THAT ONE PUNCH had broken Line’s jaw, and for the second time since our arrival in D.C., we rushed en famille to the George Washington University emergency room. All I could think about during the drive was how it was my fault—why hadn’t I steered the caller with the gruff voice off my uncle’s trail?
Linc spent two nights in the hospital and had as many surgeries, to stabilize three fractures of the mandible. He came home with his jaw wired shut, and sequestered himself in his room. My mother bought a heavy-duty blender, Cinnamon returned from Fields of Plenty with bags of vegetables and protein supplements, and Molly and I provided room service, carrying tall glasses of pureed soups, fruit shakes and whatever else could be liquefied and sucked up with a straw.
The Brawny look-alike who’d laid Linc out had not been heard from since. After the punch, my father rushed down the front steps and threatened a citizen’s arrest, but the lumberman flipped him the bird and hopped into the Bug, and that was the last we’d see of the KING TUT RULES / OUR HOUSE car.
While we flew off to the hospital, my father and Tino had remained behind, dealing with Linda Silvers and the stunned students. According to Dawn and Stephanie, who later reported back to me, even the St. Sebastian miscreants could only sit quietly as my father and Tino asked questions about Earth Day and President Carter’s address, pretending that nothing had happened. After half an hour, class was dismissed. And when we got the news that Linc was going to need a second surgery, my father canceled school for the rest of the week. The term had been winding down anyway, and he needed time to come up with some explanation for why a vigilante had stormed into class, cracked a teacher in the face and stolen our school’s art project. Linc returned in no state to explain himself—wincing, he garbled his words—so my father called a meeting of the Fellowship of Chester.
By now I’d grown weary of this ritual. Getting locked in jail had been the last straw on so many counts with my father. Wasn’t I grown up enough that we could speak plainly, without reciting some artificial vow? In graduate school, the woman I’d eventually marry would tell me that in times of stress her own father was so uncomfortable talking directly to his sons that he resorted to pirate-speak:
Ay, me hearties, your mother wants to leave me.
Shiver me timbers! You don’t say?
’Tis true, me buckos. The saucy wench is set to weigh anchor and hoist the mizzen!
As I look back on it, my father was not much better at getting his message across. We were in the kitchen, and he was washing dishes. Chester sat on the counter, stabbing at an injured roach. “You’ve been acting funny, Daniel. Is something on your mind?”
I filled the blender with banana, yogurt and honey and claimed to know nothing more than anyone else. I said the assault had to do with the cigarette car, a simple case of payback. Not long ago I might have told him about the letters Linc had showed me from Rex Brisbee and Rudy, the mail clerk at the Mazama P.O. I might have confided my guilt over the phone call that preceded the attack. But I no longer felt I’d do anything to protect my father, and the words that used to roll off my tongue stayed coiled as snails.
“What should we tell the students?” he asked.
“Say it was a car theft.”
“But they could see it was personal. The guy knew Line’s name.” My father put a plate in the drying rack. “And I don’t want someone to call and get the police involved. I have a good thing going at the precinct.”
“Say it was a misunderstanding.”
“That’s too vague. We have to brainstorm. I can’t afford to have Bailey find out about this.”
You don’t know the half of it, I wanted to say. If Bailey found out we had a teacher sleeping with an underage student, all his preconceptions would be confirmed and he could shut down the school tomorrow. My father shooed Chester off the counter and sprayed the backsplash; the wounded roach circled the drain and disappeared; and it occurred to me that maybe Molly had been right all along about Our House. What kind of school was this, after all, where the kids were indistinguishable from the teachers, where there was no order and no one in charge? That my father couldn’t recognize the signs of a looming crisis, that he stood by and counted on me, a thirteen-year-old with no experience in the world, to tell him what to do next, made me wish for someone I could look up to, like the presidents I’d been studying for years. Why couldn’t my father be that kind of leader?
“What are you going to do, Dad?”
“I was asking you.”
“I don’t know. It’s your school.” I switched on the blender and the kitchen filled with a steady, piercing wheeze.
