by Robert Rorke
“A little Christmas music before everyone goes home,” she said with forced merriment. I was sure she couldn’t wait to see Himself on his way. Our first Christmas at the beach was bound to be our last.
Himself was in no condition to drive; that didn’t stop him from getting behind the wheel. Uncle George wanted to ride with us, but Himself said there wasn’t room in the car. Then Uncle Tim offered to take some passengers and follow from behind.
“Can I ride with Uncle Tim?” Dee Dee said, holding our Christmas pyramid in front of her like a chalice. She was only nine, but she was no fool.
“I think that’ll be all right.” Mom looked at Patty, pulling on her plaid parka. “Would you go sit with your sister?”
Dad raised his eyebrows in deep suspicion, but he was outnumbered. “Mother of God,” he muttered as we went out the door.
The sky had clouded over and snow began falling in enchanted storybook fashion on the sleighs in people’s gardens and the garlands coiled around mailbox poles. The sidewalk and the roof of the Black Beauty had already whitened. It was beautiful, and I wished I could have taken the bus home, watching the snow as it coated the rocks along Jamaica Bay. But I had to get into the car. Mom, Maureen, Mary Ellen in back, Himself at the wheel, and me in the Death Seat again. As I belted myself in, I felt defeated, as if I had done something wrong. It was great sitting next to Himself when he let me take the wheel, but now he felt like an albatross. I was stuck for the foreseeable future.
I stared down at the black threads of water below the Marine Parkway Bridge. The sky turned pinkish with snow. In the far distance, the Empire State Building glowed red and green at the top.
It was a long, glum drive home, the embarrassment and near-calamity of the fire casting an ash-like pall over the car. Not only did Himself spoil our holiday, he also nearly ruined my cousins’. I didn’t have a chance to ask Patty if she’d had any success gluing the pyramid’s broken fence back together.
The westbound lanes of the Belt were filled with cars trying to beat the storm. We had seven, eight miles to go and we went slowly on the Flatbush Avenue extension, the engine grinding. The traffic lights looked ethereal, colored gels hanging in the air, and flakes flew at the windshield as if churned out of some machine beyond the horizon. It was hypnotic, as if our house would magically appear in front of us if we just kept staring at the snow.
Not knowing the patron saint of snowstorms, I said a quick Hail Mary to cover the bases. If everybody was as scared as I was, they didn’t let on. We all listened to the windshield wipers as they jerked back and forth, squeaking like a faulty metronome and never quite cleaning the glass. A few cars passed on the right, and I gripped the door handle as Himself cut out of the lane and nearly collided with an oncoming car, horn blaring, headlights fierce in the snow-light.
I couldn’t be a passenger anymore. I moved over and put my left hand on the bottom of the steering wheel so we could stay on our side of the road. Himself didn’t object. He knew the shape he was in.
An empty Flatbush Avenue bus rattled by in the southbound lane as we passed the Torregrossa funeral home. In general, traffic was heavier going toward Rockaway than away from it and I was grateful. The car groaned, its insides sounding like they were about to fall out. Uncle Tim eventually pulled up alongside and then in front of us. For some reason, I felt better even though I knew if we crashed, it would be into him.
Then we turned right onto Brooklyn Avenue. The car skidded and Himself hit the brakes. “Son of a mutt,” he said. We all gasped as the car jolted and screeched, toppling a corner mailbox.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Mom said in an infernal whisper.
We were in the middle of Avenue J. I knew from riding my bike that a police station was just down the street.
There was a sharp rap on the window. My heart jumped. It had to be a cop—a cop who would see Himself’s condition and arrest him, on Christmas. He rolled it down, and I saw Uncle Tim’s worried face, his gray hair like a halo around his head as the snow blew all around him. “Everybody all right?”
“Yeah,” Dad said. “This car has old tires, that’s all.” He raised his head and looked in the rearview mirror. “Everything copacetic back there?”
“Your rear end is in the middle of the street,” Mom said, biting off the words. “If you don’t get us out of here in two minutes, I’ll get out and walk.”
