by Liza Rodman
As Christmas approached, his landlord at White Wind told him he would have to move out; like he had at the Crown & Anchor, Tony had brought too many drugs and too many “freaks” in and out of the place at all hours of the day and night. He had no place to go, so he asked Avis if he could move in with her. With three children and now a live-in boyfriend sharing her one-bedroom apartment, Avis asked Donna and Woody Candish, who lived in the downstairs apartment, if Tony could crash on their couch. Even though theirs was a small one-bedroom apartment, the Candishes agreed. Not only did Donna know and like Avis, but the three kids were frequent visitors at Donna and Woody’s apartment and would often come downstairs for their evening baths. Donna had always thought Tony to be fastidiously clean and polite to a fault, so they agreed to his moving in but told him he would have to leave when their baby was born in mid-January.
Tony was the perfect roommate; quiet, neat, and nearly absent. He’d get up in the morning and head out, either to work or to roam the streets. He never ate a meal with them. And while he rarely “hung out” at the apartment, he occasionally would have a couple of his followers over who’d sit at the kitchen table high on drugs. One day, Donna watched the head of one young man fall right to the table, passed out. Another time, as Tony and his small entourage were leaving, he invited a very pregnant Donna to come along.
“We’re going to the woods in Truro,” Tony said. “Why don’t you come? We go and rap and shoot arrows.”
Donna demurred, saying she’d rather just stick around the apartment. But the invitation “gave me a funny feeling,” she said later.
* * *
On New Year’s Eve, Woody and Donna threw a party, and as Donna was making herself a cup of tea in the kitchen, Tony came in and sat on the counter. He asked her, “If I could give you anything in the world that you wanted, anything, would you sell your soul?”
Startled by the odd question, Donna paused, stirring her tea. She looked at him and what she saw stayed clear in her memory for the next fifty years. There was track lighting behind Tony’s head that backlit him, shadowing his already dark face and exaggerating his pointed eyebrows.
“He looked evil, like the devil,” Donna later said. “I’ll never forget that face. I’ll take it to my grave.”
She took a deep breath.
“No, Tony, I never would. Things are just things in the world, but your soul is all you have.”
Tony looked stricken, then put his head in his hands, and wept. Through his tears he said, “I have done three things in my life that I can never be forgiven for. Never. This lifetime is a forfeit for me.”3
When Avis arrived at the party, he approached her, still weeping. She accused him of being drunk.
“No. No. You don’t understand,” he said. “I need prayers. Pray to God to forgive me. I need forgiveness. Only God can give me that.”
She asked if this had something to do with Christine’s death, and he said yes, but that there were two others. She didn’t ask who they were.
“There isn’t any forgiveness, no forgiveness for Tony,” he said, slipping into the third person, then back. “I sold my soul to the devil. I can never atone.”4
36 LIZA
When we returned home to West Bridgewater, we found that Nana and Grampa Georgie had moved away from their house next door. His red barn was empty, and the shades in the house were drawn. No one said anything about why, but I figured it had something to do with Grampa Georgie being in trouble. What if he had needed us to pick him up at the police station again and we had been far away in Provincetown? A few days after we got home, I was listening on the stairs above the phone and I finally got the story.
“My parents sold their house next door,” Mom told Ron. “My father had to get out of town, I guess. So I can’t go out tonight—I’m a little short on babysitters.” She laughed as she exhaled her cigarillo smoke and took a sip of her gimlet. I ran back upstairs to bed.
Had to get out of town… I rolled the words over and over as I lay in my bed trying to fall asleep. I knew enough to know that if Grampa had to get out of town it couldn’t have been good. I remembered all the nights Mom would haul us out of bed to go get Grampa Georgie out of the drunk tank. I could never tell whether she was scared or angry or both. I asked her once, “Are you angry, Mummy?”
“How many times do I have to tell you that children are to be seen and not heard?” She looked at me in the rearview mirror, her angry face reduced to a rectangle and filtered through cigar smoke. “Huh? How many times?”
