I CAN’T SAY how long I walked. Long enough that the rain stopped and the sky began to lighten with the first stirrings of dawn. I reached the outskirts of Pepperville Beach, which was marked by a big, rusty water tower, just behind the baseball fields. In small towns like mine, climbing water towers was a rite of passage, and my baseball buddies and I used to climb this one on weekends, the spray-paint cans jammed in our waistbands.
Now I stood before that water tower again, wet and old and broken and drunk and perhaps a killer, I should add, or so I suspected, because I never did see the driver of the truck. It didn’t matter, because my next act was a no-brainer, as determined as I was to make this the last night of my life.
I found the ladder’s bottom.
I began to climb.
It took me a while to reach the riveted tank. When I finally did, I collapsed on the catwalk, breathing hard, sucking air. In the back of my addled brain, a voice scolded me for being so out of shape.
I looked out on the trees below me. Behind them I saw the baseball field where I had learned the game from my father. The sight of it still dredged up sad memories. What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you’re so wrecked it’s hard to believe you ever were a child?
The sky was lightening. The crickets grew louder. I had a sudden memory flash of little Maria asleep on my chest when she was small enough to cradle in one arm, her skin smelling of talcum powder. Then I had a vision of me, wet and filthy as I was now, bursting into her wedding, the music stopping, everyone looking up horrified, Maria the most horrified of all.
I lowered my head.
I would not be missed.
I took two running steps, grabbed the railing, and hurled myself over.
THE REST IS inexplicable. What I hit, how I survived, I cannot tell you. All I recall is twisting and snapping and brushing and flipping and scraping and a final thud. These scars on my face? I figured they came from that. It seemed as if I fell for a very long time.
When I opened my eyes, I was surrounded by fallen pieces of the tree. Stones pressed into my stomach and chest. I lifted my chin, and this is what I saw: the baseball field of my youth, coming into the morning light, the two dugouts, the pitcher’s mound.
And my mother, who had been dead for years.
II. Morning
Chick’s Mom
MY FATHER ONCE TOLD ME, “You can be a mama’s boy or a daddy’s boy. But you can’t be both.”
So I was a daddy’s boy. I mimicked his walk. I mimicked his deep, smoky laugh. I carried a baseball glove because he loved baseball, and I took every hardball he threw, even the ones that stung my hands so badly I thought I would scream.
When school was out, I would run to his liquor store on Kraft Avenue and stay until dinnertime, playing with empty boxes in the storeroom, waiting for him to finish. We would ride home together in his sky blue Buick sedan, and sometimes we would sit in the driveway as he smoked his Chesterfields and listened to the radio news.
I have a younger sister named Roberta, and back then she wore pink ballerina slippers almost everywhere. When we ate at the local diner, my mother would yank her to the “ladies’” room—her pink feet sliding across the tile—while my father took me to the “gents’.” In my young mind I figured this was life’s assignment: me with him, her with her. Ladies’. Gents’. Mama’s. Daddy’s.
A daddy’s boy.
I was a daddy’s boy, and I remained a daddy’s boy right up to a hot, cloudless Saturday morning in the spring of my fifth grade year. We had a doubleheader scheduled that day against the Cardinals, who wore red wool uniforms and were sponsored by Connor’s Plumbing Supply.
The sun was already warming the kitchen when I entered in my long socks, carrying my glove, and saw my mother at the table smoking a cigarette. My mother was a beautiful woman, but she didn’t look beautiful that morning. She bit her lip and looked away from me. I remember the smell of burnt toast and I thought she was upset because she messed up breakfast.
“I’ll eat cereal,” I said.
I took a bowl from the cupboard.
She cleared her throat. “What time is your game, honey?”
“Do you have a cold?” I asked.
She shook her head and put a hand to her cheek. “What time is your game?”
“I dunno.” I shrugged. This was before I wore a watch.
I got the glass bottle of milk and the big box of corn puffs. I poured the corn puffs too fast and some bounced out of the bowl and onto the table. My mother picked them up, one at a time, and put them in her palm.
