“In vino veritas,” Grandpa shouted.
“In cannabis veritas,” said Dad with a snort of disdain.
Puck and I looked back and forth between them.
Grandpa struggled to his feet, and Puck rolled off him onto the rug. My brother and I sat up on our knees, cars in our hands, wide-eyed, intrigued by the argument but somewhat astonished. Before now, we had never seen the grown-ups lose their tempers.
Grandpa hovered over Dad, his face contorted with rage, his finger jabbing:
“You sit there in your tower every day, sneering, looking down on the world. You call yourself a broker, which is a perfect name for what you do, breaking people’s lives so others can make piles of money without lifting a finger.”
“My company isn’t into shark feeding frenzy,” Dad answered, unruffled. “We specialize in low-risk investments, and we do everything we can to help middle-and low-income families, and keep them from getting hurt.”
“Sure, sure, and you skim off your take.”
“My take?” Dad replied without raising his voice. “My take—which I work hard for, by the way—feeds your daughter and your grandsons.”
“She shoulda married an honest working man, like me.”
“An honest working man like you, Ben? An honest Son of the Revolution like you?”
Grandma hastened out of the room in tears, off to the kitchen where she began moving crockery about, in preparation for an unneeded round of baking. Mom stayed seated on the arm of Dad’s chair, looking up at her father with a pained expression.
“Max and Puck, go up to your room,” my mother said quietly to my brother and me. “Get ready for bed and I’ll tuck you in. You can read until I come.”
We scurried up the staircase and into our room, a little alarmed but mostly excited by the drama. In seconds we were into our pajamas and threw ourselves onto the floor, pressing our ears to the circular heat vent above the parlor woodstove. We could see reflections of Christmas tree lights below. We could hear Grandpa’s volume increasing, and our father’s voice maintaining a steady calm.
“Which revolution was it, Ben?”
“Don’t mock my ancestry,” Grandpa bellowed.
“If you honored your ancestors half as much as I do, you wouldn’t be doing what you do behind the scenes with your—”
“What are you talking about?” Grandpa interrupted.
“I’m talking about an honest merchant like you,” my father continued, “with the best darn revolutionary grow-up crop between Manchester and Montpelier.”
Silence.
“You call the cops on me and I’ll blow your head off,” Grandpa shouted.
“Dad!” cried my mother’s voice.
We heard boots thumping out of the house, a door slamming.
“Oh, Jamie, you provoked him.”
“I do believe, honey, that your father provoked me.”
“But you know what he’s like when he’s been drinking.”
“And smoking. And selling.”
My mother broke into sobs.
“O sweetie, sweetie, I’m sorry,” my father murmured, and I knew he was hugging her, because that is what he said whenever he put his arms around her and held her close.
My father’s footsteps climbed the stairs. His head peeped into our room; he smiled reassuringly and sat down on the edge of the old four-poster where Puck and I slept together.
“Dad, is Grandpa mad?” I asked.
“It was just an argument, boys. A little tiff. Grownups sometimes have ’em. Nothing to worry about.”
He kissed us, and leaned over and turned out the bunny lamp.
“Love you, Max. Love you, Puck.”
“Love you, Dad.”
Leaving the room, he pushed the old mangy rocking horse, making its runners squeak-squeak-squeak. We laughed, because it was our ritual. He left the door open for light.
Later our mother came up. We could tell from her voice that she had been crying.
“I love you so much, boys.”
“Love you too, Mom,” we recited in unison.
“Night-night, now. Sleep tight.”
“Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” we giggled.
She went out, forgetting to push the rocking horse.
Sometime later, after Puck-boy was sound asleep, I got up to make a final trip to the toilet down the hall. I heard my mother and grandmother conversing in low voices in the parlor. Passing my parents’ bedroom, I heard through the open doorway my father talking to someone in the dark.
“He’s sleeping it off in his cabin,” said my father.
A silence followed.
“No, I don’t think he’s dangerous,” my father said.
