He had a great passion for baseball. He’d talk of it incessantly, in a dusty murmur that whispered air through the words and which made him sound like no one else she had ever heard. The voice seemed a penned-in thing, far too small for his frame, but it lent their time together a delicious sense of conspiracy. Most of what he had to say passed her by, but that did nothing to dampen his enthusiasm. For her, the sound of him was enough, puffing his way through the words, soft as wet dirt. Later, she’d understand that he spoke the way he did because his voice had been for generations shaped with another language in mind and that even if he’d forgotten the words or replaced them with others the essence of that different music at least remained with him, the lilt a thing ingrained. And sometimes, as they walked and just for fun, she’d sing ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’, timidly and unbidden, putting it up as backdrop to his chatter. He’d smile whenever she did that, the sort of smile she loved to see because of how it made her feel. His eyes would pinch a little as his mouth fell open, and she knew even at five or six that if she were ever to see him cry it would be with an expression that matched this exactly, adding only tears to the equation.
She finds it difficult even now to imagine the gravitational pull that must have existed between him and Madge. Perhaps especially now, given the perspective of time. But love is a language that often defies translation. Pete was not handsome. He had a very long face, slender and flat, with too much forehead on show and too much chin. His bones came very close to the surface, yellowing his skin where they ridged or cornered. He worked in the subway, some type of construction or laborious maintenance duty that kept to an odd rolling shift arrangement as dictated by train schedules, so time was a watery thing for him, with nights running ever into days. Any sort of natural light must have felt like an otherworldly treat. At Madge’s insistence, and just to keep the illusion of a family life, they often ate porridge breakfasts at midnight and dinner at ten a.m., overcooked cabbage, turnip or sprouts, potatoes that fell out of their skins and turned to powder on the plate, stringy corned beef or offal meat, heart or kidneys or liver, cubed into chunks and fried to a crunch. He’d eat as though there was tax to be paid on leftovers, the way men fresh out of prison often eat, getting the food down with assisting gulps of stout if it happened to be anywhere close to pay day and with buttermilk if they were all spent up on good things for the week.
Perhaps because of its limited exposure to sunlight, his flesh was pallid except for the insomniac bruises that underscored his small pale eyes. Sometimes, if the weather was hot and they were going for ice cream, he’d take off his cheap suit jacket and hold it by a thumb over his shoulder as they walked, and in those moments another side of him revealed itself, allowing Caitlin a telling glimpse of the footloose man capable on the least whim of hitching his way clean across the country, the type who could easily go a month without shaving, sleep in fields or under bridges, and who could fight without qualm, equally well with fists or with something broken and jagged, for his supper. At his best, he was a good man, the times when he was able to keep a distance between himself and anything harder than beer; and those must have been the moments that held Madge enthralled, even if she was strict with him about everything, about getting home an hour late, not taking out the garbage or leaving his dirty socks beneath the bed. When she went at him he simply bowed his head and took it, though if he was within reach of whiskey then things could go either way. Caitlin remembers mornings, not many but a few, when Madge could only talk in croaks and from behind a staunching towel or handkerchief, but she also recalls a night awakening to peculiar birdlike whines and finding her mother lying face down on the bed with the hem of her nightgown tugged most of the way up her back while Pete, upright and completely naked, bucked against her from behind, his hands kneading and gathering loose fistfuls of her flabby sides, luxuriating in that swell. The details remain vivid for Caitlin, the sight of their bodies shining like exposed bone, and that wall of small sound: the relentless slap of flesh, the jerking breaths, the choked, misshapen words and half-words, and more than anything else the absurd delicacy of the squeals knocked loose from Madge with every taken thrust, animal sobs immediately amplified by the darkness, in intensity if not in actual volume.
Was it love? Well, who but the involved could ever truly know? What’s clear is that, for four years, Pete was there, as a father, husband and provider. Talking baseball, dozing off at the morning table after a long night spent in the tunnels, but tossing and turning in bed, kicking loose of the sheets, getting up to open the window, to close the window, to drink water, to soak a facecloth against the stinking Brooklyn summers before finally, around noon, just giving up and taking himself down to the corner bar or, if he was out of credit, to the building’s front stoop, where he’d settle on the top step, prop himself against the jamb of the open doorway and catnap between passing chats. Living that way wasn’t easy, but they got by, and while his appetites stayed small there was a lot of room for laughter in their lives.
Then one day he was simply gone. Caitlin still thinks about it sometimes, when she is alone. A day in late summer, the golden air burned and thickening to redness with the shadows of early evening. Out on the street some kids had opened a fire hydrant and were taking turns leaping through its spouting arc, shrieking against the breathtaking coldness of the water. The pavement gleamed and the men out on the stoops in their shirtsleeves or undershirts watched and smiled and shook their heads and talked about how it had been back when they themselves were kids.
