I was looking into the darkness beyond Ninth when I saw him out of the corner of my left eye, coming hard up the scoop of another underground garage. He was a big man with a big head and he lumbered: a bull in a field, moving, gaining momentum, his body shaking on its rumbling frame. The dark-haired man had on the kind of short blue jacket that mechanics wear, soiled with grease; a gray sweatshirt under it, blue pants and heavy work boots. He had something in his hand, and without warning, without changing his dull expression, he lifted his arm over his head to bring that thick wrench down on me.
I turned and moved hard toward him and he caught me across the shoulder with his wrist and forearm, and he tried to grab me with his left arm, but I got underneath him. But as I stepped back to square up, he slammed me in the left shoulder with the flat side of the wrench and I went to my right, stumbling, and I hit the post of a street sign hard and it snapped against my back and scraped the side of my face. He came at me, this imposing man; his purposeful scowl chilled me, and when I came away from the sign, I threw a right at his stomach. It hurt him and he stopped but he didn’t quit.
And there was my shot and I took it, springing at him and driving my right to the center of his face. And I knew I got him. The blood flowed hard, across his lips, his broad chin.
He quickly gathered himself, but his nose was hurt bad and he was confused. He swung the wrench again, but he missed and his right flank was exposed. I drove a left into his ribs, then another.
The wrench flew out of his hand and smacked the cold sidewalk with a sharp clang. He looked down, he looked up at me. And then he lunged at me. His move was awkward—he seemed to want to grab my head with his two big hands. I ducked, but then he surprised me: He brought his right hand back quickly and I raised my hands, but he looped an uppercut into my stomach. And I went down hard, landing on my knees. And there was the wrench, inches from my left hand.
Gasping for air, I threw up my right forearm to protect the side of my face against a blow and, at the same time groped for the wrench. But the blow didn’t come and when I risked peering up, I saw he was running toward Ninth. He had a cumbersome gait, as if he had to throw his legs forward to keep moving: Karloff running, an unexpected image in my hazy head. As I tried to rise to catch him, I realized I was hurt. My wind was gone and there was something wrong where I’d hit the metal street sign. For no reason now, I reached for the wrench, brought it toward me, then collapsed onto the pavement. I brought my legs toward my chest and I saw the jutting cornices of the brownstones below the night’s first stars before I turned my head and felt the cold concrete on my face.
A gangly garage attendant helped me to my feet, but he wasn’t really interested.
“I heard, but I ain’t seen,” he explained.
“He came from your place,” I said. “Did—”
“I ain’t—”
“Did he park with you?”
“No one’s come in since I went on at four o’clock,” he said. “Out, but not in.”
The students from the Aladdin, who were speaking what sounded like Dutch, were more curious than frightened.
A pretty blond girl in a pink sweater looked at me with sympathy. She had a round head and pale eyes.
“Taxi,” I said.
The wrench dangled at the end of my arm. A thin stream of blood trickled down the side of my face from the wound near the edge of my right eyebrow.
The blood on the sidewalk came from the big man’s shattered nose.
“Taxi?” she repeated.
The attendant turned away.
“Ja,” I said, “bitte.”
She smiled.
I knew two words in German. Amazing that they would both be useful now.
“I want to go home,” I added as I dabbed at the small wound near my eye.
SIX
Stravinsky’s Concertino for String Quartet was playing on WNYC. The Tokyo String Quartet, recorded in Prague. The work of a Russian-born composer played by Japanese musicians in the Czech Republic. How about that? Small world.
“Dad, stop fidgeting.”
I was at the dining-room table, shirt off, and my daughter was applying peroxide to my right shoulder. That damned sign had caught me good: gash at the eyebrow, slice at the shoulder, bruising near both wounds. The welt on my left flank hurt only half as much.
The first-aid kit rested atop Bella’s manuscript. Zuppa di vongole burbled on the stove and the scent of clams, garlic and fresh tomatoes wafted around the room.
