In the morning the door opened, and my father was in the doorway, his eyes fixed on me like a bad-tempered old dog’s. Beside him was the same policeman who’d pulled me from the car. I told my father I’d been wrongly accused, that I hadn’t shouted anything at the police or given anybody the finger. The policeman said with a loud weariness: We saw your hand come out the window. You were the one sitting by that window. He told my father that my friends and I had come to their town’s high school dance to pick a fight. When they brought your son in, the policeman said in a disgusted tone, he smelled like a brewery. I was lucky they weren’t charging me with disorderly conduct, he went on. That was only because they’d phoned the police in my town and there was no record of my having been in trouble before. The next thing I remember I was no longer in the detention room but outside its door, facedown on that grimy floor. There’d been other beatings in which my father had probably punched and kicked me as hard as he did in the police station, swatting at my head, hoisting me off the floor and slamming me down, kicking me in the side, under the ribs, against my thighs, though maybe he’d never done so with so much rage. The police stood and watched. I glimpsed some of their faces; I remember a pair of pale-blue eyes like soap bubbles. I’d never felt such shame, such a helpless rage of my own, had never experienced anything so sordid as being on that police station floor being beaten up by my father, had never felt such hatred as I did for my father and those police.
By the time I got home, that feeling of hatred had grown stronger and wilder, an uncontrollable combustion about to explode inside me. Yet I managed to stand in the kitchen telling my mother what had happened. The police had falsely accused me, but my own father had believed them and not me. He’d beaten me up while those lying policemen watched, I railed to my mother like a trial lawyer driven into frenzied indignation by the bewildered, passive stares of the jury, until my voice collapsed into sobs and I stood there horribly mewling. Yoli, the police said he stank like a brewery, shouted my father. He’s lucky they decided not to charge him, this goddamned good-for-nothing. I went down the hall to my room. If someone had put a knife in my hand I swear I would have gone back and stabbed him and maybe my useless mother too.
Before that night, I merely thought I hated my father. Now it was like he’d been truly revealed. A father who could betray his own son like that, in front of those police. It almost stopped being personal. He deserved to be annihilated. Still, nothing happened right away. It wasn’t until the next winter that it did. Even if it was inevitable, I was as surprised as he was when I finally did hit back.
Fists squeezed tight under the bar top and my eyes feel like there’s a hot, dry wind blowing directly into them. The bartender gives me that glance, like he’s wondering if there’s something wrong with me and is about to ask, but I push my glass forward and say, Another refill, please.
About seven years passed between the first bad beating from my father and that last one, seven years of him pretty regularly beating the shit out of me. You can’t put a similar time frame on his verbal violence—against my mother but especially directed at Lexi. What kind of father calls his twelve-year-old daughter a fat fucking pig? Even if it was the messiness of her bedroom that set him off, those words had no semantic credibility as punishment. They weren’t going to make Lexi suddenly discover a yearning for a fulfilling tidiness. But what punishment reforms the father?
I don’t even remember anymore what ignited it, only that it happened on a stingingly cold winter night out in the front yard, covered with frozen snow. I must have run out of the house barefoot, Bert chasing after me, and I was crouched by the hedges in my usual defensive posture, arms clasped over my head to fend off his barrage of hard cuffs and swats. From the bottom of that commotion, my eyes fastened on his chin, which somehow, miraculously, you could say, expanded like I was looking at it through a telescope. And next thing I knew, all the strength coiled in my legs was propelling me out of my crouch, up behind my fist and toward that chin, a jolt like an electric shock inside the bones of my hand, and as my father fell forward I hit him on the back of his head, driving him face-first into the crusty snow. I took off running, the ice in the road cracking under my feet. Bert was screaming behind me: I’m having a heart attack! Yoli! Yoli! He gave me a heart attack! I ran all the way to Space Cavanaugh’s house and hid in his basement for three nights. Space brought me food and lent me a pair of too-large black rubber boots that I wore to school without socks. When I finally went home, Bert was wearing a bandage on his nose. He must have fallen on it, because I didn’t hit him there. No word or sign of any heart attack.
