Often, after closing the store, he’d repeat these conversations to my mother, though he should have known she’d be a tougher customer. “If that tannery closes, what’s Louie and all his friends gonna do for work around here?” he said one night when we were all watching the end of the Yankees game on TV.
Usually she just let him talk, but tonight she was in a foul mood after working on Ikey’s books all afternoon. “Keep Lou out of it,” she said, rising from her chair. “For one thing, he doesn’t have any friends. Every minute he’s not in school or doing his homework, he’s helping you at the store.”
What she’d said was true, and we all knew it. At the beginning the rules limiting my time there had been strictly enforced, but I loved Ikey’s and my father’s company, so they’d gradually eroded. I knew my mother disapproved of my hours at the store and was waiting for my grades to slip, if only a little, to lower the boom, but thus far they hadn’t.
“And for another thing, Lou isn’t going to work in that tannery whether it’s open or shut, any more than he’s going to work at Ikey Lubin’s the rest of his life. He’s going to college.”
“I ain’t saying that,” my father said, surprised that she’d taken her stance right in front of his chair, coming between him and the Yankees, and was pointing her index finger at him.
“And why do you always say you aren’t saying what I just heard you say?” she wanted to know. “You should’ve been a politician. You can’t remember what you’ve said from one minute to the next.”
“I ain’t saying Louie’s gonna work there,” he explained. “I’m saying people. What’re people gonna do around here if there ain’t no work?”
“Starve, Lou,” was her instant reply. “Either that or move to where there is work.”
“They got houses here, Tessa. People all lose their jobs at once, how they gonna sell them?”
“They won’t be able to. The banks will take them.”
My father shook his head stubbornly. “They ain’t gonna let that happen—”
“Who’s ‘they,’ Lou? Just out of curiosity.”
“The Beverlys and them,” he said. “They got houses here, too. You got any idea how much them houses in the Borough are worth?”
“Not as much as the ones they’ve got in Florida. Wake up, Lou. The people you call they? They’ll get out clean. They aren’t stupid.”
And you are was what she left unsaid.
Then she went upstairs, leaving my father staring at the TV, nodding at the Yankees as if their problems and Thomaston’s were inextricably intertwined. “I ain’t sayin’ the tannery won’t ever close,” he conceded to me. “I’m just sayin’ it don’t have to be like your mother says. She don’t know everything either.” This last was spoken in a whisper.
We’d first heard about that sign on the Beverlys’ front yard midweek, but it was Sunday morning before we saw it for ourselves. My father didn’t say where we were going, just suggested we take a drive while my mother worked on her books, but I suspected what he had in mind. We parked across the street from the Beverlys’ house, and my father turned the ignition off, though the engine continued to idle for a good ten seconds before finally shuddering into silence. We’d bought the car, a Ford, used, when the dairy clamped down on personal use of company trucks. But since we’d purchased Ikey’s, it didn’t get driven much. My father was always at the store, and my mother seldom drove, so it just sat out by the curb, unused, for weeks on end. She kept saying we should sell it and save the cost of insurance, but he didn’t want to be totally without transportation. Besides, he was fond of joking about how we had the only car he knew of that liked to run so much it was reluctant to shut down. Today, though, there were no such jokes.
For a long time he just sat there staring at the house—pink and sprawling and all on one level, its backyard surrounded by a tall fence through the slats of which you could see the blue sparkle of a swimming pool. And sure enough, there was the FOR SALE sign everyone was talking about. I don’t think my father completely believed it would be there, not until he saw it with his own eyes, and even then he wasn’t sure of its meaning. I could tell by the way he was rubbing his chin that he was trying to come up with another explanation. I, too, found it hard to believe, though for reasons more rooted in my world than his. The Beverlys simply couldn’t move away, because if they did, the perfect symmetry of my junior high world would crumble. Nan Beverly had to remain in Thomaston to counterbalance Karen Cirillo—the light girl and the dark. Could either exist without the other? I didn’t see how. Even contemplating the possibility made me queasy, so while my father tried to come up with another meaning for the FOR SALE sign, I developed scenarios whereby Nan’s parents would move and she’d stay on with an aunt and uncle I’d invented on the spot to take her in.
We were quiet for a while, trying to make our worlds right, until my father finally spoke. “How much do people gotta have to be happy, Louie?” he wondered out loud, as if he thought I might actually know the answer. “You lived in that house, wouldn’t you be happy?”
I said I would, and meant it.
“Anybody would,” he nodded, glad to have produced such a sensible kid. “How could you not be happy if you had all that?”
When my father and I were alone, sometimes I could hear my mother’s responses to things he said, and now I heard her say, You think people are geared to be content, Lou? And you came to this conclusion how?
I was pretty sure this wasn’t a skill my father possessed, or he wouldn’t have said half the things he did. “When you’re all grown up, if you live in a house like that, be happy. Don’t let nobody tell you you ain’t got it made neither.”
