Just after 2 AM my mother and I mounted the steps of Brooklyn’s seventh precinct police station, on our way to report a missing person: her husband, my father.
My mother carried a recent snapshot of him, but she would never take it from her purse. The handsome young officer who led us to his desk listened to her without writing anything down, leaning far back in a swivel chair. His mustache was intensely black on his pale face, his shirt heavily starched; his precise neatness contrasted to our messy story. Around us, in the bright room, men moved about, talked, phones rang; twice another officer dropped papers on Handsome’s desk, and they discussed them as if we weren’t there. After the second interruption, Handsome straightened up in his chair, in the abrupt manner of someone getting on with more important matters, and said that, from what he was hearing, this was no missing person case. “Look, lady, the guy just skipped out on you.”
So we trudged off, and I imagine those men took a break in their busy evening to laugh about us: the woman with the big nose and thick ankles and her homely daughter. “No wonder the guy . . .”
When we got back to our apartment we looked through Dad’s clothing, to see how much he had spirited away. It was then that Mother noticed a grocery bag shoved in a corner of the closet. She pulled it out — a bulky bag filled with something hard, the top rolled closed. She placed it on the bed. We watched it as if it might try to crawl away. Finally she unrolled the top. Inside were women’s shoes. She pulled out one shoe after another — there were no two alike — and held each in her hand, a stunned look on her face. They smelled of the feet that had once been squeezed into them.
It was Dad’s farewell to us — to his wife and three children. We never saw or heard from him again. Our lives changed. We moved to a less expensive apartment — smaller, shabbier and with considerably more roaches. Mom, who had worked part time as a bookkeeper for a shipping company, looked for a full time job. The highest bidder for her secretarial skills was a Japanese firm importing chinaware. They were located in Manhattan, on lower Fifth Avenue, a commute of an hour and a half. She would arrive home after dark. Invariably, she had a hard day. I never saw her boss, but I imagined him as a samurai, a character out of a film. His entrance would be preceded by a growl of rage, and then he’d appear, framed in the door of his office. Crouching, clutching the handle of a sword in both hands, heavy gown swaying, guttural sounds erupting from his grimacing mouth, black eyebrows forming a wicked peak over his nose. Actually, he wore a suit and tie, and in his hand he waved a paper on which he had found some petty mistake. In front of the other workers he would hurl abuse at my mother. But, as she always said when relating this scenario, they paid well.
All three of us children had to transfer to new schools. I quickly assumed my role as the top student in the high school’s sophomore class. I remained oblivious to comments putting down my perfection. In my bedroom I arranged my books on pine boards placed across cinder blocks. On my desk was a gooseneck lamp, a dictionary, a thesaurus. On the wall a poster of Franz Kafka watched over me, mournfully. Everything was all right in my world.
Denise, at age twelve (on the eve of puberty — that’s important in her story) also showed little change in what was (then) a bovine temperament. She was blessed with beauty, not brains, and her teachers continued to refer to her as a sweet child. On the street, or in stores, men in overcoats watched her as they pretended to be occupied with other things.
Paul, at thirteen, self-destructed, with never an attempt to tell anyone, not even me, how he felt. Mother began to get phone calls at night from his teachers — he got into fights, refused to do his work, was sullen. Mother listened, said she’d do what she could, and did nothing. Why bring on a screaming fit in the apartment? Paul mostly stayed in his room, scratching crude symbols on his biceps with a penknife.
So — to set the scene — one night Mom and I are doing the dishes, the roaches lurking behind the wallboard, under the appliances, a few of the braver ones already scurrying from one hiding place to another, like the first ominous encroachments of an enemy force. Denise is lying on the couch, doing her math homework, contentedly writing down columns of wrong answers. From behind Paul’s door comes the defiant sneer of a new balladeer named Bob Dylan.
There’s a knock on the door. We never have visitors — we have no friends. Who is there? Is it Dad, to claim his bag of shoes? A school counselor? A bill collector? Mother stands in the door of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel. Denise is kneeling on the sofa, looking over its back; her bottom, in pink leotards, is sticking up. I go past Mother, proceed to the door, open it. Standing there is Brandon, my uncle. He smiles, that shy smile of his.
“Hey, kiddo. How the hell you doing?” The raspy voice.
He’s wearing a tweed overcoat, no doubt bought second-hand, with snow on its shoulders, and on his sandy hair. A few day’s stubble darkens his cheeks. His eyes smile at me.
In a half hour our shabby existence is transformed into something golden.
First comes pandemonium.