After I had fixed Line’s banana shake, I poured it into a glass and said I should be getting upstairs. Leaving the kitchen I caught a glimpse of my father with his back to the sink, his third baseman’s forearms crossed over his chest and a weirdly vacant look on his face. He could have been lost, or lost in thought. It was anybody’s guess.
That night, in the back yard, Molly and I helped Quinn with the final details of his zeppelin. The days were growing longer, and we worked—or, rather, Molly and I lifted the frame and tail assembly while Quinn tinkered with the gondola—until dusk wore down to dark. Quinn figured he was a week away from formally christening his airship and flying it on a tether above Our House, and he wondered aloud if the school would ever reconvene. “I’ve been through this kind of thing before,” he said.
“What kind of thing?” I asked.
“You know, watching what happened to Anthony with his family. I couldn’t take that again.” Quinn put a tarpaulin over his blimp and we made our way inside.
It occurred to me that Quinn cared far more than I had realized. He poured as much energy into that silly balloon as I used to put into helping my father. “The school’s going to be fine,” I said, and felt a new resolve. “All the kids will be back on Monday, just like normal.”
But when we reached the front hallway we heard the sound of my parents’ arguing from Line’s room at the top of the stairs. Afraid to go up, we waited and listened:
MOTHER: Don’t talk to him like that. He’s in incredible pain.
FATHER: He brought it on himself. You can’t drive off with a car and get away with it.
LINC: Uh here uhreddy. Got a hrolluh?
FATHER: Damn right I’ve got a problem. I’ve got a whole list. Want me to go over it for you?
MOTHER: Leave him alone, Pete. He shouldn’t be talking.
FATHER: What am I supposed to tell the parents, huh? Guess who I got to speak with this afternoon? The bishop of the Episcopal diocese of Washington. And guess who else? Sister Donovan. I didn’t know what to say, so I told them it was a freak incident, a random attack.
MOTHER: That wasn’t very smart. We’re supposed to be a safe haven. How do you think we got students here in the first place?
MOTHER: You could have told them what I said to Linda—it was a lovers’ quarrel.
LINC: (muffled laughter)
FATHER: Are you kidding me?
MOTHER: It worked. She said she’d come back anytime.
FATHER: This isn’t my fault. It’s your brother’s. That’s right, Linc. I’m talking to you, and I don’t care about your jaw. I’ve had worse pain than that, buddy, and I didn’t deserve it. You think I’m mad now? Wait till the hospital bills arrive, and you bankrupt us.
LINC: ’Ats not your hrolluh.
MOTHER: Quiet, Linc. Don’t get excited. I’ll call Mom and Dad. I’m sure they’ll help out.
FATHER: They haven’t talked to your brother in years.
MOTHER: They still ask about him. They’re ready to reconcile.
FATHER: And what better way than to slap them with a bill for a couple thousand dollars. I used to have an inheritance—now it’s gone. Got an education grant—that’ll be up in smoke after next month’s bills. A few days ago we had two cars for the entire school to share. Now we’re down to one beat-up van in need of a tune-up that we can’t afford. Thanks to you, Linc, I’m going to the Rent-A-Man as soon as the term is over to work a summer job. And I’m not the only one who better be seeking outside employment. You’re going to have to get off your ass, too. Your sitting-around-plucking-the-guitar days are done if you have any desire to stay in this house.
This time my mother allowed my father to let off steam, and I thought his threats would turn out to be idle. But I didn’t realize how dire our finances had become. The next week, the students did return, and when they asked Linc to explain why he’d been attacked, he struggled to speak and my father took over. But he hadn’t come up with an adequate lie and was blabbing abstractly when Cinnamon broke in to save the day. She asked everyone if they remembered the story about the former hunter who taught the communards how to tan deer hides then wigged out and wandered into the woods. Somehow he’d gotten into his crazy head that Linc had done him wrong, and came all the way across the country to punch him out and take his ride. “The good news is, the cops arrested the guy and took him back to Washington State to lock him up.”
“What’s the bad news?” Stephanie asked.
“There was a high-speed chase, and he totaled the car.”
