Recent History

At first it seemed to work, too. My father’s initial sight of Andrew caused his mouth to close in on itself, his lips to thin with uncertainty. We had had to get off the bus to go to Andrew’s house to fetch him that first Friday night. From there it was an easy enough walk to the rooming house. Andrew was waiting for us on the front steps of his house, holding a large shoe box on his lap. He did not want to have his mother take any part in this, I knew that about him, knew how he came at things sideways, crab-walked through life so as not to seem committed to anything, while all the while settled and certain about selected things in a way that made me envious. When I had invited him to spend the weekend with my father and me, he’d sifted the invitation through some recessed part of his brain, taken a long time answering. I had almost given up when I heard the words “I suppose” come out of him.

Now he came toward us, his loping, sidelong walk that was—I had learned from other boys to form the words, though they applied only to Andrew, never to my father—a faggot’s walk. My father saw, and I watched my father seeing, which is why it is stupid and dishonest for me to say I didn’t know what I was doing.

Nor did Andrew finally escape his mother. She came out after we had started off. Andrew turned around, as if expecting this from her, and I did, too. She had come out to get a look at my father. She called to him. “Thank you for doing this!”

And my father shouted: “No problem!”

She said, “I hope he’s no trouble.”

“I’m sure he won’t be. We’ll have him back tomorrow.”

“Your father lives where?” she had asked me, when Andrew had first presented the invitation to her. The arrangement, the course of my weekends, had fascinated her. But now they stood waving to one another, like any suburban parents, as if beyond the waving and the calling out of questions, they each connected to lives so ordinary and conventional as not to bear pondering.

Bob and my father both immediately knew Andrew. Their eyes went directly to the long and girlish swoop of his hair, his odd walk, and also to the fact that his eyes did not meet theirs when he reached his hand out to shake. There was a subtle kind of recognition in all this. Chastened by the events of the night when he’d taken a ride home from Wellsie, Bob made sure now he took the regular ride, the one from Ed Kennedy, so he was waiting for us in the room when Andrew Weston arrived. Things seemed to be settling dangerously, between my father and Bob, into a more conventional domestic routine.

Bob still drank, of course. When we got to the room, there was a line of empty Schlitz cans on the table, and my father eyed them, silently counting.

“Well,” Bob said, at his first sight of Andrew. Then he glanced at me as if there was something he did not understand, something he was mad at me for. And then something, oddly enough, that he pitied me for.

That night it was Birdman of Alcatraz at the Embassy. First, though, was the diner, the awkward series of questions that Andrew deflected with the same swift expertness with which he dressed after gym. None of us was ever to see Andrew’s naked skin again after the incident with the hard-on (he had been excused from having to shower, allowed into the locker room to change ten minutes before the rest of us), and my father and Bob were not to see any of Andrew either: he seemed to dodge through the empty spaces of the meal like a man dodging rain. I was not helpful. I volunteered only that we had worked together on a school project, a project about Athens. For Bob, this was an opening. “Oh, Athens,” he said. “My daughter Maureen would be able to give you an interesting discussion about that. She’s a smart one, too.”

I caught my father staring at me across the table more than once that night, with a kind of grimness riding just in back of his eyes, as if the notion of my becoming like Andrew Weston—or like him—was more than he could bear.

“Did you bring your glove?” he asked me, with quiet seriousness.

“What?”

“For a catch.”

“No.”

He stared at me a moment, not unkindly, but allusive in a way he could be. “I told you to bring it. Remember?”

I ate my meat loaf.

“Do you play? Andrew?”

“Hmm?”

“Ball?”

“Oh. No.”

We must have driven him crazy.

I had seen sometimes, in brief moments, how vested my father had been in my perfection, how even something so small as my ability to play ball well had been enough once to rip all the leave-taking energy out of him. Somehow he’d expected, no matter what he’d done, that certain things in me would stay the same. So I knew, or sensed, that the way to get back at him was to fall from perfection, to fall as far as I could.

At the end of the meal, when my father was in the men’s room and Bob Painter had stepped outside, to stand on the curb with a toothpick in his mouth, Andrew and I had a moment, the two of us at loose ends within the diner. My father had handed me a bunch of change to leave on the table for a tip, and after I’d done that, I stared down the line of booths at Andrew. He was waiting at the door, looking at me as though he was trying to probe—it had become habitual by now—who I might be. It wasn’t the sort of moment that I expected or wanted very much. It made things between us briefly, uncomfortably real. I wanted to make a joke then, to remind him of the things we liked to laugh about in his room—diarrhea, pustules—but I knew that wouldn’t work right here and now. Andrew had a way of shrugging with his eyes, and that was what he did then. But I had a moment of believing it was all wrong, that I had stepped into something I wasn’t going to get away from unscathed. Andrew was storing things up in a way I could only guess at.

