just as I did then, I would have counted myself lucky. I had probably begun to understand that they all belonged to me, and I to them.
The photographer snapped his picture and muttered something and then asked us to stay for one more, something had gone wrong, and as he pressed his button anew, someone bumped him from behind, and this last time just as he took the picture, Matt bolted into the camera’s field.
The fat photographer straightened up, said, “That’ll have to do,” and I heard him add “goddammit” under his breath as he waddled away with his camera, trailing cigarette ash and shirt-tails behind him. Shortly after that troubled photo session a fight broke out over a coat, and the police were called. I thought my heart would burst.
I rode home with Uncle Tom and Uncle Mike. Uncle Mike was driving, hunched over the wheel as though the car crowded him. He was big and heavily built, and had the red hair of Grandpa’s people. Tom was dark-haired and dark-eyed like his mother, and a relatively small man, though I couldn’t see it then. They muttered to one another in the voices they usually used when they didn’t want me to hear, but I did, I always did, and I knew they were talking about Tom and the girl.
“Playing with fire, Tom. It ain’t gonna work.”
“We’ll see.”
“And Philly, he finds out, he’ll come looking for the both of you.” He pronounced it “Da bota you.”
“I can’t do nothing about that.” A moment later Tom added, “He don’t appreciate her, he don’t appreciate what he’s got. If I hadn’t had to go to overseas, she’d have been mine. I’m gonna take her from him.” Tom said this last with the same tone of absolute certainty he’d used after the death of my parents, when he’d told me that they were all going to take care of me.
“Be careful,” Uncle Mike told him, and then sighed. He sat looking out the window and shaking his head.
I waited what I thought to be a respectful moment and then asked, “Are you gonna marry the lady with the black hair, Uncle Tom?”
“Jesus,” Tom muttered. He looked at me in the rearview mirror. “You don’t miss anything, do you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, this is between the three of us. About that lady—whose name is Helen, by the way—it’s too soon to be talking about that kinda thing. Besides, nobody can tell what’s gonna happen in the future. Now crawl back in your hole and go to sleep.”
I nodded, my suspicions confirmed: this was the mysterious Helen whose name I’d heard whispered among the family.
“Just be careful,” Mike repeated. “He’s nuts, that guy.”
“Yeah? So what? So am I,” Tom said quietly.
I was delighted to hear his intentions. I wanted him to marry the dark-haired girl, I wanted him to have anything he wanted. Just as he was his mother’s favorite, he was mine: he was handsome and funny and brave and a war hero, and in the absence of a father, I was convinced Tom had hung the moon.
For much of the time, though, I associated Tom with bad news, it seemed that he was always the one delegated to give bad news, and on a June morning in 1954 that I will never forget he had given me mine. He had dropped down on one knee to get closer to my level—I’d been playing on the floor of my grandmother’s living room, and I’d already come to expect any adult dropping down on one knee to give me a serious talk about something: it had been my mother’s habit. He gave me a nervous half-smile and put a hand on my shoulder.
I wanted to run away, for I sensed what was coming: something had happened to my parents, to both of them. I’d spent the night at my grandmother’s and it was clear that something catastrophic had occurred. My parents had gone out on Friday night and had not come back to pick me up, and then I’d woken during the night to hear my grandmother sobbing in the kitchen and my grandfather trying to calm her.
In the morning she woke me with a forced smile and a stricken look in her eyes and then made me pancakes in an empty kitchen—my grandfather wasn’t in his accustomed place, sitting facing the window and filling the air with the blue smoke from his Camels. My grandmother hardly spoke to me during breakfast except to ask if I wanted more pancakes. After five I was full, but she kept making them. I remember that they were perfect, not a one of them burned or irregular. In a lifetime of making pancakes for me and the others in her family, that was the only day I can remember when she hadn’t produced at least one pancake the color and consistency of my school shoes. I watched her silent form and saw her wipe her eyes several times. At one point she stopped and just leaned on the stove with both hands, and I knew what had happened but said nothing, as though I could fend off this evil, undo it, perhaps, if I could but refrain from speaking of it.
My uncle came in just as I’d gone into the living room to play. I remember that he stood with the door half-opened, as if he might leave again, and then he went out to the kitchen. I heard my grandmother begin to weep, and then Uncle Tom came in to see me with the look of a fighter who has just barely beaten the count. Uncle Mike was behind him, big-eyed and looking stunned.
“How you doing, kiddo?” he asked, and didn’t even fake a smile.
“I don’t know,” I told him, and I didn’t.
He looked off past me for a moment and then got down on his knee. “Something happened. A bad … a bad thing, kiddo.” He broke off and looked away again, and this time he made a faint gasping sound. He seemed to be searching for the words, and I beat him to it.
“Something bad happened to Mommy and Daddy.”
He blinked in surprise and then nodded. “Yeah. They were in an accident. And they died. They went to heaven.”
“I want them to come back.”
He looked away again and shook his head. “No, they … people don’t come back. Once they been to heaven, they … they don’t come back.”
“How do you know they’re dead?”
He shot a panicked look at his brother, saw no help, plodded on alone. “I was, you know, I was out there.”
“I won’t see them?”
“Not ’til you get up there, to heaven.”
“I wanna go now.”
“You can’t, not yet, anyways, you got to …”
And then I let it all out, and I have no clear recollection of the next few minutes, except that I sobbed against his jacket ’til his shoulder was wet, and I could hear them all crying, all of them except him. He just hugged me. I had a sudden feeling of terror that was somehow balanced by the fact that the accident hadn’t taken him as well. Up close, he smelled of Old Spice and Wildroot Cream Oil and I had always wanted to smell like him.
I remembered our crowded apartment up the street on Clybourn, a cluttered flat above a shop where they repaired radios and fans and had them lining the windows, and I saw myself alone in the middle of it. They were all gone. I was seven years old and they were all gone.
“Where
