The Last of the Savages by Jay McInerney

just behind her like a dim moon. At the age of thirteen, he still wore short pants and an Eton jacket and seemed stunted by the attention his mother had lavished on him ever since his father disappeared, shortly and not coincidentally after his arrival on earth. Aunt Colleen spoke for him, adjusted his clothes and hair and generally treated him so much like a puppet that he seemed not to have developed any volition of his own. He shook my hand with a kind of fetal languor.
    After our turkey dinner came the inevitable moment when Aunt Colleen seized a lull in the proceedings to ask, “What about some music?” And when no one could think of a polite way to disavow any such desire, she nudged Jimmy right out of his chair. “Go get your accordion, darling. You know how Aunt Jean and Uncle Mike love to hear you play.”
    And so I offered Nana Keane my arm and we adjourned slowly, slowly, to the living room, where once again I failed to scream in frustration that I did not belong in this upholstered oubliette where the Christmas tree blinked away and the beatified likenesses of John Kennedy and Pope John XXIII beamed down upon us from above the fireplace and little Jimmy Boyle unpacked his monstrous instrument of torture. We settled in for the long haul as Jimmy, suddenly animate, perched on the ottoman. Nearly obscured behind the dreadful device, he coaxed forth a series of preliminary sighs and moans. No matter how many times I was subjected to this instrument I could never quite get used to the sight of it—spawn of some violent coupling of reptile and pipe organ.
    Glowing with proud anticipation, Jimmy’s mother proposed “a nice polka.”
    “What about some Christmas music?” my mother suggested.
    Aunt Colleen observed generously that there was plenty of time for both. My father and I, for once of one mind, exchanged sinking looks, and at that moment I felt almost achingly close to him, my own flesh, and all the more so for knowing that I could not express it. Awkward reticence was part of the nature he had bequeathed to me; neither of us was likely to announce:
No fucking polkas in our house, thanks, and get that nasty box out of here before we smash it to pieces.
For all my adolescent disgust I was as big a coward as he was, and so we sat and listened to “White Christmas,” “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” “The Beer Barrel Polka” and a half-dozen other selections whose names have blessedly faded with time. Colleen led the applause after each number and then called out the next tune. If Jimmy resented any of this, if he had any notion of how ridiculous he appeared to us, he didn’t let on. He rocked back and forth on the ottoman, embracing his squeeze box, impassive. I squirmed on the sofa. Tiny as he was, my cousin seemed at times merely a passive appendage of the respirating instrument, a freakish child attached to a primitive life-support machine, trying to eke out another day on earth. Finally, Mom suggested we ought to be getting ready for Mass.
    “Just one more,” said Colleen brightly.
    My father was caught standing. With a guilty look, he sank back in his recliner and listened stoically to the final, rousing polka while I blamed him for everything that was weak and yielding in my character.
    Mass was another torture. Father Ryan preached at interminable length about the Holy Family while I daydreamed helplessly about sex. In recent years the sight of stained glass, the sound of the liturgy, aroused a perverse stream of carnal reflections. As if sensing my defection, my spiritual mentor Father Ryan had questioned me in the supposed anonymity of the confessional about impure thoughts and impure deeds, assuring me that these were mortal sins. Having no control over my thoughts, at least, I began to question the idea of involuntary sin and other aspects of supposed and actual church doctrine. I stopped going to confession, and would have stopped going to communion except I was afraid of what my parents