The Bestiary (9 page)

I only knew my mother’s image from that handful of snapshots which I now kept in my grandmother’s silver music box, along with the white whisker. Many times I had studied my mother’s face with a magnifying glass. I failed to identify the shadow of the bird on her shoulder. One day I took the snapshots to Jones Beach and tried in vain to determine their exact location using some blurred landmarks—shrubs, a bench, a lamppost—in the background of each. What did I expect to find? My grandmother had preached to me that the spirit of every creature to walk the earth was still among us. I felt my mother was nearby when I was most alone—lying awake at night, riding in a darkened train, descending an empty stairwell at school.

In Mr. Hood’s ancient history class he had us memorize passages out of Livy and Herodotus. I was entranced with the latter: his incredible descriptions of animals such as the giant silver ants that fought elaborate wars in the Libyan desert; and in Book IV, the catalog of Scythian tribes like the Melanchlaeni, who all wore black cloaks, and the Budini, whose entire population had red hair and gray eyes. I also chose Mr. Hood as my adviser. I was a regular visitor—maybe the only visitor—during his office hours. His other advisees were assigned to him because they hadn’t gotten their first or second choices. In addition to helping with my bestiary research, he actually offered me real-life advice, culled from philosophers like Diogenes: “To be saved from folly, Atlas, you need either kind friends or fierce enemies.”

Mr. Hood was considered a loner himself among his more convivial colleagues. He lived alone in one of the faculty cottages by the river. Every morning he canoed or kayaked six miles. When the river was frozen, he used the rowing machine in the gym. For relaxation, but with a kind of religious fervor, he built and refurbished bark canoes, working out of a shed on the riverbank. One morning when I visited him there he explained how to construct a twelve-foot canoe.

“First, you strip bark from a silver birch,” he said. “Unlike elm or hickory bark, birch bark doesn’t waterlog. For the frame, you use spring cedar. I choose to work only with the tools available to the Malecite Indians who lived around here: an ax, a peeling tool, and, most importantly, a crooked knife.” He handed me a knife with a bulbous grip and a V-shaped blade. “Ever seen one before?”

“No, sir.” I balanced it in my palm and touched the tip, sharp as a scalpel.

“It was peculiar to Maine. That bent tip is for carving and shaving the rib boards and planking. My canoes don’t contain nails or tacks. I pitch them with sap from a black spruce. Then I decorate the prow with porcupine quills. The Malecites considered a canoe incomplete, unprotected, without an insignia. I’ve used a fox and a lynx. Their favorite was a rabbit smoking a pipe.”

I laughed. “It sounds like a cartoon.”

“It was supposed to demonstrate their calm in the face of adversity.”

Most afternoons after his last class, Mr. Hood retreated to the rocking chair on his porch, a pipe clamped between his teeth, a book in hand, and his white bulldog at his feet. Blind in one eye, Polyphemus was named after the cyclops in
The Odyssey.

My own dog had died a month after I went away to school. In his cramped hand, Bruno reported Re’s last days to me:

He didn’t want to leave Lena’s room. But he got short of breath climbing the stairs. We took him to the animal hospital, and saw two vets, and they said, “He’s just old.” They wanted to keep him there, but I said no. He didn’t want to stay, and I knew you wouldn’t have wanted him to. The next night he stopped eating. We brought food upstairs, but it was no use. He stayed in Lena’s room, and she never left his side. In the morning, he went over and stretched out by the window, watching the snow fall. He fell asleep like that, and then Lena saw he had stopped breathing. I’m sorry he couldn’t be with you, Xeno. We did all we could. Lena’s been crying ever since.

Lena wrote me her own letter:

My mother says the best way to die is in your sleep. It’s because she’s afraid my father will die in a fire. I don’t believe there is a good way to die. I hate that Re died. But he was peaceful in the end. I know how much he loved the snow….

