What I Lived For

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Show us where you were standing again, son,” McClure said.

  Jerome wiped his nose on his fingers. Went to reposition himself near the edge of the rust-colored shag rug at which, until the morning of this day that was, yet was not, Christmas Day, he did not believe he had as much as glanced.

  It was a new rug with a rough grassy texture selected by his mother for his new room in the new house but he’d had no purpose in considering it until now. Had he not known that this was the rug he’d been walking on sometimes barefoot for the past eleven months he could not have identified it in a display of rugs.

  How the world now was being slowed down and opened up and all you’d never looked at and never thought of was revealed as there, waiting, all along.

  His knees were shaky, the men could see his legs trembling. He moved slowly like a man eager to give the impression of being sober while prepared, from past experience, to discover that he is not.

  “There?” McClure frowned. “Before, you were standing a little more over this way by the window.”

  He did not move. He was feeling the subtle strain of adult male kindness, patience, pity. He knew it had a sudden breaking point. Still, he did not move. “. . . I took off the sweater, and threw it on the bed.”

  “This sweater, eh?—your grandma knitted it? I got one just like it. Except mine’s some other color, I forget.” Jerome’s Uncle Sean, who was sitting on Jerome’s hastily made-up bed, leaned over with a grunt to touch a sleeve of the green cableknit sweater folded now atop a bureau. In a curiously tender gesture he lifted the sleeve, then let it drop. “And larger, eh?” He made a hissing sound meant to be laughter.

  Sean Corcoran had not slept the previous night, you could see he’d been drinking. You could see he was dazed by the murder of his younger brother Tim and the shock of it allowed him not to be thinking at the moment that he was terrified as well.

  There had been threats made against both the Corcoran brothers’ lives over the years but such threats had, in the past, dissipated, or had been caused to dissipate. This, the child knew without knowing a single fact pertaining to it.

  Sean Corcoran, forty-one, had a boy’s high-colored slapped-looking face, ravaged incredulous veiny pale eyes like peeled grapes. He had a high round belly and an exposed pink scalp across which wisps of fading red hair were combed. Like Tim Corcoran, and like their deceased father before them, Sean Corcoran always wore a freshly laundered starched white long-sleeved shirt and a necktie no matter the occasion, and no matter his condition or grooming or disposition, and so, on the day following Tim Corcoran’s murder, he was so dressed, though unshaven and unwashed.

  Jerome looked to his uncle for solace but Sean was chain-smoking Camels knocking ashes about the floor and bed. In his right hand he held a pint of Johnnie Walker which out of courtesy or ritual he offered to the three other men, and, when they were obliged to decline, he sipped from it himself and wiped his pale fleshy lips with his knuckles. Some time ago Uncle Sean had been a bricklayer, his hands showed the wear.

  “Jerome, y’want some?”—Sean lifted the bottle in the child’s direction.

  The child would have said yes, he’d tasted whiskey, and many times beer, in the past, offered him by his father. But he shook his head, no, as McClure’s fingers on his shoulder subtly yet unmistakably urged him forward.

  “Step closer to the window, son. Right about here.”

  Jerome did so. He too had not slept the previous night. He had to narrow his sore, swollen eyes against the glaring light. Outside, the world was vividly white with snow and thrumming with the hurtful clarity of an overexposed photograph. Yesterday’s dusk of snowfall and shadow was vanished as if it had never been and could not ever be again. A bright frigid-blue sky, a hard wind off Lake Erie blowing snow fine and sinuous as sand across the sidewalk in front of 8 Schuyler Place and the narrow street and the dune-like snowy contours of the little park, of about the size of an acre, across the street. A dozen or so handsome old brick or stone or stone-and-stucco houses overlooked Schuyler Place and the child had the unmistakable sense that these dignified houses were contemplating 8 Schuyler Place which, on this Christmas Day of 1959, was the only property here to be cordoned off by order of the Union City Police Department. The only property in whose driveway and at whose curb black-on-white vehicles emblazoned UCPD were parked.

  “That patrol car at the curb—it’s pretty clear to you, isn’t it? To your eyes?” McClure spoke kindly; when Jerome did not reply, his kindness deepened. “Son, I know it’s hell. Oh Christ, I know. But you need to remember now before you forget.”

