The Ghost Of Delores
Landon (nee Riley)-A Si Landon Story
By Zack James
[The Pete Markin
mentioned in the sketch below is the late Peter Paul Markin who despite a lot
of serious work as a journalist back in the early 1970s fell off the wagon down
south of the border and fell down shot dead with a couple of slugs in some
desolate back alley in Sonora after a busted drug deal as far as anybody in
America was able to find out. The Peter Markin who moderates this site is a
pseudonym for a guy, Frank Jackman, who along with Si Landon, Jack Callahan,
Frankie Riley, Josh Breslin and a bunch of other guys knew Markin in the old
days and has taken the pseudonym in honor of his fallen comrade who before his
untimely end taught him a lot about the world and its ways. “Peter Paul
Markin”]
Si Landon like a lot of
guys, gals too, but this is about guys from his now creeping aging generation,
a generation a guy, Pete Markin who hung
around with Si in the old days, the old high school days around North
Adamsville where they grew up called the “generation of ‘68” because that
seemed to have been the watershed year in the explosive 1960s which they all had
been washed by, washed clean by at least
for a while, was a man of hard-bitten memory. Had remembered whatever needed to
be remembered when called upon by the surviving members of the tribe, the
corner boys they called themselves back in the late 1950s, early 1960s when
everybody, every professional everybody from teachers and the cops to the
Governor was trying to figure out why ordinary growing up working class guys
were so sullen, so “alienated” was the term most frequently used, from what has
been called the golden age of the American working class and its progeny. Had
despite drifting away from the old crowd more than most in the recent past had
that “remembering” gene activated big time after a period of dormancy.
Si was, according to
Frankie Riley, who was anointed the leader of the leaderless corner boys who
hung around the corner of Doc’s Drugstore up on Sudbury Street near the Josiah
Adams School (the town was named after this head of an illustrious
ship-building family who had help settle the town back, way back, when
religious dissenters, dissenters from orthodox Puritanism, were not welcomed in
Boston) something of a loner. A guy who was genial enough on those awkward
Friday and Saturday nights when they shared their individual alienations
collectively, but more inclined than anybody to brood endlessly and walk alone
along the existential beaches that dotted the old town. So it had been no
surprise that he was the first to leave the group, drift away would probably be
a better way to put it, once they graduated from hallowed North Adamsville High
School.
What the corner boys,
what anybody who came in contact with Si back then, did not know was that Si’s
family life was something like a living hell on a day to day basis. The only
one who did have an inkling was that same Markin mentioned up in the brackets
whom Si would confide in when things got really bad and he had to stay over at
Markin’s house when he for the umpteenth time got kicked out of his family
house for some schoolboy misbehavior. Si would tell the others, tell the lie,
the big lie, that he had walked out of the
house, had decided to
seek the next best thing, had decided to seek a newer world a term he learned
from a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson that he had read in English class in school
and then a few days later would be seen coming out of the family house. You get
the drift.
The cause of Si’s
constant anguish had a name, had a name to be conjured with. Delores Landon nee
Riley the latter surname reflecting the overwhelmingly Irish “Acre”
neighborhood where Si and about three prior generations of Rileys had grown up,
some to prosper others like the Landons to suffer the slings and arrows of
misfortune since Delores had not only married outside the neighborhood, outside
the religion, outside the Irish diaspora, a decided no-no, but had married what
the whole clan had determined was beneath her status as lace curtain progeny.
Had married Si’s father, a southern redneck transported by fate, and world
politics, World War II-style, to finish up his time as a Marine at the
well-known Riverdale Naval Depot and the rest was history, family history
mostly kept under the rug. That rug referring to a neighborhood steeped in the
tradition of not “airing the family business in public,” of keeping
closed-mouth about what was going on inside the house (or inside the brain).
Si’s father Lawrence was nothing but a high school drop-out whose lack of
skills and education would be the torment of one Delores Landon once the
reality of that teenage marriage and the five subsequent children, all boys,
sunk in.
