Recent History

For the first time, I was able to see beyond my father’s vision of this room, to what John was trying to do here. We were princes now, Bobby and George and me, but how did you go about being a prince? What did it mean for your daily life? I knew this: the book in my lap was something to be ashamed of. I knew vaguely but, still, enough what would be inside it: sex and more sex. George had given it to me because, for him, sex was easier than other things—easier for George than the books on his desk, or John’s new insistence that he be a “college man,” which we’d begun to hear for the first time.

A sound came from outside, but my reverie was deep enough that I did not get up to look until the sound had been going on a long time. At the base of John’s driveway, my father was lighting a cigarette and with his free hand throwing rocks. That is, he stopped to light the cigarette and then he threw the rocks. He looked calm and unperturbed, just as if he had stepped out to have a smoke, and it was only in the motion of his arm as he threw that I knew something was wrong. He was throwing the rocks very hard, very far, and with great concentration. He was trying to hit our house, across the way.

After a while, he stopped. He disappeared, walked into the dark. I could see the lit ash end of his cigarette and then nothing of him, but I suspected he had gone over to our house and was inspecting it, testing the floorboards and the beams the way he did, humming, all the while, one of the songs with which he consoled himself. “Teach Me Tonight.” “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.” I watched, and I held the book George had given me, and at that moment, though I didn’t know why, I wanted to fling the book across the room, to mimic my father’s gesture with the rocks.

After another little while, John came out in search of him. I saw John stop at the end of his driveway. He looked to both sides, exaggeratedly, like a man in a cartoon, and like the man in the cartoon, I suspected he would choose the wrong direction. I almost shouted, from the window, to set him straight. But he chose right. When he brought my father back, ten or so minutes later, it may have been me, reading into the scene, but John had his arm around my father’s shoulders, and I saw in those shoulders an immense resistance, as though John were leading him back toward a place he had decided, in the last ten minutes, he really didn’t want to go.

Like everything else, that image disappeared, covered over by another, and another. I was in the seventh grade, and I made my good marks. Luca Carcera, beloved of the teachers. In the winter there were lakes, frozen over for skating, and I had friends. Sometimes we stayed late, skating; the sky took on, around the departed sun, a shade of deep yellow that exists in the world only when you are twelve, and disappears after. My father arrived to pick us up and stood outside the car, bundled up. “Nobody drowned, huh?” he shouted. “Nobody fell in?”

Sometimes he brought his hockey stick and came down to the ice to show us how it was done. He’d played left wing at BC and he had wonderful speed and when he turned on the ice he managed a terrific little jumping movement. I would never be as good as he was, none of us would. “Your father,” they said, the boys who were my friends, breathless and in awe.

Afterward, he patted himself and found the pack of Pall Malls in his coat pocket and smoked one. Smoke came out of his mouth, and the smoke our breath made in the cold seemed a pure imitation. The car smelled of cigarettes and, once or twice, of the presence of someone else, a body that had recently been there. It was a poor-smelling, weathery body, whosever it had been, someone who did not dress well or have the personal habits of my father, and we covered it, my friends and I, packed in with our skates. It went away. I looked out the window and saw the crust of the snow and something that flashed across my mind went away. To entertain us, my father was singing.

In the evenings, we drove to Natick, to Framingham, to visit furniture showrooms, to move among the great empty sofas and easy chairs. Or else my parents huddled in the kitchen, planning the house. “Do you want this, Dorothy, or do you want that?” my father would ask, as they studied furniture catalogs. He was only slightly impatient, even indulgent at times. Sometimes they would retreat into Italian, tender when they did that, or else angry. In the adjacent dining room, I sat writing a play about Cortés, “The Conquest of Mexico,” my assignment for school. In the scene where Cortés faces Montezuma, I had him shout, “Do you want this, or do you want that?” Meanwhile, my parents, in English, moved toward agreements: a sectional in off-white, a beige easy chair, a round kitchen table with teak chairs.

