“But what did I do?” I said plaintively, at the time unaware of how much I must have sounded like my father. (“What did I ever do to him, is what I’d like to know.”)
She gave me a big hug. “Lou, sweetie. You’re not listening to me. It has nothing…to do…with you.” Then she added ominously, “There are things going on in that house that you know nothing about, but they have nothing to do with you—or your father.”
What things, I asked, but she wouldn’t say any more, just that they weren’t any of our business. “And I don’t want you quizzing Bobby either, do you understand?”
But it wasn’t fair. Whatever was going on next door, my mother knew about it. If our families were estranged, this wasn’t true of my mother and Mrs. Marconi. Their friendship, as far as I could tell, was exempted. True, it was largely clandestine. Mrs. Marconi was still supposed to stay in their flat and tend to Bobby’s little brothers, but once her husband and my father were off on their routes, she and my mother could meet secretly, and I was pretty sure they did. When I returned from school, my mother would sometimes be on the phone and hang up as soon as she saw me, and later, after I’d changed out of my school uniform, I’d find her staring abstractedly out the living room window, and if she saw Mr. Marconi returning from work, his empty mail bag over his shoulder, her face would darken, and I suppose mine did, too. If she could have a secret friend, why couldn’t I?
One day near the end of the school year, I came home and discovered my mother wasn’t there. In our house, a window at the top of the stairs faced the Marconis’ second-floor flat, and that day, thanks to an unseasonable heat wave, my mother had opened every window in the house, as Mrs. Marconi apparently had, and the houses were close enough that I could hear what I was pretty sure was whimpering, followed by my mother’s soothing voice saying, “There, there, it’ll all work out,” and then I saw my mother’s hand reach out and pat Mrs. Marconi’s. A few minutes later, when my mother returned looking both shaken and angry, I asked her where she’d been, and she said down to Tommy Flynn’s, but this wasn’t a very good lie because she didn’t even have any groceries.
That night, in bed, I heard a brief snippet of conversation between my parents float up through the heat register. “Just because she says it don’t make it so,” my father said. “That woman ain’t right, you know.”
“I know she’s slow,” my mother replied. “But that’s no reason to treat her like a dog. He might as well chain her to a stake.”
One morning later that month, my mother phoned her and was surprised when Mr. Marconi, who should’ve been out on his route, answered. There were children crying in the background. “What do you want?” he said when she identified herself, explaining that she’d called to see if Mrs. Marconi was feeling better. Now in her ninth month, she’d been ill with the heat and humidity.
“D.C. went to visit her sister.”
“I didn’t know she had a sister,” my mother said.
“Why should you?” came his rude reply.
“Will you have her call me when she returns?”
“I’d just as soon you stayed away from her, actually.”
“I don’t think she even has a sister,” my mother told my father over supper that night, still so upset she didn’t try to conceal any of this from me. “Certainly not around here.”
“How do you know?”
“Because if that woman had an option, she’d have taken it long ago.”
My father opened his mouth to say something, regarded me, then shut it again.
“Plus,” my mother continued, “she was in no condition to go anywhere.”
My father considered this. “How come I gotta mind my own business and you don’t?” he said, which was exactly what I’d been wondering. And if my mother had an answer to that, she wasn’t sharing it.
A few days later, the Marconi station wagon pulled up to the curb with a dazed-looking Mrs. Marconi in the passenger seat. When her husband came around and opened the door for her, she just sat there staring up at their flat. “Help her out, you miserable son of a bitch,” my mother said, watching from the front window and apparently not caring if I heard. “Help her, or so help me God…”
But now Mrs. Marconi was out of the car and waddling toward the porch, where she put one hand on the railing, the other under her enormous belly. Two days later she gave birth, yet another little brother for Bobby. As soon as her husband shouldered his leather bag and headed for the post office, my mother had my father give her a lift in the milk truck out to the new hospital so she could pay her friend a visit. That night, over another hamburger casserole, she reported that Mrs. Marconi seemed to be feeling better, that whatever had been weighing down her spirits had lifted. She’d assured my mother she was fine, never better, that there was no reason to be concerned. In fact, she was anxious to return home and hated being away from her children. My father listened, apparently enjoying this hamburger casserole more than he had the last one. “See?” he told my mother. “You got yourself all bent out of shape over nothing.”
I was glad, as I always was when it turned out my mother was wrong about something. Since the evening my parents had agreed so easily that Mrs. Marconi wasn’t “right,” I’d thought about her a lot, probably because, thanks to my spells, the same had been said of me.
“I also asked how her sister was,” my mother told him, pushing away her own uneaten food, and the glance they exchanged told me that Mrs. Marconi, as my mother suspected, had no sister.
THAT WAS the summer I got my first serious bicycle, the kind that in those days were called “English,” which meant it had three gears you could shift. It was an interesting gift, first because it was extravagant and second because I hadn’t even asked for it. I’d mentioned that Bobby was saving his paper route money for one, so I suspect my father saw an opportunity to one-up Mr. Marconi. My mother, however, had different reasons. In her opinion I needed to “get out and expand my world.” She’d always liked the fact that I was a reader, happy to while away hours in a book, but when she saw other neighborhood boys heading off to the American Legion Field with baseball bats over their shoulders, she worried that I stayed so close to home. I was putting on weight, and my mother said I was too young to be so sedentary.
