by James Brown
She squeezes my hand. “Don’t worry,” she says. “He’s okay. He’s just a drunk.”
We make a wide arc around him. We continue down the block but I keep glancing over my shoulder at him. He doesn’t look okay to me, not at all. My mother hurries me along, and I wonder, as I turn my back to the man, what exactly a drunk is and why it is that he doesn’t deserve our concern.
We spend the night at the Travel Lodge on Beach Street. There’s only one bed in the room but it’s large enough for both of us, and I remember lying beside my mother in the dark, listening to the cars passing on the street outside the window. She has her back to me. I remember her gentle, even breathing and the warmth of her skin against mine. I don’t think she is sleeping. Even at that early age I sense that something is wrong, terribly wrong, and for a long while I also remain awake. The headlights from the passing cars outside make shadows on the ceiling, and I watch them, the different patterns, how they bend and disappear.
In the morning we have breakfast at the coffee shop next to our motel. The counter is full of men reading the newspaper, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee. We sit in a booth near the back. My mother looks tired, in no mood for the men at the counter who keep glancing her way. She dips the corner of her napkin into a glass of ice water on the table.
“Hold still,” she says.
Leaning toward me, she draws the wet part of the napkin along my cheek. The water is cold. I wince and pull away. “How you get so dirty,” she says, “I’ll never know.” The waitress brings her coffee, and afterward, when we’ve ordered and eaten our breakfast, we return to the car in the parking lot of the motel.
For most of the ride home that morning we say little. It’s still foggy out and she is concentrating on the road. Highway 101 runs parallel to San Francisco Bay, and I look out over the gray choppy waters as we drive. We pass Candlestick Park, where our father once took us to watch the Shriners’ all-star game. We pass the San Francisco airport. We pass through the sprawling suburbs of Brisbane, Burlingame and Palo Alto and then we are back, moving along the familiar streets of San Jose where again, while we are stopped for a red light, I catch a couple of men staring at my mother. They’re standing at the bus stop on the corner, and one of them whistles. I give him a dirty look. The other guy smiles at me. My mother ignores them both, and when the light changes we drive on. I’m too young to realize why men stare at my mother so much but I’ll understand when I’m older and look at some old snapshots of her.
I am looking at one now, as I write this.
It is pinned to the wall in front of me, and in it my mother, brother, sister and I are standing in front of an older Buick Special. We are squinting against the glare of the sun, and in the background you can see the wide expanse of the Pacific. I look closer at the photograph. My mother’s hair is cut short, like a boy’s, and she is wearing a white sleeveless sweater, a tight skirt, and sandals. One of her legs is posed ahead of her. Her hands are laced behind her back, and she’s leaning against the fender, smiling pleasingly into the camera.
This house is an achievement for our father, a building contractor with an eleventh-grade education, and our mother, a secretary and real estate agent who dropped out in junior high. It is Spanish style, painted white with brown trimming, the roof terra-cotta. The front lawn is neatly manicured. Inside there are three bedrooms, two baths, a den and an office. Through hard work, scrimping and saving, they have also acquired six other houses in San Jose. They buy them run-down, fix them up, then sell or rent them out. They are doing well. Marilyn and Barry attend private schools and take piano and dance lessons. We have a baby-sitter, a beautiful Mexican woman a few years older than our mother, a woman who reads to me, who makes us breakfast, makes our beds, does our laundry, shops for us and keeps our house clean.
I share a room with my brother, and when I get home that morning I find him stretched out across his bed reading. He’s always reading, it seems. Big fat books. By eleven Barry has skipped two grades. He can speak French and Spanish and his IQ tests out at 170, genius level. Someday he wants to be a movie star. Already he’s had two small roles in Equity theater in San Francisco and a walk-on in the movie All’s Fair in Love and War. This is our mother’s idea, for Barry to act, though he’s taken to it as if it were his own. He is the classic overachiever, ambitious, driven to please. As a child Barry is bone-thin, sickly and pale from lack of sun and exercise. Fun, or play as other children know it, is not an important part of his life.
My brother is reading Profiles in Courage. John F. Kennedy has recently been elected president, and Barry is a big Kennedy fan. Usually he ignores me when he’s reading, usually he ignores me in general, but this morning is different. He puts the book down and looks at me when I come into the room. I’m carrying the foxhole shovel.
“Where did you and Mom go last night?”
“San Francisco.”
“Why’d she take you?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “She just told me to come.”
“The fight wasn’t that big a deal. They’ve had a lot worse.”
“She said she had to get away from him,” I say.
He shakes his head. He picks up the book and begins to read again.
“I don’t see why,” he says. “She was doing all the yelling.” My brother and I share bunk beds. He has the lower half. I have the top. I climb up to my bed and sit Indian-style. The foxhole shovel unscrews at the base of the handle so that the blade can drop up or down, and I play with it for a while, screwing and unscrewing it. The threads are rusty and make a grating noise. I hear my brother sigh. I hear him slap his book shut and leave the room.
