like someone wanting in.

Cold with fear, I’d slip from early bed,

Camp on the stairs to hear the radio’s drawl

Or worried parlor voices (what they said

Of mother chilled) or Sithee, in her shawl,

Rocking my sister, shushing her bleating cries,

Crooning, in Arabic, soulsweet lullabies.

Crooning, in Arabic, soulsweet lullabies,

(Her long black hair, unbound, mysterious)

Hugging us, baking us hubbus, cakes and pies,

My grandmother opened house and heart to us.

Father’s bachelor brothers became my brothers.

Aunt Anna, whose love would fasten us together,

Quit her job to be our “second mother.”

New Year’s eve brought snow and bitter weather

And the party at Aunt Mary’s where we sleighed

On frozen coal hills while the grownups sang

And laughed and polkaed. How the accordions played!

And when the curfew blew and the church bells rang

In the falling snow, I wept. But at my ear

My father whispered, “She’ll be home next year.”

That summer, I went with cousins and Uncle Frank

Picking huckleberries. Blazing days were here.

Sithee and Charlie showed me how to yank

The tenderest grape leaves from their ghostly groves.

With Aunt Kitty I rode a Trailways in the gloaming

To her Jersey in-laws’ farm, where swimmers dove

From a swinging tire. I’d feed the chicks and roam

The butterfly fields. Flash, racing me, would bark.

Hot nights I twisted while the thundering trains

Shook the walls and moaned in the far dark,

The starlost night of “isolation’s” pain.

Back home, the streets, the morning light seemed strange.

Once more I watched the season’s colors change.

On Chestnut Street the trees were towered gold.

My father, faltering, told me he’d arrange

For me to visit mother “before the cold.”

I had made that trip before, then stood outside,

Forbidden to enter, looking up at mother

Through her window. After that endless ride

We could only wave and smile, each to the other.

This time we went inside. We found her room

Where paned October sunlight crossed a hall.

I entered with small steps. Her eyes consumed.

We dare not touch. By a crucifix on the wall,

She lay there lost in cerements of white.

Softly, fondly she asked, “Why don’t you write?”

Memories of Tiger Rag

The house would jump with light and sound.

Melancholy would fly away

When uncle Al and uncle Joe

And their swinging twelve-man band

Rehearsed in Sithee’s living room.

When they rose as one to sway and play

The roaring score of Tiger Rag,

My secret soul would strut and shag.

“Al Awad,” was their billing,

“And his Royal Vagabonds.” Long

Afternoon, at the upright,

Al tinkered, plinked, exploring chords,

Bending an ear to heed a key,

Orchestrating a popular song,

Arranging it in his easy style,

Replaying it with a dreamy smile.

Uncle Joe was a cabinet maker.

He hammered and sawed by day.

By night he rattled and rolled the drums,

Bashing the cymbals with panache.

He crafted the band’s music stands,

Emblazoned on each a double “A”

And a treble clef with a sparkling crust

Sprinkled with Hollywood glitter dust.

When a tympany thundered in our house,

All the kids in the neighborhood

Milled like moths at our front window,

Agog, with Barney Google eyes.

I would king it in the living room,

As any schoolboy would,

Loving their envy, pressed to find

A friendly way to draw the blind.

Those runs, those flights

Make the celebration in my spirit . . .

The shining tuba’s oompah, pah,

The crashing cymbals, the clarinets,

The thumping bass, the rippling race

Of the fingered keyboard (I can hear it);

The blue salute of the saxophones,

The purr and romp of bronze trombones.

Hold that tiger . . . Hold that tiger . . .

Hold that tiger . . .

For My Irish Grandfather

I am stung now with a different shame than then,

That day in front of Kresge’s five-and-ten

When my urchin friends and I ran into you,

Staggering, unshaven, your crushed felt hat askew.

You swooped down with unbounded love to hug me,

Then stopped and rocked in grieved uncertainty.

You must have sensed my recoil, my debate,

Young as I was. (Was it seven or eight?)

Lips tobacco flecked, blue eyes clouded and remote,

You fished in the baggy pockets of your coat

(That coat so oversized

The sleeves fell past your fingertips). Your eyes

Found sunlight. You held up a dime,

(One you had just bummed, maybe) black with grime

And chew tobacco, and tendered it to me.

I ran and left you gesturing helplessly.

They say the whole town knew you, Tommy Dwyer,

That you had a voice like one of heaven’s choir,

That silver voice my mother used to call

Your “sad and tragic downfall.”

In those depression years, in the saloons,

They plied your weakness. One would importune,

“Have another drink Tommy. This one’s on me.”

And another, “Sing us your beautiful Mother Macree.”

Whole seasons you would disappear.

When I’d ask mother why, she would look severe.

“He’s riding the rails,” she’d whisper. “Who knows where?

Let’s pray God’s mother keeps him in her care.”

In laurel time I think of you the more.

That’s when you’d show up at the door.

Mother would argue you to a hot tub.

My father, when you were sobered up and scrubbed,

Would cut your hair and shave you, find you shoes,

And one of his old suits. For a month or two

You’d be a different man. Then you’d be gone

As suddenly as summer moving on.

