The Empire of Ice Cream (18 page)

When I came out of the bathroom, I got the job of mixing the powdered milk and serving each of us kids a glass. At the end of the meal there would be three full glasses of it sitting on the table. Unfortunately, we still remembered real milk. The mix-up kind tasted like sauerkraut, and looked like chalk water with froth on the top. It was there merely for show, a kind of stage prop. As long as no one mentioned that it tasted horrible, my mother never forced us to drink it.

In the dining room where the walls were lined with grained paneling, the knots of which always showed me screaming faces, Jim sat across the table from me, and Mary sat by my side. My mother sat at the end of the table beneath the open window. Instead of a plate she had the ashtray and her wine in front of her.

“It's rib stickin' good,” said Jim, and added a knifeful of margarine to his plate. When the orange stuff started to cool, it was in need of constant lubrication to prevent it from seizing.

“Shut up and eat,” said my mother.

Mary said nothing. I could tell by the way she quietly nodded her head that she was being Mickey.

“Softee never came today,” I said.

My brother looked up at me and shook his head in disappointment. “He'll be out there at the curb in a snow drift,” he said to my mother.

She laughed without a sound and swatted the air in his direction. “You've got to have faith,” she said. “Life's one long son of a bitch.”

She took a drag on her cigarette and a sip of wine, and Jim and I knew what was coming next.

“When things get better,” she said. “I think we'll all take a nice vacation.”

“How about Bermuda?” said Jim.

In her wine fog, my mother hesitated an instant, not sure if he was being sarcastic, but he knew how to keep a straight face. “That's what I was thinking,” she said. We knew that, because once a week, when she hit just the right level of intoxication, that's what she was always thinking. It had gotten to the point that when Jim wanted me to do him a favor and I asked how he was going to pay me back, he'd say, “Don't worry, I'll take you to Bermuda.”

She told us about the water, crystal blue. So clear you could look down a hundred yards and see schools of manta rays flapping their wings. She told us about the pure white beaches with palm trees swaying in a soft breeze filled with the scent of wildflowers. We'd sleep in hammocks on the beach. We'd eat pineapples we cut open with a machete. Swim in lagoons. Washed up on the shore, amidst the chambered nautilus, the sand dollars, the shark teeth, would be pieces of eight from galleons wrecked long ago.

That night, as usual, she told it all, and she told it in minute detail, so that even Jim sat there listening with his eyes half-closed and his mouth half-open.

“Will there be clowns?” asked Mary in her Mickey voice.

“Sure,” said my mother.

“How many?” asked Mary.

“Eight,” said my mother.

Mary nodded in approval and went back to being Mickey.

When we got back from Bermuda, it was time to do the dishes. From the leftovers in the pot, my mother heaped a plate with spaghetti for my father for when he got home from work. She wrapped it in wax paper and put it in the center of the stove where the pilot light would keep it warm. Whatever was left over went to George the dog. My mother washed the dishes, smoking and drinking the entire time. Jim dried, I put the plates and silverware away, and Mary counted everything a few dozen times.

The garage of our house had, five years earlier, been converted into an apartment and my grandparents, Nan and Pop, lived in there. A door separated our house from their rooms. My mother knocked, and Nan called out for us to come in.

Pop took out his mandolin and played us a few songs: “Apple Blossom Time,” “Show Me the Way to Go Home,” “Good Night Irene.” All the while he played, Nan chopped cabbage on a flat wooden board with a one-handed guillotine. My mother rocked in the rocking chair and drank and sang. The trilling of the double-stringed instrument accompanied by my mother's voice was beautiful to me.

Over at the little table in the kitchenette area, Mary sat with the Laredo machine, making cigarettes. My parents didn't buy their smokes by the pack. Instead they got this machine that you loaded with a piece of paper and a wad of loose tobacco from a can. Once it was all set up, there was a little lever you pulled forward and back, and presto. It wasn't an easy operation. You had to use just the right amount to get them firm enough so the tobacco didn't fall out the end.

