Читать книгу Life with Sudden Death - Michael Downing - Страница 9

3. False Pride

In third grade, a lot of my baby teeth fell out. It didn’t worry me. My mother said that none of the Downings held on to their baby teeth for long, and I was pleased not to be a kid in one of those other families that did hold on to things too long.

I knew there was no tooth fairy. Sometime during my stint in kindergarten, I’d spit up my first loose tooth while I was gargling with Listerine from my brother Gerard’s private stash. I didn’t ask Gerard about the tooth fairy. Gerard reminded people of my father, which translated into high hopes for his future, so he wasn’t expected to waste his time with his youngest brothers. Joe and I made him pay for ignoring us in mouthwash, cologne, and aerosol deodorants.

I had asked Joe about the fairy. The tooth fairy is against our faith, he’d said. Joe was deeply religious. So is Santa Claus, Joe added, and P. S., keep it all to yourself.

Joe was taller than I was and he had darker hair, and his only apparent disadvantage was a wicked cowlick he occasionally tried to master with a combo of the sprays and pomades he could dig up in Gerard’s bedroom. He was wearing his maroon cotton long-sleeve jersey with the fake black dickey. It must have been a Saturday. I was wearing my mustard-colored long-sleeve jersey with the fake black dickey. These were bought-new jerseys, and Joe and I knew they were more sophisticated than the striped things our friends wore. Out of modesty, we rarely kept them on when we left the house.

I liked the way we looked in those almost-matching jerseys. I knew Downing boys weren’t supposed to care about style, but I didn’t much like the way we looked in the wide-wale corduroys and cable-knit sweaters that came in plastic bags from the family of the man who owned the local newspaper, one of many prominent civic leaders who had been my father’s best friend. Whenever Joe and I put on some not-new clothes and stood in front of the full-length mahogany mirror in the upstairs hall, we could see that our knees and elbows weren’t where the previous owner’s joints had been. My mother would say they fit “like a glove.” She’d say this out of one side of her mouth. She’d be on her knees, a threaded sewing needle pressed between her lips, and she’d be tugging on a sleeve or cuff.

If I was in kindergarten, my mother must have been f0rty six, maybe forty seven. Joe and I weren’t pitiless, but we didn’t pity our mother any more than we pitied ourselves. I think we knew that anybody fortunate enough to be a member of our family was above pity. This was a matter of some pride, which was okay. As far as I understood the policy, pride was an indoor virtue that became a problem outside the family, like my favorite jersey. Pity was reserved for the poor and needy and other people who weren’t related to us.

We didn’t even pity my father, who was only forty-four when he died in 1961. And it would be almost two decades before I got a sense of how needy we all had been. My parents never had any savings. In 1960, they had put down $1,000 on a $20,000 stucco house about two miles across town from the small three-and-a-half bedroom house in which they had lived since 1947. There were eleven of us before my father died; the new house had six bedrooms. My father’s life insurance policy paid out $50,000. When a couple of his best friends sat down with my newly widowed mother, they added up the annual Social Security payments she would receive and the estimated interest on the life insurance. Until I graduated from college, her annual income was between $6,000 and $7,000. She gave 10 percent to charity every year, as did all of her children from their part-time jobs.

We never spoke of these details, even amongst ourselves. We were the children of a widow, and the Church and its Missions received more than their share of our mites. We knew the parable. But to admit we saw any parallel to our own lives would have been false pride. Instead, we behaved like aristocrats who knew better than to squander their fortunes on new bikes with banana seats or restaurant food. We accepted the hand-me-down clothes and free Oriental carpets and tickets to Tanglewood and part-time jobs with flexible hours in the spirit in which they were given. As tribute to the temple of my dead father. This was the same spirit in which we swallowed the peculiar hash that was served up for dinner in the homes of friends and in prosaic homilies by the parish priests. We recognized that it was the very best other people could do.