By six, mother and child were at the table. Madge said nothing, just sat there in a pale blue sleeveless blouse that bloomed navy around the armpits. A gloss of sweat lathered her temples and now and again a bead would gather and then break in a quick runnel down her cheek. Dinner was cold cuts and a simple salad, and at first she insisted that they wait for Pete but after a while, twenty minutes, half an hour, she relented and let Caitlin eat. Her own plate, though, remained untouched. She sat there, waiting, thinking bad thoughts and then worse ones. When the heat became too much for her she unbuttoned her blouse and let it hang open. Her great breasts bulged inside the drab white cups of her bra and her skin had reddened in places, prickling with rash. She was still there an hour later, when the daylight at last began to dim.
Over the years, newspapers have printed countless stories of men going out for packs of cigarettes and staying gone. As a statement of intent there are few as effective. There is even a word for it, desertion, the sort of word that feels like grit on your tongue and makes you want to spit, or at least wince, upon speaking it. Caitlin stood by the window in the last of the sun, and again in the days after, gazing out onto the street and waiting for a glimpse of something familiar. She sensed that their lives had turned to pulp but was too young to understand the magnitude of what had happened. She can’t recall ever crying about his leaving, but she does remember an overwhelming feeling of displacement, as if somehow the heart had dropped from its perch inside her body, leaving behind a high and gaping cavity. The oddness of that sensation lingered with her a long time and maybe, in some way, lingers still.
Talking was never part of the equation. While the wound was still fresh, and careful to avoid collisions, she knew better than to try; but even later, growing up, her attempts at broaching the subject were always met with a kind of reactionary paralysis. Madge possessed an entire neighbourhood of rage, but the merest mention of Pete would turn her instantly to glass. It was understandable. People defend themselves in different ways. Some can talk openly about the bad side of the world, some will shout or sing about it and a few will even turn it into great art. Madge’s way was to work a kind of reverse transubstantiation, some alchemical fast-hand Monte trick that morphed flesh and blood into merest matter. Even in absentia, Pete retained a bedrock permanence in their lives, but she’d stare back hard at any challenge, refusing to speak, and her denial had the gradual effect of eroding away his essence. This locked-down state was her mode of s
elf-preservation, the tool or weapon that helped her to endure what for her had been a thing of total ruin. And without the details, Caitlin could no more than speculate as to what exactly had gone bad.
Most likely, some argument had triggered his walking out, because there was always something going on and rows seemed to seep one into the next with them. Over drink, over some act of selfishness, over God alone knew what. But why that particular row should have been any more ferocious than the thousand others opened up the floor to all manner of fancy. Was it something said that could never be taken back, a thing so foul it did not bear remembering? Was it something done? Or was there, this time, perhaps someone else involved, another woman, offering him more, offering escape, even love? Was that what made this fight so different and so definitive? Maybe. Caitlin wondered, calculated the possibilities, indulged the variables. But it was a futile practice. And the passing of years have done nothing to clarify the situation. Even now, all she knows for certain is that Pete was there the way that the walls of their apartment were, as solid and assured, as dependable; talking baseball, smelling sour, looking always washed-out, always more than slightly sad, a tall, thin, slack-shouldered man with big hands that never seemed quite comfortable or at rest. And then, without a word of explanation or even a kiss goodbye, he was gone. As to whether or not he’d been in contact since, there was no way of knowing. It’s possible that he called, or wrote, because total abandonment didn’t fit with what Caitlin thought she understood of his nature, and a spoken or written word might help to explain the tears that came to mark the worst of their night-times. But if letters had made it through then they did not survive. Nothing did, except the memories.
Love complicated matters. For Caitlin, meeting Thomas added a certain volatility to the world. She liked him, right from the beginning, liked the way he looked in his tight black denims and with his shirtsleeves rolled high towards his shoulders. And even more than that, how he looked at her, with a hungered gaze that stuck like thrown mud. He wasn’t a troublemaker, and had no involvement in gangs or drugs, but being with him made her feel as if she were bending some law. Sometimes, when they were out together, he’d lean her up against a wall and just stare, eating into her with his wide dark eyes. Silence was easy then, in a way that it never would be later on, but at that stage, with everything still sweetness, a gaze said more than enough. He’d put her gently against the wall, bring himself close in and stare until she became entranced, and even as he began to kiss her mouth his hands would be going for her breasts, through her shirt or sweater but even so, fearless and unashamed, right there on the street, in public. Later, deep into the night, she’d lie in her bed and relive it all, trying to reawaken the sense of life he’d given her, and after a while she decided that she liked him for many reasons but she liked him most of all for the innocence of who he was trying to be. And it was easy to fall into his game, to catch a little of his swagger, and to convince herself that what she was feeling for him could in fact be the real thing.
By the end of their first year as a couple, they’d taken a shabby two-room apartment in Hudson Heights. Breathing one another’s air was a new challenge but, with the bloom of what they had going still then rich and ripe, the equilibrium could hold. And Thomas, being from a big family and suited to confinement, moved like a dancer. That was the trick, he said. That was how to navigate the dark. Back then, he was very good at romance, at the notion of it. He held her hand at unexpected moments and kissing thrilled him because it led them towards such heightened states. She learned things about him, emotionally as well as physically, things that made sense of certain aspects but which threw others out of focus. And she supposed that he learned quite a bit about her too, even though she was slow with revelations that felt too intrusive.
