Читать книгу Monkey Boy - Francisco Goldman - Страница 9

Five days a week and sometimes on Saturdays, too, my father used to get up at 5:45 a.m. to go to work at the Potashnik Tooth Corporation in an industrial pocket of Cambridge, a half hour or so drive from our town if you knew how to avoid the traffic. Moving around this apartment at that same predawn hour all these years later, hurriedly packing for my trip to Boston, I remember how his moving around the house always woke me before I had to get up for school: bathroom noises, heavy tread on the stairs, the garage door hauled up like a loud ripping in the house’s flimsy walls. My father kept his Oldsmobile in the driveway but always came into the house through the garage. Late school-day afternoons and evenings, I especially dreaded that garage-door sound. Unless what I heard next was my mother’s Duster coming inside, the flinching chug of her light nervous foot on the brake, it meant Bert was home and would soon be coming up the stairs. If I was listening to music on my little stereo I’d turn the volume way down or snap it off to be sure to hear his footsteps outside my door. Sometimes, if he was really angry at me over something or other, he’d burst into my room without knocking.

I remember no part of life inside the house on Wooded Hollow Road, which we moved into when I was in fifth grade, more vividly than my fear of my father. It seems now like years went by without a day when he wasn’t angry. But that must not be true, not every day; it’s not like there weren’t things in his life that didn’t bring my father joy or a kind of joy. Bringing home a new sapling or bush from Cerullo Farm and Nursery to plant in the yard on a weekend morning or winning his football bets and collecting from his bookie, joy.

But what a shitty start to the day, thinking about old Bert, feeling like his shadow is falling across the decades into my apartment as I get ready to head out the door doesn’t seem to augur too well for the trip ahead. But I’m not like my father, am I. He’d let any little frustration enrage him. Right now he’d be stomping from room to room noisily seething: God damn it to hell, where’s that goddamned Muriel Spark. Even in the most berserk moments of some pretty overwrought relationships, I’ve never even once screamed at another person the way he used to when he’d really lost it. Okay, here it is, on the sofa facing the TV, hiding underneath the Styrofoam tray last night’s beef chow fun came in, The Girls of Slender Means. I left it out to read on the train, a bit of homework before I see my mother tomorrow. The novel, according to the back cover, is set in a London boardinghouse for single young working women right after World War II, and Mamita lived in one of those, though in Boston, and in the 1950s.

Five months ago, in October, after I’d moved back to New York from Mexico City, I rented this parlor-floor apartment in a brownstone in Carroll Gardens. I still had stuff in storage from when the city had last been my home, nearly ten years ago. But I’ve only visited since, coming up to New York once a year, sometimes staying as long as a few months. I didn’t want to move back but felt forced to by a warning I received in Mexico that I probably could have ignored. But it didn’t feel that way at the time, so I fled. The warning was the result of my journalism on the murder in Guatemala of a bishop, the country’s greatest human rights leader, including the book I published less than two years ago. Maybe in some unacknowledged way I wanted to come back to New York. Thirty years ago, the first time I ever came here to live, I was also fleeing, looking for a refuge from humiliation, a new start. I don’t buy that myth of New York City as a place to come and begin your ambitious climb. Better to arrive humbled, self-embarrassed, it kind of de-hierarchizes the city, spreads it out, offering you more places to hide and also more room to move, to discover yourself in obscure corners, inside shadows and murk. In the past, not wanting to miss out on the chance for some ever-elusive apotheosis, clinging to a relationship or some romantic delusion, I wouldn’t have taken the time for all these trips home to Boston to see Mamita.

When I visit my mother tomorrow in Green Meadows, her nursing home, it will be for the fourth time since I moved back, this after a decade of sometimes seeing her only once a year. My sister, Lexi, visits a couple of times a week and speaks to her on the phone at least once a day. After all those years of living abroad when I often couldn’t remember to phone her even once a month, I do try to talk to my mother every week now. She hasn’t felt so present in my life since I left home for good at eighteen. It seems now like she’s always just a quick thought away, and I like to picture her in her room at the nursing home with her patient rabbit smile, waiting to resume our conversations. I was a little puzzled when I noticed that I’m not in any of the framed photographs on her windowsill and wondered what the reason was; really, I should just bring her a picture now. Two photos of Mamita with her own mother are displayed there, one from when she was in her midtwenties and Abuelita came to Boston to help her move into that boardinghouse and get her settled; the other is from a few years before Abuelita died, when she looked quite a bit like my mother does now, puffy around the eyes, eyelids drooping. There’s a photograph of Lexi from when she went to Guatemala during a college summer vacation: she’s standing on the rough stone steps of the famous old church in Chichicastenango, smiling zestily, surrounded by the usual kneeling Maya shamans with their smoky incense censers, lighting candles, beseeching and casting spells for their clients. Another from about a decade later shows Lexi and our parents in a familial pose, standing close together, mother and sister in flowing dresses for who knows what occasion I wasn’t at, my father in jacket and tie, but you can’t see his face because of the piece of cardboard taped over it. Only Lexi could have decided to do that, though apparently without much opposition from our mom. When I asked Mamita about it, she looked blank for a moment, then there was a flicker of recognition in her eyes and she dismissively clucked her teeth like she does and said, Ach, no se, Frankie. I wonder if the nurses and other staff laugh to themselves over that photo, some even thinking: Oh yeah, I know about husbands and fathers like that.

Usually on these visits I spend at least a couple of nights in Boston hotels and sometimes a night at a highway hotel near the nursing home, located in a town nearly at the end of a commuter train line out to the southern suburbs. If I have to live up here again, for however long it turns out to be, this seems as good a time as any, when my mother has obviously started her mental and physical decline but for the most part is still lucid enough to have good conversations and giggles with. Ay, Mamita, we make each other laugh, anyway, don’t we?

I head down the sidewalk in the cold March, just predawn dark, feeling half-awake and half-asleep, pulling a wheeled carry-on. I forgot to take the locker padlock I use at the gym out of the backpack hung over my shoulders, and the lock knocks against my back in rhythm with the fall of my boot soles on the pavement, a muffled clanking the quiet seems to amplify along with the suitcase’s clacking wheels: clackclack clink clackclack clink.

The subway ride into Manhattan doesn’t fully belong to the awoken world either. There are grim-faced, sleepy-eyed early commuters, some with heads heavily nodding down as they sit, and a few homeless men sleeping across the seats, blankets so blackened they look made of cast iron; it’s like this train is transporting exhausted spirit miners out of a supernatural mine.

I still always call it going home to Boston, though I haven’t lived in that city since I was an infant, back when my newlywed parents had an apartment somewhere on Beacon Street. But this year I didn’t go home to Boston to spend any part of the Christmas holidays with my mother and sister. In early December I flew to Buenos Aires to report a magazine article on the search for the missing and stolen children of parents disappeared in the Dirty War years and stayed until just after the New Year. Then I’d only been there a few days when I got an email from my sister saying how happy she was that we’d be able to spend Christmas together for the first time in so many years. I hadn’t told Lexi I’d be in Argentina for the holidays, though I had told our mom, but she’d probably forgotten to pass that on. Instead, I was invited for Christmas Eve dinner with one of the Abuelas de la Plaza de Mayo and her recently recovered grandson, the only son of her only daughter, who’d given birth while a secret prisoner of the military dictatorship twenty years before, after which she’d “disappeared” forever, most likely rolled from the bay of a plane into the South Atlantic. Her son’s identity had been confirmed by DNA testing only a few months before. For my piece, I only had to try to describe that Christmas Eve just as it was in order to transmit an appropriate sense of the sacred, of the mystical presence of the missing mother-daughter—Paulina was her name—her blessing and love in the new bond between a grandson and grandmother who until recently had been strangers. Later, I got mail from readers who were moved by that scene especially, a few who had stories of their own to share about lost or missing mothers, even of ghostly visitations during holiday family gatherings and weddings.

In her email, Lexi wrote that we could hire a caregiver and take our mother, in her wheelchair, from the nursing home to have dinner in a restaurant, or else we could even have Christmas at her house in New Bedford. “I can’t think of a better occasion for you to finally come to my house and see how I live here,” she wrote. I’ve never been to the house Lexi bought a few years ago out in that old fishing port and now mostly defunct manufacturing city. She bought it as an investment, she says, with the money she got from our parents. An old gabled New England manse-looking place, originally built supposedly for a whaling captain back in the Melville time. There are plans to finally bring commuter rail service out to those South Coast communities that are a little closer to Providence than to Boston, and when they do, all those old Victorian sea captains’ and textile magnates’ houses are going to be coveted by yuppies who work in one or the other of those cities, and the house she bought is going to quintuple in value, so says Lexi. She’s always considered herself a sharp businesswoman and has been waiting all these years to prove it. Regarding his daughter’s self-proclaimed acumen, my father tended to be bluntly derisive. It’s a shame Bert won’t be around to get his comeuppance if Lexi’s real estate gamble pays off. Our parents signed over all their savings and property, everything they had, to Lexi. During those last years when my father was constantly in and out of the hospital, they did need help keeping up with their bills and various other such obligations, and they both knew that after my father was gone, my mother would never be able to handle those tasks alone, so Bert had to teach Lexi how to do it. I know Mamita, especially, was worried about my sister’s sometimes unstable employment and life situations and was determined to give Lexi some security but with responsibilities too. Those decisions freed me to be an aloof son and an even more aloof brother, almost always living far away, in Mexico, Central America, stints in Europe. Meanwhile Lexi has taken care of our parents, often a full-time job, first our father, whom she says she hated through his last years, and now our mother, whom she loves with what it’s no exaggeration to describe as “total devotion.” Look, Lexi deserves everything my parents have given her. I don’t resent her for that, not even a little, possibly for some other things but not that. I wouldn’t have traded the freedom with which I’ve been able to live my life for nearly anything.

As I emerge off the Penn Station elevator into a lightening gray dawn, the giant Corinthian colonnades of the post office building create the illusion of a grand boulevard, and an invigorated optimism floods me, like it’s the first morning of a long-awaited trip to Paris. Even with the time I lost looking for the novel, I’m early enough to walk up Eighth Avenue a few blocks to the salumeria to get a hero sandwich for the train. The trip between New York and Boston is almost five hours long, as long as a flight from JFK to Benito Juárez, and traveling with a good sandwich makes all the difference. Hombre prevenido vale por dos, Gisela Palacios always liked to say. She loved those old-fashioned country grandma sayings, though she could barely cook a quesadilla. Whether it made him worth two men or not, planning ahead like this is just the sort of thing my father, both a scientist and a sandwich man, always did, though he would have found an old-style Jewish deli, corned beef on a bulkie or else tongue. Bert always drove, I can’t even picture him sitting on a train or a subway. He only flew when he had no choice. The last time he made that end-of-winter drive from Florida back to Massachusetts, he was eighty-seven. He was passing through one of the Carolinas when, before pulling into a motel for the night, he stopped for dinner in one of those highway national chain steakhouses and only discovered the unpaid restaurant bill in his pocket when he got home. He mailed the bill with a check to the steakhouse along with a note of apology, explaining that the reason he’d left without paying was that he’d been tired from a long day of driving; he had to admit that at his age he no longer had the same stamina as when he was younger. Barely a week later a letter came in the mail from the restaurant’s manager, who wrote that nowadays it was rare to encounter such an honest American traveler, and he included a certificate that would let Bert eat for free in that steakhouse in perpetuity. Free steak for the rest of his days! But he’d already sold his little Lake Worth condo so that he could live year-round on Wooded Hollow Road. My father would never drive through the Carolinas again. He wasn’t always that honest, either, though he had a way of giving the impression that he was, with sort of an Abe Lincoln look of homely integrity, dangling rail-splitter arms. So Mamita took him back for that last time, and though she was nearly twenty years younger, the repercussions on her own health of those next six years of looking after and having to deal with Bert every day would be dire.

While the counterman prepares my sandwich, I sit at a table, quickly downing a small cup of coffee and a cup of yogurt, getting a healthy start to what’s going to be a long day, and open the Muriel Spark novel to the first page: “Long ago in 1945 all the nice people in England were poor, allowing for exceptions.”

