he did not have the capacity for emotional nakedness that Bob Painter had, he still felt as deeply and harshly and intensely as Bob, that they were alike in some important way.
Moments like that made me doubt that I could win my father back, that he was as close to coming back as I had tried to convince myself. And then something else happened to make me feel keenly the press of time, the need for something—if it was to happen at all—to happen very soon.
A few weeks before Thanksgiving, after another of the futile Thursday night meetings with George, I found Uncle John waiting for me at the bottom of the steps leading to his front door, with what I immediately detected was a new, troubled look on his face.
He had his hat in his hand and he was tapping it against his knees. “All finished?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Success?”
Tonight he didn’t even wait for me to answer.
It was cold out, and John wanted first to know if I was warm enough. This was all preparation for something. He led me past my house, as usual.
“You like it here, Luca?” he asked. But he seemed anxious; there was nothing casual in the question.
I said I did.
“You think we did right?”
It was an odd question; of course they’d done right. My father’s desertion changed nothing. The neighborhood was perfect. I tried to say all this in silence because John still cowed me out of words, though I believed he understood how enthralled I was by the neighborhood.
“I’ll tell you one thing, though, that we did wrong. We didn’t get the right architect. We got Zambetti, who we knew, and he was not …” John had stopped, not at the end of the street, but before Meola’s house. There, he lit his cigar and waved it through the air, forming a wide, half-disparaging, half-envious circle. “Not for houses like this, anyway. You notice how much foundation he left showing, in your father’s house, in mine?”
I had. It was a sore spot. It diminished us, the amount of gray at the base.
“You see how in these others, the brick and stone, they go all the way down to the base? That’s important. That’s a neater look. But what did we know?”
I did not move on, but stared at Meola’s perfect lawn, which the Meola boys had not been expected to mow. Bonica, the landscaper, brought his men once a week.
“These are all, all these men, of the professional class.” He sounded the old theme, pointed down the street, his fingers landing, in my foreshortened view, on each of the houses in turn. “Dentist. Lawyer. Cincotta’s a … what? A tax man. Like your father. College man. A professional man knows these things. Me, I’m learning from the ground up. I’ve got a strong back and a weak brain.”
He chuckled. “You cold?”
“No. I’m okay.”
He paused, a long and significant silence, so that I might have known something important would follow.
“But it was still good for you, to come here, to have this time.” His words trailed off, as if he understood he need not make them heard; they were for himself.
My mother and I began, soon after, taking rides at night, with a big-toothed realtor named Mrs. Chase. My mother settled on a rental house on Hobbs Road, a small house set within a grid of nearly identical houses, and one in which our bedrooms would butt directly up against each other. Our own house went up for sale, and was sold quickly, at a large profit. Still I retained the last-ditch belief that all these events could be forced to give way.
My thirteenth birthday fell on a Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Andrew was with us again. The movie that night was The Manchurian Candidate. Watching it, it occurred to me that I was studying six subjects in school, and then a seventh at the movies. All the movies of 1962 were about the same thing, with minor variations. Laurence Harvey wore a beatific expression throughout much of The Manchurian Candidate, as if nowhere in his imagination was there such a thing as resistance to the life that had been thrust upon him, the life of an assassin, condemned to kill even the girl he loved. He might have been Burt Lancaster tending to his birds, for all the hope that existed in those black-and-white images. I watched these movies and I watched Bob Painter watching them. As his drinking began to lessen, he stayed awake more. He was more reactive in his movie watching than my father. He made noises that called attention to himself, and I sensed in these small grunts of affirmation and denial a certain recognition and a fight against the recognition, as if, in spite of himself, he kept waiting for the redemptive moment these movies so rarely provided. Give him a happy ending, he might have been saying, in the grumbling silence with which he watched. For Chrissake, give him something. The movies of 1962 resisted him, unremitting in the bleakness of their conclusions, with only the occasional handclasp of a man and a woman—Frank Sinatra and Janet Leigh at the conclusion of The Manchurian Candidate—to indicate a belief that some compromise might be made with life, a dollop of pleasure or warmth squeezed out of the surrounding frost.
There was a reason Bob Painter may have been paying attention to the movie that night in a different way: his daughters were coming tomorrow. Mrs. Painter had at last agreed to his demand, would leave them to his care for a day. It had been five months. What exactly had precipitated the change in Mrs. Painter was a mystery, but tonight he had forsworn drinking. Fidgety in the room, snappish in the diner, he settled down only for the movie. My father gave Andrew and me to know that Bob was nervous. “These girls of mine, they’re everything,” Bob said. But if they were everything, why was he living with my father, when he could have been with them? That paradox, unspoken, rode with me all night.
In the morning, he was anxious, too. He drank cup after cup of coffee, shaved, lathered on Aqua Velva, stared out the window, and asked perpetually as to the time.
They were due at 10:00. At 9:45, Bob went outside, stood on the sidewalk to wait. He smoked a cigarette, paced, and from the window my father and I watched him. Andrew, in his sleeping bag on the floor, slept in.
At five minutes after ten, the car pulled up. A green Chrysler. Bob Painter crushed his cigarette underfoot. He stood with his back to us, but his back was expressive of desire, and his hands hovered just to the sides of his hips. I stared at the back of his head, the way the red hair curled and matted against his red neck, damp with sweat, though it was November. When his wife pulled up, I noticed he couldn’t quite look at her face, nor she at his, but something was suggestive of the mood of their past days: the big, boxy, overused car, the slapdash parking job Mrs. Painter did. They had lived in chaos.
The two younger girls rushed out of the car, and Bob clasped them. The youngest, wearing glasses, hugged her father’s leg and stared up at him. The middle girl was not so expressive, but wanted to be. Maureen, the oldest, the genius, Bob’s pride, had not yet emerged from the car.
He went to the door and leaned in. Maureen was resisting, we saw that even from our perch at the window. Bob opened the car door and gestured with his arm toward the sidewalk, where the two younger girls waited. Mrs. Painter was not a clear figure to us. She sat behind the steering wheel in dark glasses—heavy, we could see that, with thick black hair, and pale—but she had turned, and stared at her estranged husband, her cheeks sagging somewhat, accusatory in her determination not to be his advocate in the matter of Maureen.
Finally the reluctant Maureen did emerge. All the girls had red hair, but Maureen’s was the reddest. She made a dramatic figure there on the street, with her long hair and her size—at twelve, she was nearly as tall as Bob—along with her extreme paleness and the air of resistance even a stranger might have been able to read. Bob did not touch her, but he said some words. She did not nod her head, but seemed to have made some kind of agreement—temporary, conditional—nonetheless. Bob dipped his head back inside the passenger window, reached a final agreement with his wife. She drove off. With the little girls close by his body, and Maureen dragging slightly behind, Bob approached the house.
We moved from the window and took on our postures of waiting.