I had to do something and there was only one thing to be done. “Daddy, let me finish,” I said. I hardly called him that anymore: too needy.
He looked at me, incredulous, like the night during the World Series I tried to get him to come home from the Dew Drop. “You?”
“Yeah. Look, it’s not far and you’re tired. You know me, I never go above twenty miles an hour.”
Dad chuckled, but Uncle Tim didn’t think it was a good idea. “I should be all right if I follow you,” I said.
Uncle Tim leaned in. “Pat, what do you think?”
“How about somebody asking me what I think?” Mom piped up from the backseat. “Nicky, you’re not old enough. The last thing I need is you getting pulled over.”
“He’s the only one who’s driven this car besides me,” Dad said. It was as close to an admission of his condition as we were going to get.
“I drove from Brooklyn College to Kings Highway.”
“When did you do that?” Mom was getting madder by the minute. “You told me you were only taking him to Holy Cross.”
“We branched out,” Dad said. “We went to Bedford Avenue. Hardly any traffic. The Jews don’t drive on Saturdays.”
“Well, then, I guess we should all kneel down and thank God for the Sabbath,” she said.
“Listen, we’d better get out of here,” Uncle Tim said. I nodded: we had to go while I still had the nerve to do this. Reluctantly, Dad got out of the car and came around to the passenger side. I adjusted the rearview mirror and waited for Uncle Tim’s lead.
“Are you sure you’re going to be all right?” Dad asked, the wine smell wafting off him in sick, sweet waves.
I nodded. “It’s only like seven, eight blocks.”
But they felt like the longest ones I ever drove. The windshield wipers were out of sync, and I only had the left headlight. I stared ahead into the snow, which was lighter now, making it easier for me to see Uncle Tim’s car in the home stretch. Down the hill to Foster Avenue, where the Vanderveer Houses dominated the block like a prison, the road was sopping wet. A red light flared at the intersection and Dad told me to hit the brake hard because we were going to roll at the bottom. I pressed down all the way to stop the slide while I gripped the wheel.
“When’s the last time you had these brakes checked?”
I looked over. His eyes were closed. “Stop busting my hump, Nicky. I let you drive, for chrissake,” he said.
I was able to stop the car ten feet before the red light, but it felt like my lungs were going to go through the windshield. Uncle Tim had cleared the intersection and was waiting for me on the other side. I waited for the light to turn green and caught my breath. The silence in the car was deadly. Mom was furious, but I had proven my point: I could drive. And I was going to bring everybody home, in one piece.
Dad leaned over to me. “Don’t know if the Black Beauty’s gonna make it through the winter.”
“Five more blocks, that’s all she has to do,” I said. When the car finally died, I was going to miss her. I always thought of her as my first.
With the projects behind us, we soon came upon the graves at Holy Cross, tombstone angels graced by the snow. Two more turns and we were on our block. Up ahead, Uncle Tim honked his approval. Mary Ellen and Maureen were clapping in the backseat. I stopped in front of the house and jumped out of the car—and almost slipped in the snowy street. I reached for the car door handle to steady myself and helped Mom out and then the girls. Mom barely looked at me.
Uncle Tim had pulled up in front of Mrs. Garrett’s house. Dee Dee carried the Christmas py
ramid up the stoop. Maureen stood on the sidewalk, smiling, snow falling on her hair. “You did it,” she said. “You never told me you could drive.”
“I did too,” I said. “You just didn’t believe me.”
I walked over to the car. The grille was dented, the right headlight gone. Himself came over to look at it. He put one hand on my shoulder. “They should give you that license now,” he said.
I smiled and caught a glimpse of Mom unlocking the front door. Queenie jumped on her and barked. “Get off me,” she said, going inside.
The dog bounded down the steps, their cracks sealed into perfection by the snow, and waited near the edge of the stoop.
“She needs to be walked,” I said to Maureen. “I’ll do it if you get the leash.”
She went inside and I overheard Himself invite Uncle Tim in for a nightcap. Was he kidding? Ever the diplomat, Uncle Tim said he had to be heading back. God knows what it would be like crossing the bridge back to Rockaway in this weather.
