By Victor Greto
I don’t remember very much, I never feel lonely anymore, and I’ve never been more alone in my life.
Memories come in images, short scenes, emotions. I hold them to my chest in the moment. Everything seems present-tense to me. I think I know why. I don’t particularly like the reasons, but they’re there, the memories, scenes and emotions, often when I don’t expect them. Maybe they extinguish the loneliness, or transmute them into aloneness. I’m not sure.
If I consciously think about the past and the way I think I used to be, it’s like barely recalling a life that belongs to someone else: it’s an insatiable hunger for knowledge stoked by anger. I’m not interested in figuring out from where it comes. In fact, it bores me when my mind wanders that way. No past. All passed.
It’s been ten years since my mother died. More than twenty years have passed since my father died.
And it’s been more than a year since my brother Marco died from lung cancer, when I saw him look at me as he stretched his body up and back on his bed, and I heard his daughter behind him say, Let go, dad, let go, and he looked at me with the frozen, dazed expression of a statue as he gently fell back on to the bed.
Maybe he pushed me over into conquering loneliness.
I moved up to my parents’ home to take care of my mother two years after my father died. I soon became a feature writer at the local newspaper. It’s been thirteen years since I left that job and eventually became a tenured professor at a small liberal arts college, teaching journalism and media, history and culture. The school closed through administrative incompetence.
Too soon, on the fragile cusp of retirement, alone, I wander in the house I rebuilt, knowing I will have to leave.
I feel all dressed up with no place to go. I float. Not so long ago, after all, those events.
The mirror shows the changes. My face has hardened and become curiously angular; my hair has turned mostly gray, my eyes, like my mother’s, set deep. I often fear that face when I see it suddenly, objectively: it looks both contemptuous and unsure. Occasionally I can see the younger man I’d been. But I rarely think about him anymore. As with all incipient introspection that creeps up on me, after the shock and anger, I look away.
I don’t want to leave Ridley Park. I should. I feel like a might-have-been; my brothers, too, though they never say so – except my older brother Marco, with whom I talked all the time about what happened.
I sometimes engage in what you might call cosmic-chromosonic roulette.
The wheel spun, perhaps I might have been pretty much the same – less lachrymose, more ambitious. The latter was only and always emergent, but was that because of my order in the lineup? Or, was that because of something missing? Or, was it none of the above?
I could tell by looking at pictures of my nineteen-year-old father that I would have been skewed different, if I had even been born. Perhaps, if my old man hadn’t been crazy, I might have been the one to inherit that combination of genes that turned a chunk of the family toward Neverland, a place I can’t stop seeing just outside his hospital door.
But it isn’t enough. I’m unsure why, but even now, after all that stuff, that half-century of wandering and analyzing and figuring, I still would have loved the chance to have played with the roulette wheel, given it another spin – but not for me. I want to watch my old man play in those crisp black and white films, play on those ballfields of the Fifties, before over-expansion, where it seemed like it was all dirt and chalk lines and overstuffed bags for bases, and guys were always on top of the situation and knew something magical was about to happen on that echoing expanse of green.
I know – and it feels terribly liberating to know – I would have sacrificed all that I had been and was going to be to give my old man that chance, to have cleared his brain of whatever that unbalanced shit coursing through him was that had fucked him for life into becoming an ambivalent, tortured producer of ambiguous, tortured men, his own gaze past them, through them, toward a future he could have. It was in Marco’s gaze as he died: as if he were shocked that something was happening but also resigned and acquiescent.
It wasn’t about having a chance at redemption. Everything is too random and complex to even make a concept like redemption possible. All those alluring mythologies require some sense of teleology, the grasp of a beginning, an end infused with purpose. It all seems so pathetically wrong. If you made your own purpose, it could never be about that. The stuff that lasted beyond your consciousness, beyond all that cogitating and trying to make your mark, was filled with circumstances and matter and formless energy.
That was it. A chance encounter of sperm and egg, and then chromosomes in the conditions they happen to be in at that very moment, and it was all different. I think I see him now: I spin the wheel and watch my old man move with grace on the diamond, his head as straight, his skills as inevitable, as DiMaggio’s.
Not all that long ago, I imagined I saw my mother as a young woman, no more than 22, with rich black hair, smooth olive skin, ruby-red lips and a finely-sculpted nose.
After my mother died, I had rooted around the old house and found hundreds of photographs, including one old 8-millimeter reel of film. I took it to a video place and had them convert it to a DVD. It was my mother and father’s 1952 wedding film, barely two minutes long, filled with young smiling faces, men in suits and ties and hats and women in flowing white and pastel dresses. It was taken at the church in the old neighborhood where I grew up. The first part was at the church, mom getting out of the car, her father helping, the smile on her face both tense and happy, the center of attention.
They gathered and walked into the church and then, in the blink of a film-eye, she came out again, holding on to my father’s arm, married. They stopped at the top of the church steps, looking around, talking to each other, hesitating, waiting, for it all to begin.