Nor did the evening turn jolly after that. During Birdman of Alcatraz, Bob Painter kept falling asleep, and snoring. My father would nudge him, and Bob, awakened, would watch the movie as though it pained him, somehow, to try to comprehend the life of Robert Stroud, the convicted killer, who remained, for the movie’s nearly three hours, unredeemed, and unrelieved of the burden of loneliness. Even his birds were taken away from him, midway through, and all that was left was the sweaty faces of the other prisoners and the guards, and the white sunless air of the cells. Under the lights of Main Street, afterward, and on the bus returning to the rooming house, we seemed not to be able to shake the movie’s unsettling truth, that it was possible, unlike Uncle John and perhaps even my father and Bob believed, that life didn’t finally yield toward goodness and forgiveness and the triumph of the human spirit, but, instead, might very well end as it had for Burt Lancaster, in the transference of the human body from one solitude to another.

I caught a certain look that night between Bob and my father. They were sitting on opposite sides of the bus, my father and Andrew on one side, me next to Bob on the other. Both men seemed thoughtful, and both were, for a moment, idly staring into space. Then Bob looked up and gazed into my father’s face with a look I was growing used to, a look of longing and helplessness, eloquent and deeply private at once. My father returned Bob’s look. I cannot say exactly what his face did, but ice entered my heart as I looked at him. It was as if that look were telling me, in no way I can quite describe, that though he did not have the capacity for emotional nakedness that Bob Painter had, he still felt as deeply and harshly and intensely as Bob, that they were alike in some important way.

Moments like that made me doubt that I could win my father back, that he was as close to coming back as I had tried to convince myself. And then something else happened to make me feel keenly the press of time, the need for something—if it was to happen at all—to happen very soon.

A few weeks before Thanksgiving, after another of the futile Thursday night meetings with George, I found Uncle John waiting for me at the bottom of the steps leading to his front door, with what I immediately detected was a new, troubled look on his face.

He had his hat in his hand and he was tapping it against his knees. “All finished?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Success?”

Tonight he didn’t even wait for me to answer.

It was cold out, and John wanted first to know if I was warm enough. This was all preparation for something. He led me past my house, as usual.

“You like it here, Luca?” he asked. But he seemed anxious; there was nothing casual in the question.

I said I did.

“You think we did right?”

It was an odd question; of course they’d done right. My father’s desertion changed nothing. The neighborhood was perfect. I tried to say all this in silence because John still cowed me out of words, though I believed he understood how enthralled I was by the neighborhood.

“I’ll tell you one thing, though, that we did wrong. We didn’t get the right architect. We got Zambetti, who we knew, and he was not …” John had stopped, not at the end of the street, but before Meola’s house. There, he lit his cigar and waved it through the air, forming a wide, half-disparaging, half-envious circle. “Not for houses like this, anyway. You notice how much foundation he left showing, in your father’s house, in mine?”

I had. It was a sore spot. It diminished us, the amount of gray at the base.

“You see how in these others, the brick and stone, they go all the way down to the base? That’s important. That’s a neater look. But what did we know?”

I did not move on, but stared at Meola’s perfect lawn, which the Meola boys had not been expected to mow. Bonica, the landscaper, brought his men once a week.

“These are all, all these men, of the professional class.” He sounded the old theme, pointed down the street, his fingers landing, in my foreshortened view, on each of the houses in turn. “Dentist. Lawyer. Cincotta’s a … what? A tax man. Like your father. College man. A professional man knows these things. Me, I’m learning from the ground up. I’ve got a strong back and a weak brain.”

He chuckled. “You cold?”

“No. I’m okay.”

He paused, a long and significant silence, so that I might have known something important would follow.

“But it was still good for you, to come here, to have this time.” His words trailed off, as if he understood he need not make them heard; they were for himself.

My mother and I began, soon after, taking rides at night, with a big-toothed realtor named Mrs. Chase. My mother settled on a rental house on Hobbs Road, a small house set within a grid of nearly identical houses, and one in which our bedrooms would butt directly up against each other. Our own house went up for sale, and was sold quickly, at a large profit. Still I retained the last-ditch belief that all these events could be forced to give way.

