By Victor Greto
There comes a point in your life when you seem sure of everything.
This is no earth-shattering discovery or insight. But it’s also not that one, the one that ends with, “I’m amazed how smart my old man got when I hit twenty-one.”
It’s more about purpose. I almost had it once. When I was sixteen, I was the best baseball player of anyone my age. I could run and never get tired. I could hit and catch the ball like Joe D. It was the only time I saw myself outside myself; you know, when I could see myself swing the bat, as if I was watching from the front row of the stands or was on-deck. But it wasn’t my purpose. Just when it was about to be my purpose, I got sick.
It was 1947, and everything was baseball. When I woke up in the morning, I thought about baseball; when I was at school, I thought about baseball; when I was praying to God at church, I thought about baseball; when I was eating lunch or dinner, all I thought about was baseball. I had this picture in my head: the seams of a baseball. If I could see the seams spinning toward me, feel the steadiness of my eyes watching the spin, I knew I could do anything. When I was up at bat, just before I hit the cover off the ball, I could literally see the seams spinning. I could see my bat hit the ball, hear the crack, then, with arms outstretched, start running.
Whenever anything worked for me – it didn’t matter what I was doing – my mind saw the spinning seams of a baseball. Even when I steamrolled over the defensive line playing football as halfback, when I made a lay-up – there they were, the seams, the stitches: the world was in-joint.
This is not nostalgia talking to you more than thirty years later. This is fact.
But then I got sick and the rest is my life. I haven’t been able to see the seams of a baseball since.
If you could open me up and look inside, you’d find nothing but fear. People don’t think I know that. But it’s there when I take a walk. It’s there when Grace has company over and I just can’t get up from my chair. It was there when I used to work, in that brief moment before I left in the morning, when I closed my eyes and sighed as I got into the car.
Grace’s brother Jack reminded me of the seams, even though he became to me everything the seams were not.
Jack’s an ugly cuss. He reminds me of the worst of Pop, Grace’s father. That is, if you had reshaped Pop’s face just a little, moved his eyes a little closer together, made his nose a little longer, then he’d look like Jack, shifty, devious, bitter. Pop was bitter, but he usually never showed it. Jack’s middle name is bitter, inside and out. My middle name is seams. Even though I know not seams anymore.
Jack came here out of the black. It was a cold Saturday night, those Saturday nights you can set your watch by, when Grace’s sister, Carla, and her husband, Stan, come by and bring the kids’ stuff, and we sit around the table talking. There was a knock at the front door. No one ever knocks at the front door. The swim club driveway leads to the back and people park there by the garage, then come up to the back door and knock. So, when someone knocked at the front door, you know it’s either something formal or it’s Halloween – or, finally, somebody who doesn’t know any better. Well, it wasn’t Halloween and it wasn’t formal, either.
I didn’t move from my chair when the knocking started. So, Grace got up from the dining room table to answer it. She almost yelped when she recognized who it was. When Jack came in, I sure as hell didn’t know who it was. After all, I hadn’t seen him in thirty-some years. He was short and stocky, wore blue overalls that showed a belly, and had hair on his face.
When he came in, he walked hunched over like a cat. When Grace said, “It’s Jack,” thirty years collapsed like a house of cards. It was Jack all right. He looked like shit, but it was him. He had been missing for more than three decades because Pop had banished him from the house, the house where I ended up living with Pop and Grace after I married her in 1952.
Grace and I lived in that house for seventeen years. Pop died in 1966. This was, of course, years into my renewed cycle of sickness. It had started up again after Vincent was born. This will all become clear in time, even though time, when you look back upon it, flies like a baseball without seams and, when you finally catch it, it falls apart in your goddamn hands.
Jack (whose real name is Francis Jr., but who always called himself Jack) ended up in the stockade at the end of the war. We had heard it was for fighting; whatever it was, Pop told him not to bother coming home. We figured, of course, it was more than just about fighting, but asking Pop anything he wasn’t willing to tell you was a study in frustration. He would give you that look that you’d guess he had used a thousand times in his life, that said, non capisco. So, non so on what had happened to Jack at the end of the war.
We saw him briefly sometime in 1947, the summer. He was slim then, wiry, and very strong, black hair short and curly. He had given Grace some drawings he’d done during the war and a couple of paintings that we still have up in the den. Grace put them up after Pop died.
I really didn’t know Grace’s family all that well right after the war. When you’re fourteen or fifteen, what do you care about returning soldiers when they’re all over the place? We used to see Jack before the war, but he seemed so old to us then. And he was always working to help support his family. They lived catty-corner to us; our back yards actually ran into each other, blocked by clotheslines and a long bench. My dad and Pop spoke Italian together on occasion, and that’s how we found out that Jack wasn’t coming home, at least to stay. My dad said it as an aside during one dinner conversation. That was it, and I didn’t care anyway. Baseball, remember?
But that stuff about what it was like being a kid and growing up near my wife and how the old neighborhood got along – that stuff is so far gone now. It’s not that I can’t remember a lot of it. It’s just that it’s all so not-present. The people in that neighborhood are either dead or scattered; dead because of old age or disease or accident, scattered because they paved over half our neighborhood to put the interstate through. You should see the place now. Walk up Maddock Street in Crum Lynne on the way to Eddystone; it ends two houses short of where we lived, where you now hear the traffic of the interstate, convenient interchanges for those slugs who want to get to the airport faster. Pop had built that house, just like he and a bunch of other Italian guys in the neighborhood had built the swim club nearby. It’s all gone now, just fields and weeds, some houses and the interstate. I haven’t gone back since Grace and I walked those streets two years after we moved. It was sad for her. I think back on that walk: I wasn’t even forty. And now, what, I’m close to fifty.
What’s funny about Jack – and the whole point of why I’m even talking – is that when I remembered him last, back in 1947, I was the best. And that’s what came to me when he hunched through the front door of my house that winter night.
Let me explain something to you. Have you ever played the outfield and pounded your glove with your fist in excruciating anticipation? Dying for the son of a bitch to hit it your way, to run and feel your body stretch, watch yourself reach for those spinning seams? Nothing else exists. No man, no woman, no mom, no dad, no brother, no sister, no nothing. If you’re moaning that I’m being redundant, you just haven’t experienced it and you’re either jealous or simply uninterested. Well, I’m actually jealous now, but I’m interested. I haven’t lost that yet.
