The Defenestration of Little Brian

He will command his angels concerning you and with their hands they will support you lest you dash your foot against a stone.

Matthew 4, 6.

One of Little Brian Farley's earliest and most vivid memories is that his father tried to kill him when he was only three years old. Whether the endeavor was intentional, attempted murder, or unintentional, an almost tragic accident, Little Brian never did find out, but he always hoped it was the latter. Little Brian slept in his parents' second floor bedroom in The Summer House at that time, he in his crib and his parents in their big, comfortable bed. The main entrance to The Summer House was on the second floor and the main living areas, as well as four bedrooms, were on that floor. The first floor, called the basement, had an additional four bedrooms. Even at that young age, Little Brian envied his parents' spacious sleeping accommodations and, on Saturday mornings, he would invade the privacy of their bed to play with his father.

On this particular Saturday, which occurred during the summer of 1945, Little Brian was playing on his parents' bed as usual, bouncing on his father's stomach without a worry in the world. His father's side of the bed was next to the window, and during the summer, the window was always open. The windows in The Summer House were screened to keep out intruders from the insect world, especially mosquitoes, but the green wooden screen on his parents' window was not strong enough to support the weight of a healthy three-year-old boy. Little Brian's father miscalculated on one of his tosses, and Little Brian bounced off the bed and through the screen. Little Brian dropped fifteen feet after exiting the bedroom – a very unpleasant surprise! Fortunately the house was in Long Beach on Long Island's south shore, and had been built on sand, contrary to Biblical warnings, and Little Brian was not seriously injured. But his parents did not know this. Little Brian's mother leaped from the bed and ran screaming into the dining room where Nana, Little Brian's paternal grandmother, and Aunt Sadie were sitting around the table drinking tea. Weren't they always?

When they heard Little Brian's mother's shriek, they joined in the scream not yet knowing why they were screaming. Aunt Sadie dropped and broke her teacup.

Aunt Lucy, who was downstairs playing with her dog, Cottonpuff, became very frightened when she heard the screaming from above and added her scream to the uproar.

Meanwhile back in the bedroom, Little Brian's father, known as Big Brian since Little Brian's birth, jumped through the window to rescue his son, fortunately landing near him and not on him. In the excitement, Big Brian had forgotten that he, Big Brian, always slept with the waist cord of his pajamas untied which, in this instance, caused the pajama bottoms to end up around his ankles as he stood in the sand. It was at this point that Big Brian realized that he and his wailing son were not alone in the alley. The Jewish lady who owned the bungalow next door was standing outside her side door shaking out a dust mop. She uttered something akin to, "Well, I never!" and retreated into the safety of her house. She would later tell her friends about the Irish pervert who deliberately hurled his son out of a second floor window and then jumped out and exposed himself. "Only a goy!" said one of her Jewish friends.

Little Brian's father, to add to his son's sense of rejection, picked up and retied his pajama bottoms before attending to his crying, possibly dying, son. He actually tied the pajama cord in a bow. Little Brian was driven to Doctor Rosen's office, and Doctor Rosen, the family's summer doctor, examined him and then declared, to everyone's relief, that he had only been frightened.

Little Brian's mother, Agnes, said to Big Brian, "I told you this would happen with your roughhousing." Big Brian did not remember her ever saying that.

The Jewish neighbor, Sarah Rosen, had a wooden picket fence erected between the houses the week after the incident. She did this for two reasons: first, to protect herself and her family from the Gentile pervert and, second, to prevent a re-occurrence of the defenestration she had witnessed. "Not even a goy," she said to her friends, "would deliberately impale his son on a picket fence." "Don't be too sure where a goy is concerned," one friend said. "Don't be too critical, Sarah," said Mrs. Silverstein from across the street. "You can never know the true reason behind anyone's actions. Remember Abraham and Isaac."

"Brian Farley is no Abraham," answered Sarah.

Little Brian always thought his family, the Farleys, was a very intimate and closely knit family. At least he thought so until August 11, 1958, but that is the end of the story and we have a long way to go before we get there.

The Farley family as Little Brian knew it began in 1907 when John Farley, hereinafter referred to as Grandpa Farley, met Sadie Burke, hereinafter referred to as Nana, and whom you already met in the dining room of The Summer House drinking tea. Grandpa Farley's parents did not approve of Nana and were opposed to a matrimonial link between themselves and the Burkes. This did not deter Grandpa Farley, however, and he and Nana eloped and joined hands in holy matrimony on August 17, 1908. Prior to the wedding, Nana had been working at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in Manhattan, and crossed from Brooklyn to Manhattan each day over the Brooklyn Bridge. Not having much money, and not earning much at the factory in Manhattan, she crossed that magnificent structure on foot each day. The bridge was only four years old when Nana was born in 1887, and close to thirty men had died during its construction. Nana loved to stand on the bridge in the very center and look at the river traffic flowing under her. She, of course, left her job at the factory when they married, which was perhaps a sign that God favored the union. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire occurred less than three years after she quit, on March 25, 1911, and there is a high probability that Nana would not have survived the fire had she not agreed to marry Grandpa Farley and had remained at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. Then there would not have been a Little Brian nor a story to tell.

The Farleys did not approve of Nana for three reasons: first, she was born in 1887, and Grandpa Farley was born in 1889, and not even a lovesick, and very young Grandpa Farley could deny the absolute mathematical truth that this made her two years older than he, and respectable men just did not marry older women; second, they were not educationally compatible – Nana had only finished sixth grade, and Grandpa Farley was a high school graduate; third, and most important, their social backgrounds were dissimilar – Nana was from a poor, working-class family while Grandpa Farley's family, in defiance of the Deity, had not earned their bread by the sweat of their brows in over a century in the new world. Grandpa Farley's mother, Great-Grandmother Farley, had said to him before he eloped, "John, I don't want you getting mixed up with shanty Irish. You'll live to regret it." This obvious mismatch did not quite last fifty years, but that it did not was God's doing, and not man's.

Great-Grandmother Farley was very nervous during the first nine months of the marriage. She was sure that Grandpa Farley had married Nana because she was...