Car Trouble

by Robert Rorke

  “C’mon, Nicky,” Patty said. “You must know what’s going on with him.”

  A bent venetian blind behind Mary Ellen and Dee Dee revealed the intrusive glow of a streetlamp. “I know nothing.” The longer we sat there looking at one another, though, the more I knew whatever was going on wasn’t good. “Don’t worry. They always show that movie on The 4:30 Movie.”

  But we didn’t go back to the living room when we went downstairs. Whatever he was watching, we didn’t want to watch it with him. Instead, we huddled in the kitchen. Mom was peeling potatoes into sheets of newspaper and plopped the white, skinned vegetables into a pot of water.

  “Is Daddy sick?” Patty asked.

  “He’s not feeling so good today and he came home a little early,” she said in a clipped tone that suggested she was not willing to elaborate. But he didn’t go to work the next day either. He didn’t even come down at breakfast. I didn’t see him until I got home after rehearsal. I was taking off my coat in the vestibule and he was putting his on. He was telling Mom that he was going out “to see a guy.”

  It seemed like a casual enough remark, but I didn’t realize this was going to be one of his catchphrases, Himself standing in the center of the living room, one sleeve of his jacket already pulled on, face splashed with Old Spice, hair slicked back. These “guys” he was meeting never had names, but the bars where he met them did. The Dew Drop, Martin and Joe’s, Harkins, and, dive of dives, Shanahan’s at the Junction.

  * * *

  Something was seriously wrong, and I was the first to get the official word, before the week was out. “Your father’s not working for the phone company anymore,” Mom said. We were in the kitchen alone together, sitting at the kitchen table and looking through seed catalogs for flowers to buy for the summer garden.

  My back clenched. “What happened?”

  She drummed her fingers on the table. “Somebody found him sleeping in his van and reported him.”

  “So?”

  “Well, it seems that he was also drunk and that’s when they told him not to come back,” she said, her voice cracking.

  “Don’t cry, Ma.” I took her hand. “It’s not your fault.”

  She took off her eyeglasses and wiped her eyes. “I know that.”

  We’re going to lose the house. The sunlight bathed the windows of the back porch and kitchen in a single swath. This was the time of day—late afternoon, when she would be seasoning meat or chopping vegetables or sitting at the table just drinking a cup of tea—when I felt closest to her, watching her take her simple pleasures without having to rush around keeping us going. Now moments like this would vanish. In fact, they were already gone.

  “Why doesn’t he go to AA?”

  “Do you know how many times I’ve told him he has to stop?”

  I didn’t know what to say or do. My eyes welled up; I wasn’t prepared to see my mother in this state, confessing her desperation. She couldn’t cover for him anymore, and the disappointment and anger I’d seen cross her face had turned to hopelessness. I couldn’t believe he let her down like that. As her soldier, I’d make sure he never hurt her again.

  “So what are you going to do?”

  She was close to tears again, and I couldn’t bear it. “I don’t know. But obviously I’m gonna have to do something.”

  We all knew this day was coming. If we saw him stumbling from the front door to the kitchen and up to the bedroom, they had definitely seen him fall down at work. But if my mother felt a sense of reckoning, she didn’t show it. She addressed her next task—dinner—and got up from the table to start cooking. I paged through the seed catalogs, but the splashy displays of zinnias and dahlias and bachelor buttons could not cheer me up. Who knew if we would even be living here in the summer? We had lived in this house for ten years. I remembered the day we moved in. Every room was painted green. Mint. It was just awful.

  That morning when he came into the kitchen of our basement apartment after a night of football and boozing was the beginning of the story. I didn’t know yet if we were in the middle, but I was sure we weren’t at the end. Chapter to chapter, we would walk on eggshells.

  “Can’t he get another job?”

  “I don’t know,” Mom said from the stove, as she pulled out pots and pans from the drawer below. “I’m going to look for one. Your father’s not too happy about it, but he should have thought about that when he was out every night on Church Avenue.”

  I held my breath. I was afraid she was going to start throwing things. But she never did. There was always the business of living and that’s where my mother found her focus.