Yesterday evening I thought it was already over with Lulú López. Even though we’ve only gone out a few times, it’s the closest I’ve come to any kind of romantic relationship in five years, since things ended once and for all with Gisela. But then last night Lulú sent that maybe-it’s-not-over text message: Hurry back, we’ll ride bicycles, etcetera. I can’t pretend I don’t care what happens between us, but I do try to keep up a fatalistic interiority. But I’m excited about this trip to Boston, in fact, I’ve started out a day earlier than originally planned just so I can meet Marianne Lucas for dinner tonight in the South End. When she wrote to me out of the blue a couple of weeks ago on Facebook, we hadn’t spoken, or had any kind of communication since tenth grade, thirty-four years ago. She’s a family and divorce lawyer now and divorced herself. In one of her FB messages, Marianne wrote that she’d decided to try to contact me after hearing me on NPR. I was talking about José Martí and his years living in New York City, the focus of the novel I’ve just finished, which is not a strictly biographical novel. The House of Pain I’m calling it. No argument from me that it might make a suitable title for the biographies of so many of us out here on the sidewalk this morning coming out of and headed down into Penn Station, who’ve also spent consequential time in a house of pain. It’s not a title anyone would ever use for an actual biography of José Martí, those always have to evoke heroism, martyrdom, literary and political genius, or strike the “Yo soy un hombre sincero” chord. But The House of Pain is a perfect title for my novel, the major part of which takes place inside a boardinghouse during a couple of the sixteen years Martí lived in New York City, back when he was a poor immigrant exile, tirelessly hustling freelance journalist, translator, private Spanish tutor, poet, and revolution plotter, all this over a decade before he finally found his martyr’s death on his one-man, one-horse charge against Spanish troops on a beach in Cuba. I handed the novel in to my publisher just before I left for Argentina. It’s only 182 double-spaced pages long, but it took five years to write. It required a lot of research, I even went to Havana and spent a few weeks in archives there. I needed to learn every­thing I possibly could about Martí in order to identify the gaps where there was no historical or written record, and let my imagination go to work inside those. One draft was 500 pages long. That was followed by another of 278 pages that I handed in, but it was a botch. My editor, Teresa Fijalkowski, was hard on it; that is, while she was fine with latter parts of it, she stuck it to me about the first third. So many voices and who’s talking and whose thoughts? Look, Teresa, it’s simple, I explained. The narrative spine of that opening section is Martí on a long walk through the city streets to his boardinghouse, where his wife, small son, and the boardinghouse owner’s wife, secretly pregnant with Martí’s child, are all waiting for him to come home. He’s trying to work out in his thoughts how everything in his life has gotten so completely fucked up, and inside his head he’s talking to his wife and to his lover and to other people, and he’s even trying to imagine what they’re saying about him. All of that trails after Martí on his walk back to the boardinghouse like clouds of consciousness that settle onto the page as if into wet cement as fragments of narrative and story. Teresa cracked a half smile, gave me one of her steady ice-cave stares, and finally, with perfect dry comedy, cracked: The dubious gift of consciousness, now I get what Blanchot meant. I said, And it’s just my luck to have the only book editor in New York with a PhD from Oxford in critical theory. I wrote my thesis on Auden, said Teresa. But of course we read theory, so what? Frank, there’s a lot of turmoil, a lot of pain in that boardinghouse, I get that, said Teresa. But I’d like to sense how they’re experiencing it, one character at a time, right from the start. Martí was a hyperconsciousness, I argued, so voluble he was nicknamed Dr. Torrente, and he had more going on in his brain, in his life, than maybe anyone else living in New York City at that time. I spent another relatively monkish year in Mexico City working on the novel. I needed to fasten my prose not only to Martí’s heartbreak and torment but also to his wife’s, her life obscured by over a century of blame. You think Yoko Ono had it bad, imagine having Fidelista Communists and Miami Cuban right-wing fanatics all blaming you for the Cuban Apostle’s failed marriage, separation from his son, and years of complicated private torment. It’s my lost skinny ugly beautiful book that lived with me through my own most trying years and finally found its way home, my best book, The House of Pain. In about nine months maybe it will be displayed over there in the train station bookstore, facing out on the new-books table, ideally positioned between Zaro’s bagels and the men’s room. Maybe someone will buy it to read on a morning train to Boston a year or so from now, and I’ll be taking that train again, and for the first time in my life I’ll get to see someone reading a book of mine in public.

Call it Pain Station, too, I think, having just taken my Louis Kahn memorial pee at one of the urinals in here, can’t think of a bleaker place to die of a heart attack like the great architect did than this always-stinking filthy men’s room. I always picture his final collapse onto the floor like Nude Descending a Staircase, a paroxysmal grandeur but with a short, elderly Jewish man clutching his chest and falling, white shirt stained with airline salad dressing and coffee dribbles—he’d flown into JFK and come to the station to catch a train—his final breaths witnessed by drug addicts and the homeless psychotics who’d be in federal or state mental hospitals instead of sheltering in train station bathrooms if such hospitals still existed. Kahn was on his way home to Philadelphia from Bangladesh, where he’d just built his masterpiece, the Bangladeshi capital’s National Assembly Building, ancient sacred monumental grandeur reformulated into rigorous vanguard modernist design. After creating one of the most beautiful, spiritually stirring public spaces of modern times, Kahn came home to die in one of the ugliest and most demoralizing.

Here in Pain Station, passengers wait to board their trains in a grimy plastic-and-linoleum arena enclosed by numbered east and west gates while heavily armed soldiers in camouflaged combat fatigues and bulletproof vests stand guard or patrol the floor, bomb-sniffing dogs, too, all of us jammed together as if into a ravine. As our train’s scheduled departure time approaches, if we’re Pain Station veterans who know how it works, our eyes fix on the clacking departure board, waiting for our gate to be posted, white numerals and letters, 7W, 11E, 13E, west on the left side, east on the right. Because these are posted several crucial seconds before they’re announced over the station speakers, clued-in passengers get the jump and surge toward that gate; when it’s obvious the train is going to be crowded, it’s a stampede. There: 9W! In this split second my eyes drop from the departure board to the back of the hand that my mole is on and I start moving. In my dyslexia I rely on this mole to tell me which way is left. Trapped inside that instant of panic—turn left!—I only have to look for the directional mole in the dead center of the back of my left hand to know which way to go. That Francisco can’t tell his left from his right; oh, but he can, thanks to his directional mole.

“The 8:05 Northeastern Regional Amtrak train to Boston is now ready for boarding, please proceed to gate 9W and have your tickets out.” But I’m already at the gate, near the front of the line.

Coming off the escalator I walk quickly ahead, passing passengers proceeding single file alongside the train, clackclackclinkclacking all the way to the next to forwardmost train car. This cold March morning is probably not going to be a heavy travel day. Should have a seat to myself all the way to Boston.

So Marianne wrote to me because she heard me talking about Martí on the radio. But why, really? When I discovered her message on the computer screen, my first reaction was that it couldn’t really be from that Marianne or that it must be a hoax. Then I felt like I’d been waiting for a message from her practically forever. But we were only close for a few months back when we were fifteen. “It’s funny,” she wrote in her message, “what survives for more than thirty years.” So what survives? She didn’t say. What about those few months could still matter to her? Maybe I’m making too big a deal out of it, and this, my excited curiosity, is just phantom-limb nostalgia for the reciprocated first adolescent love I never experienced. Does Marianne still recognize herself in that long-ago girl, and does she think I am still anything like that boy? Sometimes I wonder if it would have made a difference in my life, to have had a high school love. Back in tenth grade, it was Ian Brown who provoked our not even speaking anymore. It was Ian, in middle school, who gave me the nickname Monkey Boy. Marianne is going to want to talk about Ian tonight, I know she saw him at the last reunion. “Same asshole as ever,” she wrote. Just remembering Ian makes anger flare through me. I rock back in my train seat. Whatever, man, that was all more than thirty years ago. Like if it weren’t for Ian Brown, you’d be happily married now, a dad even, instead of a man too ashamed to show up at a high school reunion because he doesn’t want them to know that at nearly fifty he’s a lonely grown-up Monkey Boy like they all would have predicted for Frankie Goldberg. A grown-up monkey on the cusp of fifty who hasn’t had a lover of any kind since his relationship with Gisela Palacios ended some five years ago in Mexico City. A stretch of loneliness that was starting to feel fucking eternal. But things have unexpectedly picked up since I moved back to New York. As if change might really be in the offing. We’ll see.

Out of the long tunnel, the train is passing through Queens, and the pale morning light gives the monotonous if jumbled sprawl here the look of something covered in grime being slowly hosed off, revealing a submerged radiance like a soft, youthful glow in a face where you wouldn’t expect to see it, an old or sick person’s face. I slowly finish my coffee. The sandwich rests in my backpack.

It wasn’t just Monkey Boy. I had another nickname before that one, Gols, pronounced gawls. I wonder if Marianne remembers Monkey Boy or Gols. Even though it was only inspired by a sixth-grade teacher talking about the Franks and the Gauls as he stood in front of a map of old Europe, it was a creepy-sounding name, it sounded like crawls or ghouls. Even now, it’s painful to consider why Gols struck kids as so apt for me, but it’s not really a mystery. When I was almost three, living with Mamita in my grandparents’ house in Guatemala City after she’d left my father for the first time when I was around six months old, I’d caught tuberculosis, and whether that was the cause, something grossly impeded my physical development. In photographs from elementary school, I’m an emaciated, sallow weakling, sunken eyes, wooly hair, mouth dumbly hanging open, huge ears, a feeble boy raised in a damp, dark cellar by spiders who feed him moths, a boy called Gols. Eventually my limbs began to fill out; slowly I got stronger. By eighth grade I’d even score a few match points for my middle school track team; a year after I’d transform into a boy who won 440 races; in tenth grade, which is when high school began in our town, I’d even try out for football. Yet Gols stuck to me. I had other nicknames, too: Sleepless because I so often looked sleepy, lost in a demoralized stupor, Chimp Face, Pablo, but Gols was the one I really hated.

That snowy morning after Grandpa died, walking with my father through the town square to the bakery that sold bagels, rye bread, and challah, a snowball hit the back of my father’s herringbone fedora in a burst of snow, the hat jumping up and landing almost jauntily tipped forward atop his head, gloved hands clapping falling eyeglasses to his chest. He shoved the glasses back onto his nose, pushed back his hat, and we turned and saw the boy who’d thrown the snowball, Ricky Rossi from my sixth-grade class, sneering baby face in a bomber hat with hanging earflaps. Pitching arm cocked as if about to hurl another as he lightly skipped backward on the snow-covered sidewalk, he shouted, Jew! The boy beside him, who I didn’t even recognize—long, waxy, potato-nosed face under a wool cap pulled low—loudly screeched Gols, and they turned to each other to laugh as if in triumph and spun and ran away. A Norman Rockwell painting, quaint New England town square in prettily falling snow, rascally boys being boys. My father, a half snarl on his face, looked at me, and I tensed, certain he was about to ask, Gols? They call you Gols? What in hell does that mean, Gols? But he turned back toward the bakery into his composed silent grief. With his fedora, thick-framed eyeglasses, and weighty angular nose, he did look pretty Jewish. I’d hardly known my grandpa. He was pretty out of it in his last years and lived in a crowded multistoried Jewish nursing home that I so hated to visit I was only occasionally forced to, though my father went nearly every weekend, often accompanied by Lexi. Grandpa, born in czarist Russia nearly a century before, in the Ukraine, had grown up among Cossacks and pogroms. What must my father have made that morning of having a snowball thrown at his head by a punk kid shouting Jew?

My father liked to make emphatic statements about character. Things like: You can’t hide not having any character, Sonny Boy. If you don’t have any, it always shows. Like a hypochondriac trying to check his own pulse but unable to find it, I anxiously dwelled on this mystery and problem of character. Standing there in that pretty snowfall, those boys having just thrown that snowball and shouted “Jew” and “Gols” and my father looking at me like that, I felt that it was me who’d been exposed as lacking this thing called character, who couldn’t even imagine, no matter how much I brooded afterward, what I could have said or done in that moment that would have demonstrated character, so that even remembering it now I feel frustrated by this sense of an insurmountable lack that seems to have a name; that name must be Gols.

“So why don’t you ever come to any of our high school reunions?” Marianne asked in one of her messages. How long would it take me to answer that. Longer than it will take to eat my sandwich.

That year of eighth grade especially, Ian Brown used to invite me to his house, hectoring me on the phone to come right over, and I’d get on my bicycle or walk. If I cut across that side of town by walking on the railroad tracks, I could make it in about forty-five minutes. The Browns lived out by Fuzzi Motors and the House of Pancakes and the synagogue, in the same kind of split-level house that we did, common in the newer neighborhoods, plasterboard walls and doors, no basements, skeletons of wooden beams resting atop concrete foundations. Ian never came over to my house on Wooded Hollow Road, painted a bright tropical blue with black wrought iron Spanish grillwork underneath the front windows, my mother’s touch. I was happy to have a friend who was as popular at school as Ian, it made me feel as if our destinies were auspiciously linked. That seemed even truer when our school system selected—or classified—both Ian and me as underachievers, meaning that if we didn’t want to be held back, we would have to attend a special summer program. Was there anything good about being an official underachiever? To my father, it was one more shaming of his son for his infuriatingly stubborn refusal to try to do better in school, one more signpost on the bad road he was always announcing in that lowing tone of doom and lament that I was ineluctably headed down: You’re going down a bad road, headed for an ineluctable bad end, Sonny Boy. That’s how I knew the word “ineluctable,” surely no other eighth grader used it as much as I did. But if being an underachiever actually meant you were somehow a superior person, which according to Ian it did, you shared a bond with a fellow underachiever, you were like members of a secret club who understood the workings of the world in a way people outside it didn’t. According to Ian, we didn’t really have to worry about the future, high scores on our SATs would get us into college no matter what. When we took the exams our natural underachievers’ intelligence would take over. I didn’t really buy that theory. I was sure my low grades were going to count against me no matter how I did on the SATs, but I kept it to myself; even when you disagreed with Ian about something minor, he’d ridicule you until you took it back. Ian’s elastic grin, the way it narrowed and stretched his greenish eyes, gave his face an ecstatically diabolical expression. But he was a handsome kid with a mop of sandy hair who could always create a circus around himself. On Halloween he came to school with his face dyed red with food coloring, carrying a jar of mayonnaise under his arm, and went around clapping his own cheeks to make the whitish goop squirt from his mouth into the paths of squealing girls and onto their clothes. Even the pretty young social studies teacher Miss Turowski came out into the hall to gape at Ian doing that, and I saw how she lifted her hands into her thick blonde hair and looked around appalled, then went back into her classroom shaking her head, sort of laughing. No one else but Ian could have come to school on Halloween as a perambulating phallus and gotten away with it like he did.

