Loitering: New and Collected Essays (9 page)

My hand will always remember the density of those silver dollars, the dead weight as I tumbled them back and forth, the dull clink as the coins touched. The nature of that weight offered a lesson in value too; you knew by a sense of the coin’s unique inner gravity that the silver was pure, that it wasn’t an alloy. Holding the coin in your palm you felt the primitive allure of the metal itself, its truth. Years later, I would pay for college by fixing washing machines and dryers. I was a repairman for a company that installed coin-operated machines in apartment buildings and laundromats. We had collectors in the field, men who worked set routes, hitting laundry rooms all over the city, emptying the coin boxes into canvas sacks. Late in the afternoon they returned to the shop and delivered the dirty bags to the counting room. The coins were filthy, turning everything they touched the lugubrious gray of pencil lead (you see the same graphite stain on the fingertips of people who play slot machines compulsively). The counting room was a dingy, windowless, fortified cement vault in back of the repair shop. Inside was a
conveyor belt and a slotted metal chute and a machine for sorting the coins. A woman named Laurel did all the counting. She was thin and pale and her hair was limp and she wore black-rimmed glasses and a flowered smock that seemed a peculiarly sad flourish in that colorless place. She was a drudge in the operation, and unconsciously I equated her plain looks with honesty, her weak sexual presence with a lack of guile. Every afternoon thousands of dollars worth of coins slid across her tray. The metallic droning of the coins was mind numbing, and yet this woman, hearing the slightest deviation in that monotony, would toggle a switch and stop the belt, poke through the money in the chute, and pluck out the one silver coin—a Mercury dime, or a Washington quarter that predated copper-nickel composition—and replace it with one of her own. Thus in a matter of seconds she would make between a hundred and a thousand percent on her investment. One day she invited me into the counting room and demonstrated all of this, tapping a quarter against the tray, trying to teach me the subtle difference between the sound of a standard and a silver coin, and I never thought of her the same afterwards. The racket of those rattling coins was hellish in the confinement of her concrete bunker, but this pallid, dreary woman had a keen ear for that one true thing, the soft dull sound of silver
as it thunked against metal, and she would eventually amass a small fortune in rare and valuable coins.

My silver dollars felt like a fortune, assembled and protected and given value by an abiding faith, a loyalty to them. They were Christmas gifts from my father, one for every year of my life. My vague, instinctive resistance to the coins as legal tender—as pure purchasing power—added to their worth. Somehow I knew that I would never spend them, never convert them into baseball cards or Slurpees or rides at the Evergreen State Fair. I didn’t view them as vehicles for my desire; they were things in themselves, they held their own fascination, and I knew the continuing life of that fascination depended entirely on taking them out of circulation. As they lost currency, an element of worthlessness thus entered into my idea of money, an aesthetic dimension. I understood that their value increased the more they sank into the past, and because of this the coins had some of the quality of buried treasure. At that age, I lost things, I broke them or outgrew them, my interests changed, but I guarded those seven silver dollars jealously, aware of the link between their personal interest to me and their significance in the world. The coins had very little real toy value. I couldn’t throw them or use them to improvise scenarios of valor or heroism; and I couldn’t include
anyone else in my play, as I did with my guns and Tonka trucks. I kept the coins in a leather purse that was shaped like a boot, a souvenir my father brought home from a trip to Tucson, where he had presented a paper at an academic conference; the boot zipped shut, and
MEXICO
was printed across the sole. I hid the purse in the bottom drawer of my dresser, stuffed beneath clothes I no longer wore, but then there was a moment in which I decided it was time to put the whole thing—the boot-shaped purse and silver dollars both—in the bank.

