Weekends With Charlie

We can reconcile the death of a parent with the gentle understanding that nature is following its predetermined course, but losing a brother or sister is never easily justified. There’s an implicit pact that you helped each other survive the worst moments of childhood and celebrated the best. The dissolution of that bond severs that part of you that you spent years using, drinking or in therapy trying to escape, but whose memories bring strange comfort in the lonely recesses of night.

“I wish I would have written them down so I’d never forget,” said my cousin Carol, who, as the oldest of 40 Viola cousins all born and raised in Fort Lee, spent every weekend sitting with her brother Charlie whose stories made her laugh even as he lay dying.

Charlie Viola’s voice has been removed from the choir of our family, and our town. Gone with that voice is the laughter, the memories, the connection with a part of our collective past that only he could bring to life with such clarity that often you had to remind yourself that it was his memory, not yours.

Growing up in Fort Lee surrounded by 40 cousins blurred the lines between cousins, brothers and sisters. We all took care of each other; we all had a role.

Charlie assumed the role of comedian.

From the depths of my memory, I can’t remember a time when he did not make all of us laugh, mostly at the most inopportune times—wakes, funerals, when our phalynx of uncles were screaming punishments at us at Sunday dinners. Even the mistakes he made were hilarious.   

Charlie had the distinct pleasure of working in the remnants of the Fort Lee film industry with my grandmother. Now, my four-foot nothing grandmother was a force to be reckoned with. Any woman widowed at the age of 37 with 10 children is a woman who takes crap from nobody, especially from her sarcastic teen-aged grandchild.

Every day a car came to pick them up, and everyday he collected more stories about Grandma. It’s because of Charlie that memories of my grandmother and many of the resident characters that once populated lower Main Street are preserved for me. He planted within me the seeds for all my stories. 

Charlie also raised the bar for the Viola family and took us out of lower Main Street and into high society, if only for a day.

One summer in the early 70s, four or five cousins were getting married. The altar boys in the family made a fortune serving the wedding masses at Madonna Church!

Up until Charlie’s wedding, the VFW served as our family’s reception hall. Charlie broke tradition by marrying the only daughter of a well-to-do Fort Lee family and having his reception at the (tony) Manor in West Orange. My aunts, along with half the female population of Fort Lee, were in a tizzy buying new dresses at Marni’s and getting their wigs and hair pieces coiffed at Paul Gae’s in preparation for the big day. Unfortunately, the marriage didn’t last, but the memory of our family “moving on up” like the Jeffersons did.        

On the day of his funeral mass at the old Madonna Church on the hill, listening to Father Carey’s sermon, staring at a portrait of Charlie smiling to the point of smirking, I couldn’t help but cry. Cry for the loss of laughter, cry for the fact that our once vibrant family has thinned, cry for the mortality of all of us crowded into the pews of a church that our family has been baptized, confirmed, married in and buried from for 100 years.

My hand searched my pocketbook for a tissue. Finally, I came across a stiffened crumpled tissue and pressed it against my eyes. Suddenly, it felt like my eyes were on fire, and it was all I could do to suppress screaming out in pain. At the same time a beautiful fragrance filled the pew, making me think for a moment that it was Charlie’s spirit seated beside me.

Then it occurred to me. That scent was awfully familiar. I strained to look at the tissue and realized through my watery blur that it wasn’t a tissue I had wiped my eyes with, but a used dryer sheet. Clearly, my tears re-activated that fresh Downy scent.

It seemed an appropriate thing to have happen at Charlie’s funeral and I could hear him saying in his lower Main Street, Huntz Hall-tinged accent, “Whata you, a freakin’ idiot?” 

Through the tears, I laughed. It reassured me that even though his life on this little part of our earth has ended, the legacy of his laughter will forever live on, and the stories that he told so well will fill the empty spaces of all my yesterdays.  

Editor's Note: Thursday is the one year anniversary of Charlie Viola’s death.