That’s some goddamned friend you picked, that Brown kid, I remember my father blurting as we drove somewhere in the Oldsmobile one day. His father’s in B’nai B’rith, I see him when he comes to meetings. He’s the one owns that toilet store out on Route 9, wears those pastel jackets and dyes his hair, a regular Liberace, that one. No wonder his kid’s a good-for-nothing, thinks it’s a joke to be forced to go to a summer program for lazy kids going goddamned nowhere, big joke that is, and you running after him every time he snaps his fingers.

And me, running after Ian Brown every time he snapped his fingers. It makes me feel sick to remember all this.

Ian’s father did own a bathroom fixtures store in a small shopping plaza on Route 9. Mrs. Brown worked as the personal secretary to the owner of a Boston liquor distillery called Old Yeoman. There’s one night that I especially remember, when Ian must have snapped his fingers and I’d gone running over, and Mrs. Brown came and sat with us at the kitchen table after they’d all had dinner. She was wearing pajamas and a thick quilted bathrobe, her hair a Phyllis Diller mess, cold cream spread like cake frosting over her face, her nose like the carrot on a snowman. She was smoking menthol cigarettes and sipping Old Yeoman mint-flavored vodka straight on the rocks.

Gleefully grinning Ian proclaimed: Ethel says you’re a sickly looking boy. He called his mother Ethel. A sickly little monkey boy. Come on Ethel, don’t deny it, and Ian rocked back in his chair as if propelled by his inhaled wheezy laughter, slapping the tabletop with his big basketball player’s hands.

Mrs. Brown wanly smirked at her son, thin eyebrow raised, opposite eye narrowed, and she exhaled a long plume of minty smoke. Her chin was trembling.

Ethel knows you got tuberculosis down in banana land when you were a baby, said Ian. And you don’t take the TB tests at school because they’re going to be positive. So you don’t even know for sure that you’re cured.

Mrs. Brown’s eyes fixed on me from inside her white mask in a way that suddenly sickened me. I should have heeded my mother’s advice and never told anybody about having tuberculosis, but to have told Ian! The TB tests took place behind a curtain. Nobody even had to know I didn’t take them because when the nurse looked at my medical record, it informed her that my skin would react with a positive.

Come on, show some character, I silently urged myself, then said as strongly as I could: I’m cured.

That made Ian laugh. I don’t know, he said. Ethel thinks you’re still sick and that it might be contagious, right Ethel?

Mrs. Brown laconically said, Oh Ian, stop that. Don’t be such a jerk to your friend.

You’re going to catch a sleeping illness from that sick little monkey boy. That’s what you always say, Ethel, admit it, said Ian, even sounding somewhat accusing.

Alright, boys, Mrs. Brown slurred wearily. I’ve had enough of your joking around, what a couple of pranksters. I’m going to bed. She took a last drink of her vodka, stubbed out her cigarette, got up without saying goodnight, and headed down the hall, her big pink shaggy slippers, thin slumping shoulders, and wild hair making her look like a Dr. Seuss character.

So, really, it was Mrs. Brown who named me Monkey Boy.

What was Bert doing in B’nai B’rith anyway? He wasn’t religious. Most years he’d go to synagogue for maybe one High Holiday service at most. I never heard him say a word, fond or disparaging, about his Fiddler on the Roof shtetl roots. Even his youngest sister, my aunt Milly, born in Dorchester, spoke some Yiddish, but if my father did, he never let on. Once as a boy when I asked him why he didn’t love Russia the way my mother loved Guatemala, he answered with a wolfish snarl: Why the hell would I have any love for that goddamned country. They didn’t want the Jews there, our family and all the others that got out alive were the lucky ones. He’d probably joined the local synagogue’s B’nai B’rith to make some friends in our town, expecting to find other men he’d be able to talk to like an old-time Boston tough guy about horse racing, bookies, sports teams, forgotten local athletes, Democratic politics. Except the Jews in our town were of a younger generation and milder types than Bert: accountants, administrators, salesmen, a dentist or two, or else the owners of small businesses like Mr. Brown; dutiful dads, and Friday night synagogue goers, most of them; a few even with hippie-style affectations, denim shirts and bell-bottoms, long bushy sideburns. Bert never put on a pair of blue jeans in his life. Most of my friends, from college years and after, got a kick out of Bert and his old Boston tough Jew ways, and some had a hard time believing the terrible stories I’d tell about him. Our neighbors, especially once we’d moved to Wooded Hollow Road, all seemed to like him well enough too. Anything they might have glimpsed of his violence with me, they probably thought I was getting what I deserved. It wasn’t as if that argument couldn’t sometimes be made.

The train slows, allowing passengers to linger, through the windows, over the ruin and splendor of Bridgeport: old factory buildings, many with bricked-in or gaping windows; tall smokestacks, some exuding black smoke; container cranes and storage tanks, a few berthed ships; the greasy sheen of canals and stagnant inlets under concrete highway overpasses; slummy apartment buildings and homes, plywood-covered windows gray with moisture or rot. Farther on, after we’ve left the station, a CasparDavidFriedrich graveyard with crooked gravestones, bare, black, twisted trees, enclosed by an old wall of stained, crumbled masonry and shriveled vines.

The Ways was what the rich-people part of our town was called, out near the Charles River and the border on that side, because it was only out there that the streets had names like Bay Colony Way and Duck Pond Way. Not many if any Jews lived out there. The various Ways turned off one or the other of a pair of sparsely settled avenues to loop past houses built on adjoining lots as in the town’s other subdivided neighborhoods, except here the houses were much larger, none exactly alike, and some very unalike, and they stood far apart in yards that were like medium-size parks with their own stands of pines or islands of trees, with thick forest coming right up to the edge of backyards. But until the infamous Arlene Fertig night in the spring of eighth grade, I’d never seen any of those houses from behind, even though every morning before school I bicycled through the Ways on my paper route, riding at least part of the way up long driveways to snap tightly folded newspapers at front and side entrances, trying to make them fly end over end and land flat at the foot of doors, and keeping score, one side of the street against the other. The houses on the Ways had spatial depths I found it hard to imagine a house possessing. What was in those humongous basements? Movie theaters, indoor swimming pools, bowling alleys? Even the basement of our small ranch house on Sacco Road, where we’d lived before Wooded Hollow Road, had seemed kind of limitless to me, especially on the other side of the paneled bedroom that my father built for Feli when she came from Guatemala, sent by Abuelita to be our housekeeper and to help take care of Lexi and me, that area of raw cement where my father’s massive pine carpentry table and the clothes washer and dryer were, pink fiber insulation wadded like cotton candy between two-by-four beams and into the ceiling, and the storage area at the back, a spooky tunnel of luggage and stacked cardboard boxes where when I was small I liked to hide for hours, and down at the basement’s other end, a furnace like an iron dragon, a blaze roaring in its belly through the winters.

Arlene Fertig was the first girl I ever kissed. It comes back like this whenever I’ve been thinking about Ian Brown. In my memory they’re linked, Ian and Arlene and later Marianne. Arlene was from the same neighborhood as Ian. Romance had been building between Arlene and me in the ways it does in the eighth grade, flirty smiles, cryptic comments from other girls, slow dancing with her to “House of the Rising Sun” at our middle school’s afternoon dance, the warmth of her waist in my hands through her corduroy dress, her hands on my shoulders, her freshly shampooed hair that fell midway down her back, straight but not fine, tingling against my cheek. When the song was over she thanked me in her slightly hoarse voice and I speechlessly slunk away, stunned by the novel overload of sensations. Black bangs over darkly made-up eyes gave her a precocious look, and she was so slight that when she hurried through the halls at school she looked like a running marionette. Once, between classes, when we were trying to have a conversation, she said, My hair is too heavy. It’s making my head ache. Do you think I should cut it all off? She seemed so sincere that I was too confused to say anything. In June, only a couple of weeks left in the school year, I was invited to Betty Nicholson’s party on Duck Pond Way, the first and only time I ever saw a house out in the Ways from the back. Breathing in the early summer lusciousness, looking across the lawn toward the tree line at the fireflies hovering out there, hearing the yammering of tree frogs and crickets, I had the impression of visiting a plantation estate in Guatemala. Arlene and I danced to some slow songs on the torch-lit patio: “Crimson and clover over and over.” One, two, three, go for it. I gave her a quick kiss on the warm flesh of her neck and turned into a trembling tree inside, and she lifted her head and stared into my eyes, an assertiveness like a tiny flame in each of her dark irises, and her small red mouth broke into a smile like a childishly happy and excited strawberry; that’s how I described it to myself later that weekend, silently going over every detail of what had happened. Holding hands, we slipped away through a row of tall evergreen hedges into a neighbor’s backyard where, in the nearly pitch-dark, we embraced and lowered ourselves, already kissing, down into the plush grass, me partly on top of her, and made out. I don’t remember for how long; it could have been five minutes or twenty. The lawn’s nutritious smell also held something stinky, a mix, I realized, of manure and moist soil that grew stronger the longer we lay there. There was just enough moonlight to see that her eyes were closed, her head turning side to side in tempo with the swirling of our tongues, her little hawk nose rubbing and bumping mine. I love you, Arlene, I whispered, I’ve loved you all this year. Arlene, with her lips against mine, murmured, Me too, me too, me too. A minute or so later she hoarsely whispered, We should go back. I remember how after we’d stood up, she reached behind her to rub her dress and brought her hand to her nose and sniffed it, but neither of us said anything about the fertilizer smell. We stepped back through the shrubbery, toward the torches and patio, and she stopped to put on her shoes. She laughed quietly and said, You have lipstick all over your face. She licked her fingers and rubbed them vigorously on my skin. You should go wash your face, she said. I obeyed, slipping quickly into the bathroom off the patio. At the sink I grinned in proud near disbelief at my reflection in the mirror, so smudged by lipstick that it looked smeared with red poppy petals.

Making out with Arlene meant I was going to have a girlfriend, I was sure of it. She was going away to camp soon, and I was headed into the underachiever program. We only had to make it through summer and by fall we’d be discovering love and sex together in the woods after school, over at each other’s houses when no one else was home. We’d stand making out on street corners oblivious to passing traffic like the teenage couples you saw all over our town, talking and laughing with their foreheads touching. Maybe by Thanksgiving we’d even lose our virginity together, like only a few of our classmates, not including Ian Brown, supposedly already had. When I got to school that Monday morning, just before the homeroom bell rang, it seemed like everybody was waiting for me, though that really couldn’t be true, there couldn’t have been that many seventh and ninth graders waiting for me. What I do remember is stepping through the doors into the wide lobby by the cafeteria and hearing howls and shrieks of excitement, laughter and shouts about a monkey and a banana. I saw Arlene standing between Ian Brown and his best friend, Jake Rosen, our middle school’s football star even as an eighth grader, and Ian was holding her by the bicep. Arlene’s face was weirdly distorted, like a rubber mask of her own face hanging in a tree, her usual sweetly shy smile replaced by a grimace-grin, as if she were about to explosively sneeze. Her hands flew up as if to pull that mask off, and she turned and fled, Ian spinning to watch, her friend Betty Nicholson chasing after her.

Supposedly, Arlene had said that when she was making out with me, she’d felt like a banana being chomped on by a monkey. That joke electrified the school. But I’ve never believed it was Arlene’s joke. It just didn’t make any sense to me that she would have said that. I think it was Ian who came up with it and that he and Jake told everyone it was Arlene. In all the classes I went to that morning, I elicited snickers, sharp grins of malice, looks that mixed pity and hilarity, a few just pitying. Kids made banana-eating gestures when they saw me coming in the corridors or made screechy monkey sounds, some jouncing their hands under their armpits. In one class after the next, I sat stiffly in my seat as if trapped behind the steering wheel in an invisible car crash, that dazed sensation of wondering: Is this really happening? I felt as if I’d walked out of myself, leaving behind an eviscerated container. That horrible sensation of a vacated hollowness that follows one of those enormous disappointments that can seem to take over and permeate everything. Whenever I have a day like that, I remember my first kiss.

Two teenage girls who I noticed when they boarded at ­Bridgeport—both Latina looking, one a short-haired sprite, bright lipstick, the other long-haired in an oversized scarlet hoody—are sitting a few rows behind me and talking about, as far as I can tell, another girl whose name is Pabla, their giggles foaming over like a boiling pot of squiggly pasta. And now one sings out, with more hilarity than mockery: Pabla! Who names their daughter Pabla? The other girl says: It’s her father who’s Puerto Rican. Her mother’s a white lady from here. And the first: But Pabla? So how stupid could her father be? Pabla! They laugh some more.

I’m grinning to myself too. Poor Pabla. I’ve never known anyone named Pabla. It sure is not the feminine version of Pablo, not in any common usage anyway. I once knew a Consuelo who told me that all her life in the United States people had been calling her Consuela. Consuelo literally means “consolation”—Consuela, “with shoe sole.”

But I’ve just remembered another Pabla, in Krazy Kat I think it was. Krazy, for once distracted from his spurned love for Ignatz, meets a lively cat with amorous eyes named Pabla in a tree. They frolic like squirrels in the nearly bare boughs, but suddenly Pabla slips from a branch and instead of plummeting drifts down into a pile of raked leaves. Krazy follows, leaping into the pile, at first playfully searching it for Pabla but then more frantically, snatching up leaves one by one and flinging them aside until not a single leaf is left. No sign of Pabla. Alone again, wails Krazy, natch-roo-lee.