The only times I’d actually been inside the bank were in the company of my father, who, among other things, taught business finance. In back of the bank was the vault, the door a polished steel slab with a spoked wheel such as you would find at the helm of a ship, and inside the vault was my father’s safe deposit box. He kept important papers in the box, insurance policies and a few stock certificates that must have had sentimental value, as either early or important trades he’d made in his career, because normally a man with my father’s acumen would have held the issues in their street name. Also in the box, he kept an ornate silver watch and fob and penknife, a beautiful set stored in a case lined with crushed green velvet. It had belonged to his father, a man I’d never met. My father would set
the watch on the table inside the vault and let me play with it while he shuffled through his papers, always telling me that his father had given it to him, and that he, in turn, would pass it on to me, when the time was right. Imagining that far-off juncture thrilled me, in large part because it implied that my father knew the future, and that he’d considered my place in it. I had only recently learned to tell time, and my sense of it was shaky, but I would pull the crown and adjust the delicate black hands until they closely matched those of the bank clock, then I would wind the stem and hold the watch to my ear, listening as the seconds ticked away inside.

My father seemed affable and relaxed in the bank, friendly with the tellers and the president alike. He addressed everyone by name, he flirted and joked, walked briskly and with confidence, taking command of the space. His own father had been a bookie and a figure of the Chicago underworld. More than once my father had seen him viciously beat other men over money, and I would come to understand, with time, that it had terrified my dad, seeing his father so violent in the conduct of business. As a young boy, he would visit the local precinct, first with my grandmother, then on his own, to bail his father out of jail. Because they were on the take, the police had to make a show of arresting
my grandfather periodically, and on those occasions my father would come to the station, only to find his dad laughing and joking and playing cards with the cops who’d arrested him. My father’s early education in money must have given him a glimpse of something savage and hollow in the heart of the system. The shock of that insight took the form of shame, as it does for so many of the son’s of immigrants, and so now, as I look back, it makes perfect sense to me that my father’s public self glowed in the company of people who did their business legitimately. His passion for securities—and common stock, particularly—was where he ultimately acquired his citizenship; in the bank, or on the phone with a broker, or in class teaching others about finance, he acted like a man with the rights and privileges of a native, a status his own father had never fully attained. Funny, charming, seemingly at ease—he became these things the minute he walked through the bank door. He especially loved the buildings that housed the institutions of money, banks among them. The enormous trust implied by the whole system was palpable to him, perhaps because he knew the fragility of it first hand, how beneath the flirtation and joking, the first names and handshakes, without some essential civil arrangement between people, it could always devolve into brutal beatings.

People who knew him in his capacity as a money-wiz have told me that he was a genius, and there’s no question that he was a smart man. Whether he was explaining why cigarettes were price inelastic or describing the dissonant notion behind fairly standard ideas of diversification (that you’re actually seeking an utter lack of correlation as a form of harmony), you felt the force and elegance of his mind—and at our house, this kind of stuff was table talk. And so what happened with my silver dollars and my shoe-purse is a mystery, a moment that I’ve returned to again and again over the years. The whole thing had the character of a lesson, of something more than a simple transaction. Put plainly, here is how I remember it. My father and I drove to the bank and stood in line and waited for a teller. When it was our turn, I reached up and stuck my shoe on the counter, which was about level with my chin. My father had instructed me at lunch that I would do all the talking, and we had even rehearsed the lines, so I said to the woman that I wanted to put my purse and silver dollars in the bank. Even to this day, I can see myself standing there, I know the hour, the weather outside as seen through the bank’s high windows, the slight feeling of confusion, the hesitance as I wondered if my words were making sense, the coldness at my temples where a faint doubt registered. My father exchanged
a glance with the teller, and I looked back, over my shoulder, at the vault, and when he asked me if I was sure, I said yes, because that was our script, that was the story we had rehearsed and agreed to tell. The teller did her work, and then handed me back my empty shoe and a green savings book. At this point I was so flustered that I couldn’t summon the courage to tell her what I was thinking—that the shoe was part of it, that I wanted my leather boot in the bank too.

Naturally, when I went to retrieve the silver dollars they were gone; and yet I was devastated when I was handed, instead, seven ordinary dollar bills. I felt rooked. All the alchemy of imagination that had brought me to the bank, that had enlarged the idea of those silver dollars, was undone. What has remained curious to me over the years is why my father didn’t see what was happening and intervene. He had all the savvy, while in some ways my idea of the bank was based on banks in old Westerns. For me, it was a place where people stored money, and where criminals could grab it, if clever or brutal enough. The bank kept money safe. It was the physical place, it was the vault with the polished steel door, it was the safe deposit box in which I’d store my silver dollars beside the watch and fob that would one day be mine, when the time was right. Most of all, the bank was where my father and
I spent some of our best days, the rare place where I saw him happy and at home, his private and increasingly troubled and violent self set aside in favor of the public man who was upright and worthy and could stride across the carpet to shake the president’s hand. It seems so obvious now, but ultimately that’s what I was investing in when I decided to put my silver dollars in the bank, that future with my father.