Brandon enters, kisses his sister on the cheek as he hands her his overcoat, and then turns, without a word, to Denise. She cowers on the sofa, her legs drawn back. Brandon plunges past her kicking defense, until his bristly chin finds her bare, wriggling belly. She screams, her head thrown back, biting her lower lip. Then he swings her up on his shoulders, piggy-back style, and they are teetering around the room. More screams. A neighbor pounds on the wall; Brandon veers to that wall, reaches up, grabs Denise’s curly blond head in his hands, and with it he thumps back. Paul appears in the door of his room, his eyes aglow, like the boy’s in “Old Yeller.” He piles into Brandon, the three collapsing into a squirming mass on the floor. Brandon’s voice emanates from the melee, the commentary of a sportscaster.
“The heathens have attacked the Christian. It’s two heathens against the one Christian. The heathens are doing good, they’re pulling the Christian’s hair. But, wait, the Christian is making a comeback” — Denise is flung from the pile onto the sofa, where she lies hiccuping with pleasure — “and now there’s this one heathen, who’s in big trouble, but he’s tough, he’s tough, folks, but the power of the Lord has entered the Christian . . .”
Afterwards, the three of them sprawl on the sofa, satiated. Brandon has brought a pint of whiskey in the pocket of his overcoat, and Mother pours him a stiff drink — the way he wants it. She and I sit in armchairs. Mother has the look of a hen with her brood finally together. Brandon is telling the history of his second-hand clothes. He refuses to go into most retail stores; he buys from the racks set up on the sidewalks of the lower East Side. It is a part of his sweeping refusal to live by society’s conventions, its rules. He had never even finished high school — instead, at seventeen, he had signed on as a merchant seaman. But while sailing the world he had read Conrad and Gogol and Mann. Now, slouched on the sofa, he is saying that his thickly-corded pants had been worn by Dylan Thomas on his trips to the White Horse Tavern, and he identifies certain crusty spots as the ancient remains of vomit. Actually, Brandon must have spotted the book of Thomas’s poetry I hold in my lap, with sheets of paper tucked in its pages. I know that, after the noisy ones, Brandon will have time for more meaningful things.
And he does. I sit beside him and he reads “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” with a steely passion, and then I lilt out “Fern Hill.” The sleeves of his flannel shirt are rolled up, and sometimes his thick, hairy arm touches mine. He silently reads my poetry, and then his gray eyes consider me with solemn regard. “But tell me how to make them better,” I plead, wriggling closer. His blunt-nailed finger points to places where I state feelings. “Don’t say that you’re happy or sad. The reader is some hard-hearted bastard, doesn’t give a damn about you. He has to feel it himself before he’ll care. Remember ‘Acquainted with the Night’? How Frost gets the mood? Does he once say how he feels? What I want you to do, Ginnie, is write a few more things this character would see on her walk . . .”
Brandon came often in the next months. He told Mother that he had stayed away so long, for over a year, because he had never liked to be around that silent, sneaky-eyed bastard she was married to. Maybe so, but I also think we were a phase he went through. We were his fiefdom; at this point in our lives he would arrive to the jubilant trumpet of our need. Some nights we walked through the streets of old brick apartment buildings to the bright area of a business district. We bought ice cream cones and strolled about, finding something interesting in every shop window. Walking back home, our footsteps crunched in the snow, which gave off a bluish shimmer under the street lights. Paul would throw snowballs at the stop signs; sometimes they’d hit with a metallic clang, and he’d turn to Brandon, his face seeming, somehow, naked in its joy.
Occasionally we had dinner at a Chinese restaurant, Mother always slipping a twenty dollar bill into Brandon’s hand. We almost babbled when the boiled wontons arrived, pale, wet cushions steaming out their gingery fragrance. When Christmas neared we got a tree; Brandon and Paul carried it home, maneuvering it up the three flights of stairs. We decorated it as Johnny Mathis sang Christmas favorites. We drank egg nog, and Brandon spiked everyone’s with a dollop of whiskey — Mother kept a fifth of Jim Beam in the kitchen cupboard for his visits. The evening was Dickenesque, and Paul dragged one leg in an imitation of Tiny Tim. The tree leaned at a jaunty angle.
Another evening Brandon put our presents under the tree, and he was with us on Christmas Eve to open them. Denise got a makeup kit and a silk scarf that Brandon claimed had been worn by Elizabeth Taylor on Richard Burton’s opening night in “Hamlet.” Denise began painting her face thereafter, though Mother would not allow her to go to school looking like that. The eyeshadow made her seem alien; it imparted a touch of defiance to her expression.
Paul got an old wooden recorder. It had been Brandon’s first musical instrument; he was now reaching concert level skill at the oboe. Brandon took the recorder from the case and put it to his lips. Sweet sounds flowed out. Then he handed it to Paul. Paul practiced morning and evening, but his hollow piping never achieved melody.
