Almost a Family Read online

  The sad news was that Inell had gone. We didn’t learn the details, just that her departure had to do with the “rough patch” we had gone through, the difficulty of pulling together enough money to pay her on time every week. Mom appeared to feel that, after being with us all those years, Inell had been less than loyal in not sticking around. But with characteristic optimism she pointed out that we were big boys now and didn’t need her. We’d manage fine, just the three of us. In fact, to ease the transition, she had arranged for us to be invited to dinner at the house of Inell’s new employer, the Katzes. Perhaps Inell would even cook our favorite dessert, lemon meringue pie. When the dinner took place the following week, it turned out to be a fiasco. Bob and I wanted only to visit with Inell in the kitchen, while she was scurrying about nervously trying to put on a feast that would please her new boss. She made it clear that we were “underfoot.” The dinner conversation was awkward. As Inell served us, I kept looking to her for some sign that she missed us as much as we missed her. Making small talk, Mom noted that I was a fan of “pop music.” Mr. Katz brightened at this and promptly showed me his collection of jazz and show tunes, not a single one of which I was familiar with. The kind of music I liked were these new songs with a heavy beat, like Bill Haley’s “Crazy Man, Crazy,” which were pushing out traditional songs like “Stranger in Paradise” and “I Love Paris” on Lucky Strike’s Your Hit Parade. “That’s not music; that’s nothing but noise,” sputtered Mr. Katz. Even the lemon meringue pie seemed to have lost its savor.

  Without Inell, there was no one at home when I returned from school each day. I reveled in my new emancipation. When friends came over, I’d raid the refrigerator. I’d fix us a snack while pulling out a couple of raw eggs and I’d toss them over my shoulder while they, shocked, tried to catch them before they splattered on the floor. I was signaling: Anything goes in this anarchic household. We had the run of the place. On a hill in the woods behind our house was a decaying shack, which became a clubhouse for all my buddies. They gathered there after school. One afternoon I engineered an elaborate plot to entice the class bully over. We punished him, strapping him to a bedspring and slapping his belly until it turned red, and then proffered a document pledging that he would straighten out and give up his bellicose ways. He signed it. The rest of the afternoon we all played football.

  I still liked creating miniature villages tucked away in hidden places outdoors. But now, the thrill of destruction entered the picture. I designed the bridges and houses to come crashing down in landslides and earthquakes, and on the Fourth of July, I placed firecrackers and cherry bombs in strategic spots—beneath the cars, under the town hall—to wreak mayhem. I’d try to light the fuses all at the same time, which I could never quite manage. I also had a more permanent microworld—an American Flyer toy railroad set that Mom helped me with. We placed it on a twelve-foot-by-six-foot piece of plywood, using plaster of Paris to create tunnels and sculpted hills and, over time, adding a station, a farm, a rural crossroads, and a couple of houses complete with chopped twigs for stacks of wood by the back door. One day, acting on a sudden impulse, I gave it all away and told my astounded mother that I needed the plywood for a tree house. That was only partly true. I suddenly felt I no longer wanted to be the lord and master of such a perfect pretend little community.

  I was also developing a fascination with criminals. To some extent, this mirrored society’s interest of the time, a remnant of the public preoccupation with gangsters during the great crime epoch of the 1930s and 1940s. Each week, I listened fervently to “Gang Busters” on the radio, my heart racing at the end when the announcer issued a real live “wanted” bulletin for an escaped killer known to be “armed and dangerous.” I was sure the killer was in our neighborhood, probably in the bushes outside our house, which kept me tossing and turning in bed. I cadged copies of The Saturday Evening Post, which printed stories of bank robbers and killers. The magazine rarely disappointed, illustrating the articles with grainy black-and-white photos, usually mug shots, of ruthless-looking criminals. I especially prized its annual “Ten Most Wanted.” Of all the criminals, I most admired Willie Sutton because he was shrewd and acted alone, although it was hard not to make room for the charismatic John Dillinger, who was said to have escaped from jail with a phony gun carved from soap and blackened with shoe polish.

