Brief background
Dark hair, blue eyes, little Irish-American boy, skinny, sickly, always cold, too quiet-where did the bruises come from this time?
In the dawning days of 1943, they were 17 and 19 (and maybe they’d been lucky up ‘til now). Her name was Kathleen Annarose Brennan, and like eight other girls in her class, her Confirmation name was Cecelia, the patron of the choirgirls who believed in the songs they sang. Bobby Cheevy was the older boy from two streets down who used to tease her when they were children growing up in the little mountain town of Beacon, on the edge of Fishkill near Poughkeepsie, an hour North from New York City by train, a little more by car. The days and years passed in slow chaos, and they were both poor, but good Catholics with a number of siblings each, and the days were free and many. Then there was a day when the teasing stopped, and she was thirteen and had her very first bra passed down from her older sister, and he was fifteen and played baseball with the other neighborhood boys. As the lazy months turned, his silence turned to singing (I’ll take you to your home again…) and the choirgirl was enchanted. Years went by, and he serenaded her under her window after the night shift and drinks with the boys…
And then they began to invite her along. And then…
In 1942, women didn’t have a choice; but Bobby was a good boy, and Bobby had a good job, and Kathleen got a quiet wedding and a pretty ring from Bobby’s savings. They moved to the town-next-door, to Fishkill, barely another town. You wouldn't know there was a boundary unless you looked. Hard. Still, in those days, it was estrangement enough from both their families. They were determined to make it on their own.
They were 17 and 19, and about to start a family.
In 1943, Miniver was born. It was the 22nd of January. A thin film of snow huddled on the ground, slushing for passers-by and hissing under the wheels of their lumbering old car as they pulled into the hospital.
They’d carved for themselves a pretty little fairytale, but like countless millions of poor couples before them, the fairytale ended soon. With a baby at her breast, Kathleen worked two jobs, Bobby kept late hours, and they drifted apart. Bobby made eyes at other women, and Kathleen took to the bottle to calm her nerves and her fears of the things that go bump in the night. Bobby took the train into the City on the weekends, and sometimes wasn’t home two, three nights at a time.
And then there was Miniver.
Poor Kathleen, sharing a bed with whoever her husband hired: he sometimes didn’t bother to wash off the lingering perfume before rolling into bed with her as the sun came up over the mountains. She could smell them; she knew. Poor Bobby, too young to be a father, he looked at his son with a sort of baffled awe, learned to feed him from a bottle, talked to him in the crass language of the streets, sometimes read him stories too old for an infant to comprehend. He was gone more and more, and Kathleen got more desperate.
And then there came a day she learned to quiet her sick boy’s screaming with a quick slap to the face.
And so the years rolled on …
Her boy was scrawny, neglected, smacked around when his mother got drunk or stressed, smacked around by the boys on the street, by the boys at school, sneered at by the girls, tormented by the kindness of his father, by the perpetual absence of his father. Her boy sought refuge in books, the quiet calm of the school library and the public library and even, when he grew older, the library in New York City after saving pocket change for months and taking the train, pretending to chip in for the ticket when he knew the money came out of his father’s pocket. These were rare and precious times. Miniver loved and feared the City, with all its light and noise. He sometimes imagined that if a new King were to be born, like Arthur, he would be born in New York City. He made up songs for the future monarch, and named his knights-himself always among them. Sir Miniver the Bold.
He was physically weak, but bright, hardened by his home life and made wise by the books who were his only friends. He had a basset-hound stare, a body that looked (so he thought) like the poets dying lyrically of consumption, and a grace of word that made his lack of poise almost charming. He was sometimes mothered by the girls, never romanced-which was just as well, because Miniver had a secret.
When he was 14, he snuck into the backyard shed of Dana from down the street. She put his hands on her breasts and put her closed lips onto his and he stood there statuesque and cold, and all he felt was regret that she seemed to want something he could not give her. She was pretty, curly-haired and cherub-cheeked, but he touched her and it was like touching a piece of furniture.
