Bloodroot (32 page)

Danny stood behind me, and my father looked straight past me over my shoulder, hard into the eyes of his other son.

“The butcher was fresh out of fatted calves,” Dad said, stepping into the yard. He let the door close behind him. I thought he might swing on Danny. I hoped I’d be quick enough to sidestep the punch. “Hope you fed yourself tonight.”

Dad puffed out his chest, pushing the thrill of seeing his son deep beneath his duty to protect his wife. “I’m talking about your stomach, Daniel. Not your arm.”

“I’m good, Pop,” Danny said. “Every part of me. It’s good to see you.”

My father glanced at me. I dropped my gaze and stepped aside. He walked up to Danny.

“If you break her heart again,” my father said, “I will kill you for it.”

My head snapped up. It was the simplest, plainest threat my father had ever made to either of us. The two of them stared into each other, my father’s rage percolating under his skin, Danny, always the superior actor, looking calm and unafraid but wary. I had made a huge mistake. These two men were not ready to be in a room together. They’d probably never be.

“Mom feeling okay?” I asked, forcing my father to break first. Tonight wasn’t about either of them, or me. I’d just have to trust in how much the both of them loved my mother.

“Grand,” my father said, turning to me. “So excited you’d think the damn pope was comin’ over. No monkey business tonight, you mopes. I’m warning you. We better get inside before she bursts.”

Mom sat upright in her blue armchair, wearing a faded but pretty dress I had never seen, her face soft and warm in the glow of the lamplight. Her hands rested folded in her lap and her ankles were crossed. She seemed immobilized by the anticipation, as if set in place by a puppeteer, hardly as excited as my father had said. For a panicked moment I worried that while my brother, my father, and I talked outside she had forgotten the three of us. But then the tears rolled forth and I realized why she’d been so still. Joy. She was basking in the sight of her three men walking together through her front door. She wanted to see us so intensely that nothing, not time, not her sickness, could ever take us from her. This was the scene, I realized, she had chosen as the drape over her eyes in her last moments before the final darkness came. So shot through with emotion she was, Mom could only lift her shaking arms as Danny crossed the room.

Danny knelt before her chair, one knee down then the other, his arms reaching around her. Our mother folded herself over him, a bird shielding her young from the storm. She pressed her cheek against the top of his head, her teardrops falling into his hair, her thin, pale arms stretching down his back, fingers spread wide. It was how she’d held him when his nightmares sent him screaming through the house, when years later he lay twisted and drenched, dope sick in his boyhood bed. Not embracing Danny as much as absorbing him, straining to put all of herself between her son and the beast at his heels.

There was no screaming this time, though. There was only the sound of my mother’s wet, undulating breaths as her body rose and fell against her son’s.

My father had teased Danny about being the prodigal son. It was an old joke, one the black sheep boy of every Catholic family on the island had to endure. It was a story most every family played out, up and down every Staten Island street and far beyond. I saw no reason the Curran family should be different. But then I remembered what had happened to Danny under the East River Bridge. I remembered Danny had stopped his heart, had died, not once but twice. The other families, their prodigal sons quit college, or refused to work in the family store, or knocked up the high school slut their parents had warned them about. What I was seeing, what I had
done
by bringing Danny home, was bigger than any of that bullshit. How many of those families all around us, I wondered, got to live out the story of Lazarus?

I felt my father’s hand on my shoulder. The tremor in his grip told me I didn’t have to turn to see his tears. Me? I thought of Santoro. Of Whitestone and Bloodroot. Something lit up inside me I had never felt before. A furnace caught fire, pumping a new heat through my blood with every beat of my heart. I hated my nervousness, my hesitation on the stairs outside Whitestone’s office. How had I even thought twice about going through with that? How had I ever agonized over telling a few measly, meaningless lies that no one would ever remember? Or about committing worthless, victimless crimes when the scene in front of me was what my family stood to gain? Time together. I understood the things Kelsey had said about her mother, about family, and about blood rules. She was right. At the end of the day, love’s the only virtue there is. Everything else, every rule, every law, withered to dust and ashes in comparison.