He never hit me again, though. That sure counts for something. But remembering or even sometimes telling this story always makes me feel sick to my stomach, as if striking your father must inevitably result in a permanent ignominy. He was my tormentor and strong as a bull, but he was also sixty years old. I don’t know what else I should finally have done. I’ve never thought I was wrong to have finally hit back. But I’ve always felt some shame and distress over it anyway, over that second punch especially, dangerous, as if driven by a lethal instinct to finish him off. If I’d only hit him just once, I might look back on it as a more cathartic event. It’s the only father-son relationship I’ve ever participated in, and it was a failure in pretty much every way.
Late fall of freshman year in college, I was sitting in the cafeteria with friends on a gray afternoon when I looked up and recognized my father crossing the dun lawn of the quad, that driven trudge, the churning of his arms, fedora tilted down, raincoat flapping around his thighs. My first trimester grades had been straight A’s. What could I have done wrong? He’d come all the way to my college in Upstate New York to punish me for something. Was it the money I’d been spending at the campus bar? But I spent only what I’d earned through my job delivering newspapers around campus in the mornings. I hurried outside to meet him so that he couldn’t make a violent scene inside the cafeteria. What must have been a look of terror on my face brought him up short. Sonny boy, he croaked, holding out his arms. He was driving up to Corning for a conference on ceramics that was related to making artificial teeth. He’d made a detour to take me to dinner.
Like all war stories, the ones you went through yourself, I mean, no matter how many times you tell it, you never feel like you get it quite right.
Well, I never got why you hung out with those guys anyway, Marianne is saying. Trapped in all that boy thuggery, pretending you belonged. Frank, that was never the real you.
Yes it was, Marianne, I answer. I was a thug too, come on.
She looks startled, until she gets it and laughs.
We’re sitting at a small corner table in this restaurant Marianne chose. We’ve already ordered but are having a round of drinks first. She’s been telling me about the reunion and my old sophomore football friends who, she claims, were all sorry I wasn’t there. But Space Cavanaugh wasn’t at the reunion. Seems nobody knows anything about what’s become of him. Mike Bonks wasn’t there either, though Joe Botto has kept up with him a little. Joe’s a house builder who hit the jackpot during the suburban Boston housing boom. But Mike has had a hard time, Joe told her. He owned a company that cleaned up construction sites, but it went bankrupt. Bonks lost everything.
Unbelievable, I say. It’s like his nickname held his future.
But Marianne didn’t know he used to be called Mickey Dumps, so I tell her about that. Good thing high school nicknames don’t always foretell destinies, I say, because that would be awful. She doesn’t pick up on this bit of ironic metacommentary.
Oh, poor Mickey Dumps, she says with sincere-sounding sympathy.
So Joe is rich. Good for him, I say, not in the mood to feel even a little bit sorry for Bonks. Joe and I were in a lot of the same classes together. Because of my grades, I was mostly in lower-track classes, except for in English. School was never Joe’s thing either. But you, you were always in top-tra
ck classes.
No big mystery, she says pleasantly. I just studied and did my homework.
Marianne’s a family and divorce lawyer with her own practice here in Boston. I really am kind of thunderstruck by how good she looks, how fit and prosperous. She’s dressed urban stylish, all in black, cashmere jacket, silk blouse, her legs as proportionally long and slender as ever in skinny pants. Only her leather ankle boots with slanted cowboy heels aren’t all black but instead a gray-and-black zebra pattern. She wears her glossy black hair, no silver that I can see, pinned up in back. Just a little softer in the neck, around her eyes.
We ask after each other’s moms. From our Facebook chats she knows that my father died a few years ago, at ninety-three, and I know her dad died around the same time, though in his midseventies. Our mothers are about the same age, Marianne’s living on her own in a duplex in Swampscott.