I had been the best when I had last seen Jack. I confess I hadn’t thought about that in years, maybe decades. Perhaps since Pop died. No, I take that back: I hadn’t thought of those times for sure since Pop died.
You see, when Pop died, our lives changed. I was thirty-five years old then. I’d been working at BP Oil for nearly fourteen years. I carpooled to work. I had gotten into an accident when I got sick and the insurance went through the roof. But, to be honest, I didn’t want to drive anyway. I only began driving again after we moved, but not before then. Grace has never driven a car in her life.
I had known Grace since she’d returned home after spending more than a decade in an orphanage. You see, her mother died of misdiagnosed appendicitis when Grace was only two, and Pop was (aside from forever bitter about the death) stuck with seven children, the oldest of whom was only ten at the time. He put them in homes in Philly until he could find a steady job. He always had a hard time finding jobs, and it was the Depression.
But everything changed with the war.
The first time I saw Grace was long after the war began; she was standing in front of the railing of Pop’s porch, her elbows leaning back. I remember her saddle shoes and white socks. She wore a gray wool skirt, a dark-colored blouse and a little vest. She had one of those dress-scarves wrapped around her neck. Her hair curled past her shoulders and she just looked at me when I walked by with the most incredible smile I ever saw. I stared, and as my body moved, my head stayed in position to look at her. I walked around the block and she was in the same spot, except now she was looking at the house across the street, or maybe the sky, I couldn’t tell, but she wasn’t looking at me. I whistled at her, and her head moved cat-like and she almost gave me a dirty look, like I had disturbed her. I whistled again. She smiled in response, but it was more cautious, less free. So I turned away and kept walking. I was thirteen. I even remember the date: June tenth, the Saturday after D-Day.
After that, I saw her a lot, though only to look at. I walked by her all the time to impress her. It didn’t hurt that I grew to be the tallest guy on the block, and me and my older brother Fredo would be walking side-by-side and I would glance over to Grace and wink and pretend I was talking to Fredo. I liked walking with Fredo because, though older than me by two years, he was nearly a head smaller. Grace knew I walked for her, you could tell by her look, and she had that smile, that way of tilting her head just to the side and down a little, and you could see her dimples, and she liked touching her hair even though it wasn’t in her face. I remember feeling so full of myself at those times, fourteen, fifteen. I’m not sure how this happens, but when you’re younger it’s so easy to fall in love with just the way someone stands, or looks at you, or breathes.
Fredo and I played sandlot together, but he was already a fine baseball player when I started playing in high school. Sports was a competition with him, but it wasn’t with me, really, though I got to be better than he was. I was bigger, after all. I always say that Fredo was a better baseball player than I, but actually he was the best catcher I ever saw. I was the best outfielder and hitter because of my size and my agility. I didn’t even have to work at it. It was just with me, a sort of ease, confidence, sprezzatura, like when we walked by Pop’s house and Grace was out there. It was no coincidence that she showed up on the porch rocking, or sat on the railing as light as a leaf, with a leg dangling over the side, when Fredo and I walked by after practice. We had a much longer walk because our old man made us go to St. James High School for boys. Grace went to Ridley High School , the public school, which had a better sports program. Talking to my dad about the choice between going to a public or a Catholic school, though, was as useless as talking to him about anything else.
But I admit it now: I was full of Grace then, at least after practice, or the weekends after Fredo and the other guys in the neighborhood played ball. Because our houses were catty-corner, I could actually see Grace from the windows of the house, especially the bathroom shower. It was there, when I showered, that I sang to Grace. My voice grew into a light baritone by the time I was sixteen, and I’d croon Crosby to her, I Surrender Dear, or The Whiffenpoof Song, her favorite because I would belt out the bah-bah-bahs as deeply as I could. She’d sit on her stoop, her face tilted that way, her hand on her chin, and watch my head full of soap sing to her. When I came out squeaky-clean, I’d go into Jolson, my favorite, who I wanted to be so much at times. “What care I who make the laws of a nation?” I’d sing to her when I came out, feeling every muscle in my body; “Let those who will take care of its rights and wrongs.”
Soon, we found ourselves sitting on Pop’s bench talking about Crosby and Jolson and baseball, asking, begging her to come out and see me play. Later, Grace told me my mom would invite her over for coffee and talk about me. I still miss my mom. But Grace’s family was the opposite about me and Grace. Pop never understood sports, the attraction, the point, making it into the end, and not the means, of your life. And Grace’s sisters, before they married and went away, would say, “Grace!” almost in unison when supper was ready – or when anything was going on, for that matter – just so she would leave me and go inside the house with them or Pop. I remember sitting there once when Grace ran into the house after Carla called her, and looking at Carla, who had remained on the stoop. She just kept staring at me like a dog does when you look at it too much and is about to go for your throat, and I gazed back with as open a face as I could. When she turned around to go into the house, I felt I knew I would have Grace forever.
That was a hell of a thing to feel at sixteen. It didn’t seem as true as hitting the ball, but it was as much a fixture in my head. In fact, my attitude toward Grace was curiously like my attitude toward sports: I took it easy; I was never aggressive in the sense that others were aggressive, and often downright mean, about playing. Like Fredo, who could be a real son of a bitch when it came to running the bases, or not taking shit from anyone. Of course, he was smaller than me, but he was nearly as strong, and it used to piss him off when I just took things from people. Like from Arnie Willoughby, a big guy – bigger than me – from Cardinal O’Hara High School and who lived on the border of Crum Lynne. He’d always push me around, the kind of kid who’d poke his index finger into your chest. Around him, I did the open-face expression I’d used on Carla. But one day Fredo had simply had enough. Walking home from practice, he told me that if I let Arnie push me around one more time, he wouldn’t walk with me again. And there was Arnie, right on cue, in the alley we used to cut through between Nino’s bar and Pop’s house, coming out at me with his index finger erect and ready to poke my chest. “Sammy!” Fredo cried as Arnie came by, and I looked at Fredo’s expression, and it was filled with so much frustration and shame that I went crazy and literally jumped on Arnie and beat the living shit out of him. It wasn’t satisfying at all, and Arnie cried, but Fredo walked the little way home with his arm straining around me and his eyes filled with proud tears. But that was a unique incident in my life. Arnie and I even became good friends after that. I never became aggressive like Fredo wanted me to; that was too much like letting go of myself, the opposite of concentration, of what came naturally, of locking my eyes on the seams of a baseball. It was always the art of sport that appealed to everything in me. I was DiMaggio to Fredo’s Cobb.
