of his right hand for George to sniff.
This was their agreement. If Bobby, the younger brother, was going to get laid first, his promise to his less lucky brother was that he would bring home, for George’s pleasure, at least the scent of sex. George would close his eyes and breathe in that scent, that secret cache stolen from inside Joanne Lacosta, while Bobby, on the bed, laughed at him. “You are so nuts, George. Stop it. You are so crazy.”
Once, at the end of this ritual, they both looked at me. “Go ahead, let him,” George said, and Bobby nearly did, but then shook his head. “He’s too young. It’d only fuck him up.” For a moment, my heart had been beating very fast.
On my way out, Uncle John was always waiting, at the foot of the stairs, the ten dollars in his hand, to walk me home.
We both knew he was buying only hope. Even then I could sense the agreement he had made with himself, in his own mind, to keep two things separate: his real assessment of George (and with George, maybe, of the whole fate of his family) and this other thing, this belief certain men have, that life must ultimately be benevolent. Life must ultimately yield. It was the essence of optimism I faced at the bottom of the stairs: might I tell him that some miracle had occurred? Some progress made on the College Essay? John had fixed his sights on Northeastern for George. He had gotten hold of the application, which would not be due until February. “State three things that have shaped the development of your mind,” Northeastern asked. At the bottom of the steps, I saw how fixed John was on this specific, accomplishable goal, so small, so reachable. If he could have written it himself, he would have. Had even gone so far as to announce once, “For me, very easy. Number one: when I was seven years old, having no food to eat …”
At the bottom of the stairs, he would not quite ask me, but only stare, his head tilted, that characteristic male hope in his eyes that taught me that every man, however old, is still a boy, waiting for the story to be altered in a favorable way. Sometimes he would say one word. “Progress?” Or “Success?”
All I could give him was a weak smile, a shrug. In that moment I knew he hated me. But I couldn’t lie. He handed me the ten. In my mind there was a slight pull at the end, as though he didn’t really want me to have it, knew I hadn’t earned it.
The final part of the ritual was John walking me home. It was unnecessary, I lived only across the street. If I was old enough to tutor a seventeen-year-old boy in the College Essay, I was old enough to assay the fifty yards separating John’s house from ours. But he did not only walk me home. We toured the neighborhood, “the Hill,” as everyone now referred to it. We charted the progress of new houses. We stared into the woods, at felled trees, bulldozers left standing in a kind of sleep. There were living things growing around us, lifting up toward the palatial. John’s own house, being as large as these others, was not quite diminished. He had been the first, the pioneer. Someday they would come to appreciate this, though they hadn’t yet. Whatever went on in George’s room, whatever the ultimate success or failure of that venture, there was sustenance to be had here.
We would speak sometimes, though never of important subjects.
“The rock is from Italy,” he would say.
Mastrangelo, the lawyer, had imported marble from Italy. The tiniest of facts rippled through the neighborhood, bypassing my mother and me, outcasts in our house.
“Imagine,” he said.
We would reach the end of the street, where it was entirely woods. John would remove a cigar then. Slowly he would unwrap it. I didn’t believe I was there for him anymore; having come this far, my task was completed, I might now disappear. Slowly he would unwrap the cigar and with one hand light it and with the other cup the lighted end as he puffed until it took. Then he would drop the crumpled cigar wrapper on the ground.
It struck me, this gesture, because it did not seem offhand, but a deliberate, if tiny, defacement. The crumpled cigar wrapper lay on the virgin ground. John knew it was there. He puffed and stared down at the rows of houses, the farthest ones lit, the nearest plywood skeletons drawn up from the ground as if by the force of moonlight.
I wanted to stoop and lift the cigar wrapper but I understood that if I did, John would hold my arm hard and tell me to leave it.
After John had stood smoking for several minutes, he seemed to remember me again. “I’m keeping you up, aren’t I?”
“It’s okay.”
“When’s your bedtime?”
“My mother doesn’t care.”
He mulled that over. “Your mother doesn’t care about a lot of things.”
I acted as though I hadn’t heard.
“And how’s your father? How’s the weekends? Tough?”
“No. They’re all right.”
“I’ll never get anything out of you, will I?” He chuckled.
We started home.
It was only then, as we walked again into the light falling from the streetlamps and from out of the living rooms of the houses we passed, that I could forget John’s casual dropping of the cigar wrapper, could stop thinking about what it might mean, could again become absorbed by the houses and the lights and the views of interiors, the modern furniture and the hanging chandeliers. We were far then from the rooming house, from the breathing of Bob Painter, the enigma of my father’s staring at me, the nights when I fell asleep, of the three of us, last. John had convinced me of something in these walks: the necessity of effort, the capacity of the world to be shaped to a man’s ends. This was my romance, and in spite of all the confusing things I knew about him, John was slowly becoming its hero. In the grip of such a romance, Bobby’s bedroom faded, as did the movement of Bobby’s body into George’s room, the offering of the fingers.
Bobby and George were lost to sex. But not me. I would not be that way; no.
All that fall, my father kept making marks in my hand, some of them blotting out earlier marks. But the word I was to shout in understanding—the Helen Keller scream of recognition—never arrived.
One Friday night, just as the weather took a turn into serious cold, my father was late coming to get me. I sat on the front stoop, staring at the tall birch tree that dominated the front yard. Uncle John sat with me, smoking, saying nothing, until he stood and said, “My ass is getting cold, Luca. I expect your father will be along sometime.” Then he stared at me as if I should prepare myself for something.
That night, when my father finally arrived, it was on foot. He stood at the base of the driveway, not coming closer. It was evident he was waiting for acknowledgment, for us to see him and respond.
“What the hell is this?” John said.
“We’re taking the bus,” my father answered. “Come on, Luca.”
“Where’s your car? You break down?”
“I had to sell it, John.”
I stood up, ready to go, even to come between them if necessary.
John rolled his cigar back and forth between his lips in such a way that I knew, even when he asked, “What do you mean, you had to sell it?” that he understood precisely.
My
