As I recall, we chose as a family to see these behaviors, like his preoccupation with germs, as a quirky endearment, rather than a problem to worry about. Maybe we were just fooling ourselves; I guess, given the evidence, there’s no question about that. As Justine would have said, Duh.
But it was just something we lived with, like the shedding of Bill Buckner’s hair. I remember once Justine clipping her toenails and bringing them to my father in the palm of her hand. “Can I get rid of these, or does anybody want to save them?” she asked, and even he could laugh at himself. We never thought of him as sick or crazy. Even when he burned his car to the ground, my mother said it was time he got a new one, anyway. It was just Dad.
“There must be every key he ever owned in this box,” Justine said, reaching forward to pick through them. The box contained double-sided keys, cap keys, keys to car models we never owned, even a few miniature, toy-type keys like the kind you might find taped to a child’s diary at Woolworth’s. “Should we take them, or what?”
“I don’t see why. We’d never find out what any of them belonged to. Let’s just leave everything, except the baby clothes.” I went to pick up the first box, but Justine was still staring down at the keys.
“I know this’ll sound weird,” she said, not looking at me, “but I think I’d kind of like to have these. It just seems kind of sad to chuck them. Do you think we could?”
“Of course, if you want to. They’re ours now.”
“No, I mean could we move them,” Justine clarified, kicking the dense cardboard. We each squatted down to take an end, then heaved and managed to shift the box only a foot or so before we had to set it down again. Justine had never been strong when it came to lifting. And though she had extra weight in her legs now, it didn’t seem to help.
“Okay, forget it,” Justine said.
“You’re just going to give up?”
“Well, it’s not working.”
“Wait a minute. I’ll bring the car around.” I climbed into the daylight, got in the car, and backed it down the driveway, along the side of the house. At the lip of the lawn I hesitated only a moment before I drove over it and parked with the hatchback next to the bulkhead doors.
“I can’t believe you did that,” Justine said. From the look on her face you might have thought I’d landed a spaceship in the middle of a tub. We pushed and dragged the box of keys across the floor, up the steps, and out to the grass. We lifted it again and swung it into the trunk, where it fell with a thud and spilled some of the keys out; but at least we had secured them in the car. We went back for the baby clothes, and we were going to leave our mother’s souvenir newspapers behind as we had decided, but in the end Justine convinced me that we should take everything.
We were starting back up the bulkhead stairs for the last time when we heard a man’s voice say, “Hands in the air, please,” and then Frank Garhart recognized us as we climbed out into the yard. “Oh, sorry,” he said.
“It’s you,” he added, when we were all standing level with one another. His radio crackled at his hip, and he lifted it to speak. I was waiting for some coded lingo out of Adam-12, but he only said, “Everything’s okay at the Pearl Street address. It’s just the Dolan girls.” Hearing our name on his lips gave me a stab at my center, regretful and sweet. He looked straight at me.
“Oh,” Justine said, realizing suddenly who he was. “You’re the one who—oh, yeah.” She leaned over and I thought she might vomit, but she took a deep breath and the danger seemed to pass.
Frank looked uncomfortable, as if he were the one who’d been caught at something. “What are you two doing here?”
“Cleaning out the basement,” I told him. “We’re trying to sell the house.”
If it weren’t for Justine, I knew he would have asked other things: why I hadn’t returned his last phone calls, for instance. We’d talked almost every day after the night we spent together, once I left Ashmont for Delphi. On my first day at my mother’s condo, he sent flowers with the message, Looking forward to next time. Hope you have some peace. I told my mother and Justine that they were from Ruthie and hid the card in a compartment of my suitcase. I was afraid to see him in person again. Whatever had taken over that night and sent me to bed with him—not only the willingness, but the need to be seen as naked as I ever would be—was foreign to me before and since, but I wouldn’t have known how to explain this to Frank. He kept offering to drive out to Delphi to see me, and I kept putting him off. Then I just stopped calling him back altogether.
