“My parents are thinking they are in Gehanna with the beyz man here.”
I’m not sure where Gihunna is or what baze men are, but I think he’s talking about my father and it’s not good.
My grandfather’s leaning against the piano now and scanning the room.
“Did you know your mother used to play this piano when she vas a little girl like you? She practiced every day. She played recitals for us on Sundays after lunch.”
“Really?” I’ve never heard my mother play the piano. David and I take lessons; otherwise, no one ever plays it.
“She vas a good girl, your mother.”
He walks over to the bookcases on the living room wall. One whole side of the living room has books from the floor to the ceiling. It’s like we have our own library. I point to the Bobbsey Twins books. “These’re antiques. My mother read these when she was little,” I tell my grandfather, although I’m sure he already knows.
“Yeh, yeh. Many of these books are hers. She vas such a smart little girl. Do you read them?”
“Absolutely. I’ve read all the children’s books she read. Nancy Drew is my favorite. I’ve started reading the encyclopedias and the grown-up books now.”
“You’re a smart girl, Chavalah. Keep studying hard and you’ll go to college one day.”
“My mother goes to college sometimes. She keeps her schoolbooks on this shelf.” I point to the crowded shelf above me where we have to remember not to touch.
My grandfather looks at all the books and says, “You’re going to be a dedicated scholar, then you will become a great teacher and make me proud. Can we go see your room now?”
“Sure.”
On the way upstairs he stops to stare into the dining room at the big wooden table and the china cabinet. I wonder if he’s really not going to come back to our house. His eyes are all soft and sad.
We stop at the top of the landing where my parents’ room is. He stands in the doorway and peeks inside. I’m hoping he doesn’t go in because we get in trouble if we do.
“Are your brothers still playing outside?” he asks as we walk by their empty rooms.
“I think so.”
“Do you know where you mother is?”
“We’re not supposed to tell, but she’s probably with her friend Natasha.”
“Why can’t you tell?”
“My father doesn’t like her.”
He leans back and stares down at the wood floor after I answer.
“Will you take me and David and Moses with you?”
He looks up. “Why would you want me to do this?”
I can’t say why I want him to take us, I’m too afraid. “It would just be better.”
I don’t want to tell him about the fights where my father punches my mother and she throws things and screams and they say mean things to each other. I have a hunch it’s gonna get worse. Especially if my father runs out of money, because that’s what they argue about all the time.
Instead, I walk with my grandfather to the end of the hallway, to my room, and we step inside.
“Did you do all these paintings, Chavalah?”
All my watercolor gardens are spread across my floor, drying.
“Of course, and all of these.” I spread my arms to include the drawings taped up on my walls.
“An artist.”
“Yes,” I answer. “I’m going to become a great artist someday. But first I have to get dedicated,” I add seriously, remembering his earlier words.
My grandfather laughs and shakes his head back and forth between his hands and says, “Oy, oy.”
But then he stops laughing and leans in close. “You need to stay here and take good care of your brothers. Who else will do this?”
“But why? Why can’t we come and live with you and Grandma?” I start to cry.
“We have no room for you in our apartment, Chavalah.”
“Oh,” I answer; then I’m crying big hiccups.
I throw my arms around his legs. I’m thinking maybe if he sees how much I want to go with him, and how sad I am, he’ll take me.
“Oh Grandpa. I’ll be good. I’ll be so good.”
He bends down and takes my face in his hands. “You are good. No one is as good as you children. But, still, I can’t take you home to live with me and Grandma. Stay here with your brothers. Things will be better, you’ll see.”
He peels away my arms and smiles down at me.
“I love you, Grandpa.” My voice still has a hiccup.
“Come outside with me,” he says.
At the far end of the hallway, there’s a door leading outside to a widow’s walk at the back of the house. We step outside and onto the walkway. The wind is up again and slams the screen door closed after us. My hand makes a flap-flap sound across the railings as we walk. The salt air stings inside my nose and makes my eyes water more.
My grandfather and I stop on the edge of the walkway, right next to my bedroom window, and look down toward the ocean, out below the cliff. His eyes see something far away.
“I often come out here to contemplace” I say.
He reaches into his pocket and slides me a butterscotch candy. As I’m letting it melt on my tongue, he points toward the lighthouse. “When I came to America, I came from that direction.”
Except for the island the lighthouse is on, there’s just ocean as far as I can see. In the other direction is Boston. It sits like a huge mud pile. Down below, the rocky beach bends out to the land bridge connecting us to the other side of the island.
My neck starts to sting where it’s got stitches.
“It’s a good property. It should stay in the family and be a place for you kinder to come back to with your own families. I wanted to protect her, but I’ve prevented her from growing up. I’m going to sign over the deed to your mother to be rid of his greedy begging. She must learn to control her own future. I will make the home and the land hers, but she will receive no more help from me if she sells it. She will have to honor this. She cannot sell.”
I don’t think my Grandfather Samuel is talking to me, and I’m not sure I understand everything he says, but I want him to know I can keep a secret. “I won’t tell.”
