Читать книгу: «The Last Romantics»

Chapter 1

IN THE SPRING of 1981, our father died. His name was Ellis Avery Skinner, thirty-four years old, a small bald lozenge at the back of his head that he covered every morning with a few hopeful strands. We lived in the middle-class town of Bexley, Connecticut, where our father owned and operated a dental practice. At the moment his heart stopped, he was pulling on a pair of blue rubber gloves while one of his afternoon patients, a Mrs. Lipton, lay before him on the padded recliner, breathing deeply from a sweet mask of chloroform.

“Oh!” our father said, and toppled sideways to the floor.

“Dr. Skinner?” Mrs. Lipton sat up. She was unsteady, groggy, and afraid as she looked down at our father on the floor. He twitched once, twice, and then Mrs. Lipton began to scream.

The look on his face, she later reported to our mother, was one of surrender and absolute surprise.

Our mother was thirty-one years old. She’d never held a full-time job and possessed a degree in English literature from Colby College in her home state of Maine that sat unframed in an upstairs closet. Her dark hair hung like two pressed curtains framing the window of her face. Her eyes were wide and brown, with sparse lashes and narrow lids that gave an impression of watchfulness and exposure. Her name was Antonia, though everyone called her Noni, and it was decided long before my birth that her children should call her Noni, too.

The day of our father’s funeral was dank, mid-March. Ronald Reagan was president, the Cold War dragged on, Star Wars had made us all believe in forces we could not see. At that time Bexley was a town where people greeted each other by name at the post office or the bank and no one cared who had money and who did not. The doctor and the mill worker both visited my father for root canals, and both drank beer at the same drafty tavern. The dark Punnel River meandered along the east side of town and gave us something to do on summer days. This was still the era when a ninety-minute commute to New York City seemed absurd, and so the people who lived in Bexley, for the most part, worked in Bexley.

It was no surprise when the whole town turned out for our father’s funeral. Hundreds, it seemed to me. Thousands. Noni led us through that awful day with an iron grip on two of our eight hands. She alternated, she did not play favorites. She had four children, and we all needed to feel the warmth of her palm.

Renee, the eldest of us, was eleven years old. Long, thin limbs, chestnut hair she wore in a single braid down her back. Even as a child, Renee exuded competence and self-containment, and at the funeral she was no different. She did not cry or make a fuss when her tights ran up the back. She helped Noni with us, the younger ones, and tried not to look directly at the casket.

After Renee came Caroline, who was eight, and then Joe, who was seven. Caroline was the fairest of us, with cheeks pink as bubble gum and hair that streaked blond in the summers. Joe was the boy, the only boy, with floppy hands and large feet and a stubborn right-side cowlick that he was forever flipping away from his face. Joe and Caroline both had a tawny glow and quick, broad grins and were mistaken so frequently for twins that sometimes even they forgot there was a year between them.

And then came me, Fiona, the youngest, four years and eight months old on the day our father died. I was a pudgy child with soft, dimpled knees and unruly reddish hair that frizzed and flamed around my freckled face. My looks contrasted so vividly with those of my lithe, golden siblings that neighbors raised eyebrows. A tilt of the head, a shadow of gossipy doubt passing behind the eyes. Bexley, Connecticut, was like that. Working-class New Englanders starched in Puritan ethics. Their nails were dirty, but their souls were clean. After our father’s death, the gossip stopped. Widowhood trumped the suggestion of infidelity. In her grief Noni became infallible, untouchable.

I remember very little about my father while he was alive, but the day we buried him I recall in great detail. At the cemetery a racket of crows flew above the casket. Our priest, Father Johns, delivered remarks in tones that rose and fell like a fitful storm; I could not understand a word of it. The ground was mushy with thaw, but crusts of snow still lurked beneath trees and along the shadowy side of the marble mausoleum that sat up on a low hill behind the grave site.

The mausoleum resembled a house: front steps, a peaked roof, the appearance of windows. It was so much larger and more impressive than the tidy headstone Noni had chosen for our father’s grave. I was more interested in the mausoleum than I was in Father Johns, and so I ran away from the funeral, around the back of the crowd, and up the hill. The mausoleum stones were a deep gray, speckled with rain spots and age, significant and somber. Along the top I sounded out the name GARRISON H. CLARK. And then: BELOVED FATHER, HUSBAND, SON, BROTHER, COLLEAGUE, FRIEND.

