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Recent History
Anthony Giardina


From the acclaimed short story writer – a brilliantly observed portrait of a man teetering on the edge of abandoning his marriage for a homosexual affair.As a husband, Luca Carcera hides his emotions behind the safety of routine domesticity. With his spice jars and cookbooks stacked perfectly in the kitchen, he feels in some measure of control. He loves his wife, but is struggling to come to terms with the secret desires which lie beneath his role as a steady, suburban, middle-class husband. His parents, Lou and Dorothy, spent 14 years together before Lou abandoned his wife to set up home with a male friend and, perhaps unsurprisingly, young Luca grows up confused, not only about his own sexuality, but about the whole institution of marriage.Luca may well love his wife, but what guarantee has he that he will not walk out on her 14 years into their marriage, having finally woken up to his latent homosexuality?Acclaimed for his elegant stories on the flawed but necessary social bond that is marriage, Giardina once again proves himself an acutely sensitive writer – a brilliant observer of middle-class dreams, aspirations and compromises.









Recent History

Anthony Giardina










Contents


Cover (#u7f83d512-7089-56b9-bd15-5bce967d86df)

Title Page (#ub6118761-8a45-5dc3-ac44-86117c53766e)

Three Teachers (#ua2a7a81e-2176-5532-bc4d-47941941ad75)

I Inca Boy (#ubb71dbaf-804d-5dfe-a329-6f90ff4ed6d5)

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II History Teacher (#litres_trial_promo)

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Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

Other Works (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Three Teachers (#ulink_af1cf5b0-91d2-5e03-a467-012699c1ea06)


Carmello Chiarelli

1924–1985



Janice Slotnick

1914–1983



Jeffrey Kresser

1950–1997





I (#ulink_39784245-719b-5541-a0d4-3d4fb0871043)




1 (#ulink_495fd76e-7fe2-54cc-8374-78330fced743)


When I was eleven years old, in April 1961, my father arrived at school one day to take me into the woods. It was half-day, Wednesday. I usually walked home for lunch but that day he was waiting beside the Fairlane, in the suit he wore to work, the only man among the group of older, nervous mothers who insisted on coming and walking their children home from school.

On the drive—unannounced, with a mysterious destination—he tapped the wheel and hummed an odd little song that let me know he was nervous. I tried to follow the song, but couldn’t. My father was a small, secretive man, quiet, well-dressed. He was known in the family into which he had married, a large and clamorous Italian family (as he was Italian, himself), as one who habitually stood back from the passionate center of action. You can see even now, in the home movies that survive from those years (he never took them, my Uncle John did), how he stands aside from the others on the beach, hardly noticeable sometimes, smaller and more compact and less expansive than the other, heavier, laughing men. What those movies don’t tell you, though, is how he spoke, and the power he wielded because of the way he spoke. “Should we dig for clams?” someone on the beach would shout, trying to draw one last drop from the day. “No,” he’d say, and point. “The tide’s coming in.” The others would stand back then, nod. How foolish they’d been.

That day, he’d brought sandwiches for us to eat, meatball; they were on the seat between us. By the time we were into the woods the submarine rolls had gone soggy, and the bag had a wet stain on the bottom. We had to park at the bottom of the hill where the road ended—the hill was adjacent to the old Girl Scout property, a large undeveloped tract in our town, which had been dominated once by a mill and watch factory, then, after these had closed, had managed to hold on to its population by becoming a bedroom community for the city of Boston. There were still large wooded patches left, one or two farms. My father led me up the hill, as if following some sort of map that existed nowhere but in his head.

We found a rock—a large, flat boulder—that seemed to be what he was looking for, then ate the sandwiches. He still hadn’t spoken. He held a napkin six inches under his chin, a formal gesture, so as to catch any of the drops of sauce. Then, finally, he leaned toward me. He nodded once, and his lips made a small, familiar pursing motion.

“We’re going to live here, Luca,” he whispered.

He took another bite, then gestured, with his mouth full, across the ground in front of us. “This, this is our lot.”

My father’s voice had a slight rasp to it, as though he were in fact tougher than he appeared. It mixed with what was subtle and educated about him, and it was one of the things—there were many others—that gave the effect of there being at least two of him, two things not fighting it out so much as living inside of him in some interesting kind of harmony.

“That, over there, you see those sticks with the little orange flags? They mark out lots. Of course it’s only trees now, but they’re going to build a road up here. Everything you see …” Here he hesitated again. “They’re going to blast away. The rocks and …” He gestured with his fist. “Make houses. You can’t see it, but there’s an orange stick way over there. That’s where Uncle John’s house is going to be. We’re starting a neighborhood, you could say. The family. The Italians.”

He laughed a little after he said that, as if this last part of it, the Italian part, so important to my Uncle John, could never be as serious to him.

Then there was a silence. I looked where he’d asked me to look, and took in all this strange information, strangely delivered; delivered, that is, as though while he was telling me one thing, he was also telling me something else. So I listened harder than I was used to. I listened for the second story.

We kept a photograph prominent in our house in those days, a photograph taken when my father was in college. He’d gone to Boston College, the first in his family to go beyond high school, on a hockey scholarship. The photograph was black and white: him and his teammates, a row seated, a row standing, hockey sticks crossed in front of the seated row, “Snooks” Kelly, famous in our house, stood beside them, heavy, jacketed, the coach. They were either jug-eared boys or else big-jawed boy-men who looked thirty when they were only twenty, and I suspect your eye would be drawn to my father even if you didn’t know him. Seated in the front row, he is smaller and more delicate then the others, the one who appears most singular, and therefore blessed. There is a smile he is wearing that I used to sit and study. It was the smile of a man announcing: I am in this world, but not of it.

It was there now, curiously so, as he looked off into space, and ate his sandwich.

“Listen,” he said. “This is for you. Here, living here, so you can have a better life.”

I watched him consider his words carefully.

“Candace Road, that’s a decent street, Luca, a nice neighborhood, but this is really something else …” Suddenly he trailed off. Something had begun to trouble him.

He had stopped—that was my father—as if too bold an announcement would trap him. He smoothed the wax paper in his lap. He took several seconds and then he looked at me. “You almost finished?”

I said that I was, though I still had half a sandwich in my lap.

That is the quality I remember of that day: my settling into a journey I believed was to be slow and luxurious, then being hurried by him, as if the direction in which he’d pointed us were being altered midstroke.

I have to say that in the days and weeks afterward, my father seemed more excited by what he was doing than he had that day in the woods. Sometimes, even months later, he would take out the architect’s renderings and sit with us—that is, with my mother and me; I was their only child—at the kitchen table, pointing out this nicety and that. It wasn’t uncommon that as he was speaking he would touch my hair. I would run down the street, afterward, on a kind of cloud. And return, an hour or so later, to find he had retreated to his office, my mother setting the table for the two of us.

She never complained. He was a law unto himself. There were things he required: silence, immense space. She kept his food warm, then, only at the end, when it was clear he would not be coming out, for hours perhaps, wrapped it carefully and put it in the refrigerator.

I thought, in those days, that I knew more about him than she did, and made a child’s judgment as to her stupidity. I thought I knew something of my father’s darkness, though that would not have been the word I’d have chosen then. I knew at least what he did at night. From my bedroom window, I could watch him in the backyard, sitting for hours some nights in the Adirondack chairs that had been set up near the rock garden, smoking Pall Malls with his head tilted at a slight angle, as though listening to a difficult voice coming at him. The words he heard disappeared from time to time, so he had to move his head forward, to catch something he might otherwise miss, which was out there in the dark.

Afterward, he would come inside, and if I was still awake, I heard their noise. My mother made a low besotted groan, and it took off from there, took off and ascended, and became like the sound of her dying. I associated those sounds with violence. I was young, and it scared me, but since in the mornings she was all right, even cheerful, after a while I stopped worrying.

Still, there were always two things about my father to consider. One was the nights when he elicited those sounds from her, and then, afterward, in the morning, by some alchemy I couldn’t figure, made her happy. The other was what he did on Saturdays, when men came to our house. In addition to his work in the accounting department of Vanderbruek, the defense plant he’d been hired at out of college, and at which, over the course of fourteen years, he’d steadily risen, my father opened our house on Saturdays to men who wanted their taxes done, or men who had special financial problems, “tricky things,” he called them. They were an odd assortment; the only thing that held these men together was the ridiculous way they all dressed, half in the world of weekend chores, in flannels and chinos, and half in the world of business.

Something in my father’s bearing, I knew, made them want to appear respectable.

I would sometimes pass the window of my father’s office, which faced our backyard, on the pretext of throwing a ball up into the air and catching it, and, in the light over my father’s desk, always on, even on the brightest day, watch his alert, handsome face staring into the face of another man, some doughy, awkward stranger, with an intensity he only rarely directed at my mother and me. It was as though the man had just said something, and my father wanted to stop and ask him to explain. But I do not know how to tell you it wasn’t a word or a piece of business my father wanted explained, but something else, a hazy thing that the man embodied, so that while he was listening, I knew my father wasn’t really listening at all.

After the men were gone, there was another waiting to be endured. For the rest of the afternoon, my father sulked. Sometimes he took off in the car. I imagined he was chasing down one of the Saturday men to point out an error in judgment. Supper was always eaten in silence. Later, in the evening, he would go out and consult with himself in the backyard. His Saturdays followed that pattern, without fail. But just before dusk, in the spring and summer, the boys on Candace Road always gathered on the street to play Wiffle ball. It was a quiet street, full of small houses into which sound penetrated easily. By the time the game was in its second or third inning, the fathers had all come out of their houses to watch.

They were not, for the most part, successful men. They were tire salesmen, mechanics. Among them was a retired Army sergeant. No visible trajectory attached to their lives; the neighborhood houses lacked the silence and absences of ambition.

But at dusk on summer evenings, they came out and rested inside a moment of grace. Their sons on the quiet street. The soaring of the Wiffle ball, which, even sailing far, would break no windows. The smell of lilacs, apple blossoms in May. The fall of light in a suburban neighborhood early in the reign of John F. Kennedy. I do not want to romanticize, but there it was.

Frequently, my father was the last to come out. Even when he did, his mood was often such that he didn’t greet the other fathers, merely stood there, stiff and in the white shirt he had worn to prepare men’s taxes. But even he was capable of being seduced by this scene. At a certain point his shoulders settled, he’d light a cigarette, and the compulsion to leave—so strong, while reined in, so much of the time—leaked out of him.

Even guarding second base, I sensed this. In this game, in the perfection of boys at play, lay my power.

In October of that year, Uncle John’s house was completed, and he held a party in celebration.

We’d often visited Uncle John and Aunt Emma in the two-family they lived in on River Street. Their sons were Bobby and George, who used to entice the younger cousins outside so they could piss off the roof onto them. But that night, when my parents descended the stairs and noticed that I was wearing my everyday clothes, a look crossed their features, as though there was something profound I didn’t get.

We had seen John’s new house in daylight, the most solid and finished of the several houses then in development, split-level houses surrounded by bulldozers and, in mid-fall, by heavy, dug-up mud. John’s house had pillars and second-floor tiers and a facing of pink-tinted marble. A large effort had gone into making it grand, and my father, in the past, whenever he’d driven to the Hill to check things out, had come back and voiced a certain skepticism about what was going on up there. “Versailles,” he had taken to calling John’s house. He splayed his lips and made a sound, which was frequently followed by a call to the architect of our own house, to see if ours couldn’t be simplified.

At night, though, the house underwent a kind of transformation. From far away, from half a mile down the hill, though the road was still unpaved and deeply rutted, we could begin to see the lights of John’s house coming at us through the trees. My mother gasped when we were close. John had set up spotlights outside the house; what they lit appeared larger and more imposing even than it was. Surrounding it, in the dark, were high trees, so that the house poked out of the wilderness like it was making some supremely confident announcement of itself, and I remembered what my father had said about John’s ambition, to make a neighborhood of Italians, and it began to make sense. I could not have said exactly what I apprehended when I looked up at the finished house, but I remember something quickening in me.

