“I just don’t want to ruin things for Sarah,” I say. “You know how I am afterward. If I had a spell over there, she’d have to do everything herself. I just keep hoping we’ll hear from Bobby before we go. That way if something happens…”
This is exactly the wrong thing to say, of course, since it makes me seem childlike, even more in need of reassurance. Saying his name out loud to my mother has the unintended effect of allowing the needy boy I was to creep back into my voice, an echo across the decades. All over again I’m telling her I just wish Bobby’d call with his new phone number like he promised, or I just wish he hadn’t been sent off to school downstate, or I just hope he’ll call during the Christmas break. And my poor mother, beyond exasperation, telling me for the umpteenth time that I have to stop depending on him, that my just wishing and just hoping are pointless, since I don’t even know for sure that he’ll be coming home for Christmas, or that his father will allow him to call even if he wants to. And finally, that if I don’t stop worrying these same things over and over in my head, I’ll end up having a spell.
So the sad look she gives me when I say I wish for my wife’s sake that we’d hear from Bobby Marconi—who doesn’t even exist anymore, at least not by that name—is the one I knew I’d get, the one that says I’m deluding myself, now as always. But kind, as well, as she sometimes was with my father when she took a break from trying to change him and accepted both who he was and even the fact that she loved him. She leaves her hand on top of mine, and it is a comfort, I must admit, though shameful. Is it a comfort to her as well? To be able to let go, however temporarily, of whatever unease has been between us, mother and son, for so long?
“Oh, Lou,” she says, squeezing my hand so hard that it has to hurt her gnarled, arthritic fingers, “why must you be so…”
I can’t say, any more than I can explain why I said that about Bobby writing back before we leave. Because I do know that’s not going to happen.
I PARKED in the lot behind the movie theater, planning to fetch the car after lunch and save my mother the walk, but now she says she’d prefer the exercise, so we cross the street and walk slowly and silently up the alley between the Bijou and the now-abandoned Newberry’s. For me this alley is one of the most haunted places in Thomaston. Here, though it’s been nearly forty years since the last yellow kernel was popped, I can still smell the dime-store popcorn and Karen Cirillo’s cheap perfume. Here, too, is the rusty fire escape leading up to the exit that was always chained shut for Saturday matinees to prevent West End kids who’d paid from sneaking up into the condemned balcony and letting their friends in for free. From the second step of this fire escape I witnessed one of the most shocking events of my youth, and I suppose I’ll have to commit it to paper sometime next week if I continue writing my story. Even so many years later, I’m deeply ashamed to recollect what happened that afternoon and tempted to either skip the episode or put the whole undertaking aside.
We’re halfway up the alley, each in our own thoughts, my mother clutching my elbow to steady herself, when I feel her stiffen and see a shambling, pear-shaped old man coming toward us. Backlit as he is, I don’t immediately place him. He’s dressed in ratty thrift-shop clothes, including a Thomaston High letterman’s jacket with a faded blue wool body and gold leather sleeves that has to be over thirty years old. He’s about my mother’s age, sporting a full head of wiry salt-and-pepper hair. It’s the cowlick I finally recognize.
It’s a narrow alley, and Buddy Nurt has stationed himself foursquare in the middle. There’s room for my mother to navigate around him on one side and me on the other, but that would involve her letting go of my elbow, something I can tell she has no intention of doing. We have no choice but to stop and regard Buddy as he’s regarding us and apparently enjoying our predicament.
“I know you,” he says, looking first at my mother and then me. “You got something for me?”
When I reach for my wallet, my mother says no, as much to me as to him.
He’s seen my hand move, then stop moving, and now he’s waiting to see if it’ll start moving again. “Give me something and I won’t tell,” he says. This isn’t really a personal threat, as my mother well knows. It’s just how Buddy has greeted people ever since he went batty. All he wants is a dollar or two, which I usually give him, after which he says okay, he won’t tell. I have no idea what he thinks he knows, or even if he actually recognizes either one of us. He’s just convinced people will pay him to keep their secrets, whether or not he has any idea who they are.
“No one’s going to give you anything,” my mother tells him. “Will you kindly move out of our way? You smell.”
Buddy waits a beat, then does as he’s told. “You think I don’t know about you, but I do,” he tells her as we pass. “You think I won’t tell, but I will.”
“Keep walking,” my mother says, reading my mind, because I’m tempted to go back and give the man a dollar.
“Lynch,” he calls after us. “That’s your damn name.” And then he laughs his nasty old laugh, as if once upon a time he’d caught us stealing from his store, instead of the other way around, and that knowing our name proves he knows all about us, including every wrong thing we’ve ever done or imagined doing.
My mother and I don’t speak until we arrive back at Ikey’s. In the hallway she settles onto the lift chair and, with what appears to be her last ounce of will, presses the button that pulls the “damned contraption” upstairs. I follow, in case her irrational fears turn out to be real.
I DIDN’T SEE Karen Cirillo in school the next day, but since we had no classes in common, it didn’t dawn on me until the end of the week that she was gone and not just from the flat over the store. On Saturday, when her mother came in for cigarettes, I had a chance to inquire.