When my parents had first gotten the Laredo, Mary watched them perform the process and was fascinated. She was immediately expert at measuring out the brown shag and never got tired of it. A regular cigarette factory once she got going; Pop called her R. J. Reynolds. He didn't smoke them, though. He smoked Lucky Strikes, and he drank Old Grand-Dad, which seemed fitting.

Jim and I, we watched the television with the sound turned down. Dick Van Dyke mugged and rubber-legged and did pratfalls in black and white, perfectly synchronized to the strains of “Shanty Town” and “I'll Be Seeing You in All the Old Familiar Places.” Even if they weren't playing music, we wouldn't have been able to have the sound up, since Pop hated Dick Van Dyke more than any other person on Earth.

My room was dark, and though it had been warm all day, a cool end of summer breeze now filtered in through the screen of the open window. Moonlight also came in, making a patch on the bare, painted floor. From outside, I could hear the chug of the Farleys' little pool filter next door, and beneath that, the sound of George's claws, tapping across the kitchen linoleum downstairs.

Jim was asleep in his room across the hall. Below us, Mary was also asleep, no doubt whispering the times tables into her pillow. My mother, in the room next to Mary's, I could picture, lying in bed, her reading light on, her mouth open, her eyes closed, and the thick, red volume of Sherlock Holmes stories with the silhouette cameo of the detective on the spine, open and resting on her chest. All I could picture of Nan and Pop was a darkened room and the tiny, glowing bottle of Lourdes Water in the shape of the Virgin that sat on the dresser.

I was thinking about the book I had been reading before turning out the light—another in the series of adventures of Perno Shell. This one was about a deluge, like Noah's flood, and how the old wooden apartment building he lived in had broken away from its foundation and he and all of the other tenants were sailing the giant ocean of the world, having adventures.

There was a mystery about the Shell books, because they were each published with a different author's name, sometimes by different publishing companies, but all you had to do was read a few pages and it was easy to tell that they were all written by the same person. I would never have discovered this if it wasn't for Mary.

Occasionally, I would read to her, snatches from whatever book I was working through. We'd sit in the corner of the backyard on the lower boards of the fence, in the bower made by forsythia bushes. In there, amidst the yellow flowers one day, I read to her from the first Shell book I had taken out:
The Stars Above
by Mary Holden. There were illustrations in it, one per chapter. When I was done reading, I handed the book to her so she could look at the pictures. While paging through it, she held it up to her face, sniffed it, and said, “Pipe smoke.” Back then, my father smoked a pipe once in a while, so we knew the aroma. I took the book from her and smelled it up close, and she was right, but it wasn't the kind of tobacco my father smoked. It had a darker, older smell, something like a horse and a mildewed wool blanket, a captain's cabin. I got an image of the silhouette of Holmes on the binding of my mother's book. His pipe had a stem that dipped in a curve like an S and the bowl had a belly.

When I walked to the library downtown, Mary would walk with me. She usually never said a word during the entire trip, but a few weeks after I had returned
The Stars Above
, she came to me while I was searching through the four big stacks that lay in the twilight zone between the adult and children's sections. She tugged at my shirt, and when I turned around, she handed me a book:
The Enormous Igloo
by Duncan Main.

“Pipe smoke,” she said.

Opening the volume to the first page, I read to myself,
“Perno Shell was afraid of heights and could not for the world remember why he had agreed to a journey in the Zeppelin that now hovered above his head.”
Another Perno Shell novel by someone completely different. I lifted the book, smelled the pages, and nodded.

I wanted Perno Shell to stay in my imagination until I dozed off, but my thoughts of him soon grew as thin as paper, and then the persistent theme of my wakeful nights alone in the dark, namely
Death
, came clawing through. Jimmy Bonnel, a boy who'd lived up the block, two years younger than me and two years older than Mary, had been struck by a car on Montauk Highway one night in late spring. The driver was drunk and swerved onto the sidewalk. According to his brother, Teddy, who was with him, Jimmy was thrown thirty feet in the air. I always tried to picture that: twice again the height of the basketball rim. We had to go to his wake. The priest said he was at peace, but he didn't look it. Lying in the coffin, his skin was yellow, his face was bloated, and his mouth was turned down in a bitter frown.