Joe had advised me to wrap my first lost tooth in toilet paper and try selling it to one of our older sisters. Much of what Joe did and almost all of what he said puzzled me, but I respected his advice because I was in kindergarten and he was in second grade. Plus, he had managed to accumulate a vast, secret collection of smelly chestnuts, which were sprouting roots in all three drawers of an oak desk we allegedly shared in our twin-bedded bedroom.

I took the tooth to my sister Marie, who was always allowed to have friends over because she was sandwiched in the family between Joe and me on one side and Gerard on the other, and she claimed half her secrets could be shared only with girls. Marie never liked to be interrupted, but she did like to be asked for her opinion. Mom has to pay you a quarter for every single tooth, she said after chasing me out of her bedroom, where she was putting makeup on a girl named Rose, who was wearing a white dress decorated with a big pink picture of a rose. Marie was wearing a red-and-white muumuu purchased by one of our older sisters, which was supposed to be an outdoor dress but was worn only as a housecoat by a Downing. We’d had a couple of informative dinner table discussions about muumuus. The upshot was, muumuus were Hawaiian and we weren’t.

I knew we weren’t allowed to stick old teeth under pillows and pretend not to know how they got there, so I knocked to get Marie’s attention again. She spoke to me through a two-inch opening in her bedroom door. She often did this. For years, I imagined this was how members of the Supreme Court handed down their decisions. Give me your tooth, and I’ll give it to Mom, she said, sticking her hand out into the hall.

She must have seen the toilet paper I’d packed around it, because her hand disappeared and she hissed, Sterilize it. I knew this would require bleach, but my mother kept the Clorox in the laundry room, and she was constantly running in and out of there all day with baskets of clothes, which made it very hard when you wanted to do something private with bleach or ammonia.

I tracked down Joe in the garage, where he often spent time alone after he’d been forced out of the house to play with kids in the neighborhood. I asked him a general question about sterilizing procedures people used before bleach was invented. He suggested a bonfire. Since he’d joined the Boy Scouts, Joe was constantly angling to get me to start a forest fire he could put out. But I knew if I hung around long enough, he’d come up with something else just to get me to leave him alone. He finally told me Gerard’s cologne would work. He was right. A long soak in half a bottle of Excalibur decanted into the bathroom glass did the trick. And I also discovered that hydrogen peroxide got rid of the smell of cologne in a drinking glass. This was after I’d figured out how to dribble the hydrogen peroxide I’d snagged from my sister Mary Ann’s private stash of hair-care products into the inconveniently tiny hole at the top of the Excalibur bottle to replenish Gerard’s supply.

Marie accepted the tooth without comment. She was often a lot of things I didn’t appreciate, but she wasn’t a thief. The payment turned up under my pillow the next morning.

Over the next two years, I got refunds on at least a dozen baby teeth. Then, during the spring of 1967, I swallowed two teeth while eating a bologna-and-cheese sandwich at my desk in the third-grade classroom of Notre Dame grammar school. We hadn’t had a lunchroom for a couple of months because of a flood, but we’d been allowed to turn around and face our neighbors while we ate. I motioned to my best friend, Joey T., whose desk was four rows away, but he couldn’t understand what had happened, so I had to pass him a note.

On the way home, we stopped just one block from school on a rise in First Street, which was actually a bridge over a stretch of railroad track. We hung our heads over the concrete railing to see if there were any bad kids playing down there who might get their arms chopped off by a passing train. We’d heard it had happened. We couldn’t prove it, but we knew for sure that in second grade one bad kid had told Sister Jeanne Arthur he’d by mistake dropped his penmanship homework off the bridge. She didn’t believe him, and neither did I. Whenever I brought it up, though, Joey T. always said he could believe it. This particular day, when I brought it up I added some of the worst stuff from the bad kid’s résumé—his parents were divorced, his mother yelled; plus, I’d once watched him set some of his own hair on fire—but Joey still said he could believe a homework paper could just fly away.

Standing on the bridge, looking for potential amputees, I asked Joey if you got paid for teeth you swallowed. He’d know. He’d swallowed a metal bottle cap, a nickel, and a lot of our marbles.

Joey said, You mean, prove it?

I nodded.

