Anthropology of an American Girl (71 page)

“Yes,” I say. “Interest.” Thinking,
Rourke’s coming back
.

“Exactly,” he says. “I would’ve told you about it, only Mark told me not to say anything. And until Pinky’s last night, I wasn’t sure where you stood with things.”

“When will it be?”

“Soon as I can swing it,” he says as he turns the ignition off. “Just be careful.” He nods toward the figure approaching on the grass. “She’s pretty touchy about fights.”

“She’s not going to mention fights to
me
—is she?”

“Hard to say.” He leans to open his door. “She’s got, like, ESP. It’s weird.” He swings around to my side, snap-jangling his keys and stretching a bit. He helps me to a stand, then tosses an arm over my shoulder, bending down into me. “Ready?”

Our footsteps clap on the crisscross brick. There is the
thsst-thsst-thsst
of a sprinkler and the
thwock
of a ball and a voice—
“Gloria-aaa.”
And again, birds. Maybe the same birds as the other times I came, maybe different ones. I’ve forgotten the life span of a bird. Kate once had an African finch that lived for five years, but that is not the right type of bird. Funny to think of Kate’s bird, but not Kate.

Rob says hi. She offers her cheek. He kisses it. “This is Eveline. Evie, this is Mrs. Rourke.”

She plucks off her gardening gloves and extends a hand. “Eveline. Happy to meet you.”

Her skin is the softest I’ve felt not on a baby. Her smile, her hair, her eyes—it’s really very hard. I bite the bottom skin of my lip, inside my mouth where no one can see. Like her son, she projects an aura of radiant health. Her manner of speaking is faintly aristocratic. She married beneath herself, I think—she married for love. Rourke has that kind of beauty, the kind that comes from people in love.

“How are your parents, Rob?” she inquires.

“They’re at each other’s throats, so they must be okay.”

“That’s right. It’s when they stop scrutinizing each other that you have to worry,” she says with regal detachment.

Rob reaches for a cigarette, then recalls his hand. I’ve never seen him so edgy, except the time with Uncle Tudi. “Listen, Mrs. R., I gotta grab some stuff from the basement.”

“Help yourself,” she says. “When you’re finished, I’d like you to carry down some boxes from the attic. They’re stacked beneath the street-side window.” She turns to me. “I’m giving everything away. You’d be shocked by what accumulates over a lifetime.”

“A lifetime,” Rob chides. “From the look of it, you’ve got at least two more of those to come, Mrs. Rourke.”

“Careful with the compliments, Rob. You’re liable to make me suspicious. Eveline and I will be inside. Come find us when you’re finished.”

He falters as he backs away, nearly tripping over a row of boxwoods. He straddles it, asking me, “You gonna be all right?”

“I won’t rough her up, Rob,” Mrs. Rourke says. “Promise.”

She takes my arm to climb the porch. Each broad step of the five we mount is one upon which Rourke sat or walked, as a child, as an adolescent. Surely, at some point, the outline of my foot fills the melted-away outline of his foot.

Inside is cool. The corridor walls are papered with frail caramel pinstripes and columns of cyan. Tucked behind the curve in the base of the mahogany banister is an oval writing table with a silver-and-white pitcher full of purple irises.

The kitchen is airy and brightly lit, and what is wood is a pallid milk-ice blue. It is a cook’s kitchen, spacious and fully implemented, with inflections of red—the clock, the dish towels, the moiré swirls in platters. I am seated at a table for eating, and in the corner to my right is another for working, which has a cherry-checked vinyl cloth. It is covered with an assortment of split-open cookbooks and textbooks with frayed paper page markers. She puts heat under the kettle and busies herself, withdrawing cups and plates from the china cabinet and a beer glass for Rob. Although I would not have expected her to be lonely, I’m amazed by how
busy she is—the pile of mail, the ringing telephone. The world whirls about her.

I watch for signs of Rourke. They have a physical resemblance, but the bond between them is clearest to me in the subtleties of environment. There is nothing arduous or sentimental about her domesticity. Like his masculinity, her femininity is uncontrived. She moves too fast and too well to be false. Like her son, she’s good because no one else is better. The house is charming, and yet I don’t feel covetous. It’s easy to be seduced at the Ross houses, or at the houses of their acquaintances, to become desirous of things you don’t even want, such as Baccarat dolphins and inlaid walnut humidors. Here, instead, I feel pressured to comply with her independence of vision—though I barely know her, I don’t want to disappoint. I feel she has faith in me, simply because she shares her time. I begin to count the minutes before I have to leave, before her influence will be lost. That too is familiar.

