Cindy handed me a cup of coffee. “Is she out of her tiny mind?” she said.
It’s exactly what I had told Mike Riordan when I picked Robert up after he’d been held in after school because of what Mike called “a verbal altercation” with the despised Jonathan Green, who had said that the New York Yankees were a bunch of losers. “We’ve done some talking about keeping your temper and agreeing to disagree,” Mike had said, handing over Robert’s backpack, trying not to look at me, or me at him, the horrible see-and-slide we’d both done with our eyes ever since we’d slept together. And Mike and I had had to agree to disagree about the genealogy lesson with which Mrs. Bernsen proposed to galvanize the fifth grade during the waning weeks of the school year, a lesson that might have made sense when she’d started teaching thirty years before but today was as perilous as walking down the center of Route 18. What would little Hillary Thompson, who stuttered like a jackhammer, do with her two stepfathers and their five collective children? What about Brittany McLeod, who had been adopted from Paraguay and was as small and dark as her parents, now divorced, each remarried, were big and fair?
“She says that this always gives the class a lift,” Mike said, shrugging. “All I can tell you is every year I get complaints, and every year I hear afterward that it worked out fine.”
“She’s out of her mind,” I said.
There was no spring in central Florida, just as there had been no real winter, no hiding the ungainly edges of its strip malls and ranch houses beneath the white hillocks of snow that lent charm to even the most charmless Northeastern town in the months that seemed to stretch endlessly between Christmas and Easter (or, as Mrs. Levitt informed me when I complained about the lack of seasons, between Hanukkah and Pesach). The change of seasons might touch the tired foliage in the farm fields and the shades of green on the development lawns, but on the narrow streets with their yards of yellow-white gravel and their struggling shrubs where I lived and worked, the seasons were visible only in the displays in the store windows, the green of Christmas giving way to the red of Valentine’s Day and the purple of Easter and now the pink of Mother’s Day. Robert walked to the strip and bought me a box of candy and a stuffed bear holding a balloon that said I Love You. Cindy made lasagna, but Mrs. Manford couldn’t come, had stomach flu or some such. “Thank God it didn’t happen the day after, or my dad would have sworn it was my cooking,” Cindy said.
The next day Robert had no school, some teacher’s conference or another, and he went with me to visit Mrs. Levitt. The television was on, as it always was, and the noon news featured a story about a police shootout in the Bronx, four officers dead and two wounded, the greatest carnage in twenty years for the New York City Police Department. As though still corded together my boy and I sank down side by side on the sofa and leaned toward the television, as though, face-to-face, it could tell us more than the sketchy story a woman in a bright red suit and matching lipstick was reading from a TelePrompTer. We didn’t have cable in our apartment, couldn’t afford it, but the Castros did, and Robert knew to flip to other news channels. For an hour we waited, watched, as though we were those people I’d seen so often in the public areas of the hospital, mouths agape, half-asleep in molded chairs, waiting for the doctor to bring them news. Finally there were names, and we sank back, exhausted. I put my arm around his shoulder.
“You know people who are police officers in New York?” Mrs. Levitt said softly, placing another cup of tea in front of me. “Family maybe?” And Robert looked into my face with fear and yearning, too, and I squeezed his shoulder.
“We have friends in the department,” I said. “None of them were hurt.”
“I’m glad Daddy’s not dead,” Robert said as we began walking home.
“Me, too,” I said. “Really. I’m really happy that he’s okay.”
“Is he okay?” Robert said. “Do you know he’s okay?”
“You heard the news.”
“But I mean really okay, like every day.”
“I hope so,” I said.
How many times had I wished Bobby would die? I lost count years ago. It was my biggest fear when he was first a street cop that the phone would ring, that the chaplain would come to the door, that I would have to hear those bagpipes again that I’d heard wailing at his father’s funeral, that all I’d have left was a piss-poor pension and his badge in the bottom of my jewelry box. Even on those days when he’d first twisted my arm, or shoved me into the wall, I still woke and peered at the digital clock and then lay back to wait if he was even a half hour behind his usual time. I’d be awake when he dropped his clothes in the corner, the belt buckle making a ka-chunk in the quiet house, when he slipped between the sheets, smelling of scotch and beer, tasting of it too as he put his arms around me and eased my nightgown up, hand over hand, like he was climbing a rope up into me.