“I’ll take you,” she whispered. “Whenever it is.”
“Why can’t Daddy take me?” I asked.
“Daddy’s not here.”
“Where is he?”
She didn’t answer.
“When’s he coming back?”
She squeezed the corn puffs and they crumbled into floury dust.
I was a mama’s boy from that day on.
NOW, WHEN I SAY I SAW MY DEAD MOTHER, I mean just that. I saw her. She was standing by the dugout, wearing a lavender jacket, holding her pocketbook. She didn’t say a word. She just looked at me.
I tried to lift myself in her direction then fell back, a bolt of pain shooting through my muscles. My brain wanted to shout her name, but there was no sound from my throat.
I lowered my head and put my palms together. I pushed hard again, and this time I lifted myself halfway off the ground. I looked up.
She was gone.
I don’t expect you to go with me here. It’s crazy, I know. You don’t see dead people. You don’t get visits. You don’t fall off of a water tower, miraculously alive despite your best attempt to kill yourself, and see your dearly departed mother holding her pocketbook on the third-base line.
I have given it all the thought that you are probably giving it right now; a hallucination, a fantasy, a drunken dream, the mixed-up brain on its mixed-up way. As I say, I don’t expect you to go with me here.
But this is what happened. She had been there. I had seen her. I lay on the field for an indeterminate amount of time, then I rose to my feet and I got myself walking. I brushed the sand and debris from my knees and forearms. I was bleeding from dozens of cuts, most of them small, a few bigger. I could taste blood in my mouth.
I cut across a familiar patch of grass. A morning wind shook the trees and brought a sweep of yellow leaves, like a small, fluttering rainstorm. I had twice failed to kill myself. How pathetic was that?
I headed toward my old house, determined to finish the job.
Dear Charley—
Have lots of FUN in SCHOOL today!
I will see you at lunchtime and we’ll get a milkshake.
I love you every day!
Mom
(from Chick Benetto’s papers, circa 1954)
How Mother Met Father
MY MOTHER WAS ALWAYS WRITING ME NOTES. She slipped them to me whenever she dropped me off somewhere. I never understood this, since anything she had to say she could have said right then and saved herself the paper and the awful taste of envelope glue.
I think the first note was on my first day of kindergarten in 1954. What was I, five years old? The schoolyard was filled with kids, shrieking and running around. We approached, me holding my mother’s hand, as a woman in a black beret formed lines in front of the teachers. I saw the other mothers kissing their kids and walking away. I must have started crying.
“What’s the matter?” my mother asked.
“Don’t go.”
“I’ll be here when you come out.”
“No.”
“It’s OK. I’ll be here.”
“What if I can’t find you?”
“You will.”
“What if I lose you?”
“You can’t lose your mother, Charley.”
She smiled. She reached inside her jacket pocket and handed me a small blue envelope.
“Here,” she said. “If you miss me really badl
y, you can open this.”
She wiped my eyes with a tissue from her purse, then hugged me good-bye. I can still see her walking backward, blowing me kisses, her lips painted in red Revlon, her hair swept up above her ears. I waved good-bye with the letter. It didn’t occur to her, I guess, that I was just starting school and didn’t know how to read. That was my mother. It was the thought that counted.
SHE MET MY father, the story goes, down by Pepperville Lake in the spring of 1944. She was swimming and he was throwing a baseball with his friend, and his friend whipped it too high and it landed in the water. My mother swam to get it. My father splashed in. As he surfaced with the ball, they banged heads.
“And we never stopped,” she would say.
They had a fast, intense courtship, because that’s how my father was, he started things with an aim to finish them. He was a tall, meaty young man, fresh out of high school, who combed his hair in a high pompadour and drove his father’s blue-and-white LaSalle. He enlisted in World War II as soon as he could, telling my mother he’d like to “kill more of the enemy than anyone in our town.” He was shipped overseas to Italy, the northern Apennine mountains and the Po Valley, near Bologna. In a letter from there, in 1945, he proposed to my mother. “Be my wife,” he wrote, which sounded more like a command to me. My mother agreed in a return letter she wrote on special linen stationery, which was too expensive for her but which she bought anyhow, my mother being respectful of both words and the vehicle used to deliver them.
