Trenton Makes

by Tadzio Koelb

  That meant he couldn’t take them to the apartment to wait for his mother. He never knew when his father would be home. The old man was always calling in sick, by which he really meant drunk, and Art wasn’t ready to confront him again, not yet. He wasn’t sure he ever would be. He sensed somehow that Bets expected it of him, or at least expected him to desire it. He knew she was someone who would look forward with a kind of athlete’s anticipation to the showdown, the bold and honest confrontation, but he had attempted it and found that the fear—of his father, of course, his unquenchable rage, but also of his own sudden and unfamiliar honesty—had been too much to handle, had overwhelmed him. The words as they rose had stolen all the air from his lungs and left him breathless, his legs had felt almost too weak to carry him when the moment came to run.

  He told Bets only half the story: that he and his father had argued yet again over the draft, and Art’s clothes, which to Art’s father were somehow permanently linked. The two of them could barely be in the same room together without fighting. They disagreed about Nixon and segregation and the draft, a script they followed with the predictability of a streetlight coming on at dusk, Art’s father talking about it all in terms of what he called a man’s duty, of patriotism and fatherland, all the usual empty stuff. Art knew but somehow couldn’t express why this was beside the point, that there was something deeper, more basic, something about the rules, the system, but the idea he was after remained so soft in his mind, so abstract and distant and intangible, that he couldn’t with his constraining mouth find the words. Without ammunition of his own, Art would again find himself falling back on things he had heard others say, things he believed were true but that were not the thing he wanted or needed to express, as when he said, “So a bunch of villagers should burn to death in their fields because you think that makes a man out of some poor guy from Iowa? That proves we love our country?”

  Abe had been kneeling as he ran mechanically through his list of grievances with a generation who mocked responsibility, who had no idea of sacrifice, a generation of boys who needed to become men. He was searching through the nameless third- or fourth-hand piece of furniture that sat behind the sofa in the living room, the one in which were stored all the unused things Art’s mother nevertheless kept as safe as relics, the cheap department-store teacups, tiny wineglasses, little circles of lace gone yellow. “What the hell do you know about being a man, with your long hair and your sissy clothes? It’s all a big joke to you. You’ve never had to take responsibility for anything. I have news for you: that’s not how it works. Do you think I could have done what I did if I went around dressed like that, with long hair, and no collar, wearing a bunch of voodoo necklaces like a fruit? Work at a factory? Support a family?”

  “Are you kidding? You haven’t worked at the factory since I was a little kid. Mom pays for everything around here; we all know that. That’s why you’re crawling around on the floor, isn’t it? Trying to find her money because you spent all of yours on liquor?”

  Was that when his father had stood up? He didn’t tell Bets the rest: the awful admission he’d made, the unprecedented effect it had on his father.

  Art said to Bets, “My mother is probably at her job anyway.” They walked, Art thought, the way things float in a puddle, sometimes pulled apart, sometimes pressed together, and he could never understand what the force was that made the difference.

  “So we’ll go by her job,” said Bets.

  “It’s always changing. She’s, you know.” He stopped to inhale. “She’s not like a normal cleaning lady, like always working at the same place. She works for a company that does a whole bunch of the big office buildings downtown, a couple of them maybe in the suburbs. You never know where they’re going to send her. She could be anywhere.”

  “Well,” said Dion. “Then we wait.”

  “No, we don’t,” said Bets. “We don’t have long before either you go to the induction center or become a criminal. We can’t wait. What’s the name of the company? We can look it up. If they’ve got customers all around, they’re going to be in the book.”

  “I don’t really know. I mean, we never really talk about her work much. I just know that her boss is called Mr. Helms. My uncle Jacks might know where to find her, maybe. They work for the same people, I think, only…”

  “Only what?” Bets asked in a voice that wasn’t angry, or demanding, or even concerned, but instead just strangely empty, as if hollowed out and waiting for the anger or demand or concern that might need to come. Art thought about Jacks, huge in every way except his mind, his deafening voice, his ungainly lumbering, and above all his massive, overwhelming simplicity. “I don’t see him very often. I mean, I’m not sure if he’s working today, too. And honestly, you know, he’s a little strange,” he said finally.