In April, we moved into the new house. The day had a ceremonial quality, measured and carefully paced, like a presentation scene in the movies, the birth of Ramses. My father held my mother’s elbow at the threshold, as if they were about to step into a lake and he was attentive to the chill she might feel. With his hands in his pockets, in his best camel’s hair coat, he inspected the rooms and nodded. The rooms were large and full of light; on the walls, the textured grass cloth shone. Before us lay a new life, shimmering and empty as the model kitchens and dining rooms in the furniture showrooms. Moving trucks had preceded us, and the movers had made mistakes. A couple of chairs, placed in the wrong room, had to be dragged across the carpet. The carpet itself was thick enough so that my father, lying down in the living room, could move his arms and leave the impress of an angel’s wings. He pulled me down and we tussled and only in a region far back in his eyes did I see signs of effort.

Later, Uncle John came. He wore an expensive raincoat and his hair was wet. He had a cigar in his mouth and one for my father. He always took a shower in the middle of the day because he sweated so much at work. His midday freshness was legendary. My mother was unpacking dishes in the kitchen, my father had gone to lie down in their room. For this, I had been given the day off from school.

“Everything good?” John called to my mother. My father came out of the bedroom at the sound, his hair mussed and standing up at the back of his head, still in the camel’s hair coat.

“Going back to work?” John asked.

“Yes.”

“So. Moved in.” John’s hands were in his pockets, he rocked back on his feet.

He offered the extra cigar to my father, but my father just looked at it. It had a pink wrapper on it, so we knew it was left over from when Emma had the baby.

“Yes. Moved in,” my father said. It sounded grim coming out of his mouth, and John stared at him a moment, annoyed.

“You?” my father asked. “Going back?”

“I’ll have a cup of coffee first, with Dorothy.”

We all gathered at the bay window to watch my father drive away. John’s eyes stayed on him a long time.

When my mother took the roast out of the oven at six, he was still not home. We were used to seeing him at 5:30, and there was less of a drive from Vanderbruek to here. At 6:30 she put the roast back in the oven to warm. Outside the window, I saw some boys cut across the lots, disappear into the frames of houses. Meola, Semenza; I knew the names already, and who would live in each of the uncompleted houses, and when I saw these boys, I didn’t think they were the ones who would live there. They were just boys looking, gawking, and I waited for them to come out.

At seven o’clock, the lights of my father’s car came around the bend and into the driveway. He entered, excited, holding a bottle of wine. “My new house,” he said, like a boy.

We ate in the kitchen; my father kept reaching up to play with the chandelier that hung over the table. “Look at that,” he kept saying, and flicked the dangling crystals of the chandelier they had chosen, one frozen winter night at Jordan’s. We had not had a better dinner in a long time, and I kept wishing that I had homework, that I had gone to school that day, so I could feel now the exquisite pang of having to leave a scene so sweet.

That night they made love. I lay in bed listening. It was a windy night and there were tree branches that tapped against the house. My father had come into my room and stood in the dark, thinking I was asleep. He had leaned against the wall with his hands in his pockets, and I didn’t think I was wrong in assuming what he was feeling was pride. Then he had gone in and made love to my mother, but the sounds tonight filled me with terror. Though I ought to have been used to them, tonight they seemed extreme, as though he were doing something to her beyond the usual. When I heard my mother cry out in that ripped-open way of hers, I went into their bedroom and stood in the doorway. I tried to fool myself by pretending what I was doing wasn’t conscious—that I was sleepwalking—and thus excusable. When my father noticed me there, he made a gasp. Then he said “goddammit.” He rose and I expected to be hit, though he had rarely done that. I had seen him naked many times but not like this.

On the bed, my mother’s head was turned against the pillow.

My father tried to overcome his anger by taking my hand. “Never never never,” he said on the way to my bedroom. “Do you understand, Luca? Never interrupt like that.”

He tucked me in, exaggeratedly, almost secretly gentle. “You’re scared?”

I said nothing. His face came very close. “New house. Your mother scares you, making those sounds?”

