If I Knew You Were Going to Be This Beautiful, I Never Would Have Let You Go (24 page)

“The hare was fine,” I said. “But Daddy, did you—I mean, during the war—wars—were you in the—I mean, you don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. I’m just—I’m interested in what you have to say.” It was true. I was listening to my father now. He was saying the same things that Mitch had said, but in a different way. I thought he was
saying things that Luke was probably feeling. I heard everything my father was saying, because it made so much sense.

He was quiet for a few moments. When the waiter came by, he asked for more coffee. “During World War Two, I was an ensign,” he said. “Because I had a college education, I went directly from school into the navy, at a higher rank than some of the others. It was different than now; everyone enlisted. Everyone wanted to get into the service, to fight for their country. I was in the Pacific. And one of my assignments was to—to transport the men who experienced very intense battle fatigue back to the States from Japan.” He was quiet again.

“So—they were just tired of fighting?” I asked. “Were they going to, like, rest up and go back to the war?”

“No,” he said quietly. “They would never go back. Some of them—many of them, in fact—were classified Section Eight, meaning they’d been judged mentally unfit for service.”

After a moment I said, “So, they like, flipped out in battle?”

My father smiled wryly. “I guess you could put it that way. It’s as good a way as any. The ship was huge, a destroyer, filled from stem to stern with men who . . .” He paused. He stayed quiet for a minute. It seemed as though he was searching for words and couldn’t find any. “Those breakdowns occurred a lot more frequently than most people think,” he said, finally.

“What’d they do?” I asked. “Like on the ship, did they act crazy? Was it like
The Snake Pit
or something?”

He nodded. “Some did. Some cases were more severe, they cared for them in different ways. But mostly it was quiet. Almost eerily quiet, considering. Considering the sheer numbers of men on board. What I remember most was their eyes, how they’d follow you when you were walking by. They’d just look at you, not saying anything. At times, it was unnerving, to tell you the truth.”

“I bet it was,” I said. I looked at my father, dressed in a suit for his job as an accountant in a real estate firm. I tried picturing him in a
khaki uniform, looking like Henry Fonda in
Mister Roberts
. I tried picturing him giving orders, walking past hundreds of men who couldn’t speak or didn’t want to. “Were you afraid, ever? That they’d like, do something?”

My father laughed out loud. “It was a war, Katie,” he said. “Every day, everywhere you looked, you had to be afraid someone was going to do something. You just never knew what.”

“Do you think any of them recovered? Like, once they got home, were around their families?”

He nodded. “Some of them, sure. Sure. I like to think most of them, after a while. And don’t kid yourself—a lot of men who fought and weren’t classified Section Eight were just as troubled afterward. If you’re really interested, there’s a movie you should see—
The Best Years of Our Lives
,
with Fredric March. It’s a bit difficult to watch, but it’s a wonderful film. It tells the story of what happens after better than I ever could.”

I nodded. “I can look for it on
The 4:30 Movie.
Sometimes they run old movies.”

“But I never answered your original question,” he said. “About the war we’re fighting now. Kate, listen to me: You must never underestimate the evils of communism. Despite what you kids think, it enslaves people more than capitalism. God knows this country has its problems, but—in Korea, the lines were drawn. Things were clear. You knew exactly who the enemy was. With Vietnam, there was no provocation, no attack. There’s no—no clarity to this war whatsoever. Half the time our boys don’t know who they’re fighting, or why. Chasing shadows in the jungle. I don’t blame them for being terrified, and when you’re terrified you do desperate things. We don’t belong there. We never did.” My father drank from his water glass. I lit a cigarette. We sat in silence for a while, but it wasn’t bad. The waiter came back, pouring fresh coffee into our cups. He handed us both dessert menus.

