Happy years, she supposed, for the two of them, running around, making their plans, doing whatever it was they did in their bedroom.
But when the boy’s dreams crashed a second time, a strange stillness overtook him—a sullenness that Florence stupidly accepted with relief. She was glad to have a little peace and quiet. Frank began to read voraciously. He’d always been a smart boy; she was pleased to see him using his brain again—even if the piles of books grew to unmanageable proportions. Half of them were library books, grossly overdue—stories by writers long dead, with covers of faded black cloth in which dust seemed to have permanently settled. Others were curling secondhand paperbacks that smelled like mold and sported brightly aggressive covers with renderings of birds and castles and women in shimmering togas. He would read to Lucy sometimes—her body neatly folded up on his lap. Other times, he would wander off into the garden with his head drooping over the pages like a spent rose. And even though Florence could see, from the window, the odd expressions on her son’s face, she thought to herself: at least he’s focused.
Books were a mystery to Florence; she had had very little schooling herself—but she approved of education. She arranged Frank’s books in neat piles. Such interesting names: Hesse, Huxley, Asimov, Nabokov, Vonnegut, Poe—plus one woman with the nutritious name of Rice. For a while, a blessed silence overtook the house—a silence ruled by the power of Frank’s newfound inwardness. But this stillness had been deceptive. It was apparently a dark basement in which Frank had been tending even stranger thoughts—the evidence of which began to pop up everywhere, like black mushrooms. The thoughts were often so odd that when Frank gave voice to them, Florence wondered if they might not be a kind of humor she was not sophisticated enough to understand. There had been that nonsense about his teeth, about people coming at night and stealing things. Sometimes he counted the spoons.
She got to observe him more than the others. With Pio off at work and Lucy at beauty school, Florence spent the day with her jobless son, watching him wander around the house like he’d misplaced the Hope Diamond. Often he was in a tiff about frivolous matters: drips from a faucet; birds in the rain gutters; the Dominican mailman who wore a nylon head stocking and too much cologne. Whenever Florence opened the front door to fetch the mail, the smell of cologne would waft into the hallway, and Frank, who regularly observed the black man’s movements from the living room window, would shout: “That’s illegal!”
Florence often noted—sometimes only from the corner of her eye—how Frank clenched his jaw and flinched at the precise moment the mailbox was slammed shut. Noise seemed to be at the center of Frank’s growing concerns. At first, his condition didn’t seem so much like madness, but simply touchiness, or possibly too much caffeine.
It was hard to know what was really going on in the boy’s head. He never explained anything, never confided in Florence; though she would always say, “Frankie, talk to me. What do you need?” Still, it wasn’t the end of the world. Florence knew it was a phase, it would pass. The boy was simply irritated with life, the way many among his generation seemed to be. The right job, that’s all he needed—and then he’d come home exhausted, without the energy to nitpick the million little faults that were simply part of life. Because really, that’s all it was, in Florence’s opinion: a smart boy at odds with an imperfect world. She couldn’t imagine, at that point, the power of the chaos tendrilling out from the center of Frank’s brain. Later, she’d marvel darkly over the stealth of the shadow: a puppet show behind a scrim that took nearly ten years to arrive at its wretched conclusion.
When Lucy gave birth to Edgar, Florence hoped it would bring Frank back to his senses, but, sadly, the child had been born into the worst of it.
What had started out as foolish concerns and petty irritations became anxieties—which, in the last awful year, bloomed into full-fledged terror. Frank crouched on the floor of the baby’s closet, tapping his fingers against the wall as if sending a telegram. Sometimes, when they found him there, he had Edgar with him—the child’s eyes strangely placid or even closed, while Frank’s were wide with fear. It was always Lucy who managed to coax him out, only Lucy whom he’d listen to. “Come on, baby,” she would say. “Come on.” Repeating the words until Frank stopped tapping and turned to look at her. She’d hold out her arms and wait for him to hand over Edgar. Florence, wiping her tears in the doorway, would watch as the mother laid the child in his crib and then went back to the closet for the man, who sometimes wouldn’t step out of the tiny room for another half hour. It was not a rare occurrence to see the girl crawl into the closet beside Frank and whisper into his ear. Florence could never hear what the girl said, but whatever it was, it worked. Eventually, husband and wife—still so young, Lucy in her mid-twenties, Frank barely thirty—would emerge from the closet. A silent Florence stepped back to let them pass, hesitant to even touch her son on the shoulder. Though she would always touch the girl, in a glancing way, to mark her confused gratitude.