It was safe to nod, and he smiled, lightly and delicately. “Luca, that’s the sound of happiness you hear. That’s all.”

He went away then. I drew the covers tight, and heard their attempts to discipline themselves, to keep quiet. The trees that would need trimming made their scratching noise against the outer walls and I thought about what my father had said.

One night early in summer, he brought home from Vanderbruek a man named Bob Painter. Bob Painter was a good deal larger than my father, tall and gruff-looking, with a round red face. He worked on the grounds crew. My father made sure we understood Bob was one of the foremen.

Bob Painter’s effect on my father was a little startling to watch. He made this neat, taciturn man, who was always telling other people to temper their effusions, himself effusive, wanting to show off. My mother and I were both very quiet at the beginning. We were watching a man we thought we knew behave as we had never seen him before. He showed Bob Painter around our house, and, pointing things out, laughed at things that didn’t seem funny. He laughed in a high and irritating way, and there were times, doing that, when he seemed to be dismissing us, and our whole lives, for the benefit of a stranger.

We sat in the backyard, on the flagstone patio. My father cooked steaks on the grill. Bob Painter was uncomfortable being here, I could tell. To my mother’s question, he said he had three little girls, they lived in Woburn. Seven, nine, and eleven. “Like clockwork, we had ’em,” he said to my mother. “Every two years.” He was like a man you would see in an Army movie, a black-and-white one, a minor figure, the sergeant who loses his temper, gets in a knife fight, dies. Only at the end would you feel sympathy for him. I kept waiting for him to disappear, become as unimportant to our lives as he would be to that movie. His big round face had cracks in it, fissures. His cheeks were immense, long and drooping and marked by the outlines of broken veins. His face looked like it had been frozen in reaction to some sort of trouble. He had brought a six-pack of Schlitz beer, and each time he opened one of the cans he looked like he was in pain. He offered one to Mother, and she surprised me by taking it.

Did she flirt with him? I don’t think so. But as it grew dark, she began calling him Bob in a familiar way that irritated me terribly. “Another Schlitz, Bob?” she asked, though he was clearly in charge of that area, holding them between his legs. He had an orange fringe of hair that swept back off his crown.

“My brother-in-law,” my father announced, turning the steaks, “had an idea, Bob. This hill is going to be full of guineas.”

He had never said the word “guineas” before. Perhaps he said it at work. The light was falling, and you could see where the lawn was starting to come up, shoots of green still vulnerable to our footsteps. My father looked at the shrubs ringing the patio and seemed regretful, perhaps knowing he’d gone too far. On the days when he had planted the shrubs, it had been as though nothing was more urgent and important than to make things grow here.

Bob Painter was again on the verge of speaking. Then suddenly he appeared to be embarrassed, thinking better of his own impulse. He sat quietly in the chair. He turned to me at last. “You got a room there, Luca?”

I said I did.

“Can I see it?”

“Sure,” my father answered for me.

Behind me, in the hallway, Bob Painter’s step made a heavy tread. His breathing, too, was heavy. There was not much to show him in the room. I thought maybe he had asked to see it just to get away from the uncomfortable scene below, but I was embarrassed, because this called attention to me in a way I didn’t want. Like George’s room, across the street, mine was stripped down: bed, bureau, desk, heavy dark rug. Over my desk, however, was a print my teacher had given me, after the successful completion of “The Conquest of Mexico,” of an Aztec warrior. The warrior had a strong jaw, and a flaming burst of feathers grew out of his head. In his arms, he held a prone woman, a woman who had been overpowered somehow. He was, for me, a hopelessly romantic figure, and in Bob Painter’s presence, I found I wanted to turn him to the wall.

Bob Painter stared at the print, though, with great interest. “What is this, an Inca?” he asked, and breathed in his funny, sucking way.

I corrected him.

He went on staring at the picture, then at me. “I have three daughters,” he said finally. “You’ll like them.”

