he’s up here somewhere and even has children who were born here.
Mamita must not have loved my father enough anymore, or must have convinced herself that she didn’t, to want to live with him and raise a family. It’s not like Bert was cheating on her and that’s why we left. That seems like the kind of thing she would have told us or at least told my sister and Feli; they sure wouldn’t have kept that a secret all these years. We were going to stay in Guatemala and make our lives there. But what misery and humiliation my father must have endured over those two years plus, a long time to be separated from his family; he couldn’t really have been expecting us to come back. Then what large-hearted forgiveness he displayed when he found out that his truant wife and tubercular three-year-old son were returning to him after all. In Boston, I’d at least get better medical care; that was really why we came back, I understood later. My father rolled the dice and decided to move his shaky family out to that idyllic-seeming town off Route 128, where he purchased a ranch house in a neighborhood so brand-new it looked just unpacked from its box, set down between steep hills and ridges, and comprised of only two intersecting streets, straight Sacco Road, where we lived, and bending Enna Road, together running along three sides of a large weedy-thistly rocky field called Down Back. That was the house, already partly furnished, that my mother and I came to live in around Christmas. My father must have met us at Logan Airport and driven us to our new home, where he’d put up a Christmas tree down in the basement, right in front of the furnace, a dangerously flammable spot, instead of in the living room, as if he didn’t want the neighbors to be able to see it through the picture window, worried that at the last minute we wouldn’t come back after all, and the neighbors would wonder about that solitary Jewish man who made false teeth for a living and had a Christmas tree in his living room. His older sister, Aunt Hannah, married to a Russian Catholic, Uncle Vlad, had decorated it. Underneath the tree, an orange toy steam shovel awaited me. But I was afraid of my daddy and instinctively rebuffed him, this enthusiastic, grasping man whose marriage and family I’d saved by getting sick. On a recent visit to Green Meadows, my mother told me that. You didn’t like your father, she said. You were afraid of him. Really, Ma? I was afraid of him? And you could tell? Because I don’t remember any of it at all.
A hemorrhaging relapse while playing outside on a hot sunny afternoon that made me vomit sloshing wallops of blood onto the sidewalk—I remember that—my father wrapping me in a blanket and rushing me into his car and also that I got to stay in the Boston Children’s Hospital. Mr. Peabody and Sherman came to visit us in our ward, and my father sat by my bed performing the magic tricks he’d bought at Little Jack Horner on Tremont Street. One was a shiny black top encircled by white flecks, but when my father made the top spin on its special stick, the flecks became a rainbow blur before turning into a row of flying scarlet birds that he said were called ibis.
That’s how these visits with my mother go now, but her occasionally blunt, unguarded way of speaking is a new trait. She’s almost comically the opposite of how she used to be, after all those years of keeping her guard impermeably raised. This new heedless candor is a manifestation of the somewhat premature dementia that has been overtaking her in recent years, possibly the result, doctors now say, of a stroke that wasn’t noticed, a commotion in her brain that caused a tremulous weakness in one leg that was misdiagnosed as a symptom of advancing age. But my sister and I also attributed her decline to the exhaustion brought on by having to tend to Bert during his unrelentingly demanding last years, when being repeatedly hospitalized for an array of health emergencies somehow only fueled his manic, cantankerous energies. By the end, it was Lexi who took over his care, moving home again, adamant that she was only doing it out of concern for our mother. Mamita’s condition seemed related to another medical mystery, that being the most dreadful insomnia that overtook her, when it was as if the more Bert exhausted her, the harder it was for her to get any sleep, her often reddened eyes encircled by darkly puffed skin. It was only when she had to go from the nursing home to a hospital in Boston because of a nearly fatal case of pneumonia and an adverse reaction to her medications that doctors, studying her puzzling medical history, also hypothesized that prior stroke. On my mother’s side of the family, there’s no known history of strokes or heart disease or even of dementia; there are a few old family stories that along with the little bit I’ve found out on my own do suggest that Abuelito was manic-depressive and maybe even schizophrenic. In the nursing home, Mamita’s doctors did finally straighten out her medications. She sleeps better now, though that fog she’s often at least a little bit lost in and from which she does sharply emerge, nevertheless seems to be slowly, ineluctably deepening.
