SHEPHERD
AVENUE
For
CISSY, DUDY, and MILLIE
I never saw my father with a newspaper in his hands.
You hear about people in aboriginal tribes who live without ever seeing a written word or hearing the story of Jesus Christ's life, but Salvatore Ambrosio traveled from Roslyn, Long Island, to midtown Manhattan each weekday to earn his living as an advertising copywriter. It was a long ride, more than an hour each way. I guess he looked out the window. It's not likely that he talked to anyone.
When he got home from work his dress pants, jacket, and tie came off and were replaced by frayed work shirts and pants. He was never casually dressed, my father. His clothing was either impeccable or absolutely shabby.
My father's aloofness toward the outside world didn't do me much good when I'd ask him to help me with current events homework. Without batting an eye he'd say, "Just tell your teacher that people are worse than ever, and do as many terrible things to each other as they can get away with."
"Nice thing to say," my mother would comment. Then she'd trim an article out of Newsday and read it aloud to make sure I understood it, while my father watched with amusement as the two of us "swallowed that bilge they print in the paper."
My mother read the paper front to back. "Somebody in this house should know what's going on," she used to say. She knew in her heart that my father cared about people, but that he couldn't hide his disappointment in most of them.
One thing that never disappointed my father was his garden.
He loved to spend hours tending it slowly, treating our plot of land as if it were a giant jewel that needed daily polishing.
I got to know him best working beside him in silence. The big rectangles of lawns all around ours were tended by professional landscapers, men who jumped off trucks, unloaded machines, and, in furious clouds of noise and gasoline, cut lawns so fast it was like rape. My father used a four-bladed push mower. The neighbors mocked him behind his back, I'm sure.
I got an important glimpse into a secret chamber of my father's heart when I was nine years old. It was an October afternoon. We had just raked the lawn and put down fertilizer. The job done, I lay on the browning grass and fell asleep. When I awoke he was standing by our hedge, leaning against his rake just hard enough to bend the tines. A honking flock of geese flew overhead. He let the rake drop and did a perfect slow motion pantomime of their wings, flapping his arms and walking in their direction on tiptoes, backlit by the dull orange sunset. It was a startling imitation. I was sort of surprised when he didn't get airborne.
And I knew he wasn't just a nut. Something was bugging him, urging him to tear away from the circumstances of his life — something he fought internally all the time. I didn't know what it was, but I sensed that somehow I stood in his way more than my mother did. I pushed the lima beans around my plate and hardly touched the meat loaf that night.
It all came down when my mother became sick with cancer the following year. We used to visit her at the hospital early in the evenings. She would make us feel better, believe it or not.
"You guys got it backwards," she explained. "The visitors are supposed to cheer up the patient. See?" After about an hour she'd chase us out of there.
"Go feed the dog," she'd say.
"We don't have a dog, Mommy."
"Go feed the cat."
"We don't have a cat," I'd giggle.
"Go feed the ostrich."
We'd leave in laughter, then eat our dinners in Northern Boulevard diners, watching cars whiz past as we chowed down on cheeseburgers, french fries, and cole slaw. My father knew the rudiments of cooking, but I don't think he was able to bear the thought of a meal at our home without his wife.
She stayed at the hospital for all of April and half of May 1961. In the second week of May, he stopped taking me with him to visit. I was just ten years old but he left me alone in the house those nights and came home with take-out food in foil-lined bags.
It occurs to me that I never had a baby-sitter. Wherever my parents went — to restaurants, the movies — I came along, a son treated like a miniature adult.
Elizabeth McCullough Ambrosio died in the hospital on May 13th. That night my father came home and filled a big aluminum pot with water, shook salt into it, and put the flame on full blast under it. He began opening a can of tomato paste.
"We're having spaghetti," he said as he cranked the can opener. I started to cry because I knew she was dead.
They buried my mother without a wake the day after she died. The only ones present at the cemetery were my father and me and a priest from a nearby Catholic church we'd never attended. My father was alternately sharp and polite with the priest, who didn't dare to ask my father why he'd never seen us in church.
We lived an awkward month in the house before my father put it on the market. He hired a stranger to run a garage sale and sell every stick of furniture we had.
All my mother's clothing and all his dress clothes went into a big Salvation Army hopper at a nearby shopping center. My father held me by the hips as I dropped three big bundles down the dark chute. For an instant I had a vision of him pushing me in after them.
Everything that could possibly tie him down was now gone. We lived those final June days in Roslyn like raccoons that break into summer homes through the eaves. With the rugs gone the aged oak floors groaned at every step, and even with the windows down little currents of air puffed in crazy directions.
The only thing we couldn't get rid of was the four-bladed push mower, which my father left behind in the barren garage.
He didn't let me in on his plan until our final night together in the house. We slept on a pair of cots dragged close together in the living room, a courtesy of the moving company that was to bring the new owner's stuff in the morning.
I hadn't asked a single question about where we were going during the scuttling of our possessions. I just sat up in my cot, waiting for him to start volunteering information.
He swallowed. He was hesitating, like a kid reluctant to tell a parent about a broken vase. "I quit my job," he said through a dry throat.
