“You promise?”
“I promise.”
Blackie was fairly reliable at keeping the promises he made to me when he was sober, so that was good enough for me. After they shut the bedroom door behind me, I could hear the other man still howling.
On Saturday mornings, one of my favorite activities was riding in the car with my father while he made his rounds. I loved that term, “rounds.” Made it sound like he was a surgeon or something. In fact, his rounds consisted of picking up money and betting slips and making payoffs all over the Bronx and the northern reaches of Manhattan, areas like Inwood and Washington Heights. I’ve been on New York City streets I’ll bet the police don’t even know exist, dark and twisty lanes with warehouses and factories and tenements and bars. Always bars.
I spent countless hours sitting in the car, waiting for him outside those places, wondering what was going on inside, reading my schoolbooks or studying the people on the street, and always worrying about my father. I was not sure why I worried, I supposed it was just instinct. Even so, I would often pass up neighborhood games of baseball or football or stickball, just to spend that time with him.
Over the years, my mother fought hard to keep me away from Blackie’s business, and when I graduated high school, sending me away to college was going to be one of the proudest achievements of her life. She not only wanted me to have a good education, but she also needed to provide the ultimate insulation between me and the Serious Men my father associated with—distance.
Blackie had other ideas.
One afternoon, during the summer before I set out for the university that would take me three hundred miles from home, my father asked me to take a ride with him to Tenafly, New Jersey. What he didn’t tell me, and had definitely not mentioned to my mother, was that he’d located a dealer with a used XKE convertible for sale.
For the uninitiated, you need to know that the Jaguar XKE was more than a car. It was a passion. It was a work of art. Even now, it occupies a unique place in the Pantheon of the most beautiful cars ever built.
That day, when my father and I drove into the parking lot of the dealership, Blackie had this big, wicked grin on his face. “Come on,” he said, “I want you to see something.”
We entered the showroom and there it was, sitting in the middle of the floor, its top down, the dark red paint Simonized to a high gloss, glistening in the sunlight that streamed through the large, plate-glass window. The XKE appears to be moving even when it’s standing still, and I noticed that the cars on the road outside slowing as they passed, people ogling the sensuous lines of the sexiest car in the world.
My father introduced himself to the salesman, saying something about being the guy who called about the car. The salesman then turned to me.
“Go ahead young man. Get in. See how it feels.”
Get in? I couldn’t believe he was asking me to get in.
“Go ahead,” Blackie said with a little underhand motion intended to propel me forward.
So I walked over and opened the door and it felt great. I mean, this was some kind of door. You could feel how solid it was just by opening it, so I shut it, just to feel the weight and test the perfect fit. Then I opened it again.
“Get in,” the salesman said again. “Just eleven thousand miles on this beauty.”
I lowered my butt into the seat, which felt about six inches off the ground, swung my long legs under the dash and pulled the door shut. I was at the wheel of an XKE.
When I looked up at my father, he and the salesman were smiling. I opened the door and began to climb out.
“What’s the rush?” my father asked. “How does it feel?”
I sat there, half in and half out of the car, staring at my father. “What’s this about?”
“You like it?”
“Like it?” He must have been kidding. I turned back to study the burled wood dashboard, the leather seats, the gearshift with the polished walnut knob. Then I looked at him again. “I love it,” I said. And I did. I loved it. How is that possible, to love a machine? What is it about cars? “I love it,” I said again.
“Good,” my father responded simply. Then he turned and said something quietly to the salesman who nodded his understanding. I was still dangling there, neither in nor out of the car, when Blackie said, “Come on, let’s take a walk.”
We went outside, which is where Serious Men often go to discuss something serious. We were in the parking lot, walking slowly away from the showroom, when he said, “Beautiful car, eh?”
“Beautiful,” I agreed.
“That’s the car you and your cousins are always talking about.”
“That’s the one.”
He nodded, not speaking for a while. Then he said, “Here’s the deal. You stay home and go to city college and I’ll buy you the car.”
I stopped walking and gaped at him. Even at my impressionable age I knew the tradeoff was absurd. I also knew what this was about. My father was conflicted about my going off to school in Pennsylvania—not because I wouldn’t cut it, but because he would miss me—yet being Blackie, he couldn’t just come out and say that, it wasn’t his style. This was his way of letting me know, his way of asking me to stay.
Not only did I realize the idea ludicrous, but I knew he was failing to factor in my mother’s views on the subject. He and I were aware of how determined she was that I go away to college, but that was not something I was going to bring up at the moment.
What I wanted to say was that everything would be all right, that my leaving would not change how we felt about each other, but I was his son and suffered from the same inability to express those emotions directly. It just wasn’t the sort of thing I could bring myself to tell him. The best I could come up with was, “I have to think this over.”
Which I know was not much.
“What is there to think over?” he asked.
I felt like saying, “Nothing much, just my whole life,” but instead I shrugged.