Our business at the bank finished, we took a walk. Town was only one block long but my father was dressed for Michigan Avenue, dapper in his wingtips, navy blue blazer, and the sort of rakish flat cap favored by southern Italians. I wore dungarees and leather boots and a green flannel shirt from Penney’s. I kept a native’s eye on the Sammamish, where sockeye ran in the fall, flashing red in the slow murk of the slough, and a disused granary that rumor said was full of rats, but to my father that beckoning world was terra incognita, and at the corner, already impatient, the main drag used up, he steered me across the street, leading us toward what we called our “secret destination.” It was fun to play along with my father in this conspiracy, to hold this secret in common, though we’d both known all along exactly where the day would end. We were going to the bakery and we were going to eat chocolate cake.

On the way there my father mentioned that when he was a boy he had a favorite uncle who gave him a Morgan silver dollar every Christmas. He didn’t need to explain to me that the seven Morgans I’d just put in the bank were the direct descendants of that distant gesture.

“Where’s your uncle now?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” my father said. And then, in a way that registered very strangely for me, he added, “He was unmarried.”

I didn’t know what my father meant but I never forgot what he said. My ear seized on the distortion, heard the lurch in logic, the faltering fact: unmarried. He seemed to have answered a question I hadn’t asked, drawing on a depth that was wholly private. Briefly, he was alone. In the worshipping eyes of a son any father’s life is epic, I suppose, but nothing in my father’s life ever approached the coherence of narrative. He was, I know, a proud and high-minded man, but with the kind of rigid pride and impossible rectitude that’s a form of suppression, an immigrant son’s pride, the triumphant pride, namely, of having overcome the past. In his epic life the trail of evidence was scant, the facts meager and few; an odd scattering of fragments and then a vast surrounding silence. That unmarried uncle was one such fragment, but my father would return to this uncle so often, feeding off the same thin
fact, that I began to collect the pieces, storing them up as zealously as I had guarded my silver dollars. And so, in time, this one false note, this strange detail, this favorite uncle, this unmarried uncle eventually acquired a name, he was Chris, he was Uncle Chris, an Uncle Chris who lived alone, alone in a single room, a room that was spare and clean, a small cheap room in a flophouse on Chicago’s near West Side, and one day, a winter day, my grandfather, Antonio D’Ambrosio, viciously beat his brother and left him, this brother, this Uncle Chris, the giver of silver dollars, bloody and unconscious in a hillock of dirty snow beneath the El tracks at Argyle.

The Argyle El stop served as my grandfather’s front, and all through elementary school my father, always a go-getter, worked the counter in the afternoons and on weekends. In his mind the front was the family business, a Father & Son operation, and it was his job to hustle commuter sundries, all the newspapers, magazines, cigarettes and candy that would show sufficient income on my grandfather’s modest but fraudulent tax returns. “I saw him beat the living daylights out of my Uncle Chris,” my father would tell me, years later, in language that had never escaped 1944. “It was ugly,” he said. “I ran,” he said. “I ran the hell out of there, I ran all the way to the lake and”—with a dismissive
wave of his hand he shut the story down, a thing beyond words, pointless to try, what can you say? He ran and it was winter and in his fear he’d fled without his coat. Now whenever I visit Chicago I make the same run myself, chasing after my father, pursuing him all the way down Argyle, crossing the Outer Drive until I too hit the lake. My father doesn’t know I do this, and he probably wouldn’t care or even understand, and really, I have no idea why this lunatic errand matters to me, beyond the foolish belief that, one of these days, when I reach the lake’s edge, I will find him, I mean literally find him, still there, an eleven year old boy, cold and alone, with nowhere else to run.