In a sense, thinking about it at this moment, baseball and Grace grew into and choked my mind simultaneously. I first made love to Grace in my sixteenth year; she was nearly eighteen and a senior. Pop used to take long walks to the grocery store in Chester, dragging his two-wheeled metal cart; he would be gone for hours. Pop had a small limp, and it was a good five miles to Chester from Crum Lynne, and he would go out in his square-cut brown pants, checkered wool shirt, suspenders, brown, chipped shoes and wide-brimmed straw hat, and visit people on the way, including my dad when he was home. But it was during those lazy, fast hours, with Grace’s sisters and brothers all gone off and married, or just away, that we would sit together on the couch that I now still sit and lay upon, and talk about everything, and we kissed and, finally, like it was as natural as coming up to the plate and holding and rubbing the bat tight in my hands, I carried her up to her room and fell on her as easily as I would catch a fly ball with my body stretched, my eyes fastened upon her mouth and the smell of her hair and body, until my eyes had to close, exhausted and unable to see anything.
I got a call from the talent scouts for the Phillies; one of whom watched me play in the Catholic League all-star game. I still have the letter; Grace pasted it in the scrapbook she made for me. I never went.
I got sick, for the first time in my life, and it came like a curve ball at my head. I was in the hospital for a couple of months, missing most of that basketball season – as well as the baseball try-out. But I came back in the spring, just after I turned seventeen and baseball season began.
That was the beginning of the end, 1948, but I didn’t know that. How could I? But I think my old man knew it. The thing was, he and I never really talked about it, and we never let anyone outside the family know. Fredo talked to me about it a couple of times, how our old man and dad’s mother had had the illness, how, he said he had heard once, when she had gotten sick in the old country, my grandmother stuck the family dog in the oven, then pulled it out hours later like she was serving dinner. But after baseball started up again, we never talked about it. There was nothing to talk about but baseball, and Grace, who thought I was in the hospital for a bad case of the flu, just missed me. I admit I’d hardly thought about her during those two months. I kept going over plays and pitches in my head. Although I began to gain weight where before I was tall and thin, I still had my stride and kicked the shit out of the ball even more.
But it hung over me, made me anxious, as though it were a pitcher with great stuff who I hadn’t seen before, or just couldn’t remember.
I went to Washington College on a baseball scholarship. The first year was great, and I did well academically and on the field. My old man would drive Grace the hundred or so miles to watch me play, and we wrote letters to each other; I sent her poems. But then, in my sophomore year, the illness hit me again, and I quit, resigned. Back home, I played semi-pro ball for the Chester Upland team. Days I wasn’t playing outfield, I pitched. We won the championship; there was no pressure.
During all this time, I had grown to know Pop as a laid-back guy. A few months after I left college, when I started dating Grace again, he came up to me one day and said, “So, what you going to do with this girl?” as though he was asking me what I thought of the weather. I was twenty, and he didn’t know anything about me, really, certainly nothing about my illnesses and, as I said before, seemed to have no respect for the sports I played. I had just gotten a job as a proofreader at a little publishing place in Philly. I always had good eyes – until last year, when I had to get reading glasses. But I used to be so proud of my eyes; they were one of the reasons why I was so good at sports. Like Williams or Hornsby, I could see everything. It was almost as though my eyes contained my judgment; they measured, chose and reacted before I could even think. So, when Pop asked me that question, I looked at him closely because I knew he was serious; the sentence he had spoken progressively went down in tone, until “girl” came out like a rumble.
Pop’s face was one color. I’ve never seen another face all the same color like Pop’s, but except for the whites of his eyes, his lids, lashes, nose, even lips were a deep brown. His straight, thinning hair looked Roman; black strands limned his small forehead, like tines over a jewel, setting it, keeping it in place.
He looked both ancient and kind, even all-knowing. He knew what I was thinking: nothing. I had no plans. I felt nothing but anger toward myself and my illness. It was ruining my goddamn life, revisiting me just when I needed it least. But that anger, even then, was starting to become pressed as thin as a communion wafer under a numbness inches thick. My eyes shifted toward his gnarled, hairy hands that held his knees in place. It was all there in this short, brown man. I remember thinking as quickly as I had ever thought before in my life – and would ever again. I saw my old man, my mother, my brothers and sisters; and I saw Grace and Pop, and that was it. “I want to marry her,” I said. I felt my lips touch one another as I said the words.
When he looked up at me, his hands still on his knees, he smiled, his mouth a pencil line that slowly, imperceptibly, curved into a smile. He rose and shook my hand. I looked down at him but he did not look up at me. He merely touched my shoulder and nodded his head and walked back into the house that would become my house. My heart started beating like a hammer in my chest. I had done it. I had decided.
So, we got married. I was twenty-one and Grace was twenty-three. After the wedding, and then after the reception at my father’s house, and before we went to the Poconos on our honeymoon, I walked into Pop’s house by myself. It was actually a smaller version of my own father’s house, but it was just going to be us three at first. Grace’s four sisters had married, and the other boy, Tony, also had left after the war. Grace had told me just before the wedding how she wanted a large family, and I remember just shrugging my shoulders and smiling. It was like being on a course set by a power greater than yourself, and you assenting to it. I went into that house after getting away from everyone who’d gathered at my dad’s place, and I walked through the small alcove and into the living room. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a reflection of myself in my tux. I looked sharp as a tack. I turned and gazed softly into my own eyes and smiled. But I wasn’t really seeing myself. I watched myself laugh and thought about the smallness of the house, Grace, Pop, baseball. I tried so hard to concentrate on my looks, my tux, my face, but I couldn’t make any of it out. It was almost as though I was looking at another person.