Moreover it did not help
that Si was the oldest of the lot and therefore bore the brunt of Delores’
unspoken anger at her situation. Unspoken to anybody but Si upon whom it came
out as continual carping and belittling from the time that the last, mercifully
the last, of the Landon siblings were born. The anger, the righteous Delores
anger came out in little ways and large. Little by the constant pressure on Si
to act beyond his years as a secondary father figure to the younger boys. Any
variation, any trouble that normal Acre boys got into without much damage got
magnified way out of proportion in screaming matches that while they were held
in private could be heard all the way to Adamsville proper. An example, small
but one that the great rememberer would brood about even fifty years
later.
In fifth grade at a time
in the neighborhood where boys and girls started to see each other as
interesting rather than as something to be avoided like the plague Si had been
sweet on one Rosalind Lahey, a born heartbreaker as would later prove to be the
case but just then the focal point of his un-channeled lust. As things went in
school life then Miss Willow had planned a dance exhibition to show parents
what little well-versed social creatures their off-spring had turned into. As
blind fate would have it the dance exhibition was about square dancing which
Miss Willow had spent several months trying to teach her charges. As double
fate would have it Si was to be paired with Rosalind. So Si thought it natural when
Miss Willow told the class that they should make an effort to dress up as
country folk, farmers to do something to impress Rosalind. That was when
overheated brain Si decided that if he cut up the bottoms of the one of two
pairs of dungarees to his name that he would impress the lady Rosalind. He did
so as it turned out before the exhibition and before the parents arrived
including Delores Landon (Lawrence was trying to hold onto for dear life a
nighttime extra pay job and so could not attend which was probably just as
well).
Things were okay until
the dancing squares were formed and somehow Delores spotted what Si had done to
his pants and let out a blood-curdling cry against her son. Said right there in
public so you know that it was a bad time how could Si disgrace and disrespect
his parents meager hold on reality and cut
up one of his only two pairs of pants which moreover were slated to be
handed down soon to the next oldest boy, Norman. Needless to say that was the
end of any “romance” with the fickle Rosalind. But that was not the worst of it
for he was grounded for the next two weeks and the subject of the “belt” from
his father. Even that was not the worse since for about the next four years
until something more serious replaced it in Delores ammunition dump of
grievances Si and whoever else was around the hearth got an earful about Si’s
rotten deed.
That event four years
later would set up what would be an on-going battle between mother and son for
the next forty years or so until she passed away. (Si would be estranged for
longer and shorter periods from high school onward and would not even attend
Delores’ funeral so you know how bad the blood between them had been.) The
simple fact was that Delores between her young age at marriage and on-going
health problems from complications in a couple of her deliveries coupled with
extreme economic distress for most of Si’s time at the family house was in way
over her head whatever love she had, and it was untiring devoted love, for
Lawrence Landon. (Si would regale his corner boys with his stories about that
extreme economic distress-long-hand for the weekly “envelopes”-the envelopes
which sat on the kitchen table every Thursday payday for the various bill
collectors one at least each week would be empty and the stall would be on for
a week’s reprieve. When things got really bad the envelopes were all “short.”
Si dearly knew those weeks because those would be the weeks when he from about
age six to twelve after which he refused to do the arduous chore anymore and it
was farmed out to his brother Norman had to go with the envelope to the
landlord and look very sheepish, very sheepish with the “tide over until good
times” short money. Little did Si know then that in “don’t air your dirty linen
in public” Acre that his corner boys could have retailed the same kind of
stories.
That inability of
Delores to do anything more than rant and rave at Si in her frustration
combined with that economic distress which the late Pete Markin called the
“wanting habits” the whole crowd suffered from left him with very few outlets
for his own anger. Made him very malleable when it came to any kind of ways to
grab some dough or to do some other misadventure. That misadventure part
happened one night when Si had just turned sixteen and he and a few corner
boys, he would not mention any names, still wouldn’t almost fifty years later,
when he was the only one caught, had “hot-wired” a 1959 Chevy and went
joy-riding down the causeway one hot summer night. Problem: Si had no driver’s
license when he crashed into a stone wall and the others fled leaving him to
face the inevitable coppers alone. Fortunately the guy whose car was stolen had
adequate insurance to cover the damage but Si wound up with six months’
probation in “juvvy.”