But the real reason they got me that bike, I believed, was that they hoped it might help wean me off Bobby’s friendship, or rather my continual dependency on it. For instance, his father knew someone in Parks and Recreation, and he’d enrolled Bobby in a free morning program and done it the last day you could sign up, so by the time I found out, it was too late. Afternoons, Bobby had to help his mother with the care and feeding of his little brothers, and early evenings he had his paper route. My mother didn’t want me moping around the house waiting for him to show up, and if I rode around our East End neighborhood, maybe I’d make new friends. Such must have been her reasoning.
At first I was wary of both the bike and what I was meant to do with it. I knew how to ride, but felt odd about getting a gift I didn’t particularly want or need when my best friend both needed and wanted one, so the first thing I did was offer Bobby the bike to use on his route. He thanked me but said his father wouldn’t allow that. The following week, though, Mr. Marconi did get him a bike of his own, a used “American” one with bald tires, a torn plastic seat and a rusty chain.
For the first few weeks I used my new bike for little more than sidewalk circumnavigations of our own block, one after another, which worried my mother even more than my hanging around the yard had done. Riding on the sidewalk was technically against the law, and gradually I ventured out into the street and expanded my travels, first to the two or three square blocks that made up our immediate neighborhood, then to half a dozen and beyond. By midsummer I’d discovered Whitcombe Park on the outskirts of town, at the center of which stood Whitcombe Hall, a mere shell, which at the time was owned by the county. Most of the park’s extensive grounds were surrounded by a tall wrought-iron fence that w
as maintained by a tiny Negro man named Gabriel Mock, who lived in a small outbuilding behind the Hall. Gabriel regarded the fence as his because it was his job to paint it, from one end to the other. Close to a mile of it, he claimed proudly. Officially, he was caretaker of the entire grounds, but what that meant in reality was the fence, since the county had no money to maintain either the Hall or the park. The only budget they had was for painting the fence, which Gabriel kept from rusting by applying a thick black lacquer to it each year. It took him all spring, summer and fall, and after an upstate winter it would be time to start all over again. His only other duty was to keep vandals off the property.
The day we met, I hadn’t even seen him painting away a few feet from where I’d leaned my bike up against the fence. The word he used to describe how I was standing there, my chin between the black railings as I stared across the sloping lawn toward the Hall, was “forlorn,” which he seemed proud to know the meaning of. “You the picture of forlornity,” he elaborated, when I finally noticed him.
“How do you get inside?” I wondered.
“You don’t. Can’t let you in,” he sighed, as if it disappointed him powerfully to have to deliver this sad truth. “Ain’t nobody suppose to be on this side of the fence but me, and I ain’t suppose to leave. That seem right to you? Maintain the darn fence and let history”—here he gestured over his shoulder in the direction of Whitcombe Hall itself—“go to rack and ruince.”
I must have looked like I agreed with him, because he decided on the spot to let me in on a secret. “Thing is, though, the fence don’t go all the way round the proppity. Stops just off yonder into them trees.” When I followed along his thin index finger with interest, he may have suffered a misgiving at having told me so much, because he said, “Who you, anyhow?”
I told him my name was Lou.
“That don’t tell me much,” he said. “All kinda Lous. I know half a dozen of ’em my own self.”
I told him my last name.
“Lynch,” he repeated thoughtfully. “Your daddy the milkman?”
I said he was.
“Your mama Teresa?”
This tiny Negro man, I couldn’t help reflecting, who looked almost thin enough to slip between the bars of the fence he was painting, knew an awful lot about us Lynches.
“Nice girl, your mama. Use to be, anyways. I expect she turn out good.” He looked me over again, in light of my parents. “So, that make you Lou Lynch Junior.”
Shaking my head, I explained that my middle name was Charles, after my mother’s father, whereas my father’s middle name was Patrick, after I didn’t know who.
“Narrow escape,” the little man nodded. “I’m Gabriel Mock Junior. No difference between me and my daddy, ’cept he’s dead.”
That seemed to me a distinction worth noting, and I said so.
“Still gotta go through life being Junior, though,” he said. “Gabriel Mock Junior, even with him dead, whether I like it or don’t. No Senior for me, ever. That seem fair to you?”
I said it didn’t and on impulse confided that everybody called me Lucy, and he agreed that bad luck wasn’t fair either. It occurred to me to ask if he had a son, and what he’d named him.
“Name him Gabriel Mock the Third,” he said, and stopped painting to consider the decision. “Three’s what everybody call him. All of us got crosses to bear, and that’s the truth. A man’s name the worst of it, he’s doin’ fine, I guess.”
He returned to painting, and I climbed back on my bike. Before I could pedal off, he said, “Don’t fall down no cave hole.”
“What cave hole?” I asked.