In the basement—carpeted, immense—there was immediately a competition for us. Who would we choose to sit with? The aunts’ arms all went out, as if to grab us, and when they shouted greetings, it was as though with one voice. There were three of them, including Emma, John’s wife. My mother’s sisters all had black hair, long and rich and falling out of the bobby pins and clips with which they tried to pull it back. That hair was like a shout in the dark. Family lore had it that they were all unhappy women, but they never seemed that way. My father explained it to me: “They came from an island, Luca. An island in Italy. You have to understand this. They were little girls, and they lived in Paradise. And then their father took them here.” (My mother, the youngest, was the only one born in this country.) “And since then, it’s been nothing but complaints.” Then he always added, low, conspiratorial, not for me to repeat: “Maybe it wasn’t really Paradise, you understand? But let’s keep that our secret.”

I tried. But it was difficult sometimes, to believe in the vaunted unhappiness, or to see it as the central thing about them. They were vivid, even in their voiced dissatisfactions, and they stuck together in a way I admired.

Emma, in her forties, was pregnant then, tired out by the series of miscarriages that had come between Bobby and George and this late, last child. She sat with her sisters Carmela and Lucy on the couch. Carmela and Lucy had both been wild girls, and they had married the sorts of men wild girls married, sailors and musicians. They owned small houses, packed with children, and not until that night had there been any indication that one day these lives would prove to be inadequate. But here, in this house, came the first suggestion of the movement of history and, with it, a kind of panic.

As soon as we entered, they tried to pull my mother down with them, onto the couch, to assert that nothing really had changed, but my mother resisted their entreaties, moved past them, toward John. He rose from his BarcaLounger. He smelled of aftershave and wore a smoking jacket, with patches of suede at the cuffs. He had a large, smooth head, a businessman’s head (he ran a fleet of trucks), with surprising blond hair—surprising, anyway, for an Italian—brush-cut, so that you could see the scalp through it. He planted a soft kiss on my mother’s cheek, and then looked at my father, who remained at a distance, as if asking him to come closer, to stand with him in a kind of solidarity of success.

The two other uncles, Mike and Tony, were gathered around the pool table, where Bobby and George, the former roof pissers, posed for the rest of us, their hair pomaded and combed back off their short foreheads. They looked like the dark, wrongful heirs in Shakespeare, who carry small knives concealed. They held pool cues, and pretended they knew the game, but after a while John and my father came and took the cues away from them and began shooting.

My father was a very precise athlete, a man who wasted no motion. He knew how to hold the cue, and his shots did what he wanted them to. He looked unsurprised afterward, even a little bored. John was clumsier. Once, after a particularly bad shot where he scratched the table, he leaned down and rubbed at the nap, and said to my father, “Meola’s bought a lot up here. Did you hear?”

“The dentist?” my father asked.

“Yes.”

My father made a motion with his mouth that was like shrugging.

“And Doc Semenza,” John said, preparing his next shot.

“So we’re up here with the hoi polloi,” my father said.

Someone, one of the uncles, had put on a record, Dean Martin, and when Dean Martin lapsed into Italian, Uncle Mike, who used to sing in a band that played at weddings (he worked for John now), began to sing along. At first John seemed amused by this, but as it went on, a kind of annoyance started to come into his face. Lucy, Mike’s wife, picked up on this, as though John’s shifting moods were setting the tone for everyone, and she shouted out, “You gonna get me something like this, Mike?” and then, glancing at John, as if for his approval, added, “In a pig’s eye.”

There were children in the room besides Bobby and George and me, five of them, some of them younger, and though they behaved in a respectful manner, every once in a while one of the smaller ones had to be reprimanded. This always came out louder, more angry than it needed to be. And every once in a while Carmela or Lucy would shout something insulting to one of their husbands, as though once that particular theme was introduced, it became a favorite.

Displaced from the pool table, my cousin George was leaning against a bank of windows, his hands behind him, staring at me. He had never much liked me, so his stare was unsettling, some hint of a challenge beneath it. That was the party: George staring at me, and bursts of noise followed by quieter pockets in which the only sound was that of my father and John moving around the pool table, the tops of their heads, my father’s smooth black hair and John’s bristly blond, lit by the glow of the lamp over the table. It was in one of these quieter moments that Lucy grabbed me, pulled me up close, and shouted, “So what are you gonna be when you grow up, huh, Luca? A fighter pilot?”

It had no meaning as a question, it was just Lucy’s way of bursting through the uncomfortable silence of the party, but they all reacted as if their ears had been cocked. John, my father, the uncles all laughed, and then when the words “fighter pilot” were repeated, a second wave of laughter followed. George narrowed his eyes and looked me over again. He moved across the room toward me, turning once, to glare at the others. He hadn’t laughed, the only one. When he faced me again, he said, “Come on. Come with me, fighter pilot.”

We went upstairs. He flicked on the lights that illuminated the living room, a deep, long room full of soft furniture, pastels, and light wood, a room full of turns and nooks, with, at the end, a great stone fireplace. My father had described this room to us; he had come back from his first viewing of John’s house and tried to make us laugh by describing the ornate furnishings, the sheer exuberance of John’s yearning for a life beyond that which he knew. That was when the word “Versailles” first entered our vocabulary, and my father began referring to John as “Louis the Sixteenth.” The memory of this derision stood between me and the room. I might have looked at it my father’s way, and his way alone, if I hadn’t been aware of the concentration with which George, standing next to me, was looking at it, a concentration that altered his breathing, made it reverent, and for a moment created a kind of intimacy between us.

He led me down the hall and opened the door to Bobby’s room and allowed me to look in. “Bobby’s room,” he announced. Then he opened another door. Inside was a crib and pink walls. “If they don’t have a girl, they’ll go apeshit,” George said.

George’s room was identical to Bobby’s. Both were brown and nearly bare, with only a bed and a dresser and a desk situated near the window. There were paintings on the walls, of boys catching footballs, boys playing golf. George sat at his desk and folded his hands. A neat pile of books lay on the corner of the desk: Geometry and Physical Science and Animal Farm. They had the overused look of books given to students in the lower depths of the high school, which was where George had always resided. The design of the room seemed a deliberate attempt to wipe clean the slate of George’s previous life, to make of him a more ambitious boy, a scholar. George drew one hand up, to pat his pomaded hair, and a shadow of trouble crossed his features.

George’s room was on the corner of the house, so he had two windows. He got up and went to the one that faced the side yard, the woods. His hands were in his pockets, and because of the light over his desk and the fact that there were no curtains yet, I could see the reflection of his face in the window, and the way he was looking at me.

He was short, shorter than Bobby, and less good-looking. Bobby was the handsome one, with a face like Fabian’s and a tall body in which he moved like a swimmer.

“So, welcome to our new lives, Luca,” he said.

He turned to me, and his face made a beckoning motion before he lowered his brow. He was thinking something over, whether or not to make some request. I said nothing, offered nothing. It was all too new, this sort of power shift between us.

“How old are you, Luca?”

I said eleven, soon twelve.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and touched his hair again. He looked at his school books, sullen and mistrusting, then reached under his bed. He pulled out a fat paperback and flipped through it. He chuckled. “This is good,” he said. “This is very good.”

He tossed it toward me. The throw didn’t quite make it. I picked it up. It was a purple book with a picture of a Victorian gentleman on the cover, a man with a long mustache.

“You go back downstairs, and the next time Lucy tries to treat you like a baby, you read her some of that, okay? Read it out loud.”

I knew that was not a good idea, but I nodded, because his face on the bed now wore a cruel little smile.

“You take it, and read it anyway. If you have any questions, you ask me.”

That was all. He dismissed me. And the next thing was, I was sitting alone in John’s living room.

I hadn’t known that was what I wanted to do, but I was drawn back there, rather than to the party itself. I sat and absorbed it all. The room was dark. The only sound was the bubbles sent up by the filter of the fish tank. I’d come to sit here for a reason, but I didn’t know exactly what that was. Our world was changing. I understood now why my parents had looked as they’d looked at home, preparing for this, charged and expectant. I sat there, and I tried to grasp it.

For the first time, I was able to see beyond my father’s vision of this room, to what John was trying to do here. We were princes now, Bobby and George and me, but how did you go about being a prince? What did it mean for your daily life? I knew this: the book in my lap was something to be ashamed of. I knew vaguely but, still, enough what would be inside it: sex and more sex. George had given it to me because, for him, sex was easier than other things—easier for George than the books on his desk, or John’s new insistence that he be a “college man,” which we’d begun to hear for the first time.

A sound came from outside, but my reverie was deep enough that I did not get up to look until the sound had been going on a long time. At the base of John’s driveway, my father was lighting a cigarette and with his free hand throwing rocks. That is, he stopped to light the cigarette and then he threw the rocks. He looked calm and unperturbed, just as if he had stepped out to have a smoke, and it was only in the motion of his arm as he threw that I knew something was wrong. He was throwing the rocks very hard, very far, and with great concentration. He was trying to hit our house, across the way.

After a while, he stopped. He disappeared, walked into the dark. I could see the lit ash end of his cigarette and then nothing of him, but I suspected he had gone over to our house and was inspecting it, testing the floorboards and the beams the way he did, humming, all the while, one of the songs with which he consoled himself. “Teach Me Tonight.” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” I watched, and I held the book George had given me, and at that moment, though I didn’t know why, I wanted to fling the book across the room, to mimic my father’s gesture with the rocks.

After another little while, John came out in search of him. I saw John stop at the end of his driveway. He looked to both sides, exaggeratedly, like a man in a cartoon, and like the man in the cartoon, I suspected he would choose the wrong direction. I almost shouted, from the window, to set him straight. But he chose right. When he brought my father back, ten or so minutes later, it may have been me, reading into the scene, but John had his arm around my father’s shoulders, and I saw in those shoulders an immense resistance, as though John were leading him back toward a place he had decided, in the last ten minutes, he really didn’t want to go.

Like everything else, that image disappeared, covered over by another, and another. I was in the seventh grade, and I made my good marks. Luca Carcera, beloved of the teachers. In the winter there were lakes, frozen over for skating, and I had friends. Sometimes we stayed late, skating; the sky took on, around the departed sun, a shade of deep yellow that exists in the world only when you are twelve, and disappears after. My father arrived to pick us up and stood outside the car, bundled up. “Nobody drowned, huh?” he shouted. “Nobody fell in?”

Sometimes he brought his hockey stick and came down to the ice to show us how it was done. He’d played left wing at BC and he had wonderful speed and when he turned on the ice he managed a terrific little jumping movement. I would never be as good as he was, none of us would. “Your father,” they said, the boys who were my friends, breathless and in awe.

Afterward, he patted himself and found the pack of Pall Malls in his coat pocket and smoked one. Smoke came out of his mouth, and the smoke our breath made in the cold seemed a pure imitation. The car smelled of cigarettes and, once or twice, of the presence of someone else, a body that had recently been there. It was a poor-smelling, weathery body, whosever it had been, someone who did not dress well or have the personal habits of my father, and we covered it, my friends and I, packed in with our skates. It went away. I looked out the window and saw the crust of the snow and something that flashed across my mind went away. To entertain us, my father was singing.

In the evenings, we drove to Natick, to Framingham, to visit furniture showrooms, to move among the great empty sofas and easy chairs. Or else my parents huddled in the kitchen, planning the house. “Do you want this, Dorothy, or do you want that?” my father would ask, as they studied furniture catalogs. He was only slightly impatient, even indulgent at times. Sometimes they would retreat into Italian, tender when they did that, or else angry. In the adjacent dining room, I sat writing a play about Cortés, “The Conquest of Mexico,” my assignment for school. In the scene where Cortés faces Montezuma, I had him shout, “Do you want this, or do you want that?” Meanwhile, my parents, in English, moved toward agreements: a sectional in off-white, a beige easy chair, a round kitchen table with teak chairs.

In April, we moved into the new house. The day had a ceremonial quality, measured and carefully paced, like a presentation scene in the movies, the birth of Ramses. My father held my mother’s elbow at the threshold, as if they were about to step into a lake and he was attentive to the chill she might feel. With his hands in his pockets, in his best camel’s hair coat, he inspected the rooms and nodded. The rooms were large and full of light; on the walls, the textured grass cloth shone. Before us lay a new life, shimmering and empty as the model kitchens and dining rooms in the furniture showrooms. Moving trucks had preceded us, and the movers had made mistakes. A couple of chairs, placed in the wrong room, had to be dragged across the carpet. The carpet itself was thick enough so that my father, lying down in the living room, could move his arms and leave the impress of an angel’s wings. He pulled me down and we tussled and only in a region far back in his eyes did I see signs of effort.