And then there were the nights when I began to dread the sound of the door opening softly downstairs, two or three hours past the time he got off, the sound of his stumble on the stairs or the loud bangings of cabinet and refrigerator door from the kitchen, semaphore for discontent, an investigation going nowhere, a witness who’d been arrogant or uncooperative, even a car nosed a little too far toward the entrance to our driveway. The nights when he would pick a fight, throw open the bedroom door to say “Where the hell is the bread?” or ignore the regular breathing I learned to fake and come over me, into me, no matter what.
God forgive me, but there were so many times he went out to work and I would think the best thing that could happen to me was the call, the chaplain, the casket with the handsome cop I’d married inside it, who would never ever be able to lay a hand on me again, a fist in my face or rough fingers that opened me up as though I was a tunnel through which he was entitled, as a matter of right, to pass. When I was thinking about it rationally I knew it was no solution, that for my son his father would become a martyr, a man he would idolize and about whom he could never be told, never stand to hear the truth, the whole truth, nothing but. But often I was not thinking rationally, and I wished with all my heart that some lowlife’s bullet would find a soft spot on Bobby’s body, one of the soft spots I had lost the ability to find myself, with my hands or my tears or my words.
“Why did you say Daddy was a friend?” Robert said a week later, out of nowhere, as he was working on his family tree. “That day when you were talking to Mrs. Levitt? When the other police got hurt.”
“Well, he sort of is,” I said. But that was never true. Every time I saw a woman describe her husband as her best friend in some magazine or another, I always wondered what in the world she was talking about. Bobby and I had never been friends, ever, or I could never have loved him so completely and let him treat me so badly.
Hunched over a sheet of gleaming poster paper, Robert began to sketch out his family tree for Mrs. Bernsen, and as he did I thought of how little he asked about the past and the future. Any other child would have been at me constantly with questions, about when and whether we were going back. Any other child would have slipped up at school, told his friends where he was really from, boasted that his father was a policeman, pointed to the map of Italy during social studies and made a lie of the nondescript middle-American last name that he carried. But as I watched Robert spread his left arm wide around his work as though to hide or shelter it, I realized that he had been in training for this subterfuge almost his whole life, learning to ignore what was in the next room, to hide what he knew from others, to refrain from asking the wrong questions. His parents had always been in disguise; it was just a different disguise now, a different sort of false mustache, funny hat.
“Do you want help?” I asked nervously from the kitchen.
“Not yet,” he said.
I made some macaroni and read a magazine and the new Avon catalogue and there was still no sound from the room. Then he appeared in the doorway, smiling, nodding his head, taking my hand and pulling me to the card table.
“I figured
out how to do this,” he said. “Like, once I don’t mind what I call people, then it can be just like it really is. Here’s Daddy, only I called him Robert Crenshaw. And here’s Daddy’s Daddy, and I called him the same thing. It’s just the same, only with different names.”
And so it was. As I filled him in on the generations that had gone before, I made amendments, but few were necessary. There was one telltale Giuseppe, Robert’s paternal great-grandfather, but I named him Joe. My mother-in-law’s maiden name was Stanowicz; I let her keep it. And mine? Pick one, I told Robert, making a game of it. Give me a name before I was married. He made it Wynn. Elizabeth Wynn. It sounded sort of grand.
“What about Grandmom?” he asked, and my mother went in true to life, O’Donnell as she’d been born and raised, too far out on a limb to shatter the disguise of our new existence.
“See, I know who they are,” Robert said. “That’s enough, right? That I know. Like everybody in the class will be looking and it will say Robert Crenshaw and I’ll know what it’s supposed to really be.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“I know. Like, remember how Daddy took me that one time to the place where he was working in Central Park? There was this big policeman there, I can’t remember his name, but he was really really big.”
