Man Gone Down

by Michael Thomas

  “This is it.”

  She starts to the stoop and turns. She closes her eyes and tilts back her head—waiting for a summer breeze. It doesn’t come. She waves. “Bye.” She comes back to me. She wants a kiss goodnight. I bend for her and give her my cheek. She rubs her cheek against mine and says bye again, too loudly in my ear. I step back. She ascends the stairs, finds her keys, unlocks the door, and disappears.

  There are ghosts on the street tonight. There’s a giant moon in the eastern sky, low and orange. It throws light on the asphalt, light and shadows of tree leaves and telephone wires. My father ran out on us when he was the age I am now, but he didn’t have the heart to just go. First he went to the couch, then to the Ramada, and only after a decade of coming in and out of my life did he finally allow himself to completely disappear. Then he returned—again—for my wedding and stood with me and the minister and Gavin behind what was left of an old farmhouse, the stone foundation wall. I hadn’t seen him in six years and in that time he’d lost his hair, his teeth, and I thought any claim to me as a son.

  I gave Claire my mother’s ring, a white gold band with the world’s smallest diamond. And her face fell like I’d just broken her heart, but then the smile came—long, trembling. I remember being quiet, staying quiet, waiting for her to speak, but she didn’t. She kept looking from her ringed finger to me—back and forth.

  She wore ivory. It took place at Edith’s in a clearing, just before the rosehips and the dunes. It was five thirty and an August storm was rolling north up the coast. I could hear thunder booming from Rhode Island. Edith gave her daughter away. Claire’s veil whipped about her head in the wind. Above us seabirds squawked and flew inland as the clouds rolled out—charcoal and billowy. I looked out at the congregation, my family on one side, hers on the other. We read our vows and we kissed and the clouds burst. After the rain, a double rainbow appeared with one foot in the little guery pond and the other out in Buzzards Bay. In the receiving line people commented—as though their observations were original—on the auspicious beginnings of our union. We shook hands with people. We hugged people. And Claire seemed to be truly happy—raindrops or tears on the end of her swooping nose, unblinking green eyes. Her cheeks were like two suns at magic hour—what the day was fading into. Double rainbows: double rosy suns. Her grandfather was the only one who shot straight.

  “I think I gave you silver.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Twelve or sixteen settings. You’ll see soon enough.”

  “Thank you, grandpa.”

  “You know, he’d said, taking in her cheeks or the rainbows behind. It’s going to be an awfully rough road to hoe.”

  Claire read when he died. “Little Gidding”—the fifth movement. She’d announced in the pulpit of the old barn church, and the congregation had smiled and nodded in approval, “What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make an end is to make a beginning. / The end is where we start from . . .” She read it with lock-jawed precision. I had typed it out for her the night before on bond paper and left it sitting beside her coffee and grapefruit that morning. “Every poem an epitaph. And any action / Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat / Or to an illegible stone: and this is where we start.” When we sang “Jerusalem,” I couldn’t help but think we were each the last of our lines.

  Smith Street is empty except for the ghosts and the moon and one woman who walks toward me unaware, phone to her ear, talking loudly. She’s buzzed and mocking someone on the other end about her choice in men. Ten feet away she finally sees me. She readjusts the phone. She smiles. “Hey,” she says, as though we know each other. “Nothing,” she says into the phone. “Just someone outside here. I’m walking home.”

  A car passes and Marley floats from the open windows—“No, woman, no cry”—more ghosts. I scroll through things in my head. Memories. Images out of sync with song. “We die with the dying: / See, they depart, and we go with them. / We are born with the dead: / See, they return, and bring us with them.” My father, not dead, but toothless and struggling for language. Struggling, perhaps, even for the force, the feeling, the idea, that drives the word. When her grandfather lay in bed in the ICU dying so far from England, so far from anything that was familiar to him, the last thing he saw was my face. His breaths were slowing. He looked at me. He closed his eyes and clutched the gurney rail as though summoning the strength to battle the guardians of memory. He sang: “In the middle of the ocean there grows a green tree . . .” He cried one tear—spare and poignant and easy to miss. He inhaled sharply—a whooshing vortex sound marking his emersion into history—drawing him in as though his words went first, then thought, then memory. The ninety-year stoic, how had he managed to hold on to even that much—weeping—lost nobility or nobility revealed? He died without exhaling.

