It's Your Baby Now

Freddys was his favorite and that’s where we went to tell him. He was sitting at that corner table under the ficus, lunching on one of those absurd roast beef sandwiches Freddys made its name on. Roast beef with bacon, horseradish mayonaise, peppers and onions. No lettuce. He despised lettuce, always telling us it was good only for target practice.

He watched us approach, a huge mug of ale poised at his mouth. A dark barley ale. Not to my liking, but he swore by it and never bought you a drink unless you took what he was having. He would say, If you’re drinking with me then you’re drinking with me. So I was always buying my own.

We couldn’t hold our excitement. Clocks spilled it, bubbled it out, literally. Actual bubbles popped on his lips.

He gave us that look, as if deciding which bed to take for the night, ate a forkful of potato salad, leaving a nugget in his beard. He loved that potato salad. Too much vinegar to my taste.

So, he said, The old man’s gone.

The police will have him before nightfall, Clocks said.

Already the police are in the game? he said.

It was over, we told him. Happened so fast it was impossible to grasp it. In an hour people the streets would be full.

It’s a great day then isn’t it? he said.

He picked up his sandwich, wiped a smear of mayonaise from the crust, put the finger in his mouth, smacked his lips. Well, he said, Enjoy your republic.

Three months later he said the exact same thing, just before I gave the order to the firing squad.

When Plenty is Enough

While Bob had his act together I couldn’t imagine wanting to be around anyone else. He was capable of small kindnesses, like bringing home my favorite ice cream – Chocolate Chunk, for instance – for which he had no love. And in his best impish moods he invented songs about my breasts, set to melodies from television commercials. I couldn’t fathom his infatuation with my breasts, but it was flattering to have someone conjure lyrics about them. In bed at night, his hand would rest on my hip, as if he were a dinghy moored at a yacht club, making me believe I might never again know such love and devotion.

One day, though, he came home early from the office. We made love with the afternoon sun boring through the bedroom windows.

A week later he did the same. I thought I might pass out from his attentions.

I began watching the clock above the kitchen sink. It broke my heart concluding it was time to leave.

To England and Back

Father Conant was not our priest. Being Presbyterians, we did without priests. But Mother had known him since high school. We called him FC and he enjoyed the occasional Sunday dinner with us, so when he offered the trip overseas she was thrilled. Only Dad had visited Europe, and then under imperfect circumstances. The prospect of one of her boys seeing civilization delighted her.

She drove me to the vicarage the morning of our flight and hugged me outside the car. I’m so excited for you, she said.

A month later I walked into the house with my bag and made her tea. She remarked on my accent. Within a week it disappeared.

Several months passed before she asked if I had had any trouble. I remembered scowling at a newspaper FC had picked up at Victoria Station, but left the moment to myself.

Someone said something to me about it, she said.

No trouble, I said.

I never thought there might be, she said.

He snored, I said. Quite loudly.

To prove the point, although I didn’t see it that way then, I fell in love with a girl named Jenny Bridge. FC didn’t attend the wedding but he sent a generous check.

The Morning I Loved My Father

That was a terrible night, to hear them tell it later. My brother Manfred said the lightning went at Pulpit Hill like in a story from a dusty book. It made you wonder what wrong a bump on the map had committed to merit such wrath. The sky was black as a mourning dress, except for rents here and there that filled with a bluegreen, like poison spilled from a vial.

One bolt, as if the storm had a moment for distractions, put the torch to the Market Street Hotel. Gramma drove us all to church, except for Papa, and all through the service I could see the fire across town through those tall Methodist windows and I knew that someday I’d like to go to a church with stained glass.

We didn’t see Papa until we came down to breakfast in the morning. Mama was stirring the pot of oatmeal on the Lorraine, and Papa was at the table having sausages and fried potatoes. He was as sooty as a coal miner and was wearing only his pants over his union suit. Only his hands and lips were clean, and with his hair so out of shape he would have looked like a sasquatch if he weren’t so skinny.

