Time passed. My sorrow for the elephant disappeared with my pimples. I graduated high school, studied business in college, and I learned to embrace the elephant story as I would a favorite gift. Now and again I’d pull it out, turn it over, admire it, enjoy pride in owning it. Who else could claim such a thing? I couldn’t remember my own circus fire story, so I would tell my father’s. I’d reveal it to friends late at night after too many shots of bourbon made my tongue dry and loose. I shared the story with women in hopes that my escape from the tent combined with my father’s dangerous history would impress them. Oftentimes it did.
But there was my first wife who asked, “If the gun was civilian issue, where did he get it?” I couldn’t say. He never kept guns in the house. She peppered her salad, said, “I’m surprised he wasn’t hurt. You’d think the elephant would have gone crazy and him standing right next to it. It might have trampled him or grabbed him with its trunk and smashed him against the ground.”
“Maybe it couldn’t see him,” I said. We both shrugged. She asked, “When he went to have his uniform cleaned, wouldn’t someone have asked how he got all that blood on it?” and “Aren’t you angry that he left you in the hospital bed for three days?” She was a persistent, questioning woman who challenged everything and accepted nothing, and maybe that’s why we’re no longer together. But her questions made me wonder about the story my father had told me on that brittle afternoon in Gray’s Tavern. I believed him, but I doubted his story.
In the basement of the Connecticut State Library there are thousands of documents that tell the story of the circus fire. Letters, photographs, government reports on onionskin paper copied with carbon. I spent days there turning fragile page after fragile page. I suffered headaches and nausea from spinning microfilm. My father’s story had brought me into the library, but I let myself lose him in the larger history of the fire. This was as close as I had ever come to knowing the world in which I burned and later became patched together by skin grafts. In the end, though, even what the library held was not enough. It was cold and lacked life. So I turned back to my father’s story, which felt closer to my own truth than any government record.
I learned that the circus did remain in Hartford with its elephants—but it rolled out of town on the railroad ten days after the fire. If it is true that my father left Italy more than a week after reading the news, traveled across an ocean, then spent two days in Hartford before visiting the circus grounds, how could he have made it in time to see the elephants? Perhaps my memory is faulty, or his was, and he left Italy earlier than he remembered. But I never found an account in any newspaper of an elephant being shot. Nor could I find any such report in police records.
I asked my mother once. It was a slushy winter day, and we sat in the living room drinking tea and eating kryszczyki—a fried confection powdered with sugar; “To remind us how beautiful is snow,” Mama said. She had retired from cleaning houses, but Papa still worked, and he was at the factory that day. I asked about the circus elephant. She smiled as if pleased and surprised. “No, of course not,” she said. When I told her the story, she laughed. “What magic! I wish he had told me.”
Now I wonder about everything. Or, more accurately, I work to decide which parts of Papa’s story are true. Because some of it is. I add to the story, and I subtract. Some days I believe he lied to distract from his failing: the three days he let us linger. On more generous days I put him at the circus grounds, weeping beneath a shade tree because all he sees is an empty field, and how could a tired meadow have caused his family such pain? Some days I set him in Italy, and I put a bloodied brick in his hand. Other days I bury the fascist in a grave, and I imagine a hole in his skull, opposite the eye socket.
My parents came together in the age of marriage and not in the age of divorce, and so they lived. I believe she came to love him—I saw hand-holding and gentle smiles as they aged—though how they survived those years before I don’t know. I think she never wanted to love a simple man, and he knew that. Perhaps in telling me his story, he tried on the cloak of mystery and found it didn’t fit, even if it was true. But he was patient, and when my mother’s love eventually embraced him, it was not a love of bodies or of mystery. It’s naive to think my telling the elephant story made any difference to my mother. It seems more likely that her love grew from need and proximity and time’s slow unfolding.
My mother died a little over a year ago. She slipped on ice outside DiPietro’s Market and afterward complained of back pain. The doctor gave her muscle relaxants, and we waited for her to feel better, not knowing an aneurysm had torn a hole in an artery. When she died, my father’s depression was acute, and because he was already crippled by the emphysema, I had no choice but to move him into a nursing home. I asked him to move to North Carolina where I lived, remarried and with a son and daughter of my own, but he wouldn’t leave Connecticut. “Whose games will I get?” he asked. “The Braves? That’s the National League!”
A mediplex in Rocky Hill was as sane a place as I could find in Greater Hartford, but pastel prints of flowers and a jukebox in the game room couldn’t disguise the small unbearable ways in which residents conceded their lives. Because of broken vertebrae, Papa’s roommate shrieked with every simple shift in his bed. A woman in a wheel-chair stopped most afternoons at the door of their room to curse my father and accuse him of adultery. And the Yankees seemed to lose every day.
He called me one evening last summer to ask that I come home. I had not seen him for three months. He could barely summon breath enough to speak. In words interrupted by coughing fits, he told me to fly to Connecticut right away. He told me wouldn’t last past the next night.
But the doctors had said Papa would live another few months at least. And I already had a plane ticket that would bring me home in a week and a half.
“You’re not dying yet,” I said. “I’ll be there in nine days.”
“Too late,” he said. “Too late.”