Another silence, and I realized he was speaking into his cell phone.
“He’s a sad and angry man who hates anything that threatens his addictions and his pride. Not to mention his illegal profits.”
A pause ~
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound so harsh. But if I say anything that he interprets even remotely as a slight on his twisted honor, he counterattacks in overkill mode. Sometimes it’s a preemptive strike. I don’t know how Dorothy puts up with it.”
~
“Summers are unbearable, all of us pretending he’s gone mushroom picking in the woods when he’s really somewhere out there tending his secret garden. I just don’t know what to do. Is he selling it to kids? Is he hooking innocent gullible people, or just supplying his cronies? If only I had a flamethrower.”
~
“Yes, you’re probably right. I don’t think he ever really recovered from the war. Too proud to get help.”
~
“I’m trying not to be. I’m really trying not to judge him.”
~
“I’ll surely give her a hug from you and Mom.”
Now I realized that my father was talking with his own father, my other grandfather, who lived in Maryland. We called him Granddad, not Grandpa.
“She’s doing her best to love them, not so easy with parents like that. It never has been easy, which is why she left home so young. She’s a real hero, Dad. She’s the best thing that ever happened to me in my life—her and the boys.”
~
“Yup. See you at New Year’s.”
~
“I love you too—very much.” I tiptoed back to bed.
In the morning, everything was fine between the adults.
Puck was called Puck because my mother loved a character in a Shakespeare play and my father loved hockey. My little brother’s name, in fact, was Philip. Mine was Paul. We were Puck and Max. We lived in a split-level house in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, so close to New York City that it was virtually part of it. Dad commuted every weekday to an office where he worked, a soaring structure, two structures actually, which we could see from our front porch.
“Those towers are the tallest in the city,” I would tell my school friends, stating the obvious, pointing across the East River to the monoliths.
“Probably in the whole world,” a friend would say.
“My dad works there,” I would brag.
Puck was five years younger than me, a cute little guy with a goofy smile, always begging me to pack him around on my back. Strangely, I never felt—or perhaps never remembered—any sibling rivalry between us. I always loved him. I taught him to climb monkey bars in the park near our home. I once got a bloody nose stopping a bully from hurting him, and felt quite proud of it. I read stories to him. I quieted his fears when he was scared of the dark.
On Sundays in summer our family sometimes rode a bus into Manhattan, and my brother and I sailed our toy boats on a pond in Central Park, the boats Dad helped us make. In winter we learned to skate on a frozen lake near the zoo.
When I was ten years old we spent our last Christmas with my Vermont grandparents. My grandfather had given up his illegal trade, because my grandmother threatened to call the police if he didn’t (I overheard my mother tell my fat
her), and moreover he was drinking less. Throughout the visit both he and Dad made valiant efforts to get along, keeping their conversation to less personal topics, such as the masculine currency of local political news, the benefits of certain tools, and ponderings over the financial stability of the brewery. My father, who had little money to spare, offered to help out with a loan. My grandfather adamantly refused and went into a funk of wounded pride. For the sake of the women, we did not depart immediately for the city but determined to tough it out a few more days.
It was my custom each year to borrow a broom from Grandma and sweep snow off the pond ice, making a path carefully toward the center, hoping to see down through the glass to the secret life of the bottom. I loved the thrill of splintering ice, though it never failed to support my weight. However, that winter was warmer than usual, and the ice deceived me. At first it splintered nicely beneath my rubber boots, fractures spreading around me like a spider web, and then without warning it collapsed.
I plunged in up to my neck. Panicking, I was sure I would drown. Panting, yelping, I struggled back toward shore, pushing the floating fragments aside, until I reached the shallows and broke through the remaining ice shelf with every step. Back in the kitchen, after gasping out my story, I was unabashedly stripped and dried and dressed in warm clothes, and set on a chair by the fire. When the last of my terror had been wiped away by the outpouring of adult sympathy and anxious admonishments, not to mention a mug of steaming hot chocolate, I felt that the accident just might have been worth it. The only loss was my beloved yellow racing car. It was now lying at the bottom of the pond.