“This one’s on pies.” She’s talking about cookbooks; she has written three. “I’ve baked and tasted just about every pie you can imagine—from apple to quince crumb to mincemeat.” Mrs. Rourke rests back on the counter, facing me. Her eyes are like the dark of sky between stars. “I despise spice pies,” she says. “Do you despise spice pies?”

“I don’t know,” I say softly. “I’ve never tasted one.”

“Well, in this case, I’d say you’re better off for your ignorance.”

I think of Maman. If I am reminded of Kate’s mother rather than my own it’s not just because I loved her more, but because I have a limited inventory of imagery to draw upon when it comes to the business of the kitchen. But the comparison extends beyond food, beyond admiration and wonder; Mrs. Rourke has reached the same empty place in me that Maman filled. It makes me think how lucky I was to meet Maman when I was a girl. How auspicious for a woman with an abundance of resources to come upon a child with a surplus of lack. And, of course, how inauspicious to have died in the midst of that. I recall our awareness of the barter—it was like a tutorial. Next, in an unwelcome leap, I recall the germinating deadness of Maman’s home, the picturesque dryness, the claiming-back process of nature.

I feel Mrs. Rourke’s hand on my shoulder.

“Why don’t you make a trip to the pantry while I pour the tea. There are cookie tins on the left. I’m giving my niece a baby shower. No one will notice if any are missing.”

The right side of the slope-ceilinged room is lined with shelves, and to the left is an old meat safe or pie safe, which is where I find the canisters. There are three full ones; I take the one with children dancing. I turn to leave; the pantry door has drifted partly closed. On its back I see marks in the wood—a growth chart, his. My parents never measured my growth, not once, though that is nothing to me now. Now I see only Rourke, metamorphosing downward through the years. I kneel, touching each strike, knowing that he was there every time one was carved. I arrive at last at the first—twenty-nine inches, not much higher than my knee. I feel heart-stricken and regretful, as if flicking in reverse through a photo album of a child I gave away, at once jealous of and beholden to the woman who kept this simple study of him, this careful anthropology.

“This last one is Thanksgiving 1978.” She is above me, on the other side of the door jamb. Through the narrow gap I see the cherry-printed dish towel in her hand. “Six-four. Although he might actually be taller now. He refuses to stand for me anymore.”

No
, I think,
he is six-four exactly
.

“Would you like to see the rest of the house?” she inquires. She finds in the gruesome clarity of my eyes what she surmised from the moment we met. She does not look away. Most people look away, unable to bear the sight of him there.

I say yes, and we go, leaving the tea untouched.

The tour she gives is not merely a tour of his childhood—where he smashed his head, where he carved his initials, where he took his first steps—but a scholarly sort of assessment, as if we are in professional accord as to the relevance of the obscurest technicalities of our shared passion.

She leads me to her room, the one I have seen from the street. An IBM Selectric rests on a table between stuffed barrister bookshelves, and there is a chintz chair with a cashmere blanket folded over one arm. Photographs of Rourke are everywhere—him upside down at two; him swinging a bat at eleven, his muscles already standing out; him brown at the beach, grown-up, hugging her, by a palm tree.

“Hawaii,” she says. “We went for Christmas once. When he was still at UCLA.”

There are old black-and-white photos, the square kind with scalloped edges, and bleached ones, in color, of a man—her husband. There is the boy on his father’s knee in green; the two emerging from underwater in a pool, two faces the same; the infant tucked in the crease of his father’s arm. Her fingers stutter over the photos.

“My husband and I eloped,” she explains. “My mother refused to help us financially, though she was capable. My grandmother left this place to me, and soon after we moved in we had Harrison. Of course my mother fell in love with the baby and had an immediate change of heart. Every week new furniture would arrive, or silverware, or china. Bill’s colleagues from the police department would visit and accuse him of accepting graft.”

On a shelf with iron brackets, there is a row of random items. “Trinkets,” she says, lifting one, tilting it. “Things I find in the garden—thimbles and buttons—rocks Harrison gave me when he was a boy. Beach glass. He was forever giving me beach glass.”