Later, Uncle John came. He wore an expensive raincoat and his hair was wet. He had a cigar in his mouth and one for my father. He always took a shower in the middle of the day because he sweated so much at work. His midday freshness was legendary. My mother was unpacking dishes in the kitchen, my father had gone to lie down in their room. For this, I had been given the day off from school.

“Everything good?” John called to my mother. My father came out of the bedroom at the sound, his hair mussed and standing up at the back of his head, still in the camel’s hair coat.

“Going back to work?” John asked.

“Yes.”

“So. Moved in.” John’s hands were in his pockets, he rocked back on his feet.

He offered the extra cigar to my father, but my father just looked at it. It had a pink wrapper on it, so we knew it was left over from when Emma had the baby.

“Yes. Moved in,” my father said. It sounded grim coming out of his mouth, and John stared at him a moment, annoyed.

“You?” my father asked. “Going back?”

“I’ll have a cup of coffee first, with Dorothy.”

We all gathered at the bay window to watch my father drive away. John’s eyes stayed on him a long time.

When my mother took the roast out of the oven at six, he was still not home. We were used to seeing him at 5:30, and there was less of a drive from Vanderbruek to here. At 6:30 she put the roast back in the oven to warm. Outside the window, I saw some boys cut across the lots, disappear into the frames of houses. Meola, Semenza; I knew the names already, and who would live in each of the uncompleted houses, and when I saw these boys, I didn’t think they were the ones who would live there. They were just boys looking, gawking, and I waited for them to come out.

At seven o’clock, the lights of my father’s car came around the bend and into the driveway. He entered, excited, holding a bottle of wine. “My new house,” he said, like a boy.

We ate in the kitchen; my father kept reaching up to play with the chandelier that hung over the table. “Look at that,” he kept saying, and flicked the dangling crystals of the chandelier they had chosen, one frozen winter night at Jordan’s. We had not had a better dinner in a long time, and I kept wishing that I had homework, that I had gone to school that day, so I could feel now the exquisite pang of having to leave a scene so sweet.

That night they made love. I lay in bed listening. It was a windy night and there were tree branches that tapped against the house. My father had come into my room and stood in the dark, thinking I was asleep. He had leaned against the wall with his hands in his pockets, and I didn’t think I was wrong in assuming what he was feeling was pride. Then he had gone in and made love to my mother, but the sounds tonight filled me with terror. Though I ought to have been used to them, tonight they seemed extreme, as though he were doing something to her beyond the usual. When I heard my mother cry out in that ripped-open way of hers, I went into their bedroom and stood in the doorway. I tried to fool myself by pretending what I was doing wasn’t conscious—that I was sleepwalking—and thus excusable. When my father noticed me there, he made a gasp. Then he said “goddammit.” He rose and I expected to be hit, though he had rarely done that. I had seen him naked many times but not like this.

On the bed, my mother’s head was turned against the pillow.

My father tried to overcome his anger by taking my hand. “Never never never,” he said on the way to my bedroom. “Do you understand, Luca? Never interrupt like that.”

He tucked me in, exaggeratedly, almost secretly gentle. “You’re scared?”

I said nothing. His face came very close. “New house. Your mother scares you, making those sounds?”

It was safe to nod, and he smiled, lightly and delicately. “Luca, that’s the sound of happiness you hear. That’s all.”

He went away then. I drew the covers tight, and heard their attempts to discipline themselves, to keep quiet. The trees that would need trimming made their scratching noise against the outer walls and I thought about what my father had said.

One night early in summer, he brought home from Vanderbruek a man named Bob Painter. Bob Painter was a good deal larger than my father, tall and gruff-looking, with a round red face. He worked on the grounds crew. My father made sure we understood Bob was one of the foremen.

Bob Painter’s effect on my father was a little startling to watch. He made this neat, taciturn man, who was always telling other people to temper their effusions, himself effusive, wanting to show off. My mother and I were both very quiet at the beginning. We were watching a man we thought we knew behave as we had never seen him before. He showed Bob Painter around our house, and, pointing things out, laughed at things that didn’t seem funny. He laughed in a high and irritating way, and there were times, doing that, when he seemed to be dismissing us, and our whole lives, for the benefit of a stranger.

We sat in the backyard, on the flagstone patio. My father cooked steaks on the grill. Bob Painter was uncomfortable being here, I could tell. To my mother’s question, he said he had three little girls, they lived in Woburn. Seven, nine, and eleven. “Like clockwork, we had ’em,” he said to my mother. “Every two years.” He was like a man you would see in an Army movie, a black-and-white one, a minor figure, the sergeant who loses his temper, gets in a knife fight, dies. Only at the end would you feel sympathy for him. I kept waiting for him to disappear, become as unimportant to our lives as he would be to that movie. His big round face had cracks in it, fissures. His cheeks were immense, long and drooping and marked by the outlines of broken veins. His face looked like it had been frozen in reaction to some sort of trouble. He had brought a six-pack of Schlitz beer, and each time he opened one of the cans he looked like he was in pain. He offered one to Mother, and she surprised me by taking it.

Did she flirt with him? I don’t think so. But as it grew dark, she began calling him Bob in a familiar way that irritated me terribly. “Another Schlitz, Bob?” she asked, though he was clearly in charge of that area, holding them between his legs. He had an orange fringe of hair that swept back off his crown.

“My brother-in-law,” my father announced, turning the steaks, “had an idea, Bob. This hill is going to be full of guineas.”

He had never said the word “guineas” before. Perhaps he said it at work. The light was falling, and you could see where the lawn was starting to come up, shoots of green still vulnerable to our footsteps. My father looked at the shrubs ringing the patio and seemed regretful, perhaps knowing he’d gone too far. On the days when he had planted the shrubs, it had been as though nothing was more urgent and important than to make things grow here.

Bob Painter was again on the verge of speaking. Then suddenly he appeared to be embarrassed, thinking better of his own impulse. He sat quietly in the chair. He turned to me at last. “You got a room there, Luca?”

I said I did.

“Can I see it?”

“Sure,” my father answered for me.

Behind me, in the hallway, Bob Painter’s step made a heavy tread. His breathing, too, was heavy. There was not much to show him in the room. I thought maybe he had asked to see it just to get away from the uncomfortable scene below, but I was embarrassed, because this called attention to me in a way I didn’t want. Like George’s room, across the street, mine was stripped down: bed, bureau, desk, heavy dark rug. Over my desk, however, was a print my teacher had given me, after the successful completion of “The Conquest of Mexico,” of an Aztec warrior. The warrior had a strong jaw, and a flaming burst of feathers grew out of his head. In his arms, he held a prone woman, a woman who had been overpowered somehow. He was, for me, a hopelessly romantic figure, and in Bob Painter’s presence, I found I wanted to turn him to the wall.

Bob Painter stared at the print, though, with great interest. “What is this, an Inca?” he asked, and breathed in his funny, sucking way.

I corrected him.

He went on staring at the picture, then at me. “I have three daughters,” he said finally. “You’ll like them.”

But why should I ever know them? I conceived for him in that instant a disgust so strong that whole sections of the evening are blocked out for me. All I remember after is wanting him to go, wanting the course of our lives, with its secrets and its blurred-over areas, to resume. We ate steak. The light withdrew. I went in to watch television. I listened to the sound of them on the patio, my mother’s voice, now drunk, the loudest. I imagined my father again using the word “guinea,” and I wanted my mother to lift a gun and shoot Bob Painter. Or me, I could do it. I could take an ax and finish the job. But my mother made her loud noises and then her murmuring assenting ones, and the men’s voices rode under hers. It was like they were going away from her secretly, under cover of night, throwing their voices like ventriloquists, so that she could not know how far away from her they already were.

It was a Wednesday in July when he finally didn’t come home. At first, it seemed only another of his latenesses. My mother kept his supper warm, we watched television together. When, the next day, we still had not heard from him, I thought she should call his work. I understood, though, that even if I suggested it, my mother wouldn’t act. For an hour in the morning I threw a rubber ball against the side of the house, and caught it.

By afternoon, the waiting had become too much to endure, so I took the trolley into Boston. I was old enough to do that then, usually with friends, today, for the first time, alone. I knew my mother wouldn’t know or care. I explored the streets of Boston, looking for a movie, finally settled on Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man at the Saxon. I remembered nothing of it afterward, save for one thing, one detail.

I took the trolley home and walked to the Hill, then slowed my pace, certain that when I got to the top his car would be in the driveway. When it wasn’t, I shut off a light in my mind and went and got my ball and threw it against the house. I must have made too much noise; there was a tapping at the window. Uncle John was there. He motioned me inside.

I remembered then what it was about the movie I’d just seen, the single scene that had lingered. The boy, Nick Adams, comes upon a boxer, punch-drunk, wasted, in the woods. Paul Newman played the boxer, and with him was a Negro. When the boy comes upon them, they share some melted ham fat, and then the boxer becomes excited. Something in the boxer cannot be contained. So the Negro knocks him out. Taps him, and he’s unconscious. That was wonderful, that small and vivid display of power and control.

I loved that scene.




2 (#ulink_ea29dc4a-8795-5fdb-b923-975bcc57623e)


By August of that year, the houses on the end of our street, and Uncle John’s, began filling in. Something was evident right away. A new kind of person had come here.

Uncle John had said the names, “Meola, Semenza,” as though he were describing a delicate, expensive purchase he’d just made. But when they moved in, they ignored us.

In late summer, they began giving parties for one another. The rows of Cadillacs and Buicks began coming up the Hill. There were four houses on the end of our street, facing one another, and two at the end of Uncle John’s. At first, on the nights of those parties, Uncle John would stand out on his lawn, watering hose in hand. Perhaps they’d made a mistake, forgot he lived there. He stopped short of waving to the well-dressed people going to the party at Meola’s. His big house took on the appearance of a gatehouse at the entrance to an estate.

The sons of Meola and Semenza were also different from us. They played on the high school football team and wore, in their front yards, letter jackets, purple and yellow. They were compact, black-haired boys, guards, centers. They drove their own cars, too, and some nights brought their girlfriends up to the Hill. From where I watched, from my room or from the front yard (the grass had grown enough to begin mowing), they seemed to drive with an extraordinary calm. Beside them, their girlfriends, girls who wore their hair in “flips,” and who were cheerleaders for the football team, seemed to have all the energy. The girls moved, in the passenger seats of those cars, talking and gesturing with their hands, and when they parked in front of the boys’ houses, they waited for the door to be opened, and then moved inside, sometimes half-running, always followed by the boys, who moved more slowly.

It had been, in all the ways that counted, an odd summer. No one had bothered to tell me why my father had left. His disappearance, however, had been sudden and absolute. Apparently, he had not needed to take his clothes with him, wherever he had gone, because they still hung in his closet, and because it was summer and I was home all the time, I knew he didn’t come to retrieve anything, unless he came at night when I was asleep.

I still had my old friends, and sometimes, after supper, I would get on my bike and ride to Candace Road to play in the Wiffle ball games. But the old neighborhood held no great interest. Coming home, I would get off my bike at the bottom of the Hill, walk slowly up, and approach the houses, which had their lights on, like a spy.

In their backyard, Bobby and George might be sitting at their picnic table, talking, and though they laughed frequently, I began to feel their diminishment, how they were coming to understand that they were not like the sons of Meola and Semenza, and yet not thugs either, in the way they had once been, in the way it had once been all right for them to be. Instead, for a time they were hiding, just as I was.

Then I would walk down to the other end of the street to look at the newer houses, in which there seemed to be a heightened sense of life: more lights were on, the football team sometimes gathered, or else the sons of Meola and Semenza were there alone, flipping cards to one another under the extravagant chandeliers hanging over their dining room tables.

