You need help because, after everything is said and done, all the prayers uttered, the Sorrowful Mysteries finished, and you’re alive and in trouble like this, you know that it is all your fault. That you got here on your own, but you can’t get out without somebody who cares about you.
The Queens County Court building looks more like a school than a courthouse, red and gray stone with two dozen charcoal-colored stone steps up to the front door.
I see Marty Trainor on the steps, his arm around my mother’s shoulders. For the first time in my life, she looks frail to me, huddled there in a yellow flowered dress beneath Marty’s arm.
I have no clue as to what is going on, except that I know I am in trouble, and that Marty Trainor is the guy everyone in the neighborhood calls when there is trouble. I haven’t seen Frankie or Nicky or any of those guys from New Jersey since I got up from the ground on Queens Boulevard.
My mother doesn’t say anything, and I can hardly look her in the eyes, those
keep
hazel eyes now reddened at the corners.
“Your mother and I have talked this over,” Marty says, “and I think I can get you off, but you’ll have to give us your word that you are willing to change your life.”
Marty Trainor is an old Kips Bay Boys Club guy, and he knows that giving your word means something here. But I still don’t know what he is talking about, get me off from what?
“What kind of trouble,” I say in a shaking voice, “is this?”
“Pretty serious,” Marty says, grabbing me by the arm, pulling me away from my mother’s earshot.
“Felonious assault is pretty serious,” he says, “and a lot of people go to jail for felonious assault. The guy you were fighting with has twenty-six stitches.”
“Not the guy I was fighting with,” I say. I was thinking that the worst thing with the guy I fought is that he could be bald.
“It doesn’t matter who,” Marty says. “The fact is someone has all those stitches from a fight on a public street, and the judge won’t care about who actually did what.”
“The guy hit me first, Marty.”
I have always believed that if someone hit you first, it was not only fair to hit him back, but almost a personal responsibility. But you have to forget about Sister Maureen and the Sermon on the Mount first.
“Look, Dennis,” Marty says, “we have to go in. Your mother is a wreck. This is going to cost her three hundred and fifty dollars for getting me out of bed and coming all the way out here, but I am not going to take the money from her. I want it from you, do you understand?”
“Yeah, sure,” I say, “but I don’t have that kind of money.”
“You’ll pay me ten a week until it’s paid, understand?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“And this is what you are going to do.”
“What’s that?”
My voice is not so shaky now, and I am thinking that Marty Trainor is a smart man and a good lawyer—that’s what everybody says—and he belongs to the Jim Farley Democratic Club, and so he knows all the big shots in the city. I don’t have to be so nervous, but still… still, my mother has not said a word to me.
“You have never been in this kind of trouble before,” he says, “and this is the first time you’ve been in a courtroom. The judge will like that. But what he will really like is when we tell him that you are going to be seventeen years old in just three weeks, that it has been your lifelong ambition to join the United States Air Force, that you are making an appointment with the enlistment officer, that you will be on your way to a boot camp in a month, and that you will be far from your friends and the neighborhood that have made it possible for you to end up here in a courtroom for criminals before your weeping mother.”
I don’t know what to say to Marty, but I am thinking that I don’t have much to say about any of it, anyway.
I guess that he has talked this over with my mother, and so I just shrug my shoulder in agreement. I look over at my mother, hoping that she will smile or say something, but she has a rock-hard look on her face, like she is worrying that the judge might yell at her for having a son like me.
It is still early morning now, and we are again at the top of the court’s stone steps. Marty Trainor has just gone, and my mother and I are standing quietly for a moment, looking at one another, waiting for the right words to come.
My mother has had such a hard time of it with me, I know. I wish she had someone to share the hard time with, maybe to soften it a little. I don’t think any of this fight was my fault, but still…
Still…
Here she is in the Queens County Courthouse, prim and proper in her yellow flowered dress, but haggard, looking beaten from a sleepless night, and from being forced to stand behind her son before a ruddy-faced judge who only wants to know if her son would join the air force, and if her son would join the air force he would dismiss the charges so that her son could still be a cop or a fireman or a postal clerk or anything you could be if you aren’t convicted of some crime even if the crime was something you didn’t start. And so I know there is only one thing to say to my mother, only one thing she will expect.
