Gypsies

“Here,” Mama said. “The house on Constantinople… you remember?”

Karen inspected the picture. Daddy must have taken it: it showed Mama standing by their new car, a steely blue Rambler parked in front of the house. Karen and Laura and Tim stood listlessly in the background leaning against the porch railing. How bored we look, Karen thought. It must have been a church day: everyone was dressed up, Mama in her pillbox hat with the preposterous black mesh veil, Karen and Laura in white starched dresses. Tim wore a black suit and collar. How Tim had always hated those collars. It made his child face seem piggish, baby fat pushed up into his chin.

Briefly, dizzyingly, she remembered her dream, the ravine behind the house, the night they had passed into a grim world of Tim’s devising. And not just a dream. It was a memory. It was as real as this photograph.

She thought, If we had taken Mama’s Kodak Brownie through that Door we might have a picture now—a picture of that strange night city, a picture of the Gray Man.

In her mind the Gray Man said, Your firstborn son.

“Those were good days by and large,” Mama was saying. “Your father had steady work. And I think I loved that old house on Constantinople more than any place I’ve lived since. More even than this place.”

Laura said, “Then why did you leave?”

Laura was focused, alert: Laura had not been seduced by the photographs.

Mama said, “Well, you know. You remember what I used to tell you kids? We’re gypsies. We move around …”

Laura said, “That’s not a reason.”

Mama hesitated, then turned back resolutely to the photographs. “Here’s the apartment in the West End. Karen, you were in fifth grade that year. That was your birthday party—you remember that? Here’s where we moved in Bethel. That’s Tim on the streetcar going downtown. Here we are with Mama Lucille taking the boat tour around the Point, I guess it was 1965 or ’66, the summer we had so many fireflies. Oh, and here I am—I was ski

Laura said, “There aren’t any baby pictures.”

Mama remained silent, her eyes on the pile of photographs.

Laura went on, “It just seems strange. No baby pictures. And the way we moved. I mean, there was Constantinople Street, there was Bethel; there was the West End, there was Duquesne. And we could have stayed on. Daddy wasn’t drinking so bad in those days. And I remember how we moved. Pack up and leave overnight. Like we were skipping out. But I remember how you always left the rent in a white envelope taped inside the door. So we were ru

Mama said sullenly, “Is that why you came back here—to stir up all that old trouble?”

“Is it so wrong to want to understand?”

“Maybe. Maybe there was a good reason we left those places.”

“We’re all grown up now,” Laura said. “We have a right to know.”

“If it would help you,” Mama said vehemently, “you think I wouldn’t have told you? It was only ever to protect you … it was only so you could lead normal lives.”

Normal lives, Karen thought. She was passive now, a spectator in this exchange between her mother and her sister, thinking, A normal life is all I ever wanted. A normal life is what I wanted for Michael.

Laura said, “But we don’t lead normal lives.”

“But you could!”

“No. We can’t. Maybe for the same reason you couldn’t.” Laura held up a handful of the flimsy old photos. They looked, Karen thought, like so many brittle leaves. “Is he in here?”

Mama looked fearful. “Who?”

“You know who. Is he in here? Is he looking over somebody’s shoulder? Is he watching from the window across the street while Daddy waxes the Rambler? Is that why we moved all the time, because he found us on Constantinople Street and he found us in Bethel and he found us in Duquesne?”

Karen was holding her breath now. She thought of what Michael had said about the Gray Man on the beach, the way he had flicked that little girl out of the world with a gesture. With his eyes.

Mama said breathlessly, “You shouldn’t even talk about him. It could bring him back. It’s bad luck.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” Laura said firmly. “He doesn’t need luck.”

“God help us,” Mama said. The kitchen clock ticked; a wind rattled the windowpane. Mama added faintly, “He found you?”

“He found Michael in Toronto,” Laura said. “He found all three of us in California. There’s no reason to believe he can’t find us here.”

“So much time passed… we thought you were safe.”

“Did you? What about Tim—is Tim safe?”

“I pray for Tim.” Mama lowered her head. “I pray for him the way I prayed for you all these years.”

Laura looked startled. She opened her mouth, closed it again.

Karen found herself speaking. “We need to know all there is to know.” The words spilled out. “Not just for us. For Michael’s sake.”

“It almost wrecked us,” Mama said quietly. “Do you understand? It could wreck us again… There’s nothing I can say to help you.”

“Please,” Karen said.

Her mother looked infinitely pained and, in that protracted moment, impossibly old. Her cotton print housedress dangled limply from her shoulders. Outside, the wind raised up a whirl of snow.

“I can’t,” she said finally. “Try to understand. I never spoke to anybody about this. It’s hard. Maybe later. I have to think…”

Then, at the front of the house, the door rattled and slammed. A draft of cold air swept in along the floor. Jea

Chapter Eleven

1

The house was quiet that night, but Michael couldn’t sleep.

The dark third-floor windows were shrouded with snow. The snow, he thought, should have melted; it was early for this kind of weather. But the temperature had dropped and the snow had deepened, cold air sweeping down the valley where the Polger met the Monongahela, whipping through these old blacktop streets.

Michael had spent the day exploring the town, walking from the north side to the south and back. He had bought a couple of paperbacks at a sad-looking Kresge’s and stopped for warmth and a cup of coffee at the tiny McDonald’s on Riverside, but mostly he just walked. One long depressing afternoon hike, one side of the valley to the other. The town, he had estimated, was about as big as Turquoise Beach, but older and dirtier and poor in a different way. Michael understood that many of the people in Turquoise Beach had volunteered for poverty, lived that way so they could paint or write or make music. But poverty in Polger Valley was an unforeseen accident, a disaster as tangible as a train derailment.

He had climbed a hillside until he could see all the sooty length of the town and the broad winding of the Mon, the steel mill and the gray highway, clouds rolling like winter itself from the northwestern sky. Standing there in his heavy coat, Michael felt the power in himself—stronger, it seemed, than ever before. It was like a current rising out of the depths of the earth, the old coal veins buried there, carboniferous ruins—it was a river ru

He thought, I can go anywhere I can imagine. The places he had seen were real places—as Turquoise Beach was a real place—but accessible only if you could dream yourself there.

He thought about this, walking home. He endured Willis’s pointed stares that evening, thinking about it. He took his thoughts to bed with him.