“What would you like?” my father asked. “They make a terrific German pancake here. They’re famous for it. They prepare it right at the
table, set it up in flames and everything. It’s a real performance, very dramatic. And delicious. You can have anything you want with it—apples, chocolate sauce. Huckleberries. Though maybe you’ve had your fill of berries for one day.” He smiled. He was reading the menu and he looked happy. My father loved desserts. My mother was always after him; “That’s enough, Bob,” she’d say, when he tried to sneak an extra sliver of chocolate cake, a final dollop of rice pudding. She didn’t want him to get fat. She didn’t like fat people; she thought they were sloppy and had no discipline.

I had seen them make the German pancake before, when we’d come here on my grandmother’s birthday. It was an exciting dessert, but we’d never ordered it because my grandmother was always afraid the tablecloth would catch fire and we’d all go up in flames. I was full from the lunch, but I said, “I don’t think I could eat a whole one, can we split it? Maybe with chocolate sauce?”

“Of course,” he said, smiling, signaling for the waiter.

•   •   •

O
utside the restaurant, my father handed me the instructions he’d written on one of the index cards he always carried in his shirt pocket, on how to get to West Fourth Street, where I’d be meeting Georgie. I told him Jimmy Day’s was a bookstore in the Village. He wouldn’t have approved of me meeting a boy in a bar while it was still light out. He didn’t love me meeting my friends in bars when it was already dark. I thanked him, thinking that after he got back on the subway going uptown, I’d just walk over instead of riding the train. The sky had cleared and the sun was out. I liked the way the air smelled, different from the beach, but tangy, intoxicating. I had never walked in the city by myself. I knew I would get to where I was going all right. The streets were filled with people I could ask for help if I got lost along the way.

“You have everything you need? You have enough money?” my father asked.

“Plenty,” I said. “I got paid yesterday.”

He nodded, staring down Fourteenth Street. I hooked my arm through his, something I rarely did with anyone, but it seemed just the kind of old-fashioned, courtly gesture that went with the rest of the day. With the restaurant and the Tiffany lamps and the mustached waiters and the deer heads hanging from the walls. We walked toward the subway at Union Square, where my father had promised to leave me. We walked slowly, in the sunshine, and I leaned a little toward him and he didn’t pull away.

death to the working class

N
o one has as many dead friends as we do. It always freaks me out when I talk to people in their twenties, sometimes older, even, and they don’t have anyone who died in their life. I don’t know if it’s better to get it over with when you’re younger, to have that experience of seeing someone you were hanging out with two days ago lying in a coffin, dressed in their best clothes, looking like a figure in a wax museum. But I don’t know that it ever gets easier, no matter how many years go by.

The first one was Tess Nolan, when I was seventeen. She was a year ahead, already enrolled at Katie Gibbs in Manhattan, even though she felt she was meant for better things. “What to do with this life?” she’d moan, examining her face for blackheads in the small mirror she always carried with her, those nights we sat around someone’s bedroom, smoking and listening to records. She’d pull her hair back, experiment with different looks, talk about becoming an actress, but she’d never even joined the drama club and Mr. Nolan wouldn’t pay for anything but
secretarial school. He had five daughters and was hoping they’d all marry rich bosses so he wouldn’t be carrying them on his back for the rest of his life.

The weekend right before Halloween, Tess and Paulie Barton, her boyfriend until somebody better came along, were on their way home from a costume party at Paulie’s cousin’s over in Rockaway. Tess had gone dressed as a nun, and had spent weeks making the costume as authentic as possible. Paulie went as a baseball player, donning his old uniform from the Knights of Columbus summer league. He’d just bought his first car, a Toyota, because it was good on mileage and seemed more classy than a Volkswagen bug. They’d been drinking at the party and Paulie wasn’t used to driving anywhere but Elephant Beach. Coming home on the Belt Parkway, he was in the left lane and hit the divider; witnesses said the car swerved out of control and was then hit from behind by another vehicle. Paulie was already dead when the paramedics arrived. Tess died in the ambulance, on the way to Mercy Hospital. We learned later that she’d won a prize at the party for Most Original Costume.

