Black and Blue (27 page)

“I figured out how to do this,” he said. “Like, once I don’t mind what I call people, then it can be just like it really is. Here’s Daddy, only I called him Robert Crenshaw. And here’s Daddy’s Daddy, and I called him the same thing. It’s just the same, only with different names.”

And so it was. As I filled him in on the generations that had gone before, I made amendments, but few were necessary. There was one telltale Giuseppe, Robert’s paternal great-grandfather, but I named him Joe. My mother-in-law’s maiden name was Stanowicz; I let her keep it. And mine? Pick one, I told Robert, making a game of it. Give me a name before I was married. He made it Wynn. Elizabeth Wynn. It sounded sort of grand.

“What about Grandmom?” he asked, and my mother went in true to life, O’Donnell as she’d been born and raised, too far out on a limb to shatter the disguise of our new existence.

“See, I know who they are,” Robert said. “That’s enough, right? That I know. Like everybody in the class will be looking and it will say Robert Crenshaw and I’ll know what it’s supposed to really be.”

“That’s right,” I said.

“I know. Like, remember how Daddy took me that one time to the place where he was working in Central Park? There was this big policeman there, I can’t remember his name, but he was really really big.”

“McMichael. Captain McMichael. He was the station commander there.”

“That was him, I think. And he kept looking at me and saying you’re not a Benedetto. I know you’re not. I knew your grandfather and I know your father. Nah, I can tell, you’re not a Benedetto. And I think he was saying it like a joke, because I looked like Daddy, but I was only a little kid, like five, and I didn’t really understand that it was a joke. I thought maybe he was right, that I was adopted or something, like that Korean kid in my old school who was always telling everybody he was Italian just because his name was Russo, and everybody thought he was really stupid. And Daddy could kind of tell that I was upset and when we went out to get ice cream from the Good Humor truck in the park we were sitting on this bench and he said to me, see this. And he pointed to that really big vein in my arm.” He held it out, thin and bony, and pointed to the blue artery that ran behind the elbow, his grubby finger outlining it for me. “And then Daddy showed me the one he had. It was really big, and it kind of bulged out. And he said there’s a part of me in you. And there’s a part of you in me. And there’s a part of me in all the kids you’ll have, and their kids.”

“That’s true,” I said.

“I know,” he said, picking up his pencil again and coloring in some leaves. Then he asked casually, as though he was only wondering whether he should use a forest-green or a medium-green
pencil, “Remember that time that Daddy busted Nana’s mirror in the hall and then he said he was really, really sorry and got her another one? If he did that to you, would you say it was all right?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I don’t mean like go back,” he said, not looking up from the paper. “I mean like accept his apology.”

“I don’t know, sweetie,” I said. “A lot of bad things happened with Daddy and me. He did a lot of things to me that he shouldn’t have. He shouldn’t have hit me. Ever. No one should ever hit another person. And he did, a lot. I know it’s a hard thing to understand, why he did what he did.
I
don’t even understand it. Maybe someday I will.”

“I need to finish this,” Robert said, his pencil point coming down hard on the poster paper.

Sometimes I felt as if I’d spent my life sitting on the closed lid of the toilet seat with the water running while I cried, and I wondered whether Robert, sitting downstairs working away on his project, heard the sound of the cold-water tap at full throttle as somehow soothing, the background noise of his childhood nights, as familiar as the rumble of the furnace coming on. It took me a long time to finish this time, to throw cold water on my wan face, to blow my nose and then use a little concealer to veil the flush of emotion. Then I folded laundry and changed sheets. Cotton had always helped me get over the humps.

By the time I went back downstairs the names were all neatly printed and Robert was working on his tree, a mighty oak by the look of it, many branched, thick-trunked, sketched in with colored pencils. And as I admired it, exclaiming over his neatness and the careful attention to the leaves, I realized I would have to tell
Mike that Mrs. Bernsen was wiser than I, at least in this case. For there was Robert—just ROBERT, I noticed, with no surname at all—at the bottom of the trunk, at the roots, the base, the center of it all. He had not colored the leaves in yet, and the trunk and its branches looked for the moment less like a tree and more like a great brown river, the Nile, the Amazon, the Benedetto and Flynn river of blood, and there at its isthmus was this one child, so that it seemed that all of these people, from Poland, from Italy, from Ireland and the Bronx and Brooklyn, had come together for no other reason than to someday produce Robert Benedetto, in an event as meant, as important as that one in Bethlehem that he had learned about in catechism class at St. Stannie’s. There was Robert, the reason for the collision of these incongruous constellations, the savior of us all.

