The Lovers

My mother: now, as I trawled through the details of our life in that place, my relationship with her began to seem less and less normal, if that word can ever truly be used about the interactions of families. If she had sometimes appeared disco

Or perhaps that was just a game memory was playing on me as I churned up the mud in the reservoir of the past and, when the dirt had settled, picked my way across the bottom to see what had been exposed.

After the killings, and what followed, she fled north to Maine, taking me with her, back to the place in which she had grown up. Until she died, when I was still in college, she refused to discuss in any detail the events that had led up to my father’s death. She retreated into herself, and there found only the cancer that would take her life, slowly colonizing the cells of her body like bad memories canceling out the good. I now wonder how long it had been waiting for her, if grave emotional injury might somehow have triggered a physical response, so that she was betrayed on two fronts: by her husband, and by her own body. If that was so, then the cancer began its work in the months before I was born. In my way, I was the stimulus as much as my father’s actions, for one was a consequence of the other.

The house had not changed much, although crumbling paintwork, upper windows streaked with grime, and broken shingles like dark, chipped teeth spoke of a degree of neglect. The color was slightly different, a paler gray than it had been when I lived there, but the yard was still unfenced, like those of the rest of its neighbors. The porch had been screened since last I had seen it, and a rocking chair and a rattan couch, both bare of cushions, faced the street. The window and door frames were now painted black instead of white, and there was only lawn where once there had been carefully tended flower beds, the grass thin and straggling where it was visible through banked and frozen snow, yet this was still recognizably the place in which I had grown up. A drape moved in what used to be the living room, and I saw an old man staring curiously at me. I dipped my chin in acknowledgment of his presence, and he receded into the shadows.

Above the front door was a double window, one pane broken and patched with cardboard, where a boy would sit and gaze out at the small town that was his world. Something of myself had been left in that room after my father died: a degree of i

I wondered where most of those former friends were now (none of them black, for Pearl River was a lily-white town, and we only encountered black kids at varsity games). I had lost touch with them after we left for Maine, but some were probably still living here. After all, Pearl River -cla

The light changed at my old bedroom window, a cloud scudding overhead giving the impression of movement within, and I felt again the presence of the boy I once was. There he sat, waiting for the first sight of his returning father, or perhaps a glimpse of Carrie Gottlieb, who lived across the street. Carrie was three years older than he, and generally considered to be the most beautiful girl in Pearl River, although there were those who whispered that she knew it too, and that that knowledge made her less attractive and personable than other, more modestly endowed and self-effacing young women. Such mutterings did not concern the boy. It did not concern many of the boys in town. It was Carrie Gottlieb’s very separateness, the sense that she walked through life on pedestals erected solely for her own purposes, that made her so desirable. Had she been more down-to-earth and less self-assured, their interest in her would have been considerably diminished.

Carrie went off to the city to become a model. Her mother would tell anyone who stood still for long enough about how Carrie was destined to adorn fashion spreads and television screens, but in the months and years that followed, no such images of Carrie appeared, and in time her mother stopped speaking of her daughter in that way. When asked by others (usually with a glint in their eye, sensing blood in the water) how Carrie was getting along, she would reply, “Fine, just fine,” her smile slightly strained as she moved the conversation on to safer ground or, if the questioner persisted, simply moved herself along instead. In time, I heard that Carrie came back to Pearl River and got a job as the hostess in a restaurant, eventually becoming the manager after she and the owner got married. She was still beautiful, but the city had taken its toll on her, and her smile was less certain than it once had been. Nevertheless, she had returned to Pearl River, and she bore the loss of her dreams with a certain grace, and people admired her for it, and maybe liked her a little more than before because of it. She was one of them, and she was home, and when she visited her parents on Franklin Avenue the ghost of a boy saw her, and smiled.

My father was not a big man compared to some of his fellow officers, barely making the NYPD’s height requirement and slighter in build than they were. To my boyhood self, though, he seemed like an imposing figure, especially when he wore his uniform, with the four-inch Smith & Wesson hanging on his belt, and his buttons gleaming against the deep, dark blue of his clothing.

“What are you go

“And what kind of cop will you be?”

“A New York cop. N! Y! P! D!”

“And what kind of New York cop will you be?”

“A good one. The best.”

And my father would ruffle my hair, the flip side of the light cuff he would dispense whenever I did something that displeased him. Never a slap, never a punch: it wply� punch: ias enough to cuff the back of my head with his hard, callused palm, a signal that a line had been over-stepped. Further punishments would sometimes follow: grounding, the withholding of my allowance for a week or two, but the cuff was the danger sign. It was the final warning, and it was the only kind of physical violence, however mild, that I associated with my father until the day the two teenagers died.