shovel awaited me. But I was afraid of my daddy and instinctively rebuffed him, this enthusiastic, grasping man whose marriage and family I’d saved by getting sick. On a recent visit to Green Meadows, my mother told me that. You didn’t like your father, she said. You were afraid of him. Really, Ma? I was afraid of him? And you could tell? Because I don’t remember any of it at all.
A hemorrhaging relapse while playing outside on a hot sunny afternoon that made me vomit sloshing wallops of blood onto the sidewalk—I remember that—my father wrapping me in a blanket and rushing me into his car and also that I got to stay in the Boston Children’s Hospital. Mr. Peabody and Sherman came to visit us in our ward, and my father sat by my bed performing the magic tricks he’d bought at Little Jack Horner on Tremont Street. One was a shiny black top encircled by white flecks, but when my father made the top spin on its special stick, the flecks became a rainbow blur before turning into a row of flying scarlet birds that he said were called ibis.
That’s how these visits with my mother go now, but her occasionally blunt, unguarded way of speaking is a new trait. She’s almost comically the opposite of how she used to be, after all those years of keeping her guard impermeably raised. This new heedless candor is a manifestation of the somewhat premature dementia that has been overtaking her in recent years, possibly the result, doctors now say, of a stroke that wasn’t noticed, a commotion in her brain that caused a tremulous weakness in one leg that was misdiagnosed as a symptom of advancing age. But my sister and I also attributed her decline to the exhaustion brought on by having to tend to Bert during his unrelentingly demanding last years, when being repeatedly hospitalized for an array of health emergencies somehow only fueled his manic, cantankerous energies. By the end, it was Lexi who took over his care, moving home again, adamant that she was only doing it out of concern for our mother. Mamita’s condition seemed related to another medical mystery, that being the most dreadful insomnia that overtook her, when it was as if the more Bert exhausted her, the harder it was for her to get any sleep, her often reddened eyes encircled by darkly puffed skin. It was only when she had to go from the nursing home to a hospital in Boston because of a nearly fatal case of pneumonia and an adverse reaction to her medications that doctors, studying her puzzling medical history, also hypothesized that prior stroke. On my mother’s side of the family, there’s no known history of strokes or heart disease or even of dementia; there are a few old family stories that along with the little bit I’ve found out on my own do suggest that Abuelito was manic-depressive and maybe even schizophrenic. In the nursing home, Mamita’s doctors did finally straighten out her medications. She sleeps better now, though that fog she’s often at least a little bit lost in and from which she does sharply emerge, nevertheless seems to be slowly, ineluctably deepening.
Soon after Bert Goldberg’s beautiful young wife, Yolanda Montejo Hernández, came back from Guatemala with their sick little son, she became pregnant, with a girl this time, Alexandra. Husband, probably wife, too, must have felt blessed and redeemed, if not shocked, by this successful fast work, which won them the right and even the responsibility to turn their long separation into a subject never to be spoken of again, certainly not within hearing of the children. In the fall, living in our neighborhood was like being snugly enclosed at the bottom of a basket of flagrant fiery and more muted colors, replaced in winter by hues of snowy slopes, pine crests nearly black in the distance, frigid gray skies, flying flocks of crows, crimson-streaked Atlantic sunsets, followed by successive seasons that wove into our little valley every shade of green from sapling shoots to darkest boreal forest. How could my father even have suspected the viciousness lurking all around us? The Saccos, related to the contractors who’d founded and built our neighborhood, a brutal clan, lived around the corner on Enna Road in a little ranch house like our own. Whenever Gary Sacco called me dirty kike, I shouted back: So are you. You’re a dirty kike too!