Soon after Bert Goldberg’s beautiful young wife, Yolanda Montejo Hernández, came back from Guatemala with their sick little son, she became pregnant, with a girl this time, Alexandra. Husband, probably wife, too, must have felt blessed and redeemed, if not shocked, by this successful fast work, which won them the right and even the responsibility to turn their long separation into a subject never to be spoken of again, certainly not within hearing of the children. In the fall, living in our neighborhood was like being snugly enclosed at the bottom of a basket of flagrant fiery and more muted colors, replaced in winter by hues of snowy slopes, pine crests nearly black in the distance, frigid gray skies, flying flocks of crows, crimson-streaked Atlantic sunsets, followed by successive seasons that wove into our little valley every shade of green from sapling shoots to darkest boreal forest. How could my father even have suspected the viciousness lurking all around us? The Saccos, related to the contractors who’d founded and built our neighborhood, a brutal clan, lived around the corner on Enna Road in a little ranch house like our own. Whenever Gary Sacco called me dirty kike, I shouted back: So are you. You’re a dirty kike too!
Down Back, the weedy, stony field behind our houses, was where me and my few friends from school, especially Peter Lammi, who at school was called Lambi, used to stand shoulder to shoulder, throwing rocks at Gary, who was a year older than us, and his brother, Chris, and some of their friends, while they hurled and zinged them at us. We went to Dwight, the public elementary school, and they went to St. Joe’s. We faced off far enough away that we could usually easily dodge the rocks they threw. My rocks never even came close to reaching them, though I left that part out when boasting at the dinner table about my daring charges against the enemy and perfectly pitched throws. Peter Lammi was much stronger than any of us on either side. Come on, Pete, split a head open! He aimed his rocks relentlessly, one after another, but always so they’d miss but be close enough to make our enemy pull back and finally run away. He couldn’t bring himself to intentionally hurt even Gary Sacco. Peter launched those wild bombardments in part to protect me but to protect himself, too, because he knew the Saccos and their friends were desperate to see our faces covered in blood, if only they could get close enough. I also wanted to see their faces covered in blood, there was not a single thing in this world I wanted more. The serious problem of enemies, what to wish for your enemies.
We did have some nice neighbors, and Mamita even got along with Connie Sacco for a while. But then my mother decided we had to give Fritzie, our German shepherd, away and put an advertisement in the newspaper. Mamita couldn’t take Fritzie anymore, such a rambunctious galoot that he didn’t seem to even fit inside our little house, and he filled the yard with dog shit that it was my job to collect inside wads of newspaper and drop into the aluminum rubbish incinerator that resembled the robot in Lost in Space, a job I performed at best haphazardly. An elderly black couple came from Maine to see Fritzie. They drove an old-looking automobile and told us they lived on a small farm. They went into the yard to meet Fritzie, then sat in the living room with my parents over coffee and cookies, looking at vaccination and kennel papers. Two days later a petition was left in our mailbox, signed by our neighbors, maybe by every household on Sacco and Enna Roads, complaining that if we sold our house to Negroes, their property values would go down. No black families lived in our town, not one I’d ever seen anyway. “We, your neighbors, agree that we will take all necessary steps to prevent that,” the letter said, which my father, astounded, read aloud in the kitchen, and then he mocked: What, they’re going to burn our house down? They’re in the Ku Klux Klan now, these goddamned wops and micks? Bert! exclaimed my mother. Don’t talk like that in front of the children, you’ll make them prejudiced. When Mamita suggested that all we had to do was tell our neighbors