I told him I couldn’t arrange for the time off. I insisted that he wasn’t dying the next day. I told him it would cost too much to reschedule the plane ticket.
Those excuses hung on the line.
“All right,” he said, and he coughed awhile.
“Good night,” he said. Then he hung up.
Here is the real reason I did not go home when he called me. I was afraid. I did not want to see my father deformed and grotesque among all those others who were deformed and grotesque. I did not want to see him bloated from the steroids, wheezing through an oxygen mask, the purple capillaries in his face mapping age and pain. I was afraid to see him as a body on the verge. I was afraid to see him when he was not my father. I would visit in nine days. It would take that long to muster the courage.
The sins of the father become the sins of the son. My father did die the next day, just like he said he would. In a fluorescent-bright room, with a pitcher for his urine on the stainless steel tray beside his bed, my father tried to suck life into his lungs and life refused him. At the moment of his death I was driving along a beach in North Carolina, replaying in my head the latest disaster at work, taking for granted the pretty girls stepping out of the ocean.
Papa was buried beside Mama at St. Joseph Cemetery. Rain threatened, but never fell. The reception was held at Gray’s Tavern. Eddie Gray has retired to Florida, and he won’t fly, so he missed it, but his nephew Tom opened the doors. It’s the same bar in a lot of ways, except now there’s a television with cable mounted on the wall over where Jimmy Williams used to sit. Tom Gray likes the financial news, and he left the TV on with the volume muted during the reception. I followed my wife and daughter through the door, walking with my seven-year-old son and holding his hand. I’d wanted him with me, but he was still too young to appreciate the place. He and my daughter soon became bored, so I kissed them and my wife and gave them directions to a drugstore with a soda fountain.
Some of the workers from the mediplex came to the reception, and a few old men who s
aid they knew my father, and a woman with red hair who said my parents had once been kind to her. I recognized some names, but except for Father Harvey, I received condolences from a group of strangers. When the older ones finished shaking my hand, they retreated, backs bent, to other tables. They whispered then, and I overheard as they recalled my father’s ailments and the ailments of others—bleeding ulcers, ruptured spleens, tumors in the testicles.
I wish I could say that my grief got the better of me that afternoon and that in a rage against how the world is not supposed to be, I smashed the face of a drunk with a brick, or that I shot a bullet through that television screen. I did neither. Mine was the dull sorrow of a grown son, not the agony of a young father. Instead I listened to the old men talk of prostates and bile, their voices sounding distant almost to absence, and I wondered about my father in the mediplex that day when he hung up the phone and let his head fall to the pillow knowing that I had refused him and that he would die alone. Did he trust that this end was just? I worry that he did. The sins of the sons too often punish the fathers.
It was a short afternoon. Toward the end two laughing young women walked in, their skin tanned, hair bleached, and voices aged by cigarettes. They shouted out drink orders before Tom Gray could let them know they’d stumbled into a funeral reception. Then each of them hugged me and told me how sorry she was, and they asked about my father. I told them he had been a poor logger in Poland and a Polack factory worker in America. I would have told them more, but the shorter one squeezed my hand, and the blonder one stood and wished me well. They left me there, at my very small table, and finished their drinks at the bar, now leaning away from each other, now leaning near, whispering, their quiet laughter cutting through the cigarette smoke that swirled high and silver in the tavern’s dull light. I wanted them to stay, to laugh louder, and when I noticed the shorter one set down her empty glass and stub out the butt of her cigarette, I signaled Tom to bring them another round on me.
Boxing Snowmen
WHEN HAD IT SNOWED?
Nick couldn’t remember, a frustrating failure because clearly here was snow: days old, disheveled, wrecked by the footprints of children, newspaper carriers, and dogs, kicked about and melted in patches, not all gone but not quite there either. Sloppy, Nick thought. An unforgivable mess.
His memory, the same. How was it he could recall hurtling down the sledding hill at Goodwin Park when the kids were young, could remember the bark of metal on concrete as he shoveled those very sidewalks—the ones right there!—on an unearthly silent New Year’s morning in 1971, but from nowhere in his befogged brain could he recollect this snow’s arrival? If he hadn’t first peered through a window just now, he’d have hobbled from the house without his galoshes.
The sedan streamed pale exhaust into the dark morning, its engine ticking in the cold. These days Lena only let him back the car out of the garage, and with that accomplished he now waited while she locked the house and made her way from the back door up the flag-stone walk. “Get in the car, honey, before you freeze,” she said, taking her place behind the wheel and atop the three extra cushions that allowed her to see over the dash. “And watch you don’t slip.”
“It’s not that cold,” he said.
At the grocery store she selected a cart and had him push it a few feet while she watched the wheels to make certain none was lazy. She motioned to him in a way he understood meant this cart met her approval, so he pushed while she, with hand gripping the front right corner, steered them toward a red-tag markdown on ricotta in Aisle 17.
“Cannoli for my birthday?” he asked.
“Don’t be silly. You don’t get desserts. It’s for Franco, if he makes it. If they don’t close the airport.”
“Why would they close the airport?” he asked, though he sensed that answering would upset her.
