“We’ve been speaking about the Italians,” Carlo’s father said.
“Them again,” Gabriel said.
“What they can do with peas,” Robbie said.
“Give peas a chance,” Gabriel said.
“Clever,” Carlo said.
“Tell us,” the old man said. “What does one study in school these days?”
Gabriel was working his way through a drumstick like he hadn’t eaten in three days. He blinked at the two men—was he required to answer this question?
Carlo winked back: He’s elderly, humor him.
“This is the year everything is American,” Gabriel said.
“Heavens,” Henry said.
“American history,” Gabriel said, “American English.”
“American English?” Henry asked.
“I mean in English class, it’s all American lit,” Gabriel said.
“American biology?” Henry asked.
“Clever,” Carlo said.
“Just history and literature,” Gabriel said.
“American trigonometry?” Henry asked, trying for a double.
“The history part is decent,” Gabriel said.
“History better than literature?” Robbie asked.
“Keeping it real, you mean,” Henry said.
“Something like that,” Gabriel said.
“Here’s what’s interesting,” Henry said, pushing aside some carrots with the side of his fork as if to clear a place on his plate for whatever was interesting. “I’ve lived long enough to have read several different accounts of what I lived through, what I experienced firsthand, accounts that contradict each other. The German citizens knew x or y but not z. Then suddenly the German citizens knew perfectly well x
and
y
and
z. I have a point, it’s this:
History
has a way of changing, young Gabriel, it isn’t fixed. It’s no better than memory. And as such, you see, it’s as malleable and faulty as the literature you don’t prefer.”
Gabriel’s jaw went slack—he was puzzled.
Carlo was watching his father. He could tell the old man was agitated about something and followed his gaze first to Gabriel’s earrings, then to the tattoo on the inside of Gabriel’s left forearm.
Robbie walked around the table filling wine glasses.
“Don’t forget me,” Gabriel said, and Robbie decanted a third of a glass.
“It’s a terrible idea,” Carlo’s father said, “to separate American history from the global rest. What that breeds. The myopia, the jingoism. For the record, I brought the cranberry relish all the way from New York.”
“You were born in Germany,” Gabriel said, “but you don’t have an accent.”
Henry nodded and said, “I was twenty-two when I emigrated and worked my tail off to get rid of it. I still avoid phrases like
wagon wheel.
”
“At twenty-two, how did you lose the accent?” Robbie asked.
“I took a class. It was necessary to move forward in business. Jewish or not, I sounded like the enemy.”
“Was that really true?” Robbie asked.
“I suppose not. But I wanted to be scared it was the case.”
“You
wanted
to be scared?” Gabriel asked.
“It was a better thing to be scared about that than all the other things that disturbed me,” Carlo’s father said.
Carlo was startled and could see Robbie was, as well. The old man seemed to be broaching the forbidden subject. How much would he allow? He was still carving away at some goose, but Gabriel had stopped eating.
“What was the worst thing you saw there?” the boy asked.
“There,”
Carlo’s father said, mocking.
“I’m not sure that’s appropriate, Gabriel,” Carlo said.
“
Appropriate
,” his father echoed, riding his son.
“I’m not trying to be disrespectful,” Gabriel said.
Carlo’s father did not look the boy straight in the eye when he waved his knife toward him and addressed him: “That tattoo of yours, three red stars. Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”
Gabriel was not easy to embarrass, yet with his right hand, he gripped his left forearm and then let go.
“Dad,” Carlo said.
“Because, ha, do you know what these stars remind me of?”
“Careful,” Robbie whispered. “It’s not like he can go in the bathroom and wipe if off.”
“They remind me of the neon stars atop all the towers around the Kremlin,” Henry said. “Originally there was religious statuary, but of course that had to come down. Don’t look so upset, young man—”
“I’m not,” Gabriel said.
“Because these neon stars at dusk, they way they hover at the center of the city, it’s breathtaking. No really, it is. To Muscovites, it’s a warming sight. They see them, they’re home. Mother Russia and all that.”
Dinner was finished. More wine was drunk, mostly by Carlo’s father, although Gabriel slipped in a little more and no one stopped him. The topic changed to tennis, which the old man still managed to play in the country and which was the only sport he’d ever followed. He longed for a return to wood rackets and serve-and-volley and tournaments on grass. The chocolate torte was oohed at and served.