That was the straw that
broke the camel’s back for Delores and was the very first of an untold number
of kicks out of the house (Si always disputed whether he was kicked out or had
left of his own volition on each occasion including the last serious one when
he left the house for good never to return to stay, never.) That was the way things went for the next
forty years as was already mentioned with longer and longer periods between
temporary reconciliations. The main thrust of the battles royals was that Si
was some version of the devil incarnate which Delores was made to suffer
against some unknown offense against the church, the church being the holy
apostolic Roman Catholic Church which was the only serious religious expression
in the Acre dominated by the Irish and the Italians.
Here’s the funny thing
in the long haul which will make the story sort of byzantine. Si would go on to
be a fairly successful lawyer in Boston although Delores refused to recognize
that accomplishment. She would dwell on the more mundane fact of his three
unsuccessful marriage, no that is not right, she would have known only about
two of them but the three unsuccessful marriages is right and the failure of
that third one is what brings us back to the ghost of Delores Landon. A few
months before, maybe six months, his third wife, Maria, had given Si his
walking papers. Had told him that between his eternal moodiness and withdrawal
and her own need to “find herself” they were done as a couple after nearly a
decade of marriage. (Delores had always hated Maria since she was “one of
those,” a heathen, a bloody Protestant, English to boot, forgetting,
conveniently forgetting, that the late Lawrence Landon, the love of her life,
had been a Southern Baptist before he converted after agreeing to raise the
children as Catholics when they were married. Married not in the church because
he was a Protestant but in the rectory by the parish priest who from all
accounts was not pleased to perform the ceremony.)
The immediate effect of
their separation was that Maria would stay in the marriage house for the sake
of the children and that “rolling stone” Si would go fend for himself
someplace. Initially he had taken a sublet from a friend’s daughter who was
heading to Europe for six months. When that six months was up, actually before
that six months was up Si decided once it was finally very clear that Maria was
not going to attempt any sort of reconciliation that he needed some feeling of
rootedness, some grounding after all the years of feeling out of sorts, feeling
like some silly alienated youth which he found that he never really grew out
of. So he decided to go back to the old town, old North Adamsville. Since he
was not up for buying a condo he had decided to rent one for a year and see if
that helped his situation. He eventually found a place not far from where he
had grown up. The place had been an old elementary schoolhouse which had been
several years before due to changes in the demographics of the neighborhood and
its ethnic composition closed down, sold and converted to condos.
Although Si had not gone
to the school, Adams, named after that same Josiah who was a big wheel in
shipbuilding in the town’s more prosperous days, since he had gone to
elementary school across town at the Harbor school, three of his younger
brothers had and so he thought it ironic that “what goes around, comes around.”
He did not think much more about the matter until he moved into his new rental,
his condo. Of course converting an old school into individual units was no big
deal just reconfigure the old classrooms. What the converters had done though
was to keep some of the flavor of the old school in the main foyer by
preserving various aspects of the school when it was functioning as such. One
of the things that they had done was to place many of the early graduating
classes on the walls. Si still didn’t think much of the matter until he noticed
a newspaper article in the North
Adamsville Gazette announcing the opening of the school in 1925. Damn.
The school was located
only a block from where Delores had grown up and so she would have gone to
elementary school there in the early 1930s. And sure enough when he perused the
various class pictures from the early 1930s there among the Class of 1931 was
one Delores Riley. Si freaked. A few nights later when he was a little restless
not about his discovery but about the finality of the split with Maria he
thought he heard a voice, a shrill voice calling out that he would never amount
to anything. Probably just the wind gusting outside but he shuddered to think
that he would have to live with the “ghost” of Delores Landon for the duration.
Double Damn.