I was home babysitting for my little brother when Liz called. I remember putting the phone down and sobbing so loudly from the shock of it that my brother came running in from the next room, patting my back as I wept, asking, Did I want a drink of cold water? Should he call Mom and Dad? while the brackish laugh track from the television set blared in the background.

The wake at Farrell’s Funeral Parlor was jam-packed. The Nolans were a popular family, but Tess was beyond popular; people idolized her, even though she’d do things like take money out of your wallet when you weren’t looking, or throw your biology notebook out the window of the school bus the night before a test. But that was Tess: funny, loud, cruel; once, when we were sitting smoking on the quad, she snatched one of my loafers and wouldn’t give it back, holding it up for everyone to see while
I limped to Spanish class with a hole in the toe of my green opaque stocking. If you ever did something like that to Tess, though, she wouldn’t look at you for weeks, despite notes and tearful entreaties. That was the whole Nolan family, so stubborn they’d eat dirt. One time, Tess and her sister, Peg, didn’t talk for two months over a pair of brown gloves.

Sometimes, when Tess’s eyes would roam over us looking for a target, I wished she’d go away. I was glad when she graduated and wouldn’t be around for my senior year. People who didn’t know us often took us for sisters or cousins, claiming we had such similar features and mannerisms. Tess was always quick to point out that we looked nothing alike, that her eyes were darker, my nose bigger. Sometimes I felt insulted when she started these litanies, but other times I smiled inside where she couldn’t see. Privately, I thought I was prettier.

Now, looking down at her lying in the coffin, I realized I was glad she was dead, and the sudden, surging savageness of this thought upset me so that I began weeping violently, my tears falling on her white silk burial dress, the silver crucifix she clasped in her hands. Meg Sweeney, a distant cousin of the Nolans’, knelt down and put her arms around me. “She loved you,” she whispered against my ear. “She always said you knew how to keep a secret better than anyone.”

•   •   •

M
eg’s own mother was next, during one of the mildest Februarys anyone could remember. She’d been running from their house on Myra Lane and had tripped on the high heels she was wearing—she had beautiful legs and wore heels all the time, even to go grocery shopping—and had fallen under a sugar maple tree, where she suffered a heart attack and died right there on the sidewalk. The story was that she and Mr. Sweeney had been talking behind closed doors and she had begged him to stop seeing his mistress. “I love you,” she said softly, so the children
wouldn’t hear, even though they were listening at the door. “I’ll do anything you want me to. Anything.” He left the house and got into his truck and she ran after him. But the truck was gone, so she began running through the thick winter mist. They found her outside her parents’ house on Winchester Street. Meg’s grandparents had never liked Mr. Sweeney and hadn’t wanted their daughter to marry him. After she died, their hatred of him was so deep that they refused to see their grandchildren, to have anything near that reminded them of him.

Mr. Sweeney and Mrs. Vitelli, the mistress, had been seeing each other since last summer. They’d met when he’d gone over to fix the leaky kitchen faucet in her apartment; she was a divorcée who lived alone in the Neptune Arms on upper Buoy Boulevard. They were secret about it at first, then more blatant, holding hands at Leo’s Luncheonette, driving through town together in Mr. Sweeney’s green truck with the gold lettering, “Sweeney’s Plumbing,” written on both sides of the cab. Mr. Sweeney was the only plumber in town who would make calls around the clock, no matter what time of night, and had built up his business so that the Sweeneys weren’t country club rich but lived better than most of the other tradespeople in Elephant Beach. Whenever I’d go over to Meg’s house, her parents would be sitting on the enclosed porch with drinks in their hands, and Mrs. Sweeney would always smile as though she’d been waiting her whole life for me to arrive. “Why, Katie, hello!” she’d cry gaily. “Meg’s upstairs getting ready, she’ll be just a minute. Sit down and tell us what’s been happening in your life.”