Lucy would lead Frank to their bedroom. They said nothing to one another as they walked down the hallway, but later Florence would hear them. How was it possible, after what had just happened—and sometimes at two in the morning—that the two of them could sink into carnal activity? Sobs and ecstasies indistinguishable; it made no sense. And it wasn’t right to mix love into nightmare. In Florence’s mind, such disrespect for boundaries only added to the chaos that filled the house in those days. In bed, Florence would reach out in dismay and grab Pio’s hand. “What’s wrong?” he would say. “You don’t hear them?” she’d ask him—at which point he’d take back his hand and tell Florence to go to sleep, it was over.
* * *
At the kitchen table, Edgar tried to pull his own hand away from his grandmother’s.
“Stop fidgeting,” she said. “Sit with Grandma.” A sharp tone had crept into her voice.
Edgar looked at the stove, at the blue flames under the steaming pots and pans. His grandmother was ignoring the food. She’d been holding him captive for nearly five minutes now without saying a single word. It was stupid of him to have mentioned his father. His grandmother was going to burn down the house. The meatballs would be ruined.
Florence saw the consternation on the boy’s face and released his hand. She held out the wooden spoon. “Give the pasta a stir, would you? Grandma needs to catch her breath.” She offered him a smile—a stunning accomplishment, considering the tsunami in her chest.
As Edgar moved toward the stove, it was no longer familiar. What he’d always regarded as simplicity itself—the place where his grandmother produced meals with no discernible effort—now appeared to be the site of a very complicated scientific experiment. On tiptoes—for he was very small—the boy stirred the large silver pot. But that was the least of his problems. “The meatballs,” he said. His grandmother’s pièce de résistance appeared to be burning, judging from the smell and the demonic spitting of the olive oil.
“Turn them,” the old woman said.
It was a strange inversion: Edgar cooking while his grandmother, in a fit of distraction, sat at the table. Is this what life would be like in the future, the boy wondered—when the old woman was too old to make their food? His mother certainly wouldn’t do it.
Gently, Edgar turned the meatballs. A surprisingly difficult task—but he was glad to have the job. The science of it cleared his head of all other thoughts.
* * *
Such a good boy. Mine, the old woman thought as she watched him. Who would protect the poor child, if not her? After a half dozen or so episodes of Frank camping in Edgar’s closet, Florence had put a padlock on the nursery door—the key for which she’d kept in her apron pocket. At seven o’clock every evening she would lock it. Lucy didn’t object—nor did she argue with Florence when the old woman moved the speaker to the baby monitor into her own room. She kept it on the bureau beside the Virgin. At night she was comforted by the baby’s sleeping sighs carried to her room by the miracle of invis
ible wires. Both she and Lucy agreed that possibly it was these very sighs—almost otherworldly in their animal loveliness—that might have tempted Frank to slip from his bed and go to the boy. Who—afflicted by late-night fears—would not want to clutch such sweet-smelling innocence to his chest? Florence herself knew it to be potent medicine. Still, they couldn’t have Frank, in his altered states, swooping into the boy’s room with unknowable intentions.
Luckily Edgar remembered none of it. Florence was greatly relieved when she read—another magazine article in Dr. Faustini’s waiting room—that children did not form reliable, lasting memories before two years of age. Prior to that, it was as if they didn’t exist—to themselves anyway. Florence did nothing to disabuse Edgar of a dull and empty beginning to his life on Earth. When she offered him tales of his early days, she offered him lies and blandishments. He accepted all of it without question.