Miniver realized then, with a terrifying shock, that it was her brother he really wished was in the shed with him.
He ran from her in tears, and didn’t stop crying for a long time. The girls avoided him after that. He avoided everyone else more than he ever had.
In December of his 15th year alive in the world, his father negotiated the promise of a job from the Nabisco box factory down by the river. The day Miniver turned 16, he and his suitcase were deposited unceremoniously onto the street, with instructions to stay with his great-aunt Maude, who knew a man who knew a man who could find him a place to stay as soon as he got his first paycheck. So that was how it went. Dear mum and daddy finalized the divorce proceedings less than a week later and went their separate ways-Kathleen towards the warm South, Bobby towards the City. They left their son no forwarding addresses.
Having to work meant dropping school, which Miniver did with both regret and relief. All of a sudden, he had no one beating up on him anymore-neither his mother nor the school boys. His life was the factory and the library and the little room he called his own, with a hot plate and a cot for a bed and a can of beans or soup every night for dinner.
And then he found the bottle. The blessed release his mother had turned to night after night. The sacred substance that brought his books to vivid Technicolor life and sent him soaring and let him laugh or cry so easily and made him feel so alive…
And so the years rolled on.
The hippies came, and Miniver spent evenings with them sometimes. He fit their dress code, and his shyness and peculiar way of fidgeting and flinching from shadows while reciting poetry endeared him to them, but he was perpetually alienated by his lack of practicing romance, and made no true friends. At last when he was his father’s age, a point-blank refusal to sleep with a woman made him effectively an outcast from even the outcasts, and next five years were spent primarily in seclusion. He had the factory and his books and his booze. Sometimes in the tavern he’d read things aloud to the other factory boys, who would bring their girls like his father had, some of them heavy with child. He’d give them beautiful words, beautiful poems, beautiful stories, and sometimes they’d listen, and mostly they’d laugh, and every night he staggered home a lonelier man for all he’d done and seen and wanted.
And so the years rolled on…
In the dawning days of 1943, they were 17 and 19 (and maybe they’d been lucky up ‘til now). Her name was Kathleen Annarose Brennan, and like eight other girls in her class, her Confirmation name was Cecelia, the patron of the choirgirls who believed in the songs they sang. Bobby Cheevy was the older boy from two streets down who used to tease her when they were children growing up in the little mountain town of Beacon, on the edge of Fishkill near Poughkeepsie, an hour North from New York City by train, a little more by car. The days and years passed in slow chaos, and they were both poor, but good Catholics with a number of siblings each, and the days were free and many. Then there was a day when the teasing stopped, and she was thirteen and had her very first bra passed down from her older sister, and he was fifteen and played baseball with the other neighborhood boys. As the lazy months turned, his silence turned to singing (I’ll take you to your home again…) and the choirgirl was enchanted. Years went by, and he serenaded her under her window after the night shift and drinks with the boys…
And then they began to invite her along. And then…
In 1942, women didn’t have a choice; but Bobby was a good boy, and Bobby had a good job, and Kathleen got a quiet wedding and a pretty ring from Bobby’s savings. They moved to the town-next-door, to Fishkill, barely another town. You wouldn't know there was a boundary unless you looked. Hard. Still, in those days, it was estrangement enough from both their families. They were determined to make it on their own.
They were 17 and 19, and about to start a family.
In 1943, Miniver was born. It was the 22nd of January. A thin film of snow huddled on the ground, slushing for passers-by and hissing under the wheels of their lumbering old car as they pulled into the hospital.
They’d carved for themselves a pretty little fairytale, but like countless millions of poor couples before them, the fairytale ended soon. With a baby at her breast, Kathleen worked two jobs, Bobby kept late hours, and they drifted apart. Bobby made eyes at other women, and Kathleen took to the bottle to calm her nerves and her fears of the things that go bump in the night. Bobby took the train into the City on the weekends, and sometimes wasn’t home two, three nights at a time.