Down the small hill, Father Johns spoke in a dull, deep voice. From a distance, finally, I could make out the words:

“Too soon …”

“Great burden …”

“Do not ask …”

Noni’s head was bowed; she hadn’t noticed my absence. Noni was Catholic and felt it in her knees that ached from all the praying but not, she realized that day, in her heart. This was the last time she would entertain the rituals of organized religion, the last day she would bow her head to the words of a man wearing white.

From my position on the hill, the mourners looked similar to the crows, only bigger and quieter, perched on the yellowish green of the spring grass that cut abruptly to the darkness of earth beside the casket. I thought of how little space there was on our father’s stone. How unassuming it was, how meager, nothing like Garrison H. Clark’s showy marble mausoleum. Standing beneath a stranger’s name, gazing down at my father’s funeral, for the first time that day I began to cry.

* * *

WE LIVED IN a yellow house, a three-story Colonial on a street lined with arching maples and oaks that threw down acorns in the spring and curling red and orange leaves in the fall. There was a steep, clattery staircase leading to the bedrooms upstairs and a basement that smelled faintly of mold and scorched sheets. In the backyard we had a metal swing set, and a sandbox used regularly by the neighborhood cats, and flower beds of nasturtium, lavender, gardenia, and clematis tended diligently by Noni.

After our father’s funeral, people began to arrive at the yellow house. Everyone from church and others, too, people I had never seen before, people who knew my name and crouched to say it: “Fiona! Darling Fi!”

Our next-door neighbor, Mrs. Granger, took the plates covered in plastic wrap, the Tupperware containers in pastel shades, and bustled away to place them on the dining-room table. It struck me as odd to see Mrs. Granger perform this role, which seemed more properly to belong to Noni. But she remained on the orange couch, a white handkerchief moving from face to lap, face to lap, as strangers knelt before her, bowing their heads as though she bestowed upon them some sort of honor. She had never looked less like our mother.

The black of Noni’s dress, the orange of the couch, and the white of the handkerchief reminded me of Halloween, and I felt a strange, empty excitement. A near hysteria. Plus all the food. Everywhere! Bowls of green grapes and Chex Mix and hard butterscotch candies and potato chips. Platters of ham-and-cheese sandwiches cut into neat triangles, cubes of watermelon that leaked pink juice onto the white tablecloth. I grabbed what I could and ate it quickly, unsure as to what was permitted here, what would be allowed.

It soon became clear that anything was allowed when your father has died. I spied Joe beneath a table with an entire bowl of hard candies and three cans of Coca-Cola. Caroline took off her tights and sprawled on the floor, singing to herself; Renee sat on a rocking chair and picked with great concentration at an elbow scab, ignoring the adult who stood before her, saying her name again and again in a calm, sympathetic voice.

I ran crazily around the room. I slapped various bottoms and did not apologize. I picked my nose and wiped my finger on the coffee table. No one stopped me or spoke to me or noticed me at all. The freedom was exhausting. I climbed unsteadily into Renee’s lap. She wore a stiff black dress and black tights that she pulled at as I settled against her. With a shoeless toe, she rocked the chair back and forth, back and forth. The movement soothed me like a ship on the sea or a car on a bumpy road. This is how I would always imagine Renee: as a steadiness in times of turmoil.

I was on Renee’s lap when it began. I don’t know what triggered Joe’s fury. I know only that he got hold of a fireplace poker, sooty at its tip, cast iron, heavy. About the length of a baseball bat.

Joe began in the dining room and moved steadily, ferociously through the house. He did not strike people, only things. There was the sound of wood splintering, glass shattering, dull thumps and sickening crashes as he brought the poker down again and again on a table, a chair, those many bowls and platters of food. The noise startled me, but I didn’t cry. I listened. We all listened. Muted conversations and quiet tears gave way to a nervous, cowardly hush.

