I suspect your eye would be drawn to my father even if you didn’t know him. Seated in the front row, he is smaller and more delicate then the others, the one who appears most singular, and therefore blessed. There is a smile he is wearing that I used to sit and study. It was the smile of a man announcing: I am in this world, but not of it.
It was there now, curiously so, as he looked off into space, and ate his sandwich.
“Listen,” he said. “This is for you. Here, living here, so you can have a better life.”
I watched him consider his words carefully.
“Candace Road, that’s a decent street, Luca, a nice neighborhood, but this is really something else …” Suddenly he trailed off. Something had begun to trouble him.
He had stopped—that was my father—as if too bold an announcement would trap him. He smoothed the wax paper in his lap. He took several seconds and then he looked at me. “You almost finished?”
I said that I was, though I still had half a sandwich in my lap.
That is the quality I remember of that day: my settling into a journey I believed was to be slow and luxurious, then being hurried by him, as if the direction in which he’d pointed us were being altered midstroke.
I have to say that in the days and weeks afterward, my father seemed more excited by what he was doing than he had that day in the woods. Sometimes, even months later, he would take out the architect’s renderings and sit with us—that is, with my mother and me; I was their only child—at the kitchen table, pointing out this nicety and that. It wasn’t uncommon that as he was speaking he would touch my hair. I would run down the street, afterward, on a kind of cloud. And return, an hour or so later, to find he had retreated to his office, my mother setting the table for the two of us.
She never complained. He was a law unto himself. There were things he required: silence, immense space. She kept his food warm, then, only at the end, when it was clear he would not be coming out, for hours perhaps, wrapped it carefully and put it in the refrigerator.
I thought, in those days, that I knew more about him than she did, and made a child’s judgment as to her stupidity. I thought I knew something of my father’s darkness, though that would not have been the word I’d have chosen then. I knew at least what he did at night. From my bedroom window, I could watch him in the backyard, sitting for hours some nights in the Adirondack chairs that had been set up near the rock garden, smoking Pall Malls with his head tilted at a slight angle, as though listening to a difficult voice coming at him. The words he heard disappeared from time to time, so he had to move his head forward, to catch something he might otherwise miss, which was out there in the dark.
Afterward, he would come inside, and if I was still awake, I heard their noise. My mother made a low besotted groan, and it took off from there, took off and ascended, and became like the sound of her dying. I associated those sounds with violence. I was young, and it scared me, but since in the mornings she was all right, even cheerful, after a while I stopped worrying.
Still, there were always two things about my father to consider. One was the nights when he elicited those sounds from her, and then, afterward, in the morning, by some alchemy I couldn’t figure, made her happy. The other was what he did on Saturdays, when men came to our house. In addition to his work in the accounting department of Vanderbruek, the defense plant he’d been hired at out of college, and at which, over the course of fourteen years, he’d steadily risen, my father opened our house on Saturdays to men who wanted their taxes done, or men who had special financial problems, “tricky things,” he called them. They were an odd assortment; the only thing that held these men together was the ridiculous way they all dressed, half in the world of weekend chores, in flannels and chinos, and half in the world of business.
Something in my father’s bearing, I knew, made them want to appear respectable.
I would sometimes pass the window of my father’s office, which faced our backyard, on the pretext of throwing a ball up into the air and catching it, and, in the light over my father’s desk, always on, even on the brightest day, watch his alert, handsome face staring into the face of another man, some doughy, awkward stranger, with an intensity he only rarely directed at my mother and me. It was as though the man had just said something, and my father wanted to stop and ask him to explain. But I do not know how to tell you it wasn’t a word or a piece of business my father wanted explained, but something else, a hazy thing that the man embodied, so that while he was listening, I knew my father wasn’t really listening at all.
After the men were gone, there was another waiting to be endured. For the rest of the afternoon, my father sulked. Sometimes he took off in the car. I imagined he was chasing down one of the Saturday men to point out an error in judgment. Supper was always eaten in silence. Later, in the evening, he would go out and consult with himself in the backyard. His Saturdays followed that pattern, without fail. But just before dusk, in the spring and summer, the boys on Candace Road always gathered on the street to play Wiffle ball. It was a quiet street, full of small houses into which sound penetrated easily. By the time the game was in its second or third inning, the fathers had all come out of their houses to watch.
They were not, for the most part, successful men. They were tire salesmen, mechanics. Among them was a retired Army sergeant. No visible trajectory attached to their lives; the neighborhood houses lacked the silence and absences of ambition.
But at dusk on summer evenings, they came out and rested inside a moment of grace. Their sons on the quiet street. The soaring of the Wiffle ball, which, even sailing far, would break no windows. The smell of lilacs, apple blossoms in May. The fall of light in a suburban neighborhood early in the reign of John F. Kennedy. I do not want to romanticize, but there it was.
Frequently, my father was the last to come out. Even when he did, his mood was often such that he didn’t greet the other fathers, merely stood there, stiff and in the white shirt he had worn to prepare men’s taxes. But even he was capable of being seduced by this scene. At a certain point his shoulders settled, he’d light a cigarette, and the compulsion to leave—so strong, while reined in, so much of the time—leaked out of him.
Even guarding second base, I sensed this. In this game, in the perfection of boys at play, lay my power.
In October of that year, Uncle John’s house was completed, and he held a party in celebration.
We’d often visited Uncle John and Aunt Emma in the two-family they lived in on River Street. Their sons were Bobby and George, who used to entice the younger cousins outside so they could piss off the roof onto them. But that night, when my parents descended the stairs and noticed that I was wearing my everyday clothes, a look crossed their features, as though there was something profound I didn’t get.
We had seen John’s new house in daylight, the most solid and finished of the several houses then in development, split-level houses surrounded by bulldozers and, in mid-fall, by heavy, dug-up mud. John’s house had pillars and second-floor tiers and a facing of pink-tinted marble. A large effort had gone into making it grand, and my father, in the past, whenever he’d driven to the Hill to check things out, had come back and voiced a certain skepticism about what was going on up there. “Versailles,” he had taken to calling John’s house. He splayed his lips and made a sound, which was frequently followed by a call to the architect of our own house, to see if ours couldn’t be simplified.
At night, though, the house underwent a kind of transformation. From far away, from half a mile down the hill, though the road was still unpaved and deeply rutted, we could begin to see the lights of John’s house coming at us through the trees. My mother gasped when we were close. John had set up spotlights outside the house; what they lit appeared larger and more imposing even than it was. Surrounding it, in the dark, were high trees, so that the house poked out of the wilderness like it was making some supremely confident announcement of itself, and I remembered what my father had said about John’s ambition, to make a neighborhood of Italians, and it began to make sense. I could not have said exactly what I apprehended when I looked up at the finished house, but I remember something quickening in me.
In the basement—carpeted,