“What time did the cop leave?” I asked, checking on McDowell, who was trying to check on me.
“I looked out at about five-fifteen and he was gone,” she replied as she tore open a Band-Aid. With her teeth.
“Did he see you?”
“Peephole,” she uttered impatiently. “Dad, I’m trying to concentrate here.”
“Sorry.”
I’d had the cabbie drop me off at North Moore and, to get the long view, I came up the west side of Greenwich. If McDowell was out front of our house, I was going to go back to the Tilt to clean up before I headed home. I didn’t want Mango to know about the assault, which was not random, which was planned by someone who expected me to visit the Avellaneda, which was executed by a cretinous son of a bitch who was due a first-class ass-kicking.
Tearing at a second Band-Aid, Bella asked, “How are you going to get the handkerchief back to that girl?”
My daughter, who bought Bobbie Brown eyeliner and asked if her weekend curfew could be midnight, still said “hankachiff.”
“I think she considers it lost,” I replied.
“It’s pretty. I mean, without the blood. It matches my dress for Saturday night, kind of.”
“You got something? Good.”
“Mrs. Figueroa was no help, but the people at Ancient Artifacts are so incredible. …”
A used-clothes shop on Broadway near NYU. “And it’s pink?”
“You’ll see.” She tapped me on the shoulder, away from the wound. “We’re done,” she said, with pride.
I stood. I ached.
“You sure you don’t want me to do your eye?”
“It’s all right.” A scab had begun to form.
“Get dressed,” she instructed as she took the handle of the first-aid kit. “I’ll get dinner.”
Bella slid a clamshell into the communal bowl between us.
As I showered, she’d decided we’d forgo the pasta and have the clams with chunks of the round loaf of bread Mrs. Maoli had scored in Little Italy and an escarole salad Bella had made. My daughter likes escarole; the sweet girl likes a bitter leaf.
She poured me another glass of Il Sodaccio, a signal that it was time to leave our discussion, such as it was, of her Global homework. “Global” in the sense that the class was designed to contemplate a basic tenet of human existence. Bella and her classmates were spending the year mulling a question posed as the first semester opened: “When did people start to want more than they need?” Thus far, the discussion had encompassed Proverbs, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, the stories of the Panchatantra, the Tao Te Ching and The Canterbury Tales. The question was superfluous, since the answer preceded recorded history, but the class introduced Bella and the others to the idea that a fundamental moral precept—Crudelitatis mater est avaritia—transcends race, language, geography, time. I thought it was a great idea for a class; I loved it. I loved it so much that Bella told me to butt out.
Remembering the curriculum, I asked if Hamlet or Great Expectations was next.
“Hamlet,” Bella said, as she sent a shell clattering into the bowl.
“I know Hamlet.”
“Yes,” she replied dryly. “I know.”
I tried to lighten things by suggesting she invite her Global Studies teacher’s aide to be Diddio’s date. “Why don’t you see if you can fix him up with Ms. Reynoldo?”
You are a dunce, Bella’s sidelong glance told me. A high school teacher, no matter how extraordinary, wasn’t for her Diddio.<
br />
“He’s going to win, you know,” she added.
She watched as I took a bite of the bread, rich with olive oil, basil and a delicate trace of clams.
“Watch the love handles, Dad.”
“Love handles? I think not.”
She smiled wryly, then said, “Do you even know why Dennis was nominated?”
“What is your nightly quota on insults, Bella?”
“Er, no more?”
Of course, I knew why the New York Rock Critics Association had nominated Diddio for Best Feature article. He’d covered last January’s reunion of the surviving Beatles, the $500-million benefit at the Garden1 that turned out to be George Harrison’s last public performance, and had written a piece for the Sunday Times’s Arts & Leisure section. His hook: He sat in the pit with security, faced the audience and described their reaction to the show. I had to admit it was a terrific story, one of expectation and dedication, of the transforming power of pop music. And, mid-story, he found in the crowd Harrison’s wife and son, who knew full well that he was critically ill with the cancer that would kill him 11 months later. Each time the fragile Harrison approached the microphone to sing or stepped into the spotlight to play a guitar solo, his wife and son seemed to hold their breath in fearful anticipation. But by the show’s end, they were cheering joyfully, as were the adoring Beatles fans who surrounded them.