Don’t climb up on me, he said. I’m all a mess.

Manfred asked if he had saved the hotel.

No, he said, We did not save it.

For all his filth and disorder, I saw how handsome Papa could be. He was so weary and done in that every hard part of him had been planed away. When he acknowledged there were some fights he couldn’t win, I could see how Mama had fallen in love with him.

We pestered him about his night until he went up to bed. I can’t remember now whatever it was he described. I remember him thanking Mama for breakfast, then going out back for more water. I still hear him working the soap and water into his face.

What a strange thing, a thunderstorm that time of year. But when I think of it, they always seem to come when they want.

We went outside to play, and from a distance Pulpit Hill looked like it ever did. A month or so later Manfred said he had gone up for a look and it had gotten as torn up as a sinful town in the Bible. There were long shards of oak stuck in the ground like spears. That morning, though, everything was right again, except for the odd fact of Papa sleeping through the day. The light was sharp, defining the earth as clearly as an illustration in a weekly magazine. We played all day until Mama called us in for supper and to get ready for church. We had the day off from school, but not from church. That’s how it was then. There was no school on Good Friday.

The American Daughter

She loves me, she loves me not. If only a child were a flower, its petals accountable to a higher order. But no father wants that.

A father twists to shift his weight as clouds slip through his fingers.

The phone rings. All the way from Siracusa.

First it is her turn. Then mine. Radio days. We take our turns.

From an apartment in Siracusa she says, It’s great Dad it’s great.

She doesn’t mention the American Boyfriend. I imagine him in a little kitchen at the far end of an apartment with a view of the sea. Tossing pasta, pouring Chianti, sporting a beard.

She speaks in convenient cadences; the language of This is what I’m willing to tell you.

I do not oppose the American Boyfriend. I may as well oppose death.

There must be a chant, one I can memorize, recite. All foreign tongues being magic spells.

La sto mettendo in linea.

Non riesco a prendere il numero.

I wonder about my dreams. In them I see Vespas and fountains. I watch a movie about the American Girl living with the American Boyfriend far far away. The American Father has a minor speaking role, only a voice on the telefonino. I flip ahead in the script and find the voice a contrivance, a means of moving the narrative.

Narrow lanes emptying into wide piazzas, small round tables, sunglasses and fine bones. Vespas and fountains.

Ciao Papa. Ciao.

Destination

People died. We did what we could. Dabbed their lips with wet rags, stroked their hair, told them they were going to a better place.

Later we’d open the car door and throw them out. I’d take the shoulders, Joseph the feet. Swing them a couple times for momentum, counting, one, two, three. As if they were small children and we were playing at the beach.

Of course some were small children.

I don’t know I always took the shoulders. Maybe I didn’t. My memory is of Joseph having them by the ankles. Until it was Joseph we were tossing out. Then it was Michael holding the feet.

When the train stopped and we were at the end of our journey we got out, stretched our legs and held a thanksgiving prayer. We remembered those we lost. We pooled our stores and made a feast.

After a few days the merriment turned to hope.

Within a month hope became resignation.

More died, but the days of throwing bodies from a boxcar were behind us.

True Night

That moon sat on the clouds like a wobbly egg on a rumpled tablecloth. I walked Lui home, talking about the few things I knew and wanting to put my arm around her waist.

Along the flats we stopped to listen to something in the swamp: something large, with deliberate footsteps, picking its way across the flow.

Moose, I said.

Probably a deer, she said. Everything sounds big in the dark.

She said goodnight to me on her parent’s porch steps. I went home thinking I couldn’t live.

A couple weeks later I took her sister Jo to the movies. I put my arm around her in the theater. After the show I parked on the Cow Path and started kissing her and unbuttoning her blouse. She put her seat back to bring me over to her side. She said something, but I wasn’t listening. I closed my eyes and felt myself fill up the car. Back home I parked in the driveway and cut across the lawn to the house, dropping my keys along the way. It was too dark to find them in the grass, so I had to knock on the door and have Dad let me in.