It wasn’t the kind of behavior you’d expect from a plumber, and it was hard to picture Meg’s father, dressed in his dark blue overalls with his name stitched in red over the pocket, as a romantic figure carrying on a clandestine affair. But the most shocking thing about it was that Mrs. Vitelli was short and boxy with stringy black hair and a screechy voice, while Mrs. Sweeney was beautiful and it wasn’t just my opinion, everyone thought so. She had green eyes so huge and expressive they
seemed almost alive, like separate, living parts of her face, and luxurious black hair with red highlights, caught up and held in place with a silver clip. Even on the coldest days in winter, she wore only a white cashmere scarf over her skirt and sweater. When she stood on the steps of St. Timothy’s after mass with her dark sunglasses, she looked like a movie star.

“You could see it, though, these past few months,” Desmond, the manager at the A&P, said. “Whenever she came in she’d be wandering around the aisles in a daze, like she didn’t know where she was. Like I always say, you never know what goes on in the bedroom.”

In my mind I saw her then, running through the icy mist, her eyes frantic, her hair wild, wondering what to do, how she could get her husband to love her again. Thinking as she ran,
Maybe my parents will know. Maybe they can help me. Even if they never liked him, I’m their daughter and they want me to be happy.
And then she tripped and fell under the maple tree and had the heart attack, as surprised by the whole thing as everyone else. There had been no history of heart trouble in her family and she didn’t smoke or drink excessively. Maybe her heart had just given out, tired of loving someone who wouldn’t love her back.

“I’m going on break now,” I said, putting the wooden divider on my register to signal it was closed, grabbing my cigarettes.

Desmond turned to look at me, at my face. He put his hands up in the air. “What?” he asked, bewildered. “What’d I say? What’d I do?”

At the funeral, Liz and I clung to each other, watching Meg usher her brothers and sisters up the aisle. “It feels like all our mothers died, even though they didn’t,” Liz whispered in my ear. Later that year, Mr. Sweeney and Mrs. Vitelli were married. They moved into a big house right over the bridge and tried living like normal people, but whenever they showed up at St. Timothy’s, everyone just stared and stared; even the choir stopped singing. Finally, they moved away, to Clayton County, which
was like another country altogether. Meg went to New Hampshire to live with an aunt and uncle and attend the local community college, somewhere in the White Mountains. She seldom came home and never answered our letters.

•   •   •

T
hey say it comes in threes, and the following September, Bennie Esposito died in a cell at the Elephant Beach police station. Bennie was a city boy; he grew up in the Bronx and his family was so poor they only had a woodstove to heat the apartment. His mother moved him down to her cousin’s house on Sister Lane to get him away from his friends and his drug habit. She thought the fresh sea air would straighten him out but he found his connection two days after they’d opened the house. (We always thought it odd the way city people believed the fresh sea air would cure every ill, when all it ever really did was leave salt stains on the walls of our houses and fill the couch cushions and comforters with the smell of mildew.) Bennie looked like a rock star, with his suede jacket, two-tone platform shoes with five-inch heels, and shoulder-length shag, stumbling around Comanche Street, singing at the top of his lungs, “Every time it rains, it rains bennies from heaven.” Other times, when we were lying on our towels at Comanche Street beach, he would gaze out at the ocean before his eyes became heavy-lidded from quaaludes, shake his head and say, “You people out here. You got no fucking idea.”

“I’m cutting you off, Bennie, man,” Raven told him several weeks before he died. “Your mother did everything but get down on her knees and cry to me.” Mrs. Esposito was a small, tired-looking woman with huge black eyes like Bennie’s. Sometimes she’d come around the corner to Eddy’s, stand there in her housedress, arms folded, shaking her head. “I don’t know what you people do to him,” she’d say. Very gently, she’d take Bennie’s arm and try to lead him home, while he either
slumped against her shoulder or began dancing a frenzied jig, trying to get her to dip and twirl with him, as though they were at the Copacabana in Manhattan instead of the middle of Comanche Street. Bennie was always talking about taking us to the Copa, to clubs in the city. “That’s where it’s at,” he’d tell us, “not like these little shit nothing places out here.”