“Maybe I ought to change the subject,” I said. “You want to hear about my day? Pretty interesting.”
“There something more interesting than almost getting your head taken off?”
“In fact, I had a real This is Your Life afternoon.”
“Before my time.” She taunted me with a pretty smile.
“Bella, why are you so damned chipper tonight?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. The dinner with Dennis. Friends. Stuff.” She used the tongs to put lettuce leaves, glistening with red-wine vinegar and olive oil, and rings of red onion in her bowl. “Just stuff.”
“As I was saying, I went past the Garden—”
“Site of past glories.”
“And I was by Lincoln Center.”
She stopped, put down the tongs. “You went there?”
“No, I mean I was by Lincoln Center,” I amended. “A man suggested I take the subway.”
“Did you?” Then she quickly answered her own question. “No.”
“I’m just saying I was there. That’s all.”
She sensed an opportunity. “Maybe you should, you know,” she said, as conviviality shifted to forced informality. “I was thinking maybe we should.”
She turned to face me, brought up her leg, and placed her foot on the chair. Her baby blue socks had ducks on them.
“Oh, Bella. They’re not there.”
“We don’t know that, Dad.”
I shook my head. “I know.”
“Maybe we would have a very, very clear sense of them.”
I disagreed. “I think you’re more likely to find them here than where they were killed,” I said.
“But they’re not here. Not much.” She looked down. “Not often.”
“Bella, we’d be like those people, you know, who come down here to stare up at the empty sky, up where the towers used to be.”
“That’s bad?”
“I suppose not. But it’s not very practical.”
She turned to me. “Dr. Harteveld says—”
“I’m sure she does,” I said. “Of course she does.”
“Dad, she’s right. We should go. We should.”
“Maybe so. Probably we should.”
The concession seemed to please her. Or she wanted to stop it before I began to slide. She is a very astute girl, acutely aware. Compassionate, ever thoughtful. And we’d done this many times before. I don’t know why I start, and yet I do. It is always on my mind.
“And it would be practical, Dad,” she added as she returned to her meal. “You spend $100 a day on taxis now. Get a Metrocard. Fifteen bucks.”
I wasn’t going underground. My wife and son aren’t there. But bad, bad things are. I don’t want to confront bad, bad things I cannot see. I’ve had enough of that.
Threaten me with a hulking, fire-breathing man swinging a wrench. I’ll make him scramble.
A subway platform, the muck near the tracks. A baby cries. A woman screams. A man who could save them is not there.
“Dad, you’re bleeding.” She pointed to the corner of my eye.
I treated Bella to a strawberry waffle cone for dessert and we came back along Greenwich, quietly enjoying the purple streaks of clouds, the narrow sliver of moon, the unexpected serenity that, for the moment, brought a sense of optimism. “Look,” Bella said, her young voice suddenly full of wonder as she pointed toward the TriBeCa Grill, “limos. They’re back.”
“You think it’s going to be OK, Bella?” I asked her. I noticed The Red Curry, a once-popular Thai place, had closed early.
“I know it’s going to be OK,” she replied.
“Really?” I handed her another paper napkin.
“We’re going to make it OK,” she said confidently.
I didn’t ask her who “we” were. But I wasn’t unaware that Bella, despite the loss of her mother and brother and the death of hundreds of neighbors, their families and friends, insisted on believing that willing something could make it so.
“You still want to go to basketball camp this summer?”
Strawberry ice cream against her lips, she looked up at me and nodded.
I owed it to her to let her get out of here, to get away from death and obsession, from a city still uncertain, still struggling to recover.
“I’ll miss you,” I said.
“So that means I can go?”
We crossed Jay. “Let’s see how your report card turns out.”