Carlo’s father was holding his wine glass an inch above the table, twisting it around, swirling his wine.
“Tell me, young man,” he said to Gabriel. “What’s the worst thing
you’ve
ever seen?”
“Henry,” Robbie started to say, “I’m not sure this is the best—”
“People holding hands and jumping out of the burning skyscrapers,” Gabriel said. “I still can’t get it out of my head.”
“But you didn’t actually
see
that,” Carlo’s father said, “did you?”
“On television,” Gabriel said.
“For some reason, his sitter at the time thought it completely appropriate for a nine-year-old to watch the coverage,” Carlo said.
“You’re very hung up on what’s appropriate, son,” his father said. “Did I raise you to be so concerned with decorum?”
“Yes, actually,” Carlo said.
“I have this nightmare,” Gabriel said, swept along in his own associations, “where I’m in a burning skyscraper, except it’s here, downtown, and the fire is getting closer and closer, and the windows are all blown out, and I have to decide whether I’m going to jump or not.”
“That’s terrible,” Robbie said.
“Not really though,” Gabriel said. “Because I end up jumping and it’s—I don’t know—it’s crazy, it’s fun, I’m out of breath, I can’t breathe at all. It’s a total high. I mean, you know, it’s not like I splatter—I wake up before that. But on the way, I’m this human kite.”
Carlo’s father hummed. To Gabriel, he said, “The comparison, one atrocity to another, is a faulty rope bridge, son, we shouldn’t ever walk across.”
Once again Gabriel didn’t understand the old man.
“It’s better,” Henry suggested, “that we think about root causes, eh? Where all this hatred comes from, no? You don’t get at that in school, do you? No, of course not, not during your American year.”
“I don’t know,” the boy said. “All I can say is I have that nightmare a lot for a month, and then not at all. Then it comes back. It’s not really a nightmare. If I know I’m dreaming, I try to make it happen.”
Gabriel was having some kind of bad family day. Carlo and Robbie traded glances: What to say to make him feel better?
“Mr. Stein,” Gabriel said. “I’ve noticed that you wear a wedding ring, but I thought Carlo told me you weren’t married.”
“Gabriel,” Robbie said.
“Let the lad speak, for pete’s sake,” Henry said. “You’re perceptive. The ring is especially strange given that Carlo’s mother and I were no longer together when she died twenty-four years ago. We never divorced but we were headed that way when she fell ill.”
“I see,” Gabriel said, his voice small.
“But I hadn’t gotten used to the idea that we were not going to be together, which was largely due to my—what?—my
excesses
, and so I hadn’t yet removed my wedding band.”
Henry turned the ring once around his finger.
Carlo slumped back in his chair. He pictured his mother sitting at the kitchen table, her unfiltered cigarette unattended in an ashtray, the broken spine of the Italian text she was translating, a blank pad in front of her—his mother staring out the window at the airshaft, at a fluttering pigeon, at nothing.
“First of all, she was beautiful,” Henry said. “A curtain of dark hair like Carlo’s, which one would find her invariably sweeping back with her hand—like so—one side then the other, combing all that hair behind her ears, which was futile because it would only cascade back across her brow. Then she was astonishingly quick—what a mind. She was working as a translator when I met her. She could read Carlo in a way I never could. I’m sorry, son, but it’s true.”
Carlo managed a wan grin. For twenty-four years, his grief came and went, came and went according to a tide with no almanac. What kind of friendship would he have had with his
mother, if she had lived? Close, his mother as his diurnal confidant—but of course, it was impossible to know. What if his mother discovered the truth about her son, that he was a betrayer and a secret-keeper like his father—would she still love Carlo then? If she knew how Carlo had behaved the night Tom died—she’d disapprove, wouldn’t she? Her disappointment would be crushing.
“She was a saint. Santa Giulietta, I called her,” Henry said, again twisting the gold band on his left hand. “I enjoy thinking about her, it
calms
me. Yet I broke her heart. I regret that profoundly and hope that she forgave me.”
Carlo knew he could say that of course his mother did, but he chose to remain silent. The house became still, very still.
Gabriel turned toward the old man. “Do you believe in ghosts?” he asked.
“Ghosts?” Henry Stein asked back.