When I wasn’t even a year old, my mother split from my father and took me back with her to live in her parents’ house in Guatemala City. She’s never told me a reason why. All my earliest memories are set in my abuelos’ house, the same one Mamita and her brother, Memo, had grown up in, an old-fashioned Spanish colonial with a stone patio in the middle, dark cool rooms with polished tile floors, and usually shuttered, barred windows facing the street; heavy dark furniture in the living and dining rooms, the Virgin and saint statues in glass cases, the caged finches and canaries Abuelita kept in a small side patio; the thick, woven cloth huipiles always smelling of tortillas and soap that the servant women wore, the older one with a wrinkled face and the young one I spent most of my time with, the recollection of her ebony Rapunzel hair seemingly coterminous with her enveloping kindness and quiet giggles; the memory of sitting in my bedroom’s window seat and passing my toy truck out through the bars to an Indian woman who took her baby boy out of her rebozo and set him down on the patterned old paving stones of the sidewalk so that he could play with the truck and my astonishment that he was naked. A memory like the broken-off half of a mysterious amulet that can only be made whole if that now-grown little boy remembers it, too, and we can somehow meet and put our pieces together. I don’t even remember if I let him keep the truck or not, though I like to think I did. Not all that likely that he’s even still alive, considering what the war years were like for young Maya men of our generation. Who knows, maybe he’s up here somewhere and even has children who were born here.

Mamita must not have loved my father enough anymore, or must have convinced herself that she didn’t, to want to live with him and raise a family. It’s not like Bert was cheating on her and that’s why we left. That seems like the kind of thing she would have told us or at least told my sister and Feli; they sure wouldn’t have kept that a secret all these years. We were going to stay in Guatemala and make our lives there. But what misery and humiliation my father must have endured over those two years plus, a long time to be separated from his family; he couldn’t really have been expecting us to come back. Then what large-hearted forgiveness he displayed when he found out that his truant wife and tubercular three-year-old son were returning to him after all. In Boston, I’d at least get better medical care; that was really why we came back, I understood later. My father rolled the dice and decided to move his shaky family out to that idyllic-seeming town off Route 128, where he purchased a ranch house in a neighborhood so brand-new it looked just unpacked from its box, set down between steep hills and ridges, and comprised of only two intersecting streets, straight Sacco Road, where we lived, and bending Enna Road, together running along three sides of a large weedy-thistly rocky field called Down Back. That was the house, already partly furnished, that my mother and I came to live in around Christmas. My father must have met us at Logan Airport and driven us to our new home, where he’d put up a Christmas tree down in the basement, right in front of the furnace, a dangerously flammable spot, instead of in the living room, as if he didn’t want the neighbors to be able to see it through the picture window, worried that at the last minute we wouldn’t come back after all, and the neighbors would wonder about that solitary Jewish man who made false teeth for a living and had a Christmas tree in his living room. His older sister, Aunt Hannah, married to a Russian Catholic, Uncle Vlad, had decorated it. Underneath the tree, an orange toy steam shovel awaited me. But I was afraid of my daddy and instinctively rebuffed him, this enthusiastic, grasping man whose marriage and family I’d saved by getting sick. On a recent visit to Green Meadows, my mother told me that. You didn’t like your father, she said. You were afraid of him. Really, Ma? I was afraid of him? And you could tell? Because I don’t remember any of it at all.

A hemorrhaging relapse while playing outside on a hot sunny afternoon that made me vomit sloshing wallops of blood onto the sidewalk—I remember that—my father wrapping me in a blanket and rushing me into his car and also that I got to stay in the Boston Children’s Hospital. Mr. Peabody and Sherman came to visit us in our ward, and my father sat by my bed performing the magic tricks he’d bought at Little Jack Horner on Tremont Street. One was a shiny black top encircled by white flecks, but when my father made the top spin on its special stick, the flecks became a rainbow blur before turning into a row of flying scarlet birds that he said were called ibis.

That’s how these visits with my mother go now, but her occasionally blunt, unguarded way of speaking is a new trait. She’s almost comically the opposite of how she used to be, after all those years of keeping her guard impermeably raised. This new heedless candor is a manifestation of the somewhat premature dementia that has been overtaking her in recent years, possibly the result, doctors now say, of a stroke that wasn’t noticed, a commotion in her brain that caused a tremulous weakness in one leg that was misdiagnosed as a symptom of advancing age. But my sister and I also attributed her decline to the exhaustion brought on by having to tend to Bert during his unrelentingly demanding last years, when being repeatedly hospitalized for an array of health emergencies somehow only fueled his manic, cantankerous energies. By the end, it was Lexi who took over his care, moving home again, adamant that she was only doing it out of concern for our mother. Mamita’s condition seemed related to another medical mystery, that being the most dreadful insomnia that overtook her, when it was as if the more Bert exhausted her, the harder it was for her to get any sleep, her often reddened eyes encircled by darkly puffed skin. It was only when she had to go from the nursing home to a hospital in Boston because of a nearly fatal case of pneumonia and an adverse reaction to her medications that doctors, studying her puzzling medical history, also hypothesized that prior stroke. On my mother’s side of the family, there’s no known history of strokes or heart disease or even of dementia; there are a few old family stories that along with the little bit I’ve found out on my own do suggest that Abuelito was manic-depressive and maybe even schizophrenic. In the nursing home, Mamita’s doctors did finally straighten out her medications. She sleeps better now, though that fog she’s often at least a little bit lost in and from which she does sharply emerge, nevertheless seems to be slowly, ineluctably deepening.

Soon after Bert Goldberg’s beautiful young wife, Yolanda Montejo Hernández, came back from Guatemala with their sick little son, she became pregnant, with a girl this time, Alexandra. Husband, probably wife, too, must have felt blessed and redeemed, if not shocked, by this successful fast work, which won them the right and even the responsibility to turn their long separation into a subject never to be spoken of again, certainly not within hearing of the children. In the fall, living in our neighborhood was like being snugly enclosed at the bottom of a basket of flagrant fiery and more muted colors, replaced in winter by hues of snowy slopes, pine crests nearly black in the distance, frigid gray skies, flying flocks of crows, crimson-streaked Atlantic sunsets, followed by successive seasons that wove into our little valley every shade of green from sapling shoots to darkest boreal forest. How could my father even have suspected the viciousness lurking all around us? The Saccos, related to the contractors who’d founded and built our neighborhood, a brutal clan, lived around the corner on Enna Road in a little ranch house like our own. Whenever Gary Sacco called me dirty kike, I shouted back: So are you. You’re a dirty kike too!

Down Back, the weedy, stony field behind our houses, was where me and my few friends from school, especially Peter Lammi, who at school was called Lambi, used to stand shoulder to shoulder, throwing rocks at Gary, who was a year older than us, and his brother, Chris, and some of their friends, while they hurled and zinged them at us. We went to Dwight, the public elementary school, and they went to St. Joe’s. We faced off far enough away that we could usually easily dodge the rocks they threw. My rocks never even came close to reaching them, though I left that part out when boasting at the dinner table about my daring charges against the enemy and perfectly pitched throws. Peter Lammi was much stronger than any of us on either side. Come on, Pete, split a head open! He aimed his rocks relentlessly, one after another, but always so they’d miss but be close enough to make our enemy pull back and finally run away. He couldn’t bring himself to intentionally hurt even Gary Sacco. Peter launched those wild bombardments in part to protect me but to protect himself, too, because he knew the Saccos and their friends were desperate to see our faces covered in blood, if only they could get close enough. I also wanted to see their faces covered in blood, there was not a single thing in this world I wanted more. The serious problem of enemies, what to wish for your enemies.

We did have some nice neighbors, and Mamita even got along with Connie Sacco for a while. But then my mother decided we had to give Fritzie, our German shepherd, away and put an advertisement in the newspaper. Mamita couldn’t take Fritzie anymore, such a rambunctious galoot that he didn’t seem to even fit inside our little house, and he filled the yard with dog shit that it was my job to collect inside wads of newspaper and drop into the aluminum rubbish incinerator that resembled the robot in Lost in Space, a job I performed at best haphazardly. An elderly black couple came from Maine to see Fritzie. They drove an old-looking automobile and told us they lived on a small farm. They went into the yard to meet Fritzie, then sat in the living room with my parents over coffee and cookies, looking at vaccination and kennel papers. Two days later a petition was left in our mailbox, signed by our neighbors, maybe by every household on Sacco and Enna Roads, complaining that if we sold our house to Negroes, their property values would go down. No black families lived in our town, not one I’d ever seen anyway. “We, your neighbors, agree that we will take all necessary steps to prevent that,” the letter said, which my father, astounded, read aloud in the kitchen, and then he mocked: What, they’re going to burn our house down? They’re in the Ku Klux Klan now, these goddamned wops and micks? Bert! exclaimed my mother. Don’t talk like that in front of the children, you’ll make them prejudiced. When Mamita suggested that all we had to do was tell our neighbors the truth—that we were only giving Fritzie away, not selling the house—my father exploded in indignant disbelief: Oh Jesus Christ Almighty, Yoli!

The next weekend, the couple came again to take Fritzie back to their farm in Maine, where he was going to be a happy dog with so much room to romp. I went with my father when he drove the dog shit incinerator to the town dump and on the way home sat turned away from him while sobbing like a German war widow: Fritzie, Fritzie, oh Fritzie.

Jesus Christ Almighty, this: I’m lying on my back among the weeds and pebbles of the apron at the top of Sacco Road, gasping for breath, unable to draw any air, in a rising frenzy of panic and terror because I’m suffocating to death. My recall is hazy, but I do know that Gary Sacco and some of the others had caught me alone, insults, shoves, a burst of boy punches, clumsy and savage, a hard punch to my throat. When they saw me on my back gasping for air, they ran away. There were no houses there on that side of Sacco Road where it ran alongside the steep hill that the old house of the Sacco family matriarch, Grandma Enna, sat atop, though there were houses on the opposite side. Panic, harshly gasping, unable to draw any air, that’s what I most vividly remember, and that I was lying near a telephone pole, long slightly drooping strands of black wire high above me against the brilliantly azure sky. Soon enough my throat relaxed, opened, I gulped air, could breathe again. Then I must have gotten to my feet and walked home. How could I explain to my mother or Feli what had happened, describe the improbable punch that had caused my throat to close and how terrifying that had been, lying there unable to breathe. Whenever I go back to our town, usually by train, to spend some hours just walking around, I sometimes pass that way and see Grandma Enna’s house up there, looking like something out of an old New England horror story or movie, with its always-curtained windows, two skinny chimneys, sagging porch, in winter the snow-blanketed wide downward incline of the lawn, crows waddling across it, pecking for pine nuts from the tall pines separating the property from the old part of the cemetery where the jagged, slate gravestones from colonial and Revolutionary times are. Peter Lammi and I once found in that part of the cemetery the ripped apart, hollowed carcass of an owl devoured by crows, eyes gone, its blackened mouth or throat lining partly pulled out through its pried-open beak.

One day a small round stone, hurled without warning from the Saccos’ backyard in a missile arc over the Rizzitanos’ yard and into ours, undoubtedly meant for me, struck Lexi in the middle of her forehead and laid her out flat. Though she didn’t lose consciousness, the rock left a dark-blue welt. It wasn’t long after, at the start of fifth grade, that we moved to a split-level house with mostly Jews for neighbors on Wooded Hollow Road, just on the other side of the hill, with the town cemetery atop it, between the two neighborhoods.

Not even my mother had ever given me the slightest indication of remembering or ever even having known about that time when I was punched in the neck, yet years later I found out that Lexi knew all about it. She told a girlfriend of mine when we’d come from New York on a visit. They had a conversation that I wasn’t present for, just my sister and Camila. My sister was telling her how terribly I’d been bullied as a child and that in fact we’d had to move from our house because boys in our neighborhood had almost murdered me. They’d left me for dead, and I’d almost suffocated to death, she told Camila. You mean they strangled him? Camila asked. And Lexi said, No, but they hit him so hard in the neck his throat closed. Lexi said she’d witnessed it and that she’d run to my side to help me. I didn’t want to let on what a disagreeable surprise it was to learn that my sister knew about that incident and to find out now, as an adult, in this way from Camila. Lexi had never been a part of my memory of what had happened. It felt like a too-intimate intrusion for her to be telling Camila about it now. At least that’s what I decided later, when I tried to understand why it had so angered me. I wondered if that was a sort of trauma effect or if maybe it was the corrosive acid of humiliation that had wiped her and anyone else but those boys and myself from what I did remember. That memory should only belong to me, a terror and pain I couldn’t or didn’t want to share, especially not with someone who would later make such annoying use of it and who seemed to have a much clearer and more complete memory of what the episode had looked like, at least, than I did.

Almost murdered me? I scoffed. That’s nonsense. I had enemies, but I don’t remember anyone almost murdering me.

Well, that’s what Lexi told me, said Camila. It sounded like something out of Lord of the Flies. I hated that book when I was a girl, because I used to imagine it was one of my own brothers those boys murdered.

Camila was half-English half-Cuban, and she’d grown up “posh” in England, daughter of a Tory politician. Her parents were long divorced, but she and her three brothers were incredibly close with each other and with their mother and also with their sometimes difficult Pa.

I’ve never asked Lexi what she knows or remembers about that episode. I didn’t say a word to her about what she’d told Camila.

Lexi has blue-gray eyes and is pale and blondish, her hair the tint of rain-soaked straw. My mother used to love putting my sister’s hair, when she was a little girl, in Heidi braids and coils and dressing her in frilly white smocks, like the girls from German coffee plantation families she remembered from childhood. She attributed Lexi’s hair and complexion to her golden-haired Spanish rancher grandfather whom none of us had ever seen a picture of, though now I know that Mamita’s abuelo was as far from a golden-haired gachupín as could be. Aunt Hannah had been blonde, too, but I only knew her after she’d gone gray; she was older than my father. Mamita’s natural hair is orangish and curly, even kinky, though she’d been dyeing it black and straightening it, usually doing it herself at the kitchen sink, for as long as I’d been capable of noticing. Now that her hair is so sparse, she doesn’t straighten it anymore but dyes it a soft maroon with a slight orange tinge, a sort of cranberry-orange English marmalade color. In photographs I’ve seen of her when she’s young, most of them black and white, Mamita wears her hair like a forties movie star in thickly flowing waves over her shoulders.