I promised I wouldn’t.
“You don’t even need all this to have it made,” he went on. “Your uncle and me? We grew up in a house didn’t have no running water or electricity. You ain’t gotta have everything to be happy.”
Across the street, the front door opened, and Mr. Beverly emerged, followed by a slender, well-dressed woman I took to be Mrs. Beverly, then finally Nan herself, radiant and clean, her blondness highlighted in the morning sunlight. They were clearly on their way to church, and all three seemed to notice us at once, which made me want to slide down in my seat. How out of place we must have looked sitting there. Borough streets were extra wide, but ours was the only car visible on this one, the others all safely tucked away in their garages or on gleaming display in their doublewide driveways. I think my father also realized we didn’t belong, and I felt bad for him because, as a route man, he had once belonged here, at least certain hours of the day.
If the Beverlys wondered who we were and why we were parked there, they gave no sign. They didn’t stare at us like East Enders did at strangers who didn’t belong, openly wondering who they were and who they might be visiting. Instead, father, mother and radiant daughter just got into their shiny Cadillac, the rear window of which, I noticed, had been repaired. I saw Mr. Beverly adjust his rearview mirror, perhaps to get another look at us but more likely to have the best view possible while backing out. When their Cadillac disappeared around the corner, my father looked stricken, as if they were leaving town for good, right that minute, not just going to church.
Reluctant as our Ford was to quit running, it was equally loath to start up again, but eventually it did. Though I figured we’d now head back home, we took another slow tour of the Borough, just as we’d done in his milk truck the day he told me which important people lived where. Probably he was just reassuring himself about how many prominent families there’d still be, even if the Beverlys moved, but I wondered if he was also puzzling over how to get here from where we were. Would a corner market, once we were better at running it, bring us here, or did Ikey Lubin’s just mean we could stay where we were and not have to return to Berman Court?
When we’d exhausted all the Borough streets, we drove on out of town and slowed down at Whitcombe Park. There was no sign of Gabriel Mock. Beyond the fence the Ha
ll looked both grand and decrepit, and I wondered if it suggested to my father, as it did to me, that my mother was right, that up wasn’t the only direction you could go in America—that what was won could be lost again, that Gabriel’s fence enclosed little more than a magnificent ruin. If it was true, as my father steadfastly maintained, that down was followed by up, then didn’t it stand to reason that up was followed by down?
“I guess the fellow that lived there was about the first one to get rich around here,” he said. “I don’t know how he done it, but people must’ve liked him.” In the end, that was how my father always measured things. If you were rich, it meant people liked you and wanted to do business with you and not some other fellow. Maybe it even meant God liked you.
Before returning home, we stopped at the Cayoga Diner. Usually we sat at the counter where my father could shoot the breeze with Stan, who worked the counter, and whoever else was idling there, so I was surprised when he steered us to an empty booth at the rear. We sat next to a window that overlooked the stream below, which was water colored today, the tannery being closed on Sundays, though the bank was rainbowed, as always, like the side of a trout.
“I guess I shouldn’t’ve bought Ikey’s,” he said bleakly. “It don’t make enough to live on, and we can’t work no harder than what we’re doing.”
Trying to cheer him up, I said, “We’ll get better at it. We just started, really.”
I don’t know why he should have valued my opinion in the matter, but he did seem to brighten up, then reached across the table to rub my head affectionately. “You know,” he said, “you ain’t gotta work in the store no more than you want to.”
“I like it,” I assured him, which was true, except my conscience was weighing on me. For many months now I’d continued to supply Karen Cirillo with free cigarettes, and earlier in the week a couple of her West End girlfriends that I recognized from the Y dances had come into the store when I was alone, I was pretty sure, to shoplift. They’d split up as soon as they entered, heading to opposite ends of the market. One got my attention by asking me a question while the other slipped something, I couldn’t tell what, into her purse. I caught only a glimpse, but when my eyes met hers across the store, I was sure. They left without buying anything, including the item the girl had asked me about. Later it occurred to me that Karen had probably put them up to it, explaining when I was usually there by myself.
And a couple of weeks earlier, before falling asleep, I’d overheard snatches of a late-night conversation between my parents. “Then you explain it, Lou. Tell me how stuff that comes off the truck just disappears. It’s right there on the inventory, and then it’s gone. If you sold it, it’d be in the register.” No wonder Ikey’s was failing. Not only did my father have a known thief living right above the store, but on those rare moments he wasn’t running it himself, he turned Ikey’s over to a Judas.
I knew he would’ve suspected himself of stealing in his sleep before he’d have suspected me, which was why I felt particularly wretched. His confidence in me was so complete, so unquestioning, that I wasn’t even sure he’d believe me if I confessed outright. Even if I could manage to tell him, and I didn’t think I could, he might just sit there and look at me expectantly for the part of the story I’d left out and without which no valid conclusions could be drawn. How could I tell him that Karen Cirillo was a fantasy I simply hadn’t the strength to resist?
