Читать книгу Recent History - Anthony Giardina - Страница 8

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 Manchurian Candidate. 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.