Authors: Richard Russo
Beside the point, in any case. Art, he’d come to believe, was little more than the principle of one thing leading to another, whereas love, insofar as he understood it, depended on a thing remaining forever what it was, which in Noonan’s experience it militantly refused to do. What people called love was the perfect recipe for disappointment and recrimination at the benign end of the emotional spectrum, homicide at the malignant end. Like all the other women who’d had the misfortune to swim into his orbit, Sarah would have learned, when he finally betrayed her—when all was said and done, he was his father’s son—to find comfort and solace in other men, much as Evangeline had done when she took stock of her marriage and life.
She’d avoided all that by marrying Lucy. Which meant that at least she wouldn’t have to worry about things changing. With Lucy, one thing didn’t lead to another. He would remain Lucy—steadfast, slow of movement, wit and tongue (precisely where Noonan was quick) and, yes, unfailingly kind. Dull virtues, all, but not nothing, especially to someone as deeply conflicted as Sarah. And what of Lucy’s own drama? By the time Noonan had left Thomaston, Lucy, like Jerzy Quinn, had seemed to have arrived at resolution. In Sarah, he seemed to have more than he’d dared to hope for, and his second act was as difficult to imagine as Jerzy’s. What was at stake? Where was the suspense?
Yawning, Noonan put the envelope back on the nightstand and turned out the light. A moment later he turned it back on again, aware that he’d solved one minor mystery. The envelope had been addressed in Sarah’s hand because, at some point, it had contained a letter from her. It was powder blue, for one thing, and distinctly feminine for another, utterly unlike the sturdy business envelopes Lucy always sent his clipped photos and newsprint in. Had he steamed the letter open, read it, then replaced it with contents more to his liking? Speaking of unknowable second acts.
When Noonan turned off the lamp this time, he left it off, and fell asleep smiling.
LOVE
W
HAT HAPPENS
when the victor unexpectedly quits the field? Had Bobby Marconi not been sent to military school, there can be little doubt he would’ve ruled Thomaston junior high. But his sudden, inexplicable retreat created a vacuum, and the boy who filled it was Jerzy Quinn himself. It didn’t seem to matter that he’d been vanquished. Bobby’s disappearance had the effect of first undermining, then mitigating and finally expunging his great triumph from the public record. It was a gradual process, of course, an evolution, but by the start of eighth grade, a year after their battle, Jerzy Quinn had carried the day, and Bobby’s reputation lay in tatters.
Kids still remembered the fight, of course, and talked about it. Not even West Enders denied that Bobby had won, but there his disappearance was perceived as cowardice. No one said this so openly, at least not while there was a chance he might return, but there were whispers, and no one to contradict them. It didn’t seem to matter that Bobby’s father had banished him. His absence was all anyone needed to know. Yeah, sure, he’d won the fight, but Jerzy had never said uncle, never given in or admitted defeat. Even as he’d lain on his back on the sidewalk, face bloodied and eyes glazed over, his wolfish grin proclaimed, it was decided, that nothing had been settled. Round one had gone to Bobby Marconi, but so what? Next Friday night after the dance, or when the Bijou matinee let out on Saturday afternoon, Jerzy would have met him again, and this time, well, he could be taken by surprise once, but not twice. Some witnesses belatedly recalled he’d warned that, when Bobby was pulled off him, it wasn’t over between them, which explained why Mr. Marconi had sent him away. Probably Bobby had asked his old man to do it. Besides, he hadn’t come home the next summer and over Christmas had remained holed up in his parents’ house. Why? Because he knew what would happen if he showed his face on the street.
With history carefully revised, Jerzy Quinn’s stranglehold on the junior high was even tighter than it would’ve been had he won the fight. All during seventh grade we East End boys held out hope that Bobby would return to defend his honor and ours, but finally, dispirited, we too saw the lay of the land and sadly began to have our own doubts. Though Bobby had fought heroically, his victory had been a fluke. There was really no other way to look at it.
And Jerzy was, in his own way, beautiful. Most every boy, including many of us East Enders, imitated him. His walk, for instance. He was always up on his toes, and we were forever mimicking the little hitch in his stride. Had our parents allowed it, we would’ve copied everything about him. Our hair would have been shiny, wet and ducktailed, hanging over our collars. Indeed, many of us left home in the morning with one hairstyle only to arrive at school with another. We’d have worn thin black cotton pants “pegged” tight, and white T-shirts under worn leather jackets like the boys in his West End gang. For us, these were “undershirts,” made to be worn beneath the embarrassing plaid or checked shirts our clueless aunts and uncles had given us for Christmas, tucked into baggy, scratchy wool pants that flapped in the breeze, like our fathers’ did. We’re not raising hoodlums, our parents reminded us. We East Enders were almost glad Bobby was gone, since he looked so much like us.
