Recent History

“Well, he can’t see him,” I heard her say once. And then: “Because I told him I would tell. I would tell them at his work.”

After a moment, she repeated it: “If he tried to see Luca, I would tell.”

In my room, I heard the words bouncing off the walls, off the picture of the Aztec warrior, the novels of John Steinbeck I was reading that summer—The Red Pony, The Pearl—and the book George had given me, called My Secret Life. Steinbeck was for the day, but at night, I liked to lie in bed and read about the Victorian author of My Secret Life “rogering” women. I liked to hear the women shout things like, “You’re a horse! Oh my God, my man’s a horse!”

“And they’d fire him right away,” my mother said afterward.

Uncle John had explained nothing the day he’d motioned me inside after I’d gone to see Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man. He’d said only, “Your father’s gone away,” or something like that. On his face had been the whole weight of the secret, but he had put his finger to his lips, as if to keep them shut. He shook his head, then made a stilted promise to my mother: “I want to assure you, Dorothy, that I will do everything in my power to make sure that Luca has a normal life.”

After listening to my mother’s conversations on the phone, I expected her to look different, but she didn’t. She took care of her flower gardens and made up her face and prepared elaborate meals, enough for three or four. At the table, eating with her, I felt all arms and sharp, bony elbows. I felt ugly and like my bones would pop out and I would knock her in the face if I moved too quickly. I felt, too, and in dangerous ways, like that was what I wanted to do.

As soon as I gave up going down to the Wiffle ball games, I took to spending time in their bedroom. At the other end of the house, my mother watched four or five television shows in a row, everything that was on, so it was safe. My father’s suits hung in the closet, five of them. I could see I would be taller than him someday, if I didn’t stop growing. I would hover over him, but would I ever see him? Beside the bed was a wedding portrait, his tight smile, and then, on the wall, the BC hockey photo. When he was still here, he would have awakened every morning to the sight of himself poised to bolt.

One night my mother caught me in their room. “What are you doing?” she asked.

She was in the doorway, and I was on the bed, my hands between my legs, resting there. She cocked her head and smiled as though there could be nothing wrong with any activity I chose now. Then she rephrased the question. When I didn’t answer, I saw the change in her face, the beginning of her allowing something in.

She came in and sat beside me on the bed. She looked where I was looking, at the BC picture. Then she got up and took it down, with a decisiveness I had not seen from her up to this point. Carefully, she put it away in a drawer. In the drawer also was a rosary, and some underwear she didn’t use anymore. Then she came and sat beside me. She put her hand in my hair, which was thick and springy and resisted her fingers.

“Come and watch TV,” she said.

“I don’t want to,” I answered.

The next day she did something. I was not home when she did it. It was early September. There was still a thickness of woods behind the houses of Meola and Semenza, and I had gone there to spy on Meola’s daughter. There was a copse of birches, inside it Meola had placed a bench, wrought iron, full of fancy designs. Karen Meola came out with nail polish and a book. She had a broad, flat face and she was short, but she was popular. She painted her nails and I watched the way she lifted her heavy thighs to get at her toes. At a certain point she looked up, as if she’d become alerted—by nothing, by silence—to my presence. If she had discovered me, I don’t know what would have happened. In two days, we would be back in school, and I would see her every day. But here, now, it was charged with strangeness, my watching her, and this was what I liked about it.

When I got home, there was commotion. Uncle John’s car was parked in front of the house, and since it was the middle of the day, this was unusual. It was time for lunch.

But John was pacing in our living room, and when he saw me at the foot of the stairs, I could tell he wished I hadn’t come home.

My mother stood in the middle of the kitchen looking as if she had just dropped something and was contemplating an imaginary mess on the floor before her. Her hair looked a little wild, and her eyes.

John turned on her. “Now what?”

And then, harder: “And how do you keep the house, Dorothy? Did you consider that before pulling this little stunt? You say he needs to see his son, fine—but is the way to do that to call and rat on him, so you lose everything? They’ll fire him now for sure. You think like a woman, Dorothy. You think only with the emotions.”