“How my suppose to know which one you gon fall down?” Gabriel Mock Junior wondered back at me. “Whole proppity got caves under it, they say. Used to store liquor and gunpowder in ’em in the olden days, when all this here was England. That’s how them people made their money,” he explained, again nodding over his shoulder in the direction of the Hall. “Sellin’ liquor and guns to the redskins. Get ’em all riled up so they go down and scalp people around Albany instead of right here. Rich people all rascals. You know that, don’t you?”
This was the first time I’d ever heard that particular view expressed, and it seemed blasphemous, especially coming from a tiny Negro. After all, didn’t we Lynches hope to be rich one day?
“You fall down a cave hole, ain’t nobody gon hear you callin’ for help neither. Don’t expect me to come rescue you. I ain’t climbing down into the earth till I been dead at least three days. No exceptions.”
I promised I’d be careful, which I meant to be. The idea of the ground being hollow beneath my feet made me nervous.
“Drop by and say hello next time you in the neighborhood. I put you to work. I got all kind of brushes. Quicker I get done, the more time I got to howl. You like to howl?”
When I frowned, he said, “You prob’ly don’t know what I mean by howlin’.”
To illustrate, he pretended to drink something from an invisible container, then threw back his head and howled, and he continued to howl and cackle happily as I rode off down the fence. I’d already made up my mind to visit Gabriel Mock again, though for now I was more interested to see if I could find a cave without falling into it. As I said, the idea of hollow earth was disconcerting, but if the very ground beneath my feet was full of holes, I wouldn’t mind knowing where they were.
WHAT I DISCOVERED I liked best about striking out on my bicycle was that the farther I got from home, the more interesting and unusual my thoughts became. I discovered I could think things in a new landscape that never would have occurred to me at home or in my own well-traveled neighborhood. I was just a boy, of course, and my thoughts were those of a boy and, as such, probably no different from the thoughts of thousands of other boys my age, but they were new to me and seemed as strange and unaccountable as the recent transformations of my body, which now required new shoes every few months. My mother had recently taken to buying my pants several inches too long, cuffing them thickly, then slowly letting them out as I grew. When I set out on my bike, it was usually with a sense of anticipation, not just that I might discover something new, like a cave in Whitcombe Park, or someone new, like Gabriel Mock Junior, but also I might think something new and unexpected, as if I were letting out my brain, its thoughts, much as my mother let out my pants’ cuffs. And when returning home from my travels, I had the very pleasurable sense that I was a different boy from the one who’d left and half expected my parents and neighbors to notice the change.
But also this. If setting out into the unknown was thrilling, so, in a different but equally strange way, was coming back. I almost never rode home directly and instead wove a route through all the streets of our East End neighborhood, taking inventory of the houses and sheds and chain-link fences, to make sure nothing had vanished or been swallowed up by the hollow earth while I was away, that everything was in its correct place, as if to reclaim all of it as my own. It occurred to me that I was just becoming a route man, like my father and Mr. Marconi and like Bobby on his paper route, learning how intense the pleasure of the familiar can be, how welcome and reassuring the old, safe, comforting places of the world and the self.
Though my travels through Thomaston that summer were extensive, I stayed away from the West End. Just once did I venture back to Berman Court, which I was surprised to discover I could still locate. After I’d been away for so long the street looked almost as foreign and unexpected as Whitcombe Park that first morning I met little Gabriel Mock. The apartment house at the end, with its high windows overlooking the stream, had the feel of a storybook I’d lost, forgotten, then found again. Nothing had changed in any way I could put my finger on, yet it all felt completely alien, as if our ever having lived there was an implausible dream from which I’d awakened in our true home in the East End. Leaning my bike up against the footbridge, I followed along the Cayoga as far as the railroad trestle and covered bridge, which now looked even more abandoned and dilapidate
d. The sheets of plywood that had been scattered on top of the railroad ties were gone, and so, I thought, was the trunk, until I noticed it had fallen between the ties and broken on the rocks below. The only evidence of what had happened to me were the grooves sawed into the thick crossbeams, which were now eye level. I ran my index finger over them and discovered to my surprise that the terror I’d felt in the trunk had mutated into something almost pleasurable.
I don’t remember how long I remained there on the trestle. I left only when I felt, or imagined I felt, the tracks begin to vibrate and heard, or imagined I did, the rumble of an approaching train.
BACK THEN most people paid the milkman by leaving money in the tin milk cases that sat on their back porches. If they wanted two quarts of milk, they’d fold a bill or two into an envelope or a piece of notepaper, and my father would make change and leave it in the box with the milk. On Saturdays he collected from those customers who preferred not to pay daily and resolved the disputes that inevitably resulted from this time-honored system. Seldom a week went by without someone remembering that the five-dollar bill they’d left in the box had in fact been a ten, or that they’d asked and been charged for two quarts of milk but received only one.
My father’s route in the Borough was, as I said, the plum, in part because there were fewer collection difficulties there than in the West or East End, though my father maintained that the rich were more likely to try and pull a fast one. Recalling Gabriel Mock’s observation that they were all rascals, I asked if he thought that was true, and he said no, but he did allow that the richer people were, the more carefully you had to watch them and the better your memory needed to be. In the West End poor people fell behind in their payments, which meant their route men had to either cut them off or “carry them” until they managed to pay. But West Enders seldom questioned your tally the way Borough people did.