Four
Jules, 7 years | July, 1968
STOOGES AND CRIMINALS
“YOU FORGED MY name and sold half of our property to that crook so he can build more shitty bourgeois ranch houses all around us? You myopic asshole.”
It’s about eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning. My mother was sleeping before my father came to pick us up for his visit. He moved out last winter. They’re getting a divorce. Sundays are supposed to be the day my brothers and I spend with him. He doesn’t always show up.
“Whadya call me?” My father yells so loud it hurts my ears.
I can hear the smack of a fist on flesh and my mother’s whiny scream.
“Where’s my money?”
“It’s not yours. It’s my father’s, and you’re not getting any more of it.”
In the midst of this, Moses knocks, then comes into my room and closes the door, which muffles the shouting a bit. I’m sitting on the rug my mother says is Persian, leaning forward to pencil sketch in a pad I laid out on the wooden floor. It’s muggy hot and my shorts stick to the rug.
I taught myself to draw from a library book called How to Use the Figure in Painting & Illustration and I keep it perpetuously checked out. I’m still no good at it.
Although the door remains closed, my brother whispers to me. “Jules, I’m scared.”
“It’s all right … they’ll stop soon. Go outside and play.”
“I can’t. We’re supposed to stay in our rooms ‘til he’s ready to take us.”
“Then you better go back. Where’s David?”
“I dunno.”
We stop talking. Louder screaming. I hear the crash of glass things breaking against a wall and my father yelling. “You’re supposed to be here with your kids, not running around with that hippie bit
ch and those drug addicts.”
“What about you, you’re never with ’em. You’re too busy sleeping with my supposed friends.”
Their voices fade into growls.
“He’s got a gun,” Moses says. His eyes are big like a goldfish’s.
“No Sir … H-h-how do you know?”
“I watched him. He put it here.” Moses points to the back of his pants.
“Don’t worry. He’s just scaring her. He’ll leave her alone soon. Go back to your room and shut the door.”
Neither of us really believes what I’m saying. Moses scratches the crook of his arm where red itchy spots grow on him.
“All right,” he says and leaves.
I wait for a second, then stand up and peek out in the hallway. I hear the shouting again—louder this time—and the sound of Moses’s closet door closing. I know he’s inside. His closet has become his hiding spot, but I don’t think anyone else knows about it.
I step out of my room and run as quietly down the hall as I can. The noise and shouting is coming from their room, beyond the stairs, at the other end of the hall.
The master bedroom door is cracked open and I stop long enough to see my mother kneeling on the bed. She wears her butter-yellow silk Chinese brocade bathrobe. I can’t see any other part of my father but his hands, grabbing her hair and pointing the gun at her forehead.
Run. Call the police.
I run down the stairs and through the kitchen to the den. David sits in the aqua Naugahyde lounge chair, staring, like he’s hypnotized, at the black-and-white television.
“He’s got a g … g … gun this time. We’ve got to do something!”
David continues watching The Three Stooges, then walks over to turn up the volume on the television as the screaming from upstairs roars louder and louder. He sits back down again.
“Call Freddie,” he says.
“Who’s Freddy? Who is Freddy?” I shout at him, but he ignores me.
He won’t help. It’s up to you. Like last time.
Frustrated, I go to the phone behind the bar. Crouching down, I close my eyes, trying hard to remember the number.
See the numbers like a picture in your head.
I open my eyes and dial, remaining hidden behind the bar. I know David can’t hear me.
I never stutter when I pretend to be someone else, but my fingers shake so bad I have a hard time turning the dialer on the phone.
The woman at the police office answers.
“Yes. You need to come right now to 18 Alethea Road. My husband has a gun and he’s pointing it at the children. You need to lock him up this time and not just take him for a walk.”
She knows the address from the times before.
“Are you able to provide proof of abuse to press charges, Mrs. Finn?”
I don’t know what she’s talking about.
“N-no, I just want you to lock him up this time and keep him in jail for a few years.”
“First of all, they’ll never keep him in that long, and you’re going to have to be willing to show proof he’s been abusive—like letting us take photos of any bruises or cuts. That’s the only way for us to keep him and obtain a restraining order for you. We’ve been over this …”
“F-fine. C-come and get him now.”
I hang up before I stutter again, and I notice my hand on the phone. It’s still shaking. I stand up from behind the bar and listen to the sound of my parents’ argument, louder still, and glance over at David. The Three Stooges fight and bang each other around. This noise is as loud as the sounds of my parents’ screaming. It’s almost like the Stooges are making fun of my parents.
I’m too frightened to stay. I go out the back entry, onto the wide side porch. I still hear my mother’s piercing screams and my father’s yells as I climb down the stairs leading into the yard and around to the back of the house, which was built on the edge of a huge cliff” overlooking the ocean.
I climb down to the shoreline and I hoist myself up on one of the rocks that form a jagged seawall. With careful footing and hair-raising jumps I make it out to my favorite place—a large, flat rock that juts out beyond the seawall and is surrounded by other huge, craggy rocks that form a jetty along the shore. My thinking spot. I can sit in this spot and be completely hidden from any angle except directly out to sea.