“The blizzard, remember?” she said, her tone packed with the exasperation he had expected. “They said so on the news last night.”
“Sure,” he said, lying because he saw only a dark spot where last night should have been.
Every checkout line was clogged with old people buying in a race against the coming storm. As Nick and Lena waited, she double-checked her list: shredded wheat, grapefruit, zucchini, bottles of vitamins. “I forgot yogurt,” she said. “You stay here.”
When the cashier started to unload their cart, Nick watched for his wife, then snatched a package of peanut butter cups from the rack and showed it to the cashier, who was dark and pretty, maybe Puerto Rican, with green eye makeup that shimmered. He said, “We’ll take this, too.” Ripping the wrapper with his teeth, he shoved both cups into his mouth, then tucked the discards beneath the candy rack. The cashier grinned at him as if he were cute as the dickens. “Please,” he said, lifting a fist over his mouth to hide his chewing as he spoke. “Don’t look at me that way. I’m seventy-four, for God’s sake.”
During the drive home, traffic slowed as snow started to fall. Their car’s windshield wipers chopped side to side, erasing the flakes before they could melt on the glass, leaving it cleaner, it seemed, than even the air. Nick admired the wipers’ good work.
As he helped put away the groceries, a jar of blackberry jam fell from his hand and shattered on the floor, glass and goo everywhere.
“Now look what you’ve done,” she said, scooting beside him, using her small body to angle him out of the way.
“The thing slipped,” he said.
She stooped to pick up the larger shards. Another task. She had lived a lifetime of tasks. Days spent caring for her father, for her brother, for her children, for her husband. One after another. Laundering a kerchief into which Daddy coughed blood. Helping Gal down steps when his crippled leg was weakest. Changing diapers for Franco, ironing skirts for Denise. Now Nick, and cleaning up shattered glass and sticky jam and a thousand thousand other jobs. Lena had long ago begun imagining herself as a woman made of iron rods and pistons, a machine moving from chore to chore without rest. No time for complaint. No room for weakness. So now she ignored the damp, sorrowful fluttering in her chest and with a wet rag erased this evidence of her husband’s frailty. “It slipped,” she said. “But I have to clean it now. You go. Go read before you cut yourself and make me fetch bandages from the medicine cabinet.”
He retreated to his recliner in the living room where the radiator knocked and the newspaper waited. Even his hands failed him now. If he had ever loved any part of his body it was his hands. He held them out so he could look at the palms, study the scaly skin and the veins and hairs as if they might show mercy and explain to him this weakness. He made a fist of one and punched it into the other’s palm.
With his magnifying glass Nick skimmed headlines about the coming blizzard, snow to bury the state, winds reaching forty miles per hour, and freezing rain after dark. Turning to the sports page he read about that big heavyweight fight out in Vegas. He checked the TV listings—pay-per-view!—and clapped his hands. He remembered! He remembered talking to Franco, and he remembered Franco’s promise that for Nick’s birthday they’d go to the club to watch the fight. How long had it been since he sat with the fellas at the bar, elbows on the dark wood rail as he chowed on Italian sausages fried with peppers and onions, and the young guys found him through cigar smoke and laughter to ask for pointers on the jab, the feint, the flurry? Too long. A good kid, Franco, giving his father such a thoughtful birthday present.
“Not that it’ll be much of a fight,” he grumbled aloud.
He never understood the allure of heavyweights. Two trucks slamming into each other, and who wanted to watch that wreckage? Where was the skill? Where was the sport? From the end table he picked up a photograph clipped and framed by Lena from a newspaper some fifty years before. He read the caption though he’d read it a thousand times: “Nick DiFiore of Hartford—Welterweight State Champ.” And there he stood, yellowing forever on ancient newsprint, a skinny kid lifting lollipop arms in the air, the gloves looking like a clown’s, like e
ven for boxing they were two sizes too big. But that’s what got him by, those hands big as a butcher’s. He had speed, too, and height and reach. All those things. But not power, no. Tommy Duncan, now he had power. But Tommy had hardly touched Nick. A few hard shots to the body, nothing crippling. Tommy was New Britain tough—a line worker from the tool factory with arms like steel cords. But Nick knew how to work him, flashing jabs at the head, looking for when Tommy cocked that right shoulder for the roundhouse, then stepping away, leaving Tommy off balance and helpless to stop Nick’s counterpunches. Smart fighting. Skillful fighting. And in the ninth round Tommy quit. Just stayed in his corner. Gave the belt away. In the newspaper photograph Tommy Duncan is looking sleepy and glum while Nick DiFiore raises his stringy arms, laughing like an ape …
That had been a good fight. One of the last ones, too. Not long after, he decided Lena was right: Boxing wasn’t the way to raise a family, not in those days. But even after he quit, even after Franco and Denise, he still relished the kind of bout when somebody was so much better by skill and by practice that what was left of the other man was different, changed forever. That was a first-rate sort of destruction, a high-quality beating, and he looked for it outside the ring, too. Back in ’90, Nick had gone downtown when they imploded an insurance company tower so he could watch twenty-plus stories collapse as if into a bottomless crater because somebody knew all the right spots for the explosives.
The Greatest Show Page 14