My thirteenth birthday fell on a Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Andrew was with us again. The movie that night was The Manchurian Candidate. Watching it, it occurred to me that I was studying six subjects in school, and then a seventh at the movies. All the movies of 1962 were about the same thing, with minor variations. Laurence Harvey wore a beatific expression throughout much of The Manchurian Candidate, as if nowhere in his imagination was there such a thing as resistance to the life that had been thrust upon him, the life of an assassin, condemned to kill even the girl he loved. He might have been Burt Lancaster tending to his birds, for all the hope that existed in those black-and-white images. I watched these movies and I watched Bob Painter watching them. As his drinking began to lessen, he stayed awake more. He was more reactive in his movie watching than my father. He made noises that called attention to himself, and I sensed in these small grunts of affirmation and denial a certain recognition and a fight against the recognition, as if, in spite of himself, he kept waiting for the redemptive moment these movies so rarely provided. Give him a happy ending, he might have been saying, in the grumbling silence with which he watched. For Chrissake, give him something. The movies of 1962 resisted him, unremitting in the bleakness of their conclusions, with only the occasional handclasp of a man and a woman—Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh at the conclusion of The Manchurian Candidate—to indicate a belief that some compromise might be made with life, a dollop of pleasure or warmth squeezed out of the surrounding frost.

There was a reason Bob Painter may have been paying attention to the movie that night in a different way: his daughters were coming tomorrow. Mrs. Painter had at last agreed to his demand, would leave them to his care for a day. It had been five months. What exactly had precipitated the change in Mrs. Painter was a mystery, but tonight he had forsworn drinking. Fidgety in the room, snappish in the diner, he settled down only for the movie. My father gave Andrew and me to know that Bob was nervous. “These girls of mine, they’re everything,” Bob said. But if they were everything, why was he living with my father, when he could have been with them? That paradox, unspoken, rode with me all night.

In the morning, he was anxious, too. He drank cup after cup of coffee, shaved, lathered on Aqua Velva, stared out the window, and asked perpetually as to the time.

They were due at 10:00. At 9:45, Bob went outside, stood on the sidewalk to wait. He smoked a cigarette, paced, and from the window my father and I watched him. Andrew, in his sleeping bag on the floor, slept in.

At five minutes after ten, the car pulled up. A green Chrysler. Bob Painter crushed his cigarette underfoot. He stood with his back to us, but his back was expressive of desire, and his hands hovered just to the sides of his hips. I stared at the back of his head, the way the red hair curled and matted against his red neck, damp with sweat, though it was November. When his wife pulled up, I noticed he couldn’t quite look at her face, nor she at his, but something was suggestive of the mood of their past days: the big, boxy, overused car, the slapdash parking job Mrs. Painter did. They had lived in chaos.

The two younger girls rushed out of the car, and Bob clasped them. The youngest, wearing glasses, hugged her father’s leg and stared up at him. The middle girl was not so expressive, but wanted to be. Maureen, the oldest, the genius, Bob’s pride, had not yet emerged from the car.

He went to the door and leaned in. Maureen was resisting, we saw that even from our perch at the window. Bob opened the car door and gestured with his arm toward the sidewalk, where the two younger girls waited. Mrs. Painter was not a clear figure to us. She sat behind the steering wheel in dark glasses—heavy, we could see that, with thick black hair, and pale—but she had turned, and stared at her estranged husband, her cheeks sagging somewhat, accusatory in her determination not to be his advocate in the matter of Maureen.

Finally the reluctant Maureen did emerge. All the girls had red hair, but Maureen’s was the reddest. She made a dramatic figure there on the street, with her long hair and her size—at twelve, she was nearly as tall as Bob—along with her extreme paleness and the air of resistance even a stranger might have been able to read. Bob did not touch her, but he said some words. She did not nod her head, but seemed to have made some kind of agreement—temporary, conditional—nonetheless. Bob dipped his head back inside the passenger window, reached a final agreement with his wife. She drove off. With the little girls close by his body, and Maureen dragging slightly behind, Bob approached the house.

We moved from the window and took on our postures of waiting.

“Here they are!” Bob announced, as soon as he was through the door. “Aren’t they wonderful?”

My first notion was that, in presenting them to my father, Bob was showing off some previously undisclosed part of himself. The little girls were shy and stuck close by him. Bob placed his hands on the sides of their heads. “Girls, this is my friend Lou Carcera. Lou, these are my girls. This one here’s Patricia. And the little one’s Jane.”

My father stepped forward, the polite and formerly competent man who had smashed their lives. He shook both their hands.

“Maureen, come on inside,” Bob insisted.

