got in a couple days ago and he’s really been helping out a lot,” Deirdre said to no one in particular.
“I’ve been helping, too, Mommy.” AJ was suddenly there, tugging on the hem of her skirt and looking shyly at his cousins.
“Yes, you have. All my boys are being very good.”
Katie sighed—so drawn out it was nearly a hum—her eyes still glued to me. She stepped closer, uncomfortably close. Maybe she’d comment on my breath, smoky from the cigarette I’d sneaked in the parking lot. “Let me tell you something,” she said, swallowing hard before continuing. “Your father deserved better.“
I sucked in air, backed away reflexively. This was the judgment I’d been dreading, though I’d started to think I would get away unscathed. My head ricocheted with response lines—everything from I’m sorry to Back off, bitch—but I held my tongue and withstood Aunt Katie’s hex, my face flushed but, I hoped, inscrutable. Finally, Deirdre, bless her, took command, helping Katie out of her coat and passing it to me. “Jamie, give this to the guy in the hall. Not you, AJ. It’s too big for you.”
Walking away, hauling fifteen pounds of raccoon fur, I averted my eyes from the crowd. Who in the room had seen what just happened?
I turned around and found Tommy behind me, passing a pile of coats to the attendant. Tommy Ficchino stood out in this room, a swarthy half-Italian in the midst of a lot of pasty Irish stock. As a kid, his hair had been light brown, like wood varnish, but it was almost black now, with little flecks of gray. He wasn’t quite as handsome as his father, Uncle Angelo, had been, but Tommy’s face had the same big, expressive features: a wide nose, dark eyes, a rosy mouth surrounded by the perpetual shadow of a beard. Angelo had died of a heart attack about six years ago. I’d come back for that funeral, too—a southern Italian affair, lavish in its grief. A wailing Nonna Ficchino had to be carried out of the church, her tight black shoes fumbling along the carpet as her grandsons bore her weight.
The Ficchinos and the Garners had been neighbors in Hell’s Kitchen. Angelo and Katie were high school sweethearts, a few years older than my father, whose nickname in those days was Rusty. I’d grown up listening to their stories of taking Rusty on dates with them, then telling him to beat it so they could have their privacy. There was the time a cop caught them necking in the back of Angelo’s car. The time Rusty got lost in Central Park for an afternoon. The time they crossed paths with Joe DiMaggio and he shook my father’s hand. The stories were so recycled, even I, who hadn’t heard them for years, could recite them in detail.
Tommy’s hands were rising in front of him, palms up. I knew this gesture, which all the men in his family shared: He was preparing to speak without quite knowing what to say. I scrambled to fill the silence. “I guess this must be tough for you, Tommy. You’ve already been through this, with your father.”
With a shrug of his shoulders, he replied, “Aw, whaddaya gonna do?”
I had to bite my lip to hold back a smile.
“Any time you got a death’s lousy,” he went on. “My dad died too young, but I got no regrets there. You and your dad—that’s another story. You being, you know, the black sheep.”
I nodded cautiously. “We had our difficulties.”
“Jesus, he was pretty tough on you, right? Pretty tough, period. Gotta be a lot of mixed emotions here.” He patted his belly.
I felt my eyes dampen—not from grief but from gratitude, like a patient receiving a diagnosis after previously being told it was all in his head. “One day at a time,” I said.
“Right. Today, tomorrow. Little here, little there, that’s how it goes. Whaddaya gonna do?”
“Hell if I know,” I said, letting the smile break through this time. He nodded with finality, and we stood together for a moment, silently perusing the crowd.
“So how’s it out there, you know, in San Fran?”
“Crazy times, lots going on. The Internet. The dot-coms.” Tommy’s accent was contagious. I heard myself saying dot-calms.
“We gonna hear you on NPR again?” he asked.
“Sure, sure. Someday.”
“You got anything coming up?”
“Not right now. Things have been a little quiet.”
In fact, my career in radio had been very quiet. About six months earlier I’d lost a regular producing job for San Francisco’s public radio station, and since then I’d worked freelance. Barely. The show I’d produced, City Snapshot, a daily report on offbeat cultural events in San Francisco, was one I helped create, and I took its cancellation—its re-branding, as the station manager dubbed it—personally. Before that show, I had produced a handful of reports for National Public Radio. Tommy had heard one of my segments on All Things Considered and called to congratulate me, and since then I’d been the “NPR guy” to him and all the Ficchinos. I didn’t bother to correct this; the lack of a permanent professional affiliation always took too much effort to explain to people not in my field. There were plenty of things I couldn’t remember about Tommy’s life, too, like were he and his brothers still running the refrigeration and air-conditioning business their father had passed on to them? Judging from Tommy’s expensive-looking suit and the fat Rolex on his wrist, he had moved on to something more lucrative.
Tommy went chasing after one of his daughters, who was making a break for the front door, and I slipped back into the main room. I leaned against a wall and watched my sister in action. Deirdre carried herself with great presence, like an event planner, one of those take-charge corporate types who stands in the middle of the action, wearing a matching skirt and suit jacket (this one was black, with padded shoulders), and with precise orders keeps everyone else moving. She and Andy were both performing just fine as far as I could tell, juggling guests, accepting mass cards from well-wishers, keeping AJ out of trouble. Up at the coffin, Aunt Katie was on her knees, dabbing her eyes. On either side, in sharp black suits, knelt one of her dark-haired sons—Tommy’s older brothers, Mike and Billy—looking like Secret Service agents assigned to protect her. All around me swirled this big family, everyone performing his or her role just so, a portrait glowing with tradition: functional, ritualized, structured to endure the dark storm of death. I saw myself as they must surely see me, standing apart from the crowd with my alien facial hair and my thrift-store suit, displaying no obvious emotions, and I wondered what I was doing here, why I’d set myself up for this kind of scrutiny. Most of the trouble that comes along is trouble we cause ourselves. My father again, his voice ringing out from the past: a lecture delivered one night after I’d been picked up by the cops in the passenger seat of a parked car. At the wheel was a tipsy Eric Sanchez, whom I was trying to persuade to hand over the keys. You could have walked away, Dad had said, and he’d been right. But for all my ambivalence about my family, I had never been one to walk away from a friend.
And then, unbidden, another memory: a fishing trip we made with some of his co-workers and their sons, a cluster of men and boys on the shore of a lake in upstate New York. My father stood behind me, his arms encircling me and his hands covering mine, guiding me through the proper way to cast. My discomfort at this physical closeness melted as he helped me reel in my first catch. I couldn’t have been more than twelve, but I caught three fish that day, more than anyone else. They were small, none bigger than his outstretched hand, but that didn’t stop us from hauling them home and insisting my mother fry them for dinner. And where the memory ends is here: me recounting for her the story of each catch while he looked on, soaking up my little triumphs, taking none of the credit. The weightlessness that came from having made him proud, and the knowledge, confusing even in the moment, that the key had been to put myself in his hands, to not resist.
A rumble was building up in my stomach; I suddenly was sure I would vomit. But when I locked myself in the bathroom, what erupted from my mouth was laughter—loud, giddy, cathartic howls of laughter that I couldn’t contain and couldn’t stop. I slid down to the tiled floor, and I flushed the toilet again and again, imagining Deirdre scowling on the other side of the door.