Two weeks after my father received it, the Germans signed the surrender documents. He was coming home.
My theory was he never got enough war for his liking. So he made his own with us.
MY FATHER’S NAME was Leonard, but everyone called him Len, and my mother’s name was Pauline, but everyone called her “Posey,” like the nursery rhyme, “a pocketful of Posey.” She had large, almond-shaped eyes, dark, sweeping hair that she often wore up, and a soft, creamy complexion. She reminded people of the actress Audrey Hepburn, and in our small town, there weren’t many women who fit that description. She loved wearing makeup—mascara, eyeliner, rouge, you name it—and while most people considered her “fun” or “perky” or, later, “eccentric” or “headstrong,” for most of my childhood I considered her a nag.
Was I wearing my galoshes? Did I have my jacket? Did I finish my schoolwork? Why were my pants ripped?
She was always correcting my grammar.
“Me and Roberta are gonna—,” I’d start.
“Roberta and I,” she would interrupt.
“Me and Jimmy want to—”
“Jimmy and I,” she would say.
Parents slot into postures in a child’s mind, and my mother’s posture was a lipsticked woman leaning over, wagging a finger, imploring me to be better than I was. My father’s posture was a man in repose, shoulders pressed against a wall, holding a cigarette, watching me sink or swim.
In retrospect, I should have made more of the fact that one was leaning toward me and the other was leaning away. But I was a kid, and what do kids know?
MY MOTHER WAS French Protestant, and my father was Italian Catholic, and their union was an excess of God, guilt, and sauce. They argued all the time. The kids. Food. Religion. My father would hang a picture of Jesus on the wall outside the bathroom and, while he was at work, my mother would move it somewhere less conspicuous. He would come home and yell, “You can’t move Jesus, for Christ’s sake!” and she would say, “It’s a picture, Len. You think God wants to hang by the bathroom?”
And he would put it back.
And the next day she would move it.
On and on like that.
They were a blend of backgrounds and cultures, but if my family was a democracy, my father’s vote counted twice. He decided what we should eat for dinner, what color to paint the house, which bank we should use, which channel we watched on our Zenith console black-and-white TV set. On the day I was born, he informed my mother, “The kid is getting baptized in the Catholic church,” and that was that.
The funny thing is, he wasn’t religious himself. After the war, my father, who owned a liquor store, was more interested in profits than prophecies. And when it came to me, the only thing I had to worship was baseball. He was pitching to me before I could walk. He gave me a wooden bat before my mother let me use scissors. He said I could make the major leagues one day if I had “a plan,” and if I “stuck to the plan.”
Of course, when you’re that young, you nest in your parents’ plans, not your own.
And so, from the time I was seven years old, I scanned the newspaper for the box scores of my future employers. I kept a glove at my father’s liquor store in case he could steal a few minutes and throw to me in the parking lot. I even wore cleats to Sunday mass sometimes, because we left for American Legion games right after the final hymn. When they referred to the church as “God’s house,” I worried that the Lord did not appreciate my spikes digging into his floors. I tried standing on my toes once but my father whispered, “What the hell are you doing?” and I lowered myself quickly.
MY MOTHER, ON the other hand, didn’t care for baseball. She’d been an only child, her family had been poor, and she’d had to drop out of school to work during the war. She earned her high school diploma at night, and did nursing school after that. In her mind, for me, there were only books and college and the gates they would open. The best she could say about baseball was that it “gets you some fresh air.”