On the last day of the term Quinn launched his blimp over Our House. It got stuck in the linden trees, and Tino climbed onto the roof from an attic window. Cinnamon and Brie cried out, “Be careful,” as Tino inched nimbly across the roof tiles. He hacked at some branches with a broom and freed a space for the airship. It slipped up on its tether and snapped to rest above the trees, where it looked, for all purposes, less like a beacon than a distress signal.
Though the other faculty would have to get jobs from June through August, my mother was determined to teach and keep the school running through the summer. She called around soliciting students to take her literature and creative writing course, which would run through July, and to our pleasant surprise fourteen students signed up. Each of the four poets took charge of a different summer activity: the Our House coffee shop, the literary magazine, the book discussion group and the reading series. Linc was disappointed to learn that Dawn would be gone for the summer, particularly since she’d graduated to fingerpicking and was trying out her first Joni Mitchell tunes. The poets had wanted live music to be part of their reading series; now they’d have to look elsewhere for entertainment. Dawn said her parents had signed her and Brie up for a language camp in Aix-en-Provence, and had been late in letting the school know they’d be overseas all summer. “But we’ll be back in the fall,” Dawn promised. I could hardly contain my excitement when I heard that Brie would be out of the country for two months. With any luck she’d fall in love with a French swain and never come back to the States. Or at least she’d forget about grubby Tino during her rousing months abroad.
After a week of walking to 7th Street and standing in line at the Rent-A-Man office, my father ran into Mazzocca at a Neighborhood Watch meeting and the lieutenant got him an interview as a summer camp baseball coach. All he had to say was “first team Big Ten” and “Detroit Tigers farm system” and he was hired on the spot. After more than twenty years he dusted off his bats and gloves, slipped on his old cleats and returned to the field. The camp, the largest in D.C., drew junior-high- and high-school-age kids, so the job would bring in not just some cash but perhaps new recruits for fall.
My father told Cinnamon and Tino that they had to get jobs as well. “If we’re going to make it next year we need to build up our savings. No more hand-to-mouth.” They balked at first, but when he threatened to charge them rent, they gave in, signing up for seasonal work at an organic farm in Fairfax County, Virginia. Cinnamon helped out in the tomato and bean fields, and Tino worked in the mill, squeezing sorghum for molasses. They came home on the bus each day with bags full of vegetables, gained, for a change, by legitimate means. Despite his condition, Linc, too, went on the job hunt. After the medical bill arrived, even higher than my father’s estimate, Linc started reading the Post classifieds. He sounded like Jaws from The Spy Who Loved Me, which didn’t help his prospects, and over the six weeks before doctors could remove his wires, he grew ascetic-thin despite the protein shakes and starchy soups that Molly and I delivered. He put down the guitar, finished the last volume of The Man Without Qualities, and turned to more practical reading: What Color Is Your Parachute?
To make up for the loss of the Bug, Linc was determined to get work that came with a company vehicle. “CEO?” Tino mocked him. “You’re going to be a fat cat in a stretch limo?” In fact, Linc hoped to drive a limo, or barring that, a cab, but getting a hack’s license proved too much of a hassle, particularly through D.C.’s byzantine Department of Motor Vehicles. The best he could find was a street vendor job with the Jack & Jill Ice Cream Company. Each evening, after making his rounds through the posh neighborhoods of Chevy Chase and Bethesda, he’d park behind the Ben Franklin hydrant and sell ice cream sandwiches, nut cones, strawberry shortcakes, Screwballs and red, white and blue Bullet pops to the students and patrons of the Our House coffee shop.
I remember it was on one of these evenings, in late June, that I saw Cleo for the first time in more than a month. When she’d broken her wrist she had promised to stop by the school, but that hadn’t happened, and I’d only heard about her from Dawn and Stephanie, who said she’d been lying low of late and seemed different, more reserved. Each time I went to the basketball court I felt Cleo’s eyes on the back of my neck, but when I’d turn around, no one would be there. Not wanting to explain what had happened to Linc or why I’d never told anyone about Tino and Brie, I never got up the nerve to call.
