Authors: Richard Russo
“Have you been to the studio?” he says, lips continuing to move as he counts.
“The where?” I say, remembering how his mother’s fingertips floated over Venice in search of Bobby’s studio.
“The art room. At the junior high. Mom’s finishing a new painting, and it’s pretty good. You should stop by.”
I tell him I will and make a mental note to follow through later today. It will please Sarah to know I’ve taken the trouble when I could’ve just waited for her to bring it home. Earlier in the week she said something about “the painting going well,” and I’m afraid I looked blank for a second, trying to guess what she meant. I was thinking of rooms, of course, one of ours in the Borough or maybe the Third Street house or one of the West End apartments. I covered my mistake as quickly as I could, but not quickly enough, and I saw the hurt register, just a flicker, across her face. So later today I’ll not only visit the studio but also take time to memorize this new work, so we can discuss it in detail over dinner.
“Where’s Brindy?” it occurs to me to ask. She’s listed on Ikey’s schedule for today, not Owen.
“She’s in Albany,” he explains, or half explains, telling me where she is but not why. Perhaps consulting the doctor who told her she was unlikely to get pregnant again. Or maybe a specialist who can tell her something different. Or else she just went shopping.
“Does she dislike me?” I hear myself ask. Owen’s still counting, the change now, and it takes him a while to respond.
He squints at me, and I can’t tell if it’s the oddness of the question or just that it’s come out of left field, surprising even me. “Why would she dislike you?”
“She just seems impatient sometimes. I try not to meddle, but—”
“That’s just her way, Dad,” he reassures me. “You should know by now. You should see how she is with me.”
Not the response I was hoping for. “Do you think she’s unhappy?”
“About what?”
I shrug. “I don’t know.”
“It’s probably just from before,” he says, meaning the miscarriage. “It got Mom down, right?”
“Yes,” I say, remembering.
“But she got over it.”
In fact it was Owen’s birth, as much as anything, that got her over it, though I can hardly say this to my son, not if Brindy can’t conceive again. “You’ll tell me if there’s anything I can do?”
“Sure, Pop,” he says, “but there isn’t.”
He sounds very sure of this, and I wish he wasn’t. I open my mouth to tell him so, then close it again. He has resumed counting.
G
ABRIEL
M
OCK LIVES
in our Berman Court building in the small ground-floor apartment below the one the Marconis once occupied. He’s lived here rent-free for over a decade, in return for which he acts as caretaker. He’s old now but still spry and useful with a wrench or a paintbrush, and to observe him, you’d never guess he was older than my mother. He also helps out at our West End market, though according to Owen he hasn’t been by in several days, which is why I’m anxious to make sure he’s all right. I’d call, but he doesn’t have a phone.
Though it takes a while, Gabriel finally answers my knock. “Junior,” he says, his red eyes spiderwebbed and dull. He opens the door wide so I can enter, but I remain in the hall. It troubles me that Gabriel seems to think I have a right to enter his home on a whim, just because I own the building. I’ve tried to explain that it’s his apartment and he has as much right to tell me to go away as he would anyone else, but he sees it differently. And he’s as stubborn in his advanced years as he was back in the days when we argued about up and down.
“Mr. Mock,” I say. Over the years I’ve settled on this mode of address, though he insists he doesn’t care what I call him. Call him Gizzard, if I want to. “I was just checking to see if you’re okay.”
“Be back at work tomorrow,” he assures me. “Had me a little setback, is all.”
I can smell his humid solitude even out in the hall, and also the fact that he hasn’t left the apartment in days or even opened a window. Gabriel doesn’t drink anymore (“Done howlin’. My howlin’ days is all in the past. You got to howl for the both of us now, Junior. Even though you still a ama-teur.”), except when something reminds him of his son: the boy’s birthday, perhaps, or news of some black kid from the Hill getting roughed up behind the new YMCA. These setbacks usually last a few days, but Gabriel emerges none the worse for wear, and he seldom misbehaves in public anymore, even when egged on. Seeing him on the street, some Thomaston wags still shout “Send him out!” though most of them are too young to remember what happened at Murdick’s that night. There’s a story attached to it, but they don’t recall what it is. Other people ask Gabriel for matches, a half-joking reference to the commonly held belief that he set the fire that burned down Whitcombe Hall so many years ago.