There were girls, too: Meola had a daughter my age, in my class at school, though we never spoke. Her friends came over and they sat in the backyard. I stood in the dark with my bike, and listened to the high murmur they made. They spoke in the same language my family spoke, but it was full of hesitations and conjunctions, mysterious nuances that made it seem a language all its own.

And here is the essential thing, the thing I was most drawn to: when a man, the owner of a house, would come out the front door, and stand in the lighted entrance, it was as though he were surveying something. Nothing need be going on physically for the world to seem alive and full of movement. The men on Candace Road who would come out to watch us play Wiffle ball were not unhappy men, but this sort of proprietary moment was not possible for them. A curtain had been lifted for me, I suppose, certain important divisions in the world were made clear. And though it probably wouldn’t have affected me the same way at any other point in my life, it did then.

Finally I would go home. My mother would always be watching television in the room we called the family room. She watched with one lamp on, and, frequently, with one arm slung behind her head.

“Where did you go?” she wanted to know.

“To Candace Road.”

My mother did not understand Wiffle ball or my growing penchant for silent observation, so that was all I said.

“Want to watch TV with me?”

I would have to say yes, then sit with her awhile, though nothing on the square box in front of us interested me half so much as what was going on outside. I was watching only to be polite, because she had asked me, because I suspected she needed company.

I allotted her half an hour, then I went to my room. In summer, the windows were open, the breezes came in. I took off all my clothes and lay on my bed in the dark. Sometimes a car drove by, or there were voices, a boy and a girl. They spoke low, and I listened in such a way that even simple words—words like “No” or “Come in”—stayed with me a long time afterward.



On Sundays we still had the ritual of the beach to anchor us in the old world. The family still gathered at Nahant. We parked illegally. We carried picnic baskets of food, big coolers. We set up four blankets in a row. No mention was ever made of my father, but I could see, in the behavior of my Aunts Carmela and Lucy, a notation made. Emma was always protective of my mother, but Carmela and Lucy looked at her in a way now that suggested they were not unhappy at the turn of events.

On the blanket, eating her food, I don’t believe my mother noticed this, or if she did, she pretended not to. She smiled as if nothing had happened to her, it was all right, being left didn’t make such a difference. I asked her to come into the water with me. I would have preferred to swim alone, but I couldn’t bear to leave her with them.

In the water, sometimes, she became a girl again. She told me how, when she was growing up, she left her sisters to the chores, took her towel down to the local pool, and swam all morning. “I was a fish, Luca,” she said. “My sisters had to do all the work.” So I saw, maybe, how things had once been, and why her sisters had looked at her the way they’d looked at her on the night of John’s party.

When she came out of the water, Carmela and Lucy were usually lying back beside their husbands, often with one thigh draped over the men’s legs. It seemed, since my father’s desertion, they had become more interested in their husbands; they ran their legs up the fleshy thighs of Tony and Mike in ways they never had before. So I tried to distract my mother. I told her to watch out for crabs, to look down, down into the water. I felt all my stiffness and formality, as though I had become a kind of guide for her. In my hyperawareness of the intense sensuality of the world, it became an imperative to mask that sensuality, to stand as a barrier between her and it.

There was another side to my mother that seemed to come out exclusively on the phone. I was home a lot, so I heard. I lay in my room and read. I threw a rubber ball against the back wall of the house. I was too young for a job. My one task was to mow the lawn.

“Well, he can’t see him,” I heard her say once. And then: “Because I told him I would tell. I would tell them at his work.”

After a moment, she repeated it: “If he tried to see Luca, I would tell.”

In my room, I heard the words bouncing off the walls, off the picture of the Aztec warrior, the novels of John Steinbeck I was reading that summer—The Red Pony, The Pearl—and the book George had given me, called My Secret Life. Steinbeck was for the day, but at night, I liked to lie in bed and read about the Victorian author of My Secret Life “rogering” women. I liked to hear the women shout things like, “You’re a horse! Oh my God, my man’s a horse!”

“And they’d fire him right away,” my mother said afterward.

Uncle John had explained nothing the day he’d motioned me inside after I’d gone to see Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man. He’d said only, “Your father’s gone away,” or something like that. On his face had been the whole weight of the secret, but he had put his finger to his lips, as if to keep them shut. He shook his head, then made a stilted promise to my mother: “I want to assure you, Dorothy, that I will do everything in my power to make sure that Luca has a normal life.”

After listening to my mother’s conversations on the phone, I expected her to look different, but she didn’t. She took care of her flower gardens and made up her face and prepared elaborate meals, enough for three or four. At the table, eating with her, I felt all arms and sharp, bony elbows. I felt ugly and like my bones would pop out and I would knock her in the face if I moved too quickly. I felt, too, and in dangerous ways, like that was what I wanted to do.

As soon as I gave up going down to the Wiffle ball games, I took to spending time in their bedroom. At the other end of the house, my mother watched four or five television shows in a row, everything that was on, so it was safe. My father’s suits hung in the closet, five of them. I could see I would be taller than him someday, if I didn’t stop growing. I would hover over him, but would I ever see him? Beside the bed was a wedding portrait, his tight smile, and then, on the wall, the BC hockey photo. When he was still here, he would have awakened every morning to the sight of himself poised to bolt.

One night my mother caught me in their room. “What are you doing?” she asked.

She was in the doorway, and I was on the bed, my hands between my legs, resting there. She cocked her head and smiled as though there could be nothing wrong with any activity I chose now. Then she rephrased the question. When I didn’t answer, I saw the change in her face, the beginning of her allowing something in.

She came in and sat beside me on the bed. She looked where I was looking, at the BC picture. Then she got up and took it down, with a decisiveness I had not seen from her up to this point. Carefully, she put it away in a drawer. In the drawer also was a rosary, and some underwear she didn’t use anymore. Then she came and sat beside me. She put her hand in my hair, which was thick and springy and resisted her fingers.

“Come and watch TV,” she said.

“I don’t want to,” I answered.

The next day she did something. I was not home when she did it. It was early September. There was still a thickness of woods behind the houses of Meola and Semenza, and I had gone there to spy on Meola’s daughter. There was a copse of birches, inside it Meola had placed a bench, wrought iron, full of fancy designs. Karen Meola came out with nail polish and a book. She had a broad, flat face and she was short, but she was popular. She painted her nails and I watched the way she lifted her heavy thighs to get at her toes. At a certain point she looked up, as if she’d become alerted—by nothing, by silence—to my presence. If she had discovered me, I don’t know what would have happened. In two days, we would be back in school, and I would see her every day. But here, now, it was charged with strangeness, my watching her, and this was what I liked about it.

When I got home, there was commotion. Uncle John’s car was parked in front of the house, and since it was the middle of the day, this was unusual. It was time for lunch.

But John was pacing in our living room, and when he saw me at the foot of the stairs, I could tell he wished I hadn’t come home.

My mother stood in the middle of the kitchen looking as if she had just dropped something and was contemplating an imaginary mess on the floor before her. Her hair looked a little wild, and her eyes.

John turned on her. “Now what?”

And then, harder: “And how do you keep the house, Dorothy? Did you consider that before pulling this little stunt? You say he needs to see his son, fine—but is the way to do that to call and rat on him, so you lose everything? They’ll fire him now for sure. You think like a woman, Dorothy. You think only with the emotions.”

She looked at me, something secret in her eyes, as if I had been her ally in what she had just done; I, at least, would understand.

“What happened?” I asked.

John simply looked at me again, wishing I would go away. “Nothing,” he said.

Then he went to the big bay window and touched the sides of his pants, perhaps searching for a cigar.

“You’re going to see your father.”

That night he called.

“I’m coming to get you,” he said. “Friday night.” After which he paused, then said, in a half whisper, “It’s okay now.”

But was it? In the way he spoke, there was the inference that our world, his and mine, was going to be restored, and that it was the only world that counted. But close to me, in the family room, my mother made her presence known, in small ways, by moving her legs on the couch.

“What would you like to do, Luca?” my father asked, from whatever room or bar he might be calling from.

“I don’t care,” I said.

Again, my mother had moved, as if she were following the conversation through the movements of her legs and arms.

“Maybe I can just, show you how I’m living now,” he said. “Maybe that would be enough for a start.”

“Okay.”

He giggled. I knew it was just his nervousness speaking, though at first it cut me in a tender place.

“Your mother and you been doing okay?”

“Yes.”

“I couldn’t call because of, well, because of complicated reasons.”

“It’s okay.”

He held a long pause.

“Friday night,” he repeated.

When our conversation was over, I watched television with my mother for a while, out of politeness and a sense of impending and necessary desertion. She was watching Naked City. She favored police shows, doctor shows, anything featuring large and burly males moving heavily through the world, knocking obstacles from their paths. When the commercial came on, I spoke. “He says he’s coming to get me Friday.”

“I called his work,” she said abruptly. “I told on him. I told them what he was.”

I could see only the back of her head, the slightly mad way her hair sprawled upward, and her arm lay as if in readiness to pat her hair down.

“That’s why he’s coming, Luca.” She touched her hair then, and continued watching the show.

Of course I understood something, though maybe not in the way of words. I understood that my father had made a charge outward, into the world beyond this world, and that this charge had always been coming, he had been preparing for it a long time. Our coming here, our ascension, the finishedness of this neighborhood itself—had been, I knew, a catalyst.

But when he came, I thought right away that he looked silly. He had fallen away from a standard, and it was only at his appearance that I understood how, in his absence, I had allied myself with Meola and Semenza, and with my Uncle John, the men who stood beneath the high archways of their doors and surveyed the world.

He was wearing a hat, but not a suit. Instead, a soft cotton shirt, buttoned to the neck. He stood beside the Fairlane, waiting.

Uncle John had come for the occasion. My mother had packed me food in a bag.

“Don’t be silly, Dorothy,” John had said when she’d handed me the bag, and my mother answered, “There might not be food there.” Because so little had been said, every word carried an enormous, terrifying weight. There. Where were we going?

Behind me, as my father stood waiting, in the foolish hat, John had his hands on my shoulders, and I could practically feel his belligerence. It was only because John’s anger seemed so oversized that I was able to sympathize with my father even a little, to move an inch beyond my absorption in this new world of ours to wonder what lesser world my father had chosen, instead, to inhabit. John’s hands tightened on my shoulders and he forced me out the door.

My father smiled. I thought how I must look to him, standing before the door with my shoulders high, as though John were still gripping them, and with the bag of food in my hands. It was like I had become, in the time of his absence, a kind of girl.

“Let me look at you,” he said.

So I went down the steps. He made a great show of circling my body. He touched my arms. “Okay,” he said, as if he’d just had a thought, something secret, something he wouldn’t tell me. He glanced once at the house to find John still watching him in a leaning-forward, aggressive manner that made him seem all pointy, rodentlike head. Then he looked around the neighborhood and seemed glad to be back. “I see they moved in,” he said. “Down the street.”

“Yes.”

“And tell me. Do they … associate with you? With John? Are there … block parties, and such?”

“No,” I said.

He looked down the street. “No, I didn’t think so. Come on.”

We got in the car, and he kept looking at me as if waiting for the conversation to start, as if it were up to me. He turned the radio on but seemed not to find anything interesting there.

“What’s in the bag?” he asked.

I still held it, stupidly, in my lap.

“Mom made me something to eat.”

He looked, briefly, angry. “Put it in the back, Luca.”

I did, and then it was as if he regretted getting angry. “So? School started? Eighth grade?”

“Yes.”

His voice was soft, but he knew how to put insistence into it. “And?”

A great many things had in fact happened in the first three days of school. Mr. McCluskey, the gym teacher, had let down the ropes that hung from the ceiling of the gym and announced that by the end of the fall we were all going to have to climb them. A shudder had passed through the group of us. Then a boy named Andrew Weston had gotten a hard-on in the shower, and that had made us all forget the ropes. Everyone already knew things about Andrew Weston—the secret, vague things you could know about boys, the malformed boys who were part of every class. There were others: David Campbell, Alan Carney. Mr. McCluskey had come into the shower room and put his hands on Andrew’s shoulders and led him out. While the rest of us dressed, Mr. McCluskey sat in the gym office with Andrew and stared out through the Plexiglas at us, his mouth hard and straight, cautioning us not to say anything. Andrew had not come to our next class. Someone said his mother had come to get him.