His reaction was a mix of anger and sadness. His dark eyes clouded up and his small mouth tightened, as if he might spit. “Okay,” he finally said. “Then we’ll both just think about it.”
I didn’t manage another coherent sentence all the way home, and decided not to say anything more about it, to him or my mother.
In September I went off to Penn State, and in the end, Blackie was glad I did. To this day I’ve never owned a Jaguar.
***
YEARS LATER, AFTER I FINISHED COLLEGE and was working in New York City, I received a phone call from my younger sister telling me Blackie had been in a car crash.
She said it was bad, but I had no idea he was going to die.
I hurried from Manhattan up to the medical center in Westchester. He was in a coma, a broken-up mess connected to a thousand wires and tubes in the intensive care unit. He lasted less than two days and never regained consciousness.
I don’t think anyone is ever ready for their parents to die, not unless they’re about a hundred years old. But Blackie was only fifty, and the idea that I was not going to have him in my life anymore was beyond my comprehension. I never even got to say all those last things we wish we had the chance to say when someone we love has passed on.
As you can imagine, my family was devastated. Not only was my mother alone, but given my father’s history, she was left with less than nothing. For all his plotting and dreaming and untold hours chasing the brass ring, Blackie had remained a much more effective spender than an earner. He had a small life insurance policy, but that was barely enough for my mother to pay off his bills. I gave what little assistance I could, helping her make the distinction between the debts she would have to pay and those I assured her could be filed under the category “Tough Luck for Them.” When I got all that straightened out, I believe it was the first time my mother had been free of debt since the day they were marrie
d. She still had the office job she started right after my younger sister Kelly was old enough to begin school, so she was going to have no problem taking care of herself.
As for me, all I had as a legacy were his watches, each of which was too garish for my taste. They’re still in my jewelry box, and none of them work anymore. If there had been any other artifacts of his life, I assumed my mother threw them away, protecting me from Blackie even after he was gone, and so I never pressed the point.
It was therefore more than a little surprising when, six years after Blackie died, she phoned me about the box filled with his papers she had never mentioned before.
My mother lived in a little house on a quiet street in Yonkers she and my father had rented a couple of years before he died. I was already on my own in Manhattan by the time they left the Bronx, but Emily and Kelly each spent some time there. It was a nice place, a small Cape Cod, with three bedrooms and one bathroom upstairs and everything else, including a second bathroom, on the main level. There was also a large kitchen, where my mother spent most of her time when she was home, cooking and cleaning and talking on the phone.
Blackie’s favorite spot was the large recliner in the living room, where he would intermittently watch television and doze off. He was pleased that he had a garage for his car, although he was always coming and going so much that he usually parked in the short driveway beside the walkway that led to the front stairs.
A lot of the furniture was new to me, there were different pictures on the walls and I never did figure out which kitchen cabinet had the glasses or which drawer held the bottle opener. I wonder if that’s how it is for everyone, when their parents move out of the place where they grew up.
Anyway, six years after Blackie was gone, my mother was planning to move again. Several of her friends were already down south and she decided it was time to head off to sunny Florida. For the past couple of years she had been dating a very decent guy and, even though she had not said anything about it, my sisters and I figured they were going down there to live together. After all those years with Blackie, she learned to play it pretty close to the vest.
The afternoon she called me at work about the box, she claimed she found it while packing for her move. She said it had some of my father’s papers, nothing more. That evening I drove up to the house in Yonkers, parked my Karmann Ghia in the short driveway beside the front walkway and knocked on the door, interested to see what she had.
Sitting in her living room, just the two of us, I found myself remembering our little apartment in the Bronx. I had a look around and recognized the cherrywood coffee table, a couple of matching porcelain lamps painted in a colorful mosaic pattern and some old bric-a-brac. Somehow, all of that made me feel better. Staring at an old silver-plated candy dish, I began to see how much I was going to miss my mother.
Not that I visited her all that much. I was a single guy and figured the real visiting would start after I married and had my own children. I thought that’s who my mother would want to see, the grandchildren.
For now, I was consoling myself with the knowledge she was still going to be a phone call away, which is how we did most of our talking anyway. But I was starting to understand how different it was going to be.
“You want something to eat?” she asked.
“No thanks, Mom.”
“A soda?”
“No thanks.”
She waited, as if she needed to solve the riddle of why I wouldn’t want a soda.
I gazed around the room again, trying to sound casual as I said, “I have to admit, I’m curious about this box.”
Then I turned back to her, and she just nodded.
The living room was quiet, with no music playing and no television on. My father was never comfortable with silence. He’d walk into a room and switch on the television before he’d turn on a light. My mother was different.
She obviously didn’t want to get into the subject of the box yet, so I said, “The place looks good, Mom.” I was sitting on the couch. She was on the matching loveseat, facing me. I reached down and ran my hand along the soft, polished cotton, noticing the bright floral pattern as if seeing it for the first time. The whole room looked pretty much as it always did, and I figured if she was packing to move, she was doing all of it upstairs. “These sofas should look nice in Florida.”