  I remember my mother, not dying, but always—her fear. I remember how lost her up-south drawl sounded. I remember her slaps, ice cubes and liquor, her stories: the orphaned children in Virginia—the half- and quarter-breeds—the unrecognizable human mélange: the line of Ham; the line of Brown. I was the one who’d given Claire the poem, because she didn’t know what to say.

  The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree

  Are of equal duration. A people without history

  Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern

  Of timeless moments.

  And so in blessings, and so in song, and so in bottles and beatings. And so in absence and death, they pass themselves on to me, like they were torches ablaze but now seemingly without heat, without light—perhaps only a history of fire—a symbol of that which was once warm and bright and useful. My mother, ashes in the urn waiting to be spread.

  And all shall be well and

  All manner of thing shall be well . . .

  I think that I would like to leave this world with a song and a tear—that I would’ve held just enough in reserve to still have one of each, that there will be someone there to listen and watch and they in turn will whisper their secret affections—but there’s no way to be noble anymore. Perhaps there never was. “I will be true to the girl who loves me . . .” There are echoes of ditties unsung, therefore promises unmade. The green tree. The yew tree. The grassy hills of England. The tarmac of Brooklyn. A concession of love, a casualty of failure, disappearing down the maw of a vacant avenue, reft of language, left with memory. A phantom who leaves no legacy, only haunting, marring who you loved and who once loved you, chilling those you are near. I shudder on the avenue. What if nothing lies beneath my spasm, my stomach’s descent? What if there are no ghosts in Brooklyn, and my love’s cheeks are unspeakable and all gone?

  When the tongues of flame are in-folded

  Into the crowned knot of fire

  And the fire and the rose are one.

  The big broken clock hiccups the hour. There’s really no choice in the matter.

  I will run.

  4

  My father had always been a lousy listener; then he started going deaf—just after his first heart attack. It had been mild enough that he’d been able to call a cab to take him to the emergency room. And during his convalescence he’d been torn between dismissing the gravity of his condition and milking it for every drop of sympathy he could get.

  He’s always been an odd man. He’s never seemed to possess any discernible rage, only a kind of jazzy melancholy—lighter than the blues. Not daunting or dark: good lounge conversation—his troubles, his travels. And he was good in a lounge conversation—even toned, soft yet resonant, aloof, but not cold—with lots of high-end diction and low-end beer. I’ve always thought of him as Bing Crosby’s public persona on half a Percodan—boo-biddy-doo—breezing through life. Or Nat King Cole, just a little bit high. And it was because he was so smooth that almost everyone forgave him almost everything: the failed business ventures, the lost jobs, his potbelly and skinny legs, his balding and his absence. He was gone. It seemed ridiculous for anyone, h
is family, my mother, me, to attempt to retrieve him for punishment or salvation.

  I don’t believe he ever considered himself gone. I shouldn’t be too hard on him. I try never to be. He was lying in bed in the ICU of the Boston VA.

  “How are you doing?”

  “You know, your grandfather had his first heart attack at forty-one. That’s a lot younger than me.”

  “Yeah. How are you doing?”

  “He lived another thirty years. You never met him.”

  “I know.”

  “He was the first pharmacist of his kind to practice in the city. Kenmore Drug. You know, he came up from the Carolinas with nothing. I don’t think he was even a teen.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They let him practice in the basement. He swept up upstairs.”