But a better life was beginning, especially during the next few years, when Pop was still alive and I didn’t get sick. He was through working for a living and he staked out the cellar for himself. He piddled around the house, fixing everything that went bad. I, of course, couldn’t do anything but play baseball and football and basketball. I felt very lucky that Grace’s sister’s husband, Stan, found me a job at BP as a dispatcher. Like anything I started doing that was new, I became very enthusiastic and did well. Then, like everything else, it got to be a bore. But I hung tight to the job for a handful of good reasons.
For one, Grace and I kept having children: first, Sammy Jr. in ’53, Vincent in ’58. Pop loved them, just as much as we did. He had his bouts of depression, or what seemed depression, when for days he’d walk around with a granite frown on his brown face, patting the kids’ heads, his hairy arms naked against a ribbed T-shirt. He’d give them haircuts in the kitchen, cook for us and babysit the kids when we went out. His expression was as implacably ancient as ever, whether I asked him if he felt up to taking a walk with me in the evening, or that we didn’t want the dinner he had begun cooking because we’d been invited to eat out.
Even so, we went out rarely. And Grace did all the things around the house she was expected to do, cleaning, making beds, doing laundry. Pop never went out, except to take long walks through the neighborhood, or into Chester for food. His two other daughters who lived nearby, Carla and Louisa, came to our place to visit, with their husbands and little kids’ noise.
I have an image of us around the dining room table eating Sunday dinner, with spaghetti and meatballs and sausages and spare ribs and hard-boiled eggs, and salad soaked in vinegar and oil and Pop’s wine; we were so young then; even Pop seemed ageless. He couldn’t get any older: he just was.
Then I got sick.
I hadn’t gotten sick since college, just before Pop asked me what I was going to do with Grace. But I fell from Grace. I’m convinced she knew all the details. It had been building for months, maybe years – I don’t remember. But it was easy, the fall, how, after supper, I’d tell everyone I was taking a walk and go a block up to Chester Pike, and there’d be Amelia or Dahlia or Karen sitting there at the wheel waiting for me. It was easy and it was fun and I didn’t have to do a damn thing; they came to me, at work, when I played ball, after pinochle. Grace knew, more than I did. But enough of that.
I don’t remember much of the spring and summer of 1959, when it all crashed around me. That fall, I came out of the hospital taking an assortment of pills I’ve swallowed – on and off – since then. Everything changed. Even Pop, who seemed to have grown much older. He never did understand me or my sickness.
We had two more children before Pop finally died, from stomach cancer, thin and depressed; Nick in ’62, Anthony in ’64. Paul was a surprise, ’71; too late. That makes the six, I think.
While I was sick the first time, Pop wrote out his testament, but Grace and I didn’t read it until the evening before he died. We had brought him home from the hospital only a day earlier, and he lay in his bed just looking up at the ceiling. We’d sent the kids away to my sister’s. He had the will and testament in the desk in the den. It was about five pages, written out.
I was born August 8, 1890 in Montenerodomo-Chieti-Italy, [he had written]. At the age of 16 I immigrated from Italy. I landed in New York port May 1907; since then, I was on my own. I got myself a job and sent my parents one half of my earnings up to the time I got married.
On July 1919 I took a trip back to Italy, and on January 1920 I got married to my best friend I knew since childhood. On August 1920 we both landed in New York harbor. The conditions in America at that time were not so promising, a sort of a depression.
We settled down in Crum Lynne. I as a bread winner and my wife as a house keeper, we jointly began the new life of a family. My first job was at Crofton’s; I made only one day’s pay in three weeks. I finally quit and luckily I got a job in a terra cotta works. I stuck there until the real depression set in.
We incessantly tried to make ends meet, while newspapers and politicians were blasting the news that prosperity was around the corner with two chickens in every pot. Our efforts to conform were carried to the extreme; my income dropped to almost zero; no matter how hard I tried to earn a living for my family, the effort was fruitless. The false leaders, economists and politicians put the squeeze on and subjugated the American people to the worst kind of exploitation; my wife was one of their victims and died July 12, 1931.
During that period I experienced the darkest times of my life; at the brink of the grave I can see myself slide down into it involuntarily. The freedom so much advertised amounts to voting on election day to a politically chosen candidate for office; aside from that, the political czars dominate the nation and the people; in the name of stabilizing the economy they bring about depressions and wars to rob the common man of his labor and his needs. There is a lot of demons and deceivers which the czars create in our midst, human beasts, vultures who prey upon man.
The political czars have complete control over the working class of people with courts and law enforcement agents, for example. When they want their victims knocked out, they bring about depression to deprive a working man of his livelihood. Suffering is the result. Then an army of investigators is put to work masquerading as relief agents to visit the suffering public; the victim then is put through a barrage of questions such as his origin, parents names and addresses, brothers, sisters, all relatives, financial status, etc. If the answers conform with the creed of the masters that the victim and his family is in squalid misery, he qualifies for the “honor” of public charge and a bum name given for failure to support his family of which is no fault of his own but the creators of depression.
The world is ruled by wicked forces that exercise powerful influences upon human thinking; those forces use every imaginable means to destroy man and his efforts; the most common and accepted method and weapons used to accomplish that is by keeping man busy with illusion and a dormant mind, the sequence of wars or depressions.
At that epoch I was 40 years old, left alone with 7 motherless children and the long hoped prosperity to come. I lost faith to those terrestrial plunderers and deceivers and merciless impostors who in the name of religions associate themselves and create the deceptive theory of economics. They perpetuate themselves in the name of civilization, but they usurp man from the cradle to the grave, and keep him ignorant and poor in the name of freedom.
Guided by God’s commandment I discharged my obligations as you all know, and at the time of this writing I feel to be a free man, mentally, morally and spiritually.
The foregoing pages I have written for you is the help you need, and I am more than pleased to pass it on to you; these are the most important things the people need, enlightenment and knowledge, not alms or riches, but benevolence and understanding will make you free.
After I read the pages and I turned to Grace, I said, “I don’t get it,” and she said, “You wouldn’t.” She was crying, and it was stupid for me to have said anything.
I got it, but Pop’s life seemed then as non-present as the streets we lived on were to become; as those pages even seemed to Pop’s life since we lived with him; as I know my situation will be twenty years from now. Life is the seams of a baseball, and mooning over those seams after you can’t see them is as much an illness as anything.