Lexi was tall for her age, and as a little girl, when I was still in my infirm years, she was faster than me, could hit a rubber baseball harder and farther. She was a straight-A student, too, and played violin in a children’s orchestra in Boston. All of this gave her the air of a favored child, even if her high-strung nature and explosive temper already hinted at some of the difficulties she’d have later on. Our father encouraged Lexi’s athletic gifts but Mamita didn’t at all, endlessly cajoling that a girl should always let the boy win in any sports competition, even bowling, as I recall still from a candlepin bowling birthday party when Lexi beat everybody and afterward was made to feel terrible. Mamita was still a captive back then of certain Latin American prejudices that hadn’t changed since even before José Martí’s epoch: a well-brought-up girl should have delicate, even coquettish manners and be dependent on the protection of men. Why should she be physically strong, was she being made to carry stacks of firewood or sacks of onions on her back or to till mountainside corn milpas? Later, to her lasting remorse and guilt, Mamita realized how horribly mistaken she’d been and dedicated herself to supporting her daughter in every way she could, even if it was too late now for her to become the college and Olympic softball star she probably could have been. Around when I was finally beginning to develop muscles and becoming more athletic, Lexi began having weight problems that seemed less attributable to genetic inheritance than to emotional states; in better times, at least into her thirties, she regained her youthful trimness, had romances and all that. But then would come the more difficult times, the causes of which she and my mother always kept secret from me.

Those girls sitting back there are going on about Pabla again and I don’t know what else, their laughter rising to happy shrieks. Every Sunday morning throughout my childhood, Boomtown was on TV, with its opening routine of Rex Trailer, the Boston Wild West singing cowboy in the bunkhouse futilely trying to wake up his snoring Mexican sidekick, Pablo. Staged before a laughing and cheering live audience of New England children, the show even had a contest for TV audience members to write in suggesting new ways for Rex to try to get that lazy Mexican out of bed. Pablo was one of my nicknames too: Hey Pablo, wake the fuck up. In the kitchen at a house party, Fitzy flicking lit matches at me and taunting: Wake the fuck up, you fucking Pablo. His thug friends around him putting on Frito Bandito accents, slurring: Pablo, Pablo, Pablo. Remember that? Good times. No doubt Fitzy was only trying to provoke me into a fight so that he could massacre me. I just had to keep my mouth shut, not say a word, and get out of there, that’s all. I slipped out of the kitchen, out of the house without saying goodbye to anyone, walked home in the cold dark.

My stomach just rumbled like wet pebbles inside a shaken bucket. I won’t be able to resist that hero much longer. If I were traveling in the other direction and had bought the exact same sandwich in an Italian deli in Boston, same meats, cheese, and garnishes, same bread, it wouldn’t be called a hero. It would be a submarine sandwich.

I know that some of the distance between Lexi and me, which I do regret, though apparently not enough to do much about it, is rooted in those childhood resentments and rivalries. My mother is always asking me to be a better brother to Lexi, and I’m always promising to try, but then nothing really changes. But when I suggest that I might possibly resent Lexi for other things apart from her having inherited all of our parents’ money and property, what do I mean? What is it that I actually resent? Why should I resent Lexi at all? If it were only the other way around, wouldn’t it be justified? That time when we were small, when Lexi took all the money out of our father’s wallet and planted it around our yard because she thought money trees would grow, it kind of established a pattern. True, Bert was always complaining and ranting about money, and she wanted to help. He must have just collected in cash from his bookie or had a run of winning trifecta boxes at Suffolk Downs or something, because he went totally berserk. It took Lexi a couple of days to own up. They went out and dug in the yard, under the shrubbery, in the vegetable garden, in the dirt around the trees and bushes he’d planted, but they only recovered about half of it. So adorable, right? Something to make any good boy feel even fonder and more protective of his little sister than before. I dumped on Lexi about it like she’d done the stupidest thing in the history of humanity. What, you think if that was how to make money trees grow, you’d know about it and Daddy wouldn’t? You think he wouldn’t have already planted money in the yard? Now look what you did. You’ve made us poorer.

Then there was the incident when I snuck into Lexi’s bedroom and stole the Indian arrowhead she’d found Down Back a few days before. I can still shut my eyes and perfectly recall her running up out of the field that evening, her strong thighs in short pants rising and falling, excitedly shouting, Look what I found! In the palm of her hand she held out a white quartz arrowhead, about three inches long, perfectly shaped, lethally sharp. I’d been desperately searching Down Back and our town’s forests for an Indian arrowhead like that one since about forever. Jealousy rose inside me like a boiling magma that subsided into distilled malice and calculation. Then I played innocent for about a week, probably longer, waiting for the scandal of the missing arrowhead to blow over. If our parents never suspected me, that must be because it just seemed too cruel and far-fetched a thing for a boy to do to his little sister, steal her arrowhead and then do what with it, keep it hidden forever? (But, I’m remembering now, there was a girl I wanted to give it to, I think her name was Beth, though I only met her once, that Sunday afternoon when my father and his friend Herb, her uncle, took us to a Celtics game in the Garden, and to Durgin-Park for dinner after.) Because Lexi was always losing and misplacing things anyway, our parents tried to convince her that maybe she’d taken it to school and left it there and had just forgotten or had dropped it somewhere without noticing. After all she had so much else on her mind, with her violin recital imminent and Aunt Hannah coming twice a week now to give her lessons and coach her. Did she want Aunt Hannah to see her crying over the missing arrowhead instead of concentrating on her music? One evening a week or so later while my father was barbecuing in the backyard, Lexi sitting on the porch steps, I came running up out of Down Back excitedly shouting that I’d found an arrowhead, too, just like the one Lexi had found. Even now, sitting here on the train, I feel what a heavy sack of rotted flour would feel if it were infested and swarming with mealworms of shame. My father moving toward me, that look of revulsion on his face, uncinching his belt and knocking over the grill, the still-raw steaks falling like lopped-off faces to the grass. Those few whacks with a folded belt across the back of my thighs were nothing out of the ordinary, certainly when compared to what lay ahead in coming years. Hearing the commotion, my mother had rushed outside. The real punishment, as I lay there on the grass pretending to whimper from the sting of the belt lashing, was hearing my father explain to Mamita what I’d done and the way she looked at me, lips tightly closed, her narrowed gaze without pity, direct yet somehow absent, as if in reality she was staring inward, forced to face the truth about her life, trapped in a gringo suburb with this alien family, even this son who’d at least provided the reassurance of seemingly taking after her in temperament, who didn’t scream or throw tantrums, whose cheerful disposition rebounded even after those savage boys tried to murder him, now exposed as a conniving little fool who’d just committed an incomprehensible perfidy against his little sister.

While I lay there on the lawn, curled up with my arms over my head, displaying my penitence, Lexi must have recovered her arrowhead and carried it back into her bedroom or wherever it was she took it. I never laid eyes on it again. Thankfully Feli wasn’t with us anymore when that happened and didn’t witness it. By then María Xum had succeeded her.

Feli had come to live with us right after Lexi was born. I’m meeting her for lunch the day after tomorrow. You really had two mothers, she always likes to say, meaning my mother and herself. Yet despite how close I’ve felt to Feli practically all my life, the last time I saw her was nearly two years ago, when I came through Boston promoting my little book on the bishop’s murder and she drove in to meet me for lunch in Coolidge Corner. From when I was three until I was about nine and from when she was fourteen until she was twenty, Feli lived with us. I made up the name Feli, though only my sister and I and sometimes my father called her that. Her real name is Concepción Balbuena. Abuelita, who’d found her in a nuns’ orphanage in Guatemala City, had sent her to help my mother but also to keep her company. All her life, my mother had only lived in cities where she’d always had lots of friends and a social life; now here she was isolated with a tubercular small boy and an infant in a little town outside Boston, in a two-road, mainly working-class neighborhood overlooked by a cemetery, amid rocky field and cold forest. The bedroom my father had built for Feli in the basement, with finished plywood-paneled walls and a smooth linoleum floor, was adjacent to our playroom, separated from it by a curtain of tiny metal rings hung from a brass rod. The first time I saw Feli she was wearing black-frame eyeglasses and a convent haircut, but a year later, she’d grown and fluffed her hair like Patty Duke’s, wore loose sweaters and skinny slacks and eyeglasses with pink frames, and was always playing Top 40 music on the radio. Down in her basement room, Feli twisted, chachacha’d, frugged, and sang along to the radio, to forty-fives on her record player or to Shindig! on TV. Frankycello-Frankycello! she liked to call to me, like I was Annette Funicello’s little brother. Swinging her hips side to side and holding out her hands for me to come and dance, she always smelled damply of detergent and Ajax. When I’d made up the name Feli, was I just mispronouncing feliz or making up a name only for her because she brought so much felicidad into our house? Feli was more fun than anybody I’d ever known. But when she’d get me to march around the basement with her loudly singing “estamos de fiesta hoy, la banda la banda,” I suspect now that was her way of cheering me up, that I was, at least sometimes, a sadder boy than I remember being.

Feli didn’t have parents. She had only one relative that she mentioned, her uncle Rodolfo Sprenger Balbuena, an army colonel fighting in the war against the Communists from Cuba and Russia. Feli and her uncle wrote to each other, his letters arriving in crisp airmail envelopes with red and blue stripes, and like all mail from Guatemala those envelopes had a distinct, stronger smell than American mail, something like a moldy raisin cake. Her uncle’s letters came right from the battlefield, Feli told me; she’d read them out loud. In the mountains and jungles the soldiers ate wild animals, including opossums, iguanas, armadillos, tepezcuintles, jabalís, crocodiles, snakes, and even monkeys roasted over campfires.

About six years after she’d come to live with us, Feli left to marry Oscar, a handsome, languid, arrogant Cuban. We went to eat cake with them in Allston on their wedding day; their small apartment reminded me of the one in The Honey­mooners. Oscar eventually became mixed up in small-time gangster dealings; their marriage only lasted a few years. After Feli left, our home was never a happy one again, not even in a fleeting or illusory way, I really think that’s true. María Xum came next. Abuelita had sent her to do housework so that most days my mother could go into Boston, where now she was studying at Lesley College to become a Spanish teacher. She was probably about the same age as Feli. But neither Lexi nor I ever played with María Xum. Watching television she’d laugh uncontrollably at parts that weren’t funny or stare in bewilderment or fright at the funniest parts. All that used to make me feel sorry for her and sometimes hostile. Her feet, coming out of her black slipper shoes to rub against each other, were rough and calloused, her face dark and flat, wide cheeks, a large fleshy mouth with something fishlike about it, and her black eyes shone with a disconcerting intensity. María never took me with her into Boston on her day off like Feli used to. Soon she left to get married, too—even María Xum could find a husband!—the way every girl Abuelita sent to us left to get married. She occasionally phoned my mother to say hello, but we eventually lost track of her. María Xum was replaced by the mysterious Hortensia. After only two weeks of being our housekeeper and living in that basement room, Hortensia left to get married. I have no idea to whom or how it happened so fast. What I do remember about Hortensia is her tight sweaters and voluptuous bust, her prominent Roman-looking nose. Yolandita from Nicaragua came next, so demure and pretty, always singing along like a happy novice nun to the radio while she ironed. She had her own room downstairs in the new house on Wooded Hollow Road and was my mother’s favorite, though Mamita’s relationship to Feli was emotionally deeper. Carlota Sánchez Motta, who was my age, was the last to come, but she wasn’t a housekeeper. She was a foreign student who in exchange for living with us was supposed to help with the housework. During my senior year, Carlota went to high school with me.

More than forty years after Feli landed at Logan Airport with her little suitcase, the small settlement of Central American women founded by Abuelita in Greater Boston is in its third generation, Feli being a grandmother now, and maybe one or two of the others are too.

Mamita had married Bert because of his resemblance to her big brother, Guillermo, or Memo. That’s what used to be said, though I don’t remember by whom. Was it Feli or Abuelita who said that, or maybe Aunt Milly? They both had big noses, Bert’s classically Jewish, Memo’s a bit smaller, more triangular, classically Maya-mestizo. They both had black hair, Bert’s wavy, Memo’s tightly curly; they both wore eyeglasses and were forceful speakers. That was about it for what they had in common. Few things made my mother happier than my managing to impress Tío Memo the way I already had that day my father drove us to Fort Ticonderoga, with my energetic recounting of how on the night of May 9, 1775, Vermont’s own Ethan Allen and a feisty rabble of his Green Mountain Boys, including the future traitor Benedict Arnold, had snuck into the fort and fought their way into the British soldiers’ sleeping barracks, which used to be right over there, Tío. The redcoat commander jumped out of his bed just as the Green Mountain Boys burst in, and that’s why, Tío, when he surrendered the fort to Ethan Allen, he was holding his breeches over his private parts like this. Jajaja went my uncle’s booming laughter. I really was thrilled to be at Fort Ticonderoga, which I’d read about in Francis Parkman’s Montcalm and Wolfe, checked out from the library, the actual place instead of just a historical re-creation like boring Plimoth Plantation, still-standing ramparts, cold redolent stones, even the same dirt the Green Mountain Boys had left their boot prints in. And Tío Memo was impressed by his nephew’s knowledge and improbably extroverted outburst. He exclaimed, You’ll be a professor someday, Frankie! Ay no, Memo, murmured my mother, crinkling her nose, because coming from her brother, a manly successful international businessman, she didn’t consider that a great compliment. But from how she looked at me and smiled, fur coat hugged around her, rouged cheeks even more brightly fragrant in the cold, I could tell she was proud of me.