“So I guess she must be about the cutest one, huh?”
I was so surprised to discover he’d been eavesdropping on my thoughts there in the diner that it was all I could do to croak out my assent. He and I had never talked about girls, and I always imagined that if we ever did we’d go slow, the subject being as terrifying to him as it was to me. Now here we were admitting that Karen was the fairest of them all, which meant that my father had also registered her dark attractions.
“You and her in the same grade?”
I was about to remind him that he knew perfectly well that Karen and I were both eighth graders when it suddenly occurred to me that he wasn’t talking about her at all. He was talking about Nan Beverly, whom he’d just seen climb into the family Cadillac.
“She a nice girl?”
My relief must have been palpable. Nan Beverly was a girl we could talk about, so I did, explaining that she was the most popular girl in the whole school, so popular in fact that boys got into fights over her outside the Y on Friday nights. At this he nodded sadly, as if his memory had been jogged. Had the same sort of thing happened when he was my age, his friends getting into fistfights over the prettiest girls? Maybe over Nan’s mother? Had my father been such a boy? It was hard to imagine him in love. I knew that he and my mother must have once felt passion, since that was what love entailed, but I was grateful that over time the madness had evolved into something more like friendship or a business partnership, something I myself could be an integral part of. Even seeing my father recollect passion was disconcerting.
“You and her dance partners, down there at the Y?”
I shrugged and said, “Sometimes,” which amazingly he believed, making me feel even worse. One more lie on top of all the others.
Our burgers and milkshakes arrived then, along with a big platter of fries drenched in brown gravy. My father didn’t like to talk when there was food around, so our awkward conversation would be put on hold for a bit, and I wouldn’t be obliged to lie while we ate. But after my father had mopped up the last of the gravy with the final greasy french fry, he said, “She ain’t gotta be the cutest one. You know…the one you like?”
I felt what I’d eaten shift in my stomach. Though I knew it was true, I didn’t want him to say my mother hadn’t been the cutest.
“The one you’re looking for,” he went on, “is the nicest.”
I knew I was supposed to comment, so I agreed.
“The one you want, she’s gotta like you, too.” I couldn’t help noticing that he’d broken out in a sweat from this emotional heavy lifting, and I wondered why he thought it was necessary. “It’s not just about you liking her. You gotta like each other.”
This sort of conversation required all of our concentration, which was probably why we didn’t see Uncle Dec come in, or notice him until he was right there at our booth, telling me to shove over, Bub. He sported his usual rich three-day stubble, and when he slid in next to me he made the dry, concussive little sound I always associated with him, as if he had a tiny fleck of tobacco on the tip of his tongue that he was determined to expel. Every time he spat, I followed what I imagined to be the trajectory of whatever he was trying to expectorate, but nothing ever landed. “What,” he said, looking at me. “You couldn’t save me one lousy french fry?”
“You could order a plate of your own,” my father said. “They ain’t that expensive.”
“I don’t want my own. I eat like you, pretty soon I’ll look like you,” my uncle told him, still regarding me. “Speaking of which, you look more like your old man every day. You both got the same pointed head.” He rapped a hard knuckle on the top of mine so I’d know the spot he was talking about.
“You ready to go, Louie?” my father said.
“What’s your hurry?” Uncle Dec wanted to know. “Relax. Have a cup of coffee. I’ll spring, if it’ll make you feel any better.”
My father was half out of the booth, but since his brother hadn’t moved I was trapped on the inside, so he sat back down.
“Have some ice cream,” my uncle suggested to me. “I’ll spring for that, too.”
“He just had a milkshake,” my father told him.
“So what?”
Our waitress brought two coffees and a dish of vanilla ice cream for me.
“You hear Manucci’s closing?” my uncle said, still looking at me, though this was clearly directed at my father, who blanched at the news. Manucci’s was an old West End market, three times the size of Ikey Lubin’s. For the last year my uncle had been working there as a butcher, which was what he
did when he wasn’t roofing or tending bar.
“How come?”
“The asshole son, what do you think? Likes to pretend he’s a high roller. He could lose the old man’s money slow, but he prefers fast. Before he goes to the track he comes in the store and takes what he needs right out of the till. All this while the old man’s dying. Weighed about ninety pounds the last time I saw him. It’s all he can do to raise his right arm, then he has to take a nap afterwards he’s so exhausted.”
My father shook his head. “West End.”
“West End, East End…what the hell difference does it make? The kid’s a bum.” Now he was studying me again, as if he suspected I might turn out to be the same kind of son. “Anyhow, you know what that means, don’t you?”
You’re next was what he was getting at. You know what happened to the dinosaurs, right? Death. Decomposition.
“I guess it means you’re out of a job,” my father said, which I considered a pretty good comeback.
“Yeah, but what else?” He was grinning at my father now. “I’ll just sit here and count while you think,” he said, sticking out his left hand and beginning with his thumb. “One. Two. Three.”