I never said another word on those trips, but I remember the darkness, the low hum of the radio, the skidding sound of the tires as my mother took a left onto North Elm Street and headed to the station. I always pretended to be asleep. It was safer that way. After she collected him from the station, she’d open the car door and I’d feel a gust of cold, crisp air. Then, when my grandfather stumbled into the front seat, the peaty, acrid scent of liquor sometimes mixed with urine and vomit would fill the car.
“I’m sorry, honey,” he’d mumble as Mom slammed the door. “I’m sorry.”
“Shut up, Dad,” she said. “Just shut the hell up.” She only dared talk to him that way when he was drunk because she knew in the morning he wouldn’t remember she’d sworn at him.
I’d hear his heavy breathing and smell his sour breath. It would drift into the back seat, and I’d have to swallow hard and breathe through my mouth in order to not be sick from the stink of him. Sometimes Mom could tell he was really, really drunk and would have us keep an eye on him for signs that he was about to puke, and we’d warn her so she could pull over before he was sick all over the front seat. Sometimes we fell asleep and missed his telltale gagging as the vomit rose up through his throat.
“Goddamn it, Dad!” Mom would yell as the stench of fresh vomit filled the car, and she’d slam on the brakes so he could finish in the gutter.
So when Grampa Georgie and Nana disappeared from next door without saying goodbye, it hurt me and I missed them, but I wasn’t surprised. With him it was always something. Besides, nobody ever seemed to say goodbye.
* * *
Things improved when, one day after school, I saw a moving van and a big car pull up into Grampa and Nana’s driveway. When the car stopped, the back doors flew open and four kids piled out. Right away I noticed the oldest boy, who was tall, slender, and had a head of dark curly hair. He kind of reminded me of Tony, only younger, about my age. I put on my jacket and ran over to say hello. As I got closer, he smiled.
“Hi,” he said. “Do you live right there?”
He had green eyes and his voice was warm and gentle.
“Yes! I’m Liza.”
“I’m Tex,” he said, outstretching his hand.
That was all it took. I was hooked. Who had a name like Tex except some really great boy with a lot of adventures to share? Turned out I was right. His parents were Christian missionaries and had just moved back to the States from Brazil. I had no idea what a missionary was or where Brazil was, but it sounded so different and so far from West Bridgewater that I immediately put it on my list of travel destinations for when I grew up and got away from my mother.
Tex was patient and soft-spoken; I’d rarely met anyone who was both. Tex taught me to ride his horse, Vulcan, and to do a back handspring. The Summer Olympics had just happened in Mexico City, and after watching them I wanted to be a gymnast, even though I was already getting the big boobs my mother had warned me about and also towered over the itty-bitty girls I’d seen on television. Still, before the snow came that winter, Tex and I would practice doing cartwheels in the field for hours. I didn’t know if I wanted to kiss him, but I knew he wanted to kiss me, and one day behind the red barn he did. It was quick and scratchy, with our teeth clicking together, but even so, it felt like we had gotten married.
We spent nearly every afternoon together, and quickly—maybe too quickly—he gave me his grandmother’s ruby ring and asked me to go steady. When my mother saw it,
she asked if I’d stolen it. I told her I hadn’t, but she didn’t believe me and made me march my “little ass over there and return it.” Tex looked confused, and I think hurt, but he said he understood and tucked the ring in his pocket.
Louisa and I didn’t see much of Mom in those days. She had demanded her home ec job back at Stoughton High, and they’d given it to her because of the shoebox of Tom’s dirty letters, so days she was busy working and nights she was with Ron. She seemed happy. Ron fit her bill perfectly. He owned his own company, which sold chemicals to paint, rubber, and plastics firms, and half jokingly called himself a captain of industry. In Ron, my mother saw a man who could finally give her the financial security she craved. What I didn’t see was love, not the kind I felt for Tex anyway. Mom liked to say that her favorite color was crystal, and finally, here was a man who could fill her cabinet with it. He bought her extravagant dinners in fancy restaurants, took her away on weekend trips where they stayed in expensive hotels in Newport, Rhode Island, and on Martha’s Vineyard. He drove a flashy car and lived in a big house in the suburbs where he employed a full-time housekeeper to take care of his young daughter and son who lived with him. I didn’t know kids could live with dads—we certainly didn’t but given half a chance would have in a heartbeat.
