J. Powers - Suitable Accommodations - An Autobiographical Story of Family Life - The Letters of J. F. Powers, 1942-1963

Tomorrow Thanksgiving dinner at Madge Egan’s (Fr Egan’s mother); Fr Garrelts and others to be present. We will all be in our truest American manner. I intend to make heavy references to the Pilgrim fathers (I’m sure Fr Egan has never thought of them as anything but heretics). […]

I have a story in process about an old man who thinks that it is too bad, feeling the way he does about his wife, who has died. If we were married, I would better know how he really feels. I will have to follow my instincts, as it is. I hope my mother comes this week, so that you can come next or next or both. She is interested to know about you. She has a better perspective than perhaps you do on what it means when I say I intend to marry a girl. She knows I have never said it before. I am sure you will love her — I do not say that loosely or hopefully — I know you will. What is best in me I have from my mother, not that my father is second-rate. No, I mean that what faculty — admittedly underdeveloped — I have for listening and keeping my mouth shut I have from her. That is one of the very big things I see in you that I love and realize the absolute unique beauty of. […] Now it is almost time to put on my silly white suit and leave. I love you and am sorry if I am getting tiresome with that line. […]

Jim

BETTY WAHL

November 25, 1945

Dear Elizabeth Alice of the Sea Green Eyes,

I am taking my Royal (on loan from Egan Enterprises) in hand and endeavoring a reply to your wonderful letter rec’d this day. My mother is just to my left, on the davenport, mending things and sewing on buttons. She says, quote: “You certainly have been neglected.” We are running out of buttons (myself, I am a plain dealer and use safety pins). […]

It was most encouraging to hear that your father has been all those things. It is the first time I’ve felt good about him. You see, I know from experience I never have trouble with people who have been hoboes and so forth. Now I am watching out for your mother: a schoolteacher, whoa. […]

Now, because you have asked for it, I will tell you about me. I was born of poor and honest parents, Irish on my father’s side (County Waterford, the southernmost part of Ireland, where the name Powers, if you look it up in the Ecclesiastical Directory , is still the biggest one there, bishops, college presidents, bartenders, all have it), but his mother’s name was Ansberry and she came from Liverpool, and I do not know if that means there’s some English, but I think not, as Liverpool, a slummy place, is highly Irish and she was most definitely Catholic.

She was the woman who ruined my father’s life, I hold. He supported her instead of accepting offers he had to go to Europe and study piano (he was considered a prodigy about Jacksonville — where I was born, in Illinois — practicing the piano nine and ten hours a day, working in a music store as a player of any and all music sold there at the age of twelve. We have some of his old exercises yet; they are pages more black than white with notes). It is another curse of the Irish to throw themselves away on an aging mother or not to marry because there isn’t enough money coming in and brother John, who should undertake his share, is a first-class bastard. I am not making it up: my father had a brother John. I remember him as a tall, dark man with button shoes, gold teeth, and a large brown handful of silver from which he would select a quarter, say, and give it to you. Ten days later you would hear that he was in Boston or Spokane. He wore serge, and sometimes I think I have some of him in me.

My dad’s father came here from Ireland, the land of saints and scholars, and worked in the gashouse in Jacksonville. I know very little of him, except that he was probably taken in as my father was after him. Many children, seven or eight, and a large dog who would bite the wrong people by the name of “Guess.” What’s his name? I remember my father telling me as a child, people would ask. “Guess,” they would reply. Joke. So much for my father’s side: many unmarried children on that side, maiden literary aunts like my aunt Kate, who read to me as a child; my aunt Mame, still alive, who is being forced out of the house she did huge washings in for fifty years; my aunt Annie, dead, a Catherine of Russia type, a real dictator and organizer, who ran a grocery store with an iron hand and who would give her customers hell every morning if they didn’t order enough over the telephone. She liked me. In fact, they all liked me, because I liked them. My sister never did: she thought they were kind of crude. They were.

Turning to my mother’s side, we leave the Holy Roman Catholic Church and enter the Old Time Religion, the Methodists.6 Her mother is now living in Chicago with my father and mother and is now senile, the widow of three or four husbands, a dear old lady who should never have left the small town. She tries to go to the Methodist church in our neighborhood in Chicago, and everyone is nice, the minister shakes her hand after services, but they don’t sing right. She wants everybody to join in, and they let one woman do most of it. My mother’s father was a farmer and painter; we have some of his work, which isn’t bad at all (I’ll show it to you when we go to Chicago together). He, her father, had nice hair, just like mine, my grandmother thinks. My mother went to college, a rare thing in our families, and did a little gentle sketching. She is a gentle woman.

My father had dance bands before they were married (he had them to make money; I think he hated that kind of music) and worked for Swift and Company. He became a manager and got the idea he was a sure-enough business genius. It was dispelled in 1934. Since that time, until the war and he got this paper-shuffling job, times were tough. Now he takes pride in this job which must go the way of all war efforts. It is too bad he becomes engrossed in secondary things. I subscribed him to Time . He likes it. If he sits down at the piano now (which is all out of tune), he fumbles around, and it hurts him worse than anyone. So he gets up and sits down to Time [magazine]. The American Tragedy. I think I see what happened. I am determined it shall not happen to me. Help me.

I went to the public schools first, had my first fights for girls, which I won incidentally, and in the third grade transferred to Catholic schools when we moved to Rockford. So on to the seventh grade, when I went back to the public school — it was the day of the purple and green felt hats and “Did you ever hear Pete go tweet, tweet, tweet on his piccolo?” You were six years old then, I was thirteen, smoking cigarettes and kissing girls after school. A year later I found out about masturbation. A year later a Franciscan came to the Catholic school, where I was making my first retreat, and made us all as clean as a hound’s tooth. I submerged myself in the athletic life of the place. I had a fight and got my nose broke. I became a basketball star. I also played football. At the end of the year we decided to have a yearbook (my senior year), and I was not chosen to be editor. I did not want to be and, if I had, could not have been. Already I was beginning rather to want to be the dark horse in any enterprise, someone with no office or commitments who would do something daring or impossible and save the day. It is funny now.

I graduated and went to Chicago, where my family had been living for a year. It was hell after Quincy, after leisurely beers (we drank a lot of beer for high-school boys in Quincy), and nothing more serious than typing class or Washington Irving, the only writer I liked then that I could like now, I think. A couple of times I was almost a success. I always wasn’t, though, when they finally hired somebody. I went to a public school (college) and quit at the half year to drive a big Packard for a bastard through the South and Southwest. I stayed in dollar hotels, a different one nightly, except for weeks in San Antonio and El Paso, when I would drink too much. I was put in jail in San Antonio, picked up one morning when I was returning from taking the car to be washed. They held me for a half hour when they found out I was from Chicago. The bastard I worked for was at the St Anthony Hotel, the biggest and best, but they preferred to call Chicago. When they decided to let me go, I told them I might be about on the next day and if they didn’t have anything to do then — again — they could pick me up again. For this I got the rest of the morning in jail. It was my first jail: scrawlings on the wall, two racetrack touts not telling the truth about themselves when I was so naive as to ask, cold white macaroni on a sallow tin plate. Across the border from El Paso is Juarez. Here I lost my virginity. I was nineteen.