The Bestiary

by Nicholas Christopher

  I boarded a Greyhound in town, and riding all night, making connections in Bangor and Boston, arrived in New York at nine A.M. on the morning of the funeral. I had slept maybe two hours. I changed into a fresh shirt in the men’s room at the Port Authority Terminal. Then I took the shuttle to Grand Central and the No. 6 train up to the Bronx. It was bitter cold. Mounds of dirty snow lined the curb. I lit a cigarette and walked down the old familiar streets to Saint Anthony of Padua Church, where my grandmother’s funeral was held.

  A crowd was gathered in the sunlight. Two battalions of firefighters, in dress uniform, were standing in formation. The fire commissioner was there, and the mayor, surrounded by a claque of politicians: city councilmen, a state senator, and the dapper silver-haired man who had been our congressman since I was a kid. He was Italian and every Sunday attended mass, rotating between the three Catholic churches in the district. Because of the mayor’s presence, cops were out in force, and there were reporters and photographers, in addition to all the people from the neighborhood.

  I was scanning the crowd for the Morettis when two limousines rolled up in front of the church. The mayor and fire commissioner waited by the first limo as the driver opened the rear door and Mrs. Moretti stepped out. She was wearing dark wraparound glasses. Her brother-in-law, Carl, in his police uniform, followed her, then Bruno, slump-shouldered, and Lena in a long black coat. Carl’s wife, Irene, emerged from the second limo with their children. The mayor held Mrs. Moretti’s hands and spoke to her as if they were the only two people there. Then she took his arm and they climbed the steps. Everyone else followed, including Mr. Moretti’s entire squad, who later, while a bagpiper played “The Battle Is Over,” would carry his casket out to the hearse. As I made my way through the crowd, my eyes never left Lena. Her long blonde hair partly shielded her face. Her eyes were downcast. She was pale, like a phantom of her real self, which at that moment was somewhere else.

  I walked to the front of the church, and there was the flag-draped casket, floating in a sea of flowers. Bruno stood up and embraced me. He felt even thinner and shakier than usual.

  “I’m so sorry,” I whispered into his good ear.

  He gripped my forearms and his eyes filled with tears.

  I hugged Mrs. Moretti. Her body was stiff, her cheeks cold as marble. I saw my face reflected in her dark glasses.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said in a husky voice, touching my cheek. Her lips were quivering. She was heavily sedated.

  Suddenly I was standing before Lena. Her eyes were empty. I held her close, then sat down beside her.

  When the priest appeared, crossing himself before the altar, she started to sob. “Oh, Xeno,” she murmured, squeezing my hand.

  After the service, at which the fire commissioner and Carl Moretti delivered eulogies, and the burial on a windy hillside at Sacred Heart Cemetery on Long Island, we went back to the Morettis’ house. A photograph of Mr. Moretti in his uniform was propped on the mantelpiece beside the wedding pictures. There was liquor and coffee and platters of catered food. Mrs. Moretti sat in her husband’s easy chair, quiet and dignified, though I saw how red her eyes were now that she had removed the dark glasses.

  “How is school, Xeno?” she asked when I approached her.

  “I don’t know,” I said, choking back tears.

  She smiled. “You came a long way. Have something to eat, even if you’re not hungry.”

  She was right; all I’d eaten in the last twenty-four hours was a doughnut and a candy bar at the Bangor bus station.

  I hadn’t seen Bruno since we entered the house, and I found him up in his room, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  I sat beside him. The water filter was bubbling in the aquarium. The ferret was scratching around under the bed. “Your father would have been proud of you today,” I said.

  He shook his head. “My father was so strong. I’ll never be like him.”

  “Maybe not physically. But you’re like him in every other way.”

  “I wish that were true,” he sighed. “I thought it went well at the church.”

  “It was a beautiful service.”

  “Uncle Carl rambled on too long.”

  I shrugged.

  “He was maudlin. It was all about him.”