But that testament was just like Pop: there was so much going on beneath the surface and no one knew anything about it.
One thing I really didn’t get – the stuff about Grace’s mother. She had died from appendicitis, plain and simple, just before Grace turned two. Then again, Pop didn’t like things that didn’t fit. Like a lot of people, Pop’s view of life was a jigsaw puzzle, and no matter how many missing pieces there were, once found, the pieces rationally fit in the big picture. They had to, or nothing made sense. I think that’s why my illness was so mysterious to him.
Pop had once come up to me after Nick was born and asked me what my problem was, why I became “irrational and not understandable” at times. I told him as matter-of-factly as possible that it was like having a broken leg, except it was in your head, that you couldn’t help it, but you had to nurse until it was better again. I was mimicking my doctor, but Pop just shook his head and said, “After a broken leg is fixed, it gets stronger.” “This one doesn’t,” I said. “I guess it’s more like a crazy joint that becomes out of joint. Then,” I said, making my expression as grim as his, “the medicine I take helps it go back to where it was. But it’s still a loose joint.” I could see in the furrow of his brow those images coming and going. He nodded and walked away. That was the only time he ever mentioned it to me.
I took Pop’s testament as a reprimand. He had told me about the testament a year or so before Nick was born; this was after at least two of my illnesses, maybe three. It may be my imagination, but I recall Pop had a Jack-like look to his face when he told me of what he had written. Non li rispetto. You could just tell, and to be honest, I couldn’t blame him. But it made me feel bad. And when I finally read what he’d written those years before, I felt as though he was writing to me personally.
I got sick again right after we buried Pop.
After Pop’s death only one thing mattered. If the neighborhood and Pop’s testament and even my youth were inevitably to become the non-present, it was my illness that seemed to be the present, an eternal recurrence. That’s what finally mattered to me.
Jack’s hunching body made me think of all of that, just as it made me feel again the numbness that had re-taken my body since Pop’s death. I had to get up off the couch to shake away the needle-like pain. “Holy mackerel,” I heard myself say after I got up, reaching for a cigarette. “It’s a ghost!”
Then I heard Jack’s laugh; no, Jack’s hiss. His whole face smirked, he put his hand to his lips, and hissed like a lizard who’d just found the shade. “Sam!” he said, looking contemptuously at my belly, then into my eyes. He reached to shake my hand.
Carla screeched and Stan laughed out loud as they came from the table to meet him. The women hugged Jack and sat him down at the head of the table. I even went over and stood to the side by the bay windows.
Jack was scruffy looking. His voice was gruff, too, as though it had been sandpapered with time. The first thing I did was offer him a cigarette, and he started banging the filter end on the table like we used to do.
He said he had been out all over the country, most recently to California, where he’d been a lifeguard, a janitor, all the shitty jobs you could think. But he had a stash. He brought some of it out of a front pocket of his overalls. He peeled the bills slowly out, one by one.
“Fifteen hundred dollars,” he said. That was just his traveling money, though. He told me later he had plenty of money stuffed away in other places – but not in banks, God forbid. He said he wanted to stay with us for a few days or weeks, and this was an advance on his rent.
I took it, right then and there, even before I knew about any other money. It seemed the right thing to do. The roof needed fixing. There was a leak in Nick’s room, just above the window, and it had started to spread like some creeping thing, branching out in three directions. The money came close to the estimate. I hired the roofer the very next day. Grace was mad at me, but I didn’t care. The job got done.
For the first couple of months, Jack piddled around the house. Nothing serious, but he fixed a lot of the stuff that had been going wrong, caulking the tub upstairs, fixing the drip in the downstairs bathroom, replacing the doorknob and lock on the back door, helping me fix up the lawn.
Then Jack got it into his head to redo the lawn altogether. Not the grass itself, but everything that went with it. He wanted to put up a wooden fence by the south side of the lawn to shield us against the swim club driveway, and build a wall of small colored stones all the way to the weeping willow. He said he wanted to put up a small gate toward the back of the yard, where we had once planted tomatoes; he brought me a sign he’d painted one morning: Bar V ranch, it said. He envisioned a wheelbarrow of flowers set in the front of the lawn at the apex of the two hills facing the traffic, crowned by a large statue of the Blessed Mother. He followed through on all of these projects through the spring and summer; we even got the kids to help with the fence, which ended up taking an entire weekend. You could tell Jack had done all these things before, or, if he hadn’t, he wasn’t afraid to do them or any other thing he set his mind to.
After a typical day was over, we’d take long walks into Ridley Park, past the railroad tracks. We’d come home at twilight for supper. Before Jack, I liked to take early morning walks. Twilight – when you couldn’t see the sun anymore but saw the last remaining strands of its light unwinding into blackness – well, I hated that time of day. While I never thought it exactly, the feeling was the sun would never come up again and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. Jack’s bitterness and anger was one way of fighting against that feeling, though even thatidea was more a feeling than anything.
I don’t want you to get the idea that I did much with Jack. He did just about all the work. I helped here and there, and when I did, it felt damn good. Like I almost had a purpose again.
At times, Jack and I were like two old maids, rocking on the glider on the front porch watching the cars and the people go by. Jack liked to watch the high school girls when they get out of school around three.
Then I got sick.
That spring, I received a letter confirming for the third or fourth time that I would never return to work and there was nothing I could do about it. I stopped taking my medicine. After the third day, I don’t remember much. But it was a quick one. I was back home within a month, thinner and tired as hell. Jack never said a word to me about it. He just acted more and more surly.
It was toward the end of the summer when my brother Gene started coming by for a string of visits. Although my unemployed life had begun to revolve around Jack and his projects, the rest of the family had become uninterested in him. Even Grace was tired of Jack’s tirades against the government, lawyers, the educational system. I took his speeches like I took a drag on my cigarette; it became part of the air I breathed. It wasn’t a big deal – and look how the house was turning out.
Gene had been coming over a lot during the last part of August just to talk with Jack and me. He was hurting; for the past week, he had been vaguely detailing how he and Violet, his wife of seven years, were on the verge of a divorce.
