“Let me tell you about Black Jacques,” my father said. He drew a long breath and took a pull at his beer. He glanced at Grandfather. When he looked back at me, I looked hard into his eyes, and I said to myself, “He’s going to make this up.” May put her hand on my knee and gave it a squeeze.
“Black Jacques,” my father said, “was a clammy. He was a short, fat man with black hair and a black beard. That’s why he was called Black Jacques. He worked hard, when he was sober. You have to give him that,” he said, to the others, turning from me for a moment. “Now, as far as beer goes, he was well known for drinking it, and I imagine that he did make quite a lot for his own use, but he was not in the beer business, and there wasn’t any Leroy Lager, and Black Jacques didn’t hang around with poets and that kind of crowd.”
“Well—” said May.
“All right, all right,” said my father. “In a way he did, I guess. His cronies liked their beer as much as he did, and you will find, Peter, when you grow older, that people start to behave in lots of funny ways when they have too much to drink. Some of them decide that they’re God’s gift to women. Those are usually the ones who are too loaded to get it up.”
“Bert!” said my mother.
“Hmmmmm. How do you know that, Bertram?” asked May.
“Let me speak my piece,” said my father. “Other ones decide that they’re great poets. Those are usually the ones who are too drunk to hold a pencil. So, if you like, you could probably say that Black Jacques hung around with a lot of great poets and famous lovers. So much for that. Now this beer of his—”
Grandfather snorted.
“If you want to get technical about it,” said my father, “he did put up some beer in bottles, but this wasn’t any sort of real business. It was just a guy brewing some beer so that he could drink it with his friends. And these poems that keep coming up, they were just some obscene—”
Grandfather had been eating throughout my father’s talk, contributing only the one snort noted above. He was passionately devoted to the fried clam. He ate them slowly, with his fingers, as we all did, for that was the only effective way to eat the clams he cooked, which crunched spectacularly and were likely to snap in two and fly off the table if you tried to cut them or stab them with a fork. Every time I fry up a batch of clams now, following Grandfather’s instructions, and sit down to eat them, I take on his single-mindedness. I want to eat through that plate undisturbed, undistracted, undiverted. If Grandfather was asked a direct question while he was eating, we would have to wait until he was between clams for an answer, and even then it would be reluctant and brief. Now, he stopped with half a clam in his hand and half in his mouth, and he said, smiling, with his skin crinkled at the edges of his eyes, “They were great.” He meant that to be all he would say, but before he could take another bite of the clam, a chuckle took control of him, and he paused again. “Great,” he repeated.
“That’s a matter of opinion,” said my father. “Anyway, it was Henry Leroy, my grandfather, who wound up having to support Black Jacques, and in fact you could say that he had to work from the time he was a boy to support his father’s habits, and what did his father do to thank him? He—”
“That’s enough, Bert,” said Grandfather, very quietly, as he might have told me that he had seen a crab when we were rowing slowly in and out among the grassy islands in the flats.
A silence followed. I looked down at my plate and let my eyes drift out of focus, blurring the food into an unappetizing lump. May ran her hand up and down my thigh and now and then gave me a little pat, as if to say, “Chin up. This won’t last long. It’s part of growing up.”
“Well, anyway,” said my father after a long while, turning to me again, “the point is that Black Jacques isn’t anybody to look up to.”
He stopped. I waited to find out why Black Jacques wasn’t anybody to look up to, but my father seemed to think he had said all he needed to say.
“Why?” I asked at last.
“That’s something that will have to wait until you’re a little older,” said my mother. There was a strong tone of relief in her voice, as if she thought it likely that I would never be a little older, and that the matter was, therefore, and thank God for it, closed. I was embarrassed. I knew that if it was something that had to wait until I was a little older, it had to be about boys and girls. Being embarrassed made me feel small and powerless, but when I raised my eyes, surreptitiously, without raising my head, I saw that except for May, who was grinning, they were as embarrassed as I. I had no way of realizing then why they were embarrassed. I didn’t realize, couldn’t have realized, that the boy-and-girl business went right on being embarrassing when people got older. Only very much later did I realize that this embarrassment was a source of power. Studying the uneasy faces, I could see, however, that the uneasiness, the embarrassment around the table, offered a little opening for me, a little chink through which, before I started to cry, I could strike a blow for Black Jacques, that tall, dark, well-muscled Algerian who was standing somewhere in my mind holding an overflowing stein of Leroy Lager, his arm around the Bavarian barmaid, reciting a bawdy poem. I didn’t hesitate an instant, and in my ignorance I tapped that source of power.
“When Great Grandma was a girl, she liked Black Jacques better than Fat Hank,” I said.
“You said it,” burst from May.
“Peter, go to bed,” said my mother.
I started sniffling.
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