“Is it all right?” he said.

“It’s beautiful. It’s perfect. I’m really, really proud of you.”

He’d been proud of himself, too, I could tell. He’d rolled the poster paper carefully, tying it at each end with a bit of twine, and he’d carried it out to the bus in both hands. The way he stood with it reminded me of when he was four, in blue satin shorts and a white satin tuxedo shirt, the ring-bearer at the wedding of one of Ann Benedetto’s godchildren. It reminded me of the way, his face solemn, he’d carried the blue satin pillow, held close to his narrow chest, down the long aisle of the church. Bennie was the same, the way he carried his. It was as though they had their lives in their hands, these beautiful dark-faced displaced boys. The look of them, so serious, so proud somehow, stayed with me all day, while I scolded the dialysis patient for eating too much junk and shopped for the woman with cerebral palsy.

“Hi,” I said casually when Robert came back home that afternoon, letting a great cloud of warm air into the dim air-conditioned cool of the apartment. There was a laundry basket on the couch, and I was folding more sheets, matching corners, my arms spread in a kind of benediction, so I did not immediately see his face, and when I did I couldn’t at first believe it, couldn’t take it in. I stood holding the sheet across myself, like a curtain, my eyes and mouth wide above it, a cartoon woman.

“My God,” I said, and pulled him into the light from the window.

It looked worse than it was. His upper lip was swollen on one side, purple and misshapen, and the area just below his left eye was beginning to color. There was a ribbon of blood beneath his mouth, but I discovered as I used my own spit to remove it, not taking the time for towel or water, that there was no wound beneath it. Maybe the gum had bled and had stopped bleeding.

“What happened?” I said.

“Jonathan Green is a jerk-off,” he said, and his voice quavered deep in his throat like a birdcall.

“Sit down,” I said. Ice, aspirin, tissues. I put them on the flimsy coffee table and put my arm around him. A shudder ran through him, and then he looked up, his fingers going to his lip. The colored pencils were still spread out on the kitchen table, a rainbow lying awry.

“Wait,” he said, and went upstairs into the bathroom. I knew he was looking at himself in the mirror.

“This wasn’t my fault,” he said. “I pushed him first but he deserved it. He’s had it coming all year. He’s a jerk. The biggest jerk
in the school. I hope I broke his nose. He called Bennie a spic. You know what a spic is?”

I nodded.

“We were talking in class about where we were from, and he started it then, he was starting to talk about how you shouldn’t be allowed to live here unless you could speak English. He was saying that America was too small for Americans and all these other people were coming here and taking stuff away. He goes, like, oh, they can’t even speak English. And Goalie was really embarrassed, I could tell, and this girl named Christie, you don’t know her but her parents are Greek or something, and they can’t speak English that good, I don’t think. And I said that there were lots of people who couldn’t speak that good English but were nice people.”

“Didn’t Mrs. Bernsen say anything?”

“She said I was right. She said her parents were German and it took them a long time to learn English and now look at her, she taught English. But then we got dismissed for the day, and we got outside, and Jonathan comes up, with Bennie right there, and he says I only said what I said because of my spic friend. That’s what he said, ‘Your spic friend.’” I just shoved into him as hard as I could. He called Bennie a spic. Then he hit me. Then I hit him.” Blood was beading up on his lower lip again, and I handed him a tissue. He pressed it to his mouth, hard.

“I sat on him and made him take it back,” he finally said. His words were muffled by his lip, which was getting bigger. “Put some ice on that,” I said.

He slumped down in the sofa, his back bent, his elbows on his knees, avoiding my eyes. There were lemon Popsicles in the
freezer and I gave him one, two birds with one stone, the ice and the unexpected before-dinner treat.