For the first time in too many years, my family was whole again. If I had any soul left, Santoro could have it, if that was what it took to bury Danny’s demons and keep the family together, at least for a little while. There was no hem for my mother to touch, there’d be no savior to lift her shroud and call her forth. But I could save her son.

Mom rose from her chair and we moved the ceremony from the living room to the dining room table. My father put a Chieftains CD on the stereo, set out a round of whiskeys and a plate of Oreos. Danny ate six while no one else ate any. We took our time with our drinks. Mom hardly touched hers, having all she needed seated around her. She was enjoying one of her best days in a long time.

Danny held court, giving my folks a mild, condensed version of his past three years. My folks had lived through the cycles of Danny’s addiction many times. There was no point recounting bouts of withdrawal and succumbing to temptation or tales of run-ins with the cops and criminals who worked New York’s heroin trade. He omitted his East River Bridge experience. Danny’s current circumstances commanded much greater interest from my folks. Keeping Danny where he was trumped how he had arrived there.

He told them about Gino Bavasi and his restaurant, about the lucrative Far Beyond Technology and his apartment near the park. He apologized for waiting a year to return to the family, insisting he needed to know his sobriety would stick before asking anyone else to believe in it. When my mother said the family could’ve helped him, Danny demurred that the family had done too much for him already. My father didn’t disagree with him.

“I couldn’t come back asking for anything,” Danny said. “Things had to be different. I had to come back offering something.”

At this my father sat back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest. He tossed me a stern glance. We both knew that Danny had mastered the art of asking for one thing by offering something else, something he rarely delivered. I thought for a moment that given the chance, my father would’ve made a hell of a judge.

In my mother’s eyes, Danny the junkie was a victim of people who preyed without mercy on the misfortune and physical weakness of others. In her mind, Danny had been whisked away by vampires who fell on him from the rafters when her back was turned. She was like those mothers perched on the edges of the soccer fields at Willowbrook Park. Harm only came to children because their parents failed to prevent it. It was not part of the natural order of things.

To my father, Danny’s addiction signified a weakness of spirit. He may have excused the flaw in light of Danny’s origins, but he blamed his son for not overcoming it. Danny had rejected the hard work my folks had done to give him a better life. But even more than the drugs, my father mistrusted the other things Danny had craved: fancy clothes, fast friends, the glamorous life in Manhattan. I couldn’t blame my father for his resentments.

My mother had grown up taking fireside piano lessons surrounded by fawning doctors and their wives. To her, fresh cigars and old scotch, pretty wives, extra money, and leisure time came as the natural blessings of doing good, of making sick people well again.

My father came of age in the rough company of truck drivers, beat cops, and dockworkers. While Eileen O’Malley played the piano, Robert Curran hauled kegs, swept floors, and scrubbed beer puke off the toilets in his father’s corner tavern. In that world, only the people without sore backs and calloused hands had fast cars, fast friends, and money to burn. Men of easy wealth were untrustworthy at best and dangerous at worst.

The adults of my parents’ childhood lives only met when an ambulance unloaded a patron of Curran’s Sligo Tavern at the emergency room of Methodist Hospital.

Danny’s owning a business would get him some traction into my father’s good graces. It was something
his
father had done. But to my father, Danny had always shown the same colors as the corner hustlers outside the tavern, the same colors as his brother Johnny. Flashing a fat wallet, no matter how he claimed he earned the money, wouldn’t help Danny’s cause. I hoped the temptation to please and impress didn’t get the better of his common sense.

“My apartment,” Danny said, “isn’t too far from Grandpa O’Malley’s old brownstone. The couple that owns it will be selling it soon.” He spread his arms like a benevolent prince. “How’d you like to move back to Brooklyn?”

My mother turned openmouthed to my father. My father shook his head.

“Daniel, how’re you gonna afford a brownstone a block and a half from Prospect Park?” he asked.

“It’s a special case,” Danny said. “This couple, they’re headed for a nasty divorce. They’ll be unloading it cheap.”