Down here I feel spits of breeze, and when I suck in the salt air it makes my in-sides soft. I lift all the hair off my neck to dry my collar and the back of my blouse.
I hate that my mother won’t let me cut it short like my cousins. I have to wear it down on Sundays whenever my father comes to take us to our Aunt Doreen’s. It ends up in horrible knots that kill my scalp when she tugs them out at night.
After a while I hear a police siren’s shrill alarm winding up the long hill toward our neighborhood. I scramble over the jetty and climb the wooden ladder built from our backyard, at the top of the cliff, to the beach below. It’s a quicker way up. The people who owned the place before us built the ladder, and the rungs are rotting and broken in a few spots, especially at the top. I only use it once in a while, when I want to spy on the house.
The shrieking siren becomes louder as I climb closer.
When I reach the top of the ladder, I poke my head over the top of the cliff, staying hidden behind the scrub at the edge. Two policemen, one I recognize as Officer Hennessy, who lives in our neighborhood, stand in the driveway. Officer Hennessy talks to my mother, and the other officer hauls my father into the police car. Officer Hennessy’s holding a gun; it must be my father’s gun. My mother’s face is scratched and bleeding. The blood’s running down her face onto her neck and the yellow bathrobe.
She’s arguing with Officer Hennessy. “I’m telling you, I didn’t make the fucking call. I’m sure one of the neighborhood morons did it.”
My mother gestures to the neighbors across the road, who are just arriving home from church. They stop to stare at the commotion. The siren light blinks a huge fiery red reflection off the white paint on our house shingles. You could probably see it a mile away.
“The divorce won’t be final until August, but he’s not supposed to be bothering me. He’s supposed to be here on Sundays to pick up the kids. Of course, he has a hard time remembering to do this unless he wants to harass me about something.”
My mother’s real angry with the local police because they’ve never arrested my father before today and he’s beaten her up lots of times. But it’s mutual: the cops don’t like my mother because she’s always calling them pigs and telling them they’d be criminals if they hadn’t become cops so they’d be able to carry guns.
Officer Hennessy asks my father, “Is this gun registered, Howard?” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Listen, Missus Finn, you’re going to have to come down to the station and let us take pictures of your face if you wanna press charges.”
He leans in closer to her. “If ya don’t put a stop to this for your kids’ sake, I’ll make sure we take you away next time and the kids’ll have to go to live somewhere else. Do you care about that?”
“Of course I care, you imbecile.”
First Officer Hennessy acts as if he might hit my mother, but then he says, “Good, we’ll see you at the station in a little while.”
“Let’s take him in,” he says to the other cop—then, to my father, “Howard, I can see how the woman tests your patience,” and they all laugh. “I’m gonna have to book you this time, though, and you better not be coming back here except to see your kids. Make ’em wait on the front lawn, or down the road is a better idea, for Chrissakes.”
I remember Officer Hennessy was a regular at my father’s bar before my father lost it in the poker game, and I wonder if he’s arresting him now because he can’t get free drinks anymore.
I look up and I see Moses peeking out his window. He holds one hand up on the wavy windowpane and it seems like his whole body is crying.
Windowpain.
By this time, more of the
neighbors have arrived home and are standing on their porches or on their lawns, watching as the police car leaves. Mrs. O’Connell, who lives across the road, still wears her church clothes: white gloves, a short, polyester pink coat that matches a polyester pink dress underneath, and a pea-green, pillbox hat. They’re the kind of clothes my grandmother wears, although I think Mrs. O’Connell is my mother’s age.
She walks up to my mother with Mr. O’Connell by her side.
“Fucking pigs.”
Mrs. O’Connell pretends she didn’t hear my mother’s comment, but her face is all scrunched up.
“It’s such a good thing you’re doing for the children’s sake. We’ve been afraid for them. Anything we can do to help?”
“He wasn’t touching the kids, you dig? Mind your own business, you square.” My mother walks inside and slams the front door.
Mrs. O’Connell asks her husband, “What did she call me?”
“It’s that hippie talk they use in the city. I can’t make sense of it.”
“Well it doesn’t make any sense.”
Mr. O’Connell walks to his porch as Mrs. O’Connell stands talking, mostly to the air. “Those poor children. Mrs. Finn’s been gone more now, since that beast of a man left, than when he lived there. Lord knows who’ll take care of them.”
I can’t figure out why, but it feels worse to hear her talk about us that way.
Glancing back up at the window where Moses stood, I can see he’s gone now.
My mother is screaming my name. I duck and step down a rung on the ladder, hiding. When I hear the sound of her and my brother’s voices from the driveway I peek over the edge of the cliff” again.
My mother, David, and Moses all pile into the station wagon. She guns the engine and screams at my brothers to hurry up so she can drive to the police station for photos of her bloody face.
I don’t want to go to the police station and risk a run-in with the lady I spoke to on the phone. I hide my head behind the scrub again and creep back down the rickety ladder, which splinters off rotted pieces with every step.
Five
Jules, 18 years
WITHENSEA, MA
The Belief in Angels Page 3