by Robert Rorke
Grandpa and Uncle Tim said Dad would be back for dinner and then they said goodbye, following Himself out the door. I got up from the couch and shut off the television. The silence was eerie and bewildering.
The adults were cooking something up and I found out what it was a few days later when I woke up and Maureen was sitting on the edge of my bed.
“What?”
She was in her yellow cotton nightgown. “They’re down in the kitchen. Daddy’s going to Florida.”
I knew it wasn’t us going on a family vacation; the Pink Panther wouldn’t make it to Delaware. He was going to live with my grandparents. That had to be it. I followed Maureen to the staircase. We sat on the top step and listened intently.
Mom went first. “So what are you going to do about this Florida thing?”
“Which Florida thing is that? Damn good meat,” he said. Even with his mouth full, his voice carried beyond the kitchen. He must have been eating the leftover pot roast we’d had last night. “What’d they get you for this?”
Mom told him the King Kullen sale price. “This truck-driving school in Florida. It would be a good way for you to get back on your feet. Have you given any thought to going?”
Truck-driving school. What a strange idea. Maybe a brilliant one. There was no answer right away. Then he said, “Why, are you trying to get rid of me?”
Was she sitting across from him at the table? Or standing away from him, at the sink, taking drags on a cigarette—her usual position—while he shoveled the food in his face? Behind, I decided. She didn’t give bad news face-to-face.
Mom sighed in exasperation. “Would you just stop it? This Florida thing sounds like a good idea. I mean, the way your brother explained it.”
“I’m not so sure about that. What do you do if I go to Florida?”
She laughed, a mocking hoot. “What do you mean, what do I do? I do the same thing I do every day.” The unspoken word “work” hung in the air like an anvil, waiting to be dropped.
“Oh yeah? You think you can handle it?”
“Handle what? I’m handling it every day, mister.”
I wondered when they had come up with the plan to get him out of the house. Had she called Uncle Tim from the bank and then he called Grandpa in Florida? I couldn’t even imagine him not ruling the roost, voice booming from the bottom of the staircase, fist coming down on the kitchen table. It would be like getting out of prison.
“So you are trying to get rid of me. . . .”
“Goddammit, nobody is trying to get rid of you. But if that’s what you want, believe me, it can be arranged.”
He mocked her with a whistle. “Now she speaks the truth. Well, you’ve been carrying me. I’ll never deny that.” He paused and asked, “We got any of that crumb cake left?”
The Entenmann’s box was always on the kitchen table, under a package of melon-colored Marcal napkins. All he had to do was look for it. “Tim said the deadline for the application is in two weeks.”
“Oh, he did now, did he?” There was always a knife inside the box. “Mother of God. Which one of your children is cutting the crumb cake around the edges?”
He probably meant that as a joke, but Mom didn’t think it was funny anymore. “Jesus Christ, Pat, would you give it a rest? If one of them so much as blinks, you’re all over them like a ton of bricks, waking everybody up at the crack of dawn to give them the third degree. They’re afraid to be in the same room as you.”Mom said, “You’re drinking too much.”
That was the understatement of the year but Himself, as always, had a comeback. “Don’t blame it on the drink,” he said emphatically. “I can’t do anything right around here. Once the bad guy, always the bad guy.”
It had to be time for some of us to be getting up for school, but Mom was on a roll. She was saying everything she’d held back, and I was proud of her.
“You’re the one who made yourself the bad guy around here. Nobody but you.” She hurled something into the kitchen sink. The plate and silverware he had been using. “I’m in that bank six days a week, and you sit on your ass in some frigging bar. Well, I am sick of it. Sick and tired—”
“Do not go down this road, Mrs. Flynn. I am warning you.”
She turned on the faucet and we couldn’t hear anything.
Maureen said, “You think she would catch a clue and leave him.” She stood and went into the bathroom.
The water stopped. Mom’s footsteps reached the dining room. I went back into my bedroom and pretended to sleep. Then she was on the staircase. “I have to start getting the girls up,” she said. “Just make up your mind, Pat. Two weeks.”
