Don't Worry About the Kids

by Jay Neugeboren

  My mother left the room and returned with a hammer.

  She looked at my father and again he said please. She banged my brother on the head, between his eyes. My brother’s eyes closed. My father’s eyes opened.

  I’ll get the police, my mother said. God willing, maybe this time he’s dead.

  My father tried, but he could not open my brother’s jaw. My mother told me to leave the room, but I held on to my father’s arm, and when my mother pulled she could not break me loose.

  The St. Dominick’s Game

  THOUGH I MISSED MY FATHER most at School foot-ball games, when the other boys’ fathers were there, I never told Mother. I didn’t feel I had the right. My father died over eight years ago, and I was too young then to remember him much, so I figured the best thing was not to bother Mother about what I was feeling. It wasn’t even as if I ever knew him well enough to miss him, I’d tell myself. It was more that at things such as football games, I was aware of his absence.

  Mother didn’t attend any of our football games and I could understand that. Ever since Father died, any kind of violence upsets her terribly. There are some days when she can’t bear to look at raw meat or raw fish. Maybe if I’d been there when he died I’d feel the same. Mother has never told me what it was like, but it seems they were both sitting up in bed and reading that night, when he suddenly grabbed her arm and then blood started spilling from his mouth. She screamed and locked the door and wouldn’t let me into the room until others had arrived, so I never got to see my father again until the funeral. He lived through the frozen hills of Korea, I heard her say to her sister, but he died in our bed in New Jersey. Go figure.

  I used to try to picture what the scene was like, and I always imagined that his eyes must have been as wide and round as they could be—as if somebody had just surprised him—and then I’d find myself picturing Mother scrambling back and forth across the bed and the floor, trying to wipe things up, and the look I’d see in her eyes would be awful—so frantic and helpless and dazed that I’d just clench my fists and get more and more angry. Sometimes, trying to feel what she must have felt, I used to wonder if it was possible to love another person too much.

  What I couldn’t understand, though, was the way she acted when I told her I was trying out for the Fowler football team. Mother had been teaching French at the Fowler School since before Father died, and sometimes she worried that I was too quiet or too much of a loner, and I thought she’d be glad to hear that I wanted to participate in a team sport. But the first thing she did when I gave her my news was to threaten to get Dr. Hunter, our headmaster, to remove me from the squad. If she didn’t receive satisfaction from him, she declared, she would go straight to Mr. Marcus, our coach.

  I liked Mr. Marcus and I didn’t want him to think I was a sissy, so what I did the next morning, despite her threat, was to talk with Dr. Hunter myself, before she could get to him. I told him about going out for the team and about how Mother was against it and about how I didn’t want to disobey her, but that I was continuing to play anyway, and he sat in his big leather chair for a while, just thinking. I looked right at him, trying hard not to stare at his left arm, even though it fascinated me. It was shorter than his right one, and sort of hung from his shoulder, swinging gently to and fro whenever he walked, as if it were made of foam rubber. Most of us at school figured that, given his age, he’d maimed it in World War II, but nobody ever asked him, or knew for sure.

  “You know,” he said, “that your mother has not had the easiest life.” “I know,” I said.

  “Still, you can’t be expected to sacrifice your boyhood because of the misfortunes she has endured, can you?”

  I shrugged and said I didn’t know. He nodded then and asked me a few more questions, all of which made me feel very uncomfortable, and then, after making some remarks about how contact sports built character, he said he would speak to her for me. The next evening he stopped by our house. Mother was upstairs grading papers, and when I told her who was there, she didn’t seem to know what to do first. Finally, after starting down the stairs and coming back up two separate times, she sent me to entertain Dr. Hunter while she changed clothes.

