enthusiasm. He tore himself away to carry my stuff into the house. I stayed outside with my father, who kept his hand on the open car door, clinging to it as tightly as a rodeo rider grips a saddle horn.
My grandmother had planned to feed us, share one big meal together, but my father said he was already behind schedule. She urged him to stay long enough at least to see his father, who was late getting home. My father said he couldn’t.
“Not twenty minutes?” Constanzia Ambrosio asked. “What’s this schedule?”
“I’m very late,” my father said. “Believe me, Ma.”
How strange it was to hear him use that word, and how anxious he was to get moving, as if a bomb were about to explode inside him and he wanted to put distance between himself and his family to protect us from shrapnel. He stood like a chauffeur, handsome in denim jacket and jeans, misty-eyed, apologetic and arrogant at the same time. At last he hugged his mother, a collision of flesh like two human bumper cars.
“I’m sorry she died,” Constanzia blurted.
“Me, too,” my father said, his voice like a child’s. He let go of her and put his hands under my armpits. I braced myself, anticipating a lift.
But his hands went limp against my rib cage. “No,” he decided. “You’re too big for that now.” He crouched and hugged me, said “See you soon” in a broken voice, and split. I don’t know which of us felt more relieved.
* * *
Relieved, but not for long. The switch was concise, a changing of the guard.
“You’re gonna be livin’ here awhile, so forget about that Grandma and Grandpa business,” said Vic, my roommate, as he lugged double armfuls of my stuff to his room.
“We decided this morning,” he said, breathing hard. “No titles. Just Connie and Angie and Vic.”
Vic was eighteen years old, five foot ten, a hundred and ninety pounds. His hair was thick as a cluster of wire brush filaments — when he ran his hands through it, it leapt back into place. His hairline ran straight across his forehead and down the sides of his head, with no scallops at the temples. His eyes were brown, like the eyes of everyone else in the house, including me. Only my father had picked up blue eyes, through some errant gene.
Every pair of Vic’s pants looked tight on him but he insisted they were comfortable and kept wearing them, despite my grandmother’s warning that “They’ll make you sterile.” His hard belly bulged slightly, like an overinflated tire. His rump bulged in the same way. From time to time he patted his buttocks, rat-a-tat-tat, as if they were bongos.
Vic’s room was sparsely furnished: a horsehair mattress on a platform bed, an army fold-out cot (for me), a crucifix on the wall, a photo of the Journal-American’s 1960 all-star baseball team (“I’m third from the left; that guy’s hat hides my face”), a Frank Sinatra record jacket tacked to the wall, and a Victrola.
“Put that down,” he said. I’d picked up his athletic cup and put it against my nose, thinking that was where it was worn. He took it from me and gestured with it.
“Listen. If we’re gonna get along we can’t be messing around with each other’s stuff, okay?”
I nodded. “What is that thing?”
He blushed. “You wear it here,” he said, holding it in front of his pants. “In case you get hit with a baseball. You like Sinatra?”
“I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I don’t listen to music much.”
Shaking his head, Vic put on a record. “If you hang around here, you gotta like Sinatra.” Music filled the room. Vic lay on his back, his stiff mattress crunching as he rolled with the music.
“Look,” he announced when the first song ended, “I think you and me can get along real good. See, I’m a ballplayer, I need lots of sleep. Most nights I’ll probably go to bed earlier than you.”
“What position do you play?” I asked politely.
Vic’s eyebrows arched. “You know baseball?”
“A little.”
“I’m the shortstop. I play in between the second baseman and the third baseman.”
“Oh.”
“Hey, don’t go thinkin’ I can’t hit, just because I’m an infielder. I hit better than all the outfielders on the team. If you can call ’em outfielders. Now listen to this part, how he does this,” Vic said, leaping off the bed and cranking up the volume on the Victrola.
Down the street the elevated train rode past, partially drowning out the music. Vic muttered “Damn” and lifted the needle off the disc to play the same part again, scratching the record.
“Here it is,” he said solemnly.
I forget the song but at a certain point my uncle was jumping up and down on the bed, singing along. When the song ended he stepped to the floor, pink-faced.
“Like, I get carried away,” he said.
Connie appeared at the doorway. “I heard you jump, all the way downstairs! You’re gonna come right through the floor.”
“Sorry, Ma.”
“Come on,” Connie said. “We’ll eat.”
When she left, Vic grinned at me. He clasped the back of my neck and led me into the hallway, giving me a slight Indian burn.
On the way in I’d noticed a beautiful dining room where I figured dinner would be served, but Vic surprised me by leading the way to a dark, rickety staircase. Our footsteps echoed as we walked down to the cellar. There were no banisters. I put my palms against the walls for balance, feeling the scrape of rough stucco.
The basement floor was red and yellow tiles. There were windows along one wall, facing the driveway — you got a view of any approaching visitor’s ankles. A long table with built-in benches stood under fluorescent lights. My grandfather’s oak chair stood at the end of the table.
This was the hub of the home. During Depression years the main floor of the Ambrosio house had been rented out to boarders, so the family had gotten into the habit of using the basement. It was roomy, and always cool in the summertime.
Upstairs, the dining room might as well have been a museum — the mahogany table with its fitted glass top, a buffet table on wheels, heavy long-armed chairs. On the backs of those chairs there were doilies that stayed white year-round, and if you opened a cabinet door in the dining room there was a clicking sound, as if the long-untouched varnished surfaces had welded together. Trapped inside the cabinets were gold-rimmed teacups and saucers with paper tags still glued to their undersides.
But that room couldn’t hold a candle to the character of the basement.
For one thing, the floor wasn’t level, which Vic demonstrated by placing a baseball on it. The ball was still for an instant, then rolled to the opposite wall.
“Enough
