ONE EVENING ON BIMINI I CAME TO THE COMPLEAT ANGLER WITH Dad, who was still on the mend from major surgery. While he sat outside on the porch I walked through the rooms looking at pictures of Hemingway on the varnished walls—in one of my favorites he was shooting his tommy gun at a giant hammerhead—and read selections from his writing reproduced in large type. There were keenly observed moments of tremendous billfish striking the bait, of anglers strapped into the chair struggling mightily to boat marlin and tuna before the hooked fish were mutilated by sharks. The wanton plenty of the sea pulsed through all of this writing. Boxing matches on the Bimini beach were flavored by the lusty fishing that had preceded them on the blue water north of the island. This writing made me desperate with excitement, and it seemed inconceivable that the author was no longer himself plying the waves pulling baits.
Abe and Harcourt, Ozzie’s father, had sat outside on the porch and I soon joined them. These two clever, wiry men toasted the balmy evening and agreed that they were lucky to have sons who would someday take over their businesses. I had smiled at my father like a puppy. Harcourt was protective of his wounded friend as though they were both part of an elite circle. Even when he was down on his luck, my father arrived in the Bimini harbor on the bridge of his Ebb Tide like a maharaja. Although Harcourt was Bimini’s most prosperous citizen, owned the power plant and Brown’s Hotel and Marina as well as the Compleat Angler Hotel and Bar, it would not have occurred to him that his own business interests far outstripped Abe Waitzkin’s.
Soon after I left Riverdale for Kenyon College, my fourteen-year-old brother ran away from home and settled in central Florida. For months Mother had no idea where he was. She was beside herself. Dad hired detectives, but they couldn’t find him. Bill worked on a farm picking cotton and eventually moved to Boca Raton, where he had his hair straightened and dyed jet black like Liz Taylor’s. In Boca he met a lady bartender also named Billy, who was twice his age and had two children. Billy believed my brother was eighteen. They fell in love and Bill moved into her place. Late at night while her kids slept, they drank Jack Daniel’s. Sometimes they left the kids and walked swiftly to the beach and made love on the cool sand. Holding Billy was beautiful and sad.
After a half a year Bill decided that it was time to move on. When he left Billy she was pregnant and Bill never learned if she had had his baby. The memory of Billy haunted him. Years later he tried to find her in Boca but she had vanished.
Bill moved from Boca Raton to Bimini. By then he had managed to have his German shepherd, Black Jack, shipped south. Bill and Black Jack moved into a room on the top floor of the Bimini Hotel, which was located at the south end of North Bimini overlooking the entrance to the harbor. My brother woke in the morning to the sight of leopard rays and tiger sharks cruising past the white beach on the inside of the reef near the small boat cut.
Bimini assuaged Bill’s sense of loss and he decided this was his home. On the island he was free to indulge his love of the sea without the immense weight of his father’s fishing hardware and his brother’s conventional big game fishing ambitions. Bill quickly discovered Bimini’s magic for allowing fantasy to run free.
Living on top of the ocean, he was inspired to write the first draft of his romantic thriller, Rogue Shark, in which an eighteen-foot hammerhead wanders through the small boat cut discovering the peaceful island of Bimini. In Rogue Shark the islanders are a naïve, idle people with a gross appetite for rum and copulation. Everything changes once the savage creature develops a taste for Biminites.
Many afternoons Bill could be found sitting in a foot of water in the bay near Ansil Saunders’s house playing with a baby lemon shark or shovelnose. My brother had the knack of calming these fierce little creatures until they grew docile and allowed petting like cats. Ansil was an accomplished fisherman and fifteen years older than Bill, but still he found himself swept up in my brother’s charisma and absurd fishing schemes. Though exhausted from poling his skiff around the flats for bonefish, he and Bill spent nights fishing with handlines from the beach in front of the Bimini Hotel, where big sharks swam in with the tide. The two friends chummed the water with amberjack and bloody tuna and held their thick lines while Bill shared his ideas on the Carcharodon megalodon or Egyptian mummies or his plans to climb the ruins of Machu Picchu while taking a break from stalking large black marlin in the Humboldt Current off Cabo Blanco, Peru. Fishing in the blackness with the tide rushing past, the friends were braced for all of life’s adventure.