  Dion did his best to enjoy this silver lining. “Hey,” he said without much conviction. “Sounds like my kind of guy.”

  “It can’t hurt us to try,” Bets said. “All right?”

  “Yeah, all right,” echoed Art. “So, I guess let’s go.”

  * * *

  ·

  Art had often enough stood behind his mother on the same steps in front of the same door to the same lodging house, listening to Mrs. Lakatos, shirt buttoned high on her neck and topped with a bow, offer in a resentful tone to call Douglas. It was Jacks who appeared when this other man had been named and sent for, something that had given Art a terrible, bitter feeling of betrayal that wouldn’t be tamed, even when Jacks had said consolingly, jokingly, but also with a hint of pride, “That’s right: I’m Mr. Douglas Jackson, Esquire. But you can still call me Jacks, because I’m Jacks to my friends and we’re always going to be friends, right?” When his mother reminded him that his own name was something else, asking, “Are you Art, or are you Arthur? Or are you both?” the fear that he was being somehow mocked had only deepened his pout. Arthur was a stranger to him, a threat. It was a name belonging to someone lurking on the stairs outside the apartment door, waiting one day to take over his body.

  Inside the stuccoed little building was the room where Art and his mother would spend the night when Art’s father was too drunk, too angry, too violent. In the rented little room Art’s mother and Jacks sat rigidly, aware all the time of Mrs. Lakatos sneaking across the landing, or standing halfway down the stairs, one ear apparently always open in anticipatory outrage. Art would play on the floor while the two adults made small talk and then eventually, inevitably, had their argument about who should take the bed. Art’s mother always lost, of course, because gallantry towards women was an immovable pillar of Jacks’ simple creed. Finally Art and his mother would sleep there, clothed, only their shoes removed and put carefully by the door so they wouldn’t trip in the night if Art needed the bathroom, and Uncle Jacks would try his best to sleep on his two chairs pulled together the way men did in the movies, even though he was clearly too big and would always end up on the floor, on one occasion with a crash that woke them all.

  For years this had been Art’s neighborhood, but he never knew it that well beyond the grocery store and the Laundromat, the way to school, his family’s home and the Lakatos house, which by a faded handmade sign still offered reasonable rates and steam heat. His mother hadn’t liked him to play with the rough boys from down the block, who were all bigger and older, born the year the war ended. His father had never really liked for any of them, mother, father, or son, to leave the apartment if they didn’t have to. He certainly didn’t want Art to associate with the immigrant families, the ones he called Hungies: the beefy, red-faced Polish kids whose fat, low-set grandmothers waddled like kerchiefed penguins between swaying baskets of groceries, strong boys who picked on Art, bringing his mother down into the street to yell at them and their parents. “Every time you go out, you make trouble,” his father once told him in a hot, gin-scented hiss. “I’d rather see you dead than let you ruin everything with your goddamn mess.” It was the flat, polished stare as he said it that had
made Art frightened. He crawled under his bed afterwards and stayed there all day.

  Art looked back at Dion and Bets and then pressed the bell, a toy-like button set in the middle of the door that didn’t really ring, but just went click clack. He pressed it twice. “Jacks isn’t really my uncle, you know,” he said as they waited. “He’s my father’s friend, back from when they both worked at this factory together.”

  “Hey, that’s okay,” Dion told him. “We’re not worried about his family tree.”

  “I just mean—”

  “I know what you mean. Don’t flip your wig. It’s all cool.”

  Pale Mrs. Lakatos answered, diminished of course, her clothes and face both threadbare, but her dry disapproval still ample, undulled it seemed by time and familiarity with the incorrigible world, her shirt still tied at the neck with a bow despite the weather. There was talcum powder caught in the wrinkled skin around the top of her collar, which was loose and limp, just as her half of the semidetached building was now loose around her: as she aged, she had grown scared of taking in new people. When the old ones moved away, or died, their rooms stayed empty. Art wasn’t even sure after all this time how many were left. It might have been just her and Jacks, for all he knew. She recognized Art right away. He assumed it was because of his harelip.

