Love and Fury (9 page)

“Sorry.”

But I was impressed with Damion's solicitude and concern for Veronica's comfort during her pregnancy, his willingness to run downstairs to the kitchen or out to the store. He rubbed her back, her legs. He soothed her anxieties. They seemed to me to be making a go of it.

Damion was looking for work. Each morning he would leave the house a young father to be, and he'd come home in the afternoon having been reminded more than once that he was a felon on parole. Not only that, but hanging over him was a three-year-old charge that, with adequate representation, not a court-appointed attorney, likely would have been dismissed. The state had decided to pull out that old file and prosecute him. Who would hire him? And how would he prove he was changed after his time in prison?

Around that time I went looking for a room to rent so I would have a place to write. I had a contract for a short-story collection, and I wanted to finish it. I had three stories in need of revision and three new ones in the works. I found a long triangular room in an industrial building and moved my desk, library, reading chair, and lamp into the space, just across the hall from an agency serving Salvadoran immigrants. I put my desk on one wall and a table against each of the other two. I have always written in multiple genres, and with my desk chair on wheels, and fiction, nonfiction, and poetry projects on their respective tables, I was able, whenever I felt stuck, to give myself a push and wheel across the room to a different work in progress. I mostly worked on the short stories and was grateful for the chance to escape the stresses of our life then: Veronica's pregnancy, the tensions of the household, Robert's crisis, my father's final illness.

That odd space became a haven, and I began to think. I would write for an hour and then sit there staring out the window for three. There had to be a way to have the charges against Damion dismissed. It was a matter of getting the DA to see him as more than a case, to see who he had become. I wrote the DA a letter and received a call from his office saying thank you, that the prosecution was carefully considering how to proceed. Kathi, Robert, Veronica, and others wrote as well.

For me, that time we were all together under one roof was too much like the household I had fled. We weren't fighting, but we weren't talking, either; we were mostly trying to stay out of one another's way. It was tense and lonely. And although the house I'd grown up in was filled with angers more chronic, tensions more constant, the two situations made a rhyme I wished I could erase.

For Kathi, that period reminded her of the year, early in our marriage, when we lived with her parents. We fought, I drank, both of us felt ourselves disappearing. Kathi would write until noon while I spent time with our newborn son. Then I'd hand him off to her and sit at the desk drinking and trying to write something. We were trying to bring two immense solitudes together, and we battled over temporal, parental, familial, and emotional boundaries. My mother was dying and I was flying back and forth to Allentown, leaving Kathi alone for days. Other times I played on her guilt to convince her to come with me so my mother could see her grandson. From one moment to the next Kathi was a mother, a daughter, a spouse—when and how would she also be a writer? Would she ever write again? Was she ever to have a professional life? One of her teachers, a poet, told her when she married that she was finished as a poet. Our life that year was mutual existential panic. Robert was our only joy.

And now he was back home with us, in his old room, which had been my study while he was away. In the parable of the prodigal son, there is no mention of the weeks and months following the moving scene of reconciliation, the father keeping his distance so he doesn't say the wrong thing, holding in check his resentment that his son is lying around the house all day, eating, sleeping, and doing not much else. The parable doesn't include the son missing his convivial pals and their nightly adventures from pub to bar to tavern. There is no mention of the son's girlfriend and how badly he wants to be back in her arms, no digression to examine the enervating effects of disgrace, how at such times it seems so clearly the opposite of grace, of comfort, of any ease at all.

We didn't know what to say to each other. He stayed in bed most of the day, watching DVDs on his laptop, and in the evening he would move to the sofa downstairs and watch TV. After Kathi and I went to bed, Damion and Veronica would sometimes join him.

I often wondered, boxed in my rented triangular room, if I would ever have my son back, the boy I once knew who was so buoyant and hopeful. Once, when he was ten or eleven, we were at Fenway Park and the Red Sox were down by nine runs going into the ninth inning. People were beginning to leave, had already been leaving for a while. I sighed, stretched, thought about the usual traffic jam in the sprawling parking lot across the street; maybe we could avoid it if we left now. Robert was standing in front of his seat, his fist in his mitt, ready for any foul ball that might come our way. I tapped his shoulder. “Come on, let's go. We'll beat the traffic.”

“Dad, come on!” He gave me a look that accused me of treason. “Two grand slams and a homer and it's all tied up!” Now he was disconsolate, touchy, and evasive.

Robert is named after my brother Bobby. Kathi took my choice, my sad and sentimental attempt to thwart death, as the desire to honor my brother, but I did it more for my parents than anyone else. I wanted to assure them of the ongoingness of life. Lo! Your son who was dead is returned to you. Not only presumptuous, but useless: within eighteen months, my mother was dead, and my father devastated, isolated, depressed, and in retreat from life.

I fantasized about all of us moving to Canada. Maybe Jamaica. I never mentioned this to anyone; I just Googled the immigration requirements of countries where I thought we might all get a fresh start. I asked a writer I knew in Denmark, an American expat, how far we would get on the proceeds from the sale of our house. “You wouldn't make it out of the airport,” he said. Kathi and I were too old; we'd be a drain on the system. “Maybe if you had a job you were coming for, or a corporate sponsorship of some kind.” All I knew was that our daughter was starting a family with a man who was facing jail time for an old and victimless crime. The two of them appeared committed to each other, come what may. I had feelings too complicated to fully understand, but there were many things larger than my understanding in those stressful days, and fantasies and daydreams helped as a way to shepherd my thoughts away from the anger and confusion I felt.

