Happy Family

by Tracy Barone

  Truth Is

  Gerry Dempsey’s neighborhood in Howard Beach is lower middle class but tidy, with rows of multifamily red-brick houses decorated with blinking Christmas lights. Cheri watches two kids in braids hand-clap while singing “Miss Mary Mack” on the little patch of asphalt they call a backyard. “You’re sure you’re going to be okay getting here?” he asked at the end of their stilted conversation yesterday, after she’d worked up the nerve to dial his number. “I can come to you if you want.” He told her to call when she reached his address and he would come down to meet her. She doesn’t have to call because he’s outside waiting, waving a gloved hand at her just in case she doesn’t know who he is. She would have known. He looks older than his driver’s license picture and taller. He’s got her under-chin and a boxer’s stance. She extends her hand as she approaches, but he goes in for the hug. He steps back and looks at her, holding her shoulders. Then, as if he worries he’s overstepped the bounds, he drops his arms. He awkwardly points to the front door of his building. “Cold out here,” he says, drawing out his vowels in a classic New York accent. “Let’s go upstairs, huh?

  “Gerry,” he says opening the door to his apartment, “call me Gerry,” although Cheri hasn’t called him anything yet. She hasn’t even thought about what to call him—certainly not Dad. Now that she’s inside, it strikes her just how weird it is to be forty-one years old and meeting the man who spawned her. “You’re very pretty, like your mother that way.” She doesn’t even begin to know what to do with that comment; she can tell he’s nervous. She tries her nicest smile.

  “Where are my manners—you want a beer? Coffee?” She says she’ll have a beer; now she’s nervous. He goes to fetch it. He has flowers in a little green vase on his kitchen table, the kind you get as a mixed bunch in the supermarket. As he hands her a cold bottle of Bud, she notices he’s wearing a St. Christopher’s medal. His eyes were probably once clear blue, but they’ve grown milky with age. He must have been blond because his eyebrows are barely visible now. His hair is white and thinning. The cleft on his chin is scarred over from—what, a bar fight? And he’s got the ruddy cheeks of a drinker. They go to the living room and sit.

  Is she seeing this right? He takes a pull on his beer and purses his lips around the bottle then keeps them pursed for a moment afterward, just like she does. They both take another drink. He does it again. He makes a comment about how people say Bud is piss water but he likes it. She cracks wise about no limes or imports for her, which makes Gerald laugh, just a bit too loudly. Cheri tries to take in as much of the place, and him, as she can. He leans forward and starts: “I told everything to that lady you hired. Some surprise that call was, let me tell you! All I know is this: I’d have wanted to know about you back then. But what could I do, I didn’t know?” Cheri nods—nothing he could have done. She’s taken aback by his admission, and not entirely sure if she should believe him. He clears his throat and continues. “I thought you’d want to know about your mother.” Cheri thinks about Cici, the only mother she’s known.

  “Let’s call her Miriam,” Cheri says. “Do you know her last name?”

  “Never did. I met her in Trenton. Nice girl. Looked a little on the young side, though she told me she was twenty. Pretty, with dark hair and weird eyes like yours—no offense. Had a feeling she was far from home and not going back.”

  “Do you know anything about her family? Sisters, brother? Where she came from?”

  “All she said was that her mother was foreign. Can’t for the life of me remember where. Somewhere exotic, but not too exotic. Could have been from one of those crazy countries like Russia or Iraq, for all I know. Miriam didn’t stick around long. Not that I would have kicked her out of bed for eating crackers. I told her she could stay with me as long as she liked. I’d help her get a job.”

  “And that was it? She just left and you didn’t know where?”

  “She took off without a word. No note even. I went out to get cigarettes and, boom, she was gone. Never heard from her again. Certainly not about being knocked up.”

  “I guess the clinic couldn’t find you. Did the PI tell you that it was because of a spelling mistake with your name?”