She came to Our House for an art opening. Stephanie had recently completed her seven deadly sins project; her photos hung on the walls; and to celebrate, each of the fourteen summer students was to read one original poem based on a deadly sin. Several had invited friends, and Cleo said she was here for Stephanie, though I wanted to think she’d really come for me.
Tino, Quinn and I had gone around in the van at the end of the college semester and picked up three old couches, some sturdy wooden chairs and a La-Z-Boy recliner that some rich kid at Georgetown University had abandoned outside his dorm. Now the living room and parlor were almost comfortable. The only trouble had been the onrush of another swampy-humid D.C. summer. But the twins had concocted a makeshift air conditioner using garbage cans filled with ice water, coiled copper tubes and standing fans, a Rube Goldberg contraption that would have made Dear Abbie smile.
After admiring Stephanie’s photographs, which covered three walls in our living room and one in the parlor, where Senedu manned the coffee shop, Cleo and I nestled on a lumpy sofa to listen to the night’s event. My mother, standing in front of the mantel, introduced the students one at a time, the four poets first, and they all read in earnest, quavering voices:
GLUTTONY
he’s walking down the street eating apple strudel not a care
in the world while
at the corner, another man waiting all night waiting
all his days for some kindness
says
please, I been down on my luck
spirit smashed
he’s looking for another chance
but that man with the strudel keeps walking not a care not a stare
in the world for his brother on the corner
I’d like to ask him how much of that strudel can he keep on eating
when
the man on the corner gets no pastry, just these trivial words,
he waits, keeps waiting
while the man with the strudel walks on by
keeps going.
We applauded each poet until my mother invited Cinnamon to say some words about Stephanie, who was the last reader of the night. Cinnamon gave a warm introduction praising the deadly sins photographs, then Stephanie came up and thanked everyone for attending. She said the title of her poem, “Lust,” and waited for the oohs and whistles to die down:
A girl sits on the bench
in the park.
She seems innocent yet
in the distance there is dark.
A torrid wind blows in from the west
Pulls at her skirt, acts like a pest.
The wind has desires...
and wants them met.
It lures the girl into its net.
Now the bench is empty and bare
And the girl and the wind
are who knows where?
Later, after nearly everyone had gone home, Cleo asked me what I thought of Stephanie’s poem. “It was short, but not bad,” I said. We were alone on the back patio, sitting on a wood-and-cinderblock bench beside the vegetable garden. Only the lettuce, kohlrabi and cabbage were growing; the celery, cukes, peppers, beans and tomatoes had barely peeked out of the ground.
“I thought it was pretty obvious.” Cleo lifted a linden bract from the knee of her white jeans. “The wind is supposed to be Tino, and Brie is the girl.”
I tried not to let on that I, too, had decoded the poem right away. It had taken a force of will for me not to look around the room while Stephanie read the words. I’d been dying to know if other students had heard rumors. “She should be careful,” I said.
“It’s been on her mind. Dawn talks about it constantly. She likes your school. She wants you to succeed.” Cleo tossed the bract in the air like a boomerang and it spun to the ground.
“But now that Brie’s in France, I’m pretty sure the whole thing is over—some other wind is blowing her skirt.” I smiled but Cleo did not respond. “So how have you been?” I was eager for a change of subject, and relieved that she didn’t badger me about whether I’d told my parents.
“I’ve been better.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Trouble at home. It’s about Troy,” she said, and went on to tell me about her family’s ordeal with her older brother, whose drinking had gotten out of control. He used to organize parties at Battery Kemble Park, where kids from OLPH and St. Sebastian would gather at nightfall and shotgun beers on the hill in the headlights of their parents’ cars. From being a weekend drinker he’d moved on to hitting the family liquor cabinet; he’d sneaked flasks into school until Factotum Frank and the maid began to notice that the booze had inched down to near empty. “When my folks were out of town around New Year’s he threw a big party and I saw him take some pills. I told my mom about it, and she sent him to the school psychologist. Troy didn’t talk to me for weeks after that.”
