The church was crowded, families reunited for the holiday. We squeezed into a pew near the front. I recognized Mitch and Deena Stanek with their four sons, arranged in order of height, smallest to tallest, like a set of Russian dolls. From behind, Mitch still resembled a college athlete, his thick neck and broad shoulders, his blond hair untouched by gray. I’d seen his truck parked behind the church, one of many with Virginia plates. Watching him, I was filled with an old longing I’d nearly forgotten: to be Mitch and Deena both, not now but a lifetime ago, when they were beguiling and rare.
I was thinking such thoughts when Father Veltri swept down the aisle, a portly man in white holiday vestments. He stopped just ahead of me and leaned in to touch Mitch’s shoulder, so close that I could smell his aftershave.
“Merry Christmas, Mitchell,” he whispered as they shook hands. “I have a favor to ask.” He handed over a leather-bound book, the page marked with a red ribbon: Paul’s epistle to Titus. I knew it almost by heart.
“I’d be grateful if you could read this,” said the priest. “In memory of your father. Herk would be proud.”
Mitch’s face reddened. “I’m sorry, Father. I’m not much of a public speaker.”
“Come on,” said Deena. “Pop would want you to.”
“I said no.” Mitch’s whisper was harsher somehow than if he’d shouted. Deena looked as stricken as I felt. Even then, in my secular phase, I couldn’t imagine saying no to a priest.
Father Veltri, apparently, couldn’t imagine hearing it. “It isn’t long,” he told Mitch. “Just come to the lectern after I say the blessing. I appreciate it, Mitchell.” He left the book in Mitch’s hand and swept away in a rustle of satin, a plump little swan.
A moment later the Mass started. The aging choir warbled the opening hymn. Without a word to Deena, Mitch turned his back to the altar. Stone-faced, in front of God and everybody, he marched out of the church.
I never saw Mitch Stanek again. That spring my father lost his battle with lung cancer, and I went back to Bakerton for the funeral. The day was warm and springlike, the snow nearly melted. I borrowed my mother’s car and spent an afternoon on the country roads where Dad had taught me to drive. I saw then that the Staneks’ house stood empty. They had finally moved to Virginia, enrolled their boys in school there. A Century 21 sign was spiked into the front yard.
That Christmas Eve, after church, my mother and I had ridden home in silence. The Mass had droned on for over an hour, but Mitch did not reappear. Deena had gone to the lectern in his place, her voice shaking a little on the first words: Dearly beloved, the grace of God our Savior has appeared to all men.
“He can’t read,” I said.
My mother kept her eyes on the road. A light snow was falling, and her reflexes aren’t what they once were. Driving now requires her full attention, especially after dark.
“That’s why he dropped out of college,” I said. “Drugs had nothing to do with it.”
Still she didn’t respond.
“You were his teacher.” Sophomore English: The Red Badge of Courage, The Scarlet Letter, Billy Budd, books Mitch Stanek had been tested on. His comprehension had been judged adequate. He’d been given a passing grade.
Finally my mother spoke. “He had a problem. A form of dyslexia, I believe. It was never diagnosed.” With great care, she braked and signaled. “Times were different then, Rebecca. We didn’t know about that sort of thing.”
“But he graduated.” You let him, I thought.
“It seemed best. I agonized over it at the time. Now I’m not sure it made any difference.”
I saw her point. Without a diploma, Mitch would have mined coal anyway, been laid off anyway. He’d have lost only those few months in Florida, his picture in the paper, the enduring legend the town still cherished. For Bakerton, it had been a net gain. For Mitch Stanek, the outcome would have been roughly the same.
She pulled the car into the driveway and cut the headlights. “Ed doesn’t know,” she said, and I thought of the radio in his old Buick: my father listening to the games in secret, away from my mother’s disdain, her caustic and sometimes merciless tongue. The local heroes—the Mitch Staneks—had been her favorite targets, but in the end she was not merciless. She left my father his idols. Maybe she wanted Mitch to win, just like everyone else did.
We sat a long moment in the dark car. The white flakes landed like news from heaven: notes from elsewhere, fallen from the stars.