  With the help of three friends, I composed a book called Crime Incopurated (an unintentional misspelling of incorporated), which documented the exploits of our antiheroes. We added essays and short stories, antisocial in nature, and even a section providing tips for criminals, a perverse mirror version of Dick Tracy’s “Crime Stoppers Textbook.” I took the book to school one day and it created such a sensation during a music class in the auditorium that the teacher spied it and confiscated it. Four hours later, I crept into his office, spotted it on his desk, and grabbed it. As a purloined object, it took on added value.

  Not long after we returned from our uncle’s house in Media, Mom began working long hours again and then appeared fatigued and began turning groggy again. Sometimes she was so tired, she didn’t manage to get up in time to go to work. On Sundays, once or twice, she placed calls to the home of the owner of Calise’s liquor store; we would drive there and park around the back and he would open the door to let her in while I waited in the car. She would come back carrying a paper bag. As inconceivable as it now appears, I still had no idea what was going on.

  I soon noticed that her driving was erratic, especially at night. When we had to pick Bob up somewhere—say at basketball practice at the junior high school—the trip turned into a nightmare. On winding country roads, our car would weave all over the place, sometimes crossing into the wrong lane and riding up on the opposite shoulder. Sitting in the front seat, I would close my eyes. The headlights would swerve, pointing first at some tree trunks, then a clump of bushes and a driveway. I’d reach over to grab the wheel and straighten the car. Sometimes I simply gave up and put myself in the hands of fate. I’d duck on the floor and cower there with my eyes closed, waiting for the crash. The moment we arrived at our destination and the car stopped, I would heave a sigh of relief. For then Bob would take over the driving. I felt my body relax. I’d climb into my customary place, lying flat in the rear well for the collapsible top while my mother scooted over into the passenger seat and Bob slid behind the wheel. He would frown as he concentrated, shifting gears in an H-pattern as he had been taught by Uncle Ben, sometimes grinding them, straining to sit taller to be able to see better. He was only fourteen. When we’d get home, we’d help Mom to bed, swinging her feet up on the mattress and tucking her in. As a rule we didn’t need to undress her, because while she was driving, or attempting to, she was already clothed in her nightgown, which was covered with a robe, and wearing slippers.

  Throughout this time, Bob was becoming more and more a lifesaver to me. He had taken over the role of the protector, becoming less of a brother and more of a father. I knew that I could lead a child’s life because of him alone, that he was a shield covering me from the dangers that would otherwise crush me. At times, I almost luxuriated in my sense of irresponsibility. With a kind of obsession, I insisted upon my ignorance, upon my right to a childhood of innocence and, even at times, joy. With desperation, I concentrated on unimportant details and short-term pleasures. The knowledge that I had, say, a sleepover date on the coming weekend was enough to sustain me. I remained detached from adults and never told anyone about the problems at home. Even while denying their existence, I recognized that they were at the core of things, a secret wrapped within secrets. Yet I could never get at the core secret, because I did not want to. I saw that the world, tenuous and full of fears, could never be complete or comprehensible to me. I became superstitious and compulsive. If I saw a Lucky Strike pack on the sidewalk, I had to step on it. I never stepped on graves, walked under ladders, or broke mirrors. Any superstition I encountered, I immediately adopted, a fall guy for snake-oil salesmen and religio
us cranks. If I spun the radio dial and came across a sermon, I had to stop and listen to it or at the least turn the radio off, move the dial, and turn it back on. I carried a rabbit’s paw to baseball games and rubbed it while playing right field, praying that a ball would not come to me or that, if it did, I would catch it. I seemed to derive pleasure from superficial, meaningless things and rituals—a collection of jelly glasses with cartoon figures on them, the daily habit of watching Captain Video on television, the number of times I could jump on a pogo stick without falling. I became fanatical in my fandom of the Dodgers. Their winning assumed an importance beyond anything else in the universe. I admired Jackie Robinson and Carl Furillo and Gil Hodges, but I loved Roy Campanella; when “Campy” was behind home plate, everything seemed in place. During the World Series, against the unbeatable Yankee machine, I lived and died on every pitch, falling on the couch with my fingers crossed as Joe Black went into his windup. When the series ended in disaster, as it invariably did, I swooned in misery.

