The Pearl—and the book George had given me, called My Secret Life. Steinbeck was for the day, but at night, I liked to lie in bed and read about the Victorian author of My Secret Life “rogering” women. I liked to hear the women shout things like, “You’re a horse! Oh my God, my man’s a horse!”
“And they’d fire him right away,” my mother said afterward.
Uncle John had explained nothing the day he’d motioned me inside after I’d gone to see Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man. He’d said only, “Your father’s gone away,” or something like that. On his face had been the whole weight of the secret, but he had put his finger to his lips, as if to keep them shut. He shook his head, then made a stilted promise to my mother: “I want to assure you, Dorothy, that I will do everything in my power to make sure that Luca has a normal life.”
After listening to my mother’s conversations on the phone, I expected her to look different, but she didn’t. She took care of her flower gardens and made up her face and prepared elaborate meals, enough for three or four. At the table, eating with her, I felt all arms and sharp, bony elbows. I felt ugly and like my bones would pop out and I would knock her in the face if I moved too quickly. I felt, too, and in dangerous ways, like that was what I wanted to do.
As soon as I gave up going down to the Wiffle ball games, I took to spending time in their bedroom. At the other end of the house, my mother watched four or five television shows in a row, everything that was on, so it was safe. My father’s suits hung in the closet, five of them. I could see I would be taller than him someday, if I didn’t stop growing. I would hover over him, but would I ever see him? Beside the bed was a wedding portrait, his tight smile, and then, on the wall, the BC hockey photo. When he was still here, he would have awakened every morning to the sight of himself poised to bolt.
One night my mother caught me in their room. “What are you doing?” she asked.
She was in the doorway, and I was on the bed, my hands between my legs, resting there. She cocked her head and smiled as though there could be nothing wrong with any activity I chose now. Then she rephrased the question. When I didn’t answer, I saw the change in her face, the beginning of her allowing something in.
She came in and sat beside me on the bed. She looked where I was looking, at the BC picture. Then she got up and took it down, with a decisiveness I had not seen from her up to this point. Carefully, she put it away in a drawer. In the drawer also was a rosary, and some underwear she didn’t use anymore. Then she came and sat beside me. She put her hand in my hair, which was thick and springy and resisted her fingers.
“Come and watch TV,” she said.
“I don’t want to,” I answered.
The next day she did something. I was not home when she did it. It was early September. There was still a thickness of woods behind the houses of Meola and Semenza, and I had gone there to spy on Meola’s daughter. There was a copse of birches, inside it Meola had placed a bench, wrought iron, full of fancy designs. Karen Meola came out with nail polish and a book. She had a broad, flat face and she was short, but she was popular. She painted her nails and I watched the way she lifted her heavy thighs to get at her toes. At a certain point she looked up, as if she’d become alerted—by nothing, by silence—to my presence. If she had discovered me, I don’t know what would have happened. In two days, we would be back in school, and I would see her every day. But here, now, it was charged with strangeness, my watching her, and this was what I liked about it.
When I got home, there was commotion. Uncle John’s car was parked in front of the house, and since it was the middle of the day, this was unusual. It was time for lunch.
But John was pacing in our living room, and when he saw me at the foot of the stairs, I could tell he wished I hadn’t come home.
My mother stood in the middle of the kitchen looking as if she had just dropped something and was contemplating an imaginary mess on the floor before her. Her hair looked a little wild, and her eyes.
John turned on her. “Now what?”
And then, harder: “And how do you keep the house, Dorothy? Did you consider that before pulling this little stunt? You say he needs to see his son, fine—but is the way to do that to call and rat on him, so you lose everything? They’ll fire him now for sure. You think like a woman, Dorothy. You think only with the emotions.”
She looked at me, something secret in her eyes, as if I had been her ally in what she had just done; I, at least, would understand.
“What happened?” I asked.
John simply looked at me again, wishing I would go away. “Nothing,” he said.
Then he went to the big bay window and touched the sides of his pants, perhaps searching for a cigar.
“You’re going to see your father.”
That night he called.
“I’m coming to get you,” he said. “Friday night.” After which he paused, then said, in a half whisper, “It’s okay now.”
But was it? In the way he spoke, there was the inference that our world, his and mine, was going to be restored, and that it was the only world that counted. But close to me, in the family room, my mother made her presence known, in small ways, by moving her legs on the couch.
“What would you like to do, Luca?” my father asked, from whatever room or bar he might be calling from.
“I don’t care,” I said.
Again, my mother had moved, as if she were following the conversation through the movements of her legs and arms.
“Maybe I can just, show you how I’m living now,” he said. “Maybe that would be enough for a start.”
“Okay.”
He giggled. I knew it was just his nervousness speaking, though at first it cut me in a tender place.
“Your mother and you been doing okay?”
“Yes.”
“I couldn’t call because of, well, because of complicated reasons.”
“It’s okay.”
He held a long pause.
“Friday night,” he repeated.
When our conversation was over, I watched television with my mother for a while, out of politeness and a sense of impending and necessary desertion. She was watching Naked City. She favored police shows, doctor shows, anything featuring large and burly males moving heavily through the world, knocking obstacles from their paths. When the commercial came on, I spoke. “He says he’s coming to get me Friday.”
“I called his work,” she said abruptly. “I told on him. I told them what he was.”
I could see only the back of her head, the slightly mad way her hair sprawled upward, and her arm lay as if in readiness to pat her hair down.
“That’s why he’s coming, Luca.” She touched her hair then, and continued watching the show.
Of course I understood something, though maybe not in the way of words. I understood that my father had made a charge outward, into the world beyond this world, and that this charge had always been coming, he had been preparing for it a long time. Our coming here, our ascension, the finishedness of this neighborhood itself—had been, I knew, a catalyst.
But when he came, I thought right away that he looked silly. He had fallen away from a standard, and it was only at his appearance that I understood how, in his absence, I had allied myself with Meola and Semenza, and with my Uncle John, the men who stood beneath the high archways of their doors and surveyed the world.
He was wearing a hat, but not a suit. Instead, a soft cotton shirt, buttoned to the neck. He stood beside the Fairlane, waiting.
Uncle John had come for the occasion. My mother had packed me food in a bag.
“Don’t