Tío Memo, during a business trip to New York from Guatemala, had come to Massachusetts by Greyhound to visit, and so Bert had taken us all on that weekend road trip up to Fort Ticonderoga, then across Lake Champlain on the car ferry and into Vermont, a state my uncle had never visited before. I sat in the back seat between Tío Memo and Feli, my mother and sister were up front, and Bert at the wheel, driving us to our motel through winter twilight and long rows of gray, white, and ever­green trees, past the occasional roadside farm stand selling maple syrup and cheddar cheese. Some of the souvenir shops we passed had teepees or big statues of moose out front that made my father shout, Look at that, a moose! the same way he shouted, Look at that, cows! whenever we passed milk cows grazing in a mountainside pasture. Meanwhile my uncle and Feli cheerfully bantered with Mamita, who sat partly turned around with her arm hooked around my sister, their jokes and laughter, ala que alegre, and púchica, and ala gran chucha, vos, Tío Memo regularly remembering to switch to English for the sake of my father, a rare memory of snug well-being, of happy pride in family. The way Tío Memo, at the start of every sentence he addressed to my father, said, “Bert,” in his deep, resounding voice, sounding so manly and respectful. And my father would say, Well, Memo, to be honest with you . . . Or, Frankly, Memo, let me tell you how I see it. They spoke to each other the way leaders at the United Nations spoke to each other, I imagined, men who understood power and how things really were, their conversations meant to deepen mutual understanding and to clarify complex matters for the rest of us. That’s why Mamita always chirped along with utterances like: No me digás, or Así es, or Oh no, they can’t do that, or, Memo, is that true? Guatemala’s improving but precarious economic and political position in the world, always threatened by powerful subversive enemies from without and within, always needing to maneuver such treacherous geopolitical currents, gave Tío Memo an urgent-sounding global outlook. My father was a serious Democrat with thoughtfully calibrated positions on world affairs and how these were complicated by US political pressures and rivalries, also from within and without, subjects that he only ever got to talk about in such a seemingly consequential way when he was with Tío Memo. In reality, considering that my uncle was a fanatical right-wing anti-Communist, and my father was just as fanatically against the Vietnam War and all right-wing warmongers, it’s amazing they never even came close to screaming at each other, the way my father and Uncle Lenny, vociferously in favor of the Vietnam War, used to scream at each other, even at one Passover dinner hurling plates of food across the table. The one thing Tío Memo and my father agreed on was that they both hated Russia.

Memo, who’d taken over and enlarged our family toy store business in Guatemala City, was a vigorous man who laughed a lot. Mamita was always quick to laugh too. She had a wonderfully jolly, occasionally silly laugh, but my father laughed less. Instead he sometimes hooted and howled as if he were faking, imitating happy barnyard animals. I’m trying to recall if he ever really genuinely laughed. Well, okay, yes, sometimes he did, though not much at home, not with us; that afternoon in the car driving into Vermont, he sort of did, with those hoots and howls it feels so melancholy to conjure back now.

Lexi once told me about a memory she said still haunted her from another of those family road trips. This was more than twenty years ago, when I’d come for a visit during one of those periods when she was living at home again on Wooded Hollow Road. It was just our parents, Lexi, and me on this road trip, and we’d stopped for a picnic lunch at a highway rest stop somewhere in Cape Cod. I was, as usual, off playing in the woods, said Lexi, and she was sitting with our parents at a picnic table. They ate their sandwiches in complete silence, she said. You could hear every bite. Their chewing was the only sound except for some cars swooshing by and a little breeze that came and went in the pine trees. I remember that breeze because it was loud compared to our silence, said Lexi. It was the most silent silence, Frank. It really started to scare me. Why don’t you say something? I thought. Mommy, Daddy, say something. Talk to each other just a little. I tried to think of something to say just to break the silence, said Lexi, but I couldn’t get a sound out. It was like they were never going to say anything again, and you were never going to come back from the woods, and I was going to be trapped in their silence forever.

Because Aunt Hannah used to fill Lexi in and tell her stories when she came to give her violin lessons, Lexi knew things about our father that I didn’t. Aunt Hannah would tell her about the family history, which is how Lexi knew about our grandmother Rose, who’d died when my father was a boy and whom he never talked about, just as he never told any stories about his own growing-up years. Aunt Hannah, and Aunt Milly too, were the keepers and upholders of the legend of the thwarted genius of Bert, which supposedly explained why he was how he was. Once upon a time, of course, some of the most prestigious universities and colleges of the Northeast had had very restrictive Jewish quotas, and Harvard, locally aspired to by Jewish immigrant children like no other school, was one of the worst, accepting a secretly designated small number of Jews while otherwise keeping qualified Jewish students out, especially those who came from the Russian and Eastern European shtetl families of Boston’s most abhorred immigrant neighborhoods. Maybe Bert didn’t even know about the quotas, or if he did, had a faith that if it was indeed harder for a Jewish student to be accepted into Harvard than it was for a Christian, it must be by some small degree necessitated by the competitiveness of the process and the unsurprising preference of Christian administrators for Christians over Jews when having to choose, say, between two equally qualified students for a last available place in the incoming class. But Bert, gung ho Americanized as could be, one of the top students at Boston English, a football and baseball star, too, determined to become a surgeon, had expected to be accepted into Harvard because everyone else around him, teachers and coaches, were sure he was going to be too. The ruthless Crimson quota crushed that dream. A year later, he was accepted into Johns Hopkins in faraway Baltimore to study medicine, but it was the Depression, and Grandpa Moe made him stay home and go to work as a locksmith so that he could help support the family. That’s why Bert had to enroll in Boston University part-time, where he studied chemical engineering, eventually leading to his long career in false teeth. I only knew those stories from Lexi.

Aunt Hannah told Lexi that Bert had a boss at Potashnik Tooth Company whom he hated, who’d been “picking on him” for years, Leslie Potashnik, one of the sons of the company founder, Dr. Simon Potashnik. According to Aunt Hannah, whenever Bert would invent a new kind of false tooth, Leslie Potashnik would put his name on the patent. That jerk took credit for all the work Daddy did, Lexi told me. There are patents for false teeth? I asked. Back then I didn’t know anything about it. Whenever you invent anything for any business, said Lexi, of course there are patents. Because of Leslie Potashnik, my father hated going to work. That’s why, my sister said, so often when he got home in the evenings, she could hear him through the thin door of the downstairs bathroom in the shower cursing: You son of a bitch, you goddamned bastard you, get off my back. Lexi said that used to actually make her feel sorry for Bert.

During the years since, I’ve managed to learn quite a lot more about what my father used to do for living. Back when Bert was starting out, the manufacturing of porcelain dental prosthetics was rugged work. He used to travel to granite quarries in Canada to inspect and choose the veins in the rock he wanted for his source feldspar. At Potashnik, he worked in a Vulcan environment of furnaces and kilns, of grinders and iron mixers, pulverizing feldspar into powders. While the company never stopped producing the high-end porcelain teeth that were Bert’s specialty, it also eventually became a major manufacturer of the acrylic teeth that came to dominate the market. The chemistry was completely different, but my father mastered it too.

A few years after I’d left for college, when the Potashniks sold the company to a pharmaceutical multinational, the new managers realized it was going to take a team of five to do what my father had been doing alone at the tooth plant for decades, seriously underpaid throughout. To convince him to postpone his retirement another five years, until he was seventy, so that he could personally train those apprentices to take over after he was gone, they more than tripled Bert’s salary. He’d been resigned to a penurious retirement. Instead, he was able to buy his Florida condo.

Here in New Haven, the train has to change from diesel to electric locomotives or vice versa. It takes about ten minutes. It’s cold out here on the platform, but as the heat is always turned up so high inside the cars, I left my coat inside, on the rack over my seat. Back in the smoking days, this was always one of the great moments to light up. The locomotive, just disconnected, looking as if it’s playing a juvenile prank, goes whizzing off all by itself, and now train-yard workers are huddled around the exposed front of the first passenger car, a few leaning over from the platform, the others down on the tracks doing whatever it is they do so that the second locomotive, when it comes rolling in reverse, will ram into that car, iron against iron, and latch on. If you’ve stayed inside in your seat, even though you know it’s coming, it always delivers a disagreeable jolt, flinging coffee up out of your cup. That routine jarring collision of locomotive and car is a pleasing reminder that not everything is all high-tech, smooth, and quiet, the way the high-speed Acela is, which is almost three times as expensive as this regional train and usually doesn’t even get you to Boston, New York, or DC that much more quickly, its velocity constrained by the archaic tracks and all the other traffic, including local commuter lines, sharing them. Though the Acela is a nice ride, with lobster rolls for sale in the café car and a certain elitist, briefcase-carrying Northeast Corridor glamour, if you’re in the mood to spend some extra dosh just for that. I like to wait until the last moment to reboard, when the conductors, some leaning out the doors, are shouting to lingering passengers out on the platform, many of whom like soldiers returning to the front in an old movie take a last drag and toss down their cigarettes as they stride forward to hop back on the train just as it’s starting to move.

Promise me you’ll always be the happy one, said my mother. I can’t have two unhappy children. If I can’t remember when she first said that, I do remember thinking, She really means it—and feeling happy that she thought of me in this way and also pained for her. She said it more than once, though maybe not quite in those exact words. Still, having an inherently “happy-go-lucky” disposition, as Mamita liked to claim we both did, didn’t necessarily make you kind to your little sister or even intuitively empathetic. If Lexi sometimes had a hard time as a child and adolescent, I was indifferent or pretended to be. Was it that she didn’t have friends? But Lexi did have friends, more and better friends than I did. Maybe they weren’t all nice enough to her, I don’t know. She had an innocence that made her easy to confuse. When someone was mean, it hurt her, but it also confused her. When people were mean to me, it didn’t confuse me. It didn’t even hurt me that much. It was just the way things were.

Even into my thirties, even beyond that, I still felt a kind of internalized mandate to hide any unhappiness of my own from my mother—I would never have been tempted to share it with my father or sister anyway.

Eventually, over the years, I had a couple of girlfriends who got close enough to me to also observe my mother and how I was with her and to form opinions about it. I remember giving one of those girlfriends that whole spiel about my mother and me being so similar, happy by nature, smiling through misfortune, and I was so taken by surprise when she responded that it wasn’t true. Yes, my mother might have a cheerful disposition, but she was sad inside. Camila said she could tell that in many ways Mamita had had a sad life, that she was a wounded woman. I, on the other hand, really did let things go. The bad things that happen to you, she said, it’s weird, it’s like you just shed them and go on to the next thing. A year or two later, Camila repeated those very words when she broke up with me. Sure, I was sad now, devastated even, but she knew I’d get over it, shed it, move on to the next thing like I always did. She reached out to actually stroke my nose as if saying goodbye to a dog, faithful and stupid, who’d miss her but would also soon forget all about her, happy to go off with a new master.

I did everything I could, tried everything for years, to get you to open up your heart, and nothing worked! That’s what Camila exclaimed a few months ago as we sat in her kitchen in the Williamsburg loft that she shares with her partner, an Iranian German avant-garde theater director, having invited me for lunch. She shouted, Frank, are you laughing? You are such an asshole. You’re laughing! But she was laughing, too, partly in disbelief, because it was me who’d just asked, all these years later, why she thought our relationship had failed, and she’d made the effort to answer honestly, I had some nerve to laugh! I don’t know why I’d started to laugh, embarrassment probably.

Not long after that previous trip when Lexi had told Camila about how those boys had “almost murdered me,” I’d come to Boston alone because my father was in the hospital to be operated on for a blocked artery maybe, though I’m not sure. Bert had so many emergencies and operations that I regard as minor only because he so robustly survived them all. Lexi, my mother, and I had met at the hospital to sit with Bert in his room for a while, and then my sister drove us in her car to the Chestnut Hill mall to have dinner at Legal Sea Foods, where, it turned out, my sister wanted to talk about her therapy sessions. I knew Lexi had been in therapy since her childhood, but this was the first time I’d ever heard her discuss it so openly. Of course one of the major problems she and her therapist had worked on was the harm my father had done to her, endlessly insulting her, demeaning her, making her feel like she was a huge disappointment to everybody, worthless. I know I’m not worthless now, Frank, she said in a tone of cheerful exhortation. But that took years of therapy, which helped me to find the confidence to prove my worth to others, yes, but mostly to myself. But, sadly, she said, trying to prove that to Bert is a waste of time. I know that now too. I was struck by how she’d pronounced “But, sadly,” as if our father’s cruelty was something she could now regard with a certain perhaps feigned detachment. Yes, darling, I know, my mother said, putting her thin, delicate hand on my sister’s paler, more substantial, elegantly sculpted–looking one. Lexi really does have beautiful hands, as if shaped by all those years of violin and viola playing when she was a girl.

