Authors: Tom Winton
I'd become old enough to vote the previous spring but had no plans to exercise this right, responsibility, privilege, or whatever else the media was calling it at that time. I couldn't devalue my convictions by voting for one of two phonies. The old 'lesser of two evils' is in reality the 'evil of two lessers'.
One of the few differences Theresa and I had was that she was apolitical. Maybe she, like so many other Americans, preferred not to think about what was happening to them. They trusted 'their' government would protect them, wouldn't let them lose their dream. Sure! By 1967 rumors were already circulating that within ten years there would no longer be a middle class, but Americans still believed justice and fairness would prevail, the good guys would always win, just like in the John Wayne movies. But this over-optimistic belief that the good guys would always prevail was slowly dying, along with 'the Duke'.
Just as the bus pulled up, a raw-boned, middle-aged man, a burn-out, started ringing jingle bells in front of the entrance to Gertz's. You could see in his expressionless eyes, his creased face and slack body that he'd been to hell and now was trying to find his way back. Sitting behind a tripod with a metal kettle hanging in the center, he looked so pitiful in his baggy Salvation Army uniform. With my perpetual heartfelt pity for lost causes, now magnified by the holiday season, I told Theresa to stay on line, and I went and dropped a buck in his kettle. The guy didn't say thanks, but I understood. As I walked back across the sidewalk, I noticed a guy in a different kind of army uniform, The U.S. Army's. He was a young soldier, home on leave, striding by with two friends in civvies. The kid wore a Vietnam Campaign Ribbon on his chest and, on his face, a look that was much too solemn for his years. Theresa glanced at him and then back at me. She could see how bummed out I was. I feared that things were going to change. For the past nine months since we'd been dating, everything had been going all too well in my life. Good things never seemed to last for me. I had these bad vibes that I too would be in a uniform before I could matriculate full time at school.
I said to Theresa, "I got a feelin' my hair's not going be this long for much longer."
"Let's not talk about that now, Dean," she said looking down at her shoes. With the toe of her little suede chukka boot she meditatively rolled a discarded cigarette filter on the sidewalk a few times. Then she mashed at it.
I would be nineteen in May, but wouldn't complete the rest of my required courses until June. They'd been drafting guys as young as eighteen. Although neither of us would admit it, deep down Theresa and I both knew they'd probably get me. This gloomy knowledge had been tearing at me more and more frequently lately, and accepting such a dismal fate grew more difficult rather than easier. I'd be losing everything - my freedom, my hair, friends and family, a college education and, most of all, the love of my life, my Theresa. The chance that I might get killed, never see her again, was genuine. And we had so many dreams yet to fulfil: marriage, kids, a house with a green lawn and white picket fence out on the island. But now, despite still being just a teenager, all of this was in jeopardy.
All along Theresa had acted as if avoiding talking about the draft might prevent it from happening. Intelligent as she was, she preferred to lock such negative thoughts out of her mind just like she did the cruel injustices of self-serving politics. But, lately I'd noticed her eyes going off to faraway places with increasing regularity. More and more often she was getting lost in her troubling thoughts.
As the Q-12 labored away from its stop, I caught her again. Taken hostage by those thoughts, peering out the window into the Queens night, she desperately searched for solutions to an unsolvable problem.
Chapter 12
After getting off the bus a block early on Bowne Street, Theresa and I picked up some snacks at the German deli. I bought a couple of 16-ounce bottles of Pepsi, a box of red pistachio nuts, two Devil Dogs and a big bag of cheese-covered popcorn.The store clerk unveiled her accent when she said, "A dollar and forty-nine, please." A buck forty-nine … boy, those were the days.
When we got to 1B, I shifted the brown paper bag to my left hand and dug into the right-front pocket of my jeans for the key. I've always been that way, methodical. Change in the front left pocket, key in the front right, my wallet always in the right rear. Small habits never change.
Theresa stood by my side as I slid the key into the lock. She liked my mother and she felt very sorry for her, but each time I brought her home turned out to be a bigger fiasco than the last. She was apprehensive now. I could see it in her movements. Don't forget, we had been dating for nine months, so I'd learned to read her pretty well. And this night she was not her usual poised-beyond-her-years self. Now she was fidgety, unbuttoning her coat, tugging her sweater down around her waist, drumming her fingernails into her shoulder bag, all before I got the door unlocked. I'd never seen her so uneasy. It was uncanny, as if she knew something would go very wrong this visit. As I said earlier, I don't believe in such bunk, but it was as if she was having a foreboding premonition of what waited for us inside the apartment.
"It's OK," I said gently, "she'll be going to bed around eight. That's only a half hour from now."
I pushed the door open and stepped back to let her in first.
Instantaneously, Theresa spun back around at me. "Dean, there's no lights on!"
I looked over her shoulder. It was pitch dark in there. I flipped on the hall light and we stepped lightly to the living room. The lamp on the table next to Ma's chair was off and there were no candles burning on the tea-cart altar.
"Ma?" I said tentatively, my own voice sounding eerie in the silence.
No answer.
Again I called out, louder this time, "MA, where are you?" My tone was a mix of agitation and concern, justifiable concern. This was scaring me. Mom had been threatening to kill herself for almost five years now. Countless times she'd said she was tired of it all, that she was someday going to jump in front of a subway train at the Main Street station. And lately she'd been making these nagging threats more frequently.