His voice was at the bottom of the staircase now and she was on the landing, to wake us up. “I thought you were trying to get rid of me—”
“Think whatever you want.”
Twenty-Six
I cleared out the spring garden to make way for summer. I cut back the yellowed iris leaves and dug up the spent tulip and hyacinth bulbs, storing them in a paper bag in the garage. Mom had done the summer planting, when the seeds from the Burpee catalog arrived. Soon enough, we would have marigolds, gladioli, and dahlias. The roses were already out.
I had changed out of my school clothes into jeans. I filled up a garbage pail halfway and carried it into the backyard. When I was finished, I went into the house through the back porch and washed my hands in the kitchen sink.
Mom came up the basement stairs. She was still in her work outfit: a green-and-white shirtwaist dress. The day’s application of lipstick for customer smiles had worn off. She was wearing slippers—sky blue with a banded front. Shoes and stockings came off the minute she walked in the door. The varicose veins on her left leg looked like busted champagne grapes.
We drank cups of tea at the kitchen table, and she told me that Himself was probably going to Florida. I had to act surprised.
She took a drag on her cigarette. “He wants to learn to drive a tractor-trailer. I don’t know if it’s going to change anything around here, but it’s better than nothing, which is what he’s got right now.”
She sounded resigned but determined to see things through. These few months of working had made her steelier. She spoke in short, clipped sentences. “Your uncle told us about it.”
Good old Uncle Tim. Determined to save his brother. The rest of us were exhausted.
“The program lasts a couple of months. Then he could stay on and work there for a while.”
A house without Himself? It was hard to picture. In so many ways, he was the house. It was his voice booming from the kitchen saying he was sick and tired of being sick and tired. His cheering from the wing chair when the Mets scored a run. His creaking footsteps on the staircase when he was struggling to make it to the back bedroom. He bonded us together, even in numb dissatisfaction, rebellion, and misery. Without that, we might all just float away.
“You mean he’d live in Florida?”
She finished her tea and rose from the table, moving to the stove and pulling pots and pans out of the top drawer. She took a package of green beans out of the freezer and dipped the green square into one of the pots. “I don’t know. Let’s see if he can finish the program.”
It had to cost something, but I didn’t ask what. I was sure Uncle Tim was covering that too.
The front doorbell rang and Queenie trotted ahead of me into the vestibule. When I opened the door, she pushed her snout past my knee to see our visitor.
A petite woman with a pile of curly dark hair stood on the intact side of the stoop, two steps down, as if she expected the dog to lunge at her. Obviously, she had encountered people’s pets this way before. Queenie thrust her shaggy head forward, giving one last bark. Then she merely looked at the stranger, sizing her up.
“That’s a pretty dog,” the woman said, giving a weak smile. She wore an open, mint-green raincoat over a print dress and carried a brown briefcase.
I glanced at the briefcase. This is not the Avon lady. “Can I help you?”
<
br /> “Yes. Good afternoon. I’m looking for Mrs. Flynn. Does she live here?”
Something electric tingled up my spine, like I’d just touched a light socket, and I shooed the collie inside. Mom appeared behind me, dish towel thrown over her shoulder. She must have heard the strange voice.
“I’m Mrs. Flynn. What can I do for you?”
The woman climbed up one step. She spoke in a smooth, businesslike voice trained to convey the utmost consideration even as it lowered the boom. “Mrs. Flynn, good afternoon. My name is Ruth Weingarten, and I’m with the Department of Social Services.” The same agency that gave us food stamps. “Mrs. Flynn, if I could come in for a minute . . .”
Mom folded her arms. No way was Ruth Weingarten getting inside this house. “Please just tell me what this is about.”
“We’ve had a report of a problem in the home concerning your eldest daughter, Maureen.”
Holy shit. I shrank back into the vestibule.
“We tried calling you several times, but the phone seems to be out of service,” she said. The phone had only been turned back on a few weeks. How long had Miss Weingarten been trying to get through?