Maureen threw the leash at me from the vestibule. It landed at my feet and I clipped it to Queenie’s collar. Himself was backing the Black Beauty into the driveway. The snow was pouring out of the sky, backlit by streetlamps. Flakes fell all around us in a crystalline white curtain, a buffer between us and the house, keeping whatever was going to happen at bay as long as we stayed outside. Queenie blinked as I led her down the block to the trail along Holy Cross. She loved the snow.
The Provenzanos had turned off their Christmas lights, strung along the wrought-iron fence of their garden. Another holiday, dead and buried, but we made it home and I was glad it was because of me.
Uncle Tim honked once as he pulled away, his car’s red taillights pedestrian and tiny compared to the Black Beauty’s exotic conical bulbs. There would be more occasions, some quite dire, when he would have to come to his brother’s rescue again. Because Patrick Flynn, the not-so-artful dodger, was about to fall through a trapdoor and take us with him.
IV.
The Red Devil
Nine
I went to the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library one day after school to borrow the Bye Bye Birdie soundtrack. The new year was here and I decided to try out for a part in the school play.
I took the bus on Utica Avenue and transferred to the No. 2 IRT train. It was a two-tiered station. Outbound trains to New Lots Avenue rolled into the upper platform; the cars headed to Manhattan rocked the lower. Everybody going toward New Lots was black, high school kids like me, talking loudly in groups. I thought I went through the turnstile unnoticed, but somebody said “Look at the white boy” as I headed downstairs. A set of trains, battleship gray, parked on an unused third track caught my attention. The sides were spray-painted with crazy letters; the artist had also drawn a buxom woman in a red dress, a comic-strip blonde whose hair extended over the top of the car.
It was wild, it was funny. As the train pulled into the station, I made out the author’s name: Blade, followed by some numbers I couldn’t make sense of because we were leaving. I got off ten minutes later at Eastern Parkway. The weathered grandeur of the Brooklyn Museum, facing me as I walked up the steps, might persuade a visitor that this was a classy neighborhood, but I knew better; they were all bad once you crossed to the other side of Kings County Hospital from where we lived. It was freezing, maybe twenty degrees, and I hurried in the late-afternoon winter sunshine past the tall apartment buildings that had once been fancy but now were shabby hulking things.
Grand Army was Brooklyn’s biggest library, with a curved façade meant to look like an open book standing on its spine. Classical figures in tarnished gold leaf were molded onto the limestone. A decorative panel mounted above the entrance, also in gold leaf, displayed a tic-tac-toe board of literary characters. I could pick out Moby Dick, squat on a coil of rope, Tom Sawyer, barefoot and holding a stick, and Hester Prynne and her (not scarlet) letter—that book was the scourge of my freshman year.
There was only one copy of the soundtrack, up on the second floor in the tiny music room. I slipped the record out of the hard plastic sleeve and placed it on an old gray turntable at one of the carrels lined up against one wall. The headphones were stretched out, and I fiddled with the adjustable band on top but couldn’t quite get them to fit my ears. What I mostly remembered from the movie, which I hadn’t seen in years, was Ann-Margret dancing in a purple ruffled blouse and skintight pants, her midriff a golden tan, with all that sexy red hair falling in her face. She wasn’t Diana Rigg, but, as my friend Larry often said, I wouldn’t kick her out of bed.
The songs came back to me—corny, catchy, and short, over before you knew it. I definitely didn’t like any of that goofy Dick Van Dyke stuff, like “Put on a Happy Face,” and knew they’d probably find some upperclassman to play the Paul Lynde role. That left Birdie’s songs, “Honestly Sincere” and “One Last Kiss,” which was a goof and didn’t require much real singing anyway. You just had to try to sort of sound like Elvis Presley because that’s who Birdie was supposed to be—Elvis going into the army.