  Art asked for Mr. Jackson and was allowed to wait in the familiar tidy hall while Mrs. Lakatos climbed slowly up the stairs, good left leg always first, and then came slowly back down again to say that he could show himself the way. Dion and Bets followed, and Mrs. Lakatos watched them coldly, especially Bets with her long, dirty hair, her unpowdered cheeks and shiny brow, her clothes that were just a touch provocative in the sense that they demonstrated no more interest in hiding her body than they did in making it desirable, revealing the densely freckled shoulder blades, the hair left to grow under her arms. Jacks, big and bald, dressed in a soiled undershirt, met them on the landing. “You ain’t been to the house in a long time,” he said in his outsized voice. “Normally, I’d be at the factory at this time of day, you know.”

  “Uncle Jacks, you stopped working there when I was still in junior high. Didn’t they close?”

  “Right,” the big man nodded solemnly. “Otherwise I’d be there now, this time of day.”

  The only apparent change to the room where Jacks lived was decay. The sagging belly of the bed bowed still further. The two cushions that turned it by day into a sofa that no one ever saw, much less sat on, but that was nevertheless constructed with care each morning, had grown dingier, their lumps more pronounced. Those few spots that Jacks apparently used to the exclusion of all others were rubbed shiny, each an oasis on the accumulated plain of dust, which otherwise covered everything: the chairs he had once tried to sleep on, the windowsill, the top of his small chest of drawers. His few shelves were still empty except for the familiar souvenirs of his army days—the good-conduct medal pinned to the flat green cap, the curling photo of men smiling around a canvas-covered truck—sitting next to the little items colleagues at the factory had given him sometimes for Christmas and the few gifts he had occasionally received in place of affection from the dance-hall girls. Jacks pointed out a little turquoise porcelain poodle sitting at cartoonish attention with a great drooping mustache and a green collar, a figurine that Art had sometimes played with on the nights spent hiding from his father. Jacks blew at its sooty halo, saying, “You used to like him a lot, right, Art?”

  “Sure,” said Art.

  “Hey, you want to keep him?”

  “No, Uncle Jacks, thanks. You keep him for me. I don’t want to break it.” Jacks nodded approvingly at that.

  Art sat with Dion and Bets on the bed and looked at Jacks across a room where the changes of the world seemed completely absent and ignored, where even the war was distant and somehow minor. Art felt his family well up within him, wanting desperately to be spoken. Jacks was the only person he had seen since the argument who knew his father, who knew what it meant to be cowed by him and yet for some reason hopeful of the mystical and unknown blessing that was his approval. In that way, it occurred to him now, they were more like brothers, and for a moment he felt almost desperate to talk about the thing they shared, especially when Jacks said suddenly with an attempt at indifference that was as close as he ever came to guile, “So how’s your pop? Is he bald like me yet?”

  Art felt as if he had passed a test when he managed to say instead that in fact he was there because he needed to talk to his mother, asking if he couldn’t have the phone number for Mr. Helms. He was about to offer an explanation, unsure even as he breathed in to fuel his speech if he would tell the truth or not, but Jacks was already nodding and standing and pointing at a pencil mark on the wall by the door, shouting, “I got the number for Helms, yeah. He’s my manager, you know, so I got that.”

  Jacks found an old envelope and wrote it down for him. Art was reluctant to break the spell of relief. He held the slip of paper in his fingers like a talisman, so bewitched he was unable to make the gestures required to leave. There was something too comforting about being in someplace so familiar, and even in a sense for what was the familiar reason: to escape his father. The same room, the same colors; he found even the same sounds as when he had hidden there before, when he had been a child sliding with his toys under the bed disguised unsuccessfully as a sofa with all around him Jacks’ barrel-shaped voice, reassuring and steady. He sank through the soft familiarity of it for a moment. Dion had found an old screen magazine on the bedside table and, as if to fill Art’s silence, he and Jacks were discussing the black-and-white movie stars, people whose names Art only vaguely recognized, Claudette Colbert and Jean Harlow. Art listened as he might to a song in a foreign language until he realized that Bets was making faces at him that said it was time for them to go.

