She wiped my eyes with a tissue from her purse, then hugged me good-bye. I can still see her walking backward, blowing me kisses, her lips painted in red Revlon, her hair swept up above her ears. I waved good-bye with the letter. It didn't occur to her, I guess, that I was just starting school and didn't know how to read. That was my mother. It was the thought that counted.
SHE MET MY father, the story goes, down by Pepperville Lake in the spring of 1944. She was swimming and he was throwing a baseball with his friend, and his friend whipped it too high and it landed in the water. My mother swam to get it. My father splashed in. As he surfaced with the ball, they banged heads.
"And we never stopped, " she would say.
They had a fast, intense courtship, because that's how my father was, he started things with an aim to finish them. He was a tall, meaty young man, fresh out of high school, who combed his hair in a high pompadour and drove his father's blue-and-white LaSalle. He enlisted in World War II as soon as he could, telling my mother he'd like to
“kill more of the enemy than anyone in our town. " He was shipped overseas to Italy, the northern Apennine mountain and the Po Valley, near Bologna. In a letter from there, in 1945, he proposed to my mother. "Be my wife," he wrote, which sounded more like a command to me. My mother agreed in a return letter she wrote on special linen stationery, which was too expensive for her but which she bought anyhow, my mother being respectful of both words and the vehicle used to deliver them.
Two weeks after my father received it, the Germans signed the surrender documents. He was coming home.
My theory was he never got enough war for his liking. So he made his own with us.
MY FATHER'S NAME was Leonard, but everyone called him Len, and my mother's name was Pauline, but everyone called her "Posey," like the nursery rhyme, "a pocketful of Posey. " She had large, almond-shaped eyes, dark, sweeping hair that she often wore up, and a soft, creamy complexion. She reminded people ofthe actress Audrey Hepburn, and in our small town, there weren't many women who fit that description.
She loved wearing makeupmascara, eyeliner, rouge, you name it–and while most people considered her "fun" or "perky" or, later, "eccentric"
or "headstrong, " for most ofmy childhood I considered her a nag.
Was I wearing my galoshes? Did I have my jacket? Did I finish my schoolwork? Why were my pants ripped?
She was always correcting my grammar. "Me and Roberta are gonna–,
" I'd start "Roberta and I," she would interrupt. "Me and Jimmy want to– "
"Jimmy and I" she would say.
Parents slot into postures in a child's mind, and my mother's posture was a Iipsticked woman leaning over, wagging a finger, imploring me to be better than I was. My father's posture was a man in repose, shoulders pressed against a wall, holding a cigarette, watching me sink or swim.
In retrospect, I should have made more ofthe fact that one was leaning toward me and the other was leaning away. But I was a kid, and what do kids know?
MY MOTHER WAS French Protestant, and my father was Italian Catholic, and their union was an excess of God, guilt, and sauce. They argued all the time. The kids. Food. Religion. My father would hang a picture of Jesus on the wall outside the bathroom and, while he was at work, my mother would move it somewhere less conspicuous. He would come home and yell, "You can't move Jesus, for Christ's sake! "
and she would say, "It's a picture, Len. You think God wants to hang by the bathroom? "
And he would put it back.
And the next day she would move it. On and on like that.
They were a blend of backgrounds and cultures, but if my family was a democracy, my father's vote counted twice.
He decided what we should eat for dinner, what color to paint the house, which bank we should use, which channel we watched on our Zenith console blackand-white TV set. On the day I was born, he informed my mother, "The kid is getting baptized in the Catholic church," and that was that.
The funny thing is, he wasn't religious himself. After the war, my father, who owned a liquor store, was more interested in profits than prophecies. And when it came to me, the only thing I had to worship was baseball. He was pitching to me before I could walk. He gave me a wooden bat before my mother let me use scissors. He said I could make the major leagues one day ifI had "a plan," and ifI "stuck to the plan."
Of course, when you're that young, you nest in your parents' plans, not your own. And so, from the time I was seven years old, I scanned the newspaper for the box scores of my future employers. I kept a glove at my father's liquor store in case he could steal a few minutes and throw to me in the parking lot. I even wore cleats to Sunday mass sometimes, because we left for American Legion games right after the final hymn. When they referred to the church as "God's house," I worried that the Lord did not appreciate my spikes digging into his floors.
I tried standing on my toes once but my father whispered, "What the hell are you doing?" and I lowered myself quickly.
MY MOTHER, ON the other hand, didn't care for baseball. She'd been an only child, her family had been poor, and she'd had to drop out of school to work during the war. She earned her high school diploma at night, and did nursing school after that. In her mind, for me, there were only books and college and the gates they would open. The best she could say about baseball was that it "gets you some fresh air."
But she showed up. She sat in the stands, wearing her big sunglasses, her hair well coiffed, courtesy of the local beauty parlor. Sometimes I would peek at her from inside the dugout, and she'd be looking off over the horizon. But when I came to bat, she clapped and yelled,
"Yaaay, Charley! " and I guess that's all I cared about. My father, who coached every team I played on up to the day he split, once caught me looking her way and hollered, "Eyes on the ball, Chick! There's nothing up there that's gonna help you! "
Mom, I guess, wasn't part of "the plan."
STILL, I CAN say I adored my mother, in the way that boys adore their mothers while taking them for granted. She made that easy. For one thing, she was funny. She didn't mind smearing ice cream on her face for a laugh. She did odd voices, like Popeye the Sailor Man, or Louis Armstrong croaking, "If ya ain't got it in ya, ya can't blow it out. " She tickled me and she let me tickle her back, squeezing her elbows in as she laughed. She tucked me in every night, rubbing my hair and saying, "Give your mother a kiss. " She told me I was smart and that being smart was a privilege, and she insisted that I read one book every week, and took me to the library to make sure this happened.