There were scores of nights when they hauled big sharks up onto the beach, the largest a twelve-foot hammerhead that they admired and then pushed back into the ocean. Another night they caught two ten-foot blacktips, and while the beasts heaved on the sand, Ansil found himself convinced by Bill to drag them a hundred yards to the Avis Club’s saltwater pool and roll them in. The following morning the two sharks appeared to be asleep on the bottom of the pool. Ansil and Bill were watching from behind a palm tree when a sleepy bather dropped his towel on a chair and took a dive into the deep end. The startled sharks came to the surface in a frenzy, racing around, smacking the walls to break free. The unnerved swimmer burst out of the pool and then stared back at the frantic sharks, shaking his head.
A producer for the popular television show The American Sportsman contacted Ansil about doing a piece on the dangerous sharks of Bimini. Soon a television crew was on the island filming the segment starring Bill and Ansil.
In one part of the show, which was Bill’s brilliant conception, the two friends stalked two large lemon sharks on the flats east of the island. When the skiff was on top of the two eight-footers, Ansil and Bill jumped onto their backs. The sharks were powerful and aggressive, and in four or five feet of water they were nearly impossible to control. As Bill and Ansil held their sharks in a bear hug, the creatures twisted and yanked their heads, tried to sink their teeth into thighs and arms. After a few minutes, half-drowned and dizzy, they let the sharks go. Back in the skiff they discovered that their bodies were skinned raw from wrestling against the whipping tails and flanks of the sharks. And to make things worse, their wounds were greased with a foul stinging slime. Bill thought this was hilarious.
Ansil recalls this stunt as one of the dumbest things he ever tried. My brother was so cocksure about handling sharks that Ansil strayed from his sense of caution. But, more, Bill had the ability to elevate outrageous ideas, to make them seem glorious. For another segment of the ABC show, they decided to harpoon a man-eating tiger shark from the fourteen-foot skiff while the cameraman caught the action. After searching for a couple of hours they found a big tiger on a white sand bottom in six feet of water behind South Bimini. The sun was high overhead. The cònditions were perfect for filming. Ansil asked the cameraman if he was ready to go and then slowly approached with the skiff. When he was close Bill threw the harpoon, but it only grazed the shark. While my brother retrieved the line attached to the harpoon for another try, the twelve-foot tiger turned sharply and attacked the side of the skiff, throwing everyone off balance. After a few seconds it let go and disappeared from view. While Bill and Ansil tried to locate the shark, it came up astern and charged the skiff again. This time it swam with its head high, planing the water like the white shark years later in the movie Jaws. It seized the flimsy transom with a broad mouth of teeth and shook its head, all but ripping the stern from the boat. My brother jabbed the harpoon into its flapping gill to try to get the shark to let go and Ansil shouted to the ABC cameraman to get this on film. But one more attack like the last and the skiff would sink and the three of them would be in the water with the enraged beast. They were lucky. On its third attack the shark grabbed the lower unit of the engine and began to shake its heavy head. Ansil started the engine and gunned the propeller. Teeth and blood splattered into the boat. When the water began to clear, the tiger shark was floating belly up. The scene was more than The American Sportsman could have hoped for, but when Bill and Ansil finally turned their attention to the cameraman, he was cowering facedown on the deck. From the tiger shark’s first attack he had been so frightened that he’d never turned on the camera.
To save money Bill shared his room in the hotel with a boy named John, who was several years older and another friend of Ansil’s. John had come to the island to do some bonefishing with Ansil before entering Harvard as a freshman. He was petrified of sharks, which Bill found amusing. But John’s literary name-dropping and snotty attitude toward Rogue Shark wore on my brother’s nerves. Whenever Bill was annoyed at someone it quickly showed in Black Jack’s demeanor. The German shepherd began snarling and making exploratory lunges at John, putting him on edge. Perhaps Bill saw similarities in this boy to his bookish brother. One night when Bill was entirely fed up with John’s pretentiousness, Black Jack came at him with teeth bared and drove John off the Bimini Hotel’s little dock, which was a notoriously good place for shark fishing. While John struggled against the current in the blackness, Bill began shrieking at the top of his lungs, “Get out of the water, hammerhead, hammerhead, swim for your life! Hammerhead!”