Of course, there’d been that business, years later: Edgar’s imaginary friend in the closet. But it couldn’t have been Frank the boy was remembering; Florence felt sure of this. The boy always spoke of his invisible playmate with affection, not fear. Also, the closet man’s name was John, or Jack—something with a J. Nothing to do with Frank. A made-up man to whom Edgar had fed cookies. Still, Florence had put a stop to it, had yelled at the boy—a thing she never did—and then, when no one was looking, had sprinkled a vial of holy water in the closet.
“They’re stuck,” Edgar said, referring to the meatballs.
“Use the spatula,” instructed Florence, rising briefly from her reverie to help prevent culinary disaster.
As Edgar slowly shepherded the meatballs out of the pan, he did so with the care of a surgeon, as if the steaming balls were living things with beating hearts. Florence watched him. What an exquisite child. She was flooding again, her own meaty heart bobbing up briefly to the surface before sinking, once more, into the depths.
Foolish idea! To have put a padlock on the nursery door. Cruelty itself. Keeping the boy locked in, keeping his father out. And, really, what had Frank done? He’d never hurt the child, only held him. The padlock had been a mistake—Florence knew that now; it was a gun pointed in Frank’s face. He’d absorbed the rebuff with a rage that was indistinguishable from shame. What had been intended simply to keep Frank in his own room proved to have the opposite effect. He took his night fears straight out of the house. When everyone was sleeping, he’d slip away, often without his shoes. When he returned, usually in the early morning, filthy as a coal miner, he would say nothing, ignoring everyone as he took the stairs, one retaliatory step at a time, back to his room.
Florence had often tortured herself with the thought that perhaps Frank’s life might not have ended as it had if they’d only let him continue to clutch his son in a dark closet. Terrible as that was, worse things were yet to come. In the closet Frank had never seemed dangerous in any way—but not long after the insult of the padlock, the boy’s rage finally erupted. One night he barged into the house, screaming. Florence woke with a start. She slapped Pio’s head to wake him and jumped out of bed.
Lucy, in a cut-off T-shirt and pink panties, stood in the hallway, her hands on Frank’s shoulders. He was banging on the padlocked door, shouting incomprehensibly in some wolf-howl language none of them could decipher. “Gome fruk in there!” he was saying. That’s what Florence heard, anyway. Gome fruk in there! Gome fruk in there!—over and over, pounding his fist with enough force that the old woman was afraid he’d break the door. Lucy tried to stop him, but Frank kept shrugging her off. She persisted until a powerful shrug—practically a punch from Frank’s shoulder—knocked her to the floor.
“Francesco,” Florence shouted. “Enough!”
The madman turned to face his mother. “You,” he said, quite clearly, in hissing condemnation, before the more horrifying, if unintelligible, “My owe weem kill me, huh?” Florence hoped he was drunk. As he moved toward her, there was the threat of violence, and she saw, for the first time, that the man in front of her was not Francesco, but the other one, the impostor; a fact that allowed her to say something she could never have said to her own son. “Get out of my house.” The words came from her mouth with surprising calmness, but as Frank continued to move toward her with his wolf eyes and his clenched fists, her consciousness enlarged to take in, once again, the infant—whose imprisoned cry had reached a throat-tearing pitch. No one was going to torture that child, not on her watch. Florence’s second eviction notice shot out like a war cry: “Get out of my house!”
Lucy was still on the floor as Pio entered the fray, wearing the white terry-cloth bathrobe and matching slippers Florence had given him for his birthday. “What the fuck are you doing?” he said to Frank. Then answered his own question by slapping the boy’s face. “You fucking bum, coming in here, middle of the fucking night, waking up your kid, waking up your mother.”
Frank, stunned, looked for a moment as if some good sense had been knocked into him. His face went blank. Florence, seeing a quick flash of the real Frank, rushed in to touch her son’s arm. Instantaneously, as if his mother’s hand were a live wire—something entirely more dreadful than his father’s slap—Frank fell to his knees. His mouth opened wide enough to show his silver fillings, and as his body began to convulse it was unclear whether he was laughing or crying. Florence knew something irrevocable was happening.
“You think this is funny?” Pio said. “You think this is a joke?”