That was not all. Karen Meola was in all my classes. We didn’t speak. I looked at her fingernails, and thought, in a silence that seemed to me enormously loud and significant: I watched you paint them. There was a power to standing outside, to knowing things about people they didn’t know you knew, that I had just begun to apprehend.

“Nothing,” I answered. “Eighth grade. Same as last year.”

After that, we listened to the radio. My father settled back. “We’re going to the plant, Luca. In case you’re wondering. We’re going to Vanderbruek.”

It wasn’t entirely a surprise, though my mother said he’d been fired. Vanderbruek was at least familiar ground. They made tiny machines—my father used the word “coordinates”—that were used in aircraft and, no one was ashamed to say it then, in bombs. This was peacetime, 1962. The Russians were the only threat, but if the Russians attacked, it was important to have bombs. That was the simple justification my father had given for his work, though it had hardly needed justification. He was an accountant, one of many. But he was in charge of a group. The plant was vast, the size of a small town. The parking lot was like the parking lot of an airport.

He stopped at the side of the main road, near one of the lesser parking lots. You could not get into it unless you showed your ID. There were uniformed guards. The guard leaned out of his booth and stared suspiciously at my father, but my father waved to him, and the guard let him stay.

“You’re probably wondering what we’re doing,” he said after a moment. It was that eerily silent time at the end of the day in a factory, just before everyone quits work.

My father took out a cigarette and lit it. The way he did it seemed slow and pleasurable, and after he’d taken his first drag he looked down at his fingers holding the cigarette and scratched one of them. “See, I don’t work here anymore.”

He squinted through the smoke out the window. His lips had thinned and gathered into what you could almost be fooled into believing was a smile. “You want to know why?”

And suppose I didn’t?

He leaned slightly toward me. “I’m going to tell you this, but I’m going to try to tell you in such a way that you believe I feel no rancor toward your mother. I’m not telling you this to turn you against her, okay?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Because she told them something about me. She’s angry at me, so she called this place and told them something she shouldn’t have. Someday I’ll tell you what that something is, but not now. So I had to quit. They couldn’t exactly fire me, but they made it clear it would be better if I didn’t stick around. So I quit.”

For a while then, my father watched me not asking the next, obvious question. I sensed that he liked it that I wasn’t asking, but who could tell? I felt his eyes pass over me a long time.

Soon the cars started coming out of the lots. It was quitting time. My father stopped looking at me and started looking at the drivers. His face was very serious, mildly recessed, anticipatory. He looked the way a man looks when he expects to be slapped but has already decided he will not slap back.

Some of the men and women in cars returned his stare. Not all of them. There were too many workers at Vanderbruek for him to know all of them. But some of the ones who did know him stared and did not greet him. They might even have looked a little frightened of him. I saw one woman who looked that way, and she stepped on the gas as she drove past him. Then a big heavy Oldsmobile pulled up next to us and my father’s friend Vinnie Fratolino rolled down his window. “I got the air conditioner on, Lou,” Vinnie Fratolino said. Still, there was sweat on his massive face. My father leaned across me, so that our bodies were touching. He appeared glad that someone had stopped to greet him.

“What did they do to you, Lou?” Vinnie Fratolino asked. Behind him, the line of cars had stopped in the heat.

My father shrugged. “I had to quit. No other choice.” Now his hand was on my knee.

“Assholes,” Vinnie Fratolino said, and shook his head from side to side. “Excuse me, I should watch my language,” he said, noticing me. His head was large and doughy, like a man’s head in a cartoon. He seemed to have parts missing—vital lines and pockets—as if he’d been drawn lazily, all cheeks, with a big affronted expression pasted on.

“It’s all right,” my father said.

My father’s gratefulness seemed to make his skin warm. He looked alert and happy, but Vinnie Fratolino stared at him with mild alarm. “So what’d you come back for, clean out your desk?”

“No, I promised somebody a ride.”

Vinnie Fratolino nodded, then looked at me, and back to my father. “You need anything, Lou?”

“I’m fine,” my father answered. “Hey, you better go, you’re holding up the works.”

Vinnie Fratolino turned around and seemed to be noticing for the first time the cars behind him. He lifted his hand and rolled up the window.

“Nice guy,” my father said.

Before long, Bob Painter came out of the building behind the guard’s booth, walking with his lunch box. When he saw my father, he didn’t hurry, as I expected him to, but slowed down, and even stopped at one point to watch the cars going past. It was clear he’d have preferred no one see him get into the car with my father.

Finally, though, he had to. He sat heavily in the backseat and the car felt immediately full of him, his weight and his scent and his peculiar breathing. He sucked in air heavily, slurped it.

“You remember Bob, Luca?” my father asked.

Bob Painter’s brow was lowered. He seemed a little shamefaced, as though all power was on my side, and after we nodded to one another, he looked out the window.

“The Inca boy,” he said, and smiled in a crooked manner.

“Who spoke to you?” he asked my father.

“Just Vinnie, that’s all.”

There was a silence after that; it meant something.

Bob Painter had said to me, on the night of the cookout, that he lived in Woburn with his three little girls. There is a moment, before you know anything for sure, when you dare to imagine things: that we were going there, to Bob’s house, for dinner, after which we would drive to wherever my father lived now. Bob was his loyal friend, a buddy. The gathering of inferences was like a storm that would pass over us. My father’s life would be white and clean, a state of unspoken confusion and quiet.

The truth was, instead, that my father and Bob Painter lived together in a rooming house in the working-class section of our own town, a place I could have walked to, easily, on any of those endless summer afternoons of his absence. They had one room, twin beds. This was where they were taking me, this was the there my mother had been referring to. My father showed me around, the hall that smelled of disinfectant, the bathroom down the hall. As soon as we were in the room, Bob Painter sat in a chair and opened a beer, drank one after another, quietly, contemplatively, the sedateness of his behavior a kind of nod to my being here. On top of the bureau sat a bottle of Old Grand-Dad, but he did not touch it that night. My father kept an eye on him, then snuck me into the hall. “Don’t worry about Bob, Luca. We’re going out to eat. Then a movie. All right?”

It was what we did. In the diner, Bob Painter began to slur his words, and he looked at me, once or twice, angrily. My father kept his eyes on me, as if to reassure me of something—that Bob Painter’s behavior could not crack the fragile vessel we needed to create. It was like he was putting his hand on my brow and saying: Don’t consider this man.

We got to the Embassy early. My father remained alert through The Miracle Worker, sitting with his hat in his lap. Beside me, Bob Painter slept, snoring loudly. My father had to reach across me to nudge him awake. We drove back to the room in the car with the lights playing across our faces in a silence that seemed filled with my father’s satisfaction, as though just getting through this night were some kind of triumph.

In the room, as soon as he was in bed, while still in his clothes, Bob Painter began snoring.

My father snapped on a light. We were private, away from Bob. The light wouldn’t disturb him.

My father still had his hat on. We faced each other in chairs.

“How’s things at home?”

“Good.”

He nodded, searching for another topic. “You still go to the beach on Sundays?”

“Yes.”

“They say anything about me?”

“No.”

“I bet they do. I bet you’ve heard things.”

“Bobby’s sleeping with a girl,” I said.

It seemed strange to be saying it. It was the only thing I could think of. It also distracted us from the thing he’d just said.

He looked at me curiously, his eyes bright in the reflection of the lamp. “Is that right? How do you happen to know that?”

“George talks about it. On the beach.”

“In front of everybody?”

“No. Just me. We go away from everybody. George and Bobby and me.”

“They tell you that.”

“Yes.”

He rubbed his chin for a while.

“And does George sleep with a girl, too?”

“No.”

“Aha.”

He played with the chain of the lamp. “Don’t they think you’re a little young for that?”

I shrugged.

“Are you tired?”

“No.”

My father took my hand. He flattened out my palm, and moved his own finger against it, making the vague shape of the letter “W.”

“Do you know what I’m doing?”

He did it again. It was what Annie Sullivan had done in the movie, the painstaking secret language through which Helen Keller had finally received meaning.

“Remember?”

I nodded my head.

“Amazing.”

He shook his head.

“Listen, start bringing your glove on weekends, okay? We’ll play catch.”

He stared at me a moment, then he got up and made a bed for me on the floor.




3 (#ulink_c83335fe-402b-5d7d-b2a0-6853d735beed)


In Ancient History, Mrs. Matheson (herself ancient, gold-plated, a figure seen as if through museum glass) divided us into pairs. A special project had been assigned, individually tailored for each pairing. “Luca Carcera, Andrew Weston,” she announced. “The Athenian character.”

We went to Andrew’s house, afternoons (his suggestion) to work on it. Andrew Weston lived with his mother on the upper floor of a two-family house on the other side of town, the poorer side, not far, in fact, from where my father lived with Bob Painter. It was a neighborhood of two- and three-family houses with postage-stamp yards, in the vicinity of the shuttered watch factory.

Andrew Weston’s mother sat at a large table pushed up to the window that caught the best light, with a pack of cigarettes (always, one was lit), an ashtray, and a stack of books. The table was full of plants, scraggly, half dead, but sometimes she would turn away from her book in order to push one further into the light, or to clip away a frond. She had long tawny hair she wore pulled close to her scalp, then hanging down in the back, a skeletal face that seemed always in motion. The books she read were the popular books of the time: Harold Robbins, Leon Uris, Written on the Wind. She read them all with a kind of annoyance, as if she were conducting a silent, impatient dialogue with the author. At any moment she might burst out with “Oh, that’s wrong,” or “That’s unworthy of you.”

Andrew did not treat her well. He was a small boy whose boner in the shower had astonished everyone. Any other boy would probably have had to leave school after an incident like that, but Andrew Weston managed to incorporate it into his persona. He was marked out, but he did not seem to care. His short hair flew up in the front into a dramatic stand of curls. In grammar school (the Westons had lived, briefly, near us), he had been a favorite of the girls, considered “cute,” called by the mothers “a young dreamboat,” but then he had made his transition, in the immense privacy of late childhood, and come out on the other side of it a friend of the girls, where the rest of us had made our lasting separation.

Within the confines of the top floor of the two-family house, he lorded it over his mother, barely acknowledging her as we entered the rooms. She glanced up with low expectations, her sharp features shrouded in smoke, caught between the cheap theatrics of her novels (even at twelve, I knew what was cheap and what was literature; John Steinbeck was literature, The Carpetbaggers was not) and the presence of two remote, silent boys who would give her, she seemed to know, very little. “The scholars,” she would always say upon our entrance. “And here I am, reading trash.”

From my first appearance, she looked upon me in a gauging, deeply focused way that let me know Andrew did not often bring friends home, and certainly not friends who were the epitome of regularity, such as I was in those days. “Who’s this?” she asked, and if I’d been older, I’d have read seductiveness in the “this.”

In his room, Andrew required no help at all in writing “The Athenian Character.” The first day, he went to his desk, opened the Ancient History text, and began writing. I sat on his bed. His walls were bare except for a Winslow Homer print. On the floor was a small record player and a stack of 45s. When Andrew caught me gazing at them, he suggested maybe I wanted to listen to a couple. “Go ahead, it’s okay,” he said. “Take advantage of my good taste.”

Then he looked at me there on the floor a second longer than he needed to, as if the sight of me in the midst of this perfectly ordinary pastime had leaked out a small but vital piece of information he was snatching up.

On his way out of the shower room, led by Mr. McCluskey, Andrew had held his head in the firm, tilted manner one held one’s head to staunch a nosebleed. But he had not cried. In the office, waiting with Mr. McCluskey, he affected the look of a boy who had already entered into some new compact with life.

As for me—as with the others, the larger group—we had made our own compact. We were not to speak of this, but it was okay to look at each other and raise our eyebrows and giggle. When the giggling grew too loud, Mr. McCluskey sent us a punishing look through the Plexiglas. Andrew stared ahead of himself, scratching his nose, waiting for his mother.

On the floor of his room, I listened to records. “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore,” by the Highwaymen. “Loco-Motion,” by Little Eva. Andrew’s taste was like anyone else’s. His mother knocked on the door and asked if we were hungry. “How about a snack?” she asked. Andrew didn’t even condescend to answer. She opened the door and gazed inside, at me on the floor, Andrew at his desk. “He’s a one-man band,” she said, and smiled in a way that inquired: she may be stuck with him, but what was it in me that found no more suitable outlet than a friendship with Andrew Weston?

