Family Stories

Bananas & Pears

Shoes of Fine Green Velvet

For 30 years her shoes of fine green velvet have been waiting for me to make a decision regarding their fate. Occasionally, and always by chance, I find them in a drawer or at the back of a closet, always when I’ve been looking for something quite else. I take them out of their stiff plastic bag and wonder what to do with them.

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Muscles

Muscles. I grew up with muscles—flexed muscles, tattooed muscles, vein-popping muscles, strained muscles, pulsating muscles, and, eventually, sagging muscles, puny muscles, and no muscles at all. Oh, they weren’t my muscles; they were my father’s.

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Even Across the Sky

Cousin Con and Nancy, who could write across the sky.

In a letter, now crumbling and brown,

Amy Tuckfield, who lived in my mother’s old town,

writes that she had it first from Cousin Con

who claims he got it from Uncle Johnny

who confirmed what they already knew:

that my mother intended to become a writer.

“A writer of humorous stories!” writes Amy.

“Oh, you’ve picked the right job alright.

You’ll be a grand success, says Cousin Con.

You can write whatever you will

and wherever you want, even across the sky.”

My mother never became a writer, not even in the end.

Instead, she had three children, sewed dresses and hems,

kept a journal of bills paid, bills owed, of who needed what and when.

For those of you 

who have made it without any help

who have thrashed thorny bushes and brambles aside

smote wildebeests all on your own

carved your initials in the company door

broken glass ceilings on the utmost floor

I unfold this letter, now crumbling and brown,

from Amy Tuckfield, who lived in my mother’s old town.

Hope Taber

I know so little about you, and yet I know so much. I know that you lived and died. I know about the little wooden chair and the tiny doll—your only toys.

I know about your illnesses, your two older brothers, your heavy-hearted hopeless mother who left you, I know not why; and your stone-souled hopeless father who sent you away, I know not why.

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After the Wake

My father showed up, reluctantly, to Al’s wake, looked around for a few minutes, and went back to his drawing board to draw this (and I believe this qualifies as a family story):

Scott Taber 1990

My Mother’s Parties

Nancy at the Sink: Dishes and Modigliani, 1971

The people down the block are having a party, a loud party with screams, barbeque smoke, and deafening bass notes that rip up the street like jack hammers. Windows rattle, trembling oaks lean dangerously into the parkway, trying to escape the cacophony; the night impatiently awaits the hour of dawn that will see the festive guests stumble into their own far-away beds under the rising sun. I shut my windows against the cool night breeze, draw the thermal drapes, and turn up the air-conditioner to drown out the noise.

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Mrs. Johnson’s Daniel

When I was a child, we had a neighbor named Mrs. Johnson. She was an older woman whose cheeks were crisscrossed with furrows and whose large brown eyes were swathed in swollen layers of transparent flesh that seemed always in danger of popping. People said she was far too straightforward and tall too be a true Southern belle—even an over-the-hill one transported by unprincipled fate to our cold North Shore of Long Island. The only thing everyone was certain of was that she was an opinioned grand dame of a woman who knew how to strike a match when she wanted to melt your icy refuge or wield a machete when she wanted to have a swipe at your defending foliage.

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The Pretend Father

George (left) and my father Scott Taber, 40 years after bumping into each other.

When we were kids, our family’s favorite visitor was soft-spoken man with a contagious laugh and a Midwestern drawl named George W. Booth. His visits, first to our apartment on 38^th Street in Manhattan and then to our house on Woodbine Avenue in Northport, NY, meant that the heavy air of every day would be lifted for the duration of his stay—an excellent reason for my brother, sister, and me to find excuses to get him to stay longer. We knew he liked to eat so we usually offered him food. And when he had had his fill, I’d sit on his lap and stare at him so he’d have no choice but to stay put. Eventually, however, he’d pry himself loose—usually with my mother’s encouragement—and we kids would give up all pretence and resort to begging.

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Claire’s Destiny

Claire Bonar Taber Simek, ca. 1927  

I never knew this young woman. I try to step beyond the sepia finish to meet her, but the barrier is more forbidding than its cracked veneer would suggest. It keeps me at an eon’s length. There’s something sad about this woman. Something defiant, too. I’ve inherited some of her genes—not too many, I used to hope. The string of faux pearls must have been provided by the photographer as was the faux-fur stole, the makeup, the hairstyle, the careful lighting. It must have been an expensive sitting, but I have no idea where she would have gotten the money.

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Letters from My Grandmother

23 North Wallis /Chichester, Sussex England

08 August 8 1916

My Dearest Winnie,

Our darling Paddy was killed in action on July 11^th, the day before Dadda’s birthday. I hope Grandpa, Dadda, James Arthur, Aunt Ansty, Ned Neill and he spent the day in Heaven with our dear ones, R.I. P.

The Chaplain sent me his book and photos and badges of the Sacred Heart that you and I sewed in his clothes to take him safely through the battle. He is now safe from sin and sorrow and my poor heart is broken, although I am proud of my noble hero. For me he lived, and for my little ones he died. God rest his soul.

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Uncle Charlie’s Little Heathen

In 1955, Uncle Charlie, my mother’s older brother, boarded HMS Queen Mary to cross the choppy Atlantic for a month in the states. He and my mother hardly knew one another, as they had not lived under the same roof since having been orphaned some 45 years earlier. Uncle Charlie lived in what was then called Malaya where he was a Christian Brother and teacher. To the rest of the world and to his students, he was known as Brother Bernard.

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Hospital Visit

My father looks around the hospital room—or at least his tiny half on the window side of the curtain—and declares that it looks like a place for babies. He taps on the side of the raised headboard, his emaciated body slumped to the right at a 45-degree angle, his arms bruised, his veins exhausted with needle marks and drugs—every sort of drug designed to calm, placate, deaden, mollify, tranquilize, and neutralize normal bursts of outrage, dissatisfaction, query, protest.

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