Florence, now quite certain that the boy was not laughing, turned to her husband to warn him. But Pio was just beginning.
“Coming in here drunk,” he scoffed—telling himself the same lie Florence had tried to tell herself. This was not drunkenness, though; it was something far worse. But Pio, a frightened old man standing at the edge of an abyss, chose to yell at his son. “You know what I think you are, Frankie? I think you’re full of shit. What is this, three years now, this is going on? ‘I don’t feel well’ or ‘I’m confused,’ and then you had to go to that friggin’ pazzo doctor. You’re lazy is what you are. You pretend you can’t get up in the morning—but guess what, Cheech? We all gotta get up and do our job—and are we confused or not don’t fucking matter!”
Florence could see her husband shaking as the anger moved through his frail body. In the last few months he’d practically stopped eating, complaining of a constant agita. Whereas Florence’s worry for her son struck her straight in the heart, Pio’s grief had burrowed into his stomach and hardened into an indigestible rage. Now it was coming up. Maybe this was good. Clearly Pio needed to get some things off his chest—and though his tone was cruel and his curses unnecessary, Florence essentially agreed with what her husband was saying. What did Frank have to be unhappy about? Yes, she understood, from what the doctor had said, that this was an illness—but still, it was hard not to see it as willfulness.
Pio was still shouting.
“What do you want out of life, huh? You want something special? You want it to be easy? You think your mother and I had it easy?”
Frank stared at his hands as if they were the source of his father’s voice.
“You’re a fucking disgrace.”
“No,” Lucy said quietly, tears in her eyes.
Pio, who’d never spoken harshly to the girl, told her to shut up. “You coddle him. You make him think he’s some fucking hotshot.”
Florence grabbed her husband’s arm, warning him to go no further. As he pulled away from her, he lost his balance. The next thing Florence knew, Pio was lying on the floor.
How odd, she thought, noticing that she was the only person still standing. Frank was on his knees; Lucy, on her butt; and Pio, flat on his back. And though they all seemed far away, she could hear them distinctly: Pio moaning, Lucy softly crying, and her son mumbling a steady stream of nonsense. He raised his face to look at her. He was smiling now, though he was clearly not happy. Even his face was losing meaning.
“Ma,” he said.
Tears came to Florence’s
eyes, to hear her name—a small scrap of sense in the boy’s shattered language.
“Yes?” she said.
“Did you ever eat raw eggs?”
It seemed a burning question (the boy’s hands were shaking), but before Florence could reply, Frank began to drill her with more nonsense.
“I had a, what-do-you-call-it, when it’s blue, you know when you have a toothache, not blue, not blue, uh, not milk, because he’s filthy, right?”
Florence closed her eyes.
“Did you ever wear a dress, Ma? A nice dress?”
Yes, the old woman thought. I did. Made it myself. Some part of her almost felt like laughing. She put her hand against the wall to feel something solid. Frank’s voice rose hard again, chafing her flesh like gravel.
“And then they put them in there and they shit on everything, they puddle up the car.”
“Come on, Frank. Frankie.” It was Lucy. She crawled over to him and touched his face. He didn’t flinch. Florence felt a dart of jealousy. “I’ll take him to bed,” the girl said, and the old woman nodded.
“Come on, baby.” He stood for her. When she kissed him, he kissed her back, even as the stream of words continued to fall from his mouth. The girl led her husband down the hallway. Before she followed him into their bedroom, she turned back to Florence and gestured toward Edgar’s room. The old woman understood. Take care of the baby.
When they were gone, she looked at Pio. He wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t moving, either. His white robe had fallen open and she could see his hairy belly. “Daddy?” Frank had once asked his father. “Why do you have so much hair all over your body?” It was summer, and they’d taken the boy to Seaside Heights to swim in the ocean. “Because I’m a bear,” Pio had said, lifting the child and growling into his ear until Frank was shaking with laughter—unabashed squeals that shot from the boy’s mouth with operatic power. There had been so much laughter once. What a richness it now seemed, a jewel beyond measure. Florence could still hear the boy on the beach, squealing with a force that seemed too potent to have come from such a little body.
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