“Is there anything I can do?” I ask him now, though I know there isn’t.
“Just leave everything go,” he tells me, meaning whatever has piled up in his absence here at Berman Court and at the market. “Be back in the mornin’.”
“Are you sure you don’t need to go to the doctor?”
“What for?” he says. “She just inform me I’m stupid. Tell me somethin’ I don’t already know, I might go see her sometime.”
“You’re an original, Mr. Mock,” I tell him.
“Not me,” he says, suddenly, unexpectedly adamant. “I’m just a copy. You, too.”
Which makes me smile.
“In fact, you a bigger copy than me. You your daddy all over again. Big Lou Lynch in the flesh. Big Lou Junior. You gonna grin at me like that, go on away. You makin’ my teeth hurt.”
I stop grinning.
“Your mama doin’ okay?”
I tell him she is.
“Good woman, your mama. Prob’ly don’t remember me.”
“Of course she does, Mr. Mock. She often asks after you.”
“Woman like that enough to make a man good an’ ashamed of hisself. You married to another one, so you know what I mean. There you go, grinnin’ again.”
And with that he shuts the door.
Since I’m here, I make a circuit of the property to check for trouble, particularly in the foundation. I’ve been warned that some rainy spring the whole building could tumble down the steep bank into the stream. Probably not in my lifetime, though, which means that’s another thing Owen can deal with. It’s ironic, I suppose, that the other structures up the street are in less danger of collapse, despite the fact that their owners have let them decay, one rotten clapboard at a time, while we’ve spent money. Foolishly, some would say, and it’s true that Berman Court never made much sense as an investment. According to my mother, I’m attempting in vain to “own my life.” Otherwise, why throw good money at Berman Court or, for that matter, the Third Street house I can’t convince her to move back into? The answer she stubbornly refuses to credit is that while the house where Sarah and I now live is in the Borough, I consider myself not only a resident but also a product of the whole town. Why shouldn’t I invest in all three sectors? I have a convenience store in each, why not a house? I’m not trying to own my life, just acknowledge it, as well as the narrative of our family, its small, significant journey. Is this not an American tale? Are we not the most typical of postwar Americans? That’s how my father would see it, so of course it makes sense that my mother would adopt the opposite view.
At any rate, I’m proud that these Berman Court apartments are in better condition now than when the Marconis and we Lynches lived here so long ago. The rent we charge is modest, not even enough to cover expenses some months, but over time we’ve found good tenants, most of whom are getting on in years and respectful of the premises and each other. Despite the neighborhood, our building always has a waiting list.
Nobody’s around, so I lumber down the bank to where the footbridge used to be. Since St. Francis closed, there’s been far less pedestrian traffic there, so the bridge was allowed to gradually fall victim to our long, difficult winters. Downstream, the old trestle was condemned and torn down years ago, and the gravel pit into which the braver boys leapt from the trestle’s edge is now infested with weeds. Despite signs posted all over the property, people use it as an unofficial dump, thereby avoiding the fees charged by the county landfill. Given what they represent, there’s no reason I should miss either the footbridge or the trestle, but in truth I do. The loss of a place isn’t really so different from the loss of a person. Both disappear without permission, leaving the self diminished, in need of testimony and evidence.
This happened. I was there. Once upon a time there was a footbridge. My father stood just there.
This story I’ve been composing so faithfully, now I think about it, probably is little more than my poor attempt to restore what was and is no more. Is this why Bobby paints? To leave his paintings as evidence?
Half an hour later, I’m sitting at a traffic light in wet, squishy shoes, having somehow slipped into the stream. Trying to imagine how I’ll explain this clumsiness to Sarah, I see Brindy and a man I don’t know emerge from a lower Division Street duplex. She’s wearing a jacket, but the man, despite the chill in the air, is in his shirtsleeves, his hair mussed. The nonchalant way he leans in the open doorway reminds me of Uncle Dec, though he’s been dead some years now. Brindy’s a head shorter than whoever this man is, and when she turns back to face him, I almost expect her to rise up on tiptoes to kiss him, but she doesn’t. When the traffic light changes, the car behind me toots and she turns around, her face flush and radiant until she sees me, but her expression changes before I can look away and pretend not to see what I’ve seen.