  “He’s upset.”

  “He’s juiced,” he said with uncharacteristic vehemence. “He drank his breakfast.”

  “You need to rest, Bruno. Why don’t you lie down for a while?”

  “No.” He stood up slowly. “My place is downstairs with my mother. I just needed to catch my breath.”

  Carl was still drinking. Everyone could hear him holding forth in the kitchen, swearing profusely. Mrs. Moretti was about to confront him when Irene stopped her.

  “This isn’t your problem, Gina,” Irene muttered, flushing with embarrassment.

  She strode into the kitchen. There was a moment of silence. Then two firefighters emerged sheepishly, drinks in hand. We heard Irene say, “What do you think you’re doing?”

  Carl shouted, “Get out of my face. Go home!”

  Without another word, she did just that—out the back door, and around to her own front door.

  Carl left too, slamming the back door, and moments later his car screeched out of the driveway.

  Mrs. Moretti didn’t pretend nothing had happened. “I’m sorry for that,” she said to the firefighters sitting around her.

  The man closest to her was a bald, square-jawed captain named Ralph DeFama, who had risen through the ranks with Frank Moretti. They had been avid Polar Bears—the swim club whose members plunge into the ocean in winter—and I remembered the day Lena joined them at Coney Island, remaining in the frigid water as long as the men and afterward telling me she would never do it again.

  After everyone left, Mrs. Moretti retired to her bedroom, and Lena and I went out to the backyard. We sat on a redwood bench on the patio and smoked my Camels. Frozen snow blanketed the lawn. The stars appeared. It was the first time we had been alone all day.

  At sixteen, Lena had grown into quite a beauty, tall and strong, with lovely skin. She had been flourishing at school: first in her class, popular, a varsity swimmer. She was close to her father. The shock waves from his death would keep hitting her for years. Her sphinxlike qualities, the tranquil poise that was so attractive when she was thirteen, were already obscured by weariness and grief. Lights still flickered in her gray eyes, but they seemed a long way off.

  It pained me to see her like that, but I didn’t try to draw her out.

  “I understand you want to help,” she said, blowing smoke into the darkness, “but I can’t see anything in front of me right now. All those people. I just want my father back.” Her eyes softened. “I’m glad you’re here, Xeno.”

  I took her hand. I wanted to hold her.

  “You know, around my father, Carl controlled his drinking. He wouldn’t have become a cop or bought his house if it weren’t for Dad. Now he’s going to be nothing but trouble.”

  She was right about that.

  The day after the funeral, Mrs. Moretti collapsed. It took her months to get back on her feet, and by then her hair was turning white.

  Back at school, I dozed off during the last of my final exams, and turned in my English term paper, which I had completed on the bus. But I wasn’t concerned about my studies. And I couldn’t stay focused for long on the misfortunes of the Moretti family. I had to deal with the ongoing crisis of my relationship with my own father, which seemed never to approach resolution.

  WHEN I FIRST went away to school, I only saw my father at hotels or furnished apartments which he would sublet for the one month I wasn’t at summer session. Even for him, this became too irregular—or too inconvenient—and so, in my third year, he bought an apartment in Boston that became my nominal home. It was really a mailing address.

  A sign of my father’s continued prosperity, the apartment was in a block of expensive brownstones canopied by maple trees near Kendall
Square—a far cry from our old Bronx neighborhood. Yet the furnishings were equally drab and heavy and, like every apartment he’d ever chosen, the air itself felt dark. An inky mist seemed to hover just below the ceilings. There were two bedrooms, and a kitchen overlooking a bare yard. The kitchen was equally bare. Except for the groceries purchased for immediate use, the cupboard was occupied by the same yellowing box of kosher salt, a dusty bottle of vinegar, and a tube of toothpicks. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were still there. My father visited several times a year—the same routine he had followed in New York. Except the rest of the time the apartment was unlived in, or else I was there alone.