I’d noticed that Nancy never visited my mother anymore and seldom came into Ikey Lubin’s when my father was behind the counter because, I suspected, they’d recently had words. He’d learned from my uncle Dec, who knew such things, that she hadn’t been exaggerating about Buddy Nurt, who over the years had been arrested on charges ranging from shoplifting to felony theft to attempted blackmail, though the latter charge had been dropped. Hearing this, my father certainly didn’t like the idea of him living upstairs, and he especially didn’t want him in the store, a message Nancy must have conveyed, since whenever she came in now Buddy loitered outside, trying to smooth his cowlick.
In the week since he’d moved in, Buddy had made no effort to find a job. He was a short-order cook by profession, but two of the three Thomaston restaurants that employed these were located out by the highway, too far to walk, in his view, and neither he nor Nancy owned a car. The hair salon where she worked now, on lower Division Street, was about the same distance from Ikey’s as the highway, though somehow she managed to walk there every day. The Cayoga Diner was downtown, of course, but he’d already worked there on various occasions and been fired each time.
“She goes to school over in Mohawk now,” Nancy explained, and she must’ve seen the disappointment on my face because her own expression became sly. “Don’t worry, she’ll be back,” she added. “Karen don’t like my sister any more than she likes me, and her uncle’s no prize either. That Quinn kid gets sent back to reform school where he belongs, you could be next in line.” Having voiced this possibility, she looked me over more carefully. “You one of the smart ones, like she says?” When I didn’t deny this, she shrugged. “Your ma’s smart, so I guess you come by it naturally.”
“My dad’s smart, too,” I told her.
“I’ll have to take your word for that,” she said. “You get good grades and all?”
“Pretty good.”
“B’s?”
“And A’s,” I said, because it was true.
“Too bad. My daughter prefers idiots.”
Outside, Buddy impatiently knocked on the glass, urging her to hurry.
“Speaking of things coming naturally,” she admitted, readi
ng my mind.
LATER THAT AUTUMN, my father became a hero.
It came about because he was doing as my mother advised, keeping the store open until midnight on weekends and, as a result, selling more beer between ten and twelve on Friday and Saturday nights than the rest of the weekdays combined. There was trouble sometimes, underage kids wanting to buy alcohol and getting belligerent when my father wouldn’t sell it to them, and their peeling out from in front of the store angered the neighbors, who complained it had never been so noisy at Ikey Lubin’s back when it was really Ikey Lubin’s. Others still resented that my father had closed down the book that had operated so conveniently out of the back room. Ikey himself was in the hospital being treated for a lung tumor, and it was widely reported that he intended to buy his business back just as soon as he was cured. “If only,” my mother remarked.
On the night in question, it was almost midnight, and my father was going over the day’s racing form and listening to the recap of the harness races at Saratoga on the radio. He seldom bet the horses, but like almost everyone in Thomaston, he followed them, needing to be able to talk results with his regulars, almost all of whom wagered daily. I also happened to know he kept a spiral binder of imaginary wagers, dutifully noting which of his picks would’ve won and how much each paid, as well as all the losers, so he could tell how much money he saved by keeping his bets imaginary. Somehow Uncle Dec found out about this binder and ribbed my father unmercifully, claiming that everything he did was imaginary for the simple reason he was too cheap to spend the two dollars necessary to make it real. Which was why, my father replied, he always had two dollars, whereas his brother was always looking to borrow two.
Be that as it may, the print on the racing form was tiny, which meant my father had to wear his glasses, and it was in the corner of the lens that he gradually became aware of an orange flickering. At first he imagined this to be a trick of the store’s fluorescent lighting, until he looked up and saw, across the intersection, a tongue of flame licking out from under a partially open window on the ground floor of the Spinnarkles’ house. The upper flat, which the Marconis had rented, was still vacant.
What he did next was call my mother. I remember the phone waking me up, ringing there on the end table in the living room. My mother was downstairs reading, and with her back to the window, she had to rotate in her chair to pick up the phone, and that’s when she saw. “Lou!” she said. “There’s a fire next door!”
That, he informed her, was what he was calling about.
“Did you call the fire department?”
“You do it, okay?” he said. “I’ll be right over.”
This, of course, was in the days before 911. The fire department number was in the front of the phone book, but you had to look it up, then dial all seven digits. Further—how odd this seems now—the telephone was one of the things my father generally left to my mother. At home he always let her answer. If he wanted to talk to someone, he preferred to go see them, either that or say, “Tessa, call the plumber, would you?” There was a phone in the store, but he found all sorts of excuses for not answering it. One day my mother called and just let it ring until he finally picked up. “Don’t tell me that,” she said when he explained that he’d been too busy to get to it. “I’m standing right here in the front room looking at you. You’re all alone in there.”
“So, what do you want?”
“I want to know why you’re afraid of the damn phone.”
“I ain’t afraid of it—” he started, but she hung up.
