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.
Monkey Boy Page 4