But why should I ever know them? I conceived for him in that instant a disgust so strong that whole sections of the evening are blocked out for me. All I remember after is wanting him to go, wanting the course of our lives, with its secrets and its blurred-over areas, to resume. We ate steak. The light withdrew. I went in to watch television. I listened to the sound of them on the patio, my mother’s voice, now drunk, the loudest. I imagined my father again using the word “guinea,” and I wanted my mother to lift a gun and shoot Bob Painter. Or me, I could do it. I could take an ax and finish the job. But my mother made her loud noises and then her murmuring assenting ones, and the men’s voices rode under hers. It was like they were going away from her secretly, under cover of night, throwing their voices like ventriloquists, so that she could not know how far away from her they already were.

It was a Wednesday in July when he finally didn’t come home. At first, it seemed only another of his latenesses. My mother kept his supper warm, we watched television together. When, the next day, we still had not heard from him, I thought she should call his work. I understood, though, that even if I suggested it, my mother wouldn’t act. For an hour in the morning I threw a rubber ball against the side of the house, and caught it.

By afternoon, the waiting had become too much to endure, so I took the trolley into Boston. I was old enough to do that then, usually with friends, today, for the first time, alone. I knew my mother wouldn’t know or care. I explored the streets of Boston, looking for a movie, finally settled on Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man at the Saxon. I remembered nothing of it afterward, save for one thing, one detail.

I took the trolley home and walked to the Hill, then slowed my pace, certain that when I got to the top his car would be in the driveway. When it wasn’t, I shut off a light in my mind and went and got my ball and threw it against the house. I must have made too much noise; there was a tapping at the window. Uncle John was there. He motioned me inside.

I remembered then what it was about the movie I’d just seen, the single scene that had lingered. The boy, Nick Adams, comes upon a boxer, punch-drunk, wasted, in the woods. Paul Newman played the boxer, and with him was a Negro. When the boy comes upon them, they share some melted ham fat, and then the boxer becomes excited. Something in the boxer cannot be contained. So the Negro knocks him out. Taps him, and he’s unconscious. That was wonderful, that small and vivid display of power and control.

I loved that scene.

2

By August of that year, the houses on the end of our street, and Uncle John’s, began filling in. Something was evident right away. A new kind of person had come here.

Uncle John had said the names, “Meola, Semenza,” as though he were describing a delicate, expensive purchase he’d just made. But when they moved in, they ignored us.

In late summer, they began giving parties for one another. The rows of Cadillacs and Buicks began coming up the Hill. There were four houses on the end of our street, facing one another, and two at the end of Uncle John’s. At first, on the nights of those parties, Uncle John would stand out on his lawn, watering hose in hand. Perhaps they’d made a mistake, forgot he lived there. He stopped short of waving to the well-dressed people going to the party at Meola’s. His big house took on the appearance of a gatehouse at the entrance to an estate.

The sons of Meola and Semenza were also different from us. They played on the high school football team and wore, in their front yards, letter jackets, purple and yellow. They were compact, black-haired boys, guards, centers. They drove their own cars, too, and some nights brought their girlfriends up to the Hill. From where I watched, from my room or from the front yard (the grass had grown enough to begin mowing), they seemed to drive with an extraordinary calm. Beside them, their girlfriends, girls who wore their hair in “flips,” and who were cheerleaders for the football team, seemed to have all the energy. The girls moved, in the passenger seats of those cars, talking and gesturing with their hands, and when they parked in front of the boys’ houses, they waited for the door to be opened, and then moved inside, sometimes half-running, always followed by the boys, who moved more slowly.

It had been, in all the ways that counted, an odd summer. No one had bothered to tell me why my father had left. His disappearance, however, had been sudden and absolute. Apparently, he had not needed to take his clothes with him, wherever he had gone, because they still hung in his closet, and because it was summer and I was home all the time, I knew he didn’t come to retrieve anything, unless he came at night when I was asleep.

I still had my old friends, and sometimes, after supper, I would get on my bike and ride to Candace Road to play in the Wiffle ball games. But the old neighborhood held no great interest. Coming home, I would get off my bike at the bottom of the Hill, walk slowly up, and approach the houses, which had their lights on, like a spy.