I hadn’t been around many people who spoke in this earnestly self-disclosing way. Even Camila, who could be direct in expressing her emotions, possessed, I suppose, an innate British restraint. Starting in my twenties, I’d spent practically ten straight years in Central America, as a freelance journalist, covering the wars, trying to write my first novel, occasionally spending time in New York, but the focus of my life was always down there. The other journalists I knew never spoke like that, the way my sister did at dinner, nor did any of the Central Americans I knew. It would have raked stridently across almost anyone’s nerves and sense of private equilibrium, would have sounded incredibly gauche, to hear someone going on about their therapy sessions or their personal emotional problems, “sharing” in this way. Obviously, violence, death, suffering were all around us. We were living through a terrible war, Central America in the 1980s, a war that many of us were dedicated to observing, to investigating in ways that practically required us to merge self and commitment to our jobs, emotionally, morally; it seemed the only way to rise to the horror of what we were witnessing. We couldn’t help but try, at least. It’s not like we didn’t manage to have fun too. But I don’t doubt that the experience was in some ways deforming. I can see now that it was. Of course some of us, maybe even most of us, also found partners to be close to, intimate with, even if discreetly. Not me, though. I didn’t find anyone in all those years. It seemed fine, in the context of that time and place, to be the way I was. What a camouflage it was for me, I guess, to be down there in those years, emotional inarticulateness passing for stoical virtue.

So here was Lexi talking about her therapy, about what a bastard Bert was and how she’d worked through that with the help of her therapist. But my sister had a surprise. Her voice was now raised and flattened as if to focus our attention, or mine really, to this new level of seriousness. Recently, she and her therapist had been going deeper into her life’s traumas, bringing those that hadn’t seemed so obvious to the surface. I remember considering at that moment whether or not to order another bourbon on the rocks and deciding that one was enough; I’ve never let myself get even a little bit drunk around my sister or even my mother, afraid of what I might say, guarding against something, not sure what exactly. Lexi began to speak about what she’d suffered when we were children, watching me be bullied by the Saccos and other boys. Here we go with the almost murdered story again, I thought, and I got ready to scowl and say, Lexi, I wasn’t almost murdered. Instead my sister said that even that had not emotionally hurt and damaged her the way, when we were a little older, watching my father beat me had. She explained that not only was it terrifying, just awful, Frank, to witness, but it also used to make her feel so helpless. It was her helplessness in the face of my father’s violence, her inability to rescue me, to make him stop hitting me that had traumatized her. That’s what her therapist had made her see.

Hah, yeah, I said, lightly scoffing, trying to turn it into a little joke. Back then there were all those protests against the violence of the Vietnam War, but I guess you couldn’t just march up and down Wooded Hollow Road protesting against Daddy, could you?

Lexi pressed on as if she hadn’t heard me. My mother was complicit in that helplessness, she was explaining, being helpless herself. I can’t blame Mom, she said. She didn’t know what to do either. We were both helpless. As she listened to Lexi go on in this way, my mother’s expression became childishly blank, as if her dementia had chosen just that moment to seize control of her brain, which it hadn’t, not at all. She was still teaching in those days.

I said coolly: So you pay money to talk about how Daddy hitting me used to make you feel. That’s rich.

It was obvious I was going to be a dick about it. Inside I was seething. I was furious, as if she’d stolen something that was mine.

Lexi said, That’s right, Frank. That’s what I talk about with my therapist lately. Yes, it was traumatic for me. If you’d prefer, I won’t talk about it anymore. It’s private anyway. I thought maybe you’d be interested.

Así es, said my mother wanly. Tal cual, she added, a bit nonsensically. She was tired out from these long visits to my father in the hospital; soon she’d be putting up with Bert at home again. Just knowing that was coming was probably exhausting by itself.

Maybe I should go to a shrink, I said. I’ll ask her to help me work through my trauma over hearing you talk about how seeing Daddy beat the crap out of me traumatized you.

I hope you’re never a father, Lexi said. You’re just like him.

I’m just like him, right, I said.

Yes, just like him, so condescending and nasty.

Without a doubt, the anger shooting up through me probably was like the anger that so often overtook Bert and made him go berserk, but it really was as if another chemistry operated inside me: I reached a boiling point, it peaked, and almost instantly subsided, just like that. I’d realized as a young journalist that in dangerous situations, when others were most frightened or most tense, I’d flatten out in a way that had nothing to do with bravery; sometimes I’d just fall asleep. I smiled at my sister and said, calmly as can be: I get it, Lexi. It’s just that I’ve never been to a therapist. Maybe I will someday.

I’m sure it would help you a lot, she said, her voice now melodious, a little shrill.

Of course it traumatized her, the poor thing, said Camila, after I was back in our apartment in Brooklyn and had told her about it, playing up my own mocking indignation. And I understand completely, she said. If I’d ever seen my father beating up one of my brothers like that and couldn’t do anything, I’d—She fisted her hands to her temples and let out a muffled little shriek.

Well, why not grab a baseball bat and hit him over the head? I said. My sister should have done that, if she wanted to help.

My oldest brother’s cricket bat, you mean. I don’t think it’s so easy. Any hint of violence paralyzes me too.

Of course, I thought to myself. I’d finally answered Bert’s violence with violence of my own, but I knew what Camila would say if I reminded her of that, that it was easier for a boy. Doubtlessly true, though I don’t know that I’d call it easy.

Well, your own father could be pretty mean, you’ve told me, I said.

If you mean bashing you over the head with patronizing pomposity, yeah—that British two-syllable yea-ah. But he never would have laid a finger on any of us. I like your sister, said Camila. She’s an emotional human, and she’s brave enough to try to talk about what troubles her. She must have loved you a lot when you were children. Who knows, maybe she still does. Though I have to say, I don’t see why she would.

Haha, I said.

Still my longest relationship, Camila Seabury. She and Gisela both for about five years, though with Camila, we were straight through to the end, whereas Gisela and I were off and on, probably more off than on, for all of it. And Camila was right, I did get over our breakup quickly. She kept the apartment, and I moved to Mexico City. I hadn’t even been there two months when I met Gisela, and that’s when something must have changed, because I’m probably still not over that. Would Camila really regard that as a change for the better?

Lexi and I are both unmarried. Neither of us has given our mother what she says she most wants, a grandchild. Just a coincidence, maybe? You can’t just go around blaming your family, your town, for that kind of thing, not at our age. But somehow take away my upbringing, take away Gary Sacco, Ian Brown, Arlene Fertig, and even what happened with Marianne Lucas, take away Monkey Boy and Gols, and who would I be? Would it be as if I’d never walked the earth? But I have walked the earth, and it’s been a long walk, and all of that is far in the past. Except I am seeing Marianne Lucas tonight. If nothing else, our dinner will be the only high school reunion I ever go to.

So I did manage to resist until we left New Haven. I reach down into my backpack and lift out the sandwich, pull it from its bag, set it down on the lowered seat tray, unwrap the wax paper but only around its top half, and hoist it to my lips for that first bite of crunchy sesame-seeded bread, capicola, soppressata, fresh mozzarella, olive oil–soaked hot red peppers, and sit back, savoring those flavors and textures. Finally I open the little Muriel Spark novel, holding it up in one hand. And read this sentence:

“Their eyes gave out an eager-spirited light that resembled near genius, but was youth merely . . .”

It makes me think of Lulú, the sweet, eager light in her eyes that chimes in my heart like a silvery bell. Gisela’s bottomlessly murky eyes were pretty much the opposite. Yet I’ve never in my life been so fixated—enthralled—by any gaze as by hers.

Besides journalists, all sorts of young foreign women, probably at least a slight majority of them gringas, were pouring into Central America during those war years: aid workers of every stripe, doctors and nurses without borders, solidarity activists, analysts and scholars of war and politics, spies, arms dealers, and even mercenaries. There were also those who would have been there even without the war: Peace Corps volunteers, embassy staff, grad students in every subject from anthropology to rain forest zoology, business types, eternal hippie backpackers; all manner of seekers seeking and scammers scamming, like those mixed up in the illegal adoption trade, fake orphanages filled with stolen and extorted babies.

Anyone might surprise. I knew a thirtyish British journalist, Cambridge grad, super suave fellow who was having a romance with a missionary nun from Indiana he’d met up in the Ixil. Sister Julia had graduated from University of Chicago Divinity School, she read Pascal and Simone Weil in French, and whenever she came down from the mountains to meet him at the lake or in Antigua or in the city, she traveled by bus with books of poetry in her knapsack. Rimbaud, Celan, Denise Levertov, I remember were poets he named. The British journalist and I weren’t close friends. The reason he came over to sit with me in Bar Quixote when I was drinking alone one night was because he was excited to tell me about his love affair with the nun from Indiana, and the reason he was so excited was because her last name was Goldberg, too, though she was “half-Jewish” by birth. I’m only half-Jewish, too, I told him. Do you think you might be related? he exclaimed. How many half-Jewish Goldbergs could there be? That made us both guffaw. Though she had a Catholic mother, she’d had to convert, because she’d never been baptized. He told me about another writer Sister Julia was into, Natalia Ginzburg, an Italian, half-Jewish and a Catholic convert too. That was the first time I ever heard of Natalia Ginzburg, but I didn’t read her until a few years later when I found some of her books in Spanish translation in a Mexico City bookstore. The British journalist told me he was in love with the missionary nun, but she refused to abandon the religious life because the people she was serving so needed her, the Ixil Maya being one of populations hardest hit by the war, the army’s now-notorious scorched-earth campaign of massacres, and its other well-documented crimes and horrors. As long as Sister Julia was living in a way that brought her closer to the meaning of Jesus Christ as she understood it, she didn’t care what other sins she was committing, was how my friend explained it. He said, She likes to call herself a Jesuit Anarchist. It’s been something like fifteen years since I last spoke to the British journalist, but I see him on TV quite a bit. He’s become an expert on the Taliban and Al Qaeda. I have no idea whatever became of Sister Julia Goldberg, but I doubt she was killed. As far as I know, whenever they murdered an American nun in Guatemala or El Salvador, and they murdered more than a few, we heard about it.

Of course there were millions of centroamericanas there, too, more or less my own age, born on the isthmus and still living there. Surely among them was the romantic companion I so longed to find. I even told myself that it would be a logical way to resolve my sometimes-confusing identity issues, to have a serious relationship with and eventually marry a centroamericana, as tritely prescriptive as that sounds now. But over the next decade, I only had a few one-nighters and brief involvements, which I was never able to keep going much longer than a week, with a mix of local and foreign women I can count on one hand. No real intimate connection or electricity, not smart or funny or political enough, that’s the sort of thing I’d tell myself, whether she’d cut out first or I had. Instead, I’d carry around some absurdly far-fetched, unrequited crush or obsession, I could keep one of those going for years.

There were two bedrooms in the apartment, originally built for Abuelita’s sister Nano, over my abuelos’ house, and for a while Penny Moore lived in one of them. She was the most important human rights investigator in Guatemala, though she did that anonymously. Her cover was working as a stringer for one of the American newsweeklies, where not even her editor knew her secret. I accompanied her on a lot of her information-gathering trips up into the Quiché, Huehue, and Rabinal, and one time we crossed over from Mexico with an Ixil guide named Maria Saché, who led us to the camp of a nomadic Maya refugee group, one of the comunidades de población en resistencia, who’d fled into the mountains and forests to evade the army, living on wild plants and roots when they were on the run, sometimes able to settle long enough to harvest a season of corn, and improvise a little school. Even deep inside the rain forest, sometimes the only drinking water the refugees could find had to be squeezed or sucked from machete-hacked tree vines and roots that fathers held to the lips of their children, they’d even offer the chance to draw a few sips to a pair of thirsty journalists before taking any for themselves. I did my own reporting, too, in Guatemala and elsewhere in Central America, every year publishing three or so magazine pieces, and those occasional freelance checks were what I lived on. I saw a lot, but not as much as Penny and a full-time correspondent like my other closest friend, Geronimo Tripp, always rushing off to the latest hot combat zone. But in Guatemala City I stayed in my room a lot, too, trying to get my novel going, writing by hand on legal pads or pounding with two fingers my little Olivetti portable. Or I’d spend entire rainy season afternoons hidden away in the upstairs mezzanine of Pastelería Jensen, a café in the center, writing in my notebook or reading novels in those British paperback editions that I bought in the little foreign language bookshop one block over, owned by a young French-Guatemalan Jewish man. He had books in English, French, German, even Japanese, but he never stocked any title known to be politically left. I remember a young French backpacker type coming in and asking for Che Guevara’s Motorcyle Diaries, and the bookstore owner looking like he was about to have a heart attack. He meticulously wrapped every purchased book with brown paper and tape, but if you tried to strike up even the smallest small talk with him while you patiently watched and waited across his counter, all you’d get back were terse nods, which must be why my memory of his very large head atop his small, slender body and his marzipan-pale, mole-splotched, sensitive face and thin, stricken lips remains so vivid. Sitting up on that café mezzanine with my little individual pot of coffee, I’d unwrap the brown paper around whatever black- (The Sentimental Journey), light-green- (Andre Gide’s Journals), or orange-spined (The Comedians) Penguin I’d just bought, hold it to my nose, and riffle the pages to inhale that nutty mustiness possessed by any book steeped in a Guatemalan rainy season. Tío Memo used to come into Pastelería Jensen from the store every afternoon at five on the dot for his coffee and oatmeal cookies, always accompanied by at least one of my younger girl cousins. Usually I’d leave my table to go downstairs and sit with them for a bit.

Penny Moore strode into my bedroom holding a gardening hand rake and said, You should have this. But we didn’t have a garden or anything like one. Her rake had five iron prongs, each filed or lathed to a sharp point. Someone had recently given it to her. She’d been keeping it by her bed, ready to use it as a weapon in an emergency. I’m trying to remember exactly what color its wooden handle was; a grayish shade, I think.