Why not get right to it, the reason we’re here, those few months when we were close during the autumn of tenth grade. Remember Space Cavanaugh’s toolshed? I ask. Not the most direct prompt, but Marianne’s expression lights up, because of course she remembers. It was there in that toolshed that I told her the whole story, she says, of War and Peace. Oh, Frank. Space and his toolshed, how could I forget? That was all so funny.
Among our classmates the Space and George Show was a much more popular show than mine and Bert’s, we didn’t offer comedy routines. In this week’s episode, so as to no longer have to live under the same roof with his father, Space moves out to his backyard toolshed. It was like a miniature of the cocoa-brown neo-Colonial out front, one door, one window, standing in a small grove of birch trees and pines at the back of the yard. Joe Botto had done the carpentry, getting it ready for Space to move into. He even had a television that we’d stolen from the student union of the women’s college in the next town, driving it back in Bonks’s car. Space lived there until George padlocked it later that fall.
At first it was three of us in the toolshed that afternoon, drinking barely cool beer from a six-pack. Then Space said that he had to go and meet his pot dealer. We could hang out there as long as we wanted, he wouldn’t be back until at least dinnertime. I hadn’t asked Space to do that.
The girl who gets out of bed in the morning and her bare feet touch the cold floor and she says, Ohhh, it’s going to be a cold winter, says Marianne. You said that foretold that all those French soldiers were going to freeze to death outside Moscow. I’ve still never read that book, but whenever I get out of bed and the floor is cold, I remember that girl and those poor French soldiers.
Natasha Rostova, I say. Effervescent, funny, impetuous, adorable Natasha. But young Natasha falls for Anatole Kuragin, the novel’s Ian Brown.
We sat nearly shoulder to shoulder on the bottom mattress of the bunk bed that Hose had built. More beer for us, Marianne said cheerfully, pulling off a flip top with exaggerated exertion. She’d been doing almost all the talking, school gossip mostly. She lay back, knees up and poking through the thready spray of the rips in her jeans. Meanwhile I stiffly sat there, mentally rehearsing and visualizing lying back on the mattress, too, putting my head close hers, turning to kiss her.
I told her that she was like Natasha Rostova, and she asked, Who’s that? That’s when I’d started in on the story of War and Peace, which I’d read during the summer, the two-volume Penguin paperback edition Aunt Hannah had given me for my birthday. “And when Natasha set her bare feet down on the cold floor …” As if my not daring even to try to kiss her, going on with this story instead, was a charming show of quirky precocity and individuality. My hands were shaking so violently that I had to clench them into tight fists. That was the first time that ever happened to me, my hands shaking when it was the moment to kiss a girl, when I believed that the kiss was expected even though it probably wasn’t, and that by bringing my lips close to hers I’d be changing everything, crossing over into the real deal. It’s plagued me ever since, coming back like malaria, adrenalized terror and misery swarming through me, hands shaking. Two years before, with Arlene Fertig, the last and only other time I’d kissed a girl, I’d managed it fine.
We’d finished the beers. Marianne sat up cross-legged to smoke a cigarette, dropping the ashes into an empty beer can beside her. I could hear the ashes pattering down inside the can. She lay on her side with her back to me, knees drawn up in a way that pulled up her sweater, exposing a slim excerpt of waist, the curve of hip muscles down into her jeans.
But poor Prince Andrei, he was never going to get the chance because …
I could hear her soft, inside-a-seashell snore. I’d never felt so intimate with beauty, yet so far away. I’d do anything, risk anything for her, this is what love is, I told myself.