"I figured that out," I said, irritated. He hadn't been to work for two weeks. "So where are we going tomorrow?"
He seemed disappointed that I wasn't startled by his announcement. "I have to take off for a while."
I felt my heart plummet. I was being disposed of, too — he'd only been saving me for last!
"What do you mean? Where am I gonna go?"
"You're staying with my parents in Brooklyn."
I was stunned. "I thought we hated them," I said. "How can we stay there if we don't even visit?"
"We don't hate them!" my father boomed. "There have just been years and years of misunderstanding."
I was disgusted. "Yeah, sure, Dad."
He said weakly, "My parents are good people."
"I don't even know them!" I rolled over on the cot so I wouldn't have to look at him. Not even sure I wanted to be with him anymore I said, "Why can't I go with you?"
"Because you can't, Joseph."
"Why?"
"Because nobody can," he said in a way that made it clear the matter was beyond his control, as if a demon inside him were calling the shots.
Puzzled, I rolled onto my back. Oddly, I felt my anger melting. I started thinking about how miserable this past month with my father had been. Maybe we both needed a break from each other. Somehow, I sensed that losing both parents might be easier than losing one.
"For how long?" I asked roughly.
The fact that I was talking inspired my father. "A few weeks, no more."
"And then what?"
"I don't know," he admitted.
"Whe
re are you going?"
"Across the country in the car."
We were silent. The wind picked up, making the ancient window panes jiggle and creak in their loose putty jackets.
I felt him grasp my elbow. "Joey, don't hate me," he begged in a voice I'd never heard him use. Desperate.
"I won't," I said. I didn't take his hand but let him hold me for a few minutes before rolling onto my side and falling asleep.
Almost everything we loaded into our Comet station wagon the next morning belonged to me. My father packed one bulging canvas sack for himself, filled with shirts, pants, and underwear. That and his shaving kit were all he'd take across the United States.
When we were on the road I said, "You have to sign my report card." I dug it out of my pile of stuff. "We're supposed to mail it back to school. Maybe you don't have to if I'm not going back."
"Give it to me," he mumbled. At a red light near the Long Island Expressway he glanced at the card, hastily scrawled on it, and handed it back to me.
"Take care of it," he said, knowing I had a stamped, addressed envelope the school had provided.
I looked at the card. Through the first three marking periods Mrs. Olsen, my fifth-grade teacher, had written tiny but stinging notes in the space provided for comments: "Joseph should participate in class more often . . . Joseph needs to be more outgoing . . . Joseph holds back during sports."
And beneath each comment was my mother's light-handed, almost fluffy signature, "Mrs. Salvatore Ambrosio." She barely pressed a pen when she wrote.
I looked at the space for the last marking period.
"I suspect he can do better," Mrs. Olsen had written of my straight-B performance.
"I suspect we all can," my father wrote back before scrawling his fierce signature. It violated the boundaries of the dainty white box, and I could feel his lettering through the back side of the card, like Braille.
"There's a mailbox," I said just before we reached the entry ramp to the expressway. He braked the car. I got out and mailed the report card, sort of surprised that he'd waited instead of roaring away.
"Put your seat belt on," he said, and that was the extent of our conversation for the rest of the trip to the East New York section of Brooklyn.
He slowed the car to a crawl when we made the turn down Shepherd Avenue. We drove beneath an elevated train track structure that left a ladder-shaped shadow in the late afternoon light. Rows of sooty red brick houses, fronted with droopy maple trees that seemed to have given up trying to grow taller.
My grandmother and Uncle Victor were waiting for us on the porch. I knew them only from photographs.
Clumsy introductions outside the car door: your grandmother, your uncle. No kisses. My father clasped his mother's hand.
"Long time," he said in a neutral voice. She nodded. Victor, after a moment's hesitation, embraced my father.
"What are we, strangers here?"
Embarrassment melted Victor's enthusiasm. He tore himself away to carry my stuff into the house. I stayed outside with my father, who kept his hand on the open car door, clinging to it as tightly as a rodeo rider grips a saddle horn.
My grandmother had planned to feed us, share one big meal together, but my father said he was already behind schedule. She urged him to stay long enough at least to see his father, who was late getting home. My father said he couldn't.
"No twenty minutes?" Constanzia Ambrosio asked. "What's this schedule?"
"I'm very late," my father said. "Believe me, Ma."
How strange it was to hear him use that word, and how anxious he was to get moving, as if a bomb were about to explode inside him and he wanted to put distance between himself and his family to protect us from shrapnel. He stood like a chauffeur, handsome in denim jacket and jeans, misty-eyed, apologetic and arrogant at the same time. At last he hugged his mother, a collision of flesh like two human bumper cars.
"I'm sorry she died," Constanzia blurted.
"Me, too," my father said, his voice like a child's. He let go of her and put his hands under my armpits. I braced myself, anticipating a lift.
But his hands went limp against my rib cage. "No," he decided. "You're too big for that now." He crouched and hugged me, said "See you soon" in a broken voice, and split. I don't know which of us felt more relieved.
Relieved, but not for long. The switch was concise, a changing of the guard.