It was one of those times when Guatemalan G-2 Military Intelligence and the death squads seemed to be launching another of their sporadic killing frenzies. The dreaded intelligence unit known as the Archivo was then headed by Tito Cara de Culo, still just a colonel. What seemed different now was that they weren’t only targeting Guatemalans. A junior diplomat from one of the Scandinavian countries had apparently spent several days in a guerrilla camp, not necessarily inconsistent with her information-gathering duties; in the middle of the night, intruders stealthily scaled the wall outside her rented home, climbed in through her bedroom window, repeatedly raped and stabbed her, and left her body for dead as a message that the people it was intended for would not misconstrue. Miraculously, she survived and was immediately evacuated by military air ambulance. There was a lot of nervous whispering going around about who was getting threats, who’d already fled, who might be next. Embassies and international aid organizations were all freaking, ordering staff living in apartments and homes conceivably vulnerable to wall-climbing agents of freedom to move into gated, multistory condominium complexes with good security.

Penny Moore, nonpareil information gatherer, also had a lot of contacts among the guerrillas. She’d received probably many more threats than she’d let on to me. It wouldn’t be so hard for people with the required skills to reach our windows from the sidewalk or the roof. We knew that the “bad guys”—­Military Intelligence, other Guat officials, the US embassy—must suspect that Penny wasn’t just a magazine stringer, even if they didn’t know for sure. Maybe they didn’t think one person could be behind those voluminous human rights reports that were causing the Guatemalan military government and the Bonzo administration in Washington so many headaches. They didn’t think one boyishly skinny, long-legged girl whose ears stuck out through her thin black hair, who had a laugh like a neighing donkey, who’d first come to Guatemala as a Fulbright scholar and college student to study bats in Mayan mythology could be doing all that by herself. One day she told me that until she let me know otherwise, we both had to stay away from every Guatemalan we knew; a deep source had told her that Military Intelligence had put a tail on us.

Our alarm system was beer and soda bottles stacked on the seats of chairs underneath all our windows, so that if they came in, bottles would fall to the floor and shatter. I’d developed a strange tic inside my cheek that twitched constantly. From that time on and even to this day, if I’m walking on the sidewalk and the door of a parked car suddenly opens just in front of me or a little way ahead, I jump out of my skin. Penny was in her black “Vietcong” jumpsuit that I liked to tease her about, a necklace of scarlet beads around her neck. Her extraordinary character amplified her awkward beauty, electrifyingly vital, with that touch of dark Azrael energy. I was trying to absorb that we were saying goodbye, for a long time at least, and would never be roommates again. She laid the garden rake down on my bed, her bequeathed going-away present. It was, indeed, a deadly weapon. She was flying to London, where she’d spend a week huddled with “Aunt Irene,” as we were supposed to refer to Amnesty International whenever speaking of it over the phone, going over and preparing their next human rights report. She’d be briefing a parliamentary committee, flying to Geneva for secret meetings with UNHRC officials. Danielle Mitterrand had invited Penny to stay with her in Paris for a week or so, who knows what else. When she came back, she wasn’t going to be my roommate in Tía Nano’s old apartment anymore. We both understood it really was time for her to live somewhere more secure, people in London and elsewhere who knew her situation were pressuring her about it. I didn’t pay any rent and had never charged Penny; we’d just split utilities. Besides her morning cup of yogurt, a banana, and coffee, she hardly ever ate there. I helped her carry her luggage down the long, narrow stairs to the metal door leading to the street. The drive to the airport was notoriously dangerous. If they didn’t want people to leave the country but hadn’t found a way to make them disappear beforehand, they’d sometimes ambush them there. A simple hatchback car with polarized windows, electrical tape over the cracks in one, was waiting for her, and a couple of sturdy muchachos got out, one to open the trunk, the other casting his eyes up and down the street, his hand thrust into the clearly weighed-down pocket of his baggy nylon windbreaker. Afterward, I went back up the stairs and could feel tears starting in my eyes. I almost never cried. When had I last cried? I had a terrible feeling of gloom, of foreboding, like my spirit was going away, too, another passenger on a long shadow train of the ghosts of the murdered or soon-to-be murdered, a train with shadow wheels on shadow tracks, its silent clacking echoing through blood and nerves, the rhythm of the flinching tremor in my cheek. When I went back into my bedroom, the sun was coming through the windows in a way I’d never noticed before, directly hitting the roughly surfaced, painted yellow wall over my bed, suffusing it with the deep golden yellows of ripe papaya skin, which contrasted with the large minty emerald squares rimmed in blue of the Momostenango wool blanket laid over my bed. Penny’s hand rake propped atop the blanket somehow possessed the gravity of a compact heavy anchor plummeting into ocean depths despite being motionless, its glinting prongs like prehistoric fangs, with its painted whorled wood handle, the wet slurry seal color of just-laid sidewalk or maybe more a periwinkle gray, but that combination of colors and light, that unexpected tableau, as if inside a mysterious door opening in the air, suddenly struck me as unbearably beautiful and melancholy, and with a sob that came out of me like a punch, I fell to my knees, face against the scratchy wool of the blanket, hand clutching the rake by the handle, and wept like I never had before as an adult.

New London, the Thames harbor, docks, berthed sailboats, nothing out there today on the choppy grayish waters. The next stop, a short stretch of seascape away, is Mystic. Bert once brought us somewhere around here to see the submarine base, and to the seaport in Mystic to tour some of the old three-masted sailing vessels. I remember standing on the balcony of a motel early in the morning and looking down into the pool where Mamita was swimming laps in a light-blue bathing suit, her hair tucked under a bathing cap, how beautifully and swiftly she swam with her long, graceful crawl through the limpid water. Was that motel around here, in Mystic? Falmouth? Woods Hole? Wait, I think it was Boothbay Harbor.

I was on a quick book tour that I’d come up from Mexico for when Penny turned up by surprise at a reading I was giving at Politics and Prose and took me out for drinks and burgers afterward at the same bar good ol’ Tip O’Neill and some of the Kennedys used to drink at, where she said she remembered the color of the killer rake’s handle as fire-engine red. No, Penny, you’re wrong. It was slurry seal, I said emphatically. Though I wasn’t as sure as I’d sounded. Penny had spent years on the lecture circuit, traveling the country, talking about Guatemala, showing her slides, speaking in church and synagogue basements and public libraries, visiting colleges and universities. She wasn’t making any money but was invited to sit with do-gooder fat cats on the boards of various human rights and foreign policy organizations; then she suddenly enrolled in the Wharton School of Business. Five years later, by 9/11, she’d made an immense fortune in big-time finance. Of course anything Penny turned her obsessive attention to she was going to excel at. That night in the bar, she confided after her third martini that she utterly loved being ruthless in her business dealings but only so long as she believed she was competing against the sorts of bastards who for decades had been dictating all the ways that Guatemala and the other Central American countries were to be fucked over. Not long after, Penny had some kind of breakdown, was diagnosed with severe PTSD and what they called “addiction to perfectionism,” and spent two months in a treatment center in the Berkshires; then she went to live in Bali with her lover for a year; now she uses her wealth to found projects like the scholarship fund for Guatemalan Maya students whose advisory board she invited me to join, and she’s promised a big donation to the “learning sanctuary” for immigrant kids in Bushwick that I volunteer at. Penny’s back again on her relentless lecture circuit, too, paying her own travel expenses, traveling the United States speaking to ever-smaller audiences. She says she doesn’t even care as long as at least a few people show up, and now and then she’s nicely surprised, in California, say, by a college or even high school crowd that includes many students who came from Central America as small children, others born here, kids so eager to learn everything they can about what went on during the war decades in their ancestral countries that their parents fled, the most common complaint being that those same parents often refuse to talk about it. Penny always tells me she’s writing a memoir, I hope she does.

Outside of my aunt and uncle and cousins, I couldn’t deal, back then, with people who didn’t get what was going on or didn’t want to; people, both up here and down there, who weren’t bothered by or were just passive consumers of all the lies endlessly poured over mass murder. The war and its politics made me judgmental in a vehement way I’m likely to roll my eyes at now whenever I encounter it in others, less over the judgments than over the vehemence, sometimes as embarrassing as hearing a recording of my own much younger self. But a fundamental truth of the war in Guatemala was always that those with the most wealth and power to lose were the most indifferent to how many were slaughtered: young mothers, babies, entire villages, whatever, it made no difference to them. To this day they’re sure they were on the correct side of history, even if what they have to show for it are failed narco states with starving populations and everybody trying to get the hell out, and now here comes the next narco president, General Cara de Culo, “a good muchacho,” as the gringo ambassador called him in a newspaper article the other day. Those trips back to New York in those years were always incredibly isolating.

But by the end of the eighties I’d moved back anyway, where I shared an apartment in Brooklyn with Gero Tripp. We still sometimes worked in Central America, even went down together for the Panama invasion. But soon after, I decided I wasn’t going to do that anymore. I was at last finishing my first novel. Gero was on his way to becoming an international war correspondent superstar. Bosnia, the West Bank, and Gaza, with the Pashtuns who fought the Red Army in Afghanistan, the Tamil Tigers, the Polisario Front in Western Sahara. He’s in Iraq right now. I was also venturing into risky territories I’d never been to before. At thirty-three, I started having girlfriends and relationships, one after the other, and that enormous change in my life consumed me. It started the night I went to meet a younger friend, a Harvard law student who’d been an intern reporter in Managua, for drinks in the city, and she turned up at the bar with a friend of hers, Burmese Belgian Pénèlope Myint, raised in Hong Kong and Brussels, a doctoral student writing a dissertation on Italian feminist writers. At the end of what turned into a long New York club-hopping night, we wound up in a crowded taxi, Pénèlope sitting on my lap as we made out, the other people wedged into the back seat around us making cracks about how we were so fogging the windows the driver couldn’t see. And so began that crazy incineration of a year, split between New York and Cambridge, the memory of which I treasure so much that often when I’m in Boston I walk down to the Esplanade only to gaze Gatsby-like across the river at that grad student high-rise against the sky and the white balcony from which, one winter night, Pénèlope threw her symbolic trinket engagement ring—I’d promised to replace it with a properly gemmed one when we made the engagement “official,” that is, when I could afford one—down into the snow-covered playground eleven stories below. After Pénèlope came Camila in New York and Gisela Palacios in Mexico City, two long relationships, back-to-back, in a decade that lifted off when I was still a young man and dropped me back down in middle age.

But I hadn’t done any journalism in years when, in 1998, the human rights bishop was murdered in his parish house garage in Guatemala City, just after presiding over the presentation of a church human rights report that exposed generals and colonels to possible future trials for war crimes. What I thought was going to be only one magazine article on the murder led to seven years of regularly returning to Guatemala to keep up with the investigations and trials and publishing occasional magazine pieces that I finally collected, along with some newer reporting, into my slender book. I thought, Now I can leave the case alone, and it will leave me alone. Fat chance of that.

Just this past weekend, General Cara de Culo, a former troop commander in the Ixil and later head of the Archivo and of the G-2, announced that he’s running for president of Guatemala. He’s suspected by some investigators of having been one of the masterminds of the bishop’s murder, and when in my book I published some of the evidence against him, including allegations made by the Key Witness that had never been made public before, that did make some noise, though mostly down there. Of course, the general denies all, and because he’s so powerful and people are so terrified of him, that was enough to make the issue go away—so much so that now he’s running for president. On Monday morning, a Boston public radio station contacted me for an interview about Cara de Culo. They said I could do it from a New York studio, but when I told them I was coming up to Boston later in the week, we decided to do it there. I have to be at the radio station this afternoon, before I meet up with Marianne.

Seems they can never tear us apart, me and General Cara de Culo, also his main protégé, Capitán Psycho-Sadist, convicted for a role in the bishop’s murder along with two other military men, the first Guatemalan military officers ever convicted of a state-sponsored political execution. Psycho-Sadist is a much more volatile and adroit figure than the other soldiers he went to jail with. Over the years the notorious capi has built a crime empire from prison: he runs the narcotics street trade in Guatemala City and also the city’s most feared squad of assassins for hire. Supposedly Cara de Culo offered to protect and empower the capitán in his ambitions in exchange for his keeping quiet about others involved in the bishop’s murder. In the meantime, several witnesses, a couple of Psycho-Sadist’s losing defense attorneys, among others, have been mysteriously murdered. That was the first thing I thought of when I was urgently summoned to the US embassy in Mexico City last year to speak to a consul there who had information from Guatemala to pass on to me. Prosecutors there had been intercepting Capitán Psycho-Sadist’s mobile phone conversations, some with General Cara de Culo, that revealed his ongoing obsession with everyone he thought had played a role in sending him to prison. All the people he named, among them a few journalists, including myself, were offered police protection if they were in Guatemala. That wasn’t an option in Mexico. Cara de Culo and Psycho-Sadist have power, but it doesn’t reach up to New York is what I thought when I decided to get out of Mexico for a while. Maybe the Key Witness came to a similar conclusion; the last time I’d spoken to the prosecutors they’d told me that the Key Witness, who had refugee status in Mexico, had gone missing, and they suggested that maybe he’d headed north, across the border.

Maybe Cara de Culo worries I’ve found more evidence about his role in the murder beyond what I included in the book. I know I’m still sometimes on his mind, because in an interview on CNN last year he accused me of being a liar in the pay of his political rivals and said he had proof, which of course he’s never explained or revealed. Really, I don’t have any more information than what I’ve already published, nor have I made the slightest effort to find out anything more. If the general somehow hears what I say about him on Boston Public Radio later today, he won’t like it, but he also won’t hear anything new, nothing that will be newsworthy down there. It’s not going to be me who stops Cara de Culo from becoming president.

And yet if not for the murder of the human rights bishop and General Cara de Culo, and if not for the Key Witness, too, without whom the case would never have gone to trial, I would never even have met Lulú. That chain of circumstances is a little weird to think about—and to acknowledge.