Joey had a sister exactly the same age as my sister Marie, and they both said prove it every time either one of us said just about anything. He told me if I had any problems proving I’d swallowed two teeth, I could always check to see when it came out in my B.M. I didn’t know what he was talking about. He was pleased to know something I didn’t know, and after he explained the abbreviation, he asked me what I called my bowel movements. I was embarrassed and a little scared that we were talking about them at all. I was going to tell him how in my family you never even touched toilet paper if somebody else had touched it, but I didn’t want to insult his family’s bad hygiene. I just let him know that my family never discussed anything that happened in bathrooms. At first, he didn’t believe me, but after a while, Joey said, You better find out what you call it before it’s too late. He went on to explain how much work had gone into his recovery of the nickel he’d swallowed. It had taken a couple of days. It was worth it, he said, because it was a buffalo head.

This somehow reminded him that he had swiped a bunch of Sweet Tarts from his sister’s bedroom for us to eat, so he dropped his green book bag and fished around in it, and then he dumped everything on the sidewalk. He had some old spelling tests and a lot of pencils and his dog Cindy’s leash in his bag, but he didn’t have any candy, and I noticed he didn’t have his geography book, which meant he was not going to live up to his potential again on the test. He did find the note I’d written him. He read it to himself and smiled. He didn’t make a big deal out of proving his point or anything. He just placed my note on the concrete railing and flicked it like a carom until it slid off and floated down to the gravel between the tracks. About halfway home, he remembered he’d eaten the Sweet Tarts secretly during art period.

It was not until I was eating dinner that I remembered eating my two teeth during lunch. Our kitchen table was always crowded, but even I eventually got a chance to speak. My mother often had to make a special plea for people to listen to me, which sometimes added to the pressure, but I appreciated it anyway. I made my announcement, and immediately one of my sisters said, I swallowed three teeth today, and then another one said she’d swallowed four teeth, and my brother Gerard asked my mother how much he’d get for swallowing one of his ears, and then they were told to change the subject. Even Joe wouldn’t look at me, even after I drank from his milk, which almost always got his attention.

It occurred to me that maybe I hadn’t swallowed two teeth. I didn’t know what “prone to” meant, but I knew I was prone to exaggerating. I was first prone to it when I tried to wiggle out of wearing some donated woolen clothes because they gave me a rash, and I was prone to it again when I explained to my mother why I had been kept after school one day by Mrs. Shaw. Mrs. Shaw had asked me to remain in my seat after dismissal, and she’d sat down at the desk beside mine and said someday she’d be voting for me for president of the United States. That was it. She said she hadn’t wanted to embarrass me in front of the other kids. And before I stood up, she said, You should be proud of yourself.

I wasn’t stupid. I didn’t repeat the “be proud” part at home. I did drop the news of my presidential timber.

My mother said, Why would Mrs. Shaw say that to you? She said it quickly, in her flat, adult voice, and I instantly knew that she was taking this way too seriously. As if I’d declared my candidacy and started to raise funds already, she said, Are you sure you’d like the job of president? She pulled the plug on the mangle—a sort of freestanding pasta press that she used to iron all of our bedsheets once a week. Mangling made her head sweat, and it didn’t often bring out the best in her personality. She explained that being president was not all spelling bees and multiplication tables, at which I excelled, she admitted. It was obvious she was not jumping on Mrs. Shaw’s bandwagon. After she recited the president’s daily duties, she said, Don’t you think someone like your brother Gerard would make a better president?

Mrs. Shaw was my first lay teacher, so it made sense that we were both prone to exaggerating.

After dinner, we all knelt down in the parlor on the thick red Oriental carpet donated by a local rug-store owner, another of my father’s best friends. We said the Rosary facing a painting of Jesus over the fire-place. He was ripping his own bloody Sacred Heart out of his chest. It was shining and tattooed with a cross. Above the piano, my father smiled a benign black-and-white smile from his perch above the color high-school graduation photos of the older kids. When I’d entered first grade, my brother Joe had pointed out that nobody else would be at home by the time a picture of me made it onto that wall.

