I still remember how much this upset me. It was our family I wanted to succeed, not me. There wasn’t supposed to be any limit to the benefits of hard work and honesty, and her saying there were limits implied that she didn’t believe in America, or, worse, in us.
And I was particularly troubled by my mother’s notion of downward mobility. I wanted her to assure me that nothing of the sort would happen to us, not if we continued to do things right and follow the rules. “Oh, Louie,” she said, giving me a hug I didn’t want. “What am I going to do with you?”
THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR was one of those divided into upstairs and downstairs flats. The downstairs was occupied by spinster sisters, the Spinnarkles, both of whom worked at Montgomery Ward. They left the house together in the morning and returned together in the late afternoon. On Saturday nights they went to the movies. Neither, as far as we could tell, ever entertained a male visitor. They were fond of children, though, and seemed genuinely to welcome the opportunity to look after me on those rare occasions when my parents needed to be someplace else. When it was time to return me next door, they wished out loud that I was their little boy. I fear I must have conveyed in countless unsubtle ways how glad I was that this was not the case.
Nothing at the Spinnarkles’ was even remotely interesting to a boy. They had no toys, no games, no books, no clue. There was a television set, but they always turned it off when company arrived, which struck me as downright rude. In our house, the TV we’d purchased shortly after moving to the East End was always on, at least when my father was home. He regarded this as one of the many fine things we had to offer visitors. He preferred a baseball game, if there was one, some other sporting event, if there wasn’t. He gave me to understand that professional wrestling was fake, but this in no way diminished his appreciation of it. He wasn’t much interested in the shows my mother liked—dramas like the Philco Television Playhouse—but offered no objection to her watching them, snoring peacefully in his armchair when she did.
That the Spinnarkle sisters should jump up and turn off their TV whenever anyone knocked at their door also struck my father as strange. “You ain’t gotta turn that off,” he’d say. “It don’t bother me.” To which the Spinnarkles, who always finished each other’s sentences, would reply that they “weren’t really watching” (Edith), “just passing the time” ( Janet). When left in their company, I quickly assured them that the TV didn’t bother me either, especially if Tales of the Texas Rangers was on, but the sisters had firm ideas about how guests should be entertained. “Let’s converse,” they’d suggest, smoothing their skirts down over their knees and looking at me hopefully. They rented their upstairs flat, coincidentally, to our old friends the Marconis.
Well, perhaps not coincidentally. When I discovered that one of the houses my parents were thinking about buying was next door to the Marconis, I lobbied hard for that one, and I could tell my father liked the Third Street neighborhood best. My mother had mixed feelings. She and Mrs. Marconi were friends, but she may have felt that having the Marconis so close by lessened the symbolic significance of our move. All-new neighbors were probably more what she had in mind. But she did feel sorry for Mrs. Marconi, who was pregnant again and seemingly every bit as trapped here in the East End as she’d been in Berman Court. “I’d forgotten how much I despised that man,” I overheard my mother tell my father. Mr. Marconi had apparently come out onto the porch the weekend my parents first looked at the house, and according to my mother his expression had clouded over when he saw who was looking at the house next door, the purple birthmark on his forehead darkening.
“We’re not buying that house unless you promise me to leave him alone,” my mother said when they got home. “Do you understand? Mind your own business. You aren’t in competition with him. He didn’t like you before and he doesn’t like you now. You’re just going to have to live with it.” My father opened his mouth to object, then saw the look on her face and shut it again. “I mean it, Lou,” she told him, then fixed me as a witness. “What did your father just promise me?” she said. “Not to bother Mr. Marconi,” I said, angry with her and not caring that she knew. I hated it when she made my father promise things, almost as much as I hated it when she made me promise things. She regarded us both dubiously, as if she knew better than to put much faith in either of us. “What’d I ever do to him, is what I’d like to know,” my father said when she was gone.
In the end we settled on the Third Street house, Marconis or no Marconis. Its owner, desperate to leave Thomaston, came down dramatically on his asking price, so that was that. But the real reason, I suspect, was me, since I’d overheard a conversation my mother had with Doctor Boyer, who convinced her that Third Street was the best place for the simple reason that I’d have a friend there.
MY FATHER wouldn’t have intentionally broken any promise to my mother, but I think even she knew he wouldn’t be able to honor the one she extorted from him as a condition for buying the house on Third Street. It was like asking him not to breathe, or to stop loving me so much. If that was what she wanted, he’d try, but it ran contrary to his nature. What she was probably hoping for was to modify his behavior by small degrees. To her way of thinking he was like a puppy that chewed shoes. You probably couldn’t break him of so rewarding a habit, but you could make him feel guilty, at least, keep him from doing it every time you turned your back, and that was something.