The Bottom of Things
Ray and his second wife drove into Bakerton on a clear winter morning, in a Ford they’d rented at the Pittsburgh airport. The road snaked through mountains, alongside streams and frozen fields. Their flight had left Houston at dawn. They’d traveled a thousand miles to attend a small party at the Bakerton fire hall, to celebrate his parents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary.
The invitation had arrived one morning in the mail. When Ray came home from work that night, Evie was already on the phone with his mother: Of course we’ll come. We’re overdue for a visit. In fact, the women had met just twice, though they spoke every month on the phone. Each year Evie suggested spending Christmas in Pennsylvania, but always there was a reason not to: work; a ruptured disc in Ray’s back; the weekend ranch they’d bought and were moving into bit by bit, where they’d eventually retire. Ten years before, Ray and a buddy had quit their jobs at Exxon and started their own company, Pueblo Energy. The venture was as consuming as a new baby; time had passed without him noticing. In that time his parents had grown older; Bakerton, even farther away.
“Are we almost there? These roads make me queasy.” Evie slipped on a pair of sunglasses, red tortoiseshell. She was an optometrist and fond of jazzy frames.
“It’s just over this hill.” He hit the gas; the Ford’s motor roared. They passed the Baptist church and cemetery and climbed what, as kids, Ray and his brother, Kenny, had called Holy Roller Hill. At the top he slowed. The town lay before them in a deep valley, settled there like sediment: the main street with its one traffic light, the rows of company houses, narrow and square—some brick-cased now, or disguised with porches and aluminum siding, but at this distance you could see how alike they all were. From a few chimneys came streams of dark smoke; most had coal furnaces still. The snow had an established look—dirty at the edges, crusted over with ice. Ray accelerated, racing down the hill.
“Ooh,” said Evie, clutching her stomach.
He felt it, too, the sudden sinking in his belly. As a boy he’d loved the feeling, urged Pop to take the hill faster, waiting for the drop with dread and glee. At the bottom of the hill, he braked. The Ford handled well, a surprise: he hadn’t driven an American car in years, though he’d once worked on an assembly line building chassis for Pontiacs and Chevys. Back then, living in the Cleveland suburbs with his first wife, he’d owned a red Corvette—a car he still drove occasionally, in dreams.
The town was quiet that morning, sidewalks deserted. A single car idled at the traffic light.
“I don’t remember this,” said Evie. “Nothing looks familiar.” She’d been to Bakerton once—three years before, for his brother’s funeral. A quick trip in the middle of summer, in and out in two days.
“It looks different in the winter.” Worse, he thought, sadder and more dilapidated. Empty storefronts lined the main street. Above the abandoned train station, a punk with a spray can had defaced the old sign: BAKERTON COAL BLIGHTS THE WORLD. He avoided looking at the vacant lot where the Commercial Hotel had once stood. The place had burned down years ago, and no one had bothered to rebuild it. More and more, Bakerton looked like what it had always been, a town of churches and bars. As a young man, Ray had lied about where he came from, said Pittsburgh when anyone asked. Over the years he’d stopped lying, or maybe people had stopped asking. He’d be fifty-three in June.
His parents lived on a dead-end street at the edge of town, a narrow stretch of gravel lined with neighbors’ cars. Ray idled while a pickup truck made a three-point turn i
n the middle of the road. On Dixon Road this maneuver was performed many times each day. There was no other way to turn around.
The house was unlocked. Ray knocked lightly, then opened the door. He was a big man, six-four, and his head barely cleared the door frame. The living room was narrow and dark, crowded with furniture. Framed photographs covered the paneled walls. The front-facing window was heavily decorated—velvet drapes, ruffles, sheer curtains underneath—as if, having only one window, his mother had lavished all her attention on it.
“Anybody home?” Ray called.
“Coming,” Pop answered from the kitchen.
Ray glanced at the photos on the wall. Himself and Kenny in parochial school uniforms; Kenny in army greens and later, near the end of his life, smoking a cigarette on the back porch, in the ratty plaid hunting jacket he’d worn nine months of the year. His graying hair was long and straggly. He had the raw, windburned look of an old sea captain.