I follow her to the end of the hall. Her left arm lengthens against a door and she pushes it, flattening back, allowing me to pass.

Rourke’s room. There are trophies and ribbons and fight posters from the Olympic stadium in L.A., the Municipal Stadium in Philadelphia, and Madison Square Garden—Palomino vs. Muniz, Jersey Joe Walcott vs. Rocky Marciano, Ali vs. Frazier, and also ones from the Criterion—Harrison Rourke vs. Little Tommy Lydell, vs. Johnny Amato, vs. Piggy Harding, vs. Chester Honey Walker.

To the right is a dresser, a mirror, the keeper of his image, the bank of his appearances. It is not neutral; it seems to undulate. I can see him standing before it at various stages through the years, contemplating the twinness of self—the real and the reflected—coming up against the riddle of being. I think of him at twenty-four, when we first met, with me just seventeen, hardly anything really, negligible and slight and completely unable to help him comprehend the mysteries he surely must have been facing.

“He was born here,” she says, looking at the bed. It is a double bed, perfectly made, as if she expects him home this very evening. On the
bedpost is an autographed glove—Ray Mancini’s. I sit and lift the glove, holding it in my lap.

“My husband was a detective assigned to lower Manhattan, to the First Precinct. He raced home, but Harrison was already halfway out.” She gestures with a short toss of the head to the memorabilia. “Some of these belonged to Bill. He was a fighter in Ireland originally, in Belfast. I don’t know how much you know.”

“Only that he died.”

“Fifteen years ago April.” She lowers her eyes, then raises them. The charm of her eyes is accentuated by black bangs and prominent cheekbones. The remainder of her shoulder-length hair is pulled into a twist. I wonder about her ancestry. She is beautiful in the locked-off, genetically undiluted way of a Senegalese or a Norwegian. Perhaps she is Russian. “I gave this room to Harrison after he got into a knife fight. The doctor said he was fighting because he needed space. As if it’s not in his blood.”

She tours the room, adjusting artifacts like a museum proprietor. “After Bill died, it was like having a bull in the house. My sister suggested acting. For years I shuttled Harrison to and from New York for commercials, auditions, lessons. The idea was that if he was making money with his face, he would have some incentive to keep it presentable. Well, he tolerated acting, but he didn’t stop fighting. He just became more selective about it.”

There is a leonine clarity to her voice as she speaks of her son, as she visits the place her devotion is kept. She says to me, “They would bet, you know.”

I did not know. Maybe I did. Maybe he told me. Yes, and Rob told me too.
There’s gonna be a fight. The comeback kind
.

“He and Rob made a fortune when they were teenagers before I found out and threatened to have them arrested. Those were trying times. Thankfully, they met an elderly Chinese gentleman who taught them martial arts and introduced them to a trainer from the Criterion, Jimmy Landes.”

I nodded. “I’ve heard of them.”

“Despite my reservations, Harrison turned into a fine fighter. I don’t
know whether his father would have been proud or horrified.” She looks up. “Have you ever seen him fight?”

I shake my head.

There is a flicker, a smile, instantly disappearing. “Naturally, everyone wanted him to turn professional. Naturally, I wanted him to go to college, and since his father would have wanted it as well, he consented. The boys were accepted to UCLA, which was the best of both worlds—they would be together, Harrison could pursue his interest in acting, and L.A. is full of gyms.” Mrs. Rourke sits alongside me on the bed. “Rob majored in economics and went on for a second degree—he has an uncanny competence for numbers. Harrison stuck around and did some acting and some fighting, mostly fighting. He intended to get through the Olympics and then use the credential to get investors. He and Rob wanted to develop an athletic club, a few clubs. Somehow, it fell apart. Even before the Olympic boycott, it fell apart.

“When Rob received his master’s degree, we all flew to California. Rob had a black eye—completely hemorrhaged, swollen shut. He was lucky his cheekbone hadn’t been broken. We all knew that Harrison had done it. I felt awful for Mr. and Mrs. Cirillo. Their whole family was there. Fortuna’s parents had flown from Bologna. I took Rob aside. I said, ‘Robert, your eye.’ ‘Don’t worry about it, Mrs. Rourke,’ he assured me, ‘It was all my fault. I said something stupid.’ ‘What could you possibly have said to deserve this?’ I asked. And he said,
‘The wrong thing.’
Do you know, I still wonder what the
wrong thing
could have been.”