Until she made the point about my father and Mr. Marconi not being in a contest, it hadn’t occurred to me that he might have seen it like that, but of course when I thought about it, it made sense. Weren’t our families on parallel tracks, having both recently moved from the West End to a better part of town? Weren’t the Lynches and the Marconis, despite our differences, both determined to take advantage of what America offered, a chance to prove our worth, to get ahead, to secure our future? Of course in Thomaston, as elsewhere, the Irish and the Italians often judged their progress against each other. So there was all of this, as well as one other potent comparison. Now that Mr. Marconi was a full-time letter carrier at the post office, they were both “route men” who owned a territory and were responsible for things getting done, for making sure people in their territory got what they needed. Men who moved throughout their world and became men of that world. This, I think, was what made my father even more interested in Mr. Marconi now than he had been before, and much more than he was in our other East End neighbors. They were both men of motion, of movement. Who would grab the brass ring?
Mr. Marconi had some advantages—not unfair advantages, my father never went that far. But in certain respects, he had to admit, the other man had it made. For one thing, the post office paid better than the dairy, and postal workers had government benefits that wouldn’t quit. Also, letter carriers didn’t have to get up nearly as early as milkmen. Except for the long summer days in June and July, my father always rose in the dark, and in winter he’d complete half his route before sunrise. Still, he confided to me more than once that he wasn’t sure he’d have swapped jobs with Mr. Marconi even if he’d had the chance, not when you considered their respective routes. Mr. Marconi delivered his letters in the Gut, the very worst part of the West End, whereas my father worked the Borough, the plum route, proof of the high esteem in which his employers held him. He worried out loud about Mr. Macaroni’s place in the post office hierarchy if the Gut was the route they gave him.
My father had begun referring to Bobby’s father as “Mr. Macaroni” shortly after he’d promised to leave him alone, and he always nudged me to make sure I got the joke. I don’t think he was aware of my mixed feelings. The joke was gentle enough, but since kindergarten I’d been called a name I wasn’t fond of, so I was sensitive about nicknames. Of course with my father it was different. He wasn’t calling the man a name to his face, and there was no ill will intended in any event, so I supposed it was all right for him and me to have a small private joke. My real fear was that he’d slip up someday when Bobby was around
. And I suspect this was his response to the fact that my mother’s injunction not to talk to Mr. Marconi had gradually broadened. By “leave the man alone” she apparently meant not just that my father shouldn’t talk to the man but also that he shouldn’t talk about him—that is, to quit bringing his name up in conversations. This extra weight, added to his already solemn promise, must have seemed particularly unfair, so he was glad to discover that he could expect a little more latitude if he referred to Mr. Macaroni, which occasioned a more benign, pained reaction. If I reported that the Marconis had purchased a television—they had, according to Bobby—my father was able to interrogate me by making the whole thing into a joke. Mr. Macaroni bought a TV? What kind of TV did Mr. Macaroni buy, new or used? Did Mrs. Macaroni like the new Macaroni TV?
The questions were jokes and not jokes. Back when we’d all lived in Berman Court, my father had had a pretty good idea of our relative circumstances, but what had happened since we’d been separated? What had the Marconis acquired? How big were the economic strides they’d taken? How much had those strides been offset by two more little Macaronis? They were still renting, which meant something, but maybe they were saving for a down payment on a house. Were they close or still years away? My father had an inquiring mind, which he was now cruelly prohibited from using.
Therefore he had to rely on me for information. Did the Macaronis drink Coca-Cola or the off brands that Tommy Flynn and Ikey Lubin stocked in their coolers and sold cheap? I never went into the Marconis’ flat either, so I knew little more than my father did, and I told him so. “Ask him sometime,” he’d suggest, meaning Bobby. “He’ll do no such thing,” my mother would reply. “It’s none of our business.”
She seemed to understand that eventually my father’s curiosity would overpower his promise, so she kept a watchful eye on him those first few months after the move, especially if he found occasion to go out onto the front porch about the time Mr. Marconi finished his mail route and returned home. If she saw him start to sidle over and attempt to engage Bobby’s father in friendly conversation, she’d fling the window open and call out that she needed something, and he’d have no choice but to return, hangdog, caught doing or about to do what he’d promised not to. “What do you need?” he’d grumble when he was back in the kitchen. “I need you to work on your memory,” my mother would tell him. “What did you promise me if we moved here?” To which he’d shrug his big shoulders. “Saying hello to somebody ain’t the same as bothering him, Tessa. We’re neighbors, them and us. You can’t not speak to people.”
All still might have been well except that shortly after we moved to Third Street Mr. Marconi bought a used Pontiac station wagon big enough to accommodate the entire clan, though they seldom used it except on Saturday afternoons to go to the supermarket. “What’d he buy it for, is what I don’t understand. They don’t go for no drives. They never go to the lake or nothing.” These were things my father himself had always said we’d do as soon as we could afford a car. “It just sits there.”
“You don’t need to understand,” my mother would remind him. “Guess why.”
“I ain’t sayin’ it’s my business,” he replied, knowing where she was headed. “It just don’t make sense, is what I’m sayin’.”
One Saturday afternoon my mother was downtown doing errands when my father must have decided he’d lived with these Macaroni mysteries long enough. He’d seen the whole family pile into the Pontiac and head out to the A&P an hour earlier, so when the Spinnarkle sisters came out to sit on their front porch, he told me he was going over to see “the ladies” for a while, though I knew the Spinnarkles were a pretext, in case my mother came home unexpectedly.