  I also turned into a religious fanatic for a short period. Convinced that I was destined to spend eternity in hell, I vowed to forsake all manner of petty thievery and other behavior that had put me on the path to fire and brimstone. This was strange, because the denomination in which I had been raised was the Congregational Church, which did not place a great deal of emphasis on the perils of the afterlife. The church I attended was a picture postcard of a New England church, a simple but majestic white clapboard structure with a soaring steeple surrounded by a sea of green grass. Yet somewhere along the line, I came across the darker strains of theology, and I embraced them, imagining a Lucifer personally eyeing me and preparing a future of fiendish cruelty. The transgressions that I and my friends engaged in were minor—shoplifting plastic toys at the five-and-ten and the like—but I knew they were sufficient to send me to everlasting damnation. At one point a group of us began sneaking into the movie theater on Saturday afternoons. We’d wait until the manager unlocked the doors, then slip into the empty theater and hide under the seats when he swept through with a flashlight on an inspection. Clearly, this alone was going to consign me to hell. One Saturday, as we assembled in front of the theater, I announced self-righteously that I was going to pay for my ticket. The other boys were surprised at my turnabout until I began to describe vividly the horrors that awaited me—and them—unless we changed our ways. We all paid. Some days later, one of the boys announced that his parents had told him that hell did not really exist in a physical state; it was a sort of spiritual symbol, standing in for something else, like Santa Claus. I questioned him closely. He articulated the position convincingly and immediately I felt a weight drop away. Shortly afterward, I gave up my fanatical religious phase.

  I resumed having arguments with Mom when she came in to say good night. The grogginess was getting worse. She was now sleeping a good deal of the time. When I awoke for school, I saw that her bedroom door was sometimes closed, and when I left to catch the school bus, I would go upstairs on some pretext and see that it still had not opened. She stayed home most days, dressed all day in a nightgown.

  At about this time, when I was in the sixth grade, we lost our house. Bob and I weren’t told what had happened, but we knew from bits and pieces of information that Mom’s business wasn’t doing well. In retrospect, it’s clear that she had sunk the mortgage into the Women’s National News Service. For the time being, until things picked up, we were informed, we’d just have to rent. The place we found was an apartment in a rambling, run-down old house in the poor section of town. The house was a monstrosity, painted battleship gray, falling apart. It loomed up like a Charles Addams cartoon at the end of Saxon Lane, a dead-end street marked off by two crumbling pillars. It was situated just a stone’s throw from the river and next to the railroad tracks.

  Overnight, we went from a place of about five thousand square feet to one that had five hundred. The apartment had two rooms—a living room, now heaped with our sofas, desks, and other large pieces of furniture, and a bleak bedroom. Sandwiched in between the two rooms was a four-foot-wide galley for a kitchen and a narrow bathroom. Mom and I slept in the bedroom, our beds separated by a bureau and a Japanese screen. Bob slept in a partially enclosed back porch. In winter, he huddled under a mountain of blankets.

  The house shook when trains went rattling past. At first, we were kept awake by the noise, but eventually we adjusted to it and were able to sleep. My friends liked hanging out on the riverbank and playing on the tracks. We’d put pennies on the steel rails, step back to watch the train thunder past, then retrieve the smashed bits of hot copper. We experimented with other coins and small items but drew the line at things that couldn’t fit into our pockets, for fear they might derail the speeding locomotive. No friend remarked that we seemed to have fallen on hard times, though I imagined them all thinking that. Children are more aware of the climbs and slides on the socioeconomic ladder than is generally recognized. I remember Mom trying to put a good face on things, cheerfully cooking oatmeal for breakfast because it “clings to the ribs” and telling us that the important thing was that the three of us were together. My hound dog, Nicky, came with us, of course, but after a week or so, he went missing. A phone call came from Boss; Nicky had turned up there, just the way he had in the old days after I boarded the school bus. We fetched him home, but after a week or so he disappeared again. From then on, Nicky commuted from our apartment to Boss’s house and back, a trip of some fifteen miles, which took him across the busy Post Road, spending two or three weeks in each place. I felt hurt every time he left and grateful when he returned. During one of his sojourns with us, he woke us at two in the morning with ferocious barking. It came from the building’s central hallway, then from the front stairs, and finally from outside. A neighbor from across the hall told us that he had chased away a burglar. Eventually, Nicky moved in with Boss and stopped coming to our place altogether.