When Bill called Mother from Florida to say he was coming home, she wasn’t sure if she felt joy or anger. She had been desperate about him when he left, but now after a year she thought less about Bill. Stella was living on West 9th Street in the Village, right around the corner from the Cedar Tavern, and had replaced motherhood with extra hours working on her sculpture and teaching. When she hung up the phone with her younger son, her heart was palpitating. She walked to May’s Department Store on 14th Street, where two years earlier, when the building was just under construction, she had buried one of her large polyester eggs. May’s was one of her favorite stores. She went inside to the appliance department and carefully selected a midsized radio with a wooden cabinet. She put it underneath her coat and walked past a uniformed guard at the door. This was the largest item Mother had ever filched. Stella claimed that shoplifting gave her a rush and distracted her from problems. But I believe she went through this phase of petty stealing mainly to climb in the same boat with Tony.
When Bill arrived in New York he discovered Mom was living with a boyfriend, Tony Fruscella. My brother would have viewed any new man in Mom’s life as a rival, but Tony brought qualities that cut to the bone.
Tony Fruscella was a genius jazz musician. He grew up in an orphanage in New Jersey listening to church music until the age of fourteen, when he first heard jazz and began studying trumpet. Following his release from the army he played with the Lester Young band, Gerry Mulligan and Stan Getz and occasionally with Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker. Jazz lovers of the fifties were touched by his emotional trumpet voice, his husky whisper lingering on melody and improvising close to it instead of racing into abstraction, like many of his contemporaries. Tony was often compared to the young Miles Davis. But today listening to his haunting solos I think of Chet Baker.
The recorded oeuvre of Fruscella’s music is pitifully meager, although several records from the early and middle fifties attest to his soulful virtuosity and the sadness of his life. By the late fifties Tony was broke and frustrated by lack of recognition. He was doing junk and playing only intermittently. For a time he didn’t have a horn and some musicians chipped in and bought him one at a pawnshop. Friends said that he played a great session with Sonny Rollins during the period when Rollins had withdrawn from the public spotlight and was mainly playing by himself on the Brooklyn Bridge. Someone taped it, but the session seems to have been lost.
Mother fell in love with Tony for his music, although by the time she met him, his career was over. At only thirty-eight Fruscella was ruined by drink and drugs, living on rooftops or park benches, and occasionally the couches of friends until he was thrown out.
Wafting through Mother’s subterranean 9th Street apartment were the sounds of Tony’s solos recorded years earlier with Stan Getz and Phil Woods, lyrical refrains, relaxing and dreamy. Sometimes the music on the hi-fi was Bach and Vivaldi, Tony’s favorites, which made Bill impatient because he favored the Supremes and Martha Reeves and the Vandellas. Mixing with the music was the aroma of Mom’s chicken soup and gribbenes to heal her wounded men; and the factory smells that came from Mom’s kiln, which was cooking in the hall fifteen hours a day. Often it was the odor of hot glass. At the time Mother was melting bottles like caved-in souls. But sometimes it was the acrid smell of melting metal, silver and gold. To maintain his drug habit, Tony was breaking into stores, apartments, going on secret missions was how he put it, grabbing jewelry, small appliances, whatever, bringing loot to Mom’s for hiding, melting down precious metals in the kiln before meeting the fence. Mother was mostly oblivious to his capers, or treated them as an aspect of his art.
Tony’s immediacy, his wildness and decadence fascinated her. If she took him for a sandwich, Tony would grab the tip when she turned to walk out the door. Mother laughed at his outrages as if they were living in a Warhol movie. Before his introduction to Sadie, Stella’s mother, Tony ran around a corner and stole flowers from someone’s fenced-in garden.
For Stella, rather than in museums, art was alive in street happenings and improvisational movies and also in abandoned refuse and crippled souls. Tony’s fall and beatness were art. One afternoon they were wandering through a flea market on Seventh Avenue. Fruscella picked up an old horn from a table and began to play taps. His sound was so ethereal and captivating people stopped what they were doing and gathered around. Mother was moved by the absurdity and pathos of vegetable vendors and housewives pausing for taps on Seventh Avenue. Afterward Tony said to her, Stella, when I go, I’m gonna leave you my body.
To make a buck Fruscella occasionally worked in a fish market. When he came to 9th Street stinking from the market, with fillets, probably stolen, she told Bill, Tony’s into fishing like you. My brother simmered.
One afternoon Bill was walking home from school and noticed the traffic on 9th Street was backed up. Standing in front of the building Tony was brandishing a Japanese sword he’d stolen someplace, dueling cars to a stop like a matador. Despite his rage Bill found this amusing. Tony was not impeded by inhibitions or rules. That’s why he’s a great artist, said Mother with a glow that irritated my brother.