  My father had torn up his knee as a high school halfback. He used to say that it cost him his free ride to Harvard but kept him out of Korea. When I was small, we’d play on the sidewalk in front of the old house. He’d call a play, break the huddle with a soft clap, and limp up to the ball, surveying the imagined defense. He’d hike it to himself and hand it off to me. After my run he’d watch me, a bit dreamily, jog back to him. “You really can hit the hole,” he’d say, taking the big ball back.

  He must have sensed me regarding his scar, ashes, and bumpy, hairless follicles because he pulled at the hem of his johnny. It wasn’t long enough to cover, so I looked away.

  “I’d go meet him at the store. The girl at the counter would give me a hard candy then send me down. He’d be gathering the filled prescriptions to bring upstairs. Your grandfather was very exacting.”

  He scratched his stubble. His face, pockmarked from ingrown hairs, rasped like a zydeco washboard.

  “He hit me once.”

  He sucked on his loose teeth.

  “We were just sitting down to dinner. I couldn’t have been much older than eight.”

  He extended his right index finger into the air above his chest and pushed at something he saw.

  “The doorbell rang. My father got up to answer it. From where I sat I could see that a policeman was at the door. My father called for me. There was another man on the porch, too. The man looked at me, turned to the policeman, and shook his head. My father told me to go sit down. I did. When he finished, he came in, sat, and said grace. I was just about to pick up my fork when all of a sudden I was on the floor. My cheek was numb. He was staring at me—cold. “Get up,” he said, really quiet. I got back in my chair. We ate dinner like nothing happened.

  He inhaled thinly.

  “I haven’t had a cigarette in three days.”

  “That’s good. You shouldn’t smoke.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  He pushed at the doorbell again and heard it ring in his head. I’d never seen a picture of my grandfather, but it had been said that he looked nothing like my old man. He never said much about his people at all except that they were “hard people . . . mean people . . .” That they used to own a town but were swindled out of it and had to move to northern Florida. The only one in his family he ever really loved was his maternal grandmother. She was the daughter of a medicine man. He only saw her once. My mother would roll her eyes or leave the room when he talked about her or how he thought that his father, who one day disappeared, was alive somewhere in the swamps.

  “When the war came, they let him practice upstairs.”

  “Then he got sick?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How are you—you keeping your chin up?”

  Marco’s just taken out the trash. He’s on the stoop wearing a T-shirt, baggy shorts, and flip-flops. He sees me and waves. When I get closer, he points at my coffee.

  “Staying up tonight?”

  “Just a prop.”

  He thumbs at the doorway. “Sox are on replay.”

  Inside, the foyer lights are on low—halogen, recessed. They make the hall seem to curve where the walls meet the floor and ceiling—and it lengthens—a tube of soft light rimmed by shadow.

  “Come on. Take a break.”

  I sip the coffee. It’s weak and bitter. I haven’t watched a game all summer; perhaps out of self-punishment, perhaps because the game is no longer the game of my childhood, or perhaps it is and I’m no longer a boy. Somehow baseball lost its charm. I found it hard to root for corporate-sponsored mercenaries. From boy to man my feelings have turned from awe to envy to spite.

  My father took me to Fenway. He’d watched the Braves as a boy. He’d seen Ruth’s last at bats. Then the Braves left and he became a Sox fan. He told me about the old park and the tradition: Young, Foxx, Doerr, Pesky, Williams, and what Yaz was like as a rookie. “He won the triple crown the year you were born—what a year.” He’d tell me stories—the curse, the Impossible Dream team—in that baritone crooner, Lucky Strike voice. Finally, one day he put me on his shoulders and walked us along the Charles to Kenmore Square, up Brookline Avenue, the bridge over the Mass Pike. We looked down at the cars speeding inbound and out. And then up to Lansdowne Street and the Monster with the net above. I got dizzy looking up at it in the vendor yells and smells. It seemed as though he knew, so we didn’t go in right away. He put me down among the legs and cart wheels and then disappeared up into the bodies and heads. When he returned, he handed me a sausage in a bun, flicking the peppers and onions off for me as he knelt. I ate it as we walked around the ballpark, east, behind the right-field bleachers, and then down the line toward home. I haven’t taken C yet. He hasn’t shown much interest—the Brooklyn boy. It was all I could do to keep Yankee paraphernalia out of the house—banners, hats, balls with imprints, bobble-head dolls, goodie bags from birthday parties. Once we burned a hat on the roof of our building and then tuned into the game on the radio. He fell asleep in his chair, the game he’d never played, the grandfather he barely knew, the field he’d never seen; all abstractions to him.