A few weeks after my eleventh birthday, my father woke my brother and me very early one morning and told us to get dressed, to “hop to it,” as he liked to say. Mom was downstairs making breakfast. She and Dad and Puck would take the bus into the city, where they would share the special treat of strawberry milkshakes and doughnuts in his office. Afterward, Mom would take Puck to his monthly appointment with a downtown speech therapist, who was helping him with his stuttering. My own stuttering had all but disappeared, but Puck’s was still pronounced.
That day, he was in one of his fussy moods, tromping barefoot around the bedroom, aimless and sullen and complaining that he had no socks.
“You’ve got plenty of socks in your dresser drawer,” I said.
“I d-d-don’t want to g-go!” he said.
“You have to go,” I told him, plopping him onto the edge of the bed. I fetched his favorite socks, pale green with red stripes. One had a big hole in the heel, but neither of us cared. I pulled them onto his feet just as Mom yelled from downstairs, “We’re going to be late!”
“I d-d-don’t want to g-go, Max,” he said, his lips trembling, eyes filling with tears.
“Don’t be silly, Puck. You get Mom and Dad all to yourself, and I have to go to school.”
“I’m s-s-scared.”
“There’s nothing to be scared of. You’ve been to Dad’s office lots of times. Now put on your shoes or you’ll get heck for making Mom and Dad late.”
After they rushed out the door to catch the bus, I finished eating my cereal, brushed my teeth, read a Spider-Man comic, did the last bits of homework, and stuffed my books into my backpack. That done, I went out and locked up the house behind me. The morning was bright and cool, with a hint of early autumn in the air, a few leaves prematurely turning color. I ran all the way to school, leaping over cracks lest I break my mother’s back.
We were minutes into the first class of the day when the school principal opened the door to our room and called the teacher out into the hallway. When she came back in, she went straight to the window and stared out, one hand to her chest and the other to her throat.
“Boys and girls,” she said in a tone of deliberate calm, “there has been a terrible accident in New York, a plane crash. The principal has called an assembly, and we are to go to the gymnasium now.”
As we took our places on the gym bleachers, my fellow students and I felt excited by the drama of a terrible accident happening so close to home. Giggling, whispering head-to-head, we hoped it would be a bad one, like a thrilling disaster movie.
We all fell silent as the principal stepped onto the court and turned to face us. A jet plane had crashed into an office tower in Manhattan, he said, and it now looked like many lives had been lost. Firefighters and police were rushing to the scene. Our families would want to talk with us and have us close to them as soon as possible. Classes were suspended for the day. Students who lived nearby could walk home, and those who lived farther away could start boarding the school buses. However, any who wanted to stay here were welcome to do so—teachers would remain on duty.
I ran back to my classroom, grabbed my jacket off its hook, and bolted for the hallway, elated by this unprecedented freedom and by the prospects of learning more about the disaster. As I passed the big window of the secretary’s office, I saw several staff members crowding around a television set, but I didn’t linger. I was out the front door and down the steps in a flash, racing for a better view of Manhattan. I saw smoke rising above the Brooklyn rooftops in the direction of the city, but it was not until I reached our house that I was able to get a better view. From the front steps I saw that the smoke was rising over the lower end of Manhattan.
I unlocked the door and entered our home, worrying a little that the fire was in the general area where my father worked. But I felt sure that disasters never really happened to people like us. Remembering that on the previous weekend Dad had been replacing damaged roof shingles, I went out through the kitchen door into the backyard, where I knew he had left the extension ladder leaning against the porch. I climbed up onto the porch top and crossed it to the roof over the garage, which was three feet higher. A short jump brought me to the next level, and from there I could pull myself onto the highest part of the roof, above the second-story bedrooms.
Sitting down on the tiles near the peak, I gazed across the East River, and my heart began hammering, my mouth dropped open. Not long after, I heard the faint ringing of the telephone in the house below. It rang and rang and would not stop.