Jerzy’s girlfriend was Karen Cirillo—needless to say, a West Ender. Just as his gang was too cool for the Y dances, he was also too cool for a conventional relationship. Everyone understood that Karen belonged to him, since she wore his ring, as girls did back then, wrapped with masking tape until it fit snugly over her ring finger, but part of Jerzy’s mystique derived from the fact that he seldom offered her even the slightest public affection. They were never seen kissing or even holding hands. To the rest of us, this could only mean one thing: they were “going all the way.” Other junior high schoolers who “went steady” made a great show of necking in the Bijou, holding hands (strictly prohibited) between classes at school and dancing all the slow dances at the Y, her arms locked around his neck, his joined at her waist, in more of a slow-motion embrace, really.
Karen attended the Y dances with her West End girlfriends, their eyes so darkened by mascara that they looked beaten up, their dark hair helmeted by spray. Where Jerzy was, as I said, thin to the point of emaciation, she was voluptuous and, at twelve, already had the body of a woman, full bosomed beneath the same pale blue angora sweater she wore every Friday night, her voice husky and deeper than most boys’, the most beautiful girl in town. Her only serious rival was a blond-haired girl named Nan Beverly from the Borough, whose father owned the tannery. Boys were always fighting over Nan, in the courtyard of the school, outside the Y or behind the theater, often in defense of her honor, after some overheard or imagined slight. Nan was always going steady. By the time we heard she’d broken up with her boyfriend, she’d already replaced him with somebody else. Still, she seemed completely artless, and the word we used to describe her, and girls like her, was “clean.”
Nobody fought over Karen Cirillo. She had no honor to protect, for one thing, but more important, nobody dared. She was Jerzy’s girl, and at the Y she jitterbugged only with her girlfriends until the much anticipated slow numbers, and then, when her girlfriends moved, one by one onto the dance floor, she stood alone while across the floor a hundred cowardly boys looked on with yearning, imagining, insofar as we were able, what it must be like to be Jerzy Quinn, who sometime later that night, we were certain, would slip his nicotine-stained fingers up under her soft angora sweater.
Jerzy’s gang never appeared at these dances until late in the evening. The Cayoga Stream snaked behind the Y, and sometimes we’d catch sight of them down there among the trees where they smoked cigarettes and, according to rumor, drank whiskey. During most of the school year it was dark by seven, so we weren’t able to actually see them, but we knew they were there by their eerie, distant laughter and the angry red glow of their cigarette tips. But during the last half hour of those dances, after the person stationed at the top of the stairs closed the cashbox, they began to filter in, cool and casual, as if to suggest they’d forgotten there
was
a dance until that moment. We’d spot one of them across the gymnasium, moving, wraithlike, through the crowd, and when we turned to share this thrilling news with whomever stood next to us, we’d discover that another grinning wraith had materialized at our elbow.
They’re here.
You could trace this knowledge surging around the gym like an electric current. I wonder now what we were thinking. Did anybody imagine that this Friday would be different?
Even the music changed, or at least seemed to, becoming darker, more dangerous. There was a line dance the West End boys were famous for, called the stomp, which required a particular beat to execute. Certain records, we knew, were stomp songs, and the opening bars were all it took for Borough and East End jitterbuggers to clear the floor so that the stomp lines, exclusively male, could form. Usually, sometime during the first hour of the dance, whoever was spinning the records would give us East End wannabes such a song so we could practice, in hopes we might later join the line and thereby gain grudging acceptance when the real stompers appeared. But the step was intricate, its moves subject to continual innovation, its orders barked out by someone at the head of the line. If the call came too late it couldn’t be carried out, if too early, then the rank broke down.
What the stomp resembled most was a military exercise, its dancers jackbooted in their aggressive precision, each move executed with a deadpan lack of emotion, fifty or a hundred boys all turning to face in a new direction on the downbeat. Turn the wrong way and you’d be facing an advancing army, then the jeering and laughter of the encircling crowd. At the heart of the stomp wasn’t courtship, the basis of most dancing, but a tightly controlled rage. Its signature move was always withheld until the last few bars of the sequence, at which point every boy in the line, instead of simply turning on his heel in a new direction, brought that heel down hard on the floor in a thunderclap that shook the gym. There was no mistaking its intent. It was a declaration of war.