Two weeks later, Bruno sent me Re’s ashes. I opened the package in the bathroom, away from the other boys, tears flooding my eyes. The ashes were in a tight gray packet the size of a brick. I couldn’t believe my dog’s bodily self had been reduced to that. Bruno also sent along Re’s leather collar and the medallion imprinted with his name, my name, and my old address. I placed them and the ashes alongside my grandmother’s music box in the trunk under my bed. Now Re’s spirit had joined hers and my mother’s.

Throughout my stay at that school, I felt his presence, not as a shadowy mist, but a weight that shifted gently at the end of the bed, or a rustle in the shadows, or a brushing against my leg when I walked in the woods.

I
N MY SENIOR YEAR
, just before I turned seventeen, Gina Moretti’s worst fear came true when her husband was killed in a fire.

One December morning Frank Moretti’s engine company responded to a four-alarm blaze at a Bushwick paint factory. He was the first man in, off the truck ladder through a top-floor window. Some beams gave way and the ceiling fell, trapping him behind a wall of flames. Two other firefighters recovered his body and got out just before the floor collapsed. Bruno phoned me at school, as distraught as I’d ever heard him. “Xeno, my father’s gone,” he said hoarsely, then broke down. It was during exam period, and I was in a daze that afternoon, going through the motions on my physics final.

I boarded a Greyhound in town, and riding all night, making connections in Bangor and Boston, arrived in New York at nine
A.M
. on the morning of the funeral. I had slept maybe two hours. I changed into a fresh shirt in the men’s room at the Port Authority Terminal. Then I took the shuttle to Grand Central and the No. 6 train up to the Bronx. It was bitter cold. Mounds of dirty snow lined the curb. I lit a cigarette and walked down the old familiar streets to Saint Anthony of Padua Church, where my grandmother’s funeral was held.

A crowd was gathered in the sunlight. Two battalions of firefighters, in dress uniform, were standing in formation. The fire commissioner was there, and the mayor, surrounded by a claque of politicians: city councilmen, a state senator, and the dapper silver-haired man who had been our congressman since I was a kid. He was Italian and every Sunday attended mass, rotating between the three Catholic churches in the district. Because of the mayor’s presence, cops were out in force, and there were reporters and photographers, in addition to all the people from the neighborhood.

I was scanning the crowd for the Morettis when two limousines rolled up in front of the church. The mayor and fire commissioner waited by the first limo as the driver opened the rear door and Mrs. Moretti stepped out. She was wearing dark wraparound glasses. Her brother-in-law, Carl, in his police uniform, followed her, then Bruno, slump-shouldered, and Lena in a long black coat. Carl’s wife, Irene, emerged from the second limo with their children. The mayor held Mrs. Moretti’s hands and spoke to her as if they were the only two people there. Then she took his arm and they climbed the steps. Everyone else followed, including Mr. Moretti’s entire squad, who later, while a bagpiper played “The Battle Is Over,” would carry his casket out to the hearse. As I made my way through the crowd, my eyes never left Lena. Her long blonde hair partly shielded her face. Her eyes were downcast. She was pale, like a phantom of her real self, which at that moment was somewhere else.

I walked to the front of the church, and there was the flag-draped casket, floating in a sea of flowers. Bruno stood up and embraced me. He felt even thinner and shakier than usual.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered into his good ear.

He gripped my forearms and his eyes filled with tears.

I hugged Mrs. Moretti. Her body was stiff, her cheeks cold as marble. I saw my face reflected in her dark glasses.

“Thank you for coming,” she said in a husky voice, touching my cheek. Her lips were quivering. She was heavily sedated.

Suddenly I was standing before Lena. Her eyes were empty. I held her close, then sat down beside her.

When the priest appeared, crossing himself before the altar, she started to sob. “Oh, Xeno,” she murmured, squeezing my hand.