And then there was Miniver.
Poor Kathleen, sharing a bed with whoever her husband hired: he sometimes didn’t bother to wash off the lingering perfume before rolling into bed with her as the sun came up over the mountains. She could smell them; she knew. Poor Bobby, too young to be a father, he looked at his son with a sort of baffled awe, learned to feed him from a bottle, talked to him in the crass language of the streets, sometimes read him stories too old for an infant to comprehend. He was gone more and more, and Kathleen got more desperate.
And then there came a day she learned to quiet her sick boy’s screaming with a quick slap to the face.
And so the years rolled on …
Her boy was scrawny, neglected, smacked around when his mother got drunk or stressed, smacked around by the boys on the street, by the boys at school, sneered at by the girls, tormented by the kindness of his father, by the perpetual absence of his father. Her boy sought refuge in books, the quiet calm of the school library and the public library and even, when he grew older, the library in New York City after saving pocket change for months and taking the train, pretending to chip in for the ticket when he knew the money came out of his father’s pocket. These were rare and precious times. Miniver loved and feared the City, with all its light and noise. He sometimes imagined that if a new King were to be born, like Arthur, he would be born in New York City. He made up songs for the future monarch, and named his knights-himself always among them. Sir Miniver the Bold.
He was physically weak, but bright, hardened by his home life and made wise by the books who were his only friends. He had a basset-hound stare, a body that looked (so he thought) like the poets dying lyrically of consumption, and a grace of word that made his lack of poise almost charming. He was sometimes mothered by the girls, never romanced-which was just as well, because Miniver had a secret.
When he was 14, he snuck into the backyard shed of Dana from down the street. She put his hands on her breasts and put her closed lips onto his and he stood there statuesque and cold, and all he felt was regret that she seemed to want something he could not give her. She was pretty, curly-haired and cherub-cheeked, but he touched her and it was like touching a piece of furniture.
Miniver realized then, with a terrifying shock, that it was her brother he really wished was in the shed with him.
He ran from her in tears, and didn’t stop crying for a long time. The girls avoided him after that. He avoided everyone else more than he ever had.
In December of his 15th year alive in the world, his father negotiated the promise of a job from the Nabisco box factory down by the river. The day Miniver turned 16, he and his suitcase were deposited unceremoniously onto the street, with instructions to stay with his great-aunt Maude, who knew a man who knew a man who could find him a place to stay as soon as he got his first paycheck. So that was how it went. Dear mum and daddy finalized the divorce proceedings less than a week later and went their separate ways-Kathleen towards the warm South, Bobby towards the City. They left their son no forwarding addresses.
Having to work meant dropping school, which Miniver did with both regret and relief. All of a sudden, he had no one beating up on him anymore-neither his mother nor the school boys. His life was the factory and the library and the little room he called his own, with a hot plate and a cot for a bed and a can of beans or soup every night for dinner.
And then he found the bottle. The blessed release his mother had turned to night after night. The sacred substance that brought his books to vivid Technicolor life and sent him soaring and let him laugh or cry so easily and made him feel so alive…
And so the years rolled on.
The hippies came, and Miniver spent evenings with them sometimes. He fit their dress code, and his shyness and peculiar way of fidgeting and flinching from shadows while reciting poetry endeared him to them, but he was perpetually alienated by his lack of practicing romance, and made no true friends. At last when he was his father’s age, a point-blank refusal to sleep with a woman made him effectively an outcast from even the outcasts, and next five years were spent primarily in seclusion. He had the factory and his books and his booze. Sometimes in the tavern he’d read things aloud to the other factory boys, who would bring their girls like his father had, some of them heavy with child. He’d give them beautiful words, beautiful poems, beautiful stories, and sometimes they’d listen, and mostly they’d laugh, and every night he staggered home a lonelier man for all he’d done and seen and wanted.
And so the years rolled on…