She smiled. Only disinterest would keep her grades from perfection, even at Walt Whitman, a challenging school for so-called gifted kids.
“Maybe I’ll see if I can get a job up there as a counselor,” I added.
“Dad—”
“Just kidding.”
When we returned home we went our separate ways. I took my running shoes and padded toward the living room sofa while my daughter bounded upstairs to her on-line chat rooms, her e-mails, her CDs that seemed to sprout like weeds. No, an inept metaphor: Her CD collection may seem to grow inexplicably—the not-so-hidden hand of Diddio, explicably—but it is immaculately arranged. J&R Music World should be so well organized.
I was too worn out to give Sinclair Lewis his due, so I stretched out on the couch and clicked to search for the NBA playoffs. The next sound I heard was Bella’s quick, almost perfunctory “’Night, Dad.” Waking, shifting to stand, I managed a guttural reply and, with my shoulder screaming and temple thumping, I cut the TV, stood up and went past Marina’s work to the kitchen to shut down the house. I reset the first-floor alarm and, after grabbing a cold bottle of Badoit, told myself it was only my imagination; that the kitchen nightlight wasn’t casting a spot on Bella’s pages. Moving through dull gray, I grabbed the creaking banister to climb toward my bedroom.
I had awakened from my short sleep on the sofa in a melancholy mood brought on, I concluded, by that simple sentence—“I’ll miss you.” And as I reached the top step, I realized, once again, that time had been lost and no longer was I needed to tuck her in, to check up on her after she’s fallen asleep, to retrieve her stuffed animal Moose and slip it back under her arm or return her book to her nightstand, wipe off her brow on a warm night, adjust her Phish throw when it’s cold.
I came to a stop outside her closed door.
She has her own life now, her own sphere, confidences. Neither child nor woman, my daughter lives in a netherworld by choice, by circumstance. But not alone: She is with friends, schoolmates, teachers, teammates, coaches, shopkeepers in the neighborhood who remember her preferences, thin librarians in turtlenecks, women who take her to buy party dresses, Harteveld, Mrs. Maoli.
She has her satisfying memories of Papa in Foggia, her aunt Rafaela amid her cut peonies, sunflowers and African daisies, her cousin Nino. Sweet, melodic lullabies sung in whispers by her mother. Her baby brother in an old-fashioned woven bassinet.
“Why is he wearing a dress?” she asked, on her bare toes to peer in to see him.
I know she’s taken the subway. She took it with Diddio to see some band at Roseland. He wasn’t supposed to tell me. It slipped, “Oops. Oh, shit. T, man.” Now I’m not supposed to tell her.
Bella and I share secrets, sometimes. Sometimes not.
Here’s one of mine: I regret every time in those lost years when she looked at me with wide, inviting little-girl eyes that said, I need somebody now, Dad, I need you.
If I had held her then, if I had brushed aside her tears by kissing her soft cheeks, stroking her hair, taking her small hands in mine, simply holding her …
I mean, there is something between us now, something real but unseen, something immutable, that keeps us apart, even when she is tending to me, patching my wounds, listening to my stories and deciding what they really reveal. Even when she is at my side, eating strawberry ice cream or trying to spin a basketball on her index finger.
I stood outside her bedroom door. All was quiet in our house.
There was a handmade sign, PLEASE KNOCK, on the door, the letters surrounded by stickers of butterflies, hearts, puppies.
“Hey, Bella,” I whispered. “You awake?”
“Just about.”
I put my hand on the wood. “Thanks for helping me before. You know.”
“No prob.”
“OK,” I said. “Good night, little angel.”
“’Night, Dad.”
I waited. I went toward my room.
It’s my job to make sure the nightlight in the bathroom is on.
He was in front of my house when I returned from my three-mile run, vapors spewing from his tailpipe violating the morning mist, the V-8 growling as if it needed attention.
Why couldn’t one of the state troopers who patrol TriBeCa’s streets come and drag him away?
A Well-Known Secret Page 9