Poetic License

Most of us know some version of the Biblical passage: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. I could riff on that particular passage for hours, but I want to focus on one family who was formerly related to me through marriage. I am going to change the names, because the family still has some restaurants in Houston, where I grew up, and I don’t want to get sued!

I met the Kelly family in church when I was very young, right after we moved to Houston from Georgia. I was still in nursery school when I became aware of them. They were the church, and they were loaded. Of course, I didn’t know this at the time, but later it became quite apparent. The Kellys owned a restaurant chain that had been founded by their fathers in the 1930s. The restaurant was famous for its breakfasts, its burgers, and its homestyle feel. Everyone knew their restaurants, and everyone knew them. Houston was a much smaller place in the 1960s, so they were very big deals.

One of the cousins, Jim, had a daughter (Ruth) who was a year or so older than me. Ruth had two older brothers and a younger sister. I had two older brothers, an older sister, and a younger sister. That’s pretty much where the similarities stopped. The Kellys had the finest clothes, the best patent leather shoes, and the best seats in the house – front pews. Another of the cousins, Roan, had a son who was paralyzed from the neck down. He had been injured in an accident while playing basketball, was the story, and was confined to a bed. In the church directory, the photo showed the two parents sitting on either side of his bed, holding his limp hands. Another cousin, Rod, was in the church, but I don’t recall ever meeting him or knowing if he had a wife or children. Roan only stuck in my mind because of that picture in the church directory.

Other things I remember about the Kellys. Nice brick homes in the best neighborhood – at least for Jim’s family. The other cousins could have lived in the country club area for all I knew, and they probably did. I never saw their houses. I only saw Jim’s house after his oldest son, John, married my oldest sister. That’s when the two families tried to become one, as it was in those times more so than now, when everyone seems to be in competition.

John came over to our modest rental home often before the marriage, but of course there was no funny business. He was very respectful of our parents and of my sister. My sister was and is very straight-laced and disciplined. She lives by the rules. To say she is a perfectionist would be an insult. She is beyond perfectionism. But she had some health issues that plagued her during her teens. None of us are the healthiest lot, as I’ve said before. I remember her being in bed quite a bit then, enduring a lot of pain. I know now that it was due to some chronic bladder issues, but at that time, it just seemed sort of normal for our family. One or more of us were always sick.

We had a photograph at one time of him sitting on the side of the bed beside her, helping to stuff and stamp wedding invitations.

John had come back from the Vietnam war the year before. He was a medic in the Army and saw some dangerous times, from what I heard. He was very proper and well-mannered. He had long eyelashes and a rather kind face. My sister felt safe with him, and my parents felt it was a good match. I know they didn’t see dollar signs because of his family’s business, but they saw someone who could take good care of their daughter.

As we got to know the Kellys, I learned just how much privilege they had. Ruth and her little sister Crystal had all of the dolls you could ever want. They had a pool in the backyard. Their bedrooms (when I finally was invited to see them) were decked out in the finest linens, flowered wallpaper, plush carpet, and built-in shelving. Their closets were overflowing. Ruth never smiled. I don’t recall ever seeing her teeth. Crystal, on the other hand, smiled all the time. She was a little “slow” they told me (probably just a learning disability) and spoke with a profound speech impediment. But she was much friendlier than Ruth, so I didn’t care about any of that.

Both girls went to a private academy, whereas I went to public school. We really had nothing in common. They seemed to just be indoor kids who appeared bored and listless.

Ruth was very much like her mother, Rosalynn. Rosalynn was a large woman with thick calves and a severe hairdo – black with white streaks at the temples. Ruth got the black hair, too. Rosalynn was loud when she spoke, as though she were partially hard-of-hearing. Jim was more soft spoken and meek, though he, too, had a loud laugh. He had an odd body shape, like all the men in the Kelly family. He was shorter than my father, who was all of 5’7″, and had short legs and a long waist with a preponderance of his weight at the belt-line. He had the shape of a bowling pin. He had a small mouth and small eyes peering from behind large glasses on a pasty, egg-shaped head. He had very little hair. Observing from the outside, one might see him as a henpecked man, but I get the feeling he knew exactly what he was doing. He was gone more than he was home.

One time my mother was talking about Christmas shopping with Rosalynn during a visit to their house. I was sitting, bored, at her feet on the thick blue carpet in the living room. There was no television, and Ruth wanted nothing to do with me. I wanted to go home and put on my new roller skates and get outside. I found their home, nice as it was, to be stuffy. It was clear to me that Rosalynn didn’t really like children, especially if they weren’t hers. I think she and Jim were married because it was expected. Her family likely came from money, too, because she seemed very comfortable with it.

She told my mother, during this visit, that she herself shopped all year ’round for Christmas presents and hid them all over the house. “Sometimes I forget where I put ’em,” she said. Her eyes were so black they seemed bottomless. Ruth had the same eyes. My mother must have been embarrassed to hear that Mrs. Kelly had the money to do such shopping. By that time, Mom had lost several of her front teeth and was always hiding her smile behind her hand or was smiling with her lips closed. Dad never thought it was important to pay for a dentist for her, because he was already insanely jealous. To him, that would have been inviting trouble and causing other men to lust after my mother. Just nuts.

I was really glad we didn’t go often to the Kelly house. It wasn’t a happy place to be, money or not. My sister told us, aghast, that under the Kellys’ tree there were more than a hundred presents, that they just spilled out into the room. I’m sure it was pretty, in a gaudy sort of way, but I was happy with what I had.