In bed, those first months, he was incessant. They took turns devouring one another; even in sleep their flesh seemed to answer some addiction or magnetic inclination, separate from thought or consequence. She felt happy then, and she smiled a lot, from a deep place, because his enthusiasm was catching. But a piece of her remained untouchable.
Of course, Madge disapproved. Time had proven her correct on some matters and dead wrong on others, though being privy to very little in the way of actual detail her prejudices remained steadfast. As far as she was concerned, Thomas was trouble waiting to happen, and what he and her daughter were doing, shacking up together, was nothing less than sinful. She couldn’t have known how often the subject of marriage infiltrated the young lovers’ conversations, almost always at Thomas’s prompting, a dialogue not merely confined to intimate moments, when the blood was up and things got said, but one that was actual and ongoing and which found itself unfurled at every opportunity, over breakfast, over coffee, over beer, always considering, weighing the pros and cons of the wedded state. A few months in, they’d had a close call on a pregnancy, but Caitlin miscarried. It came and went, without great trauma, because she’d barely even been pregnant at all, only a few weeks along. Thomas was there when it happened, and he’d taken her into the bathroom, peeled off her clothes, stood her in the bathtub and washed her, and neither one of them had even cried, though it did feel as if tears were due, or owed. They’d have plenty of time for this, he told her, then and again later on. And maybe it was for the best. Caitlin smiled for him and wasn’t at all surprised at how truthful the words felt. It was not that she didn’t want children, because she did, or that he didn’t, because he most definitely did; it was just that neither one of them felt ready yet for kids, not when so much was still at such an uncertain stage between them.
By that time, she’d become serious about her writing. It had always been a part of her, but now she began to believe that it was something to which she could commit herself, happily, for the rest of her life. It meant giving over hours every day to the frustration of building and unravelling sentences, filling up pages and breaking them back down, trying to make some sense of the things she thought about. But when it ran well, when she caught the music inside the words, something moved through her and everything lightened, or seemed to click into focus. It never lasted, but was a state worth chasing. The things she wrote at this point were the things she needed to write. At that age, eighteen, nineteen, her ambitions tended to outreach her abilities, but the constant falling short was in itself a kind of achievement. She’d heard or read Beckett’s words on failure and held to them, and she refused to go easy. Nothing was beyond the pale, and no hurt too delicate. She thought about Thomas and what they had together, who he was beyond who he pretended to be, and where he was going, where he’d end up. And she thought about the past that Madge had lived, the sufferings and sacrifices that might have accounted for so much bitterness. She taught herself to look and watch and really see, and she tried hard to empathise. Missing the mark, more often than not, but occasionally uncovering something of worth, some revelatory moment. But when it came to Pete, her way felt blocked. With him, all she had were memories, and probably half-imagined ones at that. He was dark shadows, a ghost, a feature of her heavy childhood afternoons ripe with the smell of tar and sweet things, smiling through the traffic noise at music spilling from some unseen radio; and part, too, of the moments of war, just sitting there, eyes half closed, mouth clenched, while her mother stood above him, screaming like a cat.
And then, one night, another memory came through, long forgotten and just as dreamlike as the rest but as real, too, once it hit the air, of the morning when, in a drunken state, he had taken her onto his lap and put his hand down inside her pyjama bottoms. He’d come off the ugly shift, ten to six, and afterwards had hit a bar with a couple of his workmates, and he was always at his worst when he drank his way into a day. Her mother had just stepped out for eggs and was gone maybe five minutes, and there’d been nothing more to it than that, but touching was still a long way over the line. She didn’t think she’d cried, but couldn’t be sure, and she wondered whether or not she’d felt afraid. She’d have understood, of cour
se, even without the need for Madge’s repeated warnings, that nobody had permission to touch her there, but she was six years old, and at that age, especially back then, the rules were set. At six, you spoke only when spoken to, you never answered back, you came when called, and more than anything else you trusted a parent, body and soul.
From his slouched position in the centre of the settee, he called her to him and settled her side-saddle on his lap, held her there with one gentle hand on her shoulder, his eyes closed with all the calmness of sleep and his face for once serene, breathing long slow breaths that whistled through his nose, tipping into pitch just as they reached their end, before the vacuous reversal. And all she did was keep still, uncertain at first, then nervous, while his touch without explanation pressed coldly against her belly and then inside the elastic waistband of her pyjama bottoms and lower down, between her legs. Maybe needing to shift the focus of her attention, she studied his face, let herself become fascinated by the little network of creases fanning in talons from the corners of his eyes and the way the pores of his cheeks lay open and cratered with dirt, with the soot that he had brought up with him from the city’s depths. She might have cried out when his touch hardened, but her voice would have retained its nightingale pitch and that part of it was over very quickly, probably because he was cautious of being caught out by a scream or by causing a bleed. He sat there like that, perfectly still, with his fingers tucked into her lap and a look of shut-down contentment on his face, and he took his hand back only when Madge announced herself in the hallway, talking aloud to no one in particular about traffic even at this hour or about how in Christ’s name the day could get so hot so early. Stopped as if he was simply tired of the game, or bored by it. His eyes remained closed and there was nothing to be seen in his face, no joy, no fear, nothing.
My Coney Island Baby Page 9