By the time we had finished the Rosary, I completely doubted I was missing any teeth, so I persuaded Joe to check my mouth. He made me sit on the toilet in the half-bath under the stairs, and he used a flashlight and a clean Popsicle stick. He said it was pretty clear that I’d lost one tooth, and then he added, “at most.” That stung. He was already famous for having some of the worst teeth in the family, and I told him so. We started wrestling then. My mother came in and told me she wanted to speak to me in the kitchen. She must’ve spotted Joe’s dentistry kit, because she mentioned that it was time for another visit to Dr. F.

I hadn’t yet learned to fear the dentist. I did know it was my right as a third-grader to walk from school to his North Street office without supervision, which my mother confirmed. She told me again she wanted to see me in the kitchen.

I liked Dr. F., and I knew that his credentials were impeccable. He had all the latest equipment. He had eight kids, and they were in our parish. And after my father died, Dr. F. never charged any of the Downings for his professional services, which was something we let him do to demonstrate Christian charity. He was the best dentist in Berkshire County and better than the dentists in Boston. If his name came up at dinner at our house, you’d discover that a seat in Dr. F.’s office was more coveted than box seats at Tanglewood. When any of my brothers and sisters had a dental emergency at camp or college, the previous work done by Dr. F. was admired and even envied by his peers.

My father had dedicated the last years of his short life to promoting tourism and industrial development in the Berkshires. After he died, my siblings and my mother and I carried on his work amongst ourselves, selling to each other claims of singularity and excellence. When I met people who chose other dentists—and in a town of 50,000, some did—I didn’t criticize them, for the same reason we didn’t criticize Protestants.

In the kitchen, all evidence of dinner had been wiped up and put away. My mother was seated at the oval table with her back to the stainless steel sink. She asked me how many teeth I had swallowed.

I knew I’d lost two teeth. I knew she didn’t believe me. I knew there’d be trouble if I changed my mind right in front of her. I said, Two. It had become a preposterous lie.

Sometimes my mother seemed to be making an effort not to look disappointed, and I felt bad because she already had too much work to do. She had dark curly hair and dark eyes. I could tell she was pressing her tongue against the back of her front teeth. She had a lot of ways of showing you she was not showing you her emotions.

I said, You can ask Joey T., and told her I’d even written him a note about it.

She said she didn’t have to ask Joey T. or read any notes.

Well, you can, I said, though I knew that note was long gone, like the bad boy’s penmanship homework that supposedly went over the bridge. Instead of developing a new sympathy for the bad boy, I took this as an opportunity to deepen my hate for him. If he hadn’t lied about his homework to Sister Jeanne Arthur—a story I’d naturally retold at dinner more than once—I’d have stood a decent chance of selling my mother the story of my own truly lost note.

I didn’t say anything else. My mother didn’t say anything else. She handed me two quarters. I ended up giving one of them to the Missions, a contribution Mrs. Shaw recorded under the Boys column on the blackboard and Joey T. later recorded as a waste of five perfectly good packs of Sweet Tarts. I never tried to collect on another tooth.

I did walk down North Street alone about a week later. The five or six blocks from my school on Melville Street to Dr. F.’s office constituted half of Pittsfield’s commercial downtown. Only a few of the storefronts meant anything to me. I really didn’t do a lot of shopping, except to buy cigarettes for Roberta. She was eighteen years older than I was, and besides reminding each other that she was at her senior prom when I was born, we didn’t have much to talk about. Luckily, she loved to smoke. After she graduated from college and started teaching at a junior high in Pittsfield, Roberta was too busy to buy her own cigarettes, so she took to writing notes to shopkeepers within biking distance of our home. She’d give me the notes with a dollar for two packs of extra-long filter tips. She always said Keep the change in a way that made you notice her lipstick, which mostly ended up on her cigarette butts. This was the sort of behavior that got Roberta identified with my father’s older sisters, whom we learned to love and judge harshly for their wild ways.