All summer, he came back to me from where he lay under the ground. I imagined him suddenly waking up, clawing at the lid as in a story Jim had once told me. I dreaded meeting his ghost on the street at night when I walked George around the block alone. I'd stop under a streetlight and listen hard, fear would build in my chest until I shivered, and then I'd bolt for home. In the lonely backyard at sundown, in the darkened woods behind the school field, in the corner of my night room, he was waiting, jealous and angry.

George came up the stairs and stood beside my bed. He looked at me with his bearded face, eyes glinting in the moonlight, and then jumped aboard. He was a small, schnauzer-type mutt but fearless, and having him there made me less scared. Slowly, I began to doze. I had a memory of riding waves at Fire Island and it blurred at the edges, slipping into a dream. Next I knew, I suddenly fell from a great height and woke to hear my father coming in from work. The front door quietly closed. I could hear him moving around in the kitchen. George got up and left.

I contemplated going down to say hello. The last I saw him was the previous weekend. The bills forced him to work all day. There were three jobs: a part-time machining job in the early morning, then his regular job as a gear cutter, and then nights, part-time as a janitor in a department store. He left the house before the sun came up every morning and didn't return until very near midnight. Through the week, I would smell a hint of machine oil, here and there, on the cushions of the couch, on a towel in the bathroom, as if he were a ghost leaving vague traces of his presence.

Eventually, the sounds of the refrigerator opening and closing and the water running stopped, and I realized he must be sitting in the dining room, eating his pile of spaghetti, reading the newspaper by the light that shone in from the kitchen. I heard the big pages turn, the fork against the plate, a match being struck, and that's when it happened. There came from somewhere outside the house the shrill scream of a woman, so loud it tore open the night.

When I came downstairs the next morning, the door to Nan and Pop's was open. I stuck my head in and saw Mary sitting at the table in the kitchenette where the night before she had made cigarettes. She was eating a bowl of Cheerios. Pop sat in his usual seat next to her, the horse paper spread out in front of him. He was jotting down numbers with a pencil in the margins, murmuring a steady stream of bloodlines, jockeys' names, weights, speeds, track conditions, ciphering what he called the
McGinn System
, named after himself. Mary nodded with each new factor added to the equation.

My mother came out of the bathroom down the hall in our house, and I turned around. She was dressed for work in her turquoise outfit with the big star-shaped pin that was like a stained-glass window. I went to her and she put her arm around me, enveloped me in a cloud of perfume that was too much powder, and kissed my head. We went into the kitchen, and she made me a bowl of cereal with the mix-up milk, which wasn't as bad that way, because we were allowed to put sugar on it. I sat down in the dining room and she joined me, carrying a cup of coffee. The sunlight poured in the window behind her. She lit a cigarette and dragged the ashtray close to her.

“Friday, last day of vacation,” she said. “You better make it a good one. Monday is back to school.”

I nodded.

“Watch out for strangers,” she said. “I got a call from next door this morning. Mrs. Kelty said that there was a prowler at her window last night. She was changing into her nightgown, and she turned and saw a face at the glass.”

“Did she scream?” I asked.

“She said it scared the crap out of her. Bill was downstairs watching TV. He jumped up and ran outside, but whoever it was had vanished.”

Jim appeared in the living room. “Do you think they saw her naked?” he asked.

“A fitting punishment,” she said. And as quickly added, “Don't repeat that.”

“I heard her scream,” I said.

“Whoever it was used that old ladder Pop keeps in the backyard. Put it up against the side of the Keltys' house and climbed up to the second-floor window. So keep your eyes out for creeps wherever you go today.”

“That means he was in our backyard,” said Jim.

My mother took a drag of her cigarette and nodded. “I suppose.”

Before she left for work, she gave us our list of jobs for the day—walk George, clean our rooms, mow the back lawn. Then she kissed Jim and me, and went into Nan's to kiss Mary. I watched her car pull out of the driveway. Jim came to stand next to me at the front window.