But drugs were not his downfall, the psychologist determined. Bailey’s son was an alcoholic. “He used to be a good student, too, but his grades have been slipping and this spring they went completely south,” Cleo said. “Frank tried to keep an eye on him at home, and my mom put me on watch at school, but it was no use. He didn’t do his work, and he was always disappearing.” She sighed. “I’ve been following my brother around for months like some undercover agent. It’s been awful.”
“So what’s going to happen?” I asked.
“My dad won’t take it seriously. He keeps talking about ‘the Fall of Troy,’ as if by joking about it he can make it go away. My grandfather lost an arm in World War I, and the extent of his advice to my father was to stop whining and bite the bullet. It wasn’t until Sister Donovan called to say Troy had failed all but two courses that my parents realized they had to do something.”
“They’re getting him treatment?”
“That’s what my mom and I thought we should do. But my father doesn’t believe in twelve-step programs—he’s all about selfreliance. And my mom always caves in to my dad. He told Troy to get a job, make himself useful. He lasted three days as a bellhop at the Crystal City Marriott before he overslept and didn’t bother to call in.”
“I had no idea any of this was going on,” I said. No wonder Bailey hadn’t been coming around.
“My dad would rather you not know. So please don’t tell your parents. Anyway, Troy went to France for the summer, on the same program as Dawn and Brie. It seemed the best compromise. He can get credit for the language classes, and I’ll have a friend to keep an eye on him. He probably just needs a change of scenery, far away from my dad.”
Last I’d heard, the French were not exactly teetotalers, but Cleo didn’t need to be reminded of that. “Sounds like a good plan,” I said.
Turning toward me, her lips still slightly purple from the Bullet pop she’d bought from Linc, Cleo took my hand and squeezed it. “Thanks for listening,” she said. “I knew you’d understand.”
Careful not to shatter the moment by uttering a word, I closed my eyes, leaned in, and then we were kissing, a taste of ozone and some sweet, indefinable fruit. I ran my hand down her back. Her shirt rode above her belt line, and my fingers brushed the arch of exposed skin. Entwined like this, I tried to summon the courage to cup her breast, seized suddenly with the presentiment that the chance might never come again. I was capturing this feeling in my memory when Cleo stopped and pulled back. “I should be going.”
“Why?”
“It’s late. I need to call Frank to pick me up.”
“My dad can give you a ride. Or Linc. You can go in style in an ice cream truck. Can’t you stay just a little longer?”
She touched her lips with the tips of her fingers. “The truth is, Daniel, I’m leaving tomorrow for Bethany Beach, and I haven’t packed. They’re putting me in a tennis camp there. I’ll be gone all summer. That’s really why I came here tonight—to tell you.”
I didn’t know what to say.
She kissed me again.
“Maybe I can visit,” I said, aware that I sounded too desperate. “Well—” Her voice trailed off and she stood up to go.
“I can take the bus, sleep on the beach and sneak over to see you."
“I don’t think my mom will go for that.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I’ll be back before too long,” she said. “It’s just for July and August.” She took my hand and led me into the house.
Linc and my parents were talking and cleaning up the living room. While Cleo and I had been out back, Lieutenant Mazzocca had stopped by, answering a noise complaint. Mr. Unthank had called the precinct to say the poetry reading and Line’s ringing of the Jack & Jill bell had finally gotten to him. While I listened to my parents talk about Mazzocca’s visit, Cleo slipped away to call Frank to take her home.
Apparently police complaints had been on the rise of late. People were on edge, particularly those with family in New York, ever since the news out of Queens that a serial killer using the name Son of Sam had shot two more people. Five had been killed and six wounded in seven attacks over the past year. This time, miraculously, the couple had survived. Moments before the shooting, one of the victims, Sal Lupo, had said to his girlfriend, “This Son of Sam is really scary, the way that guy comes out of nowhere. You never know where he’ll hit next.”
The fear seemed to have crawled up and down the East Coast. “The twins’ parents almost didn’t let them out tonight,” my mother said. “I’m worried we’re going to lose students unless this guy gets caught.” It turned out she was right. Soon after Cleo left for Bethany, our numbers dwindled to nine, and business at the coffee shop tapered off so much that one day Molly abandoned her sandwich board on the corner of 16th and Hill and called our grandparents to ask if she could move to Wausau for the summer. “And I’m not going to this school next year!” She stomped up to her room and slammed the door.