Most of my older brothers and sisters worked part-time during the school year in department stores and jewelry shops on North Street owned by men who had known and loved my father. When we did have to buy anything, we always went to a store owned by a friend of the family. This was just good manners, because they usually wanted to offer us discounts. England Brothers department store was our hometown Macy’s, and though the England brothers never came to our home, even my sister who worked in their wrapping department was on a first-name basis with them. I’d never been introduced to Ben or Dan England, and I suppose I resented the exclusion and thus decided I liked shopping at Besse-Clarke better. There, men you were supposed to recognize as famous former high-school athletes sold us our school uniforms and gym clothes every August.

Besse-Clarke was almost directly across the street from The Bridge, a notorious hangout. It was exactly two blocks west of the identical bridge on which Joey T. and I stood every day after school. On North Street, the concrete rail seemed to be there to keep drunks from falling off The Bridge to the railroad tracks below. Typically, at least four or five guys were leaning on that wall with brown bags of beer purchased at the nearby Pipe and Tobacco shop, which sold dirty magazines, rolling papers, Narragansett and Schlitz singles to the regulars, and pipe cleaners to boys like Joey and me when we were feeling brave enough to lie and say we needed them for a school project.

I could’ve avoided The Bridge by crossing one more block on the Besse-Clarke side, but the denizens of The Bridge were magnetic. I often tried to catch the gaze of one of them to see what he’d make of me. As a very young child, I’d cooked up a recurring nightmare featuring those scary guys, and by third grade I’d turned it into a wild fantasy that one of the booziest guys might lunge toward me, grab me by my blue school tie, and dangle me over the tracks and demand something from me. I’d have given them whatever they wanted. They were the nearest thing to pirates Pittsfield had to offer, and most of them were decades ahead of the fashion curve with their shaved pates and stubbly unshaved cheeks and chins.

It was not okay to admire them, of course. They were uneducated dropouts. They were there to teach us the value of a college education, but my mother was something of a Zen master when it came to imparting such moral lessons. She didn’t criticize the bums, and she wouldn’t tolerate any bad remarks about them. Instead, after we’d been tape-measured for a new uniform of polyester blue slacks and short-sleeved white shirts at Besse-Clarke, she’d point to The Bridge and say, They started out just like you.

I was of no interest to the malingerers, but something about my gums really caught Dr. F.’s fancy that day. I was pleased. I’d tried to impress him with my two-teeth-in-one-lunch story when I climbed into the chair, but he just harrumphed and said I should know better. He was a big man with wiry steel-gray hair on his head and arms, and whenever I didn’t open wide enough, he’d just insert his thumb and forefinger into my mouth and crack open my jaw another few inches. He’d taught me to raise my hand whenever he did something that hurt, but the first and only time I’d used the distress signal he had very politely asked me to try to keep my hand out of his face while he was working.

He took a lot of X-rays that day, and he reminded his assistant they were not cheap, which I understood as a reprimand about her rolling her eyes whenever he handed her another slide from my mouth, as if she had better things to do. Then he announced he was going to drill a cavity even though it was in a baby tooth.

I’d heard a lot about the drill, and it was often screaming in my brother Joe’s mouth while I read the women’s magazines in the waiting room, but I honestly believed Dr. F. would never turn it on me. He’d already packed me with cotton and hung a hose from my lower lip, so he probably didn’t hear my offer to just swallow the infected tooth. He said I had a molar growing under my jawbone. He was a man of few words, so I was not expecting anything else by way of explanation. Then he said, Sideways, and he sounded disgusted. You’re going to need an operation someday, he said. He also made it clear he wanted no part of the surgery. He intended to patch up the temporary molar and leave the whole mess to someone else.

If you can’t move your lips or your tongue, you really can’t pronounce the letters n and v, so I said, “hohocay” about twenty times until he nodded and said, Novocain? I’d never had it, and neither had Joe, but we knew kids who got it from their second-rate dentists when they had a loose tooth. I also had to pee, but nothing bugged Dr. F. more than pee breaks, so I figured I’d settle for the Novocain pill.

He took a step away from me and said, Do you really want your mother to have to pay an extra seven dollars for Novocain? For a baby tooth? He also produced a huge, chrome hypodermic needle with pistol grips, implying that the Novocain was a bitter pill.

