And on we go, down all the days of Boylans and others; we're in
about 1888 now. The photo shows an original DuPont powder mill on the
Brandywine River, Wilmington, Del., ca. 1905.
3. Widowed Mary Boylan was left to bring up Ned Junior and Bob as
best she could, which she did by moving from the slums of South Philly
twenty-odd miles SSW to more salubrious surroundings in less grand but smaller
and cheaper Wilmington, Delaware. There, in the city of the DuPonts, she
determinedly pursued success in the hierarchy of cleaning ladies, and she made
it to the top, bless her soul. She ended up as head house maid in one of the
DuPont houses (Winterthur) and on the proceeds bought a decent house of her own
on respectable French Street; and she managed to send my grandfather and
great-uncle to Franklin’s Academy, a good local school, primarily to lose the
remnants of that mick accent the others made fun of so mercilessly, even or
especially Poles and Italians. At age eighteen young Ned jr., my Granda, got a
job as a low-level factotum at the Reading Railway Line, the same railway
company in whose service his father had died; but, unlike his dad, Granda did
well there. He did equally well in his domestic life. Eventually, in the
fullness of his years, with two sons to nourish and raise (my dad and uncle),
Granda rose to the dizzying heights of Senior Yardmaster at the Reading Railway
depot, an honor complete with engraved fob watch, now in my possession,
attached to which is a token of his Great Rupture with my great-uncle Robert: a
Masonic medallion. Granda, you see, had joined the local Lodge, having been
invited to do so by fellow-workers who thought he wasn’t too bad a fellow, for
a mick; but they reckoned he needed a spur to his advancement of the kind only
the lodges could provide, and it was well-known that the lodges had the power,
if not of life and death, at least of promotion or demotion, over the railroad
men of Delaware and Eastern Pennsylvania’s mining country. (Shades of The
Valley of Fear, one of my favorite Sherlock Holmes stories.) Well, when
great-uncle Bobby heard about it you’d think the heavens themselves would pour
forth their wrath. His own brother forswearing Holy Mother Church and joining
up with that bunch of hopped-up heathens and their leather aprons and trowels
and all that heretical rubbish! As far as Bobby was concerned the worst part
was that all that rubbish worked. It was good for business, and it got Granda
promotions; and Bob, loyal Mass-going papist all his life, ended up a humble
printer’s assistant in Pottstown, Pa., siring second cousins I’ve never known.
I only saw him once, at Granda’s funeral, which was properly R.C.; in fact,
hedging his bets, Granda had attached next to the Masonic medallion on his fob
chain a Catholic medal bearing on one side St. (now ex-St.) Christopher
carrying the two-ton Christ child, and on the other the engraved words “I am a
Catholic. In the Event of Death or Injury Please Call a Priest.” But
Great-Uncle Bob said nothing, muttering a life’s stored-up one-liners by his
brother’s grave (“take my brother—please”)
and smoking deeply, heavily, gloomily.