Brandon gave me a “mint condition” copy of Knut Hamsun’s Pan. I read it, that tale of doomed romanticism, noting how effectively Hamsun used descriptions of nature to express the character’s emotions.
Some weekends he’d take one of us on an all-day outing. I remember a Saturday when he and I rode the subway into Manhattan, to the Sixty-seventh Street branch of the public library. We moved together through the stacks, pulling out books at random and reading the first sentence to each other. We’d consider them, then pronounce our verdicts. After that we ate hot dogs slathered with mustard and onions by the street vendor, and we wandered — looking into shop windows, at the stills in movie lobbies; then, as if setting out on a mission, we hiked through Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum, where we stared up at only one painting: El Greco’s “Toledo.”
But it was Paul who got most of Brandon’s attention. Once, when Brandon had not been around for weeks, I heard Mother talking to him on the telephone. She asked him to please do something with Paul — a game of handball, anything. He needs you, she said.
Six years later, Mother and I would mount the steps of Manhattan’s eleventh precinct police station, on our way to report a missing person. This time the officer filled out the forms.
But Paul would disappear as completely as our father had. Disappear into concrete and the night.
Of missing persons: They only retreat into the shadowy realm of mystery. Paul is gone, yet he exists everywhere — he may still appear to me whenever I turn a city corner.
Though, in truth, I don’t think I’ll ever see his face again.
As mother had asked, Brandon did come around, to do things with Paul.
I imagine a Sunday in Manhattan, when the two of them wind up at the apartment where Brandon has stayed for four years. It’s a beautiful place — how could Brandon, without a job, afford it? He lives with a woman, an artist, who has money. He’s a sort of reclamation project for her, a diamond in the rough — he has a talent that should be nurtured. He practices his oboe for two hours every morning — Mozart, Handel — in front of a window that looks down on Gramercy Park, that sedate square of gardens and gravel paths.
The woman is gone this Sunday, when Brandon and Paul slump in armchairs. Paul looks about: the woman’s abstract paintings on the walls, the shelves of books rising to the ceiling, the Persian rugs, the artifacts from world travel. Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony is playing on the stereo. Brandon’s hand is describing arabesques in the air; he smiles dreamily as he pictures the wood fauns darting from tree to tree, toward the sleeping nymph in the clearing. His hand drifts toward Paul — to pass him the cigarette that he had rolled minutes before. Paul takes it, brings it to his lips. He inhales deeply and holds the smoke in his lungs, as Brandon had instructed. It’s as if a door opens for him.
The following Monday, at his junior high, Paul joins the druggies at their bench on the yard. He has finally found his place in the world.
Next I see Paul as a young man, getting ready to leave our apartment; he is always coming and going in those days, often not sleeping in his bed. He is tall, thin, with a halo of curly hair like Art Garfunkel’s; like Garfunkel, he plays the guitar. The songs of his life come from “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.” Paul has money, often a great deal of money, and he attends high school mainly to carry on, with discretion, his drug sales. He believes that, like Brandon, he has won out over the conventions of society. He has also become indispensable to Brandon, supplying him with recreational marijuana and cocaine at dealer cost. The world is Paul’s oyster. He smiles down at me, at my cautionary words.
But there’s a flip side to sitting in a room with friends, smoking pot and listening to “Hey, Jude.” In an abandoned warehouse people shove dirty needles into their arms. How does one become the other? Why do things, so often, turn mean and ugly? Greenwich Village, once a love fest, has become dangerous. Bodies are found every morning in doorways, trash dumpsters; another drug transaction gone wrong, the TV newscaster says.
I’m looking at Paul through a wire mesh screen. One of his eyes is swollen shut — he tells me that he got into a fight with another kid at the detention center. You can’t take shit from anybody here, he says. He has the face of a derelict.
In these years Brandon has fallen too. The woman kicked him out; his dark moods had become oppressive, sometimes violent. He works at a menial job. He no longer plays the oboe; instead, in his squalid furnished room, a bicycle hanging from hooks on the wall, there is the clank of his weights. He works out obsessively. His forty-year-old body has thickened, grown ponderous with muscle. His gaze has grown ponderous too. Those gray eyes that had looked at me with such warmth . . . But that was in a golden time.
Paul is given a hand up — a program for juvenile offenders. Brandon, from a new perspective — one of enforced and embittered practicality — urges him on the straight and narrow. Paul enrolls in a culinary arts school. He works hard and upon graduation is recommended for a job in a swanky restaurant. He shows skill and drive — a surprise to us all. Two promotions and suddenly he’s making good money. He lives in an apartment on the upper East Side. There’s a girl living with him — he had met her in the school; she was there from the beginning of his rehabilitation. One night the three of us go to an Indian restaurant. As we walk back to the apartment, I look at them, holding hands. His face has the naked glow I had seen before, under another street light.
