A Long Line of Dead Men

"Oh, God, no."

"I thought perhaps it was a family thing."

"Not at all. He did, oh, different things."

"Did he drink?"

"That was one of the things he did," I said. "He mostly worked for other people, but a couple of times he was in business for himself. The one I remember best was a shoe store. That was up in the Bronx. It was this two-story building, and we lived upstairs of the store."

"And he sold shoes."

"Children's shoes, mostly. And work shoes, those steel-toed boots they wear on construction sites. It was a neighborhood store and people would bring their kids in once a year for new shoes, and there was an X-ray machine you stood at and you could see the bones of your feet and tell if you needed new shoes yet."

"Couldn't you just pinch the shoes and see where the toes reached to?"

"I guess you could, and I guess that's why you don't see those machines anymore, but they were the latest thing when he had the store. I wonder what all those X rays did to your feet. Nobody worried about them at the time, but nobody worried about asbestos then, either."

"If you live long enough," he said, "you find out there's nothing on earth that's good for you. What became of the store?"

"I guess it failed, or maybe he sold it. One day we had to move, and that was the last I saw of the store. I went looking for it years later and the whole street was gone, bulldozed and paved over when they widened the Cross-Bronx Expressway."

"Is that where you grew up? The Bronx?"

"We moved around a lot," I said. "The Bronx, Upper Manhattan, Queens. My grandparents on my mother's side lived in the East New York section of Brooklyn, and a couple of times my parents separated and we wound up living with them. Then they'd get back together again and we'd start over in a new apartment somewhere."

"How old were you when he died?"

"Fourteen." I'd switched some time ago from coffee to Perrier, and I picked up my glass and took a good look at the little bubbles. "He was riding the subway," I said, "the Fourteenth Street line, the Double-L train. They just call it the L now, they took one of its letters away. I suppose it's an economy move.

"He was riding between two cars. He'd gone there so he could smoke, and he fell, and the wheels tore him up."

"Ah, Jesus."

"It must have been quick," I said, "and he would almost have had to be drunk, don't you think? Who but a drunk would think it was a good idea to ride between the cars like that?"

"What did he drink?"

"My dad? Whiskey. He might have a beer with his meals, but if he was going to drink it was whiskey, whiskey and soda. Blended stuff. Three Feathers, Four Roses. Carstair's. I don't even know if those brands still exist, but that's what he drank."

"Mine drank wine."

"I never saw wine in the house. For all I know, my old man never had a glass of wine in his life."

"Mine bought it by the gallon. He bought it from a man who made it, another Frenchman. And he drank marc. Have you ever had that?"

"I'm not even sure I know what it is. Some kind of brandy?"

He nodded. "After you've made wine, you make a brandy from the spent grapes. The Italians make much the same thing and call it grappa. By either name it's the nastiest thing you could ever have the misfortune to drink. I had some in France, in the town where he was born, and it was all I could do to swallow it and keep it down. It was still another French immigrant he got it from. There were a lot of the French in this part of the city, you know. They worked in the hotels and restaurants, many of them, and some like my father worked in the meat market." He took a drink. "Did he hit you, your father? When the drink was on him?"

"Jesus, no. He was the gentlest man who ever lived."

"Was he then."

"He was a quiet man," I said, "and he was sad. I suppose you could say he was despairing. When he drank he would get happy. He would sing songs and, I don't know, just be silly. Then he would go on drinking and wind up sadder than when he started. But I never saw him get angry and I certainly never knew him to hit anyone."

"Mine was quiet, too. The bastard never said a word." He filled his glass. "His English wasn't good and he had a thick accent. You were hard put to understand the man. But he spoke so rarely it scarcely mattered. He was free with his hands, though."

"He hit you?"

"He hit all of us. Not her, for I believe he was terrified of her. Like an elephant afraid of a mouse, him a big hulking brute and herself a wee slip of a woman. But she could do more damage with her tongue than he ever did with his fists." He tilted his head and looked up at the stamped-tin ceiling. "I got my size from him," he said, "and I got it early. He would beat me without a word and I took his beatings without a word, and then one day when I was not quite sixteen it was a time too many, and I didn't even flinch when he slapped me but stood my ground and hit him with my closed fist, hit him right in the mouth. He stood wide-eyed at the wonder of it and I hit him again and knocked him down, and I picked up a wooden chair and held it over my head, and I was going to hit him with it, and I might have killed him that way. It was a heavy fucker of a chair, for all that my anger made it feel as light as balsa wood.

"And he broke out laughing. He was sprawled on the floor with blood ru

"A year later I was living in a place of my own, collecting on the waterfront for a couple of Italians and stealing whatever I could. And a year after that he was dead."

"How did he die?"

"A blood vessel in the brain. It was very sudden, no warning. He was almost twenty years older than my mother, and older when he died than I am now. The man was forty-five years old when I was born, so he'd have been what, sixty-two when he died? He was working when it happened. He'd been to mass that morning, so I suppose he died in a state of grace. I don't know if that truly makes a difference. I know he died with a cleaver in his hand, and wearing a bloody apron. I kept them both, you know, the cleaver and the apron. I wear the apron when I go to mass. And there have been times I've found a use for the cleaver."

"I know."

"Indeed you do. He went to mass every morning, and I don't know why he went or what he thought it did for him. I don't know why I go, either, or what I think it does for me." He was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Your mother's not alive still, is she?"

"No, she died years ago."

"So did mine. It was cancer killed her, but I always thought it was De

"The other day," I said, "a lawyer I know told me that man is the only animal that knows he'll die someday. And he's also the only animal that drinks."

"It's an unusual thing for a lawyer to say."

"He's an unusual lawyer. But do you think there's a co

"I know there is," he said.

I don't know how we got around to women. He didn't seem to need them as much now, he said, and wasn't sure whether it was the years or the drink that deserved credit for the change.

"Well, I stopped drinking," I reminded him.

"By God, so you did. And now no woman's safe from Inwood to the Battery."