Dark Whispers & Other Stories

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When I was five, my grandmother died, quite young, of heart disease. On that day, for the first and only time in my life, I saw my grandfather cry. This took a great and abiding toll on me. I have never forgotten how he looked, or sounded.

After the graveyard, and on the way back to an aunt’s house where hams and beef roasts and pies and cakes and cookies would be shared in a sort of communion, my father stopped at a drug store and took me inside and bought me a nickel fountain Coke and said I could have anything I wanted. He must have seen me watch my grandfather cry, and thus wanted to woo back laughter and shoo away a little boy’s pain and fear.

That day I bought my very first comic book. It was an issue of Superman. I know all this happened exactly as I recall it because, just before his own death, my father talked about that day. He said that rather than go into my aunt’s, I stayed in the car and read and reread the Superman. He was kind enough to bring me treats from inside. He said that he and my mother had been worried about me. I’d borne my grandmother’s death in commendable style — probably I didn’t have a clue as to what was going on — but that when I saw my grandfather cry, I clung to my father’s trouser leg and began shaking and crying myself. I suppose, without quite understanding the process, I began to realize that even the strongest and most stoical among us is susceptible to loss and grief. (He was never the same again, my grandfather, and died, still a strapping man, not many years later, “a pore lonesome wife-left feller” in the way with which Nelson Algren chose to open A Walk On the Wild Side.)

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