Maureen hovered in the doorway, taller it seemed, paler and more mature than she had appeared from the window.

“And this is Maureen.”

Andrew was still on the floor in his sleeping bag. This was where she chose to look.

“That there,” Bob said, “is Luca’s friend Andy, Maureen. You’ll like him. He’s smart as you, almost. This here is Lou, and Lou’s son, Luca, who’s just a year older than you, Maureen. He might be almost as smart, too. But we’re not sure. He doesn’t say too much.”

It was the first indication I’d received that Bob expected—even wanted—something more than I’d given. Maureen remained in the doorway.

“I’ve been telling him all about you,” Bob said.

She was too good for us; that was what I thought. Andrew and I could be in this room, it matched us in enough ways, but not her, she was above it. Bob stared at her, waiting for her to make the transition, and when it seemed she wouldn’t, he smiled apologetically at my father. “What do you think of this one’s hair?” he asked, placing his hand on Jane’s springy curls.

“That’s curly hair,” my father said.

“We don’t know where she got it,” Bob said. “We suspect the milkman.”

He smiled hard, as if pushing the joke toward my father. Andrew had begun to stir on the floor.

“Get up, Andy, we’ve got a day planned.” Only Bob called Andrew “Andy.” “It’s Luca’s birthday, by the way, Maureen,” Bob said.

She lifted her eyes toward me then, for the first time.

“Yesterday,” I announced, in apology.

That was all. Her eyes went from me to Andrew, who rose halfway and moved his hair away from his face. She took him in, then stared at me again briefly, as if now she knew something about me. Still, the mask of absence remained on her.

“You’ll all be great friends,” Bob Painter said.

The plan was to ride in two cabs to a large wooded park on the Belmont line. We stopped at a grocery to get cold cuts and rolls. My father sat with Andrew and me in one cab. Bob Painter and his daughters were in the other.

I sensed a stiffness in my father that day. There had been no birthday present, but that was understandable, I knew he was experiencing financial troubles, and I thought I knew something else as well. His distracted state felt familiar to me, the state he went into when he was close to action. It was the way he had been in the days before his departure from home—wearing a faraway look, clearly no longer with us. Now that same state might lead to the opposite action. At least, that was what I hoped. We rode, and he had his hand on my knee, massaging gently, as though maybe he wasn’t even aware he was doing that, and I remember feeling happy, certain about what was about to happen. I didn’t know the rules of houses, but I suspected even after you sold one you could get it back if you changed your mind. Andrew was on the other side of my body, like a thing that had attached to me, so that when my father looked at me now, I knew he had to see two things, and I knew, also, that this made it difficult for him, a goad to return to a place from which he could guide me away from the undesirable.

We met up on the curb and Bob led us into the woods. Somewhere there were picnic tables, he thought he knew where. “I remember a beautiful spot in here,” Bob said, but he seemed uncertain, and kept checking on my father, as if he, too, had picked up on the detachment I had noticed in the cab.

“I guess this’ll have to do,” Bob said finally, giving up when we were in the middle of the woods, in a sunny clearing, with no picnic tables in sight. “We can spread ourselves out on the ground. Otherwise we’d have to go back. I guess I’m lost. You girls mind that?”

Of course the little ones didn’t, and of course Maureen did. She stood at a distance from us and accepted nothing from her father.

“You have to eat, Maureen,” Bob called.

“I’m not hungry,” she said finally. Her voice was low, deeper than that of any twelve-year-old I knew.

Bob went on eating then, with his gaze turned inward, rising out of this every once in a while only to look at my father, and then at Maureen, like two polarities he could not, for the life of him, bring together.

We dispersed after lunch. Andrew and I were sent to push the little ones on a set of swings we’d passed on the way there. Maureen followed, walking ten or so feet behind us. While we pushed the little girls, Maureen sat on a bench, staring at the ground, playing with her hair.

“Miss Superior,” Andrew had begun to call her, under his breath.

I stared at her a long time.

“Miss Superior won’t speak to us.”

In the afternoon it got warm, and it was hot for us, pushing the little girls.

“Don’t you girls want to spend some time with your father?” Andrew asked.

They stared at us like we were curiosities.

“Give us a higher push,” the smaller one, Jane, said.

Finally, though, even they got tired and went and sat with Maureen. When they were all huddled together, I could see maybe how things were in Woburn, in Bob Painter’s absence, a little world closing in on itself, female and long-cheeked and with its own rules and intonations, complete enough so that I wondered how Bob Painter had ever fit in at all.

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