Crash. Into the living room he came. The crystal bowl full of hard candies, the porcelain table lamp with a linen shade, Noni’s collection of delicate glassware cats—all crashed and shattered to the floor. Joe paused before the piano, and then he took aim at the photographs that stood on top: pictures of what we, the Skinners, had been until that day. Six together. Ellis and Antonia, Renee and Caroline and Joe and little Fiona. Crash. Six together on windswept New England beaches and before tinselly Christmas trees, grinning and mugging, arms over shoulders, holding hands. Crash. We were gap-toothed children and anonymous infants, full-cheeked within our swaddles. Our parents were proud and exhausted, bright, blameless, beautiful even in their polyester and plaid. Crash. All of it, gone.

I waited for someone to stop Joe, but no one did. The room echoed with the noise of his destruction, grunts and strained inhalations, but otherwise there was silence. No one spoke. No one moved to stop him. Even Noni remained on the couch, her face pale and stricken. I wondered then, and I would wonder for the rest of my life: why did our mother not take the poker from Joe’s grasp, wrap her arms around him, tell him that everything would be okay?

Finally Joe paused. At seven years old, he already stood four feet tall. A borrowed black suit showed his pale ankles and pale, knobby wrists. Plaster dust had settled in his hair, onto the shoulders of his suit, ghosting his skin. With a free hand, he wiped sweat from his forehead.

Then a man’s voice called out. To this day I have no idea who spoke, but one could say he changed the course of Joe’s life, of all our lives. “Antonia,” the voice said. “Your boy’s got quite an arm. It’d be a shame if he didn’t play some baseball.”

Someone chuckled. A child began to cry. With a dull thud, Joe dropped the poker. Renee removed me from her lap, and went to him. “Joe,” she said. His hands shook, and she took one in her own. Caroline sprinted across the room in her bare feet and threw her arms around him. I followed, stumbling like a drunk from sleepiness and overstimulation, and wrapped myself around Joe’s calves and feet.

I believe this was the moment when we each assumed responsibility for our brother, Joe. A lifelong obligation of love that each of us, for different reasons, would not fulfill. We would try: Renee in her studied, worrisome way; Caroline carelessly with great bursts of energy followed by distraction; and myself, quiet and tentative, assuming that Joe would never need me, not in the way that I needed him. Years later this assumption would prove to be wrong. But by then it would be too late.

* * *

THE FIRST THING Noni did after all the funeral food was eaten and we had returned to school was to inquire about Little League baseball for Joe. She could focus on one thing at a time, she thought. If she tried to fix everyone all at once, she would fail, she would fall to the floor and never get up again. It’s important to take small steps. This was what Mrs. Cooperton, our neighbor the social worker, told her at the funeral. One day at a time. Cross one thing off your list at a time.

Noni worried that Joe would lack a strong male presence in his life, and that worry eclipsed all others. Her inquiries returned the name of a baseball coach, Marty Roach, who was famous in Bexley. For twenty-three years he’d taught young boys the nature of teamwork and the beauty of a well-thrown ball. His office, Noni had heard, was festooned with birthday cards sent by former players, men now, who had moved on to cities and careers but harbored an enduring affection for old Coach Marty. This was what Noni wanted. Someone who would endure for Joe.

“Looks like the roster’s already full,” the man on the phone told her. “But for you, Mrs. Skinner, we can fit one more.”

Noni brought us all to that first practice. The team met at the Bexley High School playing field, which was rough, chewed-up grass bordered to the north by a chain-link fence. Beyond the fence lay thick scrub, densely packed bushes, brambles, and spindly pines that eventually thickened and stretched into the forest that covered Packensatt Peak, the closest thing to a mountain that Bexley could claim. High-school kids liked to jump the fence and wander into this wilderness to smoke and drink and light fires and have faltering, unforgettable sex. Noni looked across the field to the tangled trees and saw a defensive line holding steady against an encroaching disorder.

On the field a dozen boys stood in a row, a loose knot of fathers beside them. The air smelled of wet leaves and sweetness from the mulch that sat in huge piles around the field’s southern perimeter, spring preparation for later plantings. Off to the side was Marty Roach. Maybe it was the suggestion of the surname, but I had never before seen a man who so closely resembled an insect. He was short and stocky, with burly shoulders, a dark, ample mustache, and large meat-hook hands. Sparse black hair striped the white dome of his scalp, and I thought that at any moment antennae would sprout from his forehead. He looked designed to survive in hardy conditions, to find forgotten crumbs in a clean kitchen. Noni shook his hand uneasily.

