Free Blow by Bruce Porter

and the car would be filled with boxes and ribbons and presents from Uncle George and my mother going on about wasn’t it all so wonderful and how generous he was. What he did was always more than my father gave us on Christmas morning. And how did that make him feel? He never said anything. There was nothing to say. I’d be sitting in the back seat and that’s when I began to hate Uncle George, and I decided in my mind I was going to get that son of a bitch. And I was just a kid.”
    George’s father was popular enough with his son’s friends, could talk football and joke in a manner that didn’t put them off, as adults can do sometimes when they try to be too chummy. He also struck his friends as fairly tolerant of his son when word came back that he’d gotten into another scrape. “His father was always very easygoing,” remembers Grable. “We’d be out late drinking beer, fooling around, and the next day he’d say, ‘You guys had a good time last night,’ and give you a little wink, letting you know that he knew. But never any lecture. My father would have taken my head off, some of the things we did. I think George had a freer hand from his parents than the rest of us had.”
    In the fall of George’s junior year in high school, Fred suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and fell down on the kitchen floor. For a year his speech was severely affected, and soon his oil business died. After that he was never really his old self, not kidding much anymore, prone to become easily emotional. He got part-time work as a superintendent in a cemetery, where he worked out of a little shack and could be seen trimming around the headstones with a lawn mower and now and then helping to set up a burial monument. He also worked occasionally sweeping out a laundromat. George’s mother still had her job at Remick’s, George remembers, but things got tight now. Uncle George had to begin helping the family out financially. Uncle George liked to help out members of the family. After his and Fred’s father died in 1952, he’d send his mother on vacations to Boothbay Harbor in Maine. He’d helped his sister, Aunt Jenny, buy a house. When his nephew Bobby, George’s cousin, came home from being in the army in Germany and started working in the banking business, Uncle George gave him the down payment for a house for his young family; young bankers, he felt, shouldn’t have to live in an apartment. After Marie and Otis got married, and Otis started graduate school at Michigan State University, Marie came to Uncle George. She’d been supporting them with a teaching job, but now she was pregnant and had to quit; they needed help or Otis would have to leave school. “I remember him saying, ‘Otis has too good a mind to let it go to waste,’” says Auntie Gertrude. “And so he sent the money for tuition.”
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    By the end of his junior year George needed to confront the fact that he was in serious trouble as far as going to college was concerned. Athletic recruiters from both the University of Massachusetts and Springfield College, the sports school that he’d long dreamed of attending, had discussed offering him a scholarship on the basis of his discus prowess. But he still had to pass the admissions standards when it came to grades, and during his sophomore and junior years he’d accumulated a record of six D’s and six C’s. His only B was in mechanical drawing.
    George wanted so desperately to go on to college that in his senior year he made a heroic effort to improve his academic standing. For one, he got himself into the “general” class in English, an all-boys unit that served as a refuge for students who had problems with Miss Toomey and other grammar hardballers. It was taught by Clem Horrigan, a retired naval commander like Uncle George, but there the similarity stopped short.