Pop emerged from the kitchen, slightly breathless. He kissed Evie and clapped Ray’s shoulder. “Hey, buddy,” he said, offering his hand. The hand was hard and wiry, half the size of Ray’s and twice as strong. “Fran took your mother to the bake sale. You got here quicker than we thought.”
“You remember Fran,” Ray told Evie. “Kenny’s wife.”
“Of course.” Evie looked pale and slightly clammy, still carsick, he supposed, from the ride. Ray sent her upstairs to take a nap, and in the kitchen he drank coffee that Pop had reheated on the stove. They talked about road conditions, the highway under construction, the Pennsylvania primaries a week away. They would never agree on politics. Pop was a lifelong Democrat, though once—after the war, out of loyalty—he’d voted for Eisenhower. I learned my lesson right there, he liked to say. The day of the inauguration, he’d lost his job driving a bread truck. No one could persuade him the events were unrelated.
“Evie’s a nice girl,” said Pop. All women were girls to him: matrons, elderly nuns; his own sisters, now in their seventies. Evie was only forty. To him she must look like a kid.
“Yeah,” said Ray. “She’s great.”
“Ever hear from Georgette? If you don’t mind my asking.” He was fond of Ray’s first wife, had worked in the mines with her father. For thirty years they’d been pinners, the first men to set foot in a newly blasted seam of coal. Pop and Red had worked as a team, spacing thick wooden posts at intervals to hold up the ceiling, then hammering the posts into place.
“No,” said Ray. “Not in a long time.”
“She calls your mother once in a while. Sends pictures of the boys.”
Ray nodded. “How are they doing?”
“Ray Junior’s got his own shop now. I guess you knew.”
“Sure,” Ray lied.
“He does all foreign cars. Hondas, Toyotas. I guess they’re better than they used to be.”
“How’s Bryan?”
“Still living at home.”
“You look flushed,” Ray said. “How’s your blood pressure?”
“Up a little, I guess. Too much excitement. The party and all.”
Outside, a dog was barking, a beagle the neighbors kept for hunting.
“It’s going to be quite a shindig. Fran invited half the town, from the sounds of it.” Pop looked down into his coffee. “It was her idea, you know. The party.”
“Nice of her,” Ray said.
“She means well. Of course, if it were up to Mom and me—” He broke off. “You know we don’t like a fuss.”
“I know.” Ray finished his coffee and stood. “I’m going to check on Evie.”
His mother had married Pop just after the war, a month after he returned from the South Pacific. At that time Ray was three years old. He had no memory of the wedding, wasn’t sure he’d even attended. Perhaps, in those days, young children were kept away from weddings (a fine idea, in his opinion). The bride’s young child, in particular, might have been kept away.
His mother was young then, barely twenty, the fifth of nine children. She hadn’t finished school, had instead gone away to New York City to work as a live-in maid, as her older sisters had done. Like most of their neighbors, Ray’s grandparents were Polish; during the Depression their daughters found work with the wealthy Jews of the Upper West Side, who preferred Polish-speaking help to keep their kosher kitchens. Ray’s mother was sixteen when she left Bakerton—terrified, probably; a small-town girl, an innocent. She traveled by train to Penn Station, her passage paid by her new employers. A year later she came back to Bakerton at her own expense—alone still, and pregnant. She had suffered; of that Ray was sure. He remembered his grandfather, silent and stern; his devout grandmother, who’d spent her final years saying rosaries, being blessed by priests.
He was born in his grandparents’ house; his grandmother, a midwife, had delivered every child in the neighborhood. His mother went to work at the dress factory in town, and Ray spent the days in his grandmother’s kitchen. He remembered a warm corner near the coal stove where he’d played, the apples she’d baked each morning for breakfast. He could recall playing in the woods with his aunts and uncles—the youngest aunt was his own age, the youngest uncle a year younger. The aunts had cried the day he and his mother drove away, their belongings in the back of a pickup truck. Looking back, he imagined it was the morning after the wedding—his mother’s wedding to Pop.