She looked at me, something secret in her eyes, as if I had been her ally in what she had just done; I, at least, would understand.

“What happened?” I asked.

John simply looked at me again, wishing I would go away. “Nothing,” he said.

Then he went to the big bay window and touched the sides of his pants, perhaps searching for a cigar.

“You’re going to see your father.”

That night he called.

“I’m coming to get you,” he said. “Friday night.” After which he paused, then said, in a half whisper, “It’s okay now.”

But was it? In the way he spoke, there was the inference that our world, his and mine, was going to be restored, and that it was the only world that counted. But close to me, in the family room, my mother made her presence known, in small ways, by moving her legs on the couch.

“What would you like to do, Luca?” my father asked, from whatever room or bar he might be calling from.

“I don’t care,” I said.

Again, my mother had moved, as if she were following the conversation through the movements of her legs and arms.

“Maybe I can just, show you how I’m living now,” he said. “Maybe that would be enough for a start.”

“Okay.”

He giggled. I knew it was just his nervousness speaking, though at first it cut me in a tender place.

“Your mother and you been doing okay?”

“Yes.”

“I couldn’t call because of, well, because of complicated reasons.”

“It’s okay.”

He held a long pause.

“Friday night,” he repeated.

When our conversation was over, I watched television with my mother for a while, out of politeness and a sense of impending and necessary desertion. She was watching Naked City. She favored police shows, doctor shows, anything featuring large and burly males moving heavily through the world, knocking obstacles from their paths. When the commercial came on, I spoke. “He says he’s coming to get me Friday.”

“I called his work,” she said abruptly. “I told on him. I told them what he was.”

I could see only the back of her head, the slightly mad way her hair sprawled upward, and her arm lay as if in readiness to pat her hair down.

“That’s why he’s coming, Luca.” She touched her hair then, and continued watching the show.

Of course I understood something, though maybe not in the way of words. I understood that my father had made a charge outward, into the world beyond this world, and that this charge had always been coming, he had been preparing for it a long time. Our coming here, our ascension, the finishedness of this neighborhood itself—had been, I knew, a catalyst.

But when he came, I thought right away that he looked silly. He had fallen away from a standard, and it was only at his appearance that I understood how, in his absence, I had allied myself with Meola and Semenza, and with my Uncle John, the men who stood beneath the high archways of their doors and surveyed the world.

He was wearing a hat, but not a suit. Instead, a soft cotton shirt, buttoned to the neck. He stood beside the Fairlane, waiting.

Uncle John had come for the occasion. My mother had packed me food in a bag.

“Don’t be silly, Dorothy,” John had said when she’d handed me the bag, and my mother answered, “There might not be food there.” Because so little had been said, every word carried an enormous, terrifying weight. There. Where were we going?

Behind me, as my father stood waiting, in the foolish hat, John had his hands on my shoulders, and I could practically feel his belligerence. It was only because John’s anger seemed so oversized that I was able to sympathize with my father even a little, to move an inch beyond my absorption in this new world of ours to wonder what lesser world my father had chosen, instead, to inhabit. John’s hands tightened on my shoulders and he forced me out the door.

My father smiled. I thought how I must look to him, standing before the door with my shoulders high, as though John were still gripping them, and with the bag of food in my hands. It was like I had become, in the time of his absence, a kind of girl.

“Let me look at you,” he said.

So I went down the steps. He made a great show of circling my body. He touched my arms. “Okay,” he said, as if he’d just had a thought, something secret, something he wouldn’t tell me. He glanced once at the house to find John still watching him in a leaning-forward, aggressive manner that made him seem all pointy, rodentlike head. Then he looked around the neighborhood and seemed glad to be back. “I see they moved in,” he said. “Down the street.”

“Yes.”

“And tell me. Do they … associate with you? With John? Are there … block parties, and such?”

“No,” I said.

He looked down the street. “No, I didn’t think so. Come on.”

We got in the car, and he kept looking at me as if waiting for the conversation to start, as if it were up to me. He turned the radio on but seemed not to find anything interesting there.