The last song of the night, though, was always slow, and the lights always came down, signaling, as if we didn’t know, that time and opportunity were slipping away. Karen Cirillo, ever faithful, got her reward then as Jerzy Quinn, ever cool, would touch her elbow and wordlessly lead her onto the floor. Nan Beverly would already be there with whatever Borough boyfriend on whom she’d chosen to bestow her changeable affections. In my memory, if not in reality, the first verse of that last song belonged to these two most public of couples—the Borough pair radiant, laughing and touching discreetly, Nan tossing her blond head, her new boyfriend as happy as a kid can be who knows his days of grace are numbered, and their counterparts silent, nearly motionless, an angry, emaciated boy, drawing to him a seventh-grade girl who was already a woman.
How beautiful they were, both couples, and how beautiful this moment we’d been waiting for all week, the pairing off for that last slow dance. Two couples became four, four became sixteen, sixteen became thirty-two, we East End boys alternately eyeing lusty West End girls on one side of the gym and pristine Borough girls on the other, each group requiring a type of courage we didn’t possess. Which was why we ended up asking a girl from down the block, someone we were pretty sure wouldn’t say no. And who among us had any idea what was in that East End girl’s heart? How many times in the last two hours—or the last two minutes—had
her
heart been broken?
Back outside the Y, the rule of law was quickly reestablished. In the parking lot the parents of Borough and East End girls flashed their headlights or tooted as their daughters emerged. Who was that boy you were with? Nobody. Well, he must be
somebody.
No, nobody. Then, as the cars dispersed, suddenly there’d be a rumor of a fight in the stairwell, and then flight—twenty, fifty, maybe a hundred seventh and eighth graders, roiling up Hudson and across Division Street, on the other side of which lay safety. Were we being chased? No one knew. Nor did anyone want to turn around to find out. Just run and keep running. Make it across Division. They wouldn’t dare cross Division, not even Jerzy’s gang would be so bold, except sometimes they did, so we kept on running, those West End wraiths in hot pursuit. In reality? In our imaginations? It was simply impossible to know.
Bobby could’ve told us. But Bobby was gone.
A
FTER WE BOUGHT
Ikey Lubin’s it was a good six months before my father was able to rent the upstairs flat. The old tenants had moved out—skipped in the middle of the night, as my mother put it—before he’d even been able to talk to them about their lease. He told my mother not to worry, they’d get new renters soon enough. His mistake was in allowing her to inspect the premises. Apparently her refusal to set foot in the store didn’t apply to the apartment, and my father agreed that she should look it over before they decided how much rent to charge. The expression on her face when she came back down suggested that the Great War over Ikey Lubin’s had entered a new phase. “Did you even
go
up there, Lou?” she asked that night over dinner.
Well, yeah, he had, he said, but no, he hadn’t really inspected it or nothing. It was the store that mattered, not the upstairs. Sure, he figured it would need a good cleaning. After all, they knew the last several tenants who’d lived there, West End refugees, so yeah, he’d expected it to be dirty. But he had some leftover paint down in the cellar and would use that to brighten the place up.
“Dirty?” my mother said. “Paint? Lou, there’s been a fire up there.”
This was news to my father, I could tell.
“A fire? Where?”
“In the front room.”
“I didn’t see no fire.”
At this my mother massaged her temples the way she always did when he voiced doubts about something she wanted him to understand. “Tell me, Lou,” she said. “Did it strike you as odd that they left that big painting on the wall? They took everything else, including half the fixtures, but that they left. What does this suggest to you?”
“They didn’t want it?”
“No, Lou. It suggests you should’ve looked behind the painting. That’s where the electrical fire started, in the wall behind the painting.” She allowed this to sink in. “Another thing. Did you raise the toilet lid?”
“No.”
“Lucky you.”
“What?”
“Two words. Black and full.”
My father and I both stopped eating. “I’ll go up and flush it,” he said.
“I tried that, Lou, but maybe you’ll have better luck.”
“You’re fortunate,” the contractor told my mother the next day, after he’d examined the wiring in the wall behind the giant scorch mark. “Fortunate they didn’t burn down the whole building.”
“That’s a matter of opinion,” she answered, causing him to knit his brow in puzzlement. I knew exactly what she was getting at. If the former tenants had burned the place down, my father wouldn’t have been able to buy it. “What would cause that kind of fire?”
“Off the top of my head, I’d say whoever lived here was tapping into the store’s current, getting their electricity for free. Probably did the wiring theirself. Some people, huh?”
They went through the rest of the flat, the man jotting notes in a tiny spiral notepad. When they finished, he did some arithmetic and showed my mother the notepad. Whatever he’d written there shocked her sufficiently to make her sit down on the very commode that had so repulsed her the previous afternoon, whose condition had not materially improved overnight.