In Pan, that book Brandon gave me for Christmas, a man and woman share a wildly romantic attraction. But there’s a flip side to that too. At the end the woman tells Thomas that she would like something to remind her of him — he is leaving Norland, leaving the tangled wreckage of their feelings. She asks for his dog, for Aesop. He agrees; the following day he shoots the dog, has its body delivered to her. Later, in a far-off place, he goads another man, obsessively, until this man finally kills him. Thomas thus obtains oblivion.
I am away in college; Mother is living her life. Unknown to us, Paul is spiraling downward.
Mother telephones me. She had been contacted that day by Paul’s landlord — her name was included on the lease — and had been told that the rent was a month overdue, that the apartment would have to be vacated. She immediately called Paul’s place of work — he had not been there for weeks, had given no notice. She called Brandon. He too had not heard from Paul in weeks. All he knew, last time they spoke, over beers at an Irish bar, was that Paul had found out that the girl he was living with had been screwing some old boyfriend, all the while.
I drive to New York from Syracuse, and Mother and I meet the landlord in front of Paul’s apartment. The master key is turned, the door opens. The silence that greets us is not of death but of abandonment. Each room is vacant and in disarray — the desire for order had been relinquished in this place. The bed Paul twisted upon is a tangle of sheets and blankets. I imagine him getting up from it, leaving the apartment in a search for his form of oblivion, out onto dangerous streets.
Mother and I go directly to the precinct station.
I mentioned the Christmas present Brandon got me. Those presents seem prophetic now. Denise changed, in the year after she got her gifts. The hint of defiance that the eyeshadow imparted to her expression grew, until by age fourteen it had become a full-fledged hostility. The sweet child became a child in need of supervision — another court case for our family. She turned into a woman who was determined to live the life that awaited her. There were men waiting for her — not boys, but men, shadowy figures sitting in cars that idled in front of our apartment building. Three stories above, mother and daughter struggled in the lighted window. But the struggle was futile. Denise’s intoxication with the world of the senses had the power of a life force, sweeping all away. I remembered her twisting on the sofa, her head thrown back, biting her lip, and I wonder if such abandonment is not a gift, one which we must all bow to. At any rate, Mother reached the point of resignation with another of her children. The man Denise settled on, after three years of running wild, could have been much worse. He was only twenty-eight, only had two kids from a previous marriage, and he had a good job — service manager at an automobile dealership. He came to dinner one night and everyone was constricted with politeness. He was handsome, with dark eyes that seemed restless and wary, like those of an animal awaiting release from a cage. So at age seventeen Denise was married; six months later she had a baby on her hip. That’s how I remember her, from my last visit. She moved into a New Jersey subdivision, where the land had been cleared by bulldozing every tree; despite all the houses that had been built, the place had a barren look, like the site of an atrocity.
As I back my car out of the driveway, Denise is facing the sun; her narrowed eyes seem to smolder with discontent. The baby gazes beside her, bland and unsuspecting.
Mother continued to work at the import company. An elderly Japanese man — not an employee, but someone in the import business — occasionally came to her floor; they had exchanged formal courtesies for years. One day he witnessed one of her samurai boss’s abusive tirades. Mother endured it as she always did — in silence, stoically working on. After the samurai had disappeared back into his office, the elderly man — Mr. Nakamura was his name — went to Mother’s desk. “I am very ashamed at what I have seen,” he said. She looked up. His face was pained. He bowed slightly, then turned, walked a few paces. He stopped, turned, came back to her desk. He bowed again. “I request the honor of your presence for dinner.”
He was a sixty-two-year-old widower, lonely in America. He was the whole other side to the Japanese culture, the chrysanthemum instead of the sword. Quiet, reflective, gentle, he nurtured delicacy and beauty. His luxurious apartment, overlooking Central Park, had woven floor mats, dividing screens decorated with nature scenes, bonsai trees. Mother removed her shoes at the door and entered his world.
He wished to make a place for her in that world; she wished to escape from hers. She found peace in his presence; in his arms, too? I never asked. His face was round, made rounder by his smile; his rimless glasses rested on his cheeks.
They were married, and Mother quit her job. Now, when I visit for dinner, Mother greets me in a kimono, and she serves dishes with seaweed and tea with ceremony. Yes, life has its surprises, as it twists and turns through the years.
Me, no surprises. No twists and turns. I remained the good child. I graduated from high school with a 4.0 average — perfection. I was given a full scholarship to Syracuse University. I am now a professor there, teaching twentieth century European literature. At my home the bookcases are fine mahogany ones, though on the shelves are many of the books that were on the pine ones at our old apartment. Among them is Dylan Thomas’s poetry — the same book that I had reached for, with trembling hands, on the night that Brandon knocked upon our door.