  “Come on. They haven’t tanked yet,” Marco says while repositioning a garbage can. They haven’t, but they will. They always do in a manner so predictable that I can’t see it coming—the implosion. It’s late night. They’ll show a compressed version of the earlier live broadcast. I’ve heard some compare baseball to opera. Some have said that the Red Sox’s story is tragic. This replay then—only the highlight innings—is like a dark cantata.

  I follow him inside, into the great windowed room. The television is on already. His laptop is open on the glass coffee table. He drops heavily onto the couch and waits for me to sit. He slides some stapled pages to me.

  “What do you think of this?”

  “What is it?”

  “A legal document. What do you think of the writing?”

  The first paragraph has three comma splices and one subject-verb disagreement.

  “It’s a mess, right? It gets worse.”

  I slide it back to him.

  “They all graduated at the top of their classes from top schools, made law review. They can’t write for shit.” He pats the sheets. “But what burns me is they think they can. This was handed to me as a finished document. Now I have to stay up all night to correct the work of someone who sticks it to me every chance he gets that I didn’t go to Harvard.”

  “The Red Sox take the field.”

  “Fuckin’ bums. Come on, you fucks . . . Oh,” he slides me a note, “someone called. He left a time and an address.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Meeting?”

  “Yeah.”

  He jumps up from the couch quickly, as though he’s forgotten something. He calls from the kitchen.

  “Want anything?”

  “I’m good.”

  “How’s the picture?” he asks, coming back with a bowl full of ice cream—chocolate with chocolate sauce. I shrug, not knowing what he means. “Satellite. I don’t know. I’ve heard good things and bad things.”

  I gesture at the television. “It looks fine.”

  I don’t
recognize the pitcher. He’s skinny, adolescent looking.

  “Oh no, the youth movement. The downward spiral has begun.” He turns up the volume.

  “The Sox are still playing for a postseason bid.”

  It’s twilight at the park, so it seems to me that Boston’s in a different time zone, perhaps even a different place in time. There are long shadows in left field cast by the green monster and the light towers atop it. The players run to their respective positions. I’ve always thought there was something anti-American about baseball: the definite defensive positions, the batting order, the lack of fluidity between offense and defense. It seems anachronistic, old-world—its rituals, its built-in stasis—and can turn all who watch and honor it into anachronisms dreaming of golden ages. And each fan or group of fans has a golden age—before the live ball era, before the Negroes, before television, before free agents, before steroids. No, I have forgotten. Baseball is American—as America has aged from a country of dreamers into a country of rememberers. It is better then, to live in memory and not be made to reconcile how the then is rejected by the now. The grass is emerald, the infield dirt raw umber. The first pitch is a ball.

  Marco slaps a pillow.

  “That stringbean can’t throw ninety-five. The gun’s fixed.” He takes a spoonful of sweets. “How hard did Koufax throw? Carlton? You’re telling me that he brings it like them? Who is this guy?”

  “He’s not Koufax.”

  “Damn right. Every lefty who shows up and can throw a little hard they try to sell you as Koufax.”

  “Well, he’s not Koufax. He’s probably not even him.”

  “Outside. Ball two. Another fastball.”

  “Six back with twenty-five to play. Is there a chance?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “You think if they make a few deals this summer?”

  “No.”