Once we bought the house on Wood Street we commuted to Fall River just about every weekend, and I would usually get in two good days of work before driving back. The house was taking shape. Well, becoming a little more livable, but for quite some time it was roughing it at best.
One weekend during the summer of 1974 we were in Rhode Island visiting Ray and Mal, and we went to Sung Harbor to see Jay and Gailyn on the boat, although I was loath to ‘darken’ my father‘s door in Jerusalem. Jay was working on something as usual, in the long run working on the boat was probably part of the enjoyment … for his sake I hope so. In any event, he cut his hand. Quite a deep cut, but it didn’t bleed. Some milky or colorless liquid exuded, but no red blood. A few weeks later he was diagnosed with leukemia.
Life! Guess things had just been going too well. Jay did well for a while, he was in remission, he was out, it was a roller coaster. After one particularly good report I had brought a bottle of champagne to the hospital to celebrate. Kind of against the rules, so I took it into the bathroom to open it discreetly. That top blew off with a pop so loud it sounded like a gun shot, and it ricocheted off of the walls while I got a full champagne shower. Very discrete! One little harbor of hope in a sea of bad news. It wasn’t long before he started failing again.
When the lease was up on the Newington townhouse early 1975, rather than renewing for a third year we moved most of our belongings to Wood Street, and then rented a horrible, tiny, crappy, one bedroom, third floor walk-up on Arnold Street in Hartford (ADDRESS #15). It was close to work. We weren’t there often or for long.
By then we were commuting to the hospital in Meriden, or was it New Britain, just about every night after work and to Berlin when Jay was at home. By the end of June we gave up that apartment and moved to Worthington Ridge (ADDRESS #16). They had plenty of room. The handwriting was on the wall, and I needed to be there.
In August more hospital stay … three days, five, eight … then the doc said things were looking up. But one night with the three of us there – Gailyn, Billy, me – as the time for our departure approached, Jay looked at us and said, “I see the three of you here each night, wasting your lives.”
We got a call at five o’clock that morning. It was a few days before his thirty-third birthday, and he was gone. There was a big issue about autopsy; I said no, the doctors had had their chance when he was alive. It wasn’t my call, but Gailyn respected my wishes. Then the doc called back and talked with Gailyn … she caved. I was livid. But it was too late; the body had already been embalmed. The Universe rules!
My father and I had been incommunicado for over a year. Nonetheless, it was then my duty to call him and tell him that his son was dead. Martin, Gailyn’s father, said he would call, but no, I had to do it. The first thing that Dad said was, “How can that be. He’s an Edwards. We all have good red blood.” Oh, Dad, get a clue. I tried to get him to ride up with the Lavallees, but he insisted on driving himself. In the meantime, Martin and I went to pick out the coffin and make the arrangements.
There was to be no wake, no viewing – just a family service at the grave, and the next day a memorial service at the Congregational church on Worthington Ridge. When my father arrived he wanted me to take him to see the body, but I wouldn’t go. I was being counseled by a few about ‘closure’ but I was firm. For over a year I watched my brother’s losing the battle with that disease, I had picked out his coffin, that was enough closure for me. Martin went with my father. During the family gathering at the house, my father confided in Billy, he was afraid he would never see me again. He beseeched Billy to convince me not to shut him out, and of course I didn’t. He had no one else; he was entirely my burden from that point on.
A few months later, driving home from work in the middle of a blizzard, Billy told me that he had to have a root canal. Such a simple thing, but that sent me over the edge. When I pulled into the driveway he got out of the car, and I took off, out of control. Later I found myself kneeling in knee-deep snow, with my arms around my brother’s gravestone, crying from the deepest darkest depths of my soul. Maybe that was my closure.
At Gailyn’s request we agreed to stay on in Berlin, but we knew that we would be moving to Wood Street in the not too distant future. We weren’t sure when. The house was so big that our second floor rooms, in the second of the two main buildings, were like being in an entirely different house from Gailyn’s master bedroom suite.
Our bedroom overlooked the main entrance, and about a month after Jay died I heard the door a little before dawn. Looking out I saw a man leaving. It was the minister who had officiated at Jay’s graveside and memorial services. Those predawn departures repeated themselves periodically. Yes, I know, we all have to move on. But a month? With the minister?
Gailyn and her parents continued all lovey-dovey with us, but one day when I went down to my brother’s workshop to get a tool or two that I needed to use in Fall River, the lock had been changed. I never asked. That was a very clear message. All of the tools were my brother’s, except for those that had been my father’s, and some even my grandfather’s, but they had made it clear that I was not entitled to anything. Martin didn’t know one end of a screwdriver from the other. Gailyn had also made it clear that she didn’t plan to put a stone on Jay’s grave, and would not have done so had I not gotten a few of Jay’s friends to shame her into buying one.