But she showed up. She sat in the stands, wearing her big sunglasses, her hair well coiffed, courtesy of the local beauty parlor. Sometimes I would peek at her from inside the dugout, and she’d be looking off over the horizon. But when I came to bat, she clapped and yelled, “Yaaay, Charley!” and I guess that’s all I cared about. My father, who coached every team I played on up to the day he split, once caught me looking her way and hollered, “Eyes on the ball, Chick! There’s nothing up there that’s gonna help you!”
Mom, I guess, wasn’t part of “the plan.”
STILL, I CAN say I adored my mother, in the way that boys adore their mothers while taking them for granted. She made that easy. For one thing, she was funny. She didn’t mind smearing ice cream on her face for a laugh. She did odd voices, like Popeye the Sailor Man, or Louis Armstrong croaking, “If ya ain’t got it in ya, ya can’t blow it out.” She tickled me and she let me tickle her back, squeezing her elbows in as she laughed. She tucked me in every night, rubbing my hair and saying, “Give your mother a kiss.” She told me I was smart and that being smart was a privilege, and she insisted that I read one book every week, and took me to the library to make sure this happened. She dressed too flashy sometimes, and she sang along with our music, which bothered me. But there was never, not for a moment, a question of trust between us.
If my mother said it, I believed it.
She wasn’t easy on me, don’t get me wrong. She smacked me. She scolded me. She punished me. But she loved me. She really did. She loved me falling off a swing set. She loved me stepping on her floors with muddy shoes.
She loved me through vomit and snot and bloody knees. She loved me coming and going, at my worst and at my best. She had a bottomless well of love for me.
Her only flaw was that she didn’t make me work for it.
You see, here’s my theory: Kids chase the love that eludes them, and for me, that was my father’s love. He kept it tucked away, like papers in a briefcase. And I kept trying to get in there.
Years later, after her death, I made lists of Times My Mother Stood Up for Me and Times I Did Not Stand Up for My Mother. It was sad, the imbalance of it all. Why do kids assume so much from one parent and hold the other to a lower, looser standard?
Maybe it’s like my old man said: You can be a mama’s boy or a daddy’s boy, but you can’t be both. So you cling to the one you think you might lose.
Times My Mother Stood Up for Me
I am five years old. We are walking to Fanelli’s market. A n
eighbor in a bathrobe and pink curlers opens her screen door and calls to my mother. As they talk, I wander to the backyard of the house next door.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, a German shepherd lunges at me. Awowwow! It is tethered to a clothesline. Awowwow! It rises on its hind legs, straining the leash. Awowwowow!
I whirl and run. I am screaming. My mother dashes to me.
“What?” she hollers, grabbing my elbows. “What is it?”
“A dog!”
She exhales. “A dog? Where? Around there?”
I nod, crying.
She marches me around the house. There is the dog. It howls again. Awowwowowow! I jump back. But my mother yanks me forward. And she barks. She barks. She makes the best barking sound I have ever heard a human being make.
The dog falls into a whimpering crouch. My mother turns.
“You have to show them who’s boss, Charley,” she says.
(from a list in a notebook found amongst Chick Benetto’s belongings)
Chick Returns to His Old House
BY NOW, THE MORNING SUN was just over the horizon and it came at me like a sidearm pitch between the houses of my old neighborhood. I shielded my eyes. This being early October, there were already piles of leaves pushed against the curb—more leaves than I remembered from my autumns here—and less open space in the sky. I think what you notice most when you haven’t been home in a while is how much the trees have grown around your memories.
Pepperville Beach. Do you know how it got its name? It’s almost embarrassing. A small patch of sand had been trucked in years ago by some entrepreneur who thought the town would be more impressive if we had a beach, even though we didn’t have an ocean. He joined the chamber of commerce and he even got the town’s name changed—Pepperville Lake became Pepperville Beach—despite the fact that our “beach” had a swing set and a sliding board and was big enough for about twelve families before you’d be sitting on someone else’s towel. It became a sort of joke when we were growing up—“Hey, you wanna go to the beach?” or “Hey, it looks like a beach day to me”—because we knew we weren’t fooling anybody.