A couple of months after Bill’s return, Tony broke into a boat docked at the 79th Street yacht basin. Escaping over the barbed-wire fence with a big stash, he cut himself up. Tony trailed blood down 9th Street to Mother’s basement door. He was a mess and he began bellowing, Stella, Stella, let me in, Stella. Mother wasn’t home and Bill was furious and wouldn’t open the door. He told Tony to go away, she was in Coney Island, eating at Nathan’s. Fruscella hauled his sacks down the block but came back minutes later moaning pitifully, Stella, Stella, please Stella. By now neighbors were looking out windows. When no one answered, Tony piled newspaper and wood against her door and set it on fire.
Bill was in a rage. He called the cops and they arrested Tony with the loot. Fruscella was locked up for three months.
Bill assumed a reasonable tone with his mother, as though he were the sage and forgiving parent. He explained that Tony wasn’t a respectable choice. She and Fruscella wouldn’t be able to make appearances together at 57th Street gallery openings, not to mention the Museum of Modern Art. With Tony the family would never be accepted back in Great Neck. Mother appeared to agree. She always tried to appease Bill. Then it’s all settled, was Bill’s manner.
My brother phoned a fishing captain he knew from the Montauk days, Swede Swenson was his name. Swede was rawboned and six foot six. He drove a forty-two-foot Wheeler without the help of a crew. Swede was tough and resourceful and became famous in big game circles for wrestling large game fish aboard without a mate. A few weeks before Tony got out of jail, Bill arranged a date for Mom with Swede Swenson. To please Bill, Stella was pleasant to Swenson when he came by for a cup of coffee. She thought it was comical when this huge man explained how he brought aboard big tunas and broadbills by himself using flying gaffs and meat hooks.
Bill painted his large bedroom dark blue like the Gulf Stream, hung his fish mounts on the wall beside lacquered shark jaws and his prized jars of small sharks in formaldehyde. But he could not re-create Bimini’s expansiveness. Bill was hemmed in by big buildings and the banality of school. He’d lost interest in Rogue Shark and the daydream of fishing on the beach with Ansil went lifeless. Bill turned on the afternoon soaps or flipped through the channels for Godzilla movies. He drank Jack Daniel’s and planned expeditions to South America and the South Pacific. He felt dead without mystery and bold adventure. My brother had his first epileptic seizures during this period. He regarded this illness as humiliating and managed to keep it secret for years.
When Tony got out of jail he was right back to the apartment, needing wine, needing Stella, phoning his ex-wife, jazz vocalist Morgana King (she played the role of Don Corleone’s wife opposite Marlon Brando in The Godfather), who always hung up at the sound of his pleading, plastered voice. Playing against his inebriation, vomiting, manic thievery, bags and boxes of unwanted loot passed on to Mom with frantic sweaty love, there was “Tony’s Blues” or “Night in Tunisia” or “Lover Man” carrying from the hi-fi down the long, narrow hall. Mom was painting in the little outdoor garden tapping her foot or nodding to his sweet music touched with sadness. Musicians said Tony was as good as Chet Baker. For Mother art eclipsed all sins.
One day Mom said to Tony, I could really love a man who would help me find old mattress springs. Mother felt limited by the size of her kiln. She believed if she could develop her melted-bottle sculptures on a larger scale, she might get a show, begin to make a reputation. In her view, an old metal mattress frame would make a kind of canvas. Tony searched abandoned tenements and back alleys for rusting, burnt-out and battered bedsprings and collected about a dozen. Then he helped her load them into her station wagon along with boxes of empty cheap wine and liquor bottles, most of which he had drained himself in Mother’s East 14th Street painting studio, where he slept. Mother drove off with the junk to Hazleton, Pennsylvania.
The Globe plant in Pennsylvania was only about one-third the size of the one in Maspeth, but it was brand-new, with concrete floors unsullied by oil and grease, and many windows, which made it look bigger than it was. The machinery was top-notch. The automated oven for melting glass lenses and drying lacquer on fixtures was a hundred feet long, at least the size of the one in Maspeth that had baked a million of Dad’s eight- and ten-footers.
