THE S CLUB

“Well, children what kind of day did you have today?” asked my father.

I spooned the mint jelly on my lamb chops.

“Absolutely delicious!” exclaimed my father with of commercial caliber enthusiasm.

My mother gazed up at him. “I am glad that you like them,” she said. She then gave him a quick unhappy smile.

“Well, little Missy,” continued my father, “what happened today in school? ”

“Oh nothing,” she grumbled, “same old shi...” she began.

Mother put down her fork. “Madge!”

“Stuff,” finished Madge. She smiled and forked her broccoli.

“And Edmund?”

“I hate shop,” I said.

“Why?” he pursued.

“Because I am terrible at it. We are making these little motor things. You know a little rod with a cooper wire wrapped around it. And it’s placed on a wooden stand.”

“Doesn’t sound so difficult.”

“Well it isn’t really. Except it is me making it,” I said full of self-rancor. “It comes out all crooked, even when I measure and use a vice and everything.”

“So,” said my Father with a snotty sangfroid. ”So what? Shop isn’t everything. I was terrible at it myself. They give shop for guineas and spics can learn something.”

“So,” I said, “that’s all the more reason why I should master it.”

“Your forte’ is English anyway,” he said. “Nobody is perfect at everything.”

“J.F.K. is,” I said.

“John Fitzgerald Kennedy, my lovely son, is good for nothing. He is totally ruining the entire business climate of this country with his radical liberal bull.”

“John Kennedy is great. Dad, you just don’t like him because he has a full head of hair and makes more money than you do.”

Even I was shocked at my own remark. I had been raised to be in total fear of Father but something so adolescent, frustrated and true ignited my tongue.

Father pondered that for a second. It was funny and it was true. He could have gone either way. His eyes stared directly at me. ”That is the shittest, tritest remark, I have ever heard spoken at my dinner table.” He cleared his throat. “But it’s true. He laughed. “I hate that son of bitch though. I can’t believe that I hate fellow Harvard man, but I do.”

When he laughed, we all could laugh. And laughter seems to hold things together.

“You children just don’t know what a crook and liquor runner his father was. John Kennedy is simply a product of the Irish Mafia.”

“I just think,” said my sister, “that he talks funny.”

“I thought,” I said to father, “that the Mafia was Italian.”

“Oh it is,” he said. “It is just that the Irish have one too. While the Italians are just street hooligans, the Irish gangsters run for political office. Run the fire and police. The Teamsters. They are legal and illegal. They have rackets and embezzle.”

“Well we are Irish,” spoke up Madge, “they are on our side.”

“Well, dear, your mother is part Irish,” said Father hoping that the whole thing would be dismissed as that.

“You see, if I have anything to do with it,” piped in my mother, “we are lace Irish, not the shanty Irish.”

“Well what’s the difference?”

“The difference is,” contemplated my father, “is that one kind of Irish takes graft, while the other...”

“Graft?” asked Madge.

“Pays people off,” I said.

“And another type of Irish won’t accept graft because it is a mortal sin.”

“Do “Lace Irish” use Baleek China?” asked Madge.

“Absolutely,” said Mother smiling.

“Then what are the Kennedys?”

“They are worse,” said my Father. ”They drink tea from Balleek chinaware and not only do they accept graft, they pay it out as well.”

“Well, I still like Kennedy,” I said sticking to my guns.

“He is ruining this country,” said Father. “The quality of life is disintegrating. The coloreds are ruining the cities. You can’t walk the streets of New York anymore.”

“Randolph,” said my Mother, ”when could you walk the streets of New York?”

“Well when we were first married, New York was much safer.”

“Well that was because we were first married and everything was different then.”

“Of course it was. You could live near Columbia And not be scared for your life, every time you went out to get groceries.” He cleared his throat. ”Simply because there weren’t so many drug addicts then.”

“Oh my,” said mother wonderfully sentimental. ”We had such a wonderful time then. I used to go to St.John the Divine in the afternoon because it was just so cool in the summer. Yes,” she said to herself, ”it was wonderful then.”

The way adults talk about the past makes it seem that there is very little in the future.

My mother bite into her lamb chop. She agrees with Father that the meat was quite good even though it did cost an arm and leg.

“Hey Dad, do you know when I can get a horse? I mean, if the plastic shoe thing still happens,” asked Madge suddenly out of the blue.

“I don’t know dear?” he said. ”And please don’t ask me anymore times this week.”

“Can I ask next week then?” she pursued.

“We’ll see,” he said,” we’ll see.”