  Alerted to his arrival by the usual terse postcard, I would make the five-hour train ride to meet him. Sometimes it was around a holiday weekend, but never at Christmas. With the Morettis I had always alternated between Thanksgiving and Christmas, so every other Christmas Eve I was a regular at the headmaster’s house, one of those students (the others were invariably from foreign countries) who didn’t go home. We dined stiffly with the headmaster and his family, made small talk, and felt—at least I did—like intruders required to give command performances. I was at once jealous of the headmaster’s children and repelled by their stiflingly good manners. I also felt sorry for them. Already residing in a fishbowl, they were no doubt irritated by our presence during one of the few times the campus emptied. My table conversation was limited; since I wasn’t from Switzerland or Saudi Arabia, the family was politely curious about my background, unusual name, and Greek and Italian ancestry, which was exotic in those parts.

  The rendezvous with my father were lonely enough, but the time I spent alone in Boston was worse, especially in August when the summer sessions ended. It was because I was such a summer school regular, accumulating credits, that I was able to graduate from high school a year early.

  When I did see my father, he asked perfunctory questions about my schoolwork, but since he had no interest in books or learning, and I had no desire to share my newfound passions, those discussions went nowhere. We dined out and passed most of the meals in silence, the conversation limited to the food before us, the weather, and the day’s headlines. Once when I asked him—affecting a tone of clinical inquiry—about our long silences, he readily attributed them to his years in ships’ galleys.

  “At sea you don’t talk much over meals,” he explained, as if this had any bearing on our circumstances in a steakhouse in the North End.

  The fact is, nothing had changed since I was a boy: he was disinterested, I was angry, and the rift between us had only deepened. I never succeeded in penetrating his opacity, emotionally or intellectually. I had to admit that, despite my education, his was the stronger mind; he could always repel me.

  Finally I felt so defeated that I decided I had nothing to lose by confronting him. I asked why he bothered crossing the ocean to see me at all.

  “You’re my son.”

  “Then why can’t I visit you in Europe?”

  “I’ve told you, my life there is all business. I’m never in one place for long.”

  I didn’t understand how anyone’s life could be all business.

  “I have a place in Athens,” he went on, “where I hang my hat. But it isn’t a real home. I still spend a lot of time on ships.”

  “This apartment is also a place where you hang your hat. And it isn’t a real home, either.”

  “Then why not get together here?” he asked with mock innocence.

  Our conversations had achieved a new level of absurdity.

  When I questioned him about his life, he remained guarded and elusive. The litany was always the same: he had the place in Athens; he owned several freighters; he was often at sea. He kept his office on one of the ships, he said, not in some airless building in Piraeus. “Unlike most shippers, who sit on their asses, I still like to handle a rope and a wrench,” he added self-righteously. Most of his business now was in Africa and the Far East.

  It wasn’t clear how he had put together such an enterprise. Thrift and hard work were his ready mantra, but as I got older, that seemed an awfully facile explanation. I wondered where he had acquired the business acumen to invest his small savings so shrewdly while expanding so fast. And who had assisted him? Did he have partners? Patrons? He wouldn’t say. Nor did he ever express pride in what he had accomplished. To him—despite the fact he had started out as a coal stoker with a ninth-grade education—that would have been effusive, boastful, against his code. Anyway, he never would have shared such thoughts with me. His idea of intimacy was to offer me a medical report, also superficial: blood pressure up; left shoulder arthritic; bone spurs in his heel. His more serious problems, dry cough and shortness of breath, he never discussed. Obviously the years of breathing coal dust in confined spaces had taken a toll on his respiratory system. It sounded to me like emphysema in the early stages, but when I asked about it, he insisted that the cough developed when he quit smoking, because his lungs were purging themselves. “A doctor in Malta told me so,” he said solemnly.