Like I said before, everybody was excited about Jack the first night he came. Even during his first week with us, the boys, Nick and Anthony, would talk to him for hours about his life. But then things changed. Jack grew quiet around everyone but me, scowling at the TV, not looking at people when they talked to him. Nick had come up to me one night and asked point-blank: “When is Jack getting the hell out of here?” I acted surprised and shrugged my shoulders. “He’s been a big help to me,” I said, ignoring his angry, twisted face. “Christ,” I said, suddenly moving up from my relaxed position, “he’s one of the only people around here that does any work!”
That was that. Nick, though, just kept staring at me, right in my eyes, until he shook his head and walked away. It was a non li rispetto look, actually. It made me sad, after the fact.
Nick didn’t seem to understand that Jack had been so alone and free most of his life that this family made him feel confined. Jack had even said that once out loud, so Nick asked why he just didn’t pack up and leave. Jack didn’t say anything; he just sat there in my lounge chair watching the news with me. I could see the hatred in Nick’s face. That has hurt me because those two got along pretty well when they first met. But Nick started asking too many questions, I think, about Jack’s old girlfriends, about his guns with no permits (two rifles and a handgun he stashed the first night in the cellar), about why he just did shit jobs all his life, the way he ogles women. Once, in the middle of the living room, Jack called him an old fucking man too busy trying to figure out what’s right and wrong to be worth anything. Nick took it great; he just stood there and stared Jack down. When he had enough, salved his pride, he stalked out.
Gene, though, had a great audience in Jack. He just sucked it all in, and when Gene paused for a moment to lash into Violet, say, Jack would haul out one of his common-sense anecdotes. That was one of Jack’s few charms, despite the bitterness that more often than not shrouded the common sense that had come out of all his experiences.
I was on my third cigarette since supper, and Jack was in the lounge chair just across from me. Jack sat almost like my own father, his chin resting on his chest and his eyes staring up at the TV. I had my legs up on the couch. I could hear Grace doing the dishes. The news was about the hostages as usual, it being the such-and-such day of captivity. They showed film of people screaming and burning Old Glory, tight, mustached Arab faces waving dark, hairy fists. Jack looked as he always did, straight, fixed and with a scowl. “What we fought for,” he had growled, after my first cigarette.
Gene came over after the news. It was so hot that night, even the open windows beaded with sweat. A large fan rocked gently at the open front door, slowly looking to its left and right to spread the hot air. Nick was working at the pizza shop and Anthony was sitting on his legs near me. Gene sat in the rocker to the right of the TV; Jack, as I said before, was in my lounge chair, his small, sharp feet sticking out and up. He looked grizzled again; he probably hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. He wore his overalls.
It was actually the kind of night I used to think about when I first decided to get married. Being in my own home, the company and conversation, my legs up on the couch, my wife doing the dishes.
Gene seemed very hyper. He looked good, though. He wasn’t fat, but looked like he was just about to be. He was once a real good-looking kid. I remember him at my wedding, achingly young. He always had that baby fat. He never got rid of it, and it was about to take over his body.
Grace came out of the kitchen, her hands wet and red, and asked Gene if he would like some iced tea. He told her yes, and turned to Jack who hadn’t moved an inch in the chair since Gene had arrived. “So, what’s up, Jack?” He looked at me. I took a drag on my cigarette. “Looks like you’re both still taking it easy, huh?”
Grace left and Anthony followed her into the kitchen.
Jack scowled and shook his head; I got a sidelong glance from him, like the ones I usually got when we took a walk together. “Don’t have very much choice,” I said. Jack nodded vigorously and scratched the hair on his face.
“I couldn’t tell you,” Gene began, “how many places I could try to put you in. I couldn’t even begin to tell you.”
“That’s not what he wants,” Jack said. “Can’t a man take a rest after twenty-four years of hard work at a goddamn place that never had any respect for him?”
“You’ve got to keep going,” Gene said. “You can’t just sit on your ass.”
Jack scowled and shook his head, but I had to smile. I’d always gotten respect at work. I knew they were annoyed when I got sick so many times, but when I was there I always did the job without complaint. I had no problem with them until the last two illnesses before the recent brief one. The first time I had been gone four months; the second, six months. That was it for them. That was it for me, too.
When Grace gave Gene his iced tea, he drank half of it in a gulp. He nodded to her, and she gave me a tired look when she passed to go back into the kitchen.
“So what brings you here this time, Gene?” Jack asked. Although his tone was even and low, his face laughed.
Gene sat back in the rocking chair with the glass to his mouth and shook his head. “Love,” he said, “love.” He kept shaking his head, playing the rim of the cup off his lips.
I sat up and shook my head. I felt drowsy. Lately, I had been feeling drowsy a lot; no matter where I was, I would doze. It was probably the drugs. The older I got, the worse the side-effects seemed to get. I laughed and it sounded strange. I said nothing.
Jack hissed. He cupped his right hand dramatically and held it out. “I could see it,” he said. “See this?” He took the index finger of his left hand and whirled it around the hole of his right hand.
Gene’s face was a question mark – so was mine, for that matter. “What?” we both said. Jack sat back and waved both his hands at us, then cupped his right again. “See? Cunt. Whirlpool. Trap. Ball and chain.”
I sat back and looked at Gene. He was smiling a shit-eating grin and trying to laugh, but he made no sound. “Nothing like that,” he finally said.
“Bullshit,” Jack said. He then looked over at me and looked past me, at the couch, the wall, the window. “Just because you can screw and come you think you’re a man.” He hissed as his eyes rolled around the couch and the wall behind me. “Anyone can screw and have kids. That doesn’t make you a man.”
I imagined Jack leaving behind a host of women, combing the country, screwing in cheap hotel rooms, ignoring a million sunsets while he picked his teeth inside a diner. “Your brain,” Jack said, practically poking a hole in his head with his index finger, “has got to rule when you get right down to the nitty-gritty.”
Gene was still trying to laugh, but he still couldn’t. “You can’t look at marriage that way,” he said, his voice growing louder. “You can’t diagram it like you do a sentence. Figure it out ahead of time. It’s more like a growth thing.” He looked at me and dramatically nodded, pushing his lower lip out. “A good marriage is about growing together.” He kept looking at me. I smiled and puffed.