It was a good question. Even after I’d begun to understand how precise a characterization of Andrew his mother’s had been, I continued to follow him to his house two afternoons a week, to sit on the floor and listen to records while he scratched away at the table. In his room, I half-listened for his mother outside. The phone did not ring, no one came to the door. If there was a father, his presence had become as ghostly as my own father’s was in the house he had built and abandoned. Andrew had taken a volume of Thucydides out of the town library. “Listen to this,” he’d announce gleefully, coming upon certain details of the plague at Athens. “ �Externally the body was not very hot to the touch, nor pale in its appearance, but reddish, livid, and breaking out into small pustules and ulcers.’ ” He made a face, and then seemed thrilled when he came to Thucydides’ descriptions of the afflicted Athenians’ diarrhea. At such moments it was like he was vaunting the deepest of his secrets, the utter boy-ordinariness of being thirteen.

We turned in the report and got an A. On the afternoons we’d set aside to write the report—Tuesdays and Thursdays—Andrew continued to ask me if I was coming to his house. He phrased it less in the manner of an invitation than like some burdensome obligation he had taken on. I went. It seemed easier than saying no, than making an excuse, than going home to my mother’s smiling, beautifully maintained catatonia. She sat in rooms, she watered plants (I thought of her and Mrs. Weston as engaging in a kind of war of plants, with my mother the clear victor), she watched mid-afternoon television. Somewhere I wondered how long this could be sustained: our lives had become like still lifes, like fruit on a table, spoiling in the light.

From my other friends I’d begun a long separation. My father’s leaving had done that. I couldn’t tell them about my father; that act of his had cleared out an area of experience, made it “the past.” There was a barrier now around all the things I used to do. Only Andrew asked no questions, offered me the floor, his record player, the new records he bought, the quiet of the room, and his mother outside, smoking and wondering, vaguely, if we were hungry.

My only other social obligation that fall had to do with my cousin George. I was twelve, would be thirteen in November. I was tall for my age; still, twelve is young. But I had also always been known as the smart one in the family. How merited this was I am not sure. But it was enough for Uncle John.

With the building of the house, the settling of the new neighborhood, there was a new obligation for John’s sons. They were to be like the others, the Meola and Semenza boys who were headed for college. It was all-important suddenly that they meet the new standard.

Bobby and George were both unprepared for this. They had planned on futures as advanced thugs: physical labor, caked grime under their fingernails, gray uniforms with their names stitched above their breast pockets in red, all that would be enough. But John kept looking at them as if they were made of wet clay, as if he could not hurry quickly enough to realize the vision that had come to him, I always suspected, too late. On Thursday nights he insisted I come and tutor George in English. “Straighten him out,” John said, as if I were capable of doing that. Into my palm, he folded ten dollars a week.

What these evenings consisted of was sitting in George’s room while George perched at his desk, or lay on his bed, thrumming any hard surface he could find with his thumb, while humming one of the songs then popular (though not the songs Andrew bought at Record Mart, which tended to be softer, whiter, more mainstream). George favored songs with heavy guitar lines he could mimic by forcing his lips together and letting out an “mmm” sound. He was seventeen, a senior in high school. The Great Gatsby lay on his desk, an old copy that had served maybe ten years’ worth of seniors in the General class. George was supposed to read it and write a paper. I was to help him, but I had a larger task as well.

The high school had offered an informational night for parents, and John had come back from it with a fixed idea in his mind—the “College Essay.” The guidance counselors had convinced Uncle John that whatever unimpressive record George had toted up in the previous three years, all could be rescued, his future assured, if he could only write a “College Essay” good enough. That was the core of my assignment.

But in George’s room, we barely spoke. We were waiting for Bobby to come home.

Bobby, sixteen, had been “laying” Joanne Lacosta since early summer, since one night she had surprised him, when he slipped his fingers into her panties, by not stopping him. Then Joanne Lacosta had gotten “wet,” and excited, bucking a little in her lower parts, until she’d said, “Please don’t stick it in me,” and Bobby had known, through some weird teenage intuition, that this was a signal to, indeed, stick it in her. Which he had done. All this he relayed to George and me behind a rock at Nahant one Sunday, the day after it happened. I had not been meant to hear, but I was with them, and George was crazy for the details: once Bobby had offered the first one, George’s hunger couldn’t be contained. So Bobby had to describe what it felt like to go all the way in, and what happened to Joanne while he was doing that (no, she hadn’t screamed; her body had instead, and astonishingly, seemed to be inviting him), and what he had done when he came (nothing, but only that first time; afterward, he was smart enough to buy rubbers). And since then, the affair had gone on, continued through the summer and into the fall. In August, Joanne Lacosta had begun accompanying us to the beach on Sundays; she and Bobby were shy around one another, though she sent him certain secret-sharing looks. She wore two-piece bathing suits—green and black—around the bottom of which I could sometimes see little hairs coming out, little hairs that seemed to contain the carnivorous secret essence of shy, pretty Joanne Lacosta.

Bobby’s room became, to George and me, a kind of greenhouse of sex. We knew where Bobby kept his rubbers, and George had stolen one to keep in his wallet. We touched Bobby’s aftershave bottles, poured a little on our hands, and George said, sniffing, “This is probably what drives her crazy, this is the irresistible stuff.” We even stared sometimes at Bobby’s bed, and if the bed happened to be unmade, stared at the impression Bobby’s body had made in it, in sleep, because he was a kind of holy figure now to us, his body consecrated by what he did with Joanne, three or four times a week.

It was the one great thing. It was the one astonishing, impossible thing. Staring at Bobby’s bed I caught a glimpse of how far I was from it, and my life seemed an agonizingly slow climb toward something I only dimly perceived.

“You get hard, Luca? You get little boners?” George would ask.

Yes.

It made him smile, like there was something delicious about it. Here was the College Essay.

The evening was capped when Bobby came home. We were all figures in a dance that year, each assigned a series of steps. Bobby came home and went to his room. George rose and pounded on Bobby’s door. “Whaddayawant?” Bobby called. “Get your ass out here,” George insisted. Bobby came out. His eyes were lowered, like he wanted nothing to do with us. Sexual activity had cleared his skin, improved his grooming. He had a dark shimmer about him now, like George Chakiris in West Side Story. His slicked-back hair smelled vaguely sweet. He sat on the edge of George’s bed and offered himself for our study.

George knelt before Bobby’s open legs. “Let’s have them,” George always said.

For a moment, Bobby looked resistant; every week this went on. He couldn’t believe how stupid this was. But then he offered them up, the fingers of his right hand for George to sniff.

This was their agreement. If Bobby, the younger brother, was going to get laid first, his promise to his less lucky brother was that he would bring home, for George’s pleasure, at least the scent of sex. George would close his eyes and breathe in that scent, that secret cache stolen from inside Joanne Lacosta, while Bobby, on the bed, laughed at him. “You are so nuts, George. Stop it. You are so crazy.”

Once, at the end of this ritual, they both looked at me. “Go ahead, let him,” George said, and Bobby nearly did, but then shook his head. “He’s too young. It’d only fuck him up.” For a moment, my heart had been beating very fast.

On my way out, Uncle John was always waiting, at the foot of the stairs, the ten dollars in his hand, to walk me home.

We both knew he was buying only hope. Even then I could sense the agreement he had made with himself, in his own mind, to keep two things separate: his real assessment of George (and with George, maybe, of the whole fate of his family) and this other thing, this belief certain men have, that life must ultimately be benevolent. Life must ultimately yield. It was the essence of optimism I faced at the bottom of the stairs: might I tell him that some miracle had occurred? Some progress made on the College Essay? John had fixed his sights on Northeastern for George. He had gotten hold of the application, which would not be due until February. “State three things that have shaped the development of your mind,” Northeastern asked. At the bottom of the steps, I saw how fixed John was on this specific, accomplishable goal, so small, so reachable. If he could have written it himself, he would have. Had even gone so far as to announce once, “For me, very easy. Number one: when I was seven years old, having no food to eat …”

At the bottom of the stairs, he would not quite ask me, but only stare, his head tilted, that characteristic male hope in his eyes that taught me that every man, however old, is still a boy, waiting for the story to be altered in a favorable way. Sometimes he would say one word. “Progress?” Or “Success?”

All I could give him was a weak smile, a shrug. In that moment I knew he hated me. But I couldn’t lie. He handed me the ten. In my mind there was a slight pull at the end, as though he didn’t really want me to have it, knew I hadn’t earned it.

The final part of the ritual was John walking me home. It was unnecessary, I lived only across the street. If I was old enough to tutor a seventeen-year-old boy in the College Essay, I was old enough to assay the fifty yards separating John’s house from ours. But he did not only walk me home. We toured the neighborhood, “the Hill,” as everyone now referred to it. We charted the progress of new houses. We stared into the woods, at felled trees, bulldozers left standing in a kind of sleep. There were living things growing around us, lifting up toward the palatial. John’s own house, being as large as these others, was not quite diminished. He had been the first, the pioneer. Someday they would come to appreciate this, though they hadn’t yet. Whatever went on in George’s room, whatever the ultimate success or failure of that venture, there was sustenance to be had here.

We would speak sometimes, though never of important subjects.

“The rock is from Italy,” he would say.

Mastrangelo, the lawyer, had imported marble from Italy. The tiniest of facts rippled through the neighborhood, bypassing my mother and me, outcasts in our house.

“Imagine,” he said.

We would reach the end of the street, where it was entirely woods. John would remove a cigar then. Slowly he would unwrap it. I didn’t believe I was there for him anymore; having come this far, my task was completed, I might now disappear. Slowly he would unwrap the cigar and with one hand light it and with the other cup the lighted end as he puffed until it took. Then he would drop the crumpled cigar wrapper on the ground.

It struck me, this gesture, because it did not seem offhand, but a deliberate, if tiny, defacement. The crumpled cigar wrapper lay on the virgin ground. John knew it was there. He puffed and stared down at the rows of houses, the farthest ones lit, the nearest plywood skeletons drawn up from the ground as if by the force of moonlight.

I wanted to stoop and lift the cigar wrapper but I understood that if I did, John would hold my arm hard and tell me to leave it.

After John had stood smoking for several minutes, he seemed to remember me again. “I’m keeping you up, aren’t I?”

“It’s okay.”

“When’s your bedtime?”

“My mother doesn’t care.”

He mulled that over. “Your mother doesn’t care about a lot of things.”

I acted as though I hadn’t heard.

“And how’s your father? How’s the weekends? Tough?”

“No. They’re all right.”

“I’ll never get anything out of you, will I?” He chuckled.

We started home.

It was only then, as we walked again into the light falling from the streetlamps and from out of the living rooms of the houses we passed, that I could forget John’s casual dropping of the cigar wrapper, could stop thinking about what it might mean, could again become absorbed by the houses and the lights and the views of interiors, the modern furniture and the hanging chandeliers. We were far then from the rooming house, from the breathing of Bob Painter, the enigma of my father’s staring at me, the nights when I fell asleep, of the three of us, last. John had convinced me of something in these walks: the necessity of effort, the capacity of the world to be shaped to a man’s ends. This was my romance, and in spite of all the confusing things I knew about him, John was slowly becoming its hero. In the grip of such a romance, Bobby’s bedroom faded, as did the movement of Bobby’s body into George’s room, the offering of the fingers.

Bobby and George were lost to sex. But not me. I would not be that way; no.

All that fall, my father kept making marks in my hand, some of them blotting out earlier marks. But the word I was to shout in understanding—the Helen Keller scream of recognition—never arrived.

One Friday night, just as the weather took a turn into serious cold, my father was late coming to get me. I sat on the front stoop, staring at the tall birch tree that dominated the front yard. Uncle John sat with me, smoking, saying nothing, until he stood and said, “My ass is getting cold, Luca. I expect your father will be along sometime.” Then he stared at me as if I should prepare myself for something.

That night, when my father finally arrived, it was on foot. He stood at the base of the driveway, not coming closer. It was evident he was waiting for acknowledgment, for us to see him and respond.