“Jonathan is a jerk,” I said. “He’s been goading you from day one. And he’s got a mean mouth on him. So now you know that he’s mean down to the ground. Now you know that the only way to deal with Jonathan is to stay away from him. You’re going to meet people like him your whole life. They’re ignorant and spiteful and they call names because they figure it makes them big if they can make someone else small. Makes them high if they can make someone else low. Bennie is such a star, everyone likes him, and he’s so good at sports and school that Jonathan had to pull him down. So he calls him a spic. So it tells you more about Jonathan than it does about Bennie.”

“I said that,” Robert said. “I said he didn’t know what he was talking about. He didn’t even know what a spic was. I knew from Daddy. Daddy talked about spics with Mr. Hogan and Mr. Carter. He said the spics live like animals and that they killed that policeman in Washington Heights. The one that Daddy helped train, when you went to the funeral. The spics killed him.”

I winced. “Don’t use that word, Ba,” I said. “Spic is a word that people use to talk about people who are Spanish. Puerto Ricans, Cubans like Bennie. They’re Latino, but people who don’t like them call them spics.”

“That’s not what Daddy said. Daddy said the spics messed up the city.”

“Maybe you didn’t hear him right,” I said, hearing the whole rant in my head, the way I’d heard it a dozen times. They breed like rabbits, they won’t learn the language, they put their women to work filling nickel bags, the girls dress like whores, the boys
can’t keep their pants on, why the hell don’t they stay where they belong? They were like the words to a song that I’d heard so many times I scarcely noticed it anymore, the words all blurred together.

“I thought spics were bad guys. Like robbers. Or guys who sold drugs.”

“No,” I said.

“So what are they?”

“Spic is a word that some people use to describe people who come from Spanish-speaking countries. The way people who don’t like black people call them niggers.”

“So when Daddy was talking about spics he was talking about Puerto Rican people? And Cuban people?”

“Ba,” I said, and then, when I saw his face twist, “Robert. Sometimes police officers get very frustrated with all the bad stuff they see around them. They want to say bad things about bad guys and sometimes they use words they shouldn’t use. Your daddy would tell you that if he was here.”

Robert sucked on his Popsicle and stared into the middle distance, one eye beginning to close up into a shining slit, his other focused on nothing. For a long time we sat there, side by side, not touching. Finally he stood wearily, like an old man, sore and tired.

“I’m going up to do my homework,” he said.

“Ba,” I said. “It’s all right.”

“I don’t really like to be called that anymore,” he said.

Fifteen minutes later the bell rang, and Bennie was at the door. I could see tear streaks on his face. He was carrying a comic book. “Don’t punish him,” he said when I told him Robert was up in his room. I fried chicken, boiled rice, wondered how we would talk
to each other at dinner. But when I went upstairs to call Robert he was asleep on his bed, his face turned to the window, soft and bruised like overripe fruit, a sweet peach, a golden plum. I left everything on the stove to keep warm.

I had to say this for Bobby: just like the other horrid things he did, he never did that one in front of the child, at least knowingly. He’d kept nigger out of the conversation, and whore, and all the rest, or at least he thought he had. But so much had taken place just within the range of Robert’s peripheral vision, things I might never really know, things he might never admit to himself, things that made him what he was today, sleeping upstairs in his clothes, twitching slightly.

He slept through his favorite television program and Bennie stopping by, again, with a video game and another comic. There was a glossy moon, cut from the silver paper of early summer, outside the bathroom window as I got ready for bed, and its light shone across Robert’s bed and spilled onto the floor of his room, where his schoolbooks, covered in brown paper, covered with doodles, lay in a motley pile. I stacked them on the floor next to his bed, but he never stirred. My own sleep was like clouds scudding across the sky, the white numbers on the digital clock looming out of the dark as I raised my head, 12:27, 1:12, 2:14. There was the sound of a siren someplace outside, wailing and then waning, and then I heard the sound of voices from downstairs. Underneath my bed was the crowbar I’d taken so long ago from Mr. Castro, and I closed my fingers around it and slid out of my room, down the hall and down the stairs.

“I know,” I heard a voice say, and realized it was Robert’s. He was in the kitchen, and when I reached the bottom of the stairs I
could see through the door that he was on the telephone. He was sitting cross-legged in the clothes he’d slept in, his back against the refrigerator. In the moonlight I could see a stack of Oreo cookies on the floor, like pieces to a game, checkers maybe, or gambling chips.