Mr. Wizard by Jeff Wallach

Author:Jeff Wallach [Wallach, Jeff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781948598309
Publisher: Open Books
Published: 2020-04-09T00:00:00+00:00

They stayed late at the golf club drinking. Spencer noticed that the loud Americans had finished their early alcohol consumption and headed off to dinners and probably jokes about mushy peas and further talk about brilliant bunker shots and long putts made. The locals had left for home, to their wives and kids and football matches on the television.

After more Guinness, food appeared—plates of pasties and bangers and chips and other pub fare. Padraig, it turned out, was the club manager. They gathered around a table in the dining room, telling stories, which reminded them of other stories, which often recalled other stories yet still.

Patrick told them how beautiful and wild their mother was, and what a mismatch she first seemed with the serious and upright Jack. “I remember Jenny wearing his uniform jacket at a party back on Long Island and saluting a lot, before he went off to war,” he recalled.

“She called him ‘Senator,’ because we all believed that’s where he was headed some day—like Jack Kennedy. She joked that she’d be America’s first beatnik first lady—they weren’t using the word ‘hippie’ yet, I don’t think—and that she would put banners against war on the White House lawn. It gives me a chill to remember Jack saying—only half kidding—‘Over my dead body.’ Not long after that he was dead.”

Padraig, the pro’s son, recalled the first time their father told them about Jenny and their brother in America. “We already had all the brothers we needed right here,” he said. “We didn’t pay it much mind. Our mother had always known. I remember asking Da one time if we were really all his children. He said, ‘Well, you’re certainly special, Padraig, but you were no immaculate conception.’”

Patrick and his wife Lorna raised five boys and a girl, but only Padraig and Patricia—whom they called Trisha—still lived in Ballydraiocht, hence their frequent appearance on the captains and champions boards at the club. The others had gone off to bigger cities around the UK and Europe, Padraig said.

With the beatnik first lady story in mind Phillip described the time that Jenny took Spencer and him out to Shoreham, on eastern Long Island, to protest nuclear power when they were kids, and how Spencer had been confused and upset by that. The boys knew that they didn’t have a traditional family without a father, but Spencer was surprised that Jenny would want to march about it.

“I thought we were going there to protest against the nuclear family,” Spencer explained.

When it finally grew dark, and the tide had come in, and they could hear the susurration of waves on the beach, Padraig said, “Where are you staying, then? We should move you over to Da’s house. There are all those empty bedrooms.”

“We’re at The Golfside,” Phillip said. While he wanted to give in to the invitation, to fall backward into their hospitality, he felt cautious. He wanted to look out for his brother. It was his lifelong job. He had no idea how Spencer was feeling about all this.

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