I took a pee break, and he wasn’t pleased.

Initially, I was humiliated. No one had ever come so close to accusing me of being unable to afford something in the normal range of things a kid might need. Then I was a little indignant. After all the good press he’d gotten around my house, how could he possibly make me pay for something he already had in stock? Then it got worse. I realized that either Dr. F. was lying about charging my mother for the shot, or my mother was prone to exaggerating about his generosity. Were we so poor that we couldn’t afford Novocain and bought-new corduroys? Or had we actually paid for that Oriental carpet in our living room? Just how popular had my father been?

Dr. F. repacked my mouth. He decided I didn’t want the Novocain. He was right. I was ashamed I’d asked for it. While he drilled, I held on to the arms of the chair and practiced my multiplication tables. Thirteen baby teeth times twenty-five cents plus the two disputed swallowed teeth times twenty-five cents made three dollars and seventy-five cents. My total take from the tooth fairy wasn’t enough for one shot of Novocain, and that was before the Missions got their cut.

By the time I was eighteen, I had graduated from basic dentistry to the care of an orthodontist, but instead of tackling the sideways molar, he’d diagnosed an alignment problem and tried to sell me braces at regular retail rates. My mother bargained him down to a retainer, and after a few visits it was obvious that he was not equal to the task of correcting my underbite. My mother was not surprised, as I’d inherited that from her side of the family. I was sent back to Dr. F., who threw up his hands and sent me to an oral surgeon, a friend of his who had full charge-account privileges with the insurance companies. He knocked me out with anesthesia and extracted my sideways molar. While he was in there, he did some shopping for his friend and plucked an incisor that had always bugged Dr. F.

When I graduated from high school, I was missing a couple of teeth and I had an acceptance letter from Harvard—the same ticket out of town my brother Joe had cashed in two years earlier, despite my mother’s profound objections to his choice of a secular college, and lectures from our brothers and sisters about the academic superiority of the Catholic colleges they’d attended. Near the end of that summer, my mother asked me to go for a ride with her. She was the least offhand person I knew at the time, so I figured she had something on her mind that would be easier to say if we weren’t looking at each other directly.

We drove in silence from our house to Park Square and right past Dr. F.’s office, and then my mother pulled a U-turn in the new station wagon and parked in front of Besse-Clarke. And still neither of us said anything. We were almost equals by then in our ability not to express a normal human response to things like sudden U-turns or scalding hot water in the dishpan or an imminent leave-taking. I was not unimpressed by my mother’s correct estimation of the turning radius of the Oldsmobile, but I kept my tongue against the back of my teeth instead of smiling. She turned her face away from mine and stared at The Bridge. I figured I knew what she was going to say.

She didn’t say anything. My mother surprised me by leading me into a pet store. We’d had one dog, and he’d died not long after my father. We’d never replaced either of them. I pitied people who kept pets, as I pitied people who planted showy, ornamental flower gardens. They were squandering time and money doing exactly what we weren’t doing: They were trying to patch up the holes in their hearts. Joe, on the other hand, tried for years to get permission to keep just about every kind of rodent that wouldn’t kill you if it got loose, but he never prevailed.

My mother said hello to the bald, mustachioed man behind the counter. He was wearing a green smock, as if maybe he also worked part-time as Dr. F.’s dental hygienist. My mother tapped on a few of the cages and smiled sadly when the tiny cats and dogs scurried through the wood shavings to lick her finger. There were a lot of birds that didn’t belong in the Berkshires complaining in cages in the back of the store. I pretended I might buy a painted ceramic dog-food bowl. None of us said anything until my mother said, “Thank you very much,” and led me back to the car.

There were two guys seated on the sidewalk across the street, their backs against the wall of The Bridge, rolling joints. My mother said I could drive, which always pleased me and her, I think, though you couldn’t have proved it. Just before The Bridge dropped out of my rear-view mirror, my mother said, That man I said hello to in the pet store? He graduated from Harvard.