I take a drink of the wine Marianne ordered, an Oregon pinot noir. Her phone pings. My daughter, she says with a tight smile and excuses herself to type a response. I glance down at my phone: nope, no message from Lulú. The waiter arrives with our plates. Salt-crusted cod for her. Fried Ipswich clams for me, my favorite. Small talk about fried clams. She lives out there on the North Shore, yes, many hours invested in family clamming outings in the Essex marshlands. No, it’s not that she’s bored of them, it’s just that one fried clam alone probably surpasses her allowed daily fat intake. Come on, just have one, I coax. Oh my God, that’s so good, she moans. I’d almost forgotten. And I’ve never tasted coleslaw like this, so crunchy and fresh, and what are these flavors it has, fine New England dining indeed.
Marianne begins to tell me about her law practice. Right out of law school at BC, she went to work for a small prestigious Beacon Hill family firm. When, at twenty-eight, she decided to open her own practice, her former employers and associates couldn’t have been more supportive. I was just so fortunate, Frank, right from the start. She had a little office near Government Center, and she and her husband, Derek, bought a townhouse right here in the South End before the neighborhood gentrified. When her son, Connor, was born, she brought him to work with her every day and into courthouses, breast-feeding him in judges’ chambers conferences. When we had Maddy, says Marianne, we could afford a full-time nanny. We bought the house in Topsfield. It was a long commute, but it’s a dream house with a pasture and woods near the river. The kids and I kept the house after the divorce.
The nanny? She seems surprised I’m curious about the nanny. The first one, Leena, was from Ireland. Later came Bonnie from Jamaica. Derek used to book rock shows here in Boston, she answers when I ask what he does for a living. When I met him in college, she says, he was a roadie for J. Geils. She makes a winsomely rueful expression. Then he became a booking agent for some of the Boston punk and new wave bands coming out of the Rat and other clubs. He did well for a while. I lived some of that life, Frank. Now Derek’s trying to get back into it. When Maddy heard on NPR about Pluto being downgraded to a dwarf planet, she said, Just like poor Daddy, downgraded to a dwarf planet, too, and launching a comeback in his little punk rock rocket ship.
Ouch, I say. But she has a wit, doesn’t she.
She sure does, says Marianne. Maddy is in her freshman year at Brown. Connor’s a junior at Carleton.
Isn’t there an Audubon sanctuary in Topsfield? I ask. My father used to take me bird-watching there. I rarely remember that when I was a little boy, Bert was at times a pretty devoted dad. Those better memories get buried by what came after.
It’s called the Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary, says Marianne. Even though it’s in Topsfield. If snowy white owls were called that because they deliver cocaine, then Derek would have taken our kids bird-watching too.
That comment hangs there in the air a moment. So many of the people I know in New York and Mexico City, I say, had pretty major coke habits. Some still do.
Something in her gaze looks ripped open. It closes. You’re telling me, she says. That’s not the only way Derek fucked up his life, but it’s a long story.
We�
�re forty-nine, I say. Life is a long story, don’t you think.
Marianne recovers her smile with the aplomb of someone picking a hat off the floor and putting it back on without missing a beat, and says, Oh, you’re telling me. Speaking of which, seems like you really get around, don’t you. New York, Mexico, Cuba. The last time she heard me on the radio, she says, I was talking about that Cuban revolutionary poet who lived in New York City. José Martí, right? His name’s everywhere in Miami, she says. But I never really knew anything about him. Something you said really struck me. A man should never do in the dark what he wouldn’t do by daylight, you said Martí said. Right there I started making a list in my head of all the things I’ve done by day that I should only have done in the dark.
We laugh, and I say, That’s in his diaries somewhere. Because of the mores of the time and his own sensitive position as the political and moral leader of the Cubans in exile, Martí had to keep so much of his life secret, and that hurt and humiliated him. I fill Marianne in a little bit, about the daughter, María, whom he’d had with his landlady, and whom he adored, and the situation in the boardinghouse and my book.
What’s the title? she asks.
The House of Pain.
You mean like the guys who did “Jump Around”?
Yeah, I was already using that title before I ever heard about that group.
Sure sounds like it was a house of pain, she says. So you were talking about José Martí on the radio tonight?
Monkey Boy Page 14
