The Great Migration had driven his grandparents north to Chicago—hog butcher to the world, city of big shoulders—where they elbowed their way through immigrants and ethnic whites for jobs. They endured the hatred and violence, the refusal of housing, until they finally found steady homes and secured jobs as meatpackers and textile workers. But the city was simply too big, it exhausted them, the elbowing too sharp; they were gentler people, kinder people, so they moved again, this time to Omaha. They had relatives there. The city was smaller, quieter, and far different from the rat-racy, pushy-pulley experience that had nearly overwhelmed them when they arrived in that stormy, husky, brawling city where every day had been a scrimmage. And there they stayed. 

Omaha

Just off the kitchen, next to the pantry, after returning his tools to the earthen cellar, Earl—father of three, grandfather of seven—died ascending the back stairs. Prior to turning on the Zenith to watch the baseball, he had spent the morning on the back porch mending a slice in the screen door—the flowers in the yard were beautiful but attracted no end of bees. Alice, taciturn maker of pies, directed Earl to do something about it. He obeyed. He cut a patch from an old screen he had taken from the cellar and unwoven four long aluminum strands from it. He then carefully threaded the patch over the slice in the screen door, with a dexterity similar to what his wife, Alice, had done at the clothing mill many years before, prior to their unhappy marriage. 

***

With a closetful of his grandfather’s clothes Alex, Chicago native, the spit and image of Earl (though taller) was well prepared for the swing dance revival in the 1990s. Among the items was a debonair black cashmere coat, worn at the cuffs but a perfect fit. Alex had its torn gray lining replaced with red so that whenever he took it off with a flourish (it was always taken off with a flourish), he looked like a magician. His grandmother was dismayed. She couldn’t understand why on earth he would trouble to pack all those musty things and pay good money for an enormous suitcase from Dillard’s, the fanciest store in Omaha, when he could easily afford brand new clothes made for young people, and when there were plenty of perfectly good suitcases in the attic. The underlying truth was that she did not appreciate Alex perpetuating, indulging, his grandfather’s memory; to her the suitcase was a lavish urn and the clothes his revered ashes, and she had never cared much for him. After more than sixty years of marriage she confessed that given the chance to do it all again she would have ignored that clever smart-dressing fast-talking little brown man (he was good four inches shorter than her) and kept on walking toward her job as a seamstress at the perfectly respectable clothing mill that didn’t mind hiring a colored girl as long as she worked hard and was light-skinned, and also genuinely appreciative of the favor that the manager was doing her. 

It wounded Alex to hear her say that about the grandfather whom he revered but he attributed it to her grief, an attempt to distance and diminish her loss. They may have had problems, Alex thought, what married couple doesn’t? But, boy-oh-boy, they sure did make some beautiful children. 

Alex’s mother Delores and his Uncle Jack (he hated his given name; Leonard) were both phenomenally, cartoonishly good-looking, with dimples and hazel eyes. Born just eleven months apart they maintained a bond more like identical twins, and they were equally unlucky in love. Perhaps that is what led them to drink, frequently and copiously, that they were secretly in love with each other and knew that no one would ever understand them and their singular, uncanny bond. They punished themselves with spirits for their irresistible, unnatural affection. When Uncle Jack died from his inability to love anyone else, manifested through Johnnie Walker, Alex’s mother hurriedly followed, drinking as speedily as she could so that she might catch up to her darling, irreplaceable, older brother. Earl and Alice attended the funerals, just three years apart, their single living child between them as each was lowered into the grave. Did they wonder if their children died so young because their parents left them to fend for themselves in the big city? Between Chicago and Omaha Alex imagined them as citizens of divergent worlds, speakers of different languages, venerating opposing customs. 

Jack Jr, a useless simpleton, wildly vulgar and inexplicably ugly, inherited Uncle Jack’s jazzy clothes, wrecked Jack’s beautiful Cadillac convertible, and also died willfully before his time. Alex, conversely, was born after his—he had an abiding affection for watches and suits and movies that went out of fashion before the Korean War, and for baseball, the game which he was taught by his grandfather and has the oldest fans among the four major American sports. 

The twice yearly visits by his grandfather had always included days with his father at Wrigley Field, home of the Chicago Cubs for whom they annually and hopelessly rooted; a never ending march of failure so unbroken that Grandfather and father died, and Alex acquired two advanced degrees and moved to three cities before the Cubs finally won the World Series. He still has the baseball glove that his grandfather gave him one bright sunny Christmas long ago. It is too small to fit his adult hand and after so many moves it is irretrievable.  
 

***

Pleased with his work Earl wiped his brow; an Omaha summer can conjure a powerful thirst. The lever handle on the Kelvinator clicked loudly as he opened it and removed a cold beer, then he walked into the living room and turned on the color television that sat opposite his favorite chair. As the TV warmed and the Royals slowly appeared he felt disappointingly, unexpectedly weary. Perhaps, he thought, I should go up to my bedroom and have a lie-down, I’m no spring chicken, he thought, as he struggled to lift himself from the chair. He walked back to the kitchen, replaced his unopened Falstaff in the refrigerator, and began to climb the stairs. Yet his heart, perhaps regretful that he had not been a better husband, disappointed that he had relied more on his charm and wit than on prudence and frugality, rebuked him, loading his legs to twice their weight and compressing his smokeless pink lungs in a vise of reproach, lightening his head to a swirling, dissolving vapor that reconjured the peacocking pride he felt when he was just five years old and read aloud from the newspaper “Wright Brothers Fly at Kitty Hawk” to the eager applause of adults. It was at that spectral moment he had anointed himself special, gifted, charmed, knowing that he would go far because “that boy” they said, “he’s a comer”.

“Don’t stay up there too long, Earl,” Alice said, “there’s other things that need doing.”