“What’s in the bag?” he asked.

I still held it, stupidly, in my lap.

“Mom made me something to eat.”

He looked, briefly, angry. “Put it in the back, Luca.”

I did, and then it was as if he regretted getting angry. “So? School started? Eighth grade?”

“Yes.”

His voice was soft, but he knew how to put insistence into it. “And?”

A great many things had in fact happened in the first three days of school. Mr. McCluskey, the gym teacher, had let down the ropes that hung from the ceiling of the gym and announced that by the end of the fall we were all going to have to climb them. A shudder had passed through the group of us. Then a boy named Andrew Weston had gotten a hard-on in the shower, and that had made us all forget the ropes. Everyone already knew things about Andrew Weston—the secret, vague things you could know about boys, the malformed boys who were part of every class. There were others: David Campbell, Alan Carney. Mr. McCluskey had come into the shower room and put his hands on Andrew’s shoulders and led him out. While the rest of us dressed, Mr. McCluskey sat in the gym office with Andrew and stared out through the Plexiglas at us, his mouth hard and straight, cautioning us not to say anything. Andrew had not come to our next class. Someone said his mother had come to get him.

That was not all. Karen Meola was in all my classes. We didn’t speak. I looked at her fingernails, and thought, in a silence that seemed to me enormously loud and significant: I watched you paint them. There was a power to standing outside, to knowing things about people they didn’t know you knew, that I had just begun to apprehend.

“Nothing,” I answered. “Eighth grade. Same as last year.”

After that, we listened to the radio. My father settled back. “We’re going to the plant, Luca. In case you’re wondering. We’re going to Vanderbruek.”

It wasn’t entirely a surprise, though my mother said he’d been fired. Vanderbruek was at least familiar ground. They made tiny machines—my father used the word “coordinates”—that were used in aircraft and, no one was ashamed to say it then, in bombs. This was peacetime, 1962. The Russians were the only threat, but if the Russians attacked, it was important to have bombs. That was the simple justification my father had given for his work, though it had hardly needed justification. He was an accountant, one of many. But he was in charge of a group. The plant was vast, the size of a small town. The parking lot was like the parking lot of an airport.

He stopped at the side of the main road, near one of the lesser parking lots. You could not get into it unless you showed your ID. There were uniformed guards. The guard leaned out of his booth and stared suspiciously at my father, but my father waved to him, and the guard let him stay.

“You’re probably wondering what we’re doing,” he said after a moment. It was that eerily silent time at the end of the day in a factory, just before everyone quits work.

My father took out a cigarette and lit it. The way he did it seemed slow and pleasurable, and after he’d taken his first drag he looked down at his fingers holding the cigarette and scratched one of them. “See, I don’t work here anymore.”

He squinted through the smoke out the window. His lips had thinned and gathered into what you could almost be fooled into believing was a smile. “You want to know why?”

And suppose I didn’t?

He leaned slightly toward me. “I’m going to tell you this, but I’m going to try to tell you in such a way that you believe I feel no rancor toward your mother. I’m not telling you this to turn you against her, okay?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Because she told them something about me. She’s angry at me, so she called this place and told them something she shouldn’t have. Someday I’ll tell you what that something is, but not now. So I had to quit. They couldn’t exactly fire me, but they made it clear it would be better if I didn’t stick around. So I quit.”

For a while then, my father watched me not asking the next, obvious question. I sensed that he liked it that I wasn’t asking, but who could tell? I felt his eyes pass over me a long time.

Soon the cars started coming out of the lots. It was quitting time. My father stopped looking at me and started looking at the drivers. His face was very serious, mildly recessed, anticipatory. He looked the way a man looks when he expects to be slapped but has already decided he will not slap back.

Some of the men and women in cars returned his stare. Not all of them. There were too many workers at Vanderbruek for him to know all of them. But some of the ones who did know him stared and did not greet him. They might even have looked a little frightened of him. I saw one woman who looked that way, and she stepped on the gas as she drove past him. Then a big heavy Oldsmobile pulled up next to us and my father’s friend Vinnie Fratolino rolled down his window. “I got the air conditioner on, Lou,” Vinnie Fratolino said. Still, there was sweat on his massive face. My father leaned across me, so that our bodies were touching. He appeared glad that someone had stopped to greet him.