Maybe Mom’s beautiful sister Thelma wasn’t such a great salesman, but she brought glamour to the new factory and Grandpa liked that. Once or twice a week she breezed in from New York in her fancy convertible, unless she was in France or Italy collecting glass samples for Grandpa’s lenses. Thelma turned heads walking through the plant in a designer dress carrying spiral notebooks filled with upbeat color combinations for the new line.
But Globe’s problems persisted. There wasn’t enough business and labor costs were too high. Grandpa had hoped that the Hazleton community would greet him with open arms, but the local unions weren’t offering any breaks. Grandpa suspected that his New York enemies were exercising long-distance muscle, Abe was still pulling strings. Probably the truth was that Grandpa had grown too old and weary from loss to pull the company ahead.
When Mom arrived in Hazleton with bedsprings, it was a very slow time and Grandpa was operating with a skeleton crew. More than half the shears, presses and lathes were standing by and the great oven was stone-cold. Mother viewed this as an opportunity. On long tables designed for mounting ballasts and starters into metal housings, she laid out her beat-up mattress supports. Then she began placing liquor bottles on the springs, moving away from these works to gain perspective, while a few sheet metal workers watched and scratched their heads at Thelma’s sister with uncombed hair and torn, loose clothing. She arranged bottles with heavy textures leaning against open spaces. Warped and sprung struts were brushstrokes. Stella was allowing figurative images into her work, which added enigma and dark humor. This would rankle Hans Hofmann, the great painting teacher. Was ist das? he would say to her when traces of realism intruded into her abstractions. But Mother always considered impulses and radical departures more important than dogma.
When she was ready she directed Globe workers to place her pieces on the conveyor belt at the mouth of the great oven, which was now hot and ready. Soon the small crew in the factory assembled to watch the emerging red-hot springs smeared with Tony’s liquor bottles, which Mother referred to as her “Beds of Pain.” Stella found it appealing to make art from junk in her father’s temple.
When the sculptures cooled, they were placed in front of windows, and with the white winter sun behind them Mom’s bare-boned beds came alive with shimmering light.
From the beginning of her painting life Mother considered white the color of death. “There is finality in white ... it is pure in the way a bone is pure and clean once freed from the flesh and blood around it,” she wrote in a paper for the critic and teacher Meyer Schapiro. During this period, death was a specter in her life. Tony was living right on the edge and he reminded her, like a refrain in his music, Stella, I want you to remember the good times. But in her father’s factory, with whiteness pouring through bottles like stillborn souls, one might have taken this work for a new direction in lighting. At least she did. Mother wanted to mass-produce these objects.
Only problem was, the temperature in the Globe oven was too hot or cold or the glass was the wrong type for mattress springs. As she drove back to New York most of the bottles popped off the springs and shattered against the mattress frames. Only a few sculptures from this series survived intact.
Mom tried to keep Tony away from Bill by banishing him to her painting studio on East 14th Street, but Tony missed her and was always coming over to 9th Street. When Bill was home she wouldn’t open the door and pretended she no longer cared for Tony. Fruscella would stand on the street calling pitifully, Stella, Stella, let me in. Eventually he would walk back to her studio or head for the Bowery. Some nights Mother would come to 14th Street and other times she would meet him at jazz clubs. One night at the Five Spot, Charlie Mingus invited Tony to sit in with his group. But Tony was boozed up and got on stage with a big cigar, ruined the set with his sorrowful antics. Afterward Mingus came after Tony with a knife while Mother pleaded with the great bass player.
There were nights when Stella didn’t come to 14th Street and each time Tony called her apartment Bill picked up the phone and hung up. When he didn’t have money for a bottle and was desperate and lonely, Fruscella started fires in the hall outside her door where they kept the trash. He knew that Taylor Mead or another 14th Street neighbor would call Mother to say the building was burning down. She would come out to meet him, whatever the hour, calm Tony down, feed him, make love to him. He didn’t understand why he couldn’t always be with her. There were a dozen fires, maybe more.