One of the more influential executives at Carling Electric was a fellow named Leo Kirshner, he was the information specialist who took on the Herculean task of developing a part numbering system, ultimately to be computerized (this the days before PCs), for all of the component parts for all of the little lights and switches. He would work on one switch series at a time, and when it was completed, he would write an in-depth explanation of how the system worked. Being that I was the only person at Carling who could figure out what Leo was talking or writing about, or able to interpret his instructions, I was his fair-haired boy.
Carling had an assembly facility in Brownsville, Texas, and another right across the border in Matamoras, Mexico, and Leo was entertaining the possibility of me being promoted and transferred to Brownsville, so that there would be someone there who spoke his language, so to speak. When he presented this to me I was interested, why not, and in his next breath he asked, “Would I be correct in assuming that if you go to Brownville, Billy would be going with you?“ “Yes, that’s correct.“ “Okay,” he said, “we’ll have a place for him there as well.”
In the end they decided to offer the position to someone who was already functional in Spanish, which I would not be for another twenty-five years. Nonetheless, I had mentioned this to Gailyn, and by changing the facts a little, I created the scenario whereby I had refused the Brownsville job, and Carling let me go; a more gracious way to facilitate our departure from the Ridge. Much nicer than saying – you are a cheap, money grubbing, tool stealing, minister fucking whore, and I don’t want you in my life any more – or words to that effect.
According to my plan, I left Carling a month before Billy did, and spent the time remodeling the bathroom of the house that our friends Kathy and Betty had recently bought. Kathy was also a Carling employee. We had become friendly at work, and she invited Billy and me for dinner one evening, at the apartment that she shared with her ‘roommate’ Betty.
Everything went well, but by the end of dinner an elephant was still in the room, so to speak, until all of a sudden we heard loud motorcycles out in the parking lot. Next there was a knock on the door, and their friend Antoinette – aka ‘Tony’ – stomped in sporting full leather, with two equally butch female companions. Tony growls, “I need a fucking beer!“ Pulls one out of the fridge, downs it in two gulps, crumples the can in one hand, and throws it in the trash while grabbing another.
It may be an old expression, but at the time ‘dropping your beads’ meant ‘coming out’ usually unexpectedly or unintentionally. The four of us were flabbergasted, and after watching Tony silently, we looked at each other and simultaneously cracked up! The ‘bull dyke’ was in the room, the elephant had left the building, and our ‘beads’ were all over the floor, metaphorically speaking.
The four of us were very close friends from that moment on, and Kathy and I have remained friends to this day. That year was 1976, and I did their bathroom in red, white, and blue. We called it the bicentennial bathroom. Once Billy left Carling we moved to Wood Street (ADDRESS #17) in Fall River, with plans to take about a year off to work on the house while collecting unemployment, which we could do from out-of-state through the local office.
Our first Saturday officially living in Fall River, we were shopping at a local supermarket and the lines at the checkouts were all about four or five shopping carts long. We got in a line behind a full cart that had no shopper. After a few minutes this rather robust and ugly bitch (I mean ‘woman’) came pushing and squeezing through to get to her cart. I didn’t budge. “Excuse me! Excuse me!” she says. “Please be a gentleman and let me by!” “It has nothing to do with me being a gentleman, if you would be considerate enough to finish your shopping before you put your cart in the line, you wouldn’t have this problem would you?”
Well, that set her off and she wouldn’t let it go. She kept bitching at me and bitching about me. She picked up one of the little Dell Pocket Books (at one time they were 25 cents) on etiquette and threw it at me, “Here, you should buy this. You need to read this.” I had already said what I had said to say, I didn’t need to say any more. Or so I thought.
She cashed out and I was next, but I noticed that she didn’t leave the store. She waited by the exit to go at it with me some more. On my way out I walked up to her and, speaking very quietly and pleasantly, said, “Just between you and me, my dear, why don’t you go fuck yourself!!!” That really set her off. She was just a sputtering and screaming: You pig! You pervert! And more as I walked out of the store.
That Monday I went to the unemployment office in Fall River to file my claim against Connecticut. There were only two clerks and two lines, each about twenty people long. I went to the end of the right line and read the magazine that I had brought with me. The line kept moving forward slowly, and when I was about the tenth person I looked up to check the progress.
Guess who I saw behind the counter handling the line I was in? Never before had I known the true meaning of the expression … what goes around, comes around! While doing my best to be invisible, I slithered to the back of the adjacent line where, turned to the left with the magazine up to my face the entire time, I inched forward and was able to get waited on without being discovered. Too funny!