After my sister married John in a small ceremony at the church, they went away on a honeymoon to Corpus Christi. Though John came from money, he was a penny-pincher and kept things modest. Unfortunately, Hurricane Celia, a category 4 storm, arrived shortly after they did. For two days, they were hunkered down in a bathroom inside the hotel where they were staying while the storm raged outside. All they had to eat was an overpriced loaf of bread and some bologna. My sister said her nerves got the best of her stomach, and she got over her newlywed shyness very quickly. Imagine.

So we thought well of John for getting my sister through that with grace and patience. They were okay, but his green LeMans was totaled by the storm surge.

As time went on, my opinion of John changed. I started to like him less and less. It was obvious that he didn’t treat my sister well, though I found out more about that later. His perfectionism went beyond anything she could have imagined. He needed for her to be a thin, perfect, stylish wife, while he was taking on the bowling pin silhouette of his father. The house had to be just so. When she got pregnant with my niece, five years into their marriage, she had to stop working. Work had always been important to her, because she, like me, never wanted to find herself in the same position as our mother – beholden to a man.

They didn’t last ten years. He had stopped working as a salesman for a major power tools manufacturer and went into the family restaurant business about two years before their divorce. My sister had an inkling that something was up with him, and her suspicions were well-founded. One day she paid a surprise visit to the restaurant and walked into his office in the back. He had one of his female employees on his lap, kissing her. My sister has never been a big believer in second chances. After all of their other trouble and his verbally abusive behavior, she’d had enough. We all should have known it was coming after that time she threw a full plate of food on him during Sunday dinner at our house one time. We had no idea at that time that anything was wrong other than my sister having. a short fuse and no ability to take a joke. It went so much deeper than that.

When the incident. at the restaurant happened, I was living with them while finishing high school. John was verbally abusive to me, as well. They would have friends over for dinner, but I was the one who had to cook and make a big pot of coffee to serve. There had to be dessert. He would snap his fingers at me and call me “Flossie,” and laugh and laugh. I was grateful to have a place to live, but I hated him with a seething rage that kept me awake at night. After the incident at the restaurant, my sister moved into her daughter’s bedroom across the hall from mine while they sorted out the sale of their house and their divorce. John didn’t even try to make her stay.

So in addition to my chief cook and maid status in the house, now I had to keep everything perfect while the house was being shown. I was already getting up at 6:00 to get ready for school and was working after school at the local movie theater. I either walked the 4 miles to work or rode my bicycle. If it was raining very hard, my sister would give me a ride, but I had to get myself home. I look back on that time with wonder. Four miles of walking on trails through the woods in the planned community of Kingwood, TX. These days I know I would have been murdered.

But my sister was stressed out and back at work herself, trying to figure out what her next move was. She didn’t have time or energy to worry about me. John told me I had better have a place to go. He had told me that since I moved in with them. “You’re done when you turn 18. No more freeloading!” You can hardly say I was freeloading with all the free labor and babysitting they got from me.

Nothing could have made me happier than to get away from him. My need to find a place to live in a hurry, though, made me make some really bad decisions. I survived, of course, but the path of my life changed.

As to the rest of John’s family, they were falling apart rapidly. His brother, Marvin, was in and out of jail and was abusing drugs. He finally landed in prison for good at some point. I’m sure that’s where he died. Ruth started abusing drugs, too. I know she was married at least once to a man who was also a drug abuser, and together they were in trouble with the law frequently. They had a son who, by the age of three, was still in diapers and was non-verbal – not because of anything medical but because of neglect. He was finally taken away from them and put into the foster system. I don’t know what became of him. I don’t know if Ruth had any other children but I hope not. Around the time we were both in our 30s, I heard that she had committed suicide. It was a sad but predictable end for the girl who never smiled.

Last I heard, Jim and Rosalynn were both long dead and Crystal was married. Still childlike, she found a man who wanted to treat her like a princess. I think she deserved that. A family like that has problems the rest of us never see. Were the children being abused physically and sexually? It certainly seems that way in retrospect. We didn’t talk about such things in the sixties. We all pretended everything was fine, pretty much all the time.

As it turns out, John is gay. It’s no wonder he was working so hard to be a ladies’ man, with all that internalized homophobia. The facade broke apart; he never remarried. My sister found a gem of a man later and has been happily married to him for 33 years. John still likes to pretend that he and his “gym partner” are just friends, but we all know better. It’s sad that he is still pretending. The failures in his personal life (and I’m not calling the fact that he’s gay a failing) echoed the failures in the business. Not long after he divorced my sister, the family began to close down the restaurants. Roan had died not long after his son passed away. Rod faded away, not really part of my memory at all.

This was a family who had it all. They had money inherited from the previous generation, which had built a restaurant empire in a major Texas city. They had the business, which had a well-earned reputation and loyal customer base. They had enough money to buy anything they wanted and send their kids to private academies. But they did not have happiness or stability or anything close to peace. They were a herd of camels, trying to buy their way into heaven through the eye of a needle, through their generosity to the church and their community. But their homes were chaotic and drug-riddled and just as broken as any of ours. All of the smokescreens and publicity could not mask the brokenness.

In the end, they were just another American family, celebrities of a kind, who found that not only can’t money buy happiness, it can’t buy anything of value. They encountered the same challenges that celebrities, lottery winners, and rich people around the world encounter. Having money doesn’t fix what’s broken in you. It doesn’t help you hide. Having money bring its own unique set of problems that can sometimes kill you or the ones you love. Greed becomes insidious.

From their story, I learned many lessons, one of which is that “marrying well” means nothing. Sometimes it only brings you to drink at a poisoned well. I strive to have enough. But I don’t want what I have not got, in the immortal words of Sinead O’Connor (who was also poisoned by fame).

I hope the Kelly family that remains, the ones who are trying to revitalize the restaurant chain, have learned some valuable lessons over the years. Sometimes it takes losing it all to find something worth having.

Namaste, Jude