“What the hell is this?” John said.

“We’re taking the bus,” my father answered. “Come on, Luca.”

“Where’s your car? You break down?”

“I had to sell it, John.”

I stood up, ready to go, even to come between them if necessary.

John rolled his cigar back and forth between his lips in such a way that I knew, even when he asked, “What do you mean, you had to sell it?” that he understood precisely.

My father, knowing that he didn’t have to answer, zipped up his jacket and glanced away from us. “Come on, Luca,” he said. His tone and the look on his face made me think I’d better come quickly. John followed me down the driveway. He stood close to my father, without words. They each blew smoke into the air. John lapsed briefly into a posture of what seemed like supplication, but it was as though he were looking over his shoulder, making sure no one noticed. “It’s that bad?” John asked.

My father crossed his arms, huddled within himself, somehow managing to appear unembarrassed.

“How can you have let it get to this? You?” John’s voice verged on a whine, as if, in spite of everything, he still expected my father to unzip this suit of clothes and emerge as the man he used to be.

“Listen, I’ve got a stack of bills for you,” John said, breathing to calm himself. “They’re at home, in my office. But under the circumstances …”

“Why don’t you give them to me?” my father said.

John hesitated a moment. “All right.”

He moved across the street, toward his house. We followed at a distance. In the large front window of John’s house, we could see Emma rocking the baby, looking out at us, trying to get a glimpse of my father. She didn’t wave, nor, seeing him, did she turn away. She had begun managing my mother’s life for her, taking her shopping, making sure she got to the hairdresser.

“You all right?” my father asked, while we were waiting, just to say something.

“Yes.”

A voice rang out then, sudden and shocking as the appearance of a deer. It was a woman’s voice, and though it was coming from the wrong direction—from the houses peeking out of the woods past John’s—it sounded enough like my mother to be her. It was high and musical, Italian-sounding. She was calling someone—a child or a dog—and my father, hearing that voice, snapped to attention.

He laughed lightly when he realized it wasn’t my mother. Still, a change had come over his face. Something of his old melancholy, his handsome confusion, returned to him, replacing the slack and satisfied look he’d worn since he’d left us. We were waiting for John to come out with the bills, and I knew that in this caught state of waiting, with the woman calling her dog, my father’s stomach was clenched—I could practically feel it—as though he had to be on guard against something that could still pull him back to this life.

When John came out and approached us, he said, “Are you sure you can pay these, Lou?”

My father’s voice was slightly higher than usual. “Yes.” It was as if he had to work past an obstruction, and I thought I knew what the obstruction was.

He remained in this silent, chastened state as we walked down the hill, took the bus, rode across town. Only women took the bus: nurses on their way to work, a woman and her son down the aisle from us. It was unusual for a man like my father to board; the women all seemed aware of him, but did not stare. It was half a mile from the place where the bus stopped to the rooming house. A party of French Canadian workers was in the hall. They were smoking in their T-shirts, and holding long-necked bottles of beer. It was their usual Friday night practice, a gathering at the end of the workweek. They interrupted their noise to allow my father and me to pass. There was a pause, too, so they could consider this man and his son in all the ways they probably habitually did, with suspicion and wonder.

The room was dark.

“He’s not here,” my father said, nearly under his breath, but just loud enough so that I could not mistake his panic.

He turned on a light and moved around the room, searching for a note on the table, or on one of the nightstands, then went to the window to look outside. He came back to the door and opened it, but there was only the smoke of the workers’ party, so he closed it. He kept his hand on the knob.

He sat in a chair and put his hand over his face.

After a minute or so, he looked up. “You hungry?”

“I’m okay.”

My father seemed alone then, and collapsed, like some plan of his hadn’t worked. And because I understood it wouldn’t be so bad for me if this plan of his failed, I said nothing.

But it wasn’t good, either, to see my father like this. He was having trouble looking at me, and time moved slowly.

Finally, Bob Painter did come home, though he came home drunk and much later than expected. He came home, announced by a car full of the grounds crew from Vanderbruek. They dropped him off in front of the house, and we heard them; my father went to the window to look outside and listen, and I saw his face, complicated and full of too many emotions to count.

When Bob Painter came through the door, he glanced at me as he habitually did now, disappointed to see me, or as if my presence implied something—that I was a witness to facts about him he’d rather have kept private. He held on to the doorjamb, as if to keep himself upright.

“Who drove you?” my father asked. He was calm now, or else wanted not to show Bob what it had been like for him to wait.

“Wellsie.” Bob Painter groaned, and headed for the bed, to lie down.

“I thought we arranged you were going to take a ride from Ed Kennedy?”

“We did, but listen. They wanted to take me out.”

“Wellsie did.”

“Listen …” A low growl seemed all he could manage. “It’s important, that they wanted to do this. Can you understand that?”

Bob Painter sat halfway up in bed. “Get the boy outta here so we can talk straight, willya, Lou?” Sometimes Bob Painter’s face took on a grizzled, unhealthy look that was frightening.

“He’s not going.”

“All right, so they wanted to take me out and I went.”

“With Wellsie.”

“Yes.”

“Drinking.”

“Yes. Oh shit.” His hand went to his head. Bob Painter, big and burly and always seeming on the verge of violence, had started to cry.

“Can you understand what this means to me, that they wanted to take me out?”

“Bob, stop.”

Bob fell into sobs, his hand going up and down in front of his face like he was rubbing something invisible to us.

“Can’t.”

“Bob.”

“Can’t. I can’t.”

My father looked at me but didn’t settle on my eyes. He put his hand on my shoulder and led me out the door, past the workers, who were quiet to let us by. We stood on the porch, and I could hear his breathing, mixed with the voices that had started up. It seemed the men were listening to the sobs of Bob Painter, which were audible even this far away.

After a while, my father said, “This has got to change.” He ran his index finger several times across his lips, as though he were cleaning them.

I kept my silence.

“This is not fair to you,” he said.

Bob Painter came to the window and shouted, “Lou!”

We heard the voices of the French Canadians, mocking. “Lou!” they called, and hooted. “Lou!”

From somewhere out of the circumstances of that night came a plan, the suggestion that from now on when I came I should bring a friend. And there was no friend to bring but one.

I would like to say that there was nothing devious in my inviting Andrew, though of course there was, it wasn’t accidental at all. I convinced myself that my father had made a mistake. Why shouldn’t the adult world be capable of gross self-deception? He had believed that a life spent in a room with Bob Painter could somehow sustain him. The house, my mother, me: it had all been too much, and he’d run away. But he’d been wrong, anyone could see that now. If the voice of a woman on the street was enough to call him back, if all he needed was a nudge everyone else was too cowardly to make, I thought there were ways that I might help things along.

At first it seemed to work, too. My father’s initial sight of Andrew caused his mouth to close in on itself, his lips to thin with uncertainty. We had had to get off the bus to go to Andrew’s house to fetch him that first Friday night. From there it was an easy enough walk to the rooming house. Andrew was waiting for us on the front steps of his house, holding a large shoe box on his lap. He did not want to have his mother take any part in this, I knew that about him, knew how he came at things sideways, crab-walked through life so as not to seem committed to anything, while all the while settled and certain about selected things in a way that made me envious. When I had invited him to spend the weekend with my father and me, he’d sifted the invitation through some recessed part of his brain, taken a long time answering. I had almost given up when I heard the words “I suppose” come out of him.

Now he came toward us, his loping, sidelong walk that was—I had learned from other boys to form the words, though they applied only to Andrew, never to my father—a faggot’s walk. My father saw, and I watched my father seeing, which is why it is stupid and dishonest for me to say I didn’t know what I was doing.

Nor did Andrew finally escape his mother. She came out after we had started off. Andrew turned around, as if expecting this from her, and I did, too. She had come out to get a look at my father. She called to him. “Thank you for doing this!”

And my father shouted: “No problem!”

She said, “I hope he’s no trouble.”

“I’m sure he won’t be. We’ll have him back tomorrow.”

“Your father lives where?” she had asked me, when Andrew had first presented the invitation to her. The arrangement, the course of my weekends, had fascinated her. But now they stood waving to one another, like any suburban parents, as if beyond the waving and the calling out of questions, they each connected to lives so ordinary and conventional as not to bear pondering.

Bob and my father both immediately knew Andrew. Their eyes went directly to the long and girlish swoop of his hair, his odd walk, and also to the fact that his eyes did not meet theirs when he reached his hand out to shake. There was a subtle kind of recognition in all this. Chastened by the events of the night when he’d taken a ride home from Wellsie, Bob made sure now he took the regular ride, the one from Ed Kennedy, so he was waiting for us in the room when Andrew Weston arrived. Things seemed to be settling dangerously, between my father and Bob, into a more conventional domestic routine.

Bob still drank, of course. When we got to the room, there was a line of empty Schlitz cans on the table, and my father eyed them, silently counting.

“Well,” Bob said, at his first sight of Andrew. Then he glanced at me as if there was something he did not understand, something he was mad at me for. And then something, oddly enough, that he pitied me for.

That night it was Birdman of Alcatraz at the Embassy. First, though, was the diner, the awkward series of questions that Andrew deflected with the same swift expertness with which he dressed after gym. None of us was ever to see Andrew’s naked skin again after the incident with the hard-on (he had been excused from having to shower, allowed into the locker room to change ten minutes before the rest of us), and my father and Bob were not to see any of Andrew either: he seemed to dodge through the empty spaces of the meal like a man dodging rain. I was not helpful. I volunteered only that we had worked together on a school project, a project about Athens. For Bob, this was an opening. “Oh, Athens,” he said. “My daughter Maureen would be able to give you an interesting discussion about that. She’s a smart one, too.”

I caught my father staring at me across the table more than once that night, with a kind of grimness riding just in back of his eyes, as if the notion of my becoming like Andrew Weston—or like him—was more than he could bear.

“Did you bring your glove?” he asked me, with quiet seriousness.

“What?”

“For a catch.”

“No.”

He stared at me a moment, not unkindly, but allusive in a way he could be. “I told you to bring it. Remember?”

I ate my meat loaf.

“Do you play? Andrew?”

“Hmm?”

“Ball?”

“Oh. No.”

We must have driven him crazy.

I had seen sometimes, in brief moments, how vested my father had been in my perfection, how even something so small as my ability to play ball well had been enough once to rip all the leave-taking energy out of him. Somehow he’d expected, no matter what he’d done, that certain things in me would stay the same. So I knew, or sensed, that the way to get back at him was to fall from perfection, to fall as far as I could.

At the end of the meal, when my father was in the men’s room and Bob Painter had stepped outside, to stand on the curb with a toothpick in his mouth, Andrew and I had a moment, the two of us at loose ends within the diner. My father had handed me a bunch of change to leave on the table for a tip, and after I’d done that, I stared down the line of booths at Andrew. He was waiting at the door, looking at me as though he was trying to probe—it had become habitual by now—who I might be. It wasn’t the sort of moment that I expected or wanted very much. It made things between us briefly, uncomfortably real. I wanted to make a joke then, to remind him of the things we liked to laugh about in his room—diarrhea, pustules—but I knew that wouldn’t work right here and now. Andrew had a way of shrugging with his eyes, and that was what he did then. But I had a moment of believing it was all wrong, that I had stepped into something I wasn’t going to get away from unscathed. Andrew was storing things up in a way I could only guess at.

Nor did the evening turn jolly after that. During Birdman of Alcatraz, Bob Painter kept falling asleep, and snoring. My father would nudge him, and Bob, awakened, would watch the movie as though it pained him, somehow, to try to comprehend the life of Robert Stroud, the convicted killer, who remained, for the movie’s nearly three hours, unredeemed, and unrelieved of the burden of loneliness. Even his birds were taken away from him, midway through, and all that was left was the sweaty faces of the other prisoners and the guards, and the white sunless air of the cells. Under the lights of Main Street, afterward, and on the bus returning to the rooming house, we seemed not to be able to shake the movie’s unsettling truth, that it was possible, unlike Uncle John and perhaps even my father and Bob believed, that life didn’t finally yield toward goodness and forgiveness and the triumph of the human spirit, but, instead, might very well end as it had for Burt Lancaster, in the transference of the human body from one solitude to another.

