Cherishing porcelain angels, and the real ones in our lives

Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

I didn’t mean to fall in love with him. I came to Florida to rescue him. That was the first time. It was March and his wife had just died. And there were COVID-19 restrictions: No wake. No funeral Mass. No funeral. No friends stopping by.

Leroy, my uncle, was alone in a home he had always shared. And then his knee gave out and he fell. An ambulance raced him to a hospital. After a few days, he was given a cortisone shot. After a few more days, he was transferred to a facility for rehabilitation.

That’s when my husband and I boarded a flight to Tampa. It was Easter Sunday eve and we couldn’t communicate with Leroy because he is nearly deaf and could not hear on a phone. So we flew south to talk to him in person and to bring him back to his home.

I should have known right then that he isn’t a complainer. Alone in a hospital room in isolation because of COVID, with only his thoughts to keep him company, alone just weeks after his wife of 56 years died, he could have railed at the situation. He could have been angry and bitter and demanding.

But he wasn’t. “Thank you,” he said as we drove him home. That was it.

Now eight months and a few more visits later I am sitting again by my uncle’s side and listening to this 94-year-old man answer questions my father, his older brother, would never answer. What was your childhood like? What were you like as a child? What do you remember?

“Your father was changed by the war,” he tells me not for the first time, skipping over his own tales because this is a recurring theme of Leroy’s: My father was changed by war. It is important to him not just that I know this, but that I understand. “Larry was 17 when he joined the Army. He was 22 when he came home. Our mother didn’t see him for all those years. He was in five major invasions.” Leroy names the battles. “He was wounded, and he should have been sent home but they patched him up and sent him back to fight. Your father saw too much,” he says, shaking his head.

“The day he came home from the war he had so many medals on his uniform. I remember looking at them and wanting to know what they were for.” My father never told him. He took off his uniform and that was that.

“Tell me about the war,” I begged my father so many times.

He never did.

Now, 16 years after my father’s death, I sit in a chair next to Leroy and he fills me with stories about my father before the war, about his fun brother who was 4½ years older and played with him and took him to the movies and loved him. Fun. That’s the word Leroy uses most. Carefree is second.

When I was young, my father played with me, too. Monopoly. Cribbage. He took me to movies. He was fun. All my friends loved him. But carefree? Maybe nobody’s father is carefree. Maybe carefree, like childhood, has an expiration date.

“What was Christmas like when you were a child?” I ask my uncle now and his faded blue eyes shine as he looks back through the years and tells me about the red ribbons his mother made and put in the front windows and the small tree she bought and set on the also small kitchen table. “My mother had a porcelain angel her grandmother had given her that she always put under the tree. It was little. Like this.” And he holds out his hands to show me.

There were four of them, a mother and three boys. They spent Christmas Day together. “We were the only ones who didn’t have a father,” Leroy says, a statement of fact, no sadness in his tone. And then he tells me about the Christmas he was 5 or 6. “I got a wind-up tank that went up and over books you placed in its way. Your father and Jimmy and I played with that tank all day. I don’t know how my mother paid for them, but every Christmas morning all during the Depression, there was always one present wrapped up for each of us.”

I was never close to this uncle. My father stopped talking to him decades ago. “Your father was changed by the war,” Leroy says not in a look-at-me-I’m-forgiving-your-father way. But once again, to make me understand.

There is no bitterness in this man. He doesn’t complain or demand or harbor a grudge. He is kind and he is grateful and he calls me “dear” and “sweetheart” the way my father did.

And I think about Christmas and angels, porcelain ones and real-life ones. And as I kiss him goodbye and head home to Boston, I think that my uncle is a real-life angel that his mother, my grandmother, has shared with me.

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