The album cover made me smirk. Everyone looked a little too adorable, coated with the kind of Hollywood veneer that was long out of style. Were the girls from the Catholic high schools really going to show up and audition to play these Midwestern throwbacks? I couldn’t picture it. The Brooklyn girls I knew ranged from brash to brutal. Were they going to dress up like bobby-soxers in poodle skirts and pom-pom ponytails? The guys in the movie had DA haircuts, like Himself, so the boys who got parts would probably have to cut their hair.
The back of the album cover showed scenes from the movie. The actor who played Birdie was strutting around in gold lamé, leering at everyone, in one photo. Could I get away with a costume like that? Something inside me was dying to be outrageous, jump out of my own skin.
It was almost four thirty when I left the music room. I picked up my parka, gloves, and scarf from the adjacent chair and headed out, walking along a balcony that overlooked the library’s main room, circulation desks, and wooden card catalog files. The ceilings were vast, about forty feet high, and the walls were paneled in a light brown that seemed warm even on rainy days. I looked down at the checkout desk to see how many people were standing in line. Gina Martinucci was talking to a gray-haired clerk at the information desk. She was still in her school uniform. She went to Bishop McDonnell, the high school that was one block east of the Brooklyn Museum. When I saw her glance up in my direction, I hung back, sure she didn’t see me. I bet she was here to check out the Birdie soundtrack and hid in the room where they stacked the religion and history books till I could make it down the staircase.
I could borrow the soundtrack for two weeks. If I could memorize French verbs, the lyrics to these silly songs would be a cinch, but I also wanted to impress Brian and show him that his faith in me was not misplaced. He’d mentioned the auditions several times after class since that day we met on Bedford Avenue, as if he knew from one encounter with Himself that I needed something to do with my free time.
As I headed to the subway stop at Grand Army Plaza in the gathering darkness, the album safely encased in a thick brown envelope and tucked under my arm, I wondered what part Gina wanted to play. Not the lead, right?
I listened to the album again before supper in my bedroom. I hadn’t yet realized how lucky I was, to have my own room, which I painted Antwerp blue and decorated with posters. Over my bed was a poster Mom gave me for Christmas. It was a pixilated black-and-white photo of the Parachute Jump and the boardwalk at Coney Island. Printed over the faded figures walking on the boards were some lines from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem “A Coney Island of the Mind.” On the wall facing the bed I had taped a psychedelic Peter Max poster that came in the Sunday Daily News. With Himself consuming all the addictive substances available in a six-mile radius, it was as close as I would ever come to being psychedelic.
I was sitting on the old brownish linoleum while the LP turned on my portable blue-and-white record player. Maureen
came in and plopped down on the blue bedspread. She had changed out of her school uniform into jeans, a red sweatshirt, and old fuzzy blue slippers.
“You’ve played this song three times. Why?”
“Sssh. I’m trying to get this word.” I lifted the needle off the record in the middle of “A Lot of Livin’ to Do” and turned to her. “Can you make this out?”
I placed the needle back down on the worn vinyl and Maureen bent her head to the record player. She cocked one eyebrow. “Did he just say ‘This town’s awfully square for a cat like me’?”
I laughed and handed her the album cover. “That’s what he said, all right.”
“Daddy-o, he’s groovy with the lingo,” she said, inspecting the photo on the back. “So what’s this for?”
I was going to have to tell them sooner or later.
“I know: Bobby Rydell is coming out of mothballs to perform at the next school dance,” she said, “and you just want to catch up on all his latest hits.”
I lay on the floor and cackled like a fool. “Not exactly. You won’t believe it.”
She pointed to the girl with the long hair on the album cover. “Is this supposed to be Ann-Margret?”
I concentrated on the cracks in the ceiling as I told her, “They’re doing the play at St. Michael’s this spring. My English teacher wants me to try out.”
I sat up again. I could tell from Maureen’s face, with her lips stretched over her teeth, that she was trying not to laugh at me. Then she said, “First you can drive. Now you can sing?”
Brian had said he wasn’t expecting miracles. “What can I tell you, I’m coming out of my shell. It beats hanging around here, waiting for Himself to come home stewed to the eyeballs.”