  Behind these meager facts loomed the question of the life he really led in Europe—the central mystery of my childhood. I had always assumed there must be some correlation between his efforts at concealment and the magnitude of the facts being concealed. Why would he work so hard to hide something small? I had my fantasies: that he had remarried; started another family; maybe taken a mistress? But why would any of those scenarios necessitate a double life? And why would he have to keep me away at all costs, especially as I grew older? I figured he possessed the guile to pull off a large-scale masquerade of that sort, but I didn’t credit him with the necessary imagination. Or maybe the explanation was simpler: not a double, but a single life, a dreary reversion to his earliest model: remote, friendless, built—as he insisted—around work. Maybe he was being honest when he said that it would be no different seeing him in Athens as in Boston—or Bombay or Lisbon. Every place in the world essentially becomes the same when you are that isolated.

  Outwardly, incredibly, I could detect no clues about the life my father led during the roughly 340 days of the year I did not see him. He dressed better, had plenty of money, ate in better restaurants, but, still, he felt like the same man who inhabited my earliest memories: humorless, taciturn, giving me all I needed materially, yet displaying little generosity of spirit, toward me or himself. Whatever he had lived through, and suppressed, and however that had transformed him internally, he kept hidden. At that he was masterly.

  All the while, for seventeen years, he had consigned me to limbo. I refused to remain there any longer. I wanted out.

  I got my opportunity—if you can call it that—just after Mr. Moretti’s funeral. My father summoned me from school. He had rented us rooms at the Devon Hotel, near Central Park South. I was surprised; it would be the first Christmas I spent with him in many years. It was not the way I wanted to return to New York just then, but his invitations arrived infrequently. And I wanted to see what he had in mind.

  On Christmas Eve we set out from the hotel, up Seventh Avenue, into a freezing wind. Other people were doubled over, but I tried to emulate my father, who, having endured the harshest conditions on the decks of North Atlantic freighters, strode unbowed, erect. The snow crystals froze in his moustache and on his eyebrows, yet he didn’t flinch. His black overcoat, taut across the shoulder blades, barely contained his bulky frame. His thick wrists protruded from the sleeves. His gloveless hands were clenched.

  Though I’d grown several inches in the previous year, I realized I would never be his size. I would make it to six feet, but no taller. And though I was strong, I was slim; I wouldn’t have his big arms or barrel chest. I had my mother’s hair, and her lighter coloring, and set far apart over a nose with a small bump and the right cheek more sharply planed than the left, her eyes, too, the same dark brown. My grandmother used to tell me I looked like her younger brother, Ennio, who had been killed in the First World War. She showed me a bleached picture of a h
andsome man in an Italian Army uniform, cap pushed back, cigarette between his fingers, smiling wryly beside a fountain.

  My father and I had dinner in a gloomy Turkish restaurant. Blinking colored lights framed the window in which a scrawny fir tree was draped with tinsel. The meze were displayed on a side table beneath a fake wreath: eggplant dip, turnip pickles, stuffed grape leaves, and sardines. My father drank two large rakis—unusual for him—but his outward demeanor never changed. I had baklava for dessert while he puffed a cigar, eyeing me absently. Then we walked across Fifty-first Street to Rockefeller Center.

  At the rink, Rimsky-Korsakoff was blaring from the speakers. Floodlights illuminated the towering Douglas pine, adorned with thousands of bulbs, a silver angel poised at the summit. A children’s program was under way: skaters costumed as animals spinning in formation, brandishing torches, performing tricks. There were tigers, lions, a moose, a walrus, but the best skater was a golden bear. He was juggling red balls. With each circuit of the rink, he tossed the balls higher, never dropping any or losing his rhythm, even when he leaped through a series of hoops. After taking a bow, he led the other animals off the rink and a wave of human skaters replaced them.

  I remembered what I read about bears in the Hereford bestiary:

  Bears eat ants when they’re sick from too much honey. And a dying bear sings.

  My father and I stood at the brass railing before the Christmas tree. He hadn’t said a word since dinner, and now he started talking.