HOMECOMING
T
WO THINGS AMAZED
Noonan about his mother’s final flight—that she’d gotten so far as Jacksonville, Florida, and had been gone for so long, almost two months. He hadn’t heard about it until after the fact, when he was downstate, with one more year to go at the academy. If he managed to graduate, which, given the turmoil of his junior year, was by no means a certainty, nothing much awaited him but the draft and, almost certainly, Vietnam. If he got tossed out before graduation, Vietnam that much sooner.
Of course his mother had been running away since he was a boy, but only later, after he’d returned home, did he understand the sad truth—that she’d finally made the clean getaway she’d been dreaming of for so long. Instead of staying lost, though, as he would’ve advised, she’d called his father from Florida and told him that, yes, she’d consider returning, but only if Noonan could return as well. Which was how he came to spend his senior year at Thomaston High, how he came to meet Sarah and how his conflict with his father came to a final, brutal resolution. He would often wonder if, had his mother imagined the sequence of events she was putting in motion, she still would’ve brought him home.
T
HE FIRST TIME
he’d been—what, six? They were still living at Berman Court, and her husband was working at the hotel then, but she forgot that Fridays were different, that on that day he worked as a letter carrier. She’d turned a corner, suitcase in hand, and practically run into him coming out of an apartment house. Had she just lowered her head and kept going, she still might’ve made it, because he was riffling through a fistful of letters as he walked. Instead, she’d let out a little squeal of surprise, and when he looked up, that was that. Grabbing the suitcase, he tried to open it on the spot, but she’d locked it with its tiny key, so he smashed it open on a nearby brick wall and tossed her clothing into the street, flinging the case over a nearby culvert and down the bank. Shaking, she started down after it, thinking that this was to be part of her punishment, but he told her no, leave everything right where it is, the clothes, too, even her underthings, and get on home where she belonged. But they couldn’t afford new, she objected, to which he replied that she should’ve thought of that before. Now she could do without.
Even before his mother left, Noonan, young as he was, had known something was wrong. She’d told him not to worry, that she was just going away for the day, that he should look after his little brothers until his father got home from work. If there was an emergency, he was to go upstairs and get Mrs. Lynch. He knew she was lying, that she wasn’t just going away for the day, so he was surprised when she returned so soon. When he asked where the suitcase was, she said it was gone and started crying. Finally, she told him what had happened. She didn’t want him to go fetch her things, and he knew that his father wouldn’t want him to either, but he did it anyway, never mind the consequences. It was the beginning, as Noonan now saw it, of a seemingly ceaseless contest of wills with his father.
When he arrived on the scene, his mother’s clothes still lay scattered in the street. Some of them had been run over by cars. People came out onto their porches to watch him, just a kid, gathering up these items, and it felt particularly awful to retrieve her panties and bras, things he knew he shouldn’t be touching. The suitcase, its hinges sprung, lay at the edge of the stream below, but he fetched it and stuffed the clothing inside, after which, of course, it wouldn’t close. Hard as it was to carry in that condition, he’d made it back the few blocks to Berman Court. His mother was still sitting in the chair where he left her, one hand over her mouth, the other over her swollen stomach, with his little brothers at her feet, behaving for once, having somehow intuited the gravity of the situation.