  Very quickly, the axis of the house shifted. There was some kind of conference out in Rockaway at Uncle Tim’s house—we were not present—and when it was over, Mom took over and Himself became a supporting character in our story. She took the New York City civil service test, scored well, and applied for a job as a school crossing guard. A New York City hiring freeze prevented any jobs from opening up. Then she applied for a job at a bank on Church Avenue, the Lincoln Savings. She was hired almost immediately. To prepare for her reentry into the working world, Mom bought a can of hair spray and some new eye shadow, and a new wardrobe of blouses, skirts, and stockings—nothing fancy—and a pair of flat black shoes.

  The best part: the branch she worked at was seven blocks from home. We stopped by after school to say hello, to see Mom do her job and meet the other tellers, mostly mothers like herself who had gone back to work to supplement the family income. She worked a lot, more hours than Himself ever did, with occasional Saturdays (till one p.m.) and a late Thursday. Getting out there in the world, earning money, boosted her confidence. But she was on her feet all day. Come the weekend, she just relaxed, and we took her place in the family dynamic, doing some of the cooking and all of the housework.

  I made up a chart, matching chores with our names, so we alternated doing laundry with vacuuming or washing the kitchen floor. And I learned where everything went in the house: all the respective drawers for the clothes we wore, the utensils we ate with, and the plates we ate on. One day, I carried folded clothes into the master bedroom and went to Himself’s dresser to put them away. The T-shirts and socks went in the middle drawer, the sweatshirts in the bottom. As I arranged the sweatshirts in the pile that was already there, I noticed something blue beneath the last white sweatshirt in the drawer. I pushed the ribbed cotton shirt aside and saw a book. For a minute I didn’t recognize it. Then I turned it over. The title hit me between the eyes: Alcoholics Anonymous. So this was where he had stashed the Big Book. Everybody was in the house, doing their own chores, and Himself was in the living room reading the Daily News and watching some John Wayne western on TV. So I didn’t go through the book. But it looked like, from touching the smooth cut of the pages on the side, he had never read it.

  When Mom worked Saturdays, she checked in midmorning to see how everything was going; she ran the house so efficiently from the bank that not even Himself’s dissipation could shut down the domestic machine. If he was sleeping at the kitchen table, his head plopped down next to a plate of last night’s mashed potatoes and gravy, we worked around him, saving the washing of the kitchen floor until he came to and crawled upstairs. We learned from Mom how to do this. Scrubbing, polishing, ironing, we worked in silence so we would not wake him up.

  On one of his excursions to “meet a guy,” Himself picked up a couple of shifts tending bar at some joint called the Mermaid on Bergen Street, way down the losing end of Flatbush Avenue. Maybe it was the best he could do, but it was the worst possible place he could have ended up. Now he was surrounded by booze all the time, measuring, mixing, serving—and consuming it. Then he went to an after-hours joint on Seventh Avenue to work a poker game, for tips. As our lives sped up in the daytime world, his stalled in a netherworld, an unobserved region that made him solitary and unaccountable. He became the phantom father.

  The word about Himself trickled out and the far-flung Flynns
bore down on us. I couldn’t tell whether they were concerned or just scandalized. The phone rang more in two weeks than it had since Christmas. When Grandpa called long distance from Florida, Himself went upstairs to take the call in the master bedroom. I could only imagine what belittling comments passed through the receiver. From then on, Grandpa would call every Sunday, looking for Himself, checking up on him. Naturally, he never answered the phone. So one of us would have to stall, listening to Grandpa brag about the perfect weather in Pembroke Pines until it was time to hand the receiver over to Mom, who would tell Grandpa that Dad was sleeping or was out doing food shopping (like that would ever happen). He could be upstairs in bed, sleeping it off, or out on the street. Mom protected him. We all did.

  For instance, she never said the word “fired,” and neither did we, not to one another and certainly not to Dad’s face. The phrase we used was “lost his job,” as if the means by which you supported yourself and your family was something that fell out of your hand, like a set of keys, or slipped off your wrist, like a watch.