Mom bent her head closer to the woman, and the towel fell to the tiled floor. “My daughter called you?” Her tone was incredulous, offended.
As I picked up the towel, I saw Mrs. Garrett watering her front garden next door, most likely listening to every word.
Miss Weingarten opened her briefcase and handed Mom a cream-colored business card printed with black lettering. Mom barely glanced at it. “I didn’t speak to her directly, but as I’ve said, I’ve had a report.”
Mom asked me to go inside. I sat on the rocking chair in the living room, holding the towel. The dog sat next to me on her hind legs, and I stroked her dark fur to calm myself. After my midnight confessional in Brian’s car after the dance, he had asked me more than once if I could see myself calling a social worker. Someone had beaten me to it. But who? Not Brian. He would have said something. Mrs. Garrett? My mind raced with possibilities, but it didn’t matter. Someone who knew what went on in this house had persuaded a New York City government agency to investigate.
Mom shut the front door and came into the living room. She glared at me. “Where is your sister?”
I shrugged. “Not home yet.”
I knew where everybody else was. I had passed Dee Dee and Mary Ellen playing in front of the Spallinas’ house when I walked down the block. Patty was upstairs changing out of her school uniform.
Mom stalked off to the kitchen and I looked out the window. Miss Weingarten was walking back toward Church Avenue. I watched the back of her green raincoat until it disappeared from view. She had traveled all the way from downtown Brooklyn to put us on notice. I was sure she would be back—or send someone more forceful. If I’d had more gumption, I would have opened the door and run down the street after her and told her everything—the morning shakedowns, the months of anxiety and terror. They all could have ended then and there.
I found Mom in the back porch, glowering past the window screens at the garden.
“Why did you send her away?”
“Oh, give me a goddamn break, would you?” Her hands were shaking and her eyes were glassy. “What did you expect me to do? I don’t need any social worker ringing our doorbell.” She shook her fist at me. “Did you call her?”
My voice went up several notes. “No.”
“Then who did?” Clouds of paranoia floated across her face. She picked at a hole in the window screen. “This is all I need,” she said bitterly. “If your father finds out about this, it’s going to be World War Three around here.”
“They’re onto him, Ma,” I said quietly. “It’s not as if you can’t hear him screaming all the time when he comes home drunk at five in the morning. Don’t you think somebody might have heard him? He has to go and you know it. Before they send somebody else to the house.”
She wasn’t even listening. “Your sister did not do this alone, I’ll tell you that much.”
I didn’t know what to say.
I heard footsteps in the kitchen, too light to belong to Himself. Then Patty walked onto the back porch. She wore jeans, a blue crop top, and flip-flops. “What’s going on?”
Mom turned to her. Her eyes were dry and she wasn’t looking so wounded now. “Do you know where your sister is?”
“Probably at Kathy Fitzgerald’s house.” Patty pulled her hair back and slipped a rubber band around the mane. “That’s where she usually goes after school.”
“Could you do me a favor and take a walk over there?”
Patty shrugged. She left by the back porch, flip-flops clapping on the wooden steps that led to the yard. I left Mom to hang up the wash, leaving the house by the front door. As Patty neared the corner, I caught up with her and told her what was going on.
She gave me an even look. “If Maureen didn’t call, someone at her school did. She told me she’d been called into the guidance counselor’s office a couple of weeks ago.”
We turned the corner and walked toward Brooklyn Avenue. In my fantasies, Ruth Weingarten would still be at the bus stop, waiting in her green raincoat for the next B-35. She wasn’t there, of course. By now, she was probably in the IRT subway station, waiting for the train to take her back downtown. I had missed my chance.