  My mother is a very attractive woman, with reddish-brown hair and very beautiful eyes. People tell me that I inherited her eyes. They’re blue, but not pale blue—slate-blue, I would call them. She’s tall and she makes a lot of her own clothing. When she’s upstairs working at her sewing machine, which her mother used when my mother was a girl, and looking out the window, she always hums to herself in an easy way that lets me know she’s feeling very peaceful. She’s thirty-eight years old now, but people are never certain of her age. Sometimes she looks as if she’s in her twenties, and other times, especially when she wears her hair up, she can look as if she’s in her forties. It may sound strange, but one of the reasons I was sorriest she objected to my playing football was that I’d always hoped I’d see her at a football game. She has the kind of face and coloring that’s perfect for a football game—what I would call an autumn kind of face.

  When she came down the stairs that evening, she looked absolutely gorgeous. It wasn’t what she was wearing—it was more the proud way she carried herself and the high color in her cheeks. Dr. Hunter must have noticed also, because he seemed a bit awkward when he stood up and shook her hand and said hello.

  I went upstairs and tried to do my homework, but I couldn’t. I put on the radio so they wouldn’t think I was eavesdropping, and then I took out the sheets of plays that Mr. Marcus had passed out and I studied my assignments. At about ten-thirty, when I closed my door to go to bed, Dr. Hunter was still downstairs.

  The next morning at breakfast Mother said that she’d decided it was all right for me to be on the football team. She warned me not to get hurt, and I said I’d be careful, and then she changed the subject. I tried not to smile too much, but I felt really good, and at practice that afternoon I nearly killed myself trying to impress Mr. Marcus. I dove for fumbles like a maniac, I was a tiger on defense, I wore myself out on wind sprints, and somehow I managed to intercept two passes. That was the day Mr. Marcus began using me as an example. At first I liked the idea. I wasn’t an especially good athlete and I knew it. So did Mr. Marcus. But he kept pointing me out to the other guys and telling them that if they would only try as hard as I did, they might have a good team.

  Mr. Marcus wasn’t very tall—maybe five-foot-seven—but there was something powerful about him and, like the other guys, I used to be scared sometimes that he would get so angry at us that he would pick us up, one by one, and smash our heads against each other. He yelled and screamed and never stopped moving. “My Aunt Tillie could do better—” he’d shout. Then, when the guys laughed, he’d counter with, “What are you laughing at?—Get in there and drive. What do you guys think this is—a church social? Put your shoulder in there and drive. Come on, girls—let’s hustle. Hustle! Watch Eddie—there’s guts for you! Watch that little guy give it his heart—” He could keep up patter like this for the entire two-hour practice, and at first I was thrilled with the way he praised me so much. After a while, however, I saw how it made the other guys resent me. Still, even though I didn’t want them to, I kept giving it everything I had. I couldn’t do anything else. I’d be as calm as could be during the day, or when I was standing on the sidelines watching—but the minute I was on the field and there were players opposite me, something inside me went click and I turned into a virtual madman. I didn’t care what happened to me! It wasn’t because I was angry or bitter or anything like that. In fact, whenever a fight broke out during a scrimmage or a game, I’d move back a step or two, instinctively, and stay away.

  When I got home for supper, at about six-fifteen, I’d be totally beat. I’d stay in a hot tub for a long time, soaking my bruises, but when I came down for supper, Mother never asked me about practice or about Mr. Marcus or about any of my scratches or black-and-blue marks. As the weeks went by, it made me feel more and more depr
essed to sit with her each night and talk about the weather or her classes or my homework or our vacation plans, when all the time I was wanting to share the practices with her, and how great I was feeling just to be on a team with other guys. Finally one night, after a day on which a few of the guys had really had it with the way Mr. Marcus kept praising me and damning them, and they’d gotten me during a pile-up and given me some hard knuckles to the nose and eyes, I asked her straight out if, when he was young, my father had liked football.

  She seemed surprised that I should ask, but when she answered, she didn’t seem at all nervous. “I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose he did, but he never talked to me about it. Handball was your father’s sport.”

  “Handball?” I asked.

  She laughed then. “He grew up in a city, remember? Not out here with birds and trees. That came later—with me.”

  “Was he good?” I asked.

