Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry Page 4

  “Oh good,” said Gert. “Let’s have a party.”

  Suzanne was least cheerful. She got along well with Dad, was formal and polite to Bobby, barely tolerated Mike, ignored Gert, and hated Kenneth Graves with an intensity that I only realized years later comes of having slept with a person.

  “Well?” she said.

  “Well,” said Bobby. He shrugged, looking like the sort of father a lonely child might invent, with his thick, already white hair and the swell of a pipe in a back pocket. Being the cleanest person in the room, he was tacitly put in charge. “So,” he said to Jackie and me. “It looks like your father’s gone for a while. But we plan to stick around and take care of you guys.”

  Suzanne smacked a fork onto the counter.

  “Because,” said Bobby, “he asked us to.”

  “He did not,” Suzanne said. “He left us a check.”

  Bobby crossed his long legs underneath the kitchen table, bumping one knee. He tugged at the ripples in his ironed blue jeans. “It says children on the memo line.”

  Then, in his first official act as unofficial head of the household, he asked Suzanne, the only boarder with a driver’s license, to take the two of us to school. It was a difficult job—the seat of my father’s old Cadillac had broken, and he had propped it up with a box full of empty beer bottles. Suzanne sullenly balanced on the edge and nearly ran down the crossing guard.

  That night, a group of Dad’s friends from his job at the library came over. They were all odd women, the sorts of things that would result from a high school Woman Making 101 class: legs of unequal lengths, eyes crossed, noses too big or too small for their settings, women no wider from hip to hip than from ear to ear. There were at least a half dozen of them, all talking at once: he had just quit the day before, no notice. What was wrong? No tragedy, they hoped? They loved him, they assured us, like a son. Where was Petey, anyhow?

  Jackie and Bobby and I sat on the sofa, unable to speak. No thank you, said the ladies, they wouldn’t sit down, they really had to be going. They just wanted to bring the things Petey had left behind in his locker: a necktie, a comb (one lady pulled the objects from a shopping bag; the others identified the things aloud), a book on the Swedish royal family, last year’s Guinness Book of World Records, some cancelled checks, and three letters containing the words failure to pay will result in the following. The leader of the group, the thinnest, oddest of them all, gave us a care package that included a bunch of bananas one step away from compost and a plastic bag of rolls branded with a sticker that said REDUCED FOR QUICK SALE.

  When they fluttered out, the leader lingered a minute. Instead of saying goodnight, she whispered, “God give us strength.”

  Gone, gone; we heard the words all day long. “Well,” Bobby told us after the library ladies had left, “he quit his job. Looks like he’s really gone.”

  That night, Jackie came into my room, saying he was scared. He was wearing a set of flowered thermal underwear several sizes too big; I decided, looking at them, that they were probably mine, although in our house there were always pieces of mystery clothing.

  “Don’t worry,” I told him. “I’m sure Daddy will be back.” This was a lie. I felt pretty grown-up, being able to tell comforting falsehoods to a child.

  “No,” he said. He bit his lip. “Those ladies.”

  I understood in an instant. Dad’s room was empty now, and we’d begin to look for a body to put in it. Is that why the women came to visit? Were they looking around? It wasn’t their strangeness, their telegraphic words that scared Jackie: it was those bananas. Our boarders always brought us food. Suzanne got leftovers from her catering jobs: crackers damp with parsleyed cheese, thin slices of greasy beef, cream puffs shaped like swans with only the heads missing. Kenneth Graves clerked at a health food store downtown, but could bear to steal only bulgur wheat. Mike called him the Bulgarian, and had told him that bulgur wheat was very nice—you had to be careful about insulting Kenneth—but that vegetables were also nice, as were eggs and milk. But the next week it was bulgur again, brown as the bag that carried it. Bobby was the most generous: after a successful night of busking on the Common, he’d walk into the room seriously, shake his head, trying to look poverty-stricken. Then he’d pull out a package from underneath his mackintosh, and inside there’d be a cut-up chicken, pork chops cuddled together, or, on the best nights, steaks for everyone, sparkling like jewels in the white paper.

  Jackie and I slept together in my bed that first night of no Dad, curled up close to the slant of the attic, dreaming of half-priced baked goods in plastic: the way they lost their moisture, dwindled, fogged the bag.