  There was a whole series of hushed phone conversations in the dining room when Himself wasn’t there. Mom sat on the red-leather telephone bench as if she were in the confessional at St. Maria Goretti, as if these were her sins she was imparting to the absolver on the other line. One of these calls came from Aunt Regina. That was some conversation. Mom hung up, lit up a Newport, and told me, “Well, she called to offer her sympathy. And then she has to say ‘Of course, we can’t offer any financial support.’”

  She had kicked off her shoes after coming home from work and was now wearing blue slippers on her stockinged feet. She sat in the wing chair and looked uncomprehendingly at the television screen, where an episode of Dark Shadows was playing. Barnabas was in the crypt again, with Willie Loomis. “Like I ever asked her for money,” she said, tapping the cigarette into an ashtray on the coffee table. “I don’t need her money. Frig her. I hope I’m here the next time she calls here looking for your father to come out and fix her broken toilet.”

  I didn’t know anything about money or even what a mortgage was, or how a bank could hold a lien against someone who was late with their payments, but I knew that whatever Himself made at the Mermaid wasn’t the same as having a salary. When he drove out to Rockaway early one Saturday morning in the Red Devil to see Uncle Tim, I suspected money was the reason: he needed a loan.

  He was as clean as a whistle, having stayed in the night before. He wanted me to go with him. I said I had rehearsal. And then he insisted on driving me there.

  It was harder to enjoy the pleasures of the Red Devil now that Himself wasn’t working a regular job. Before, his fascination with old cars with a trace of glamour seemed part of his charm—it gave him some style, like his outdated way of combing his hair—but now, having an old car made it look like automobiles were just one more thing Himself wasn’t paying attention to.

  I looked at the garden while he backed the car out of the driveway. The mulch that I put down in October was still crusted over with old dirty snow, and we were supposed to get more today. I was bundled up in my parka, but even with the heater on, the car still felt cold. Himself never wore a big coat, just a red-and-black Woolrich jacket and a black wool hat. We hadn’t been alone together in the car since he was fired. And you’d never know there was a problem to look at him. But I knew we weren’t supposed to talk about it.

  We headed out onto Church Avenue, past women wheeling shopping wagons piled with clothes to the corner Laundromat. The sky was full of low-lying bands of clouds like ermine collars. I cracked open the window because I thought the Old Spice aroma coming off Himself was going to make me sneeze.

  He took a right on Schenectady Avenue. “How’s life in the musical theater?”

  I smiled. “It’s great.” When we first started rehearsing, I didn’t know what I was doing, but I studied the kids with more experience, who knew how to project their speaking and singing voices. The belief in their eyes, when they looked at me when I strode out onto the stage—that what we were doing was real—convinced me that my scenes, though short, were somehow real too. And that blew my mind.

  By now, Maureen had finished my costume, down to the eighteen-inch, evening-gown-style zipper, gold belt loops, and hemming. It hung in my closet, waiting for the dress rehearsal; I had modeled it last week in the kitchen for Mom and my sisters. It fit me like a glove. I took one look at myself in the full-length mirror in my sisters’ bedroom and thought, Who is that rock star? And then: I can’t wear this with white tube socks.

  “I have to work on my dance moves, Brian says.” We were passing Holy Cross. The cemetery, granite and white amid the bare bones of trees, lay stark and beautiful out my window.

  “Does he now? Ah, yes. The famous Brian.”

  I straightened my back against the seat. I was waiting for the remark.

  “I don’t know why you want to be in this play, Nicky. That costume is just ridiculous.”

  It was bad enough that he had said, the night after Gina Martinucci had come over, “I hope this doesn’t interfere with your schoolwork.” I was carrying a 92 average and he knew it. And every time I had rehearsal, I sat on a folding chair in the back of the gym, doing my French exercises and translations and my boring geometry homework until it was time for me to go on. I read Huckleberry Finn on the bus rides home. And on Saturdays, I was the first one to finish my chores. Unlike Himself, I obeyed all the rules.

  “It’s supposed to be ridiculous,” I said. “We’re spoofing Elvis. That’s the character.”

  “You look like Liberace.”