  She wiped her lips, and when she sighed I could see that she was making a decision, to tell me something about him. “I suppose so,” she said. “He was good at most things he tried. He was a very competitive man. He took me down to Brighton Beach once—this was when we were courting—and I stood behind the fence and watched him banging this little black ball against a brick wall on one of the hottest days of the year. He wore leather gloves.” She brushed her hair back from her forehead and breathed heavily, almost as if she were feeling the heat of that summer day all over again. “I couldn’t believe it, if you want the truth. And, as I recall things, it made him happy that I kept suggesting to him that it was too hot to play. I think he liked the idea of resisting my suggestions.” She leaned forward then, her chin on her hands, looking very young. “Oh, Eddie,” she said. “Your father was very special, did you know that? There was nobody quite like him. My parents couldn’t understand for the life of them how a cultivated young woman like their daughter could be attracted to such a rough-and-tumble young man from the streets of Brooklyn, but there it was, wasn’t it?” She smiled, as if dreaming, and I told myself I’d been right about why she always had such a hard time talking about him before—that it was because they’d loved each other too much, that for her it was always as if he’d died only a few weeks ago. “I mean, there was something about the way the sweat dripped along his chest and the ferocious look he got in his eyes whenever he slammed the ball, and then—the instant the game was over—that easy smile of his. Oh, he had a smile, Eddie! Bright and white in that dark surly face. And not just for me, I can assure you. Not just—”

  She stopped and her smile became a straight line. “Not just what—?” I asked.

  She looked away, and then stood and went to the sink. “Nothing,” she said, and she changed the subject so abruptly—asking me about our Spanish class’s magazine drive—that I knew there was nothing I could do to make her tell me more.

  Although our school went up to the twelfth grade, we fielded a team that represented only the seventh through ninth grades. The Fowler School wasn’t very large—four hundred students, including girls—and the other schools that were in our league were about the same size, so we played six-man football. We wore full uniforms and the rules were basically the same as in eleven-man football, except that no direct hand-offs were allowed and you had to go fifteen yards for a first down. The second week of practice Mr. Marcus made me a defensive end; I liked the position, especially when a blitz was on: this meant that instead of “boxing,” and protecting my end against a run, I just crashed through the line and tried to knock over everybody I could until I got to the ballcarrier. Except for Charlie Gildea, who was the best player on our team, I seemed to be the only player who tried hard during practices. At games, when everyone’s parents and girlfriends were there, the other guys would exert themselves, but it didn’t matter much. “Games are won from Monday to Friday,” Mr. Marcus would say, and he was right.

  At the end of every practice session we would “run the gauntlet.” We’d line up in a straight line, about three yards apart from each other, and Mr. Marcus would give the first man a football and he’d have to run through the entire team, one man at a time. When he finished he’d become the last man and the second man would get the football. The guys hated him for it. By the time you came to the fifth or sixth man you were usually dead, but Mr. Marcus wouldn’t let you stop to get your wind back, either, so most of the guys would just fake the rest of the run, falling to the ground before they were tackled. What I’d do, though, would be to tuck the ball into my stomach, both hands around it, put my head down, and charge ahead, ramming as hard as I could into each guy I came to. I suppose it hurt me more than it did the others, but it made me feel so good! Mr. Marcus would tease me because I never tried to fake anybody out or even to sidestep. “Here comes Marcus Allen,” he’d say. “Come on, girls, are you going to let this little runt bowl you over? Or is he too fast for you? Move toward the runner—toward him!” His voice kept me going, I think. “Way to drive, Eddie,” he’d say, as I got up after each guy had rolled me to the ground. “Way to hang in there—”

  Mr. Marcus wasn’t very big, but we all knew he’d played halfback at a teacher’s college in Pennsylvania, and once, on a hot day at the beginning of the season, he came to practice in short pants and I’d never seen such powerful legs. They weren’t hairy, either. Just broad, smooth, and muscular. When he was teaching during the day, though, all his power seemed gone. He taught social studies and he could never control a class. I didn’t have him for a teacher yet because he taught ninth and tenth grade and I was only in the eighth, but the guys on the team from the ninth grade would talk in the locker room about crazy things that went on in his classrooms. They said that some of the students actually smoked or made out right in front of him.