  “Yeah, can you believe? Avoid hospitals at all costs. Guy I know went in for his appendix, got his gallbladder taken out.” She spies some Hustlers poking out from under a stack of old TV Guides on the coffee table between them. Gerry phumphers and laughs before quickly shuffling them farther under the stack. She asks a few more questions about Miriam: Did she mention going to high school, talk about a job she had or wanted to have? He doesn’t know or can’t remember. “Oh, but she liked chocolate, and those wafers, what do you call them?” He snaps his fingers. “Neccos.” Cheri notices a few dusty photographs in frames on the rickety bookshelf next to a few paperback crime books. “Mind if I take a look?” she asks as she gets to her feet.

  “Sure, kid. Look at anything you want.” Her eye is drawn to a picture of cops in dress uniforms, lined up. A younger Gerry is receiving a medal.

  “Is this you?” she asks, pulse quickening.

  “Yeah. That was for my nephew, Medal of Valor. Died in the line of duty. He was my sister Janice’s kid, I raised him after she passed.” He takes the photograph from her and dusts it a bit with his sleeve. “Closest thing to a kid of my own, Mikey was.” He pauses, catching his slip. “Of course, I didn’t know about—” She holds up her hand. “It’s okay,” she says, then adds, “I’m sorry about your nephew.”

  “Yeah. What are you gonna do.” They share a nod. Her mind is buzzing; all these men in the photographs—Christmas morning, fishing in the Rockaways, weddings—are stamped in the Eddie Norris mold. Men whose square shoulders and broad backs cry out to wear navy blue uniforms, caps at that straight-down-the-middle angle that signals a deep knowledge of the creed, membership in the tribe. She’d had the same sense of pride and duty when she was wearing that uniform. “That there’s my old man with his brothers. Think I got one of his pops somewhere, never knew him,” Gerry says, rummaging.

  “All the men in your family were cops?”

  “Yeah, typical micks, huh? Whole family of cops, except for yours truly. Those two jokers in uniform there are my younger brothers, Johnny and Odell, both retired, living the good life off their pensions.” He keeps looking for the picture of the paterfamilias, going on about all the noncop jobs he’d tried to do: speed-reading teacher, handyman, carnival barker, janitor, typewriter salesman, drunkard. “What did you expect?” he says. “You probably didn’t think I’d be a lawyer or have a fancy job. Guess you could say I was the odd man out.” What did she expect? Not mick cops. Her stomach’s doing loop-the-loops. She comes from a long line of cops. Maybe heeding the call to join the NYPD was less an act of rebellion and more a return to her roots. She can’t help but laugh.

  “I say something funny?” he asks, slightly bewildered but wanting in on the joke.

  “No,” she says, putting her hand over her mouth. “Not at all.”

  “You laugh when you’re nervous? That’s me, do it all the time. It’s gotten me in trouble my whole life.”

  She nods. They drink their beers. She asks a bit more about Johnny and Odell, and they talk about Howard Beach, the way the city has changed so much in the decade she’s been away.

  “Sheesh,” he says, slapping his hand to his forehead. “I almost forgot to ask how things turned out for you. You got a husband? You work?” Cheri pauses, thinking about how to answer.

  “My husband died. I did a few different things in my life. Looking for the next one. But it all turned out all right.” She considers, for a moment, telling him about her time in the NYPD. But that would invite conversation about other parts of her life, and she isn’t ready for any of that.

  “Sorry about your loss,” he says. They sit and nod at each other. “Here’s mud in your eye,” he says, tipping his bottle to her, knocking back what’s left. The red Budweiser clock on the wall above their heads ticks.
They slip back into an awkward silence.

  “Well,” she says, “thanks for the beer.”

  “You want another one? Can I get you something else?”

  “No, thank you. I should get going.”

  “Look, you came here all the way from Chicago,” he says. “If you want to get together again…I mean, meet up later or whenever…I’d like that.”

  “Okay. Well, the door is open now. And I get to New York from time to time.”

  “Okay, then,” he says. They both rise and walk to the front door. She reaches for her coat but he takes it off the coat stand and holds it out for her. As she’s about to leave, he reaches in his pocket and pulls out some bills wrapped in a rubber band. “Let me give you something for a cab or…for yourself. I’d like to give you something.” This gesture, his hand holding out the bills and the look in his eyes, makes her sad and a little ashamed. It makes her want to stop, maybe share a little more of herself.