“McMichael. Captain McMichael. He was the station commander there.”
“That was him, I think. And he kept looking at me and saying you’re not a Benedetto. I know you’re not. I knew your grandfather and I know your father. Nah, I can tell, you’re not a Benedetto. And I think he was saying it like a joke, because I looked like Daddy, but I was only a little kid, like five, and I didn’t really understand that it was a joke. I thought maybe he was right, that I was adopted or something, like that Korean kid in my old school who was always telling everybody he was Italian just because his name was Russo, and everybody thought he was really stupid. And Daddy could kind of tell that I was upset and when we went out to get ice cream from the Good Humor truck in the park we were sitting on this bench and he said to me, see this. And he pointed to that really big vein in my arm.” He held it out, thin and bony, and pointed to the blue artery that ran behind the elbow, his grubby finger outlining it for me. “And then Daddy showed me the one he had. It was really big, and it kind of bulged out. And he said there’s a part of me in you. And there’s a part of you in me. And there’s a part of me in all the kids you’ll have, and their kids.”
“That’s true,” I said.
“I know,” he said, picking up his pencil again and coloring in some leaves. Then he asked casually, as though he was only wondering whether he should use a forest-green or a medium-green pencil, “Remember that time that Daddy busted Nana’s mirror in the hall and then he said he was really, really sorry and got her another one? If he did that to you, would you say it was all right?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I don’t mean like go back,” he said, not looking up from the paper. “I mean like accept his apology.”
“I don’t know, sweetie,” I said. “A lot of bad things happened with Daddy and me. He did a lot of things to me that he shouldn’t have. He shouldn’t have hit me. Ever. No one should ever hit another person. And he did, a lot. I know it’s a hard thing to understand, why he did what he did. I don’t even understand it. Maybe someday I will.”
“I need to finish this,” Robert said, his pencil point coming down hard on the poster paper.
Sometimes I felt as if I’d spent my life sitting on the closed lid of the toilet seat with the water running while I cried, and I wondered whether Robert, sitting downstairs working away on his project, heard the sound of the cold-water tap at full throttle as somehow soothing, the background noise of his childhood nights, as familiar as the rumble of the furnace coming on. It took me a long time to finish this time, to throw cold water on my wan face, to blow my nose and then use a little concealer to veil the flush of emotion. Then I folded laundry and changed sheets. Cotton had always helped me get over the humps.
By the time I went back downstairs the names were all neatly printed and Robert was working on his tree, a mighty oak by the look of it, many branched, thick-trunked, sketched in with colored pencils. And as I admired it, exclaiming over his neatness and the careful attention to the leaves, I realized I would have to tell Mike that Mrs. Bernsen was wiser than I, at least in this case. For there was Robert—just ROBERT, I noticed, with no surname at all—at the bottom of the trunk, at the roots, the base, the center of it all. He had not colored the leaves in yet, and the trunk and its branches looked for the moment less like a tree and more like a great brown river, the Nile, the Amazon, the Benedetto and Flynn river of blood, and there at its isthmus was this one child, so that it seemed that all of these people, from Poland, from Italy, from Ireland and the Bronx and Brooklyn, had come together for no other reason than to someday produce Robert Benedetto, in an event as meant, as important as that one in Bethlehem that he had learned about in catechism class at St. Stannie’s. There was Robert, the reason for the collision of these incongruous constellations, the savior of us all.
“Is it all right?” he said.
“It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. I’m really, really proud of you.”
He’d been proud of himself, too, I could tell. He’d rolled the poster paper carefully, tying it at each end with a bit of twine, and he’d carried it out to the bus in both hands. The way he stood with it reminded me of when he was four, in blue satin shorts and a white satin tuxedo shirt, the ring-bearer at the wedding of one of Ann Benedetto’s godchildren. It reminded me of the way, his face solemn, he’d carried the blue satin pillow, held close to his narrow chest, down the long aisle of the church. Bennie was the same, the way he carried his. It was as though they had their lives in their hands, these beautiful dark-faced displaced boys. The look of them, so serious, so proud somehow, stayed with me all day, while I scolded the dialysis patient for eating too much junk and shopped for the woman with cerebral palsy.