I caught a certain look that night between Bob and my father. They were sitting on opposite sides of the bus, my father and Andrew on one side, me next to Bob on the other. Both men seemed thoughtful, and both were, for a moment, idly staring into space. Then Bob looked up and gazed into my father’s face with a look I was growing used to, a look of longing and helplessness, eloquent and deeply private at once. My father returned Bob’s look. I cannot say exactly what his face did, but ice entered my heart as I looked at him. It was as if that look were telling me, in no way I can quite describe, that though he did not have the capacity for emotional nakedness that Bob Painter had, he still felt as deeply and harshly and intensely as Bob, that they were alike in some important way.

Moments like that made me doubt that I could win my father back, that he was as close to coming back as I had tried to convince myself. And then something else happened to make me feel keenly the press of time, the need for something—if it was to happen at all—to happen very soon.

A few weeks before Thanksgiving, after another of the futile Thursday night meetings with George, I found Uncle John waiting for me at the bottom of the steps leading to his front door, with what I immediately detected was a new, troubled look on his face.

He had his hat in his hand and he was tapping it against his knees. “All finished?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Success?”

Tonight he didn’t even wait for me to answer.

It was cold out, and John wanted first to know if I was warm enough. This was all preparation for something. He led me past my house, as usual.

“You like it here, Luca?” he asked. But he seemed anxious; there was nothing casual in the question.

I said I did.

“You think we did right?”

It was an odd question; of course they’d done right. My father’s desertion changed nothing. The neighborhood was perfect. I tried to say all this in silence because John still cowed me out of words, though I believed he understood how enthralled I was by the neighborhood.

“I’ll tell you one thing, though, that we did wrong. We didn’t get the right architect. We got Zambetti, who we knew, and he was not …” John had stopped, not at the end of the street, but before Meola’s house. There, he lit his cigar and waved it through the air, forming a wide, half-disparaging, half-envious circle. “Not for houses like this, anyway. You notice how much foundation he left showing, in your father’s house, in mine?”

I had. It was a sore spot. It diminished us, the amount of gray at the base.

“You see how in these others, the brick and stone, they go all the way down to the base? That’s important. That’s a neater look. But what did we know?”

I did not move on, but stared at Meola’s perfect lawn, which the Meola boys had not been expected to mow. Bonica, the landscaper, brought his men once a week.

“These are all, all these men, of the professional class.” He sounded the old theme, pointed down the street, his fingers landing, in my foreshortened view, on each of the houses in turn. “Dentist. Lawyer. Cincotta’s a … what? A tax man. Like your father. College man. A professional man knows these things. Me, I’m learning from the ground up. I’ve got a strong back and a weak brain.”

He chuckled. “You cold?”

“No. I’m okay.”

He paused, a long and significant silence, so that I might have known something important would follow.

“But it was still good for you, to come here, to have this time.” His words trailed off, as if he understood he need not make them heard; they were for himself.

My mother and I began, soon after, taking rides at night, with a big-toothed realtor named Mrs. Chase. My mother settled on a rental house on Hobbs Road, a small house set within a grid of nearly identical houses, and one in which our bedrooms would butt directly up against each other. Our own house went up for sale, and was sold quickly, at a large profit. Still I retained the last-ditch belief that all these events could be forced to give way.

My thirteenth birthday fell on a Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Andrew was with us again. The movie that night was The ManchurianCandidate. Watching it, it occurred to me that I was studying six subjects in school, and then a seventh at the movies. All the movies of 1962 were about the same thing, with minor variations. Laurence Harvey wore a beatific expression throughout much of The Manchurian Candidate, as if nowhere in his imagination was there such a thing as resistance to the life that had been thrust upon him, the life of an assassin, condemned to kill even the girl he loved. He might have been Burt Lancaster tending to his birds, for all the hope that existed in those black-and-white images. I watched these movies and I watched Bob Painter watching them. As his drinking began to lessen, he stayed awake more. He was more reactive in his movie watching than my father. He made noises that called attention to himself, and I sensed in these small grunts of affirmation and denial a certain recognition and a fight against the recognition, as if, in spite of himself, he kept waiting for the redemptive moment these movies so rarely provided. Give him a happy ending, he might have been saying, in the grumbling silence with which he watched. For Chrissake, give him something. The movies of 1962 resisted him, unremitting in the bleakness of their conclusions, with only the occasional handclasp of a man and a woman—Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh at the conclusion of The Manchurian Candidate—to indicate a belief that some compromise might be made with life, a dollop of pleasure or warmth squeezed out of the surrounding frost.

There was a reason Bob Painter may have been paying attention to the movie that night in a different way: his daughters were coming tomorrow. Mrs. Painter had at last agreed to his demand, would leave them to his care for a day. It had been five months. What exactly had precipitated the change in Mrs. Painter was a mystery, but tonight he had forsworn drinking. Fidgety in the room, snappish in the diner, he settled down only for the movie. My father gave Andrew and me to know that Bob was nervous. “These girls of mine, they’re everything,” Bob said. But if they were everything, why was he living with my father, when he could have been with them? That paradox, unspoken, rode with me all night.

In the morning, he was anxious, too. He drank cup after cup of coffee, shaved, lathered on Aqua Velva, stared out the window, and asked perpetually as to the time.

They were due at 10:00. At 9:45, Bob went outside, stood on the sidewalk to wait. He smoked a cigarette, paced, and from the window my father and I watched him. Andrew, in his sleeping bag on the floor, slept in.

At five minutes after ten, the car pulled up. A green Chrysler. Bob Painter crushed his cigarette underfoot. He stood with his back to us, but his back was expressive of desire, and his hands hovered just to the sides of his hips. I stared at the back of his head, the way the red hair curled and matted against his red neck, damp with sweat, though it was November. When his wife pulled up, I noticed he couldn’t quite look at her face, nor she at his, but something was suggestive of the mood of their past days: the big, boxy, overused car, the slapdash parking job Mrs. Painter did. They had lived in chaos.

The two younger girls rushed out of the car, and Bob clasped them. The youngest, wearing glasses, hugged her father’s leg and stared up at him. The middle girl was not so expressive, but wanted to be. Maureen, the oldest, the genius, Bob’s pride, had not yet emerged from the car.

He went to the door and leaned in. Maureen was resisting, we saw that even from our perch at the window. Bob opened the car door and gestured with his arm toward the sidewalk, where the two younger girls waited. Mrs. Painter was not a clear figure to us. She sat behind the steering wheel in dark glasses—heavy, we could see that, with thick black hair, and pale—but she had turned, and stared at her estranged husband, her cheeks sagging somewhat, accusatory in her determination not to be his advocate in the matter of Maureen.

Finally the reluctant Maureen did emerge. All the girls had red hair, but Maureen’s was the reddest. She made a dramatic figure there on the street, with her long hair and her size—at twelve, she was nearly as tall as Bob—along with her extreme paleness and the air of resistance even a stranger might have been able to read. Bob did not touch her, but he said some words. She did not nod her head, but seemed to have made some kind of agreement—temporary, conditional—nonetheless. Bob dipped his head back inside the passenger window, reached a final agreement with his wife. She drove off. With the little girls close by his body, and Maureen dragging slightly behind, Bob approached the house.

We moved from the window and took on our postures of waiting.

“Here they are!” Bob announced, as soon as he was through the door. “Aren’t they wonderful?”

My first notion was that, in presenting them to my father, Bob was showing off some previously undisclosed part of himself. The little girls were shy and stuck close by him. Bob placed his hands on the sides of their heads. “Girls, this is my friend Lou Carcera. Lou, these are my girls. This one here’s Patricia. And the little one’s Jane.”

My father stepped forward, the polite and formerly competent man who had smashed their lives. He shook both their hands.

“Maureen, come on inside,” Bob insisted.

Maureen hovered in the doorway, taller it seemed, paler and more mature than she had appeared from the window.

“And this is Maureen.”

Andrew was still on the floor in his sleeping bag. This was where she chose to look.

“That there,” Bob said, “is Luca’s friend Andy, Maureen. You’ll like him. He’s smart as you, almost. This here is Lou, and Lou’s son, Luca, who’s just a year older than you, Maureen. He might be almost as smart, too. But we’re not sure. He doesn’t say too much.”

It was the first indication I’d received that Bob expected—even wanted—something more than I’d given. Maureen remained in the doorway.

“I’ve been telling him all about you,” Bob said.

She was too good for us; that was what I thought. Andrew and I could be in this room, it matched us in enough ways, but not her, she was above it. Bob stared at her, waiting for her to make the transition, and when it seemed she wouldn’t, he smiled apologetically at my father. “What do you think of this one’s hair?” he asked, placing his hand on Jane’s springy curls.

“That’s curly hair,” my father said.

“We don’t know where she got it,” Bob said. “We suspect the milkman.”

He smiled hard, as if pushing the joke toward my father. Andrew had begun to stir on the floor.

“Get up, Andy, we’ve got a day planned.” Only Bob called Andrew “Andy.” “It’s Luca’s birthday, by the way, Maureen,” Bob said.

She lifted her eyes toward me then, for the first time.

“Yesterday,” I announced, in apology.

That was all. Her eyes went from me to Andrew, who rose halfway and moved his hair away from his face. She took him in, then stared at me again briefly, as if now she knew something about me. Still, the mask of absence remained on her.

“You’ll all be great friends,” Bob Painter said.

The plan was to ride in two cabs to a large wooded park on the Belmont line. We stopped at a grocery to get cold cuts and rolls. My father sat with Andrew and me in one cab. Bob Painter and his daughters were in the other.

I sensed a stiffness in my father that day. There had been no birthday present, but that was understandable, I knew he was experiencing financial troubles, and I thought I knew something else as well. His distracted state felt familiar to me, the state he went into when he was close to action. It was the way he had been in the days before his departure from home—wearing a faraway look, clearly no longer with us. Now that same state might lead to the opposite action. At least, that was what I hoped. We rode, and he had his hand on my knee, massaging gently, as though maybe he wasn’t even aware he was doing that, and I remember feeling happy, certain about what was about to happen. I didn’t know the rules of houses, but I suspected even after you sold one you could get it back if you changed your mind. Andrew was on the other side of my body, like a thing that had attached to me, so that when my father looked at me now, I knew he had to see two things, and I knew, also, that this made it difficult for him, a goad to return to a place from which he could guide me away from the undesirable.

We met up on the curb and Bob led us into the woods. Somewhere there were picnic tables, he thought he knew where. “I remember a beautiful spot in here,” Bob said, but he seemed uncertain, and kept checking on my father, as if he, too, had picked up on the detachment I had noticed in the cab.

“I guess this’ll have to do,” Bob said finally, giving up when we were in the middle of the woods, in a sunny clearing, with no picnic tables in sight. “We can spread ourselves out on the ground. Otherwise we’d have to go back. I guess I’m lost. You girls mind that?”

Of course the little ones didn’t, and of course Maureen did. She stood at a distance from us and accepted nothing from her father.

“You have to eat, Maureen,” Bob called.

“I’m not hungry,” she said finally. Her voice was low, deeper than that of any twelve-year-old I knew.

Bob went on eating then, with his gaze turned inward, rising out of this every once in a while only to look at my father, and then at Maureen, like two polarities he could not, for the life of him, bring together.

We dispersed after lunch. Andrew and I were sent to push the little ones on a set of swings we’d passed on the way there. Maureen followed, walking ten or so feet behind us. While we pushed the little girls, Maureen sat on a bench, staring at the ground, playing with her hair.

“Miss Superior,” Andrew had begun to call her, under his breath.

I stared at her a long time.

“Miss Superior won’t speak to us.”

In the afternoon it got warm, and it was hot for us, pushing the little girls.

“Don’t you girls want to spend some time with your father?” Andrew asked.

They stared at us like we were curiosities.

“Give us a higher push,” the smaller one, Jane, said.

Finally, though, even they got tired and went and sat with Maureen. When they were all huddled together, I could see maybe how things were in Woburn, in Bob Painter’s absence, a little world closing in on itself, female and long-cheeked and with its own rules and intonations, complete enough so that I wondered how Bob Painter had ever fit in at all.




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