  “I’m good,” she says, “but thank you. Thank you for meeting me. We can talk again sometime, okay?” At that, he smiles. A few minutes later, as she’s walking down the street, she has the desire to turn around, like a little girl, to see if he’s still there.

  There’s nothing like a dive bar to make time stand still, and it’s good to know that as much as her old neighborhood has changed, she can still count on Double Down. It’s a narcoleptic remnant of the Lower East Side’s grittier past with a barely ambulatory clientele in bad Santa hats. The floor is sticky, the beer shitty and cheap. Someone puts Etta James on the jukebox. She hasn’t told Cici she’s in town; it would break her heart to know what Cheri was doing here. But before Cheri leaves New York, there’s one more stop to make. The PI also tracked down the foster family who’d briefly taken her in before her adoption. The father is deceased and the mother is in a nursing home, but she’s been given the address of a William Beal in Asbury Park. He must be a relative. She’s been trying the phone number listed for him. No one answers and it doesn’t go to voice mail. William Beal could be out of town. But there’s only one way to know for sure. Tomorrow she’ll take the Path to Hoboken and, from there, rent a car and meander down the shore to Asbury Park.

  As Cheri is walking to her hotel, she calls Cici. There is so much she wants to say, but she can manage only a hoarse “Thank you.”

  “For what? Is everything okay? You are not back in the depression?”

  “I’m fine,” Cheri says, realizing it’s actually true. “But I wasn’t, when you came to Chicago. I was an asshole. And you helped me. So thank you.” There is silence on the other end of the phone. Cheri presses it closer to her ear.

  “Cici. Mom? Are you crying, don’t cry—”

  “No, no.” Cici’s voice is thick with emotion. “All I ever want to do is help, cara. Thank you for allowing this. I love you.”

  “I love you too,” Cheri says. When she hangs up, she feels the weight of gratitude. But also an edge of guilt, as if she’s betraying Cici, the mother who had actually wanted her.

  The Jersey Shore has a magical loneliness in winter. As she drives, she can see the Twin Lights lighthouse behind her, Sandy Hook to the left, and the monochromatic gray ocean ahead. It’s the flip side of Malibu. If she turns her head she can make out the New York City skyline winking. Her axis of origin is all here. She thinks of the circumstances of her birth, how Cici said Sol had brought her back from what she’d assumed was an orphanage. Now she knows it must have been from the Beals’. She thinks of the freakish coincidences, that, despite her being raised by Sol and Cici, she ended up becoming a cop. Was that in her genetic predisposition, like hair color or being right-handed? If there is a God, He hides knowledge where we least expect to find it: in ourselves. Is the knowledge of who we are in our DNA? The genetic code passed down through the family, with the lies and half-truths we tell each other to protect the hope that each generation might be better, make fewer mistakes than the one before? Are the lies even necessary to survive? Was this why she didn’t have a child? Was her infertility a manifestation of her deepest fear—the fear that she’d be perpetuating something she herself did not know, was afraid to face? “I could have told you that,” Michael would have said. But maybe she needed to find out herself.

  She stops in Sea Bright. The town is mostly boarded up, but she finds a lone fish shack that’s open. The chowder is some of the best she’s ever had. There’s a cold drizzle that starts and stops but she needs to stretch her legs and walk down the boardwalk a bit. The beach is deserted except in the distance there’s a huddle of parkas. As she gets closer she sees a group of older men and women. They strip down to bathing suits and put on caps, slap their white flesh, and start running into the frigid water. She’d heard of people swimming in the Atlantic in winter, but seeing them do it is something else. “Come in, the water’s fine,” someone shouts. She is moved by the audacity of these old people, the brilliance of their bodies as they bravely skip into the sea and bob under. Cheri ties to picture herself skinny-dipping in the ocean at that age. Who would she be surrounded by?

  She decides to try the Beal number one last time before she’s forced to go pound on his door or canvass the neighbors. She’s about to hang up after the fifth ring when she hears “Yeah?” He’s got a deeper voice than she imagined. She’s so surprised he answered it takes her a minute to say something. “Who is this?” the voice demands after a few seconds of silence.