No one had told him this; he’d pieced the story together himself. In her old age, his grandmother had been confused, voluble. She cried, ranted, told stories in English and in Polish. It was my fault, she’d once told his mother, for sending you away. Ray was twelve when he found his birth certificate in a strongbox in his grandmother’s attic, the paper marked Father Unknown. (Years later, when he needed a birth certificate to register for the draft, his mother claimed it was lost. Selective Service accepted a baptismal certificate instead.) In the same box he found his parents’ marriage certificate, written in Polish by the parish priest. He noted the names and dates, and after that the world looked different to him. He himself looked different. He was a dark-haired boy, tall for his age. His brother, Kenny, was fair and blue-eyed, slightly undersized, the very image of Pop.
There were twin beds in his childhood room, each covered with a crocheted afghan. Evie lay on Kenny’s old one near the window. Six years older, Ray could remember his brother sleeping in a crib and, later, wetting the bed, waking from nightmares. “Go back to sleep,” he’d grumble when Kenny woke up crying and wanted to climb in bed with him. Ray was nine or ten, then. It had seemed to him a tremendous burden, sharing a room with a big baby.
He stretched out on his old bed, breathing deeply. He’d had asthma as a child; the attacks had stopped in his teens, but every once in a while he felt tightness in his chest. This happened mainly when he visited Bakerton—the coal heat, he supposed.
The party wouldn’t start until evening. Ray imagined his mother shy and awkward, Pop stiff and uncomfortable in a new button-down shirt. You know we don’t like a fuss. In all their years of marriage, he’d never known them to celebrate an anniversary.
Ray glanced around the room, unchanged since his last visit, the bookcase packed with his science fair trophies, his old Boy Scout manuals—Wolf, Bear, Eagle. Kenny’s posters of rock bands and fast cars had disappeared long ago. Ray didn’t blame his parents for that. They’d done all they could for Kenny. He had simply worn them down.
In the other bed Evie stirred. “Ray? How long have you been sitting there?”
“Not long.” He adjusted the pillows behind his back. “The party was Fran’s idea. So that’s one mystery solved.”
“Fran doesn’t know?”
“I doubt it. Kenny never knew.”
“How strange.” She rolled onto her side, facing him. “The secrecy, I mean. Today nobody gives it a second thought. Single mothers, kids who”—she hesitated—“kids with stepfathers.” Ray noticed she avoided using the word illegitimate. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I
don’t know if they’re ashamed, exactly,” said Ray. “We just never talked about it.”
Evie rubbed her belly. “My stomach’s in a knot. I think I’ll take a bath.” She’d been queasy for weeks; she blamed the prenatal vitamins. In two weeks she’d be in the second trimester; then, supposedly, the sickness would pass.
They had never planned on children. I’m not the Mommy type, she’d said on their first date. She was thirty then, with her own practice, nieces and nephews she adored. He had taken her to Italy, to Greece; they had learned to scuba dive. To Ray their life seemed full. He’d been stunned when she changed her mind. She didn’t want to miss it, she said. To go through her whole life not knowing what it was like.
It’s different for you, she said. You had your boys. You’ve already had that experience.
Yeah, he said. Look how that turned out.
Upstairs, water clattered into the tub; downstairs, Ray waited in the living room for his mother to return. He took a photo from the wall and held it in his lap. Himself and Georgette, dressed for the high school prom, Georgette’s arms bare, her red hair teased into a beehive, a corsage of carnations pinned at her waist. At seventeen she was somehow womanly; he, a year older, looked like a kid: slouching, his shoulders thin as a coat hanger in the rented tux. They’d driven to the dance in Pop’s truck. Ray wanted to park by the reservoir first, but Georgette refused to mess up her hair. He hadn’t yet told her he was leaving. She wouldn’t understand it. Coal was booming then, Baker Brothers mining literally day and night, the company so rich it provided a free bus service to transport the men to work. He couldn’t tell her that he feared the life unfolding before him: married to the only girl he’d ever laid, living in a company house just like his parents’, never seeing any more of the world than the town he was born in. His buddy Steve Marstellar could get him in at Fisher Body, a division of General Motors. Cleveland and its city pleasures, its exotic women, lay before him.
News From Heaven Page 14