Over the years she got better at fleeing, just never good enough. On her second attempt she got as far as the cigar store at the corner of Hudson and Division where the Greyhound bus stopped, but the man at the ticket window knew her husband and called him at work. The time after that she called a Hudson cab and took it to the train station in Fulton, where she bought a ticket to New York. Her plan was to get off in Fordham and take the local into the city, in order to fool Noonan’s father, but she’d been so exhausted by all the planning and the sleepless nights preceding that she’d fallen asleep. The conductor woke her in Grand Central after everyone else had gotten off the train. He had two men with him, one of whom took her by the elbow, the other carrying the suitcase she’d purchased used the week before and hidden in the back of the closet. She half expected the men to open the suitcase and toss her clothes onto the tracks, but all they did was put her on another train headed back north. She might have gotten off, say, in Poughkeepsie, and simply resumed her journey, but by then her respect for her husband’s power and reach was too great, as if he’d managed to convince her that he had a network of spies and accomplices as vast as the U.S. Postal Service, all of them devoted to making sure she stayed where she belonged. He and their three sons were waiting for her on the platform back in Fulton. “Welcome home, D.C.,” he told her. “You have a nice trip?” In the station parking lot he tossed her suitcase into the metal dumpster.
Though she became more sophisticated with each subsequent attempt, Noonan’s father also got better at anticipating her flight. Everything was against her. For one thing, she always bolted when she was pregnant. Of course she was pregnant most of the time, but still. If she’d fled as soon as she
got
pregnant, she’d have been in better shape and also less easily identifiable to her pursuers. Yet it was always in the seventh month that her despair peaked, when it occurred to her that she couldn’t bear to continue here. By the age of ten, Noonan himself could see it all coming as clearly as his father, and as the time approached he kept an eye out for another new suitcase.
Her husband couldn’t watch her every minute of the day, not while holding down his job, so his strategy was to keep her poor, thus making flight more difficult. He gave her only as much money as she needed for the week’s groceries and warned nearby markets not to allow her to set up charge accounts without his approval. No matter how little he gave her, though, she somehow managed to squirrel away bus or train fare. Returning from work each day, her husband took careful inventory to make sure none of their possessions was missing, and he also alerted the owners of Thomaston’s two pawnshops that she soon might appear, hoping to unload their valuables.
The deck was stacked against her, but the run she made when he was in sixth grade had nearly succeeded. Someone—Noonan suspected Mrs. Lynch—had given her a ride to Albany, where she’d purchased a train ticket to New York, but then, instead of getting on, she’d taken a taxi to the bus terminal and boarded a Greyhound for Montreal, trusting that her husband’s reach wasn’t international in scope. At the border, probably because she looked terrified without apparent cause, she’d been taken off the bus and questioned, and her answers were, of necessity, vague. She had no idea where she’d be staying. How long would she remain in Canada? Until her husband located her and brought her home. How much money did she plan to spend? She had fifty dollars in her purse, and unless she was mistaken, she’d have to spend all of it. Evasive answers led to further questions, which led to suspicions that she could read in their faces. These men clearly knew her husband, and they had no intention of letting her into Canada. She sat in the tiny room where they questioned her, staring out the window at the bus, the other passengers fidgeting in their seats and blaming her for their delay. For how long? She glanced up above the door at the round clock, which was there and then wasn’t there, and then nothing was there.
When she awoke on a cot with an IV in her arm, she was told not to worry. Her baby would be fine. Everything would be fine. They’d gone through her purse and found a library card, then called information in Thomaston and gotten her phone number. Her husband was on his way.
Noonan had known he was going to catch it. It had taken his old man no time at all to find out about the train ticket she’d bought for New York, so he was surprised to get the phone call from a hospital on the Canadian border. Where had she gotten money for both a train and a bus ticket? When he hung up, he studied his son suspiciously, and Noonan made the mistake of looking away guiltily.
When they returned, his father was no sooner in the door than he fixed Noonan with that same stare, just to let him know that the ten hours it had taken to fetch his mother home hadn’t interrupted his focus a bit. “Welcome home, D.C.,” he said. His mother stood in the doorway, one hand beneath her enormous belly, looking down. Noonan heard her murmur what he thought might have been “Please.”
“What’s that, D.C.?” his father said. “You have something to say to your family?”
“Please,” she said, audibly this time, though just barely. She was peering out from behind her husband at Noonan, who knew she was beseeching both of them with that single syllable, begging her son not to further antagonize his father, begging her husband not to punish his son for what she’d done.
His father came over to where he stood shaking with fear. “Well,” he said, “you’ve had time to think about it. Where do you suppose your mother got all that money, Robert?”