With this knowledge shrouding my nervous thoughts, I cried out again, "GOD DAMMIT MA, WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU?" With my concern quickly turning to fear, you could hear the transformation in my voice – twice, once when I said it, once when it bounced back off the walls. That dark demon, fear, had set up inside me and was expanding like a malignancy with every quickening breath. As I bent to turn on the lamp, all kinds of horrid scenarios raced in an out of my head.
My words were laced with panic and dread when I said, "Let me see if she's in the bedroom." It sounded to me like someone else had spoken the words, not registering until after I'd heard them. Then, as if I had injected it into my veins, a terrifying panic rushed through my body.
"C'mon," I said, rushing into the bedroom. "Shit … she's not here, either!"
The window shade was still up. She must have left before dark. God knows why, but one of the few things she did around the house, other than praying and scrubbing her hands, was to draw our three shades when the sun went down. Maybe she thought she was closing out the devil or something. The glow of the street light penetrating our tissue-thin curtains cast a dusky rectangle on my parent's bed. It was empty and still made.
Theresa broke the unnerving silence. "Take it easy, Dean. Maybe she's out with your father somewhere."
"Nooo, Theresa. She's not out with my father," I snapped as I rushed for the phone in the hallway.
My hands shaking uncontrollably I looked up the number of the church hall in our battered address book. Hastily I dialed the black rotary phone, misdialing the first time, getting it right the second.
After a thousand unanswered rings, a familiar voice finally answered. "St. Leo's."
"Father, is this Father Bianchi?"
"Yes," he said, calmly.
"Father, this is Dean Cassidy. Is my Dad there?"
"Yes. Is something wrong, Dean?" He read it in my voice.
"It's my mother! She's not here! I just got home. She's not there with my father, is she?"
"Oh, good father in heaven, no, she's not," he said. Father Franco was my Dad's best friend and he knew all too well about my mother's problems. I heard a breath riddled with despair from the other end of the line, then Father said, "OK, Dean. Here's what I want you to do. Call the 109th Precinct. Tell them that your mother is missing. Tell them your mother's mentally ill and explain the situation, you know, the death threats and the fact that she never leaves the apartment. I'll get your Dad. We'll be there in ten minutes."
"OK, Father. Thanks." I hung up and called the police.
When the duty sergeant told me they couldn't file a missing person report unless someone had been missing for twenty-four hours, I had a shit-fit. I had explained the whole deal to the cop but, still, he told me, "We can't do the report yet, but I'll tell you what..." The guy seemed OK, for a cop. There was actually a hint of concern in his hardened voice when he went on, " … see if you can find out what she's wearing. Ask your father when he gets there, maybe he knows. If he doesn't, check her closets and dresser drawers. If you can ascertain what she's wearing, I'll put a call out, have the units keep an eye out for her."
"Alright, thanks a lot. What's your name again?"
"Sgt. D'Amato. Just ask for me."
"C'mon, Theresa," I said, hanging the receiver in its cradle, "let's check the bedroom closet." When I said that, I realized exactly what we had to look for.
Stepping quickly to the bedroom, I told Theresa, "She's got this dress. It's a pale, pale blue. Kinda plain but kinda formal. A silky material." I pulled the string that turned on the bare 40 watt in the closet then I turned to Theresa, my voice breaking when I told her, "It's the dress she kept tellin' us she wanted to be laid out in, you know, like in a casket, when she dies of the cancer she thinks she has or … or … OHHH, Chrrrist … or when she kills herself!"
Theresa laid a hand on my chest and said, "Take it easy, Dean. She might be OK." Then she really stretched it. "She's probably fine."
"Nooo … ," I said jerking my head in quick little half rotations, "she'll never be fine!"
Abruptly, I began sliding hangers. One after the next, I shoved aside old skirts, dresses, sweaters and blouses, and my father's dress clothes which he only wore to church. Pushing everything to the right, I worked my way left, back to where the closet continued behind the wall for about five feet. It was like a cave back there. You could step inside the door, turn left, and go the five feet behind the thick plastered walls. But rather than step on the dozens of shoes strewn all over the floor, mostly my mother's, all second hand, I reached back in there and searched around.
"Is this it?" Theresa asked. She'd pulled a powder blue knit dress, one of ma's favorites, from the days when she liked to wear them tight and sexy. Ma had been a real looker before she'd gotten sick and begun her perpetual fasting.
"No," I said, looking way back inside the cave, finishing my search, carefully balancing preoccupation with dread and panic. With the elimination process now complete, I said, "She wore that funeral dress. It's not here … anywhere. C'mon, let's call that cop back."
I yanked off the closet light without even thinking about the act, a reflex my father had conditioned in me with all his bitching about wasting electricity. Incredible how inconsequential things like turning off a light when your mother has probably just killed herself remain ingrained in your head. The subconscious is one hell of a mystery.
We'd just stepped back from the closet when Theresa held up a finger and said, "Wait … listen."
I froze, tuned in my ears, there were distractions now--noises. I heard a jet decelerating high above the building, someone yelling outside in the darkness, and tired old footsteps from the apartment above.
"What is it?" I whispered impatiently. "We gotta call."