“Hi,” I said casually when Robert came back home that afternoon, letting a great cloud of warm air into the dim air-conditioned cool of the apartment. There was a laundry basket on the couch, and I was folding more sheets, matching corners, my arms spread in a kind of benediction, so I did not immediately see his face, and when I did I couldn’t at first believe it, couldn’t take it in. I stood holding the sheet across myself, like a curtain, my eyes and mouth wide above it, a cartoon woman.
“My God,” I said, and pulled him into the light from the window.
It looked worse than it was. His upper lip was swollen on one side, purple and misshapen, and the area just below his left eye was beginning to color. There was a ribbon of blood beneath his mouth, but I discovered as I used my own spit to remove it, not taking the time for towel or water, that there was no wound beneath it. Maybe the gum had bled and had stopped bleeding.
“What happened?” I said.
“Jonathan Green is a jerk-off,” he said, and his voice quavered deep in his throat like a birdcall.
“Sit down,” I said. Ice, aspirin, tissues. I put them on the flimsy coffee table and put my arm around him. A shudder ran through him, and then he looked up, his fingers going to his lip. The colored pencils were still spread out on the kitchen table, a rainbow lying awry.
“Wait,” he said, and went upstairs into the bathroom. I knew he was looking at himself in the mirror.
“This wasn’t my fault,” he said. “I pushed him first but he deserved it. He’s had it coming all year. He’s a jerk. The biggest jerk in the school. I hope I broke his nose. He called Bennie a spic. You know what a spic is?”
I nodded.
“We were talking in class about where we were from, and he started it then, he was starting to talk about how you shouldn’t be allowed to live here unless you could speak English. He was saying that America was too small for Americans and all these other people were coming here and taking stuff away. He goes, like, oh, they
can’t even speak English. And Goalie was really embarrassed, I could tell, and this girl named Christie, you don’t know her but her parents are Greek or something, and they can’t speak English that good, I don’t think. And I said that there were lots of people who couldn’t speak that good English but were nice people.”
“Didn’t Mrs. Bernsen say anything?”
“She said I was right. She said her parents were German and it took them a long time to learn English and now look at her, she taught English. But then we got dismissed for the day, and we got outside, and Jonathan comes up, with Bennie right there, and he says I only said what I said because of my spic friend. That’s what he said, ‘Your spic friend.’” I just shoved into him as hard as I could. He called Bennie a spic. Then he hit me. Then I hit him.” Blood was beading up on his lower lip again, and I handed him a tissue. He pressed it to his mouth, hard.
“I sat on him and made him take it back,” he finally said. His words were muffled by his lip, which was getting bigger. “Put some ice on that,” I said.
He slumped down in the sofa, his back bent, his elbows on his knees, avoiding my eyes. There were lemon Popsicles in the freezer and I gave him one, two birds with one stone, the ice and the unexpected before-dinner treat.
“Jonathan is a jerk,” I said. “He’s been goading you from day one. And he’s got a mean mouth on him. So now you know that he’s mean down to the ground. Now you know that the only way to deal with Jonathan is to stay away from him. You’re going to meet people like him your whole life. They’re ignorant and spiteful and they call names because they figure it makes them big if they can make someone else small. Makes them high if they can make someone else low. Bennie is such a star, everyone likes him, and he’s so good at sports and school that Jonathan had to pull him down. So he calls him a spic. So it tells you more about Jonathan than it does about Bennie.”
“I said that,” Robert said. “I said he didn’t know what he was talking about. He didn’t even know what a spic was. I knew from Daddy. Daddy talked about spics with Mr. Hogan and Mr. Carter. He said the spics live like animals and that they killed that policeman in Washington Heights. The one that Daddy helped train, when you went to the funeral. The spics killed him.”