That reminds me of an incident at an antiques show in West Hartford, Connecticut. While I was at a table looking at things, Billy tells me to watch out … a woman was moving along the front of all the tables, pushing people out of her way. “Oh really?!?!” When she got to me I didn’t budge, naturally, and when she says, “Excuse me!” I copped an attitude, and told her that there was plenty of room to go behind me.
“You don’t have to be so rude!” she snapped. “And you don’t have to be such an obnoxious broad!” I countered. “How dare you call me an obnoxious broad?!” “Well, you are ‘obnoxious’ … the ‘broad’ part was a compliment.” “Sidney! Sidney!” Her nebbish husband scurried over. “This faggot just called me an obnoxious broad!” “Well, dear, you can be a little pushy at times.” he reminded her meekly. “Fucking faggot! Fruit! Queer! Homo! Fairy!” she yelled as I walked away. I ignored her, but every time I got in her sights she’d assail me with another barrage. She should have been careful; we were at an antiques show for heaven’s sake. The ‘homos’ outnumbered the ‘heteros’ two to one!
Gailyn and I continued to stay in touch, feigning an affectionate relationship, but I had a bug up my ass about a few things. My older niece, Jayna, who was thirteen when Jay died, had a small coin collection with her father. It didn’t amount to two hundred dollars. She was never allowed to have that collection.
Because he didn’t trust his ex-wife, Jay had left everything to Gailyn, knowing that she would do the right thing by his two girls. Over a half million dollars in life insurance alone, and Jayna and Juli never saw one cent. All they got was the dependent Social Security benefit. Stories one hears many times, all so typical in the aftermath of a death, I‘m almost ashamed to relate them.
Finally I decided to push the envelope a bit, and told Gailyn that I wanted to set up a drapery workroom in Fall River; could I come to Connecticut and pick up the equipment? It was, after all, just gather dust in her basement. It was, after all, purchased with my money. She thought it over for a week, and then refused. That was the proverbial last straw. I wrote her one of my eloquent letters, elucidating the issues, telling her exactly what I thought of her, and reaming her a new butt hole in the process. That was the end of Gailyn.
That year of 1976 a lot of progress was made on the house. The interior of the original 20’ by 20’ cabin was finished, keeping the open plan with a comfortable living area in the back half of the space, a dining area in one corner, all carpeted in a very deep chocolate brown thick cut pile. The ceiling was done in white wood paneling, with two large roughhewed wood beams stained dark.
Opposite the dining area I built a rather unique room divider about six feet high, in the style of a spaced board fence in a medium wood stain. It screened the gas space heater in the corner utility space, created a ‘V’ shaped nook with hearth for the Franklin fireplace and, at the dining area end, had a bar big enough for two stools, with the back accessible from the kitchen.
The back patio was enclosed and turned into a den – making the trek to the half bath more comfortable – with sliding glass doors and a potbelly stove. Once we built a coal fire in the potbelly, and that thing glowed bright red … we thought it was going to go into orbit. We heated the whole house primarily with wood, so the stove and Franklin were the main sources of heat – the space heater an auxiliary back-up, keeping the place at an economical albeit nippy 55° when we were not at home. The bedroom in the new addition was finished with closets built in each corner of the back wall, which framed a window and created an alcove for a dresser.
Being three steps up from the living room facilitated the flow of heat from the Franklin to the bedroom. A coat closet was built in the hallway, masking the bedroom door and providing a little extra privacy. An exterior door was installed at the front. I remember that project well, no sooner did I get the big door-sized hole cut into the side of my house, when it started snowing! An outside porch was built in the 90° angle of the ‘L’ creating the front entrance. A bathtub and shower were installed in the space allocated for the full bath, but the remainder of the bathroom was never completed by me.
At one time on Wood Street I decided to raise chickens, and dragged an old outhouse over from the cabin across the street, which I set on cement blocks to use as a coop. I fenced in a pen off of the back, then cut out a small opening and built a ramp for the hens to get to the chicken yard.
At first I had all Rhode Island Reds and Leghorns, which were good layers, but then at a farm auction I bought two beautiful Bantam hens. Not much of a farmer, I didn’t know the roosters are the pretty ones, until I was awoken one morning at dawn. Once was enough, I had that noisy little cock for lunch … he didn’t amount to much more than one chicken salad sandwich.
One day I watched from the window, as Billy herded the hens and the one remaining rooster into the coop for the evening. There was a panel to cover the hen door, but it could only be latched from the inside. Billy got all of the birds in, put the panel in place, but by the time he went around front to enter and latch it, the rooster has knocked it open and the birds were all back in the pen.