Maybe he worries about losing her for good. Maybe he knows that you can only fight so long before you just wear out and give up. I can’t say. I can’t say much about a lot of things that happened, or didn’t happen, between my mother and father. But he is fourteen years older than her and less volatile, less willing to meet her head-on. If he is angry about her taking me and running off to San Francisco, he doesn’t show it when he gets home from work that night. In fact, they both act as if nothing has happened. She makes dinner. He mixes drinks. They get along perfectly. At this point only our mother knows what she has done, and it surprises me, when I think about it, how calmly she is able to conduct herself that night.
There is a story about the fire in the local newspaper the next day. An old woman who lived on the top floor of the apartment died of smoke inhalation. And another old woman, who lived in the complex next door, is quoted as saying that she saw someone, a younger woman, leave the laundry room and hurry down the street and into a new Thunderbird shortly before the fire broke out. That in itself doesn’t seem like evidence enough to single someone out, let alone make an arrest, but there are details that the newspaper doesn’t print, details that will surface in court. They come for our mother a few nights later while Barry, Marilyn and I are lying on the living room floor. All the lights are out and it’s dark except for the gray-white flicker of the television. We are watching House of Wax. Our father isn’t home from work yet, or maybe he’s stopped off at a bar along the way, but our mother is there, seated on the armchair behind us. She is the first to notice them—the patrol car, its headlamps off and motor dead—roll quietly down the driveway.
“Get up,” she says. “Hurry.”
She herds us behind the couch. We crouch there, waiting. Barry is the boldest.
“What’s going on?” he asks.
“Quiet.”
“Mom?”
The beam of a flashlight shines through the living room window and lands on the wall behind us. My mother has her arm around me. She is wearing a pale blue nightgown and one strap has slipped off her shoulder. I can smell her sweat. I can hear her shallow breathing. Then the doorbell rings. Another beam from a flashlight glances across the ceiling and we hear the footsteps of one of the men on our front porch. His voice is flat, monotone.
“Mrs. Brown,” he shouts. “Mrs. Brow
n. This is the sheriff of Santa Clara County.”
From around the edge of the couch I can see the television. It’s near the end of the movie. The heroine is cornered by Vincent Price, the curator of the museum, and she pounds at his face. Only it’s a mask, and it cracks away, in chunks, like porcelain. The face behind it has been hideously disfigured by fire, the skin molten and hardened.
They do not take her that night. They do not take her the next. But they will take her soon enough with her attorney, Mr. Menken, negotiating the terms of her surrender. Before then she will have to tell our father about the charges, and she will deny them, and he will believe her because he needs to believe, because he loves her.
“I was with Jimmy,” she tells him. “We went to San Francisco.”
What she does not tell him is that they are bankrupt. That over the last year she has been forging his name and selling and mortgaging the properties they own. She does this to cover the loss of some poor investments she made without our father’s knowledge. This includes the mortgaging of our own house, though it does nothing to explain why she would burn down an apartment complex they do not own. Those are two things that none of us, except maybe our mother, will ever understand.
The Jose Theater in downtown San Jose is playing The Errand Boy with Jerry Lewis. The box office opens at eleven forty-five. The first showing begins at noon. This is Saturday morning, and our father drops us off early, a few minutes before the box office opens. He gives Barry the money for our tickets. He tells him to keep an eye on me. He tells Marilyn the same.
“Stay together,” he says. “Don’t let Jimmy out of your sight, not for a second. I’ll pick you up when the movie’s over.”
I am expecting Barry to protest, to speak out on our behalf. We do not want to see The Errand Boy. We do not want to see any movie because we know why he is doing this and it isn’t right. He has told us nothing. We have overheard nothing. Still we know things. We know them intuitively, and we resent him for it, for the silence that lies.
It’s the way our father looks at him. It’s how that look lingers, and as Barry shuts the car door and turns away, without a word, I begin to suspect that he’s a part of it, this conspiracy, this lie. I begin to suspect that as the oldest he has been taken aside, sworn to secrecy and told things that Marilyn and I are supposedly too young to understand. Our father drives off. We start for the box office. Barry grabs my hand, but I am too old to hold hands, and I pull away.
“Hey,” he says, “what’s the matter with you?”
“Nothing,” I say.
“You don’t act like it.”
“Leave him alone,” Marilyn says. “If he doesn’t want to hold hands, he doesn’t want to hold hands. Don’t force him.”
Ordinarily she sides with Barry. She is his biggest admirer, his greatest ally in a family divided by favorites. But today, on this small matter, Marilyn sides with me. We stand together in line at the box office. We sit together inside the theater and share a box of popcorn that she buys with her own money. I feel privileged, special for her attention. My sister is a shy, soft-spoken girl and I like that about her.
“Are you all right?” she asks. “You okay?”
I don’t say anything. But in the darkness of the theater, I reach for her hand.
On-screen Jerry Lewis is screaming and making grotesque, distorted faces. The audience laughs, and we laugh with them, but for us it’s not real. None of this is real. None of this is happening. If you just don’t think about it, everything will be fine, and when our father picks us up later that afternoon and drives us home she will be there, as she always is, making dinner maybe, maybe talking on the phone. But she will be there. I will tell her about the movie. I will say that it was really funny. Really crazy. And then I will go out to the backyard and dig a hole with the shovel she bought me.