  Jacks had no phone in his room, and Art didn’t have the strength to ask Mrs. Lakatos to use the one in the hall. Art again politely refused to take the blue poodle, but he hugged the big man before they headed outside, pressed his face to the broad sternum like a boat’s prow. Dion shook Jacks’ hand and said, “It was very nice to meet you,” with a courtesy that he rarely displayed, even going so far as to call him sir.

  When they got outside Dion lit a smoke and said, “Hey, man, Jacks is beautiful. I could see he really cares about you, cares about your family. And he’s got that natural innocence, right?”

  Art said, “I guess,” but Dion as always saw straight into him, and said, “No, that’s wrong, Art: don’t get hung up like that. I know people probably look down on him because he’s not so bright, and sure, I mean, obviously that’s true, but talking to someone like Jacks—it’s like a hotline to reality. Can you imagine your uncle Jacks in there ever feeding someone a line? There’s no games with a guy like that, no faking, no scams. Just the truth as best he can understand it, you know. Nothing else.”

  When Dion walked ahead, Bets said quietly, “Dion has a brother—a half brother, really. He’s like your uncle Jacks, only more, if you see what I mean. When we were fighting the other night, me and Dion, it’s because I was trying to convince Dion to head to Canada or Mexico. Well, to go anywhere, really, that isn’t jail or Vietnam. But he won’t skip out because of his brother. I mean, because he’s worried he could never come back, and so he might never see his brother again.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “He doesn’t talk about it much.”

  Art wanted to apologize suddenly for how little he had tried to learn about Dion, or about Bets, really, either. He had somehow thought of them as existing only now, today, without a past, a kind of forever that made them free from the chains of family and history, all the things that on Art hung so heavily that he imagined others could simply sense them, that they were built into his body in the form of his cleft palate, his pale skin that burned in the sun, the limbs that he struggled to control and that never responded with the strength he needed from them. The puppy doesn’t ask questions, it
just follows you home, he thought. All that had mattered was that Dion and Bets were the opposite of what he was, that they were the brave and confident people who occupied the park, who knew people and places, who took him in when he needed to escape his father. Realizing his mistake he felt something like the mixture of disappointment and relief and illumination he had experienced when he first understood, in a moment that was prolonged and vague and yet somehow still sudden, that other people’s families took photos, that they looked at them and shared them and kept them in books. Those were books that would never be found in his house because what past his parents had—his father’s war, his mother’s family—was forgotten by paternal decree, the terrible weight of which could never be shifted. “Does he live with someone, like cousins or something?” he asked Bets. “The brother, I mean.”

  “That’s the worst of it,” Bets said. “Dion couldn’t take care of him, and it kills him. I think that’s why he doesn’t like to talk about him. He really did try, you know, but you can’t reason with someone like that when he gets worked up. Dion says he’s as strong as Hercules. He busted up their apartment a whole bunch of times. They kept having to move because of the landlords, you know. Then I guess he kind of busted Dion up one night. He didn’t mean it, but that’s how it is. Sometimes intention just doesn’t matter. He’s in this hospital kind of place now in Maryland. It tears Dion up, you know, thinking of his brother living there, alone. Anyway, I think Jacks reminded him of his brother a bit.”

  Dion was waving, calling to them. He had found a pay phone.

  Art didn’t remember passing out. He recalled talking with Mr. Helms and trying to sound confident, even though he was aware Mr. Helms didn’t care, that the man just wanted to get to the point and hang up, and afterwards he and Bets and Dion had tried to cut across some empty lots bleached colorless by the summer, where the sun had jumped up at him from the caked flints of glass and the beer-can tabs that studded the ground. Now he was inside where it was cool, lying down on something with vinyl upholstery that stuck to his sweaty face. People talked nearby.