Uncle John was there. He motioned me inside.
I remembered then what it was about the movie I’d just seen, the single scene that had lingered. The boy, Nick Adams, comes upon a boxer, punch-drunk, wasted, in the woods. Paul Newman played the boxer, and with him was a Negro. When the boy comes upon them, they share some melted ham fat, and then the boxer becomes excited. Something in the boxer cannot be contained. So the Negro knocks him out. Taps him, and he’s unconscious. That was wonderful, that small and vivid display of power and control.
I loved that scene.
By August of that year, the houses on the end of our street, and Uncle John’s, began filling in. Something was evident right away. A new kind of person had come here.
Uncle John had said the names, “Meola, Semenza,” as though he were describing a delicate, expensive purchase he’d just made. But when they moved in, they ignored us.
In late summer, they began giving parties for one another. The rows of Cadillacs and Buicks began coming up the Hill. There were four houses on the end of our street, facing one another, and two at the end of Uncle John’s. At first, on the nights of those parties, Uncle John would stand out on his lawn, watering hose in hand. Perhaps they’d made a mistake, forgot he lived there. He stopped short of waving to the well-dressed people going to the party at Meola’s. His big house took on the appearance of a gatehouse at the entrance to an estate.
The sons of Meola and Semenza were also different from us. They played on the high school football team and wore, in their front yards, letter jackets, purple and yellow. They were compact, black-haired boys, guards, centers. They drove their own cars, too, and some nights brought their girlfriends up to the Hill. From where I watched, from my room or from the front yard (the grass had grown enough to begin mowing), they seemed to drive with an extraordinary calm. Beside them, their girlfriends, girls who wore their hair in “flips,” and who were cheerleaders for the football team, seemed to have all the energy. The girls moved, in the passenger seats of those cars, talking and gesturing with their hands, and when they parked in front of the boys’ houses, they waited for the door to be opened, and then moved inside, sometimes half-running, always followed by the boys, who moved more slowly.
It had been, in all the ways that counted, an odd summer. No one had bothered to tell me why my father had left. His disappearance, however, had been sudden and absolute. Apparently, he had not needed to take his clothes with him, wherever he had gone, because they still hung in his closet, and because it was summer and I was home all the time, I knew he didn’t come to retrieve anything, unless he came at night when I was asleep.
I still had my old friends, and sometimes, after supper, I would get on my bike and ride to Candace Road to play in the Wiffle ball games. But the old neighborhood held no great interest. Coming home, I would get off my bike at the bottom of the Hill, walk slowly up, and approach the houses, which had their lights on, like a spy.
In their backyard, Bobby and George might be sitting at their picnic table, talking, and though they laughed frequently, I began to feel their diminishment, how they were coming to understand that they were not like the sons of Meola and Semenza, and yet not thugs either, in the way they had once been, in the way it had once been all right for them to be. Instead, for a time they were hiding, just as I was.
Then I would walk down to the other end of the street to look at the newer houses, in which there seemed to be a heightened sense of life: more lights were on, the football team sometimes gathered, or else the sons of Meola and Semenza were there alone, flipping cards to one another under the extravagant chandeliers hanging over their dining room tables.
There were girls, too: Meola had a daughter my age, in my class at school, though we never spoke. Her friends came over and they sat in the backyard. I stood in the dark with my bike, and listened to the high murmur they made. They spoke in the same language my family spoke, but it was full of hesitations and conjunctions, mysterious nuances that made it seem a language all its own.
And here is the essential thing, the thing I was most drawn to: when a man, the owner of a house, would come out the front door, and stand in the lighted entrance, it was as though he were surveying something. Nothing need be going on physically for the world to seem alive and full of movement. The men on Candace Road who would come out to watch us play Wiffle ball were not unhappy men, but this sort of proprietary moment was not possible for them. A curtain had been lifted for me, I suppose, certain important divisions in the world were made clear. And though it probably wouldn’t have affected me the same way at any other point in my life, it did then.
Finally I would go home. My mother would always be watching television in the room we called the family room. She watched with one lamp on, and, frequently, with one arm slung behind her head.
“Where did you go?” she wanted to know.
“To Candace Road.”
My mother did not understand Wiffle ball or my growing penchant for silent observation, so that was all I said.
“Want to watch TV with me?”
I would have to say yes, then sit with her awhile, though nothing on the square box in front of us interested me half so much as what was going on outside. I was watching only to be polite, because she had asked me, because I suspected she needed company.
I allotted her half an hour, then I went to my room. In summer, the windows were open, the breezes came in. I took off all my clothes and lay on my bed in the dark. Sometimes a car drove by, or there were voices, a boy and a girl. They spoke low, and I listened in such a way that even simple words—words like “No” or “Come in”—stayed with me a long time afterward.
On Sundays we still had the ritual of the beach to anchor us in the old world. The family still gathered at Nahant. We parked illegally. We carried picnic baskets of food, big coolers. We set up four blankets in a row. No mention was ever made of my father, but I could see, in the behavior of my Aunts Carmela and Lucy, a notation made. Emma was always protective of my mother, but Carmela and Lucy looked at her in a way now that suggested they were not unhappy at the turn of events.
On the blanket, eating her food, I don’t believe my mother noticed this, or if she did, she pretended not to. She smiled as if nothing had happened to her, it was all right, being left didn’t make such a difference. I asked her to come into the water with me. I would have preferred to swim alone, but I couldn’t bear to leave her with them.
In the water, sometimes, she became a girl again. She told me how, when she was growing up, she left her sisters to the chores, took her towel down to the local pool, and swam all morning. “I was a fish, Luca,” she said. “My sisters had to do all the work.” So I saw, maybe, how things had once been, and why her sisters had looked at her the way they’d looked at her on the night of John’s party.
When she came out of the water, Carmela and Lucy were usually lying back beside their husbands, often with one thigh draped over the men’s legs. It seemed, since my father’s desertion, they had become more interested in their husbands; they ran their legs up the fleshy thighs of Tony and Mike in ways they never had before. So I tried to distract my mother. I told her to watch out for crabs, to look down, down into the water. I felt all my stiffness and formality, as though I had become a kind of guide for her. In my hyperawareness of the intense sensuality of the world, it became an imperative to mask that sensuality, to stand as a barrier between her and it.
There was another side to my mother that seemed to come out exclusively on the phone. I was home a lot, so I heard. I lay in my room and read. I threw a rubber ball against the back wall of the house. I was too young for a job. My one task was to mow the lawn.
“Well, he can’t see him,” I heard her say once. And then: “Because I told him I would tell. I would tell them at his work.”
After a moment, she repeated it: “If he tried to see Luca, I would tell.”
In