  Sean said, in a voice on the verge of a sob, “Jerome, you’re our only witness.”

  Jerome shook his head to clear it. He’d heard the question but could not remember it. His mother had been hospitalized the night before at Holy Redeemer Hospital downtown for what they called shock and his grandmother too had been hospitalized there for what they called a stroke. His father’s body was at Donnelly’s Funeral Home on Erie Street because he had been murdered, shot in the back, but it was possible to think, in fact it was quite natural to think, with the hallucinatory ease of an open-eyed dream, that Tim Corcoran was simply out of the house as he was so often, yes even on Sundays and a day like Christmas, down at Corcoran Brothers Construction Co. which the family called the business meaning both the business itself and the buildings and lumberyard that housed it. Or he might be inspecting a work site. Or driving one of his own trucks.

  Many times the child had ridden in the cab of one of these trucks with Tim Corcoran at the wheel. Once, in a cement mixer. You were in terror that the heavy truck would overturn, the globe containing the liquid cement might cease its grinding revolution, but of course that did not happen.

  Many things holding the promise of terror and grief did not happen.

  McClure said again, now easing his arm around Jerome’s shoulders, “Son, just tell us what you heard and what you saw. Take your time if you need to.”

  “I told you.” His lips which were raw and chapped moved painfully but no sound came. He was needing to pee again. Sick too with dread of crying as of fouling his pants and of doing these things without being conscious of them even as others winced at his shame. There was no woman in the room, only men, another plain-clothes detective beside McClure, and a uniformed officer with a badge and a smartly gleaming holstered pistol, and the angry befuddled stubble-jawed drunken man who was his Uncle Sean sitting, big, burly, so out of place there, on Jerome’s bed. By the twitching squinting way Sean Corcoran repeatedly glanced over his shoulder toward the door, you could tell he half-expected Tim to enter the room and stride inside and, smiling, perplexed, ask in that way of his, O.K., what the hell’s going on here?

  McClure said, in a lowered voice, “A man like Tim Corcoran shot in the back by human scum, we’re gonna get them, they’re dead meat. We know that, and they know that. You’re our only eyewitness, son. Just tell us what you saw.”

  Jerome drew away from the detective’s arm. He said, not looking at any of them, nor even at the street where the UCPD vehicles were parked, but somewhere, inviolable and stubborn, inside his head, “I told you, you don’t listen. I came in here and took off my sweater and . . . it happened.”

  “The gunshots.”

  “The gunshots and the car.”

  “You didn’t see the car?”

  “I thought it was thunder at first. I don’t know. I didn’t know it was from the street.”

  “O.K., then the car took off, fast, and you saw?”

  “I couldn’t see! It happened too fast! It was too late!”

  McClure was a man in his fifties, with a face that, like Sean Corcoran’s, was flushed and slapped-looking, though his hot, humid breath did not smell of drink. His inheld fury and the tension of his smile reminded Jerome of his father’s passion at being thwarted, if only by a stiffening of posture and a shifting of the eyes, and the danger you risked in thwarting him, especially before witnesse
s.

  The other detective began to speak, but McClure cut him off with a rude gesture. “Son,” he said, “the car you saw out there yesterday was for a fact a black DeSoto four-door, 1958 model, and the front and rear license plates were covered in ice or frozen mud but they were New York State plates, for a fact, black on orange, you could make out that much and maybe part of the number which was eight eight one two MCF.”

  McClure paused, then went on, “And one of these filthy cocksuckers is likely to be the man who shot your father in the back.”

  McClure thrust into Jerome’s face two photographs at which, uncomprehending at first, the child stared. McClure held a photograph in each hand and each hand was trembling just perceptibly. One was of a youngish insolent-eyed man with a downturned scar of a mouth and the other was of an older and heavier man with a V-shaped hairline and a full, fleshy nose and close-set eyes like something dead and skinned. The photos must have been police mug shots, grainy black-and-whites of about the size and quality you would get in the self-service booth at Woolworth’s. McClure was holding them unnecessarily high and close to Jerome’s face as if he believed Jerome nearsighted or slow-minded.