“I’m sorry, Mom,” I say to her, “I am.”
She smiles for the first time and begins to walk down the courthouse steps.
“You know,” she says, “you’re going to have to pay Marty Trainor that money.”
“I know.”
“It’s a lot of money.”
“I’ll pay him back, Mom,” I say, “I promise, every last penny. If it’s the last thing I do.”
This is the first promise I ever remember making to my mother. I have said a lot of things with good intentions, but I have never promised before.
It’s a start.
“I’ll remember,” she says. “And for you, remember that the road to going backwards is made out of unkept promises.”
On the subway now, the train rollicking at sixty miles an hour beneath the East River, my mother puts down the
Daily News
she has been reading, and holds my hand.
I shift a little on the airy, cane-covered train seat, uncomfortable with having my hand held, not only by my mother but by anyone. She sees that she has taken a reluctant hand, and she squeezes my fingers.
“Time goes fast,” she says. “It seems just yesterday you were studying to be an altar boy, and now you are going to go into the military. I know you’ll look handsome in a uniform. What do those air force uniforms look like, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I never saw one.”
“You never saw one?”
“No.”
“Then,” she says, “why are you joining the air force instead of the marines or the navy?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I thought you and Marty Trainor agreed about it.”
“Oh, goodness,” she says.
My mother is laughing now.
“I guess,” she says, “when I told him that it was a great hope of mine that you would finish the Aviation High School, he just thought that the air force was the thing for you.”
I am laughing now.
“Yeah,” I say, “I guess so. What difference does it make, anyway? They say that the food is better in the navy, but that the beds are softer in the air force, and that there’s no food and no beds in the marines. I’ll be okay.”
She laughs a little more, quietly to herself, and lets the train rock her back and forth. She sighs.
“I hope you’ll be okay,” she says. “You know, there isn’t much time before you’ll be away in the service.”
“I’ll be seventeen in three weeks,” I say. “I’ll go to the recruitment center on Broadway this afternoon.”
“We have a lot to do.”
“Yeah.”
“A lot.”
“Yeah,” I say, and I think about it for a moment.
“Like what?”
“Well,” she says, “you are leaving New York, and I don’t know how long it will be before you ever come back to us. So I think it’s time … I don’t know what you’ll think about it, but I think you should come with me up to see your father before you go off into the military.”
There is a great silence now as the train screeches to a stop at the Grand Central Station stop on 42nd Streeet.
God, I am saying to myself, dodging in and out of the crowd as I walk up the subway stairs to Lexington Avenue. I haven’t thought about going to see my father in a long time. A few years, maybe.
S
o,” I say as the New York Central Albany Special speeds up alongside the Hudson River, “I have to be there to meet the recruitment sergeant at ten o’clock on Tuesday morning. We’re meeting on platform 12 at Pennsylvania Station.”
I am feeling pretty good, sitting across from my mother, in one hand a roast pork sandwich from Rossi’s wrapped in white paper, mayonnaise oozing out of the sides, and a bottle of Pepsi in the other. I am in a blue shirt with a long pink collar, new and sparkling from Bloomingdale’s basement.
“I want you to look good,” my mother had said when she gave it to me this morning.
“Sergeant Brownlee is coming with us,” I continue, “three days on the overnight to San Antonio, Texas, and to the Lackland Air Force Base. Usually, he doesn’t go, but this time he has eighteen recruits, and when there are so many recruits, the recruitment officer has to go along.”
I wondered, when he told us he had so many recruits, if Marty Trainor has a deal going with the air force and that judge.
“I’ll go to the station with you,” my mother says.
She looks fresh and happy. She is sitting there, smiling, as the trees and rock walls go shooting by the train window, wearing her green two-piece suit which she has had for as long as I can remember. Her “St. Patricks Day clothes,” she calls the suit.