I visited Damion every few weeks. Friends were puzzled. “Aren't you angry?” they'd ask. Of course I was angry. But at one remove from that heat there was warmth, familial, paternal, and also the memory of who I had been at his age: acquisitive, ambitious, desperate. I remembered the women I'd betrayed in the full-bore pursuit of my appetites, the need to prove I was what I then believed was a man. I remembered the thieving and lying, not to mention the drug dealing: the scale on the kitchen table, the bricks of marijuana in the closet of my Bronx apartment waiting to be measured out in one-ounce baggies. Who was I to judge? I often sat across from him in the visiting room, leaning forward, our elbows on our knees, staring at his broken teeth where a cop had bashed him in the mouth, and I thought of my own belabored and erratic coming-of-age, of my son's desperate flight from himself, and of my father's young rage. It was never clearer to me that the difference between our lives had been determined by the color of our skins.

There may be moments in childhood when some veil or shield moves aside and that instant is imprinted, stamped with terrific clarity on a region of the psyche usually occluded. It may have nothing to do with the force or importance of the persons or event experienced; it may have more to do with the condition of the child's consciousness: a lack or surfeit of sleep, hunger or satiety, anxiety or comfort. Who can say?

Discomfort with this puzzle leads some to a belief in fate, as if the soul is packing for a particular destination, its itinerary already known by some hidden faculty of the mind. I don't believe that. Still, it would be untruthful to say it has never
felt
that way, as if a part of me has been carrying certain of these high-definition memories as equipment, a subconscious education, a tutorial prepared especially for me. In any case, it surprises me that this memory is so sharp.

The rain had stopped. Puddles in the gutters swirled with the iridescence of oil. I was holding my father's thumb because his hand was too big, and he was taking me to the movies for the first time. It was 1954, I was five years old, and I had never seen a motion picture of any kind. We didn't have a television, although I had seen one in the window of a repair shop up the street.

There was a sign outside the theater, a vertical neon scroll that said ALLEN. Just outside the glass doors my father dropped to one knee in front of me, took my shoulders in his hands, and looked me in the eye. “You're going to be a good boy in there and do what I say. Right?”

I nodded.

“Yes, Daddy,” he said.

“Yes, Daddy.”

The carpeted lobby smelled wonderful, like caramel, like candles, like butter. The concession stand was a glass box of candy, along with something like an aquarium filled with popcorn. Some of the candy was “loose”: horehound drops, root beer barrels, and the licorice my father bought me in a little brown bag. “A box of Jujubes for me,” he said, “and a small bag of nigger babies for the young man.” He rubbed my head and beamed at me in that way of his when he was showing me off, which was why I had to be good.

We went inside and as we walked down the aisle the lights dimmed. I stopped to see if it was our walking that was making it darker, then hurried to catch up to my father. Dim yellow and purple fluted lights along the walls cast soft fans of color upward, and there were golden vines and angels decorating the frame around a maroon curtain. My father had mentioned to me that before our church was built, the parish, St. Francis of Assisi, used to celebrate Sunday Mass here. The vaulted ceiling, the art deco light fixtures, the gold leaf, the deep carpets all contributed to a sense of the sacred. My father wanted to sit near the front. I liked the way the seats flipped down to sit on them, and I enjoyed that the seat cushion would go
whoomp
when I sat down and that it sprang back up when I stood. I did this over and over again until my father grabbed my arm and pulled me down. The heavy curtain was opening. The manic Warner Brothers music came up and a cartoon began, Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck, probably. I can only recall eating my licorice and laughing with my father, watching the cartoon and seeing my father throwing back his head to laugh. I laughed with him, laughed whenever he laughed, laughed because he was laughing.

When the cartoon ended, the music changed, and my father's mood changed with it. I tried to hold onto the hilarity we'd shared by recounting something from the cartoon, but he shushed me. The laughter was gone as quickly as if a faucet had been shut. The colorful cartoons gave way to a black-and-white landscape, and the sound of explosions. The music was dark and dramatic. I ate another piece of licorice and looked at my father for some cue how to react. He was slumped in his chair intently frowning at the screen, so I did the same.

Attack!
was among the first Hollywood films to depict the grisly cost of war on particular soldiers. Two images from the film have stayed with me all my life. The first is of a tank crushing the arm of Lieutenant Costa, played by Jack Palance. Trapped in a doorway, the tank clatters loudly as he screams, his left arm smashed beneath the clanking treads. The other, from the end of the film, is Costa's dead body, his eyes open and staring, his head cocked back, chin jutting toward the sky. Together, they seem to have formed a statement I may not have been ready for: the first image, of terrible pain, I understood, at least in miniature; only some months before, I had caught my fingers in a door, and the intensity of that pain had me screaming and hysterical and for a long time beyond the consolation of my parents. The second was wholly new, an image of horror that tore through the soft flesh of my limited understanding. I knew the word “dead.” I had some vague notion of what it meant. You went to heaven. But Costa didn't go to heaven, he just lay there on his back, mouth open, and my stomach churned black licorice and threatened to empty itself on the seat in front of me.

Recently I watched a VHS tape of the film. What struck me watching the tank scene was how clearly fake it was: Palance's arm buried in a hole in the ground, out of view, with the tank tread over it. But by then you're so adrenalized and panicked by the previous moments when the tank closes in on him, trapped in a doorway, pounding his shoulder against the wooden door and yanking at the knob until it comes off in his hand, that the tank crushing his arm, or perhaps worse, is already in your imagination—you've already conjured it from the depths of fear: of entrapment, of the existential moment of no escape.