  We weren’t used to living in the same house with others and we didn’t go out of our way to become friends with our neighbors, as if remaining aloof could keep alive the fiction that we had the house to ourselves. There was one other boy living there; he had an odd tic, a way of screwing his eyeballs to the upper corners of his sockets and when I spent time with him, I acquired it, too. At other times, I would contemplate mortality. I would place my hand over my heart and feel the beats and wonder how many beats I had left in my allotted lifetime.

  Mom would have periods in which she appeared to be her old self. I could almost feel her willing these periods on, trying to rally in the face of some unnamed force weighing her down. There were still times in which she could cook up adventures that made life scintillating. I had long wanted a skunk as a pet, ever since seeing the movie Bambi, and so for my twelfth birthday, she bought me one. I had been told they made affectionate pets, once they were deodorized. I named it “Airwick” and imagined carrying it with me, looped lovingly around my neck. But sadly, the skunk had been caught full-grown and was not tame. Let loose in our apartment, it hid under my bed, and when I went to pet it, touching the frizzed white strip on its back, it sunk its capped teeth deep into my hand. From there it ran and hid under our claw-footed bathtub, a sanctuary where it remained during the day, emerging only at night or on those occasions when we took hot baths. The skunk was a disaster, and we soon got rid of it.

  I was fascinated by the river. To reach it, I had only to follow a short path through a grove of pine trees, emerging on the bank near the base of a giant stone tower that supported a railroad bridge. The river rose and fell with the tides. When the tide was out, a blanket of slippery green slime covered the rocks, and a slightly nauseating smell of pollution and sewage hung in the air. I wanted to set a raft on the river and let it carry me, the way Huck Finn did. A friend and I built a large one by lashing together the heavy creosote railroad ties. It took two weeks to construct it, and just as we were hauling it to the water’s edge to launch it, a railroad man peered over the edge of the
bridge and spotted us. He ordered us to stop and then, more calmly, explained that the New York, New Haven and Hartford line would be legally responsible if we drowned, which, he said, was a distinct possibility. Several weeks later, my mother bought me a small skiff. It had a large hole in the bottom, which I patched over. A friend and I took it out on the river and made it to the center of town, paddling furiously and bailing out the water that seeped in relentlessly. Once we made it past the town bridge, and then made it back, we never went again. The expedition had lost its romance.

  One afternoon my brother, several friends, and I were hanging out on the riverbank, idly tossing rocks at a small white buoy about forty feet out in the water. Only rarely did one of us manage to hit it, and whenever that happened, we’d all cheer. Suddenly, a wild-looking man came screaming down the path, running so fast he skidded on the earth, as if he were sliding into third base. Moments before landing on the ground, he let fly a rock the size of a fist. It struck me in the right thigh. I didn’t cry out and no one noticed. The man leapt up and continued charging at us. When he reached us, he was literally hopping mad, yelling something about “private property”—it turned out it was his buoy that we were using for target practice. Eventually, he calmed down somewhat. At that point, Bob saw tears in my eye. Realizing that I had been struck, he turned on the man, straightening up and yelling back, “You hit my brother!” Our friends moved toward him. The man blanched, mumbled an apology, and quickly slunk away. That moment remains a jewel in my memory—I can hold it to the light and examine it from any angle, all of them pleasing: the turning of tables on an adult, my martyrdom, the thrill of gang power, and, most of all, my brother as an avenging angel.