Then they were gone, and the film now showed the two of them – days later? weeks later? – walking down our old street arm in arm, past her father who sat on the porch talking to another old man, going into the house, her father’s house, but theirs for the next seventeen years.
Those things we have remaining that point to the past, all those pictures, films, letters – like holy relics, at first they act as windows to a greater, remembered dimension, but end, as they must if they survive long enough, taking on a life of their own.
Shortly after her death and a day after I watched that old film, I had taken a walk toward Morton, a town about five miles north and west of where I – where we – lived, and I passed an old Catholic Church, its cornerstone carved 1929, and thought, if I could be transported to that time, I’d walk back, beyond the two towns between here and my mom’s old neighborhood of Crum Lynne, and see my mother’s father and his growing family, the year she was born, the last and seventh child, the year the Great Depression began, three years before my grandmother would die from appendicitis.
I stopped, just past the church, near the closed storefront where a shoe store had been for decades and was no longer, and thought: it could never be. I couldn’t have made myself believable. I couldn’t speak Italian, like my grandfather inevitably did. I am too American for an Italian-American on the brink of the 1930s. I would make no sense, have no place. I would have to watch silently and, thus, be more than suspicious to everyone I saw down on old Maddock Street where my parents walked arm-in-arm shortly after their marriage.
Sometimes I feel nostalgia; sometimes I feel even longing; but mostly I just feel incongruence. Maybe it was how I’d always felt, at least around my old man. Not so with my mother, not toward the end. Sprezzatura could only have happened after my time away, just before I decided to come home to take care of her – back from my twenty-year fling, my last attempt to stay away before I succumbed to what now seems inevitable.
I have one more memory to help you try to understand what I may be, how I feel, before I go away like all people must and leave you to your own life.
It happened in Florida, where I lived before I returned home.
I love swimming. After I left Florida, that became the only thing I missed, morning swims before work and on weekends, laps and the cool of the water and the emptiness of the large pool in my townhouse complex.
I always got there before anyone. I preferred it that way, of course, so no one would look at me, so no one would be in my way as I swam lap after lap. I even swam on Christmas Day. I liked that I could swim outside in a pool on Christmas Day, and that I would become exhausted by 7 a.m., before others had even thought of getting up.
The complex was peopled mostly by the elderly. Several came out by 9 o’clock. But this one time was different, there was an old man who had been swimming just before I got there. As I creakily swung open the gate, I heard the man making waves in the water, and saw the sharp blade of a body swimming slowly and solidly and nearly silently, the water softly making way for him, softly closing behind him.
After hesitating, I swam along with him. We looked over at one another every few laps. He stayed with me the whole time, for at least fifteen minutes. I was surprised, but knew he was in good shape, sharp, bony, strong.
We both stopped for a breath at the shallow end of the pool. And then he started talking to me about his life.
And here’s the image and feelings I associate with it that may contain everything and nothing.
The old man’s hands were lithe and bony: he had leaned over in the pool just a couple of feet away from me, and set both forefingers and middle fingers cupped together atop his thumbs and looked pleadingly into my eyes. His face seemed all bone, a series of cutting angles directed toward a center of concentration, as if all of his body pointed to his hands. I saw the man’s eyes, narrow and pleading, alternately looking into his hands and up at me. He was explaining to me how he survived a concentration camp more than a half-century ago.
The old man’s teeth were jagged and his lips thin. He was telling me about how he had to beg for his life, how he had talked to the guard and had shown him something in his hands, and he looked at me with what must have been the same look he gave the guard. I couldn’t look at his face so I looked at his hands; I can’t even remember how the conversation got to this point, why the old man had volunteered the information about his past, why he chose to reenact the moment that saved his life. I could say nothing but awkwardly bob my gaze between the old man’s pleading eyes and bony fingers, as if they truly held a piece of machinery that he had fixed for the guard.
It was the old man’s look, I think, even then, when I was looking and wondering why I felt nothing but contempt for the man who had to plead for his life. Can a man be no more than this, that he must plead with another human being to survive? No, it was both: it also was the man who had maneuvered the other man into a situation where he had to plead that disgusted me so much. That had to be it. It couldn’t be because of this man’s expression, this man’s living in the moment, of teaching a German guard how to repair a part on his automobile, that made my gorge rise. If it was, I am unable ever to understand another thing in my life.
Thou art the thing itself, I thought, the point of hatred, in a jagged-toothed line from the man’s mouth to the trembling bony sticks of his fingers.
Instead of that bony prison of fingers, I came to see only the bony prison of my face in the mirror. I couldn’t figure out why my father was crazy, why, for the life of me, I couldn’t remember my mother ever touching me, and my expression, I knew – I just knew it – must have been like the old man’s, resolved from one of angry curiosity into a helpless, determined plea for my life.
© 2023 Victor Greto