I saw the first tower slowly descend into the canyons of the city, and a few seconds later I heard the roar. The other tower continued to discharge massive clouds of smoke, but it was standing. I was sure that my father worked in it. I knew that his office was very high up, somewhere close to the top. Maybe helicopters would come for him. Maybe Mom and Puck were at the therapist’s.
The phone rang again and again. It would not stop ringing.
I climbed back down the way I had come and entered the kitchen, my legs vibrating, my hands shaking. I picked up the receiver and put it to my ear.
“Sarah, is that you?” said a woman’s voice. “Sarah? Sarah? Talk to me, honey!”
“It’s me,” I choked out. “It’s Max.”
“Max, Max, is your mother there?”
It was my Grandma Franklin’s voice. She and Grandpa didn’t have a phone, so I knew she was calling from the pay phone in the corner store in Graniteville, where they usually went for mail.
“Is your mom home, Max?”
“No,” I said and burst into tears. “She went to work with Dad and Puck.”
“Honey, try to concentrate. Try to think. What did you say?”
“Mom went to Dad’s office with Puck.”
I stammered out the rest of what I knew, though it wasn’t much, and as I related the details I began to feel a monumental shadow approaching me—a sense that the impossible might have entered my life.
Grandma began to cry, a wretched, broken kind of sobbing. It was a horrible sound. I couldn’t stand listening to it. I put the receiver back on its cradle and went into the living room. I’m not sure why I did it, but I took a framed photo off the mantelpiece, the one of Dad when he was a kid in hockey gear. I sat down on the couch and stared at it.
The phone rang and rang. It quit and then rang again. And again.
Fi
nally I responded to one of the calls. It was my Granddad from Maryland. He asked the same questions Grandma from Vermont had asked, and I told him what I knew. His voice was very calm. I heard sobbing in the background, my other grandmother.
“Are you there alone, Max?” Granddad asked.
“Yes.”
“Are the neighbors at home? Go next door and ask if you can stay with them. No, wait, forget that! Don’t leave the house, so we won’t have to look for you. Roger that?”
“R-roger th-that,” I stammered. This phrase was the old code we shared, always delivered with the smile of a captain confidently entrusting a mission to a junior officer.
“And don’t turn on the television. Promise me?”
“Okay.”
“Good,” he said, strangely. “We’re getting in the car right now, and we should be with you by one P.M. Are you frightened?”
“N-no,” I said, drying my eyes on my sleeve. I was indeed frightened, but did not want to admit it.
“We’ll see you in three hours, Max. We love you very much. Don’t go anywhere.”
“I won’t.”
I sat waiting in the silent room, a space full of absence. I heard a second roaring in the air. It seemed to go on and on before tapering off.
I turned on the television. Mesmerized, I watched jets flying into the towers, fireballs, debris, shattered windows, people falling. Again and again and again. Channel after channel, the people leaping from windows, falling through space. Interviews with crying people, bleeding people, firemen, policemen in shock, business people like Dad covered with dust and describing body parts on the sidewalk. The north tower slowly going down, people on the streets running away from the choking storm clouds of dust.
Voices called from the front entrance hall, and Mr. and Mrs. Beamish walked into the living room. They lived next door. I cut their lawn in the summer and ate a lot of their homemade cookies. Mrs. Beamish was a retired nurse; Mr. Beamish was an administrator for the Brooklyn city bus line. Like a couple of other families on our street, they were black people. Their grandchildren sometimes came to visit from North Carolina. I liked one them especially, a boy named Jeffer Beamish, because we were the same age and he was witty in the way Granddad Davies was witty. He made me laugh all the time. He was also an incredibly fast runner, and we enjoyed racing each other around the block. I was always the loser, but I didn’t much mind because the challenge made me push harder against my limits. Any narrowing of the gap between us was a triumph. We argued sometimes over whether Batman or Spider-Man was the better superhero.
The Fool of New York City Page 12