Lethal Dose

mary, mary, quite contrary

My Nana Lethal was named Mary. She was stylish and classy, and worked at the Library. My mother used to call her “Mrs. Van Asta” which I think was a Massachusetts approximation of “Vanderbilt” and “Astor” b/c she thought she was a snob. My mother, not being Irish, didn’t understand. My grandmother was used to maids; my great-grandmother had her own business as a pastry baker and my great-grandfather ran numbers out of his lunch counter downtown, so they were upper-class lace curtain Irish. When she married my grandfather, a black Irish (”shanty irish”) fireman, my great-grandmother had a fit. She loathed him and so did her doberman, Lucky. Many people have commented on my physical and emotional resemblance to great-grandma Lethal, and I have her persian lamb jacket with mink collar. It fits to a tee.

Anyway, Nana Lethal and Papa Lethal slept in twin beds with a prominent crucifix in between. Papa Lethal was a ladies man, though, and an accomplished ballroom dancer, which is where his mistress came in. Conveniently, she was also named Mary. To avoid confusion? My father did something similar when he married my mother on his birthday, “so I’ll always remember.” He only had to remember for ten years.

When I was younger, I thought it was awful that Papa Lethal cheated on Nana Lethal until I got a little older and realized she was probably relieved. He was a handful! At the end of his life we pieced so much of it together and my cousin said, “All those times he’d ‘take me out for ice cream,’ he’d drop me at Auntie Blanche’s and wave goodbye. He must have been going to see ‘The Other Mary.’” My poor cousin was once ambushed by “The Other Mary” at the supermarket who proudly introduced herself as “your grandfather’s friend, Mary” much to her horror. When Nana Lethal died, The Other Mary came to the funeral (!) and even brought my aunt some Boston baked beans. “I threw them in the garbage,” my aunt said. We know that The Other Mary has a son and I’ve wanted to wait near their house to catch a look, but my father shushed me. “Now, now, don’t say those things,” he chided me. “Say what things? You took them all to lunch!” And he did - my father, Nana Lethal, Papa Lethal, and The Other Mary! One can only imagine the conversation: “Does he make you butter his bread, too?” I asked Daddy Lethal to recount it to me but he just mumbled something like, “Who the hell knows? They’re all old, who cares?”

At the end of Papa Lethal’s life, he went blind. I went to visit him in the hospital and he still had it.

“How old are you now, Donna?” he asked me.

“Thirty-five.”

“But you can’t be! I’m only twenty-nine, heh heh!”

God love him.