My own theory is that he was less afraid of the phone than the phone book. I never knew my paternal grandparents, but I’m pretty sure my grandmother was illiterate. Grandpa could read just enough to get by. As a result my father was so far behind by the time he started school that he never caught up, which was probably why he was so proud of how I devoured books and so embarrassed when my mother accused him of moving his lips when he read the newspaper. The Thomaston phone book was pretty slender, but I could tell that its long columns of similar names, the one he wanted buried among so many others, frustrated him. In an emergency, he might not have remembered that the fire department’s listing was in the front, and even if he had remembered he’d have found at least a dozen other emergency numbers listed there and would’ve concluded the thing to do was call my mother.
When she hung up after calling the fire department, she saw that I’d come downstairs and was rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and staring stupidly out the window at the flames next door. By then you could actually hear the fire. “Get dressed, Lou,” she said. “Hurry, in case the fire jumps.”
“Where’s Dad?”
“Get dressed!” she repeated, pushing me up the stairs. I did as I was told but apparently not fast enough, because a moment later she burst into my room and grabbed me by the elbow.
By the time we got out of the house, the neighbors were standing on their porches, pointing at the flames, which had spread to the second floor, and sirens were heading our direction. Across the intersection, the lights were all still on in Ikey Lubin’s, but there was no sign of my father. Nancy Salvatore, her robe pulled tightly across her chest, and Buddy Nurt, in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, had come out onto their upstairs porch to view the proceedings.
“Where’s Dad?” I asked again, but my question was drowned out by the fire engine screaming around the corner, and my mother just pulled me closer.
The flames were now dancing in the vacant windows of the Marconi flat. “Hurry up, before it jumps the roof!” one fireman shouted. Another connected a thick coil of hose to the hydrant conveniently located on our own terrace. I mowed around it every week, thinking of the plug as an inconvenience and wondering why it was there at all. “Is anyone inside?” I heard a fireman ask my mother.
She couldn’t have taken more than a second to respond, but the question, together with the fierce hug my mother was giving me, was enough for me to understand that my father was inside the burning house.
“Two women live on the first floor,” my mother said. “I think my husband’s gone in after—”
Several windows exploded outward just then, causing us to move farther back and everyone along the street to gasp.
“Where are the bedrooms?”
In the back, my mother said, and two of the firemen started around the far side of the building.
“Wet this one down,” one shouted to the big fireman operating the hose, which he then swung around to begin soaking our roof and back porch just a few feet from where the flames were licking at the Spinnarkle eaves, the force of the water dislodging a window screen that clattered onto the walk below.
“There!” someone shouted, and I saw that the front door to the Spinnarkles’ downstairs flat was now open, black smoke billowing out. A moment later a child emerged.
That’s what it looked like, though of course no child lived there, and it took me a moment to realize that this figure, doubled over choking, was one of the sisters. (I never could keep them straight.) She was blackened with smoke and soot and, I realized with a shock, completely naked. My brain immediately supplied a reason. The fire had burned her clothes off.
“This way, Edith!” she screamed back into the house (which made the screamer Janet). “This way, Mr. Lynch! Hurry!”
Several firemen ascended the steps now, and one of them threw a blanket around her, drawing her down the porch steps by force when what she intended, it seemed to me, was to go back into the burning house. Another fireman started in and then stopped in the doorway, reaching inside for Edith Spinnarkle’s hand and pulling her, also sooty and naked, out onto the porch.
What happened next surprised me even more than their nakedness. Just as the fireman was pulling her out of the house, Edith was reaching back and pulling with her other hand. I fully expected that when my father emerged, he’d be naked, too. After all, if the sisters had had their clothes incinerated, it followed that he’d likely be in the same condition, and as I rem
ember it now across the years, I think I was more worried about the fact that he’d be naked in front of all our neighbors than about the possibility that he’d been injured in the blaze. So I was very surprised when he emerged fully clothed. His white short-sleeved shirt was black with soot, of course, but it wasn’t on fire.
“Lou!” my mother cried, bolting past firemen who were holding everybody at a distance, and I heard my father, blinded by the smoke and trying to locate her voice by sound, then bellow, “Tessa!” Now that he was safe, the tears started streaming down my face, and it seemed like I stood there forever, alone and forgotten on the sidewalk. I saw my parents embrace at the foot of the porch steps, then lost them in the encroaching crowd.
At this point the remaining windows of the Spinnarkle house exploded, glass raining down over the street. The entire structure was now engulfed in flame, and we were all herded to safety across the road. The firemen, cutting their losses, concentrated on trying to save the adjacent houses. As I pushed among the crowd of onlookers, I heard Edith Spinnarkle, hugging her sister close on a neighbor’s porch, cry out, “Our home! Our home, Janet! Look! It’s gone!”
I finally located my parents one porch farther down the block. My mother was clutching my father to her as one would a big, overgrown child. He was wrapped in a blanket and shivering violently, his tears leaving tracks down his sooty cheeks. Neither seemed to notice when I climbed the steps and sat down next to them. My father looked odd, and then I realized why. His eyebrows had been singed off. “Louie,” he said, finally recognizing me and drawing me close, glad for somewhere else to look, because he couldn’t bring himself to face the blaze. “Is our house going to burn down, Tessa?” he asked.