She stared at me for a moment, then said, “I hope I’m doing the right thing, giving this to you.”
I couldn’t bear the look of concern in her eyes, so I scanned the room again, as if I was searching for something I’d lost.
“I just hope I’m doing the right thing,” she repeated.
“Don’t worry, Mom. It’ll be fine, whatever it is.” Then I smiled at her. “It’s not an old pack of betting slips, is it?”
That earned me a serious frown. “Just the kind of nonsense I’d expect from you,” she said, but somehow my nonsense seemed to provide something she needed. Perspective, maybe. She stood up and came towards me, so I got to my feet. She put her arms around me, gave me a tight hug, and said, “I love you, son.”
“I love you too.”
When she let go and turned away from me, she headed toward the stairs. “Give me a minute,” she told me over her shoulder.
I began wandering slowly around the small room, looking for some more familiar objects. When I heard her coming back downstairs I resumed my seat, as if I didn’t want her to catch me in search of memories. I watched without speaking as she walked toward me with an old cardboard carton sealed with masking tape across the top.
“These are all that’s left of your father’s papers.” She placed the box on the cherrywood cocktail table and sat down, facing me again. “I guess you should have them.” The way she said it made it clear she still wasn’t too sure.
“Why now?” I was struggling to look right into her eyes, which can be a tough thing to do with your own mother in the tough moments.
“He was your father,” she said with a sigh, as if she would have done something about that if she could. “You should have these.” As I reached out to touch the box she leaned forward and took my hand. “Your father was a strange man. I don’t know how else to say that, but you know it’s true.”
“I do.”
She nodded slowly but didn’t let go of me. “He talked about a lot of silly stuff your father. Not your kind of silly stuff,” she explained. “Big plans. Big schemes. I was always worried you’d wind up the same way. The same kind of person.”
I tried to come up with a reassuring smile, one of those smiles where you don’t show any teeth, you just sort of turn the ends of your mouth up to let the other person know that what they’ve said is all right. “I’m not that kind of person.”
“No, you’re not…” She released my hand and sat back. “Don’t open it here.”
“I won’t,” I said, and I sat back too.
We were quiet for a moment.
“You remember how your father talked about his big secret, the one big deal that was going to make everything all right?”
“Which one?” I asked with a short laugh.
“No, I mean it. Toward the end. Do you remember that?”
“I do, but you have to admit, he said those things quite a lot.”
“I know. Sometimes he got himself in trouble for it, too.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Sometimes your father talked about blood money.” She shook her head. “I always hated that expression.”
“I know. You hated a lot of his expressions.”
My mother nodded. Then she surprised me. She smiled. “I loved your father very much, even if I despised some of the things he would say. Especially that.” I watched her amusement evaporate into another look of concern. “When he talked about blood money it always scared me, maybe because of some of the things he did. But I know you’re not th
at way. I do.”
“Thank God. I thought you were still worrying I was going to become a hit man or something.” She grimaced, and I didn’t blame her. “Sorry,” I said.
“He was your father, and I know how you felt about him.” She was staring at me again. “Be sensible, son. Don’t romanticize who he was. He was a very troubled man.”
I wanted to say something encouraging, so I said, “I’m twenty-seven years old,” which was neither encouraging nor particularly informative to my own mother. Then I said, “I know who I am, Mom,” which felt a little better.
“I know you do, son,” she agreed. “I know you do.”
I offered to stick around and help her with her packing, but it was an empty gesture since she wasn’t moving to Florida for several weeks. I asked if she wanted to go to dinner or something, but she tilted her head and gave me a look that said she knew I wanted to get the hell out of there, go home and look at whatever it was that she’d given me.
Mothers are great in ways fathers will never comprehend.
She gave me another hug and told me to drive safely—as she always did—then I took the box and left. In my car, headed south along the Henry Hudson Parkway, my heart was pounding hard enough for me to notice almost every beat. The drive back to the city passed as if I were moving through a dense fog, until there I was, in my apartment on East 55th Street, sitting in my living room, staring at this old carton on my coffee table, waiting as if it would move of its own accord. Or speak to me.
I stayed that way for several minutes, just waiting for something to happen.
Nothing did, so I tore away the masking tape and removed the top.
Most of what I found inside is the type of stuff guys collect when they served in the armed forces. Old letters. Discharge papers. Blackie’s service record, which is how I came to know about some of the things he did at the end of the war in the south of France with Benny, which became important once I found the letter.
There were also a lot of photographs. Ribbons. Medals. Several medals. They gave out medals like crazy in World War II, which was the least they could do for that incredible generation of soldiers who fought overseas. I couldn’t make heads or tails out of what any of them were for because they don’t say anything on them. I supposed you need a book to explain them, and I decided I would buy one first chance I got.
Fool's Errand Page 3