  Jerome stammered, “Wh-who are they?”

  “You wouldn’t know their names, son,” McClure said, “—we know their names and we know the name of the scum of the earth who hired them. That’s our business. If you got a look at the one with the gun, he’d’ve been in the back seat with the window down, or the driver, that’s what we’d hoped to hear, but if you can’t . . . the main thing is the car, son, you saw the car, eh? Right out there?”

  The other detective spoke now. His voice was excited, urgent. “The DeSoto, sedan, black car, eh? 1958 model? A kid your age knows cars, Jerome, right?”

  And Sean Corcoran said loudly, “Jerome? Do what you can for your father. Just tell us?”

  There was a silence. McClure repositioned the photos in such a way that he could contemplate them himself. “You wouldn’t know their names, Jerome,” he said carefully. “They’re known to us. And the man who they work for. You maybe got a glimpse of their faces when the car was starting up.”

  Slowly Jerome shook his head. “No.”

  “No, what?” McClure asked.

  “I didn’t see the car, and I didn’t see the men. It happened too fast.”

  There was another silence. It was silence like a deep crevice in the mountains (Jerome was thinking of a scene in the movie Shane of a few years before, it was a movie he’d loved and wept over) into which you could fall and fall.

  Then Sean Corcoran lurched to his feet. He came to squat clumsily in front of Jerome who shrank from him fearful of being struck but his uncle was sobbing, as a man sobs, not in sorrow but in anger, and in the befuddlement of anger, crushing Jerome in his embrace. His breath was like fumes. His arms were hard, tight, desperate. “They killed Tim Corcoran, shot him down like a dog, but we’ll get the filthy bastards, Jerome, we know who they are, send them to hell to rot, just give us a hand for Christ’s sake!”

  Jerome whispered, “Uncle Sean, I didn’t see it.”

  “—The fact of it is known, the identities of the men are known, and the car, you were standing here and you saw it, you must have seen it, you’re not blind are you for Christ’s sweet sake? for Christ’s sweet fucking sake, Jerome, you’re not blind?”

  It went on like this for some time, Christmas Day of 1959.

  5

  You would not guess a man had died in so quiet a setting. The snow again falling, thicker now, like sleep coming on.

  Always Jerome Corcoran would recall how nothing that is has the power to evoke what was.

  How Time, not like a clock’s hands that circle the hours forever, runs in one direction only. Like a river, or an arrow. The trajectory of a bullet.

  Though Tim Corcoran had tried, taking Jerome each Memorial Day to Our Lady of Mercy Cemetery where for an hour or more father and son would move along the rows of markers sticking six-inch American flags into graves of veterans some of whom Tim Corcoran had known. What strange faltering uncharacteristic language issued from the elder man’s mouth, what vague strickenness of manner came over him as at no other time, the child tried not to contemplate. He loved Daddy and was privileged to accompany Daddy on any excursion but the embarrassment and tedium of Memorial Day chafed at him like the scratchiest of woollen shirts.

  And now, the snow falling upon the fan-shaped front stoop of 8 Schuyler Place which had been scrubbed clean of Tim Corcoran’s blood and which no one would cross, leaving the house by the side door, to be driven to the funeral.

  The snow falling, flakes the size of blossoms, into the park across the street.

  Maiden Vale in northwest Union City had long been closed to the Irish of the south side. The Irish were considered like Negroes, Tim Corcoran had said, not bitterly so much as bemusedly, with his quizzical dented smile. We were considered shit on their shoes, kid.

  Whose shoes? Jerome had asked, astonished and incensed.

  Well he knew what shit was, well he knew the unspeakable insult.

  A volatile, restless, quick-tempered child, some would say a spoiled child, the only issue of parents who’d wanted more children but whom God had thwarted. Making his father laugh unabashedly with love at his outbursts of Corcoran temper, Corcoran pride.

  They liked it too, as families like, love, cherish, prize, any sign that seemingly links the generations, suggesting how the past never yields to the future but in fact directs it, determines it, and is in turn preserved in it, how the little boy resembled, in hair and facial features, the old man. Even to the slightly oversized left front tooth with the milky ripple to its enamel, and the serrated lower edge he would run his tongue over, and over, and over, through his life.

