My parents asked if I would go to Charlie’s house at lunchtime to make him lunch and keep him company, as Peggy had to work and their kids were grown and had moved away. We all lived in the same Bronx neighborhood, with the McCarthy household five or six blocks from school. I said I would do it. I was the kind of kid who was at ease talking with adults, and Charlie was something of a hero to me because of his part in the Irish struggle for independence. So I would race up to their place near Crotona Avenue every day. I guess I was in the 7th grade when I began spending lunchtime with Charlie, and I think the arrangement went on for a year or so.

I made him Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup, carefully adding the exact equivalent amount of water to the contents of the can as though any miscalculation would spoil the culinary miracle, with two pieces of buttered, sliced toast and a hot cup of Lipton’s tea to go along with it. I remember that when Lipton’s introduced the “Flo-Thru” tea-bag, it was treated by the grown-ups in my parish as a scientific breakthrough on a par with the development of the polio vaccine or the flight of Sputnik. My greatest achievement, however, was making friends with Blackie, the McCarthys’ ferocious dog. I had always been afraid of him, and of dogs in general, and that had been one of my most serious misgivings about taking on this assignment. But as soon as Blackie realized I was the source of a daily dish of food and a walk around the block, I assumed most-favored person status in his world.

I don’t remember, and actually I don’t think Charlie told me, much about his wartime experiences. It’s certainly possible that his vision problems were the result of combat. We talked about Kevin Barry, but Charlie didn’t have much to say on the subject. He and Barry had just met a few times, and Charlie probably didn’t know much more than what was in the song. For me, it was enough to know someone who knew Barry. History had reached out and touched me.

Charlie smoked Camels, one after another, even while eating. His fingers were brown, and everyone in his life worried that he would burn the house down. He lit the cigarette by a process of trial and error, waving the match in front of the cigarette in his mouth, and I was always relieved when the tobacco finally ignited and he shook out the match’s small flame.

Curley’s was burned to the ground by a careless smoker, many years after the heyday of the Irish in Rockaway. The place that had seemed so magnificent to me as a child might as well have been constructed of ice-cream sticks. Just a pile of rickety old wood waiting to go up in flames. The building I grew up in also burned to the ground around the same time, leaving a host of homeless ghosts wandering the streets and beaches of my past. I am careful around fire.

I sometimes wonder if, when Curley’s burned down, stately Atlas, patient guardian of our summer days, found himself revealed amid the smoldering, charred wood, still genuflecting somberly, but now with the weight of the world a bit lighter in the open air, the balmy spray of ocean giving him his first taste of new-found freedom.

 

Terence Winch, from the book That Special Place: New World Irish Stories (Hanging Loose Press, 2004).

Website: http://www.terencewinch.com/

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