Down Back, the weedy, stony field behind our houses, was where me and my few friends from school, especially Peter Lammi, who at school was called Lambi, used to stand shoulder to shoulder, throwing rocks at Gary, who was a year older than us, and his brother, Chris, and some of their friends, while they hurled and zinged them at us. We went to Dwight, the public elementary school, and they went to St. Joe’s. We faced off far enough away that we could usually easily dodge the rocks they threw. My rocks never even came close to reaching them, though I left that part out when boasting at the dinner table about my daring charges against the enemy and perfectly pitched throws. Peter Lammi was much stronger than any of us on either side. Come on, Pete, split a head open! He aimed his rocks relentlessly, one after another, but always so they’d miss but be close enough to make our enemy pull back and finally run away. He couldn’t bring himself to intentionally hurt even Gary Sacco. Peter launched those wild bombardments in part to protect me but to protect himself, too, because he knew the Saccos and their friends were desperate to see our faces covered in blood, if only they could get close enough. I also wanted to see their faces covered in blood, there was not a single thing in this world I wanted more. The serious problem of enemies, what to wish for your enemies.
We did have some nice neighbors, and Mamita even got along with Connie Sacco for a while. But then my mother decided we had to give Fritzie, our German shepherd, away and put an advertisement in the newspaper. Mamita couldn’t take Fritzie anymore, such a rambunctious galoot that he didn’t seem to even fit inside our little house, and he filled the yard with dog shit that it was my job to collect inside wads of newspaper and drop into the aluminum rubbish incinerator that resembled the robot in Lost in Space, a job I performed at best haphazardly. An elderly black couple came from Maine to see Fritzie. They drove an old-looking automobile and told us they lived on a small farm. They went into the yard to meet Fritzie, then sat in the living room with my parents over coffee and cookies, looking at vaccination and kennel papers. Two days later a petition was left in our mailbox, signed by our neighbors, maybe by every household on Sacco and Enna Roads, complaining that if we sold our house to Negroes, their property values would go down. No black families lived in our town, not one I’d ever seen anyway. “We, your neighbors, agree that we will take all necessary steps to prevent that,” the letter said, which my father, astounded, read aloud in the kitchen, and then he mocked: What, they’re going to burn our house down? They’re in the Ku Klux Klan now, these goddamned wops and micks? Bert! exclaimed my mother. Don’t talk like that in front of the children, you’ll make them prejudiced. When Mamita suggested that all we had to do was tell our neighbors the truth—that we were only giving Fritzie away, not selling the house—my father exploded in indignant disbelief: Oh Jesus Christ Almighty, Yoli!
The next weekend, the couple came again to take Fritzie back to their farm in Maine, where he was going to be a happy dog with so much room to romp. I went with my father when he drove the dog shit incinerator to the town dump and on the way home sat turned away from him while sobbing like a German war widow: Fritzie, Fritzie, oh Fritzie.
Jesus Christ Almighty, this: I’m lying on my back among the weeds and pebbles of the apron at the top of Sacco Road, gasping for breath, unable to draw any air, in a rising frenzy of panic and terror because I’m suffocating to death. My recall is hazy, but I do know that Gary Sacco and some of the others had caught me alone, insults, shoves, a burst of boy punches, clumsy and savage, a hard punch to my throat. When they saw me on my back gasping for air, they ran away. There were no houses there on that side of Sacco Road where it ran alongside the steep hill that the old house of the Sacco family matriarch, Grandma Enna, sat atop, though there were houses on the opposite side. Panic, harshly gasping, unable to draw any air, that’s what I most vividly remember, and that I was lying near a telephone pole, long slightly drooping strands of black wire high above me against the brilliantly azure sky. Soon enough my throat relaxed, opened, I gulped air, could breathe again. Then I must have gotten to my feet and walked home. How could I explain to my mother or Feli what had happened, describe the improbable punch that had caused my throat to close and how terrifying that had been, lying there unable to breathe. Whenever I go back to our town, usually by train, to spend some hours just walking around, I sometimes pass that way and see Grandma Enna’s house up there, looking like something out of an old New England horror story or movie, with its always-curtained windows, two skinny chimneys, sagging porch, in winter the snow-blanketed wide downward incline of the lawn, crows waddling across it, pecking for pine nuts from the tall pines separating the property from the old part of the cemetery where the jagged, slate gravestones from colonial