I will dig for hours while our father sits alone at the kitchen table and drinks. Marilyn will lock herself in her room and cry. Barry will open another book. The hole will grow. If I dig long enough, if I dig deep enough, she will call me in for dinner. I will dig until the sky is dark.
The old woman who allegedly saw my mother leave the laundry room of the apartment complex and drive off in a new Thunderbird shortly before the fire broke out is found to have something less than 20/20 vision. She also takes several prescription medications that can adversely affect judgment and motor skills. Her age, of course, is another strike, and in the end the prosecutors for the State of California determine that she is not a credible witness. Because there are no other witnesses, and because there is no apparent motive for our mother to have started the fire, the original charges of arson and second-degree murder are dropped. Instead they prosecute and convict her for what they can prove: tax evasion. For several years running our mother knowingly failed to report the income from the sale and mortgaging of the properties she and our father owned. Her punishment is two years at the Center for Women in Alviso, California, and restitution to the federal and state governments, which cannot be paid because she has bankrupted us.
In her psychiatric evaluation she is diagnosed with a serious mental disorder, and the judge offers to reduce her sentence if she will serve her time in a state psychiatric hospital. In doing so he would allow her to return home once a month to visit her husband and children. But to accept the offer is to accept the diagnosis and our mother refuses to be stigmatized. Maybe it’s about pride. Maybe it’s about denial. The problem, if there is one, doesn’t exist if you don’t acknowledge it, and the choice she makes is a painful one.
In the months to come we are evicted from the home we grew up in. The Thunderbird is repossessed. Our father files for bankruptcy and we move into a run-down, one-bedroom apartment on the poor side of town not far from where our former baby-sitter lives. At school word leaks out and my brother, my sister and I are teased and ridiculed. “Your mother is in prison,” they say. “Your mother is a murderer.” In defense Barry retreats further into his books. Marilyn finds solace in God at the Lutheran church and dreams of one day becoming a missionary. I fight. And I do it often. I am a problem for the teachers. I am six years old now, in the first grade, and I am considered a threat to other students. The school psychologist says that I am emotionally disturbed and recommends that I be placed in the special education program. The kids are tougher there, and I learn more. To always throw the first punch. To always hurt others before they hurt you, and to hurt them good, so they will remember.
I am suspended often.
Usually it is for fighting but one time it is because I am not properly bathed and dressed. My father leaves for the construction site in the morning before I’m out of bed. My brother and sister are also on different schedules and leave for school earlier than I do. I don’t know who is at fault, except myself, but then you can’t expect much from a boy at this age. He doesn’t worry about washing his face or brushing his teeth. He doesn’t think about combing his hair. And the clothes he wears, the ones he wore playing in the dirt the day before, and the day before that, they’re as good as any.
Our father won’t accept welfare, his pride doesn’t permit it, though every week several bags of groceries mysteriously appear on our doorstep. Once I came home and found a bike in the hallway with a note with my name on it taped to the handlebars. It’s no secret, we know our benefactor, but she prefers to remain anonymous, and of course we go along with it. Of course we are appreciative, and in my hazy memory these gifts, this sense of goodwill, are connected with a more significant event that occurs around this time—one night, in our apartment, as it’s getting on toward dinner.
Marilyn is at the stove boiling water for spaghetti. Barry is sitting at the kitchen table looking out the window. Our apartment is on the second floor, and from that window you can see down into the carports.
“C’mere,” he says.
“What for?”
“Just c’mere.”
He is talking to Marilyn but it’s the sound of his voice that g
ets me up off the floor. I am in the living room watching TV, and when I come into the kitchen I find them both looking out the window. In the shadow of the light in the carports below, where he must believe that they can’t be seen, our father is holding our former baby-sitter. “We can’t tell Mom. We can’t tell anyone,” Barry says. “Not a soul. I just thought you guys should know.” She has her arms wrapped around our father’s neck. His hands are clasped together behind the small of her back. Aileen is her name, she is our benefactor, and we watch them as they kiss. We watch them that night, and others, in the shadow of the light in the carports below.
I am in my father’s work truck, sitting on my hands to keep them warm. The heater is broken, and this is winter. It is several days before Christmas and he is taking me to visit my mother, who I have not seen in almost thirteen months. For the occasion my hair is freshly cut, I am dressed in slacks, Hush Puppies and a white button-down shirt that my sister ironed for me shortly before we left. On the seat beside me is the Christmas stocking that I made for my mother at school, of red crepe paper, white yarn and silver glitter for snow. My father is sullen as he drives. His eyes rarely stray from the road. He talks little. The Center for Women is in the neighboring town of Alviso, about twenty miles south of San Jose, but it seems much farther.
My brother and sister are not taking this trip, and they never will. Though our father visits her often, until now she has not wanted to see any of her children, or rather she has not wanted any of her children to see her under these circumstances. Probably I am the exception because I am younger—too young, they must think, to be affected, to understand. And maybe they are right. At my age I have little notion of the indignities of prison life. I am not likely to judge her. I am not likely to ask the sort of questions that her older children might.