After the service, at which the fire commissioner and Carl Moretti delivered eulogies, and the burial on a windy hillside at Sacred Heart Cemetery on Long Island, we went back to the Morettis’ house. A photograph of Mr. Moretti in his uniform was propped on the mantelpiece beside the wedding pictures. There was liquor and coffee and platters of catered food. Mrs. Moretti sat in her husband’s easy chair, quiet and dignified, though I saw how red her eyes were now that she had removed the dark glasses.

“How is school, Xeno?” she asked when I approached her.

“I don’t know,” I said, choking back tears.

She smiled. “You came a long way. Have something to eat, even if you’re not hungry.”

She was right; all I’d eaten in the last twenty-four hours was a doughnut and a candy bar at the Bangor bus station.

I hadn’t seen Bruno since we entered the house, and I found him up in his room, sitting on the edge of the bed.

I sat beside him. The water filter was bubbling in the aquarium. The ferret was scratching around under the bed. “Your father would have been proud of you today,” I said.

He shook his head. “My father was so strong. I’ll never be like him.”

“Maybe not physically. But you’re like him in every other way.”

“I wish that were true,” he sighed. “I thought it went well at the church.”

“It was a beautiful service.”

“Uncle Carl rambled on too long.”

I shrugged.

“He was maudlin. It was all about him.”

“He’s upset.”

“He’s juiced,” he said with uncharacteristic vehemence. “He drank his breakfast.”

“You need to rest, Bruno. Why don’t you lie down for a while?”

“No.” He stood up slowly. “My place is downstairs with my mother. I just needed to catch my breath.”

Carl was still drinking. Everyone could hear him holding forth in the kitchen, swearing profusely. Mrs. Moretti was about to confront him when Irene stopped her.

“This isn’t your problem, Gina,” Irene muttered, flushing with embarrassment.

She strode into the kitchen. There was a moment of silence. Then two firefighters emerged sheepishly, drinks in hand. We heard Irene say, “What do you think you’re doing?”

Carl shouted, “Get out of my face. Go home!”

Without another word, she did just that—out the back door, and around to her own front door.

Carl left too, slamming the back door, and moments later his car screeched out of the driveway.

Mrs. Moretti didn’t pretend nothing had happened. “I’m sorry for that,” she said to the firefighters sitting around her.

The man closest to her was a bald, square-jawed captain named Ralph DeFama, who had risen through the ranks with Frank Moretti. They had been avid Polar Bears—the swim club whose members plunge into the ocean in winter—and I remembered the day Lena joined them at Coney Island, remaining in the frigid water as long as the men and afterward telling me she would never do it again.

After everyone left, Mrs. Moretti retired to her bedroom, and Lena and I went out to the backyard. We sat on a redwood bench on the patio and smoked my Camels. Frozen snow blanketed the lawn. The stars appeared. It was the first time we had been alone all day.

At sixteen, Lena had grown into quite a beauty, tall and strong, with lovely skin. She had been flourishing at school: first in her class, popular, a varsity swimmer. She was close to her father. The shock waves from his death would keep hitting her for years. Her sphinxlike qualities, the tranquil poise that was so attractive when she was thirteen, were already obscured by weariness and grief. Lights still flickered in her gray eyes, but they seemed a long way off.

It pained me to see her like that, but I didn’t try to draw her out.

“I understand you want to help,” she said, blowing smoke into the darkness, “but I can’t see anything in front of me right now. All those people. I just want my father back.” Her eyes softened. “I’m glad you’re here, Xeno.”

I took her hand. I wanted to hold her.

“You know, around my father, Carl controlled his drinking. He wouldn’t have become a cop or bought his house if it weren’t for Dad. Now he’s going to be nothing but trouble.”

She was right about that.

The day after the funeral, Mrs. Moretti collapsed. It took her months to get back on her feet, and by then her hair was turning white.

Back at school, I dozed off during the last of my final exams, and turned in my English term paper, which I had completed on the bus. But I wasn’t concerned about my studies. And I couldn’t stay focused for long on the misfortunes of the Moretti family. I had to deal with the ongoing crisis of my relationship with my own father, which seemed never to approach resolution.