Now it had been a month since we’d seen each other, so it was a shock to have him standing in front of me; in my memory he was shaggy and indistinct, and I had to look away, as if he were a sun or something else it would hurt to look at for very long.
“What are you doing here?” I said.
“Somebody called. I’m not sure who. One of the neighbors; they thought someone was breaking in.”
“But couldn’t they tell it was us?”
Frank shrugged. “I guess not. Or maybe they didn’t really look.” He knew we expected him to leave, but he kept his big feet in their black shoes planted on the lawn, where Gwen Schiff or someone in her office had set a sprinkler on a timer to keep the grass healthy in the heat. When his eyes met mine, I jerked slightly, as if he had touched the bare skin of my shoulder. “Do you need anything?” he asked. “A ride somewhere, maybe?”
“I’ve got my car,” I told him, gesturing at the old Horizon sagging under the load of boxes in the backseat. “But thanks.”
“Well. Be in touch then,” he said, and it wasn’t clear whether he was making a promise or a request. He took his time walking back to the cruiser and stretched before he got in, giving me time to summon him back. When I didn’t, he started the engine and saluted us, with a solemn smile, on his way out.
Justine knelt and picked up a few stones from the walkway alongside the house. Our father had laid it the summer before he died, and it was from this bed that Justine took the stone to cut herself on the arm, after she’d found him that day.
“Put those down,” I told her, the words coming out in a bark.
“I’m just taking a few to remember us by.” She curled some pebbles into a soft fist. I tried not to notice the new rolls of fat at her knees, the little dent of flesh in her neck where the nerves were dancing. She gave a nudge of her head in the direction of Frank’s retreating car. “You know, he’d have sex with you, if you wanted to.”
I started; it was as if she’d looked into my mind and seen the picture on the screen there, me under the covers, clutching Frank into the night. “Why are you saying that?” I demanded.
“Oh, nothing really. I can just tell.” She smirked, and I tried not to realize she was mocking my virginity. To the tune of the old jump-rope rhyme she sang, “Frank and Ana, sitting in a tree. F-U-C-K-I-N-G.”
“Shut up.” I picked up my own stone as a keepsake and put it in my pocket. If I had been anybody else, I realized, Justine would have already figured out what Frank and I had been doing, the night—or morning—he returned me to the motel.
But I knew she never thought of me as a sexual being; she claimed that role, in our sisterhood, for herself. She shrugged. “Fine. Don’t listen to me. Even though I know about these things. Better than you do.” I could tell she was only speaking to distract herself, and me, from wanting to look out the car windows as we headed back down the street. The more provocative her words, the less likely we’d be to notice where we were and what we were leaving. It worked, too; I barely took note of turning the corner from Pearl Street to the main road out of Ashmont.
“Who was it?” I asked, our neighborhood safe at a distance in the rearview mirror. “Was it Skip Junco?”
Justine clucked. “Ha. I’m not telling. Besides, it doesn’t matter. I’m never going to do it again.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do you think I mean? Sex. Intercourse. Screwing.” She rolled down her window to let the breez
e blow her hair. Looking away from me carefully, she said, “What do you think I was doing when Meggy got killed?”
It took me a moment to realize what she was saying. “Really?” I felt foolish not knowing how to respond.
“Yes, really.” She rolled up the window again, her emphatic tone mimicking mine. “I mean, there’s no way of actually knowing, since they can’t tell the exact time of death. But I could have been. I think I probably was.” Her feet brushed against an empty Styrofoam cup on the floor in front of her, and she flattened it with stabbing kicks.
There were many questions I wanted to ask—No, really who? Where? Did he use a rubber?—but I knew she wouldn’t answer. Over the years, when it came to sex, Justine had always been the one to decide exactly how much she would tell me, meting out details the way a mother gives children treats. So I stayed silent after she said she believed she’d been screwing at the moment Meggy had died. We listened to our father’s keys rattling in their box in the trunk as I took the corners. When we reached the boundary of Ashmont and approached the exit for the Thruway, I hesitated only a moment and then passed it, continuing on into Albany.