“What did they do to you, Lou?” Vinnie Fratolino asked. Behind him, the line of cars had stopped in the heat.

My father shrugged. “I had to quit. No other choice.” Now his hand was on my knee.

“Assholes,” Vinnie Fratolino said, and shook his head from side to side. “Excuse me, I should watch my language,” he said, noticing me. His head was large and doughy, like a man’s head in a cartoon. He seemed to have parts missing—vital lines and pockets—as if he’d been drawn lazily, all cheeks, with a big affronted expression pasted on.

“It’s all right,” my father said.

My father’s gratefulness seemed to make his skin warm. He looked alert and happy, but Vinnie Fratolino stared at him with mild alarm. “So what’d you come back for, clean out your desk?”

“No, I promised somebody a ride.”

Vinnie Fratolino nodded, then looked at me, and back to my father. “You need anything, Lou?”

“I’m fine,” my father answered. “Hey, you better go, you’re holding up the works.”

Vinnie Fratolino turned around and seemed to be noticing for the first time the cars behind him. He lifted his hand and rolled up the window.

“Nice guy,” my father said.

Before long, Bob Painter came out of the building behind the guard’s booth, walking with his lunch box. When he saw my father, he didn’t hurry, as I expected him to, but slowed down, and even stopped at one point to watch the cars going past. It was clear he’d have preferred no one see him get into the car with my father.

Finally, though, he had to. He sat heavily in the backseat and the car felt immediately full of him, his weight and his scent and his peculiar breathing. He sucked in air heavily, slurped it.

“You remember Bob, Luca?” my father asked.

Bob Painter’s brow was lowered. He seemed a little shamefaced, as though all power was on my side, and after we nodded to one another, he looked out the window.

“The Inca boy,” he said, and smiled in a crooked manner.

“Who spoke to you?” he asked my father.

“Just Vinnie, that’s all.”

There was a silence after that; it meant something.

Bob Painter had said to me, on the night of the cookout, that he lived in Woburn with his three little girls. There is a moment, before you know anything for sure, when you dare to imagine things: that we were going there, to Bob’s house, for dinner, after which we would drive to wherever my father lived now. Bob was his loyal friend, a buddy. The gathering of inferences was like a storm that would pass over us. My father’s life would be white and clean, a state of unspoken confusion and quiet.

The truth was, instead, that my father and Bob Painter lived together in a rooming house in the working-class section of our own town, a place I could have walked to, easily, on any of those endless summer afternoons of his absence. They had one room, twin beds. This was where they were taking me, this was the there my mother had been referring to. My father showed me around, the hall that smelled of disinfectant, the bathroom down the hall. As soon as we were in the room, Bob Painter sat in a chair and opened a beer, drank one after another, quietly, contemplatively, the sedateness of his behavior a kind of nod to my being here. On top of the bureau sat a bottle of Old Grand-Dad, but he did not touch it that night. My father kept an eye on him, then snuck me into the hall. “Don’t worry about Bob, Luca. We’re going out to eat. Then a movie. All right?”

It was what we did. In the diner, Bob Painter began to slur his words, and he looked at me, once or twice, angrily. My father kept his eyes on me, as if to reassure me of something—that Bob Painter’s behavior could not crack the fragile vessel we needed to create. It was like he was putting his hand on my brow and saying: Don’t consider this man.

We got to the Embassy early. My father remained alert through The Miracle Worker, sitting with his hat in his lap. Beside me, Bob Painter slept, snoring loudly. My father had to reach across me to nudge him awake. We drove back to the room in the car with the lights playing across our faces in a silence that seemed filled with my father’s satisfaction, as though just getting through this night were some kind of triumph.

In the room, as soon as he was in bed, while still in his clothes, Bob Painter began snoring.