I had a crush on Bennie when he first moved down. He had an aura of sinister glamour that appealed to me; Luke hadn’t come back yet and I was bored with daydreaming. Early in the day, before the drugs took hold, Bennie would start a conga line in the sand, or show us how to tango, or demonstrate the more intricate steps of slow dancing (not the kind of hanging all over each other we’d do at church dances), making the moves look smooth and sexy. When he held me against him, I could feel his rib cage beneath the spangled tee shirts he wore. Desi caught me once, watching Bennie buying a pack of Marlboros, joking around in one of his more lucid moments. Desi waited until he left, then turned to me, his eyes bugging. “That? That’s what you want?” He shook his head disgustedly. “No wonder your mother’s upset. You better get out of here. You better go somewhere far, far away from this corner.”

The cops hated all of us, but they hated Bennie the worst, especially Detective Mickey Conlon; he called Bennie the dancing junkie. “Go ahead, junkie,” he’d say, lifting Bennie under his arms and shoving him into the back of a squad car. “Dance.” In May, Bennie had come walking up Comanche Street wearing a motorcycle helmet, swaying in time to some invisible beat inside his head. Detective Conlon pulled up next to him, and without getting out of the car, said, “What, no dancing today, junkie?” Bennie began frantically tap-dancing around the car, lingering in front, as though daring the detective to run him down. Detective Conlon gunned the motor and began inching toward Bennie, but even he wasn’t crazy enough to kill him in broad daylight, while children ran through the streets and neighbors gossiped over their fences. Instead, he leaned out the window on the driver’s side. “Next time I pick you up is
gonna be your last, junkie,” he said. “And you better know what I mean by that.”

On a rainy Friday night two weeks after Labor Day, Bennie stood swaying on the corner of Comanche and Lighthouse Avenue, hitchhiking to Lefferton, a scruffy drug town over the bridge so dangerous that the beach was usually empty even during the day and no one drove over there after sunset. Desi saw the whole thing, he was locking up for the night and saw a black Buick pull up right next to Bennie. He told us that someone got out, opened the back door of the car, shoved Bennie inside and then took off. It was raining too hard for Desi to make out the dark figure in the rain, but he hadn’t spent his life on city streets for nothing.
Cops,
he thought. He shook his head and went upstairs to the apartment.

Bennie died during the night in his jail cell. The overdose-from-barbiturates story made perfect sense to anyone who knew him, but what about the bruises on his face, his chest, his legs? Everyone figured that Detective Conlon had picked Bennie up, taken him down to the station and worked him over. Timmy Jones tried talking to his uncle Frank, a retired Elephant Beach cop, who said, “You want to stay away from that one, you know what’s good for you. And what the hell you doing hanging around junkies in the first place, you?”

At the wake, Mrs. Esposito wailed, “Bennie, Bennie, we lost you, Bennie,” while everyone walked around feeling angry and sad. Voodoo, tripping on mescaline, knelt for too long at the coffin, his eyes huge in his face, whispering, “Bennie, man, wake up.” The mescaline made him believe it might happen. I walked by Bennie’s brother-in-law, a soft, pudgy man with mud-colored eyes, dressed in a checkered suit too loud for a wake, delivering a stunted eulogy to some city people we didn’t know: “I’m telling you, John, he worked her for years, forging checks, taking bills from her purse, she oughta be grateful he’s gone before he sent her to the poorhouse.” Afterward, everyone went back to the beach and sat in a line across the sand. The joints went back and forth and
finally, Voodoo motioned for everyone to raise their cans of Bud or whatever they were drinking. “Bennie, man, you were my brother,” he said, his droopy eyes still sad. “Hope you’re hanging tight up there with Jimi and remember: ‘If I don’t meet you no more in this world, then I’ll meet you in the next one.’ For real, my brother. For real.”