She dressed too flashy sometimes, and she sang along with our music, which bothered me. But there was never, not for a moment, a question of trust between us.
If my mother said it, I believed it.
She wasn't easy on me, don't get me wrong. She smacked me. She scolded me. She punished me. But she loved me. She really did. She loved me falling off a swing set. She loved me stepping on her floors with muddy shoes. She loved me through vomit and snot and bloody knees. She loved me coming and going, at my worst and at my best.
She had a bottomless well of love for me.
Her only flaw was that she didn't make me work for it. You see, here's my theory: Kids chase the love that eludes them, and for me, that was my father's love. He kept it tucked away, like papers in a briefcase.
And I kept trying to get in there.
Years later, after her death, I made list of Times My Mother Stood Up for Me and Times I Did Not Stand Up for My Mother. It was sad, the imbalance of it all. Why do kids assume so much from one parent and hold the other to a lower, looser standard?
Maybe it's like my old man said: You can be a mama's boy or a daddy's boy, but you can't be both. So you cling to the one you think you might lose.
Times My Mother Stood Up for Me
I am five years old. We are walking to Fanelli's market. A neighbor in a bathrobe andpink curlers opens her screen door and calls to my mother. As they talk, I wander to the backyard of the house next door.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a German shepherd lunges at me.
Awowwow! It is tethered to a clothesline. Awowwow! It rises on its hind legs, straining the leash. Awowwowow!
I whirl and run. I am screaming. My mother dashes to me. "What?"
she hollers, grabbing my elbows. "What is it?"
"A dog!"
She exhales. "A dog? Where? Around there?" I nod, crying.
She marches me around the house. There is the dog. It howls again.
Awowwowowow! I jump back, But my mother yanks me forward. And she barks. She barks. She makes the best barking sound I have ever heard a human being make.
The dog falls into a whimpering crouch. My mother turns. "You have to show them who's boss, Charley, " she says.
(from a list in a notebook found amongst Chick Benetto's belongings
Chick Returns to His Old House
SJY NOW, THE MORNING SUN was just over the horizon and it came at me like a sidearm pitch between the houses of my old neighborhood. I shielded my eyes. This being early October, there were already piles of leaves pushed against the curb–more leaves than I remembered from my autumns here–and less open space in the sky. I think what you notice most when you haven't been home in a while is how much the trees have grown around your memories.
Pepperville Beach. Do you know how it got its name? It's almost embarrassing. A small patch of sand had been trucked in years ago by some entrepreneur who thought the town would be more impressive if we had a beach, even though we didn't have an ocean. He joined the chamber of commerce and he even got the town's name changed Pepperville Lake became Pepperville Beach–despite the fact that our
"beach" had a swing set and a sliding board and was big enough for about twelve families before you'd be sitting on someone else's towel.
It became a sort of joke when we were growing up–"Hey, you wanna go to the beach?" or "Hey, it looks like a beach day to me"–because we knew we weren't fooling anybody.
Anyhow, our house was near the lake–and the "beach"–and my sister and I had kept it after our mother died because I guess we hoped it might be worth something someday. To be honest, I didn't have the stomach to sell it.
Now I walked toward that house with my back hunched like a fugitive.
I had left the scene of an accident and surely someone had discovered the car, the truck, the smashed billboard, the gun. I was aching, bleeding, still half-dazed. I expected to hear police sirens at any moment–all the more reason I should kill myself first.
I staggered up the porch steps. I found the key we kept hidden under a phony rock in a flower box (my sister's idea). Looking over both shoulders, seeing nothing–no police, no people, not a single car coming from either direction–I pushed the door open and went inside.
THE HOUSE WAS musty, and there was a faint, sweet smell of carpet cleaner, as if someone (the caretaker we paid?) had recently shampooed it. I stepped past the hallway closet and the banister we used to slide down as kids. I entered the kitchen, with its old tile floor and its cherrywood cabinets. I opened the
refrigerator because I was looking for something alcoholic; by now this was a reflex with me.
And I stepped back. There was food inside.
Tupperware. Leftover lasagna. Skim milk. Apple juice. Raspberry yogurt. For a fleeting moment, I wondered if someone had moved in, a squatter of some kind, and this was now his place, the price we paid for ignoring it for so long.
I opened a cabinet. There was Lipton tea and a bottle of Sanka. I opened another cabinet. Sugar. Morton salt. Paprika. Oregano. I saw a dish in the sink, soaking under bubbles. I lifted it and slowly lowered it, as if trying to put it back in place.
And then I heard something. It came from upstairs. "Charley?" Again.
"Charley?"
It was my mother's voice.
I ran out the kitchen door, my fingers wet with soapy water.
Times I Did Not Stand Up for My Mother
/ am six years old. It is Halloween. The school is having its annual Halloween parade. All the kids will march a few blocks through the neighborhood.
"Just buy him a costume, " my father says. "They have 'em at the five-and-dime."
But no, my mother decides, since this is my first parade, she will make me a costume: the mummy, my favorite scary character.
She cuts up white rags and old towels and wraps them around me, holding them in place with safety pins. Then she layers the rags with toilet paper and tape. It takes a long time, but when she is finished, I look in the mirror. I am a mummy. I lift my shoulders and sway back and forth.
"Oooh, you're very scary, " my mother says.
She drives me to school. We start our parade. The more I walk, the looser the rags get. Then, about two blocks out, it begins to rain. Next thing I know, the toilet paper is dissolving. The rags droop. Soon they fall to my ankles, wrists, and neck, and you can see my undershirt and pajama bottoms, why my mother thought would make better undergarments.
"Look at Charley!" the other kids squeal. They are laughing. I am burning red. I want to disappear, but where do you go in the middle of a parade?