Justine jerked her head up. I hadn’t been sure she was paying attention. “What are you doing?” She sounded dismayed.
“You hungry?” I said.
She gave me a quick look of puzzlement before she caught on. Then she smiled slightly, realizing where we were headed, and said, “I could eat,” as if it were an old punch line between us.
In the city, I turned onto Madison Avenue. We were about three blocks from Mercer Street, where we’d lived when both Justine and Meggy were born, and we were also near P.S. No. 16, where I had attended kindergarten through the third grade. I found a parking space directly across from the Taft Theater, and Justine and I sat for a moment watching people buy tickets for Die Hard.
The Taft was the theater my father went to when he was a boy living in Albany with his mother and his sister Rosemary. Their father, my grandfather, had died when my father was eight and Rosemary was ten. He worked as an electrician, and one morning he fell into a live wire and grabbed it with both hands. My father remembered most vividly his own confusion at being told what had happened. “I couldn’t understand how, if he fell into a live wire, he could be dead,” our father said, on the rare occasions when he talked to us about his childhood.
It was my mother who told me, one day when I was in the eighth grade and pestering her for information so that I could construct a family tree for Social Studies, that there had always been some question about the origin of my grandfather’s fall. “I guess some of the men he worked with thought he could have jumped, on purpose,” my mother said. “Of course, Daddy doesn’t believe that. But I think your Aunt Rosemary might.”
My father’s mother began working as a legal secretary after her husband died. Her job required overtime, including weekend hours, and my father and Rosemary were pretty much left to bring up themselves. They were good children for a few years until they found no reward in it, and then they began to cut school and Mass at St. Joseph’s, and to hang out with other kids who were doing the same thing. West Street was a poor neighborhood, and they got into trouble often, and most of the parents were absent or too tired to do much about any of it. Rosemary began smoking cigarettes when she was eleven, but my father never took it up. Even then—Rosemary told us years later, teasing her little brother when he was a grown man—he was squeamish about the things he would put into his mouth. “Actually, I think you got that from Pop,” she told him. It was a source of frustration to my father that Rosemary could remember things about their father, when he could not. All he recalled was a dim shadow passing above his forehead, after leaving a good-night kiss smelling of boiled corn beef and beer. “We never had anything baked or fried or broiled for Sunday dinner. Ma had to boil all the meat and potatoes, and of course the cabbage, before Pop would eat them,” Rosemary said.
It was not because of the movies themselves that my father began to spend time at the Taft, to consider it his second home. You hear stories about lost and unhappy children finding solace in the fantasy of film, but my father was not one to escape in this way. He always chose real life over fiction, biographies over invented characters, books about true crime over the tales of Dashiell Hammett or Rex Stout. When we went to the movies, it became a family joke that he usually suggested the latest disaster feature, especially if it was based on a historical event, like The Hindenburg.
At first I thought it was just because of the way boys and men were, always wanting to see things blow up or fall apart. But as I grew older, and got to know my father and the world better, I came to believe that he avoided romances, and happy endings, because it was so cruel a shock to come out of the theater and find life as it actually was.
What attracted my father to the Taft was the man who owned and ran it, Mr. Bloom. He was small and bald and gentle, a Jewish widower who had no children of his own and who, when he saw a kid hanging around the ticket booth, alone, assumed that he or she didn’t have enough money to come in. In such cases, Mr. Bloom offered free admission. It was not something he advertised, and sometimes kids who actually had money in their pockets tried to take advantage of the old man’s benevolence. But he could pretty much tell when someone was trying to put one over on him, and he had been known to take the opportunists aside and ask, with disappointment in his smooth, mild face, if they weren’t ashamed.
When Mr. Bloom told my father, one cold November afternoon, that he could come in and see High Noon as the Taft’s guest, my father grew flushed and said thank you, but what he was really looking for was a job. It was partly true—my grandfather had died without insurance or savings, and since my grandmother had to pay off his debts, in addition to coming up with tuition at St. Joseph’s for my father and Rosemary, the family finances were so tight that she would move a bulb from lamp to lamp, depending on what room she needed lighted, instead of replacing the one that had burned out.