She has had a
Saturday Evening Post
on her lap since we sat down, but she hasn’t opened it at all. She just keeps watching the passing scenery with a small, pleasant smile at her lips.
“It’s okay, Mom,” I say. “I can go alone.”
“But,” she says, “I want to go.”
“Well …” I hesitate. “You know … I would want you to come if it were just… just me … But …”
“I get it,” she says. “There will be all those soldiers there, right?”
“Airmen, Mom,” I say, “and there are eighteen of us, so it is possible that seventeeen of them, these airmen, might make fun of the eighteenth, you know?”
“All right,” she says, “I won’t go.”
“Sorry, Mom.”
I am hoping that she is not too disappointed, but she makes her lips tight together and nods her head a little.
“But,” I say, “maybe you can get me my last roast pork guinea hero for the trip, huh?”
She laughs at this.
“Of course,” she says. “But maybe you shouldn’t call it that anymore. Maybe you should just say hero sandwich, because you never know who you are going to meet down there in Texas who might take offense at words like
guinea
.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” I say. “You never know.”
“In New York, too,” she adds, “they can take offense.”
I have noticed that my mother has stopped using those hard and insulting words for people lately. Those words like
dago, spick,
and
guinea
are words I hear a lot around the neighborhood. But she changed her language ever since Father O’Rourke gave that sermon about the people out in the West of the United States calling Catholics
fishheads.
My mother didn’t like that at all, and told Monsignor O’Rourke that those cowboys out there didn’t know what was good for them, that fish on Fridays had more vitamins than canned beans around a campfire.
Archie never used these racial snarl words, and neither did Billy, and so I never had much use for them. But, I don’t know what else to call this sandwich.
“I’ve been saying ‘guinea hero’ all my life,” I say, “even to Mr. Rossi. But someone told me, when you comb your hair one way for so long, it’s hard to comb it another way.”
“Well,” my mother says, smiling as she picks up the
Saturday Evening Post,
“use a brush next time.”
She reads for the rest of the trip to the Poughkeepsie stop, almost two hours north of the city.
The train is much quieter than the subway, the seats softer, and there are fans on the ceiling making it comfortable enough, even on these hot, end-of-summer days. It is an easy trip, and I keep watching the endless lines of trees going past us. There are so many trees, they couldn’t even all fit in Central Park.
The Poughkeepsie State Hospital is a large, brown brick building, not far from the train station, and you can see the Hudson River from here. Maybe once it was the site of one of the great river mansions with the large golden eagles in front, but now it is a fenced-in building that reminds me of all those almshouses and poorhouses and asylums that the English and the Irish writers describe in their stories, except that it is not so dark and wet like they were in Europe.
We are now walking through the main corridor, and I am looking for the reception desk. I am following my mother, who knows where she is going.
“There is no one ever on the first floor,” my mother says, “and we have to take the elevator to three.”
I am trying to act calm, cool, and collected. It’s not easy being in an insane asylum for the first time, but it’s even harder to see your father for the first time.
Except for two photographs, I have never seen my father, and I don’t know what to expect. I know about these places, though, for I’ve been keeping up with my reading, and though I still haven’t gone through all the book-bricks in my building, I have read a lot of the Dickens books, and nobody described lunatic asylums or poorhouses better.
There is a small corridor before us when we get off the elevator on the third floor, and there are two doors with wired glass on either side.
I can see a nurse reading a newspaper through the door on the left, but my mother pulls me to the right. There is no nurse there, but inside I can see about twenty beds, most with men sleeping in yellow pajamas. Some men are sitting on the floor, some walking around in circles, bumping into each other. I wonder who my father is, and watch to see how many of the men turn around as my mother raps her keys on the glass window. Hardly anyone turns.
“He was here last time I was up,” my mother says, “but they keep moving him, hospital to hospital, room to room. There used to be a nurse’s desk here, too. But it’s gone.”