Eventually Molly calmed down, and among the remaining students my mother did her best to keep up morale. She went over the top in praising their hackneyed fiction and poetry. She took them to old movies based on novels—Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Great Expectations, Doctor Zhivago—and when she sensed their interest flagging she presented a list of “banned books”—Animal Farm, Huckleberry Finn, Of Mice and Men—and called for a vote. Stephanie suggested we read Lolita, and the class approved the choice unanimously. Worried that Tino and Brie would be the subtext of the whole discussion, I told my mother in private that we should read another book, but didn’t explain why. Seeing that The Great Gatsby was playing at the American Film Institute, I persuaded her to put off Lolita for a while, and she liked the idea enough to bring it up in class. The students resisted, but one of the poets, a votary of all things gothic and macabre, took my side. She’d heard that recently the bodies of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald had been moved to a Catholic cemetery in Rockville, a few miles beyond the Maryland border.
“We can read the book, see the movie and put coins on their headstone,” she said. “A friend of mine left a martini glass and a pack of cigarettes.”
“Hands up for a pilgrimage,” I said, and because the poets formed a bloc and Quinn always voted with me, my idea won the day.
And so, on July 12, on a cloudy, blessedly mild afternoon that followed two solid weeks of ninety-degree days, nine of us plus my mother crammed into the clattery van and drove up Wisconsin Avenue to Rockville Pike, turning into the small parking lot behind St. Mary’s Catholic Church.
We had seen the Robert Redford movie and read The Great Gatsby the previous week, and though it would take years and several rereadings before I’d understand why I identified with the book, I knew that something about those midwestern dreamers—one the lavish millionaire, the other the outsider looking in—who had come east to make their mark, moved me in ways that only biography ever had before. I felt an observer’s kinship with Nick and forgave Gatsby his venality and recklessness, all in the name of love. I called up a romanticized picture of my own parents as a modern-day Scott and Zelda, in self-imposed exile, on a wild, headlong ride.
We opened the gate and walked into the small cemetery, and the macabre poet pointed out the grave. Scott and Zelda were buried under the same headstone, the only one in the place footed with a marble slab. The ten of us stood in a semicircle and noted the couple's ages: Scott had died of a heart attack at forty in Hollywood, leaving The Last Tycoon unfinished, not one of his books still in print at the time; Zelda was killed eight years later in a fire at Highland Mental Hospital in Asheville, North Carolina. Etched in the slab were the last lines from Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
This could describe the life I’ve chosen, every day a backward look over time, which in its lengthening makes sense of experience. A part of my teenage self was already honoring the past as I laid a quarter on the headstone, which was half-covered in French and American coins. The macabre poet added a ballpoint pen and a fresh pack of Pall Malls, and after the rest of the group offered their own quarters and dimes, we all tried to have a quiet moment. But the graveyard was only a couple of acres and surrounded by busy Veirs Mill Road and Rockville Pike. The steady rush of traffic and car horns and the distant sound of a jackhammer broke any sense of peace. Another of the poets complained, but my mother pointed out that the Fitzgeralds had lived a clamorous life, so this seemed an appropriate resting place.
We returned to the van, piled in and rolled down the windows.
I sat in the far back with Quinn, who pointed to a plane crossing the sky and asked if I’d heard about the upcoming test flight of the NASA space shuttle. He was saying it would be the first to hitch a ride on the back of a jetliner, when my mother turned around from the driver’s seat and announced, “Something’s wrong.”
“What?” I asked.
“I need you to call your father, Daniel.”
“I need you to go into that church and get someone on the phone.” She gritted her teeth.
And that’s when I saw that she was turning the ignition and the engine wouldn’t start.
“Jesus Christ.” She tried again, without any luck. “I told your father this thing needed to be serviced.”
The other students turned around and looked back at me with expectant faces. I slid past Quinn, climbed up to the middle and let myself out of the van. Not knowing whom to call or what it would mean for us to lose our car, on top of everything else, I ran toward the church.