He’d been sitting there for a half hour or so when the Pontiac pulled up at the curb. Pretending not to notice, my father stood and stretched and told the sisters that he’d better go back home and do some chores before his wife showed up and accused him of loafing. When Mr. Marconi got out of the station wagon and saw my father pausing on the steps to say hello, he just smiled knowingly and sent Mrs. Marconi on ahead with the children while he and Bobby unloaded the groceries.
“How’s that wagon worked out for you?” my father wondered.
“Just fine,” said Mr. Marconi, his tone suggesting that those two syllables conveyed the entire length and breadth of his thoughts on the subject, and perhaps all other subjects as well. Bobby saw me on our porch and waved. His father handed him a grocery bag.
“Price of gas and all…,” my father ventured, and getting no response to this, he continued. “I was thinking about a car myself,” he said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully, “but then I figured what for? I can use the truck for free, so I decided against it.”
Loaded down with grocery bags, Mr. Marconi and Bobby headed for the porch. “The dairy allows you to use their truck for personal business?”
My father shrugged. “You ain’t really supposed to,” he conceded, “but I know the old man real good, and he don’t mind, as long as I stay around here. I give you a hand with them bags?” The station wagon’s tailgate was down, two more bags standing right there.
“We can manage,” Mr. Marconi said, brushing past my father and up the porch steps.
“I don’t mind,” my father said. “I ain’t doing nothin’.”
“We can manage,” he repeated over his shoulder, and then disappeared inside with Bobby, the outer door swinging shut behind them. Alone on the terrace, my father regarded the last two bags with what seemed to me genuine longing. Had he been given permission to pick them up, he’d have been able to peer inside and see whether the groceries they’d bought were name brands or bottom shelf, cheap cuts of meat or expensive. Had he been allowed to help, the Marconis would’ve had to let him, however briefly, inside their flat, where he could’ve taken inventory. I could see he was seriously considering picking up those bags without permission, but just then my mother came around the corner and caught him.
“I was visiting the ladies, is all,” he said when we were back inside our house. “Ask Louie.”
My mother glanced at me, saw I was prepared to take my father’s side as usual and went back to glaring at him.
“Or ain’t I allowed to talk to them either?”
“Keep it up, Lou,” she warned him. “Just keep it up and see what happens.”
“It’s him I feel bad for,” he said later, over dinner. “All them mouths to feed, another on the way.” He was picking at my mother’s hamburger casserole, normally one of his favorites. But I could tell by the look on his face that he was wondering what the Marconis were eating and that the food on his own fork had no taste.
WITH ALL THAT comparing going on, I was glad my father wasn’t the sort of man to compare children, because Bobby Marconi had it all over me. Though half a head shorter, Bobby was a natural athlete, always first to be chosen when teams were picked, whereas I, despite my size, was among the last, at least on those rare occasions I allowed myself to be drawn into a game. My father enjoyed sports on television, but he’d grown up on a farm and had a farm boy’s awkwardness when it came to handling balls of any description. Those meant to be caught he fumbled, those meant to be dribbled he’d end up kicking, an ineptitude he passed down to me. He hoped I might play Pop Warner football, something he’d wanted to do himself when he was my age, and given my size I suppose I could have managed one of those interior line positions that didn’t require any ball handling. But my mother thought football was dangerous, so that was out, and in truth I was glad.
As an only child I was a voracious reader and did better in school than Bobby, but that didn’t count for much among boys our age. Besides, I went to St. Francis, which everyone knew was easier than Bridger, the East End elementary school that Bobby now attended, and while he didn’t distinguish himself, his teachers all agreed that he was one of their smartest students. When he felt like applying himself, they pointed out, he did fine. As I said, my father would never have compared me with Bobby. I doubt h
e would have known how, his devotion to me and pride in my accomplishments being as complete as mine toward him. But for some reason I felt certain that Mr. Marconi was the sort of man to compare sons and as a result didn’t think much of me. He never said anything, of course, but now that we were neighbors again, I had the impression he was just as happy that Bobby and I were going to different schools.
So the boundaries of our friendship, much to my disappointment, weren’t very different from what they were on Berman Court. When I again pressed to expand them, I met with the same resistance and was offered the same unsatisfactory explanations I’d been given before. The Marconis were different from us. (How?) They preferred to keep to themselves. (Why?) Bobby wasn’t allowed as much freedom as I was. (Why not?) Back then I’d had to content myself with a walk-to-and-from-school friendship. Now I had to be satisfied with a few hours on Saturdays. Even so, this might have been enough except for my vague sense that there was something I wasn’t being told. Bobby was forever getting grounded, allowed to leave the apartment only to go to school or deliver his newspapers, and for some reason I got it into my head that these punishments had something to do with me, perhaps because whenever I asked what he’d done wrong, he said he couldn’t talk about it. What could the reason be if it wasn’t me? “Lou, look at me,” my mother said when I floated this theory. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you, sweetie.”