impress of an angel’s wings. He pulled me down and we tussled and only in a region far back in his eyes did I see signs of effort.
Later, Uncle John came. He wore an expensive raincoat and his hair was wet. He had a cigar in his mouth and one for my father. He always took a shower in the middle of the day because he sweated so much at work. His midday freshness was legendary. My mother was unpacking dishes in the kitchen, my father had gone to lie down in their room. For this, I had been given the day off from school.
“Everything good?” John called to my mother. My father came out of the bedroom at the sound, his hair mussed and standing up at the back of his head, still in the camel’s hair coat.
“Going back to work?” John asked.
“Yes.”
“So. Moved in.” John’s hands were in his pockets, he rocked back on his feet.
He offered the extra cigar to my father, but my father just looked at it. It had a pink wrapper on it, so we knew it was left over from when Emma had the baby.
“Yes. Moved in,” my father said. It sounded grim coming out of his mouth, and John stared at him a moment, annoyed.
“You?” my father asked. “Going back?”
“I’ll have a cup of coffee first, with Dorothy.”
We all gathered at the bay window to watch my father drive away. John’s eyes stayed on him a long time.
When my mother took the roast out of the oven at six, he was still not home. We were used to seeing him at 5:30, and there was less of a drive from Vanderbruek to here. At 6:30 she put the roast back in the oven to warm. Outside the window, I saw some boys cut across the lots, disappear into the frames of houses. Meola, Semenza; I knew the names already, and who would live in each of the uncompleted houses, and when I saw these boys, I didn’t think they were the ones who would live there. They were just boys looking, gawking, and I waited for them to come out.
At seven o’clock, the lights of my father’s car came around the bend and into the driveway. He entered, excited, holding a bottle of wine. “My new house,” he said, like a boy.
We ate in the kitchen; my father kept reaching up to play with the chandelier that hung over the table. “Look at that,” he kept saying, and flicked the dangling crystals of the chandelier they had chosen, one frozen winter night at Jordan’s. We had not had a better dinner in a long time, and I kept wishing that I had homework, that I had gone to school that day, so I could feel now the exquisite pang of having to leave a scene so sweet.
That night they made love. I lay in bed listening. It was a windy night and there were tree branches that tapped against the house. My father had come into my room and stood in the dark, thinking I was asleep. He had leaned against the wall with his hands in his pockets, and I didn’t think I was wrong in assuming what he was feeling was pride. Then he had gone in and made love to my mother, but the sounds tonight filled me with terror. Though I ought to have been used to them, tonight they seemed extreme, as though he were doing something to her beyond the usual. When I heard my mother cry out in that ripped-open way of hers, I went into their bedroom and stood in the doorway. I tried to fool myself by pretending what I was doing wasn’t conscious—that I was sleepwalking—and thus excusable. When my father noticed me there, he made a gasp. Then he said “goddammit.” He rose and I expected to be hit, though he had rarely done that. I had seen him naked many times but not like this.
On the bed, my mother’s head was turned against the pillow.
My father tried to overcome his anger by taking my hand. “Never never never,” he said on the way to my bedroom. “Do you understand, Luca? Never interrupt like that.”
He tucked me in, exaggeratedly, almost secretly gentle. “You’re scared?”
I said nothing. His face came very close. “New house. Your mother scares you, making those sounds?”
It was safe to nod, and he smiled, lightly and delicately. “Luca, that’s the sound of happiness you hear. That’s all.”
He went away then. I drew the covers tight, and heard their attempts to discipline themselves, to keep quiet. The trees that would need trimming made their scratching noise against the outer walls and I thought about what my father had said.
One night early in summer, he brought home from Vanderbruek a man named Bob Painter. Bob Painter was a good deal larger than my father, tall and gruff-looking, with a round red face. He worked on the grounds crew. My father made sure we understood Bob was one of the foremen.
Bob Painter’s effect on my father was a little startling to watch. He made this neat, taciturn man, who was always telling other people to temper their effusions, himself effusive, wanting to show off. My mother and I were both very quiet at the beginning. We were watching a man we thought we knew behave as we had never seen him before. He showed Bob Painter around our house, and, pointing things out, laughed at things that didn’t seem funny. He laughed in a high and irritating way, and there were times, doing that, when he seemed to be dismissing us, and our whole lives, for the benefit of a stranger.
We sat in the backyard, on the flagstone patio. My father cooked steaks on the grill. Bob Painter was uncomfortable being here, I could tell. To my mother’s question, he said he had three little girls, they lived in Woburn. Seven, nine, and eleven. “Like clockwork, we had ’em,” he said to my mother. “Every two years.” He was like a man you would see in an Army movie, a black-and-white one, a minor figure, the sergeant who loses his temper, gets in a knife fight, dies. Only at the end would you feel sympathy for him. I kept waiting for him to disappear, become as unimportant to our lives as he would be to that movie. His big round face had cracks in it, fissures. His cheeks were immense, long and drooping and marked by the outlines of broken veins. His face looked like it had been frozen in reaction to some sort of trouble. He had brought a six-pack of Schlitz beer, and each time he opened one of the cans he looked like he was in pain. He offered one to Mother, and she surprised me by taking it.
Did she flirt with him? I don’t think so. But as it grew dark, she began calling him Bob in a familiar way that irritated me terribly. “Another Schlitz, Bob?” she asked, though he was clearly in charge of that area, holding them between his legs. He had an orange fringe of hair that swept back off his crown.
“My brother-in-law,” my father announced, turning the steaks, “had an idea, Bob. This hill is going to be full of guineas.”
He had never said the word “guineas” before. Perhaps he said it at work. The light was falling, and you could see where the lawn was starting to come up, shoots of green still vulnerable to our footsteps. My father looked at the shrubs ringing the patio and seemed regretful, perhaps knowing he’d gone too far. On the days when he had planted the shrubs, it had been as though nothing was more urgent and important than to make things grow here.
Bob Painter was again on the verge of speaking. Then suddenly he appeared to be embarrassed, thinking better of his own impulse. He sat quietly in the chair. He turned to me at last. “You got a room there, Luca?”
I said I did.
“Can I see it?”
“Sure,” my father answered for me.
Behind me, in the hallway, Bob Painter’s step made a heavy tread. His breathing, too, was heavy. There was not much to show him in the room. I thought maybe he had asked to see it just to get away from the uncomfortable