I think Mom felt special and pampered in a way she never had before. With Ron, she might finally be able to get away from what she called the stink of West Bridgewater and all the gossip that still whispered through the Stoughton High teachers’ lounge.
Right before Christmas, Ron and his kids came to West Bridgewater for the weekend. The four of us all bunked in Louisa’s and my tiny room—his son and daughter in sleeping bags on the floor—while Mom and Ron slept in her bedroom. Louisa and I were used to random men spending the night with our mother, but this was the first time one of them brought his kids to sleep over as well. Mom got us a babysitter while they went out to dinner, and we stayed home and ate Swanson frozen dinners and watched The Monkees on television. Ron’s daughter, Jill, was exactly my age, with the long, straight, light brown hair I always wanted. From the moment I saw her I wanted to be pretty like her. Ron’s son, Danny, was a year younger than Louisa, and he had white-blond hair and both of his front teeth were missing. He said they’d been knocked out when he was hit by a car crossing a busy street near their mother’s house.
Suddenly just crossing the street became another thing I worried about doing.
37 TONY
Donna Candish began having labor pains in early January, and she paced the floor of her living room, nervous and scared. Every hour on the hour she had the nagging pain. The baby wasn’t due for two weeks, and she felt something was wrong. When Tony came into the apartment, he immediately calmed her down.
“You’re fine, the baby is fine,” he told her. “Don’t worry. Avis has had three babies; this is totally normal.”
And it was. Two weeks later, she went into actual labor, and Woody took her to Cape Cod Hospital to have their son. In the recovery room, she told Woody it was time for Tony to leave their small apartment and find his own place. It was January 16. Tony packed his meager belongings into a duffel bag and walked the empty streets of Provincetown looking for a room to rent. That same day, he spied a VACANCY sign in the window of the 5 Standish Street Guest House. He knocked on the door, and the landlady greeted him.
Patricia Morton was the daughter of the late Atlantic Monthly editor Charles Morton and was known around town as something of a kook who had taken her maiden name back after her divorce. She was known by everyone in town as Mrs. Morton. She had bulging, hyperthyroid eyes, jittery nerves, and, according to some of the town’s louder gossips, gave a few of her male guests “special treatment.” They said she dressed in too-tight clothes, revealing altogether too much of her backside and bosom for a forty-eight-year-old divorcée, and she wore too much rouge and lipstick, as if on her way to some long-ago prom. She had bought the two-story house in the center of town in 1963 and turned it into a rooming house. It had white clapboards with black shutters and faded striped awnings over the windows, and it sat almost on the street, where only a wobbly trellis fence separated the front door from the sidewalk. The building—its bones somewhat of a colonial revival Cape—was a hodgepodge of construction. In fact, it looked as if it had been assembled in parts, with windows and doors added here and there and porches stuck on the front and side almost as afterthoughts. With its peeling paint and shrouded windows, it appeared somewhat sinister. Inside it was even worse; its narrow, steep staircase and dark halls were painted a dull gray, and the floors were what Mrs. Morton called a “marine orange,” to somehow impart both warmth and cool. The guest rooms all shared common baths, and the rooms rented for anywhere from $5 to $12 a night and slightly less by the week. She kept a keen eye on those coming and going and resisted renting to single men, fearing those same town gossips’ wagging tongues, but she relented when Tony appeared on the doorstep looking for a room. She didn’t know he had been thrown out of the White Wind, and of course he didn’t volunteer the information. He turned on his infamous charm and offered to help Mrs. Morton with odd jobs that needed doing. She rented him the Bay Room, which she called her best room, overlooking Standish Street, at a reduced rate of just $20 a week. He moved in two days later.