Bill recognized in Tony an adversary he could not defeat. Tony was already beaten to a pulp. And yet for Mother his groveling need and sadness were a pure note, a kind of grace. Tony’s battered trumpet was usually in the pawnshop on Third Avenue unless Mom tracked it down and retrieved it for him. Then he’d hold the trumpet in his hand and say in his gruff dockworker voice, Stella, I can’t remember how it goes. Help me out. C’mon, Stella. Mother would smile and begin to sing, ‘“The night is cold and I’m so all alone. I’d give my soul just to call you my own.’” She had a rich emotional voice and Tony loved her so much when she sang “Lover Man.” “‘I go to bed with the prayer that you’ll make love to me. Strange as it seems.’” When Mother finished, Tony would lift the horn and begin to curl around the melody, lingering on low notes until the music ached. He had played it many times for Billie Holiday, but now he no longer had his lip and “Lover Man” had misses and scrapes of pain like Billie’s voice during her last year. Always Tony claimed he couldn’t remember how the standards went and coaxed Stella to sing before he played the horn.
At Kenyon I was distracted from my mother’s degradation by Beowulf and Lycidas. I was banking information about literature as though it would pay off for me in years like savings bonds; a decade later I would have to forget all the fine tenets of literary criticism to begin to write freely. But I was never a really devoted student. I was diverted by dance halls and townie girls. I played the bongos until dawn in the Kenyon church basement, missed classes fishing in the Kokosing River, while daydreaming about blue marlin rushing at my hula poppers and bloodworms.
On the phone Dad filled me in about the Boston business. He was gradually putting on more men and planning to expand the plant. Almost overnight recessed fluorescents had fallen into the past and Dad had transferred his remarkable selling passion to placing panel boxes and wiring troughs into the dark tangled recesses of factories, garages and sundry buildings. For additional pizzazz he produced specialty items for Alan Fischbach, including stainless steel boxes fashioned to withstand the intense heat of Nike missile launching pads.
Dad promised that someday we’d share the same office and make an unbeatable team selling the Lee Products line throughout New England. Sure I had reservations about the box business, but Dad washed them aside. After his pitch I could feel the splendor of the two of us seated across from one another in our office above the Lee shop, feet on our desks, beating back the competition.
On Martha’s Vineyard, the summer before my junior year, I met a girl with long dark hair who loved poetry and didn’t get seasick. On our first date Bonnie and I went broadbill swordfishing on the Ebb Tide. Easing through the foggy water I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I held the wheel and tried to affect the look of a weatherbeaten big game skipper. While I played the hero I ran the bow of the boat into a twelve-foot swordfish that was basking on the surface. We laughed as the fish swam off. Later that night on the tuna tower I kissed Bonnie for the first time and described to her the greatness of trolling big baits for marlin off Bimini. She was from Philadelphia’s Main Line and knew nothing about big game fishing, but I went on and on. I stressed how one must be patient dropping a big bonefish back to a blue marlin or else you can pull the bait from his mouth. She nodded earnestly. Such a beautiful girl. I wanted to kiss her forever. Bonnie went to Denison University, which was only fifty miles from Kenyon. It was a miracle.
In Ohio we moved into a little house in a cornfield and I stopped going to classes altogether. We dropped our lines in streams and lakes. We read from Eliot’s The Waste Land and The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Bonnie understood poems much better than I did but I tried to keep this from her. For some reason she was willing to accept my ideas about a lifetime of trolling. We both knew my plans were hilarious but forged ahead. After discussing all the options we decided after graduating we’d apply to the Peace Corps and ask for an assignment in Chile, where I had heard there was the best sword-fishing in the world.
Mother phoned me in Ohio after Tony Fruscella had robbed a church and brought her boxes of religious treasures. Tony was now completely out of control and she was afraid of what Bill would do to him. It is odd she imagined that I would be her ally. I was humiliated by Tony. That such a man would touch my mother. What if Dad found out about it in Boston? He wduld be appalled, and his rage would have no boundaries. Dad would hire detectives or he might even call the Commissioner.
As a twenty-year-old I never thought of Tony as an artist to be admired or a character Jack Kerouac might have written about in On the Road. I hated Tony for loving my mother. He was a bum.
I came home for Thanksgiving with Bonnie, determined to straighten things out. My brother and I spoke to Mom with our arms crossed. She smiled at us and didn’t make a fight. I believe she was charmed by our resolve and solid front.
Sometime after dark Tony came to the house carrying a big turkey he had bought with his welfare check. At the door he had a dumb smile and was wearing a new white shirt. Bill and I wouldn’t let him into the apartment. Mother stood behind us clutching her hands. Life is tough but we knew what we were doing.
I had learned about crime and punishment from my father. Bill had his own motivations. But did we actually believe we could stop his bleak solos from the street? Or that she would stop listening for him?