"You're gonna be livin' here awhile, so forget about that Grandma and Grandpa business," said Vic, my roommate, as he lugged double armfuls of my stuff to his room.
"We decided this morning," he said, breathing hard. "No titles. Just Connie and Angie and Vic."
Vic was eighteen years old, five foot ten, a hundred and ninety pounds. His hair was thick as a cluster of wire brush filaments — when he ran his hands through it, it leapt back into place. His hairline ran straight across his forehead and down the sides of his head, with no scallops at the temples. His eyes were brown, like the eyes of everyone else in the house, including me. Only my father had picked up blue eyes, through some errant gene.
Every pair of Vic's pants looked tight on him but he insisted they were comfortable and kept wearing them, despite my grandmother's warning that "They'll make you sterile." His hard belly bulged slightly, like an overinflated tire. His rump bulged in the same way. From time to time he patted his buttocks, rata-tat-tat, as if they were bongos.
Vic's room was sparsely furnished: a horsehair mattress on a platform bed, an army fold-out cot (for me), a crucifix on the wall, a photo of the Journal-American's 1960 all-star baseball team ("I'm third from the left; that guy's hat hides my face"), a Frank Sinatra record jacket tacked to the wall, and a Victrola.
"Put that down," he said. I'd picked up his athletic cup and put it against my nose, thinking that was where it was worn. He took it from me and gestured with it.
"Listen. If we're gonna get along we can't be messing around with each other's stuff, okay?"
I nodded. "What is that thing?"
He blushed. "You wear it here," he said, holding it in front of his pants. "In case you get hit with a baseball. You like Sinatra?"
"I guess."
"You guess?"
"I don't listen to music much."
Shaking his head, Vic put on a record. "If you hang around here, you gotta like Sinatra." Music filled the room. Vic lay on his back, his stiff mattress crunching as he rolled with the music.
"Look," he announced when the first song ended, "I think you and me can get along real good. See, I'm a ballplayer, I need lots of sleep. Most nights I'll probably go to bed earlier than you."
"What position do you play?" I asked politely.
Vic's eyebrows arched. "You know baseball?"
"A little."
"I'm the shortstop. I play in between the second baseman and the third baseman."
"Oh."
"Hey, don't go thinkin' I can't hit, just because I'm an infielder. I hit better than all the outfielders on the team. If you can call 'em outfielders. Now listen to this part, how he does this," Vic said, leaping off the bed and cranking up the volume on the Victrola.
Down the street the elevated train rode past, partially drowning out the music. Vic muttered "Damn" and lifted the needle off the disc to play the same part again, scratching the record.
"Here it is," he said solemnly.
I forget the song but at a certain point my uncle was jumping up and down on the bed, singing along. When the song ended he stepped to the floor, pink-faced.
"Like, I get carried away," he said.
Connie appeared at the doorway. "I heard you jump, all the way downstairs! You're gonna come right through the floor."
"Sorry, Ma."
"Come on," Connie said. "We'll eat."
When she left, Vic grinned at me. He clasped the back of my neck and led me into the hallway, giving me a slight Indian burn.
On the way in I'd noticed a beautiful dining room where I figured dinner would be served,
but Vic surprised me by leading the way to a dark, rickety staircase. Our footsteps echoed as we walked down to the cellar. There were no banisters. I put my palms against the walls for balance, feeling the scrape of rough stucco.
The basement floor was red and yellow tiles. There were windows along one wall, facing the driveway — you got a view of any approaching visitor's ankles. A long table with built-in benches stood under fluorescent lights. My grandfather's oak chair stood at the end of the table.
This was the hub of the home. During Depression years the main floor of the Ambrosio house had been rented out to boarders, so the family had gotten into the habit of using the basement. It was roomy, and always cool in the summertime.
Upstairs, the dining room might as well have been a museum — the mahogany table with its fitted glass top, a buffet table on wheels, heavy long-armed chairs. On the backs of those chairs there were doilies that stayed white year-round, and if you opened a cabinet door in the dining room there was a clicking sound, as if the long-untouched varnished surfaces had welded together. Trapped inside the cabinets were gold-rimmed teacups and saucers with paper tags still glued to their undersides.
But that room couldn't hold a candle to the character of the basement.
For one thing, the floor wasn't level, which Vic demonstrated by placing a baseball on it. The ball was still for an instant, then rolled to the opposite wall.
"Enough with that trick, already," Connie said.
The ceiling was a network of pipes and cables, painted white.
There were upright poles at strategic locations, supporting the house above us.
A bowl of spaghetti sat in the middle of the table, steam rising off it and disappearing into the fluorescents. Connie worked it with a pair of forks.
A cameo portrait of her would have displayed a slender woman. Most of her two hundred and twenty pounds hung way below her breastbone. She was fifty-five years old but her hair was black, save for a pair of white-gray stripes at either side of her part, like catfish whiskers.
Those fleshy arms rose again and again over the spaghetti, curtains of fat dangling and dancing from her upper arms. I was reminded of the flying squirrel pictures I'd seen in my science book.
Shepherd Avenue Page 1