“Hiya, Joe,” he said, leaning down to look my brother in the eye. “Ready to play?” He inclined his head toward the row of boys.

Joe nodded once and stepped away from Noni, took his place in line.

“Now, boys,” Marty said, stretching his arms out wide. “Today is our first day as a team. We are all learning our roles. As teammates you will come to rely on one another. You will come to know one another like brothers.” Coach Marty paused. “But for today let’s just have some fun.”

We sat in the stands with Noni and watched as boys threw balls to their fathers with loose, inelegant gestures. Marty stood alone with Joe and showed him how to hold a bat, swing evenly from the waist, trap a ball within the webbed leather of his glove. After a spell the boys divided into teams and began to scrimmage. Joe positioned himself in center field, just behind second base, where he looked both in the thick of it and dismally alone. Poor Joe, I thought. He stepped from one foot to the other, rubbed his nose, took off his hat and put it on again. The other players laughed or talked or waved to their fathers. Oh, poor Joe.

Batters took their turns at the plate. There were futile swings, dropped bats, tears. Finally a round-bellied blond stepped up. He was short but powerful, clearly experienced. A father lobbed a gentle pitch, the boy swung hard, and—crack—the ball arced forward into the field. And then, all at once, it was Joe like a toy on a spring who came up high to catch the ball. The force of the ball hitting Joe’s glove—whomp—took me by surprise.

The blond boy pulled up from running, a look of shock and dismay on his face.

“Wow! Great catch!” Marty called to Joe.

We clapped wildly, my sisters and Noni and I. Joe gave us a small wave. He smiled. Beside me on the bleachers, I felt Noni expand in the way of a hungry lung filling at last with air. She waved back at Joe.

* * *

AFTER BASEBALL BEGAN for Joe, one worry relaxed but others rose up to replace it.

Sometimes after dinner I heard Noni muttering. “One thing at a time,” she would say. “One thing. One thing.”

The casseroles stopped appearing on our doorstep. Our teachers stopped asking how we were holding up and gazing at us with grave, kindly faces. I slept soundly now. Joe and Renee, too. Only Caroline still suffered nightmares, terrifying dreams of darkness and a child with evil eyes. But after a spell, we became accustomed to Caroline’s bad dreams, and so it seemed, in a way, a return to normalcy.

One thing at a time. One thing.

Sometimes Noni yelled and threw objects at the wall—pencils and books and staplers. Papers littered the kitchen table and the study and Noni’s bedroom. At night Noni worried over a big gray calculator. We wandered in and kissed her and asked her to put us to bed, but she would say, “In a minute, just give me a minute,” and so we put ourselves to bed. We fell asleep atop the covers to the sound of Noni punching numbers with a jagged index finger, sharp and insistent.

Three months after our father died, we moved from our yellow house to a gray one-story ranch six miles away. This house had no stairs or swing set or much of a backyard, only a strip of gravel and a rectangle of sparse, yellowed grass that backed against a tall wooden fence. In the front yard sat a single tree, a large, humbling locust that threw a rough blanket of shade over the house. We loved our yellow house and cried more bitterly for this loss than we had for our father.

“We have no money,” Noni explained. “I’m sorry. Your daddy never told me we were out of money.”

It was June when we moved. School was out. Low-relief mounds of mosquito bites marked my legs, red and itchy and bleeding from my attentions. On that sticky, heavy day, we all rode with Noni in the long front seat of the U-Haul. Joe sat closest to the window, and he alone craned his neck to watch the yellow house disappear behind us.

We helped Noni unpack the towels and sheets, the plates and silverware, our summer clothes, our books. Renee and Caroline would now share a room. Joe was down the hall, closest to the bathroom. I would sleep in a small, tucked-away space that had a low ceiling and no windows. Our old things looked wrong in the new rooms. At any moment I expected someone—our father perhaps—to pop out from behind a door and say Surprise! or What a hoot!, which were things our father used to say.