  “Is this William Beal?”

  “Billy, yeah, what do you want?”

  “I’ve been trying to reach you,” Cheri says. “Ellen Jameson, the PI who contacted you about a year ago, gave me your number. About the baby your family fostered in August 1962?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “And what’s that got to do with you?”

  “I’m that baby,” she says.

  When he speaks again, his voice is flat so she can’t get a read on him. Billy. That’s what you called a kid. By now he should have become a Bill or a William. He’s fifty-seven years old, divorced, works as a super for apartment buildings. He tells her he’s working, but he should be home sometime “around six.” If he wasn’t there, she was to buzz number 225 and a Mrs. Crenshaw would let her in to wait for him. When she hangs up, she figures there’s a fifty-fifty chance he’ll even show. He wasn’t exactly forthcoming on the phone.

  The address is north of the train station, in a part of town that looks like it’s halfway between gentrification and Baghdad. His apartment building looks like renovations started and then stopped. There’s still scaffolding on one side and plastic over a few windows. “I got to go to work,” says Mrs. Crenshaw, letting her in the front door. “But you look okay to me. He doesn’t have anything worth stealing anyway. Here’s the key. Super’s apartment has no number, just go to the end of the first floor. It’s on the right.” Mrs. Crenshaw is a tall redhead wearing a cocktail-waitress outfit under a long puffy jacket. She doesn’t answer Cheri when she asks, “Did Billy say he’d be back home soon?”

  Cheri’s not thrilled about this half-assed arrangement, but she lets herself into Billy’s apartment. It’s small, sparsely furnished, and smells like medicinal Chinese herbs. He’s got a fake Christmas tree in the living room with a little tinsel thrown on it and a saggy, futon-type sofa. Two bar stools are snugged up to a plastic table in the kitchen.

  She tries calling Billy’s cell. He doesn’t answer. She might as well take off her coat. Something’s on her sleeve, something gray embedded in the fabric. Ashes. She’d been wearing Michael this whole time. She can’t find a napkin or a paper towel anywhere. But look what she does find: a midnight special, unloaded, badly in need of cleaning. There’s no ammunition, although a quick search of the kitchen reveals a bounty of interesting items. There’s a stash of what smells like very old homegrown weed, an unopened box of extra-large condoms, an extensive REO Speedwagon tape collection, tons of plastic bags tossed under the sink, and rat poison. The smell of those herbs is suddenly making her nauseated.

&nbs
p; This is taking too long. She goes to the bathroom to pee. Stuck to the mirror above the sink there’s a photograph of a boy, maybe twelve years old, in a baseball uniform posed in classic pitcher’s stance. It’s creased and dog-eared, like he carried it around in his wallet or pocket. His kid? She peeks into his medicine cabinets and barely has time to look at the prescription labels—lithium and Depakote, which she thinks are heavy-duty mood stabilizers—when she hears footsteps and a key in the lock.

  “You Cheri?” The man who must be Billy walks in and throws his keys on the kitchen table. He takes off his hat and whatever hair hasn’t receded stands up a bit from the static electricity. “You got in okay. That’s good. You want to sit down?”

  They sit at the kitchen table. The kid in the photo has his same wide gray eyes. Billy Beal smells like Irish Spring soap, not what she’d expect from a super who was working all day. “How do we do this? You going to ask me questions?” He’s been chomping on a wad of chewing tobacco; she can tell by how he talks it’s stashed in his cheek. He’s taking her in. Not kindly or unkindly. Just intently.

  “Okay, let’s start with your parents. Where are they now?” Cheri says, going into cop mode to mask the emotional investment she has in finding out about Miriam.

  “Pops died of a heart attack, and Moms is in an old-age home in Trenton.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “She’s got her good days and days she’s in total lala land. Some days she wakes up and says she’s going to open the deli.” He’s staring at her harder now.

  “Is this a bad time? You just got home from work. I can come back.”

  “Nah, it’s fine. Hey, let me ask you something. What’s your favorite baseball team?”

  “I’m not really into sports,” Cheri says, taken aback at his non sequitur.