I wish I could have known you in your heyday,

When your eyes were like the May and every payday

You courted pretty Bridget Rooney

With ballads of the times, all Juney-moony;

Before the years of drudging the coal mines,

Her early death, the booze, the brooding bread lines.

I keep a priceless memory

Of an hour or two you spent with me

When mother left me in your care one day.

You made up games in a grandfather’s way.

I’d run and hide behind the chair.

You’d pretend to look for me everywhere

Til you suddenly spied me. Then you sang,

(How tenderly your tenor rang)

“Peek-a-boo,

I see you

Hiding behind the chair.

Peek-a-boo

I love you

Hiding behind the chair.”

Did you remember, hopping a freight in the bitter midnight air?

The last time I saw you alive we cried.

It was when mother died.

We never knew how you heard the news.

You appeared out of nowhere, like sorrow’s muse.

I sat in the living room all alone

With mother. (She lay as if carved in stone.)

The front door opened slowly, slowly.

You stood there, bowed and bald and holy,

Your felt hat crumpled in your hands,

Your too-big overcoat strangely grand.

You ignored me and moved to the coffin and stood

A long time looking, still as the wood

Of the crucifix above her head,

One with the silence of the dead.

Down our cheeks ran the drops of our shared loss.

You made a gigantic sign of the cross,

Shouting, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph have mercy

On my darling, my girl, my little girl . . .

She forgave me all my sins

She took me in

When I had nowhere to lay my head.

She’s with Christ and his angels and saints.” You spread

A kerchief over your nose and blew it.

Then (young as I was, I knew you’d do it)

You started to sing.

Your voice had the lilt of an angel’s wing.

“My wild Irish rose . . .

Sweetest flower that grows . . .”

From dining room, kitchen, from the street outside,

Family and neighbors gathered, wet-eyed.

“You may go everywhere,

But none can compare . . .”

My memory fails here, and my art,

With you singing her beauty, your hand on your heart.

Windows

From the sanitorium’s third floor,

Mother, deathward in her isolation,

Waves through the dormer to her boy below;

Throws kisses which, in retrospect,

Pierce my spirit like pieces of jagged glass.

Framed in the suburban picture window

Like Botticelli angels, my young wife and babes

Wave, throwing me kisses. I wave in return

Through the window of my ’51 Chevrolet,

Backing out of the driveway into . . . now.

By misted casements now I wave to you,

Throwing you kisses,

Watching you tall, on your own,

As you stride resolutely down the front walk

Toward the glittering crystal towers of your dreams.

A thousand brazen windows catch the sunset

In memory’s dusky citiscape. I curse

All of those hard transparent barriers

That separate us from the reach of love.

I want to smash glass.

Aunt Anna

. . . the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,

She stood in tears amid the alien corn . . .

—Ode to a Nightingale

It must have been like landing on a moon,

So alien and so far, it seemed, from the small town

You had never been away from—that March day

We moved into the house in Washington.

The bare parlor floor was piled with crates

And cartons left unopened by the movers,

Precious trove you had transported into exile—

Old linens, pictures, your hand-painted china.

You were sitting in a covered, high-backed chair

Left by the movers near the wide front window

Bereft of blinds or curtains, in full view

Of the naked street, the lamp post, sullen houses.

It was dusklight and the city’s fitful noises

Sounded all the more forbidding in the stillness—

A siren’s scream, a streetcar’s lamentation,

The hoot and chunk from nearby railroad yards.

I see you under that high, old-fashioned ceiling,

Looking small and lost, huddled in the shadows,

Outlined by the window’s dying light

Like a figure in a Rembrandt etching, crying.

Did you panic at keeping house for your four brothers?

At raising two small children for the eldest?

Did you weep for Sithee’s grave untended? Friends,

Girlhood dreams you left behind in Shenandoah?

My sister and I wept with you, reaching hands

Over the arms of the chair to pat your shoulders,

Feeling urban darkness closing in around us

Like the mystery of how all days, all residences end.

Finally you wiped your eyes, stood up and strode

Through the dark house to the kitchen. Piece by piece,

You lovingly unpacked your dishes, your mind made up

To make this empty, friendless place a home.

For My Lebanese Grandfather

Blue brilliance of sunlight

On the sidewalk in front of Sithee’s house.

Is it Sunday morning?

My father is speaking

To the man I know is his father.

He is taller, larger than my father.

He wears a dark suit, with a vest,

A gold watch fob

That flashes in the sun.

As my father speaks, his father studies me

With black penetrating eyes.

I am waiting for him to smile.

Jaddu,

This is my only memory of you.

Christmas at Sithee’s

In glorious panoply,

With shining ornaments and colored lights

And icicles of tinsel,

The cedar tree towers

To the parlor ceiling. At its foot

A Lionel train, tiny Pullman windows lit,

Whizzes around a magic track.

For nearly ten years,

Ever since Alex’s death,

(He was the youngest of her seven sons)

She said No to Christmas trees.

Alex’s train was packed away

Deep in the cellar. Now,

Because my sister and I

Are living in her house,

She has relented.

Father whispers, “Go tell Sithee thanks.

Give her a big hug.”