My father snapped on a light. We were private, away from Bob. The light wouldn’t disturb him.

My father still had his hat on. We faced each other in chairs.

“How’s things at home?”

“Good.”

He nodded, searching for another topic. “You still go to the beach on Sundays?”

“Yes.”

“They say anything about me?”

“No.”

“I bet they do. I bet you’ve heard things.”

“Bobby’s sleeping with a girl,” I said.

It seemed strange to be saying it. It was the only thing I could think of. It also distracted us from the thing he’d just said.

He looked at me curiously, his eyes bright in the reflection of the lamp. “Is that right? How do you happen to know that?”

“George talks about it. On the beach.”

“In front of everybody?”

“No. Just me. We go away from everybody. George and Bobby and me.”

“They tell you that.”

“Yes.”

He rubbed his chin for a while.

“And does George sleep with a girl, too?”

“No.”

“Aha.”

He played with the chain of the lamp. “Don’t they think you’re a little young for that?”

I shrugged.

“Are you tired?”

“No.”

My father took my hand. He flattened out my palm, and moved his own finger against it, making the vague shape of the letter “W.”

“Do you know what I’m doing?”

He did it again. It was what Annie Sullivan had done in the movie, the painstaking secret language through which Helen Keller had finally received meaning.

“Remember?”

I nodded my head.

“Amazing.”

He shook his head.

“Listen, start bringing your glove on weekends, okay? We’ll play catch.”

He stared at me a moment, then he got up and made a bed for me on the floor.

3

In Ancient History, Mrs. Matheson (herself ancient, gold-plated, a figure seen as if through museum glass) divided us into pairs. A special project had been assigned, individually tailored for each pairing. “Luca Carcera, Andrew Weston,” she announced. “The Athenian character.”

We went to Andrew’s house, afternoons (his suggestion) to work on it. Andrew Weston lived with his mother on the upper floor of a two-family house on the other side of town, the poorer side, not far, in fact, from where my father lived with Bob Painter. It was a neighborhood of two- and three-family houses with postage-stamp yards, in the vicinity of the shuttered watch factory.

Andrew Weston’s mother sat at a large table pushed up to the window that caught the best light, with a pack of cigarettes (always, one was lit), an ashtray, and a stack of books. The table was full of plants, scraggly, half dead, but sometimes she would turn away from her book in order to push one further into the light, or to clip away a frond. She had long tawny hair she wore pulled close to her scalp, then hanging down in the back, a skeletal face that seemed always in motion. The books she read were the popular books of the time: Harold Robbins, Leon Uris, Written on the Wind. She read them all with a kind of annoyance, as if she were conducting a silent, impatient dialogue with the author. At any moment she might burst out with “Oh, that’s wrong,” or “That’s unworthy of you.”

Andrew did not treat her well. He was a small boy whose boner in the shower had astonished everyone. Any other boy would probably have had to leave school after an incident like that, but Andrew Weston managed to incorporate it into his persona. He was marked out, but he did not seem to care. His short hair flew up in the front into a dramatic stand of curls. In grammar school (the Westons had lived, briefly, near us), he had been a favorite of the girls, considered “cute,” called by the mothers “a young dreamboat,” but then he had made his transition, in the immense privacy of late childhood, and come out on the other side of it a friend of the girls, where the rest of us had made our lasting separation.

Within the confines of the top floor of the two-family house, he lorded it over his mother, barely acknowledging her as we entered the rooms. She glanced up with low expectations, her sharp features shrouded in smoke, caught between the cheap theatrics of her novels (even at twelve, I knew what was cheap and what was literature; John Steinbeck was literature, The Carpetbaggers was not) and the presence of two remote, silent boys who would give her, she seemed to know, very little. “The scholars,” she would always say upon our entrance. “And here I am, reading trash.”

From my first appearance, she looked upon me in a gauging, deeply focused way that let me know Andrew did not often bring friends home, and certainly not friends who were the epitome of regularity, such as I was in those days. “Who’s this?” she asked, and if I’d been older, I’d have read seductiveness in the “this.”