Jack said, “Growing together. What are you two then, a couple of pansies whose roots are beginning to strangle one another?”
It was a nasty crack, and for the first time in two weeks I saw Gene’s eyes narrow on Jack. But Jack didn’t budge; his eyes narrowly stared back. Gene was still.
“Simplify and distort,” I said out loud. My cigarette tasted wonderful.
“What’s that?” Jack said. “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” His eyes had suddenly brightened and rounded as they looked at me; I could see the shade of the lamp in them.
“Like anything,” I said, more coldly than I had wanted. “When you try to solve a complex problem in a couple of sentences and with a pat answer, that’s what you tend to do. Simplify and distort,” I repeated.
Jack hissed through his nose. “Sounds like an expression you pull out of your ass when you can’t think of anything else to say,” Jack said, simplifying and distorting. He looked at Gene who was finishing his iced tea.
Gene had by now regained his composure. He was smiling again, and sighed dramatically. “Life,” he said, as though the tone of the word had started at the top of a slide and sighed its way down to our ears. “It’s a strange thing. Right, Jack?” He practically shouted, his eyes moving from Jack to me. “Use it or lose it,” he finished cryptically.
“Use what?” Jack said. “Nothing. Punch your fist through the ceiling, into a man’s jaw, a woman’s snatch. All words here.” He shook his head and looked at us both, in turn. He hissed.
“Damn!” Gene whined, ringing the ice in his glass. He was practically clean-shaven, but water from the glass or ice, or maybe just sweat, gave him the glint of a mustache. “You just said earlier you should use your head, not your fists, didn’t you?”
Jack scowled at Gene’s tone. “Be wily and intelligent up to a point,” he said. “But after that point you have to take some action or lose your self-respect. And there’s a difference between being clever and being full of shit.”
I had to laugh at the mingled yarn that was us. Gene looked over to me and laughed with me, though when I stopped, he continued to giggle. Gene sat back in the chair and his voice came out low. “Life,” he said. He set the glass down beside the rocking chair and rubbed his naked chin.
“It’s a story, told by an asshole, full of excrement, signifying squat,” I chanted.
Gene rocked in his chair. “Violet,” he said – I thought about the color, at night, sunset, just as everything was fading to black, and shivered – “we’ve decided not to get a divorce.”
I nodded, but Jack hissed. “No matter where I go, what I do, who I’m with, after just the first couple of days, I imagine how far I want to stay there in that place, work at a job, be with a woman. It’s never more than a couple of years. It could be as short as a couple of months, weeks. After I decide, I never back out. And so far, I’ve never been trapped into anything I didn’t want to do.”
Gene asked the obvious next question. “Well, wasn’t there a time when you wanted to stay? What did you do then?”
“I left anyway,” Jack said.
“I don’t get it,” I said. I didn’t even look at him. I was looking at Gene’s sweat-mustache and his thickening smile. “All that gets you,” I said, turning toward Jack, “is heartache and a bunch of what-ifs.”
“And freedom,” he said. His eyes glittered; for a moment, they seemed almost intelligent. He had been lying.
“Maybe,” I said, “but if you tell yourself in advance what you’re going to do, and things turn out differently, or if your feeling for something changes, you’re trapped into doing something you’ve grown not to want.”
“That’s a trap, too,” Gene said excitedly. He raised his voice to the kitchen: “Grace,” he said, “is there any way I could have more iced tea?”
We heard nothing from the kitchen, but a few seconds later Anthony walked out and grabbed Gene’s glass. Grace brought it back out a moment later. She had just cut her hair shorter than it had ever been. She looked her age; her nose seemed to beak more than usual. When she turned from Gene, she gave Jack and me a hard glance. Jack literally ducked, but I just looked, feeling my eyes re-form themselves into slits.
“I have to tell you this story,” Jack said, raising his head. “It was in Alabama. I got a job at the counter of this little restaurant, and when it was almost time to close, you know, I had to mop up. There were guys who used to come in and ride me all the time. Because I was dark; they called me wop and everything. One night, I’d just had enough. Actually, it was one of them who just wouldn’t pay for a coke he had. He flipped me off and was walking out the door, when I ran from behind the counter and stopped him. I pulled him back in and told him he had to pay. We went back and forth till he finally wound up to hit me, and I laid him flat with my right.” He curled his fist, and it was huge; the knuckles pointed out and up like young, firm breasts. “But all his buddies jumped in.” He stopped. “But I beat them all, and when I was through with them, another guy started grabbing me from behind, and I said, real loud, like a goddamn lion, ‘You, too, huh?’ But he told me to settle down, that he was a cop, and was just trying to stop the fight.” Jack hissed, bringing his hand up to his mouth.
He looked at me: “You, too, huh?” he repeated. He had worked up a light sweat, turned away, winked at Gene, then relaxed his body into the chair.
“Well,” Gene said nervously. I was surprised. If there was anyone in our family who never had a loss for words, it was Gene. Although I had never seen him in action, I knew he was one of best insurance salesmen alive. Here’s the kind of guy Gene is: He came to the house one day, I don’t know how long ago, to show me a gold watch with his name engraved on it. We all gathered around him. Gene shines, sometimes.
“I always bounce back,” Gene announced illogically. “We had a nice wedding,” he non-sequitured. “Remember, Sam?”
I nodded. He’d worn a white tux, she a white, frilly thing. Gene looked more beautiful than she did. I remember his smiling face above the tux: nubby, five o’clock shadow like a woman’s legs. Drunk and happy. “Yes,” I said, “she was very beautiful.”
“Then your roots got a little tangled,” Jack said. He looked at Gene in the eyes; Gene shrugged, smiled thickly.
“You adapt, you endure, you survive,” I said. My eighth cigarette tasted bitter. I looked over at Jack. “If not now, then later. There’s a time for everything.”
Jack really laughed then. He laughed so hard, he started gasping, then coughed; he wiped spittle from his mouth. Then he made a fist with the same spittle-soaked hand and punched it toward the ceiling. “Strike out!” he cried.
Just then Nick came through the front door.