  Not that he’d seen me in costume, but I knew what he was implying—that doing the play would make me effeminate or something. We were cruising along Clarendon Road, a four-lane street with many brick two-family homes. “I like the play. And I’m making friends. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

  Himself looked over at me, blue eyes clearer than usual. “This teacher of yours, he wouldn’t be a little queer, would he?”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t be like that. What did he ever do to you?” I couldn’t even look at him. He put me on the defensive and I couldn’t back down. “You met him. He thought your car looked sharp or whatever he said. So what’s the problem?”

  “You just be careful is all I’m saying. He’s taken a shine to you.”

  I was trying not to sound facetious, but he made it so hard to hold my tongue. “Maybe it’s because I’m a good student and he likes me. Did you ever think about that?”

  “Why are you talking with your hands?”

  My arm was in the air. I dropped it to my side. “What?”

  “You’re talking with your hands. I can hear you. What I’m saying is that he’s taken a shine to you and I don’t like it.”

  Kings Highway could not come fast enough. St. Mike’s was within spitting distance.

  I didn’t know why I was rushing to Brian’s defense; I would never have put him in that category, with those other teachers at St. Mike’s—some of them Brothers—who got a little too friendly, almost caressing students’ backs when they had to write equations on the blackboard, or who seemed a little fey in their delivery. We joked about them. And then there was creepy Mr. Carter, the prefect of discipline, who, I swear, followed me off the subway once at the Brooklyn Museum stop and waited at the back of the station, down the dirty platform, with the look of lurk scrawled all over his face. But Brian wasn’t like them, and I didn’t want to think about him that way.

  But what I was learning about him was a gas. He once told me he lived in a commune upstate after college, which made his parents freak out; it made me laugh. It was so out there. I felt like telling Himself that, just to see his reaction, but I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t want to start my day with a smack across the face.

  I asked to be let out on the corner—St. Mike’s was on a one-way street—rather than go all the way around the block, but he insisted on taking me to the front entrance where a reddish
marble set of stairs dressed up St. Mike’s ordinary façade. So we had to go all the way around, not speaking, and I fidgeted with the zipper on my coat. I was already thinking the worst: he would make me quit the play. And if he did that, I would never forgive him.

  There were parting words. “What time you get through with rehearsal?”

  Now that he was home all the time, he had to know your schedule. “Three thirty, four.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you later.”

  Man, I could not get rid of him. “I can take the bus home. I do it every day.”

  He gave me one of those looks and I got out of the car. “Let’s see what happens with the snow.”

  Flurries drifted down to the sidewalk and melted. The Red Devil disappeared down the street, a bright splotch under the gray sky.

  Twelve

  I took a seat in the back of the gym where it was dark, wrapped in my coat, trying to shake off that encounter in the car. Brian was directing a scene with Hugo and Kim. A wiry freshman named Steve Kirkland was playing the role and Mary Zaleski, an imp with long blond hair and a big colorful voice, was Kim. She had a compact, athletic body that wouldn’t quit, with huge tits and shapely legs. I heard she’d been a majorette in a marching band, and last year, she had played Nellie Forbush in St. Mike’s production of South Pacific, but I never saw it. Back then, I still hated musicals.

  The band sat on folding chairs in front of the stage, at attention with their instruments while Mr. Testagrose reviewed the sheet music on his stand.

  Brian was near the front of the stage, the play in his hand. “Remember Kim is acting more mature than Hugo here. She wants him to be jealous,” he said. He was doing all the acting coaching while Mr. Steiner played the piano and gave the dance instruction. It turned out that Steiner had become a teacher after a brief career in summer stock. What he remembered about dance was good enough for St. Mike’s.

  Before I did anything on stage, I had to see my friends. I draped my coat over one of the folding chairs and went backstage. Larry was already there, clowning around with this girl from St. Brendan’s. She had the most amazing name I ever heard, Italian to the tenth power, Immaculata Rainone. I was afraid to ask her middle name. She had already used all the vowels in the language. She was playing Albert’s mother. Everyone just about died when she showed up to audition in an old fur coat and her grandmother’s orthopedic shoes.