In their backyard, Bobby and George might be sitting at their picnic table, talking, and though they laughed frequently, I began to feel their diminishment, how they were coming to understand that they were not like the sons of Meola and Semenza, and yet not thugs either, in the way they had once been, in the way it had once been all right for them to be. Instead, for a time they were hiding, just as I was.

Then I would walk down to the other end of the street to look at the newer houses, in which there seemed to be a heightened sense of life: more lights were on, the football team sometimes gathered, or else the sons of Meola and Semenza were there alone, flipping cards to one another under the extravagant chandeliers hanging over their dining room tables.

There were girls, too: Meola had a daughter my age, in my class at school, though we never spoke. Her friends came over and they sat in the backyard. I stood in the dark with my bike, and listened to the high murmur they made. They spoke in the same language my family spoke, but it was full of hesitations and conjunctions, mysterious nuances that made it seem a language all its own.

And here is the essential thing, the thing I was most drawn to: when a man, the owner of a house, would come out the front door, and stand in the lighted entrance, it was as though he were surveying something. Nothing need be going on physically for the world to seem alive and full of movement. The men on Candace Road who would come out to watch us play Wiffle ball were not unhappy men, but this sort of proprietary moment was not possible for them. A curtain had been lifted for me, I suppose, certain important divisions in the world were made clear. And though it probably wouldn’t have affected me the same way at any other point in my life, it did then.

Finally I would go home. My mother would always be watching television in the room we called the family room. She watched with one lamp on, and, frequently, with one arm slung behind her head.

“Where did you go?” she wanted to know.

“To Candace Road.”

My mother did not understand Wiffle ball or my growing penchant for silent observation, so that was all I said.

“Want to watch TV with me?”

I would have to say yes, then sit with her awhile, though nothing on the square box in front of us interested me half so much as what was going on outside. I was watching only to be polite, because she had asked me, because I suspected she needed company.

I allotted her half an hour, then I went to my room. In summer, the windows were open, the breezes came in. I took off all my clothes and lay on my bed in the dark. Sometimes a car drove by, or there were voices, a boy and a girl. They spoke low, and I listened in such a way that even simple words—words like “No” or “Come in”—stayed with me a long time afterward.

On Sundays we still had the ritual of the beach to anchor us in the old world. The family still gathered at Nahant. We parked illegally. We carried picnic baskets of food, big coolers. We set up four blankets in a row. No mention was ever made of my father, but I could see, in the behavior of my Aunts Carmela and Lucy, a notation made. Emma was always protective of my mother, but Carmela and Lucy looked at her in a way now that suggested they were not unhappy at the turn of events.

On the blanket, eating her food, I don’t believe my mother noticed this, or if she did, she pretended not to. She smiled as if nothing had happened to her, it was all right, being left didn’t make such a difference. I asked her to come into the water with me. I would have preferred to swim alone, but I couldn’t bear to leave her with them.

In the water, sometimes, she became a girl again. She told me how, when she was growing up, she left her sisters to the chores, took her towel down to the local pool, and swam all morning. “I was a fish, Luca,” she said. “My sisters had to do all the work.” So I saw, maybe, how things had once been, and why her sisters had looked at her the way they’d looked at her on the night of John’s party.

When she came out of the water, Carmela and Lucy were usually lying back beside their husbands, often with one thigh draped over the men’s legs. It seemed, since my father’s desertion, they had become more interested in their husbands; they ran their legs up the fleshy thighs of Tony and Mike in ways they never had before. So I tried to distract my mother. I told her to watch out for crabs, to look down, down into the water. I felt all my stiffness and formality, as though I had become a kind of guide for her. In my hyperawareness of the intense sensuality of the world, it became an imperative to mask that sensuality, to stand as a barrier between her and it.

There was another side to my mother that seemed to come out exclusively on the phone. I was home a lot, so I heard. I lay in my room and read. I threw a rubber ball against the back wall of the house. I was too young for a job. My one task was to mow the lawn.