* * *
On January 24, 1969, Tony returned to his garden in the Truro woods to “check on things.” Even though it frightened him to go back in, it had nonetheless become routine. But what he saw as he approached the clearing that afternoon stopped him cold: a human hand was sticking out of the ground; its shallow grave had been disturbed, most likely by coyotes or foxes that roamed the woods.
Tony stared at the hand in shock and wonderment, almost as if it were a prop in some horror movie. But he knew it was very real because he had put it there. As he stood transfixed, looking at the hand, the sun broke through the trees and something sparkled on one of the white, clenched fingers. As he inched forward, he saw it was a diamond ring. He thought about taking it, but instead quickly pushed the hand back into the ground with his foot, covered it with some leaves, and raced back into town. When he ran into one of his “head chicks,” Robin Nicholson, she later said he was “chalky white.”1 Something had frightened Tony, and he didn’t frighten easily.
He didn’t stay frightened for long. Instead, he returned to his Standish Street room, took a handful of pills from his mason jar, and got ready to go out for a beer. As he watched himself shave in the bathroom mirror he put his earlier horror out of his mind; now his only concern was how he was going to get his paycheck in the morning from the Royal Coachman down in North Truro. It was too cold to ride his bike, and he was again carless.
After drying off from his shower and pulling his turtleneck over his head, he heard a knock at the door. He opened it, and Mrs. Morton stood at the threshold with two young women, one striking with strong, almost masculine features, black hair, and heavy makeup around her dark eyes; the other was prettier with large blue eyes and light brown hair. Tony noted that the more attractive one had on too much lipstick.
“Hi, Antone,” Mrs. Morton said. “These girls just checked in and are staying in number two upstairs for a couple of nights.”
“Cool,” Tony said, looking at the women. The darker woman looked familiar to him; he couldn’t recall where he’d seen her, but he knew she’d been to Provincetown before.
Mrs. Morton continued. “I rented the other room upstairs to three fishermen who’ll be painting the house, so it’s rather crowded up there. Would you mind if the girls used the bathroom down here near your room?”
“Sure,” Tony said, smiling at the girls. “I’m Tony.” He stretched out his hand.
“Hey,” they said back in unison, smiling at him.
“I’m Pat,” the dark-haired woman said, taking his hand, “and this is Mary Anne.” She indicated her friend with a wag of her left thumb. “We’re up for the weekend from Providence.”
Patric
ia Walsh and Mary Anne Wysocki had been friends since high school and had attended Rhode Island College together. Pat had graduated and now taught second grade at the Laurel Hill Elementary in Providence. She was a down-to-earth young woman who took her job as a teacher seriously and who enjoyed folk music; in December she had gone to a Judy Collins concert with friends. Mary Anne on the other hand struggled with her grades; she had earned only a 2.86 GPA her first semester at RIC and dropped out. For two years she had worked and saved enough money to return to college. She had one more year to go before she finally graduated, and she hoped to also become a teacher. The women told their parents that they were tired from their heavy workloads and needed a fun weekend away. Pat called in sick at the Laurel Hill school so that they could leave early on Friday morning and have a full two days on the Cape.
Tony helped the women bring their things in from the car—Enough stuff for a month, he thought.2 The entire back seat and trunk of Pat’s Volkswagen Beetle were full of small suitcases and clothes in shopping bags and on hangers. It took them three trips to move everything into the small room. When they were finished, they asked Tony if it was a good time for them to take their showers in the nearby bathroom.
“Groovy,” Tony said. “I’m going out anyway.”
When he left, the girls brought down what they needed for their showers, and while one used the bathroom, the other sat on Tony’s bed, thumbing through his copy of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in magazine and reading the funnier parts out loud through the partially open door. Then, because his room was warmer than theirs, they remained there to dress and dry their hair with Mary Anne’s portable hair dryer before returning upstairs.