“I saved it,” his mother said.
“The hell you did, D.C.,” he told her. Not once since the moment they entered had he taken his eyes off Noonan. “A train ticket you didn’t even use? A bus ticket to Montreal?”
“I put a little aside every week,” she said. “I did…I promise.”
“When I call the bank tomorrow,” he said to Noonan, “and ask how much is in your savings account, what are they going to tell me?”
Noonan’s eyes met his mother’s then and saw how pointless it was to lie. He’d emptied the account containing five months’ worth of paper route money last week, the same day he discovered another strange suitcase in the back of the hall closet, right where his mother always hid them. It had been
his
idea to buy the train ticket but not use it. Let his father look south while she was heading north. He remembered the look on her face as he explained how to do it, at once frightened and proud of his gift for deception and strategy. One day he’d be a match for his father. Before long he’d be a man, ready for whatever the world threw at him.
But not
this
day. Today he was still a boy, and he was quaking violently now, waiting, as he had been for ten hours, for what would happen next. He wasn’t stupid. He knew the thing to say was
I’m sorry.
For his own good as well as his mother’s.
I’m sorry.
Say he didn’t know what she wanted the money for. She’d back him up, no matter what he said. Though his father wouldn’t believe either of them, that’s what he wanted to hear, and once he did then things would gradually get better.
I’m sorry
was the right thing to say, the only thing, really. Instead he heard himself say, the words nearly lost in his sobs, “
You’re
why she runs away. If you were nice to her, she wouldn’t want to. It’s
you
she hates.”
As he said this, his father stood over him flexing his big fists, the birthmark along his hairline dark purple now with rage. Scared as he was, Noonan remembered thinking, almost with relief, All right then. This was the day the terrible blow would finally come. By now his brothers had begun to cry, and his mother was pleading urgently on his behalf, imploring her husband not to strike him, telling him he was just a boy, that he hadn’t had any idea what she wanted the money for, that he didn’t mean what he’d just said. And besides, it wasn’t true. She didn’t hate him and didn’t want to leave her family, not really. It was just that sometimes she got so tired and confused that she was afraid she’d just start screaming in front of the children. “He’ll apologize,” she said. “Bobby will apologize right now. You will, won’t you, sweetie?” She’d come over to where he stood and gotten down on her knees. She’d taken his hand and was kissing it, wetting it with her tears. How ugly she was, he remembered thinking, her face contorted with need and fear. “Tell him you didn’t mean what you said, okay? Do that for Mommy?”
Noonan hadn’t yet learned that his father would not strike him. That understanding would come to him years later at the academy, a blinding, utterly transformative revelation. For all his threats to thrash the boy within an inch of his life, he’d never once struck him or, now that he thought about it, his mother. Why hadn’t it occurred to him that adults could be like school-yard bullies? Sure, his father was a holy terror when it came to inanimate objects. Earlier that year he’d taken a Pyrex dish containing a casserole his mother had scorched and scraped the food directly into the trash, refusing to let anyone taste it. Then, to make his point—that the dish itself was ruined—he smashed it on the edge of the counter, in the process slicing open the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger, and a look of horrible satisfaction had come over his features as the bright blood pumped into the sink. “See?” he kept saying, showing the wound first to his mother, then to Noonan. “See?”
Sure, the blood’s mine,
he seemed to be saying,
but next time it could be yours. Next time, if you aren’t careful, it
will
be yours.
For years Noonan had watched his father kick trash cans, rupture suitcases, throw bottles across the room so they smashed on impact, their contents oozing down the wall.
But what his father had always wanted him to fear was the day he’d lose control, when the blood would really flow. His mother’s surely, and probably his own. Maybe even his little brothers’. Noonan’s realization at the academy, that his father would run a bluff with his own blood, was liberating, though it came at a price. If he could figure this out at fifteen, what was wrong with his mother? Why had the penny never dropped for her? After all the years of cowering, had it never once registered that she was married to not just a bully but also a coward? How could she, a grown woman, fall for the same trick day after day, year after year?