Nick was off work, early. His head was a mass of wet black curls, shirt soaked with sweat, jeans faded, white at the knees. His eyes looked glazed. “Off early tonight,” I said, my head turning toward the kitchen. “Grace!” I shouted. “Nick’s home already.” I looked at him again. “And no food!” I laughed.
Nick laughed, too, and waved his hand at me. “It wasn’t very busy tonight, at least not for the last hour or so.”
Nick had been working at the Greek pizza shop in Ridley Park after school had ended for the summer. On occasion, he would bring me a hoagie, hot-peppers-no-onions, or a pizza someone didn’t pick up. Tonight, nothing.
Nick barely looked at Jack, noticed Gene. “Hello, Uncle Gene,” he said, turning to his left. He put out his hand and Gene shook it heavily and firmly. Whenever I notice one of my sons, for the first time I can remember, reaching for someone’s hand to shake, I know he’s growing up. When they’re young they just seem embarrassed, maybe stick their hand out if someone else offers his first – but boys never offer to shake hands. Nick’s face didn’t change much. Then he walked past us to the kitchen. When he came back a moment later, he had taken his shirt off, had balled it up in his hands, and started wiping the sweat with it from his chest and arms.
Nick’s body was hard. It reminded me of me. He was seventeen, after all. But he had never gone out for anything, not football, not basketball, not even baseball. Before the first of the year, he had begun to lift weights and had built himself up pretty good. What a waste. He was a good-looking kid, but he had let his hair grow long and it looked like shit; it was thicker than BP oil.
“So, what’s the discussion tonight,” Nick said. He had caught us a couple of times in the past two weeks talking over cigarettes and TV. But he had gone straight upstairs, or sat out and rocked on the front porch. He expressed no interest, and I turned to look at him to see if he was really interested. His face was non-committal.
“Life,” Gene said. I heard Nick breathe quickly through his nose, something like a sigh of contempt.
“Now, we’ll talk about something different,” Jack muttered, his eyes glued to the TV. “Or watch television. I know we can’t talk seriously about anything, can we?” He gave Nick a side glance, but Nick smiled in return, grinned. One night, a week or so previously, Jack and I were watching TV and a commercial about tampons came on. Anthony asked what they were for, and Jack said, “Rags. Cunt rags.” Nick, standing beside Jack, flicked his head toward Paul, my youngest son, who had been sitting on the couch with me, and said, “Watch it, man, Paul’s right there.” Jack’s eyes drilled a hole in the TV and he said, “Fuck that and fuck you, kid.” I’d said, “All right, all right,” to Nick, but he had just stood there, still next to Jack, his hands clenched. Then he walked away.
Now, he stood there, but his entire body, though hard, looked relaxed. “Hey, don’t let me stop you,” he said to the TV.
“Don’t worry,” Jack said. “I won’t.”
Gene smiled. He asked Nick what he was doing at the pizza place.
“Delivering, making the sandwiches, stocking the soda machines,” he told him.
“The nobility of toil,” Gene mouthed, and smiled. He nodded his head with obvious approval.
Jack sat up and snapped the lounge chair shut in one cat-like movement. “There ain’t a cocksucking thing noble about toil, Gene,” he said. He put his hands out in front of his face, palms out, then turned them palms in, and repeated it all over again. “Cleaning up other people’s shit, scrubbing johns, washing their plates, bringing them food they’re just going to shit out again in a few hours – what the hell’s so noble about that? Nothing.” He had quickly answered himself; it had looked like each one of us was about to say something; I know I was.
“It’s all a sick fucking joke,” he went on. “How many times did I justify what I did by telling myself about the nobility of toil?”
Gene looked puzzled yet again – twice in one night had to be a record for him. But he quickly recovered and looked to me. It wasn’t that hard to figure. At least from our end. That phrase was just another thing Gene had thrown out to yet another crowd of people. He’d done it hundreds of times before – no matter the words – and people just nodded, or ignored him, or apathetically said, “Ain’t that the truth,” or something. This was all part of the agreement. Dialog had become superfluous with Gene and me long ago; with most of us. It was like fate or destiny. Things took care of themselves. How could they not? And those who get worked up about things, even a throw-away phrase stated as sincerely as a twice-a-year confession to Father O’Hara, seemed obviously beside the point – hell, even downright silly.
“Then why the hell have you done shit jobs all your life?” Nick asked, as foolish. He was like Jack in a lot of ways. His body may have been hard, but it was a hard and angry question mark. Jack’s was hard, too, but it was a hard and angry period. I’m a goddamn ellipse….
Jack sat back in the chair, snapping it open as quickly as he had snapped it shut. “I’d still rather piss on you than be pissed on,” he said, less angry but final. “It’s more honest.”
Nick said nothing. He turned to me and there was that hard question mark again. I looked at him and wore a light smile; I could feel it press against my face. I lighted my tenth cigarette.
Gene said, “If those were the only choices…,” his voice trailed off.
Jack nodded and looked at the TV, moving and silent colored images.
“Who said they were the only choices?” Nick said. He actually seemed angry, and he looked again to me. I kept my expression.
Jack hissed and put his hand to his mouth, shaking his head. “Then there’s you,” he said to my son. “No God, no pissing match, just stupid. You’re like my old man was: looking out on the world thinking he did it all himself; then, after getting his ass kicked, shoving his kids into homes with strangers who treated them like shit, constructing this big ball of shit to explain why he was on the floor with a sore ass again. It’s fucking pathetic.”
He hissed louder and even tried to laugh; but he just couldn’t, so he hissed some more. Nick kept his puzzled eyes fixed on Jack. Nothing was said. Then he stalked off toward the kitchen. Nick was gone.
“Sam,” Jack said, not even looking at the TV now: “I’m out of here. This is about the time I gave myself.” He looked at me and I knew he was lying again. Jack was the kind of guy that was always thirsty from screaming too much, a pissed-off victim of his own anguish.
Give me life, I thought to the mirror just over Jack’s head, catching a glimpse of my eyes. I successfully fought tears.
I nodded and crushed out my cigarette. The three of us looked over at the TV. I could only smile, weakly and without joy, when, just before I closed my eyes to feel the warm breeze of the fan, I saw Gene smirk and wink at me, his crooked mouth the mocking caricature of the red seams of a baseball.
© 2024 Victor Greto