  What seemed especially strange to me, though, wasn’t anything Mr. Marcus said or did, but this look he had on his face when he walked through the halls. It was as if he were lost. The way my classes were arranged, I used to pass him in the halls three or four times a day and sometimes I’d say hello to him. He always said hello back to me, but I had the definite feeling that when I was out of my uniform, he didn’t know who I was. He seemed to be thinking about something else, I thought, and when I was home remembering what his face had looked like as we passed each other, I’d start thinking that I’d been wrong: it wasn’t as if he were lost, really—it was more as if he had lost something.

  He was never lost at practice, though. His eyes were all fire then. Especially when he began to get us ready for the big game against St. Dominick’s on Parents Day.

  St. Dominick’s was an orphanage about twenty miles away, run by Jesuits, and we were playing them for the first time. Mr. Marcus told us that he’d seen them play the year before and that we would have to play more than perfectly if we expected to win. By this time we’d played six games, winning four of them, and I wasn’t starting but I was getting in, usually near the end—at garbage time—when either victory or defeat seemed certain. I didn’t expect to get into the St. Dominick’s game, however, because even though I was hitting harder and playing better than ever before, so were the other guys. Dr. Hunter showed up at two of our practices that week, and once, when we were running through our kickoff return drill, I saw him pat Mr. Marcus on the shoulder in a friendly way. Until then I’d had the feeling Dr. Hunter didn’t like him. It was nothing he ever said, but what he didn’t say. He’d stopped by our house twice after that first time, and both times I’d tried to entertain him while Mother got ready to come downstairs, by telling him about our team. But whenever I said something nice about Mr. Marcus, and waited for him to say something back, he either changed the subject or agreed with me. He never added anything.

  “You certainly are a quiet lad,” he said to me one night, when, as usual, I’d run out of things to say. I shrugged. Nobody else I knew ever used a word like “lad,” I thought to myself, looking down at the rug. But then he added something that made me look up fast. “Not at all like your father was, are
you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I—I don’t really remember him much…”

  “Of course,” he replied, but before I could get up the courage to ask him for more information, Mother had come down.

  I went upstairs to my room, so they could talk. After the first time he came by, I’d begun to think of the fact that he might eventually marry Mother. The thing was, though, that every time I began to imagine what it would be like to have a man like Dr. Hunter for a father, I’d wind up by thinking of what it would be like to have Mr. Marcus as one. I knew this was foolish, especially since Mr. Marcus was seven or eight years younger than Mother, but I thought about it anyway and I wondered a lot about what he did after he went home from practice. I kept thinking what a waste it was that a man like him wasn’t married, and how sad it would be if he somehow went the rest of his life without a son or daughter of his own.

  I tried hard, a few times that week, to get Mother to talk about my father again, but she wasn’t very interested. She did bring down a box of photos for me to look at one night—and after going through the first few, of them before they were married, going to Coney Island and Jones Beach and to her parents’ home in Connecticut together, she got up and told me to come to her if I had any questions. All the photos were marked on the back, she said. Then she went upstairs.

  I looked at the photos for as long as I could, but without Mother next to me, to give me stories about what wasn’t in the photos, I got depressed. I closed my eyes tight a few times, and tried to force myself to remember things I’d done with my father, but it was hard, and the only clear pictures that came into my head were ones of him laughing and giving me a ring for my thumb that he’d made out of a folded dollar bill—and another of him tossing me into the air and of how scared I was until I fell back down and he caught me and rubbed his rough beard against my cheek. I went upstairs and gave my mother each of these memories—asking her if he’d ever told her how to make a ring out of a dollar bill, and if he used to toss me in the air a lot or just once in a while, and if his beard had been very thick—but even though she answered my questions, she didn’t add things to her answers, and she made me feel I was intruding on a part of her life I didn’t have any right to.