the years since, I’ve managed to learn quite a lot more about what my father used to do for living. Back when Bert was starting out, the manufacturing of porcelain dental prosthetics was rugged work. He used to travel to granite quarries in Canada to inspect and choose the veins in the rock he wanted for his source feldspar. At Potashnik, he worked in a Vulcan environment of furnaces and kilns, of grinders and iron mixers, pulverizing feldspar into powders. While the company never stopped producing the high-end porcelain teeth that were Bert’s specialty, it also eventually became a major manufacturer of the acrylic teeth that came to dominate the market. The chemistry was completely different, but my father mastered it too.
A few years after I’d left for college, when the Potashniks sold the company to a pharmaceutical multinational, the new managers realized it was going to take a team of five to do what my father had been doing alone at the tooth plant for decades, seriously underpaid throughout. To convince him to postpone his retirement another five years, until he was seventy, so that he could personally train those apprentices to take over after he was gone, they more than tripled Bert’s salary. He’d been resigned to a penurious retirement. Instead, he was able to buy his Florida condo.
Here in New Haven, the train has to change from diesel to electric locomotives or vice versa. It takes about ten minutes. It’s cold out here on the platform, but as the heat is always turned up so high inside the cars, I left my coat inside, on the rack over my seat. Back in the smoking days, this was always one of the great moments to light up. The locomotive, just disconnected, looking as if it’s playing a juvenile prank, goes whizzing off all by itself, and now train-yard workers are huddled around the exposed front of the first passenger car, a few leaning over from the platform, the others down on the tracks doing whatever it is they do so that the second locomotive, when it comes rolling in reverse, will ram into that car, iron against iron, and latch on. If you’ve stayed inside in your seat, even though you know it’s coming, it always delivers a disagreeable jolt, flinging coffee up out of your cup. That routine jarring collision of locomotive and car is a pleasing reminder that not everything is all high-tech, smooth, and quiet, the way the high-speed Acela is, which is almost three times as expensive as this regional train and usually doesn’t even get you to Boston, New York, or DC that much more quickly, its velocity constrained by the archaic tracks and all the other traffic, including local commuter lines, sharing them. Though the Acela is a nice ride, with lobster rolls for sale in the café car and a certain elitist, briefcase-carrying Northeast Corridor glamour, if you’re in the mood to spend some extra dosh just for that. I like to wait until the last moment to reboard, when the conductors, some leaning out the doors, are shouting to lingering passengers out on the platform, many of whom like soldiers returning to the front in an old movie take a last drag and toss down their cigarettes as they stride forward to hop back on the train just as it’s starting to move.
Promise me you’ll always be the happy one, said my mother. I can’t have two unhappy children. If I can’t remember when she first said that, I do remember thinking, She really means it—and feeling happy that she thought of me in this way and also pained for her. She said it more than once, though maybe not quite in those exact words. Still, having an inherently “happy-go-lucky” disposition, as Mamita liked to claim we both did, didn’t necessarily make you kind to your little sister or even intuitively empathetic. If Lexi sometimes had a hard time as a child and adolescent, I was indifferent or pretended to be. Was it that she didn’t have friends? But Lexi did have friends, more and better friends than I did. Maybe they weren’t all nice enough to her, I don’t know. She had an innocence that made her easy to confuse. When someone was mean, it hurt her, but it also confused her. When people were mean to me, it didn’t confuse me. It didn’t even hurt me that much. It was just the way things were.
Even into my thirties, even beyond that, I still felt a kind of internalized mandate to hide any unhappiness of my own from my mother—I would never have been tempted to share it with my father or sister anyway.
Eventually, over the years, I had a couple of girlfriends who got close enough to me to also observe my mother and how I was with her and to form opinions about it. I remember giving one of those girlfriends that whole spiel about my mother and me being so similar, happy by nature, smiling through misfortune, and I was so taken by surprise when she responded that it wasn’t true. Yes, my mother might have a cheerful disposition, but she was sad inside. Camila said she could tell that in many ways Mamita had had a sad life, that she was a wounded woman. I, on the other hand, really did let things go. The bad things that happen to you, she said, it’s weird, it’s like you just shed them and go on to the next thing. A year or two later, Camila repeated those very words when she broke up with me. Sure, I was sad now, devastated even, but she knew I’d get over it, shed it, move on to the next thing like I always did. She reached out to actually stroke my nose as if saying goodbye to a dog, faithful and stupid, who’d miss her but would also soon forget all about her, happy to go off with a new master.
I did everything I could, tried everything for years, to get you to open up your heart, and nothing worked! That’s what Camila exclaimed a few months ago as we sat in her kitchen in the Williamsburg loft that she shares with her partner, an Iranian German avant-garde theater director, having invited me for lunch. She shouted, Frank, are you laughing? You are such an asshole. You’re laughing! But she was laughing, too, partly in disbelief, because it was me who’d just asked, all these years later, why she thought our relationship had failed, and she’d made the effort to answer honestly, I had some nerve to laugh! I don’t know why I’d started to laugh, embarrassment probably.
Not long after that previous trip when Lexi had told Camila about how those boys had “almost murdered me,” I’d come to Boston alone because my father was in the hospital to be operated on for a blocked artery maybe, though I’m not sure. Bert had so many emergencies and operations that I regard as minor only because he so robustly survived them all. Lexi, my mother, and I had met at the hospital to sit with Bert in his room for a while, and then my sister drove us in her car to the Chestnut Hill mall to have dinner at Legal Sea Foods, where, it turned out, my sister wanted to talk about her therapy sessions. I knew Lexi had been in therapy since her childhood, but this was the first time I’d ever heard her discuss it so openly. Of course one of the major problems she and her therapist had worked on was the harm my father had done to her, endlessly insulting her, demeaning her, making her feel like she was a huge disappointment to everybody, worthless. I know I’m not worthless now, Frank, she said in a tone of cheerful exhortation. But that took years of therapy, which helped me to find the confidence to prove my worth to others, yes, but mostly to myself. But, sadly, she said, trying to prove that to Bert is a waste of time. I know that now too. I was struck by how she’d pronounced “But, sadly,” as if our father’s cruelty was something she could now regard with a certain perhaps feigned detachment. Yes, darling, I know, my mother said, putting her thin, delicate hand on my sister’s paler, more substantial, elegantly sculpted–looking one. Lexi really does have beautiful hands, as if shaped by all those years of violin and viola playing when she was a girl.
I hadn’t been around many people who spoke in this earnestly self-disclosing way. Even Camila, who could be direct in expressing her emotions, possessed, I suppose, an innate British restraint. Starting in my twenties, I’d spent practically ten straight years in Central America, as a freelance journalist, covering the wars, trying to write my first novel, occasionally spending time in New York, but the focus of my life was always down there. The other journalists I knew never spoke like that, the way my sister did at dinner, nor did any of the Central Americans I knew. It would have raked stridently across almost anyone’s nerves and sense of private equilibrium, would have sounded incredibly gauche, to hear someone going on about their therapy sessions or their personal emotional problems, “sharing” in this way. Obviously, violence, death, suffering were all around us. We were living through a terrible war, Central America in the 1980s, a war that many of us were dedicated to observing, to investigating in ways that practically required us to merge self and commitment to our jobs, emotionally, morally; it seemed the only way to rise to the horror of what we were witnessing. We couldn’t help but try, at least. It’s not like we didn’t manage to have fun too. But I don’t doubt that the experience was in some ways deforming. I can see now that it was. Of course some of us, maybe even most of us, also found partners to be close to,