“Gabriel has seen a ghost of his late dog wandering around,” Carlo said.
“I’m just asking,” Gabriel said.
“I can’t say I do,” Henry said, but then he changed his mind: “Or maybe yes. Maybe I believe people have a way of hanging around after they’re dead.”
Gabriel chuckled.
“What?” Henry asked. “Oh dear. Poor word choice, eh?”
“So you wear your wedding ring so Mom can see it,” Carlo said.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” his father said.
“That’s interesting,” Robbie said.
“Oh,
very
interesting,” Carlo said.
Robbie was glaring at him, signaling him to be nicer, but Robbie didn’t get it, never got it, and so Carlo glared back. Then he noticed that Gabriel was watching him, watching the two men closely. And Gabriel became fidgety, tapping his thumbs against his placemat.
“I suppose then I don’t believe in ghosts like you mean ghosts,” Henry said to the boy, “but I believe in haunting.”
“There’s a difference?” Gabriel asked.
Carlo’s father stroked a patch of gray scruff. Everyone was looking at him, waiting for him to be wise.
“Do you mean something within as opposed to something observed?” Robbie asked, he tried to help.
Still the old man didn’t speak.
“It’s okay, Dad,” Carlo said, gentler now.
“No,” his father said, addled it seemed, “no.”
“Anyway,” Gabriel said.
“A haunting
presence.
Very solid, very troubling …”
Again the table waited for the old man to elaborate, but he merely sighed and raised his wine glass to his lips with a quaking hand.
“I don’t know what I think,” he said. “I have absolutely no idea what I think. Ghosts. Oh, why the hell not? Why not?”
The conversation continued—tennis may have been discussed again, music, the boy’s preference in music—but Carlo didn’t participate. He was shocked. He’d never seen his father hesitate to render his verdict on any subject. After the boy left, Robbie cleared the table and Carlo made a fire. His father slipped off his shoes and with some difficulty hoisted one foot, then the other up on the coffee table. The old man was old. He’d been left out of sorts.
“That boy,” he said when the two men returned to the couch. He tapped his sleeve with his finger. He said, “I don’t understand
who
would allow a child to burn a tattoo on the inside of his forearm, to brand anything there.”
He’d had his own mark removed from his arm, leaving a scar in the shape of a caterpillar.
“It’s obscene,” he said. “Does anyone
not
know what it conjures? Does it
not
matter to anyone anymore? Shouldn’t there be some kind of moratorium on tattoos on the inside of anyone’s forearms for at least a hundred years? Please. Tell me. Am I all alone in thinking this? Obscene.”
• • •
T
HE NEXT MORNING
when Carlo stepped out to get the paper, he saw something hanging from a low branch of the pepper tree, but he did not understand at first what he was looking at. There was a white nylon rope and then what appeared to be a tattered flannel shirt hanging from the rope, the blue-and-green fabric damp with dew. When he did understand, Carlo beckoned Robbie out to the stoop. His father came out, as well.
It was Henry who said, “It’s an effigy.”
“It is?” Robbie asked. “An effigy of whom?”
“Who do you think?” Carlo snapped.
The shirt was limp like a flag without wind, and not packed with anything to give it body. There was nothing corporeal about it whatsoever, and no person obviously mocked.
“Wait. How is it an effigy?” Robbie asked.
“Dad, it’s cold. Maybe you should go inside,” Carlo said.
“Savage,” his father responded, shaking his head.
“I don’t see it,” Robbie said. “It’s a shirt. On a rope. It’s weird, but …”
Carlo rubbed his eyes. “How can you
not
see it?” he asked, exasperated.
His father intervened. “Because of that business. You know, Robert. With your acquaintance.”
Robbie walked across the wet lawn in bare feet to the tree and pulled at the shirt and rope. In three tugs, the knot gave and the whole thing fell to the ground. Robbie picked it up. The shirt had been fitted over what appeared to be a partly deflated tetherball, the kind one found in a schoolyard.
“Savage,” Henry said again, and the old man was pale. He didn’t like this at all, not one bit.
“It’s not helpful to exaggerate, Dad. Go have your coffee.”
“So you’re saying this is Tom,” Robbie said. He lifted the rope in the air, drawing up the shirted ball. “A headless, legless Tom?”