  The s.o.b.’s already living there, Tim Corcoran said. His smile broadening so now you saw his teeth. That thought they were superior to us because they had more money.

  Now it isn’t so? Jerome demanded. They don’t believe that, now?

  Snow covered Schuyler Park uniformly except for the narrow curving paths which had not been shoveled since the last snowfall, only trodden upon, footprints over footprints. In warm weather the park was a rectangle of close-cropped very green grass of the type grown on golf courses. There were beds of roses and a creeping ground cover like silver moss and trees of that tall, peeling species called plane trees which Jerome had never seen in Irish Hill and which to his scornful eyes looked diseased, tin-colored bark in strips like rotting wallpaper. But Theresa said how beautiful, so quiet, so few people ever there unlike Dundonald Park on the south side. Unlike any park she’d ever lived near. Yet what a pity—and this uttered in Theresa’s breathless, vehement laugh, signaling one of her teasing or daring or provocative remarks—Jerome’s too grown now for a baby, or I could push him there in his stroller! that sweet stroller with the candy stripes!

  Yes, and Theresa saw the very bench she’d sit on, beneath one of the plane trees, rocking Baby’s stroller with one slender foot as shutting her eyes she let her head fall back and lifted her face in gratitude to the sun.

  At these words of Theresa’s, Tim Corcoran grew very still and made no reply.

  Nor did Jerome, who understood that, when Mommy was in one of her breathless laughing moods, her eyes shining with deceptive joy and her fingers picking at one another, it was wisest to remain silent.

  No swings or teeter-totters in Schuyler Park. Few other children his age. And if there’d been, would their parents have allowed them to play with Jerome Corcoran?

  Shit on their shoes, kid. So they thought.

  But no longer, Daddy? They don’t believe that, now?

  The first and only summer he’d lived at 8 Schuyler Place in Maiden Vale he’d gone back numberless times to the old neighborhood, to Dundonald Park which was a real park and where he’d played all his life he could remember. The wading pool, the swimming pool, the softball diamond, the hilly patches of scrubby littered grass, his frie
nds. He was a boy with friends. Kids like himself whose families all knew one another or were in fact related by blood. Living in Our Lady of Mercy parish in woodframe, brick, stucco houses with small neatly tended lawns on Barrow Street, Roosevelt, Dalkey, Dundonald. If neither Daddy nor Mommy was free or in a mood to drive him back he’d take city buses. Summit to Union Blvd. then a pink transfer to S. Erie. The same route he took to school. In the years beyond childhood he would recall the Union City Transit buses with a distaste verging upon fury but in fact at the time he’d liked them well enough as children like well enough, or more than well enough, the circumstances of their childhood which have made them happy.

  Or even unhappy. For the childhood is your own, in any case.

  As a dream, even a nightmare, is your own.

  Taking the rattling city buses, a quarter dropped into the till back into the old neighborhood. Irish Hill. Why did we ever leave? Just as Daddy, Mommy, Grandma Corcoran who insisted upon eight o’clock mass at Our Lady of Mercy every day except Sunday (Sundays, they went to high mass at eleven) were always going back. And of course Corcoran Brothers Construction Co. was there.

  And all the family, and their friends. Everyone, everything, was there.

  So it was: Theresa Corcoran the beautiful wife of the aggressive Irish construction company co-owner Tim Corcoran, a new and proud resident of the former Keiffer home at 8 Schluyer Place, might sit beneath the great plane tree in the little park across the street, in a white puckered cotton dress, frowning in concentration at the knitting needles flashing in her fingers, she might sit there for a long summer afternoon, or for a year, or the rest of her life, a round-faced young woman with wavy dark hair and a quick eagerness to her, something both hurt and hopeful in her eyes, but no, no one in this new and so strangely quiet and seemingly underpopulated neighborhood was likely to approach her to exclaim, “Well now, hello, isn’t it a fine day?” and still less were women of the neighborhood likely to drop by her house of a morning to welcome her as, in Irish Hill, they would have done nearly as soon as the curtains were up in the windows signaling the new family was moved in.