My father leaned forward in his chair, staring Danny down. “And how do you know this?”

I knew the answer. I thought of the naked Superman and his bi-curious wife. I let Danny play it.

“I live in the neighborhood,” he said with a shrug. “Everyone knows; you’d know about the same situation on this block. Look, Dad, it’s not like I’m footing the bill or buying it outright. I would if I could. This is something I thought we could all do together. That’s the beauty of it.”

“With some help from this Bavasi character,” my father said. “Shit, he was a crook when your grandfather was alive.”

“Not financial help,” Danny said. “But, you know, his place is a neighborhood institution like the Sligo used to be. He has some influence.”

“I’ll bet,” my father said. He turned to my mother. “Don’t say it.”

“Robert,” Mom said. “Mr. Bavasi’s helped this family before. At great risk to himself. He was never anything but good to us.”

Danny and I traded glances. So there it was. Had Grandpa done it himself or just set it up? Frontier justice on the streets of Brooklyn. I recalled Danny’s pinched fingers, the sunlight beaming through the tiny gap between them. It seemed the distance was smaller than even he had guessed.

“Listen,” Danny said. “I’ve done everything possible to divide this family; I know that. I came back now because I have something to offer that can bring us back together.”

“
We’ve
been together,” my father said, “the three of us that you left behind to go out gallivanting with your cool, dangerous friends. It’s
you
that’s been gone. Being family doesn’t mean you get to come and go as you please, Daniel.” He glanced at me, then back at Danny. “No matter how forgiving your brother is about your escapades, Kevin doesn’t speak for all of us.”

“Bobby, please,” Mom said. “Danny knows all this. A lot of the time he was gone, it wasn’t his choice. He was hardly out ‘gallivanting. ’ What’s done is done. We have to think about the future.”

My father turned to me. “You’re in on this, of course.”

“From the beginning,” I said. I had heard Danny mention it. I let that qualify as aiding and abetting. Let my father think me a sucker. “I think it’s a great idea. C’mon, Dad. You’ve missed Brooklyn since the day you left. What is there for you here?”

My father raised his hands. “What’s for me there? We left over twenty-five years ago.”

“That house is there,” Mom said, reaching out for my father’s hands. She turned him to her. “My house, Bobby; it could be
our
house. Can’t we at least consider the idea? Think about it. The fireplace, the pocket doors, the high ceilings. Those old trees and sidewalks. The park. Bobby, you could find a nice pub like the Sligo for yourself, meet the boys for drinks while I cook us dinner. Think about it.” Mom sighed, gazing up at the ceiling. “This place, it’s had its time. We raised our boys and it was good for that. But they won’t live here when we’re gone. There’s no history here. Before us and after us there’s nothing but blank spaces.”

“We’d be together, Pop,” Danny said. “Free and easy in the old neighborhood. Kevin could live downstairs in the old office. Teach at King’s or wherever. My apartment would be practically around the corner. Ma could just about holler out the window for me. There’s a great Irish joint catty-corner to Bavasi’s place.”

My mother held her hand out to Danny, as if saying
See?
to my father. I thought they might high-five.

My poor dad didn’t have a chance. Not against the light burning in his wife’s eyes. If she decided she wanted this, he’d give it to her. Like he always did, Dad would complain about us browbeating him into our way of thinking and we’d all play along like we always had. But it was an act. Nothing in this world made my father happier or made him feel more like a man than giving his wife something she truly, deeply wanted. He knew it and
she
knew it.

Dad unleashed a long sigh and stood, grabbing his glass for a top-off though it hardly needed one. He glanced at my mother. She shook him off. She couldn’t stop smiling.

“Boys, give your mother and me a few moments alone,” Dad said. And so it began, the negotiation of his surrender. Danny and I respected his need to do it in private.

We grabbed our drinks and bolted to the backyard, giggling. We lit up as soon as we got outside. My father about scared us out of our shoes when he threw open the screen door. “No smoking out here. Your mother don’t want butts in her flowers. Take it out front.”