But I believe that if my father had been completely honest—and if he had known the truth, himself—he would have told Mr. Bloom that he was looking for a father. And when Mr. Bloom hired him to usher and sell popcorn, on weekends and after school, a father is what my father got. Mr. Bloom helped him with his homework (all except the catechism, of course) and brought in his own supper, whenever he had leftovers from the night before, for my father to eat while the evening movie was playing and concession sales were slack. I think my father liked Mr. Bloom because he was so different from my grandfather, a ruthless Catholic who, by all accounts, could be relied upon only to drink more than his share of Beverwyck Irish Cream Ale. In Mr. Bloom my father found the kind of quiet, steady, paternal love that few of his friends were lucky enough to have in their own fathers. When some of his classmates called my father a Jew-lover, my father had to be told by Rosemary that it was meant as an insult. When my parents got married, Mr. Bloom sat in the pew with my grandmother, and told her privately that it was the only circumstance under which he could imagine ever setting foot in a Catholic church.
Mr. Bloom died just after I was born, so I never knew him except in the stories my father told. The Taft Theater was condemned after his death and scheduled for razing to make way for a Price Chopper. My father didn’t have any money to invest himself, but he got a bunch of the St. Joe’s graduates working in area businesses to buy it back from the city. The neighborhood around the theater was becoming trendy, he pointed out, popular with young couples and single people who had money to spend. In the right hands, there was a profit to be turned.
Johnny Antonelli, who had been one of the boys who tried to play upon Mr. Bloom’s sympathies and get in for free, and who led the calls of “Jew-lover” against my father, knew a good deal when he saw one, and he persuaded his brothers to go in with him on a “Revive the Taft” campaign. They renovated the big theater into four smaller showing rooms and established Antonelli’s Pizza in the old card shop next door. Within a year, you c
ouldn’t drive by the block on a Friday or Saturday night without seeing a line of customers to the corner.
The Antonellis never forgot that their prosperity was due in large part to my father’s perseverance in saving the Taft, and they always tried to wave us in when they saw us standing in the ticket line. But my father refused. The first time he took his billfold out and insisted on paying Johnny, who didn’t want to take his money, my father beckoned Johnny closer with a crook of his finger. “God forbid I should be taken for a Catholic-lover,” my father said. He delivered the last words with an emphasis that sounded threatening, and I felt my stomach clench as I envisioned my father and Johnny Antonelli getting into a fight. But the next moment they were both smiling, then laughing, and Johnny took the bills my father handed him and clapped a thick arm around my father’s shoulder. I looked up at my mother, and she was smiling, too. As Johnny Antonelli led us in to seat us for The Goodbye Girl, I felt the pride that comes with the discovery that your family is special, and that you are loved in the larger world.
We used to order takeout from Antonelli’s at least once a week. It was one of my favorite things then, but I never eat pizza anymore. The smell of the sauce is a physical memory—reminds me always, with a quick nauseous thump, of those nights we spent hunched around the TV, eating slices straight out of the carton while we watched reruns of Get Smart, which was our father’s favorite. He always used to get red stuff on his chin by laughing at Max when he dialed the phone in his shoe.
Approaching the restaurant, Justine and I moved slowly, savoring the memories in the smells. I didn’t particularly feel like eating, myself, but after emptying out our house I craved the comfort I knew I would find at Antonelli’s—the warmth from the ovens, the old-fashioned feel of oil-cloth on the tables, and most of all a smile from one or more of the Antonelli brothers, who had catered, for no charge, the reception at the Waxmans’ house after the funerals. It was still early for dinner, five o’clock, and there were only two other customers eating as we sat down. Justine and I chose our favorite red booth by the window, with a view of the playground at St. Joe’s.
And Give You Peace Page 11
