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“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.