Kathy’s building was between New York and Nostrand avenues, a five-minute walk from our house. The block was swallowed up by a fortress of apartment buildings; set back from the sidewalk, each in a different color brick, they had been designed with an effort at elegance, with wide, brick-walled gardens and arched entrances. Patty led me to the correct building, in the middle of the row. It was massive and made of a red brick so dark it looked brown. The slanting sun glinted off the fire escapes, giving the black paint a blistered patina. A group of black girls played double Dutch on the sidewalk outside, braids lifting as their feet bounced off the pavement. I envied them. They were so lighthearted, while I was filled with dread, trying to head off a disaster. Maureen was being made to feel she’d done something wrong, and I knew there was a lot wrong with that. We were expected to keep Himself’s vices a secret, but it was too late.
To reach the entrance, we walked past an oval garden filled with weeds. The vestibule was rectangular and painted yellow, with a silver board of dozens of bells nailed to the wall next to the double glass doors. Patty found the name FITZGERALD, typed in white on a red plastic strip, and pressed the bell. And we waited, two long minutes. Maybe there was nobody home and Maureen was somewhere else. We were about to leave when a girl’s voice crackled through the intercom. “Who is it?”
Patty identified herself. “Is my sister there?”
We were buzzed in. The lobby did not look promising, with catacomb lighting and a scuffed black-and-white tiled floor. We squeezed in on the elevator with a shopping cart full of folded laundry and a woman, pale and careworn, wearing white beaded moccasins and black slacks, leaning on the handle. We got off on the sixth floor and walked down a brightly lit hallway with a terrazzo floor and woodwork painted black. The door to the Fitzgerald apartment was painted black too. A faded Easter Seals sticker was placed next to the doorbell under the apartment number: 6G. While we waited for someone to answer the bell, I spotted an old mezuzah stuck to the doorframe.
I knew Maureen was going to feel ambushed, but I had to know if she called Ruth Weingarten’s office before we went back home.
Maureen answered, with the most quizzical expression on her face. Her eyes traveled from Patty and then me, standing behind her. “What did Daddy do now?” she asked.
I wasn’t expecting Patty to do the talking. “Somebody came to the house. Looking for you.”
Maureen still looked clueless, so maybe she didn’t know anything.
“It was this lady from the Department of Social Services,” I said. “Did you call them? They had ‘a report,’ she said, whatever that means.”
Maureen came out into the hall. She
was wearing her uniform and no shoes, just a pair of white socks. Like Patty had said, the guidance counselor at St. Edmund’s—not a nun, but a lay teacher—had called her in when her friends had found her crying in the schoolyard.
“I didn’t tell her everything, but she got the picture,” Maureen said. “But she didn’t say she was going to call anyone. What about your teacher? Maybe it was him.”
“I won’t get to ask him until tomorrow.”
We could guess all we wanted to. The elevator door creaked open and a man carrying a briefcase walked to the other end of the floor, unlocking the door to his place with a loud click. There was no point in standing here and I told Maureen we’d meet her downstairs. She asked us to wait while she put her shoes on and fetched her schoolbag. The three of us headed back in silence like we were on our way to our own funeral. The carefree girls jumping rope were gone now and the sidewalk was filling up with grown-ups dressed in work clothes, coming back from the subway station. When we crossed the light at New York Avenue, Maureen said, “What did Mommy say?”
I could see the worry in her eyes. “She was panicking, that’s all. Just tell her you didn’t call anyone,” I said.
“What if she doesn’t believe me?”
I had no answer. “Tell her the truth.”
We went into the house through the back door. Dinner was cooking in the covered silver pots on the stove—I smelled the string beans—and Queenie was eating Alpo out of the yellow dish on the floor. Mom was sitting on the telephone bench in the dining room. In the dark. It was a very quiet conversation, maybe with her sister in Staten Island. She only called her when we were out of her hair and she was guaranteed some privacy. Maureen dropped her schoolbooks on the dining room table.
Mom hung up the phone. “Would you like to tell me what’s going on?”
“I didn’t call anybody.”
“Then how did that woman know your name?”
Maureen didn’t answer. I nudged her. “Tell her.”
She told Mom about her meeting with the guidance counselor. Her voice was shaky but she didn’t shed a tear.