This scenario repeated itself three times, and finally Billy had had enough. When he reentered the pen he was carrying a big stick, and the first thing he did was give the rooster one hell of a whack. It fell over and didn’t move, apparently dead. Yet once the hens were all back inside, the rooster came to and wobbled up the ramp like a drunk. When that rooster started crowing at dawn I didn’t eat him, we dropped him off in the woods near a chicken farm.
In addition to chickens I bought an incubator and quail eggs, and hatched myself a whole quail family to add to the farm theme. The plan was to raise them to sell, but that is as far as it got. They were too small to be contained by the chicken wire, so they very quickly moved to the woods. No doubt they found a lot of grubs and whatnot to eat; until they became part of the food chain – foxes were always lurking about the chicken coop. One year I bought a goose, and fattened it up for Christmas dinner.
My favorite though was my Khaki Campbell ducks. They were beautiful, quite wonderful creatures, and each produced one egg a day – duck eggs are bigger and more flavorful than chicken. I put a kids’ plastic wading pool in the pen for them, and once the stockade fencing went up I let them have the run of the yard. Then I bought three baby Campbells to raise, which were doing quite well until one got in the pool and couldn’t get out, and then exhausted herself trying to stay afloat.
When I found her she was half drowned, so I rushed her into the house and placed her on the oven door wrapped in a towel, with the heat on low to keep her warm. Then I alternated between giving her drops of scotch and mouth-to-bill resuscitation (seriously) but she never made it. The other two grew up hale and hearty, and before long we had four adult female Khaki Campbells roaming the yard. Every morning they’d be at the sliding glass door of the den, waiting for food … until one of the kids left a gate open, and the dogs got in and killed them. I was heartbroken, and lost interest in the whole farmyard venture after that.
Jay’s two girls, Jayna and Juli, then 14 and 12 respectively, started spending one or two weekends a month with us, and then practically the whole summer of 1976. Billy of course had siblings their age, and a few of the neighborhood boys were hanging around much of the time as well. Naturally! Talk about the lazy hazy crazy days of summer … that one was a blast. Ray and Mal visited us a lot; they called us ‘East Bay’ as we were on the east side of Narragansett Bay. Those two were always quick with the nicknames.
One day they showed up with a 12’ aluminum John boat, which they had bought at a yard sale. Although they never actually said so, it was apparently a gift for us as they left it and never wanted it back. Billy earned the title of ‘Mr Picnic’ because he would pack some fantastic feasts, and we’d be off on the pond LAKE in the boat, rowing to a distant secluded shore.
Or we’d pile the station wagon full of kids for a day at a beautiful secluded pond that we had discovered way out in the woods, with a rope hanging from a tree over the water. I tried it once and lost my grip, landing in one foot of water and then the E.R. Sometimes we’d go to a beach, there were many from which to choose. Evenings we were often off to a drive-in movie or an amusement park. It reminded me of summers as a kid.
We had some friends in Boston, and Newport as well, and were invited to a lot of parties. Once though, we had decided not to go a party one Saturday in Boston – probably because some of those parties bordered on reckless and outrageous – so I told the hosts that my car was having problems, but they nipped that excuse in the bud.
Anthony, a mutual friend in Newport, would be driving up with two others. Fall River was right on his way, and he’d be happy to pick us up. In the end I had to confess that we simply didn’t want to go. Anthony never made it to the Boston. His car went out of control on the highway, there were no survivors.
A single moment, a simple event, an innocuous decision, that not only changed—but saved—two lives.
All good things must come to an end. Ultimately the season changed and Billy and I were coming close to the end of our year’s hiatus – well, my year, his ten months. After getting him situated in a job at a manufacturing firm in East Providence, I started looking for work. Well, ‘started’ makes it sound like the beginning of a process, when in fact it was once again finding the perfect position the first place I looked, and landing the job. The offering was listed in the classifieds, it had been posted by Employment Development in Providence, and applicants were directed to apply there, so I did.
Upon arrival at that office my name was taken, and then I was told to “sit and wait.” I waited and I waited. Any time I tried to rattle someone’s cage I was brushed off, and told to keep waiting. As the wait approached an hour and a half, I left. Then went to a pay phone, and then called that office. I told them that I was looking for a job, and I didn’t have time to waste sitting in their office waiting for someone to get to me. I wanted the job they had listed, all I needed from them was the name, phone number and address. They were all apologies, and told me to please return to the office and they would give me the information straight away. And so they did.
The next day I interviewed for the position of Senior Mail and Supply Clerk, and it was my inventory control experience at the steel factory and Carling Electric that got me hired on the spot, at a wage still higher than what I had ever earned previously. Once again I had responded to only one posting, applied for only one job, and got hired. Career wise, this turned out to be the best move of my life. It was a classic example of being in the right place at the right time, having the necessary skills, and being smart enough to pull it off. I would spend the better part of the next five years with that company.
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