  The next day, Jackie mentioned his fears to Bobby, who said no, no: that was Dad’s bedroom; this was Dad’s house. Nobody would move in.

  That didn’t make much sense to me, and sometimes I thought of our house as a dying patient, that open space waiting for a transplant.

  Saturday afternoon, Bobby took us busking—playing music in the park. We’d gone with him a few times before, in the Cadillac. Dad, whose stutter really showed itself in song, was always put in the background; but the lead singers knocked back brandy from collapsible cups steadily between songs and, by the end of the evening, forgot the words. Dad’s voice—“G-G-Goodnight, laaaadies!”—rang out over the leads, one of them hesitantly bidding adieu to the ladies, the other, confident, to Irene. My father remembered the words to hundreds of folk songs, even when drunk, although what he sang at home, to a late-night glass of Irish whiskey, was “Bésame Mucho.”

  This time, Bobby, Mike, Gert, Jackie, and I hopped the express bus into town. The singers stayed pretty much sober, taking only sips from a flask to keep warm. Mike and I waltzed in front of the musicians, both of us admirable, knock-kneed failures. The wind pinked our cheeks. Fresh from the first rush of the season, Christmas shoppers stopped to watch us on the way to the subway, and the tweed cap that Jackie passed buckled with coins and bills. Gert, fingered by both whiskey and weather, was bright red by dusk.

  We brought home lamb chops from the overpriced butcher’s down the street. Suzanne, who was just taking an immense meatloaf from the oven, sulked until Bobby showed her the chops and won over her cook’s heart. It was the only time I ever saw him do anything like flirt. Dinner lasted for hours, full of stories of the best meals each person had ever had, the most amazing concerts heard, the most beautiful face encountered. Afterward, Suzanne presented an apple pie as swollen as a bowler hat. She almost cheerfully circled the table, dropping spoonfuls of whipped cream on everybody’s slice. Gert, the whiskey pulling at her eyelids, retired to her room. Bottles appeared from cupboards, and Bobby poured cocoa for Jackie and me and himself.

  It wasn’t an unusual scene in the house, the drinkers and the honorary drinkers around the table, arguing about art. My father was barely missed; unaccustomed to conversation, he had always lapsed into silence or lecture. Nothing new happened. Mike decided, as he did every week, that he wanted to hear “Love and Breakfast,” his favorite song. It was the only cut he listened to off an album by an L.A. band called Bootless; Mike had written the words himself. Suzanne and Kenneth took up their usual argument about music: she listened to ancient, rambunctious vocalists, Wagner and Gregorian chants; he could tolerate anything but. The fight always finished for the night at the same point, with one of them playing a song to prove the other’s pigheadedness. Tonight, it was Kenneth’s turn, and he stood by the record player, one hand on top of the speaker, the other waving Jerry Lee Lewis’s voice into the room as if it were smoke. He said, “See? See?”

  At eleven o’clock, Bobby looked at us. I was building a cathedral out of the gothic bones; Jackie slept, his arms stretched out on the table, looking like he was trying to evolve out of an amphibious state.

  “Okay,” Bobby said. “Bedtime. Chop chop.”

  This was new. Dad let us go to bed whenever we wanted to; he was a firm believer in letting children act on their stupidity until they learned bett
er. For me this threatened to be in the twenty-first century. Bobby woke Jackie and picked him up; Mike led me by the hand and we climbed the stairs to the bathroom. He lay down in the bathtub while Bobby perched on the edge, supervising the brushing of teeth, the scrubbing of faces. Upstairs in our rooms, Bobby found our pajamas and instructed us to put them on. More nights than not, I fell asleep in my clothing. He tucked us into bed firmly, as if the blankets would protect us from sudden shocks.

  In the morning, happy to be pajamaed, the covers still around him, Jackie suggested that maybe he didn’t much miss Dad.

  I did, though. I practiced by sitting in his chair in the kitchen, inventing possible lives for him, just as he had for other missing persons. All I could come up with was a clear picture of my father in another kitchen, inventing lives for us.

  Bobby announced new rules, among them, regular baths. This was not an issue for Jackie, whose only real quirk was a need to shower at least twice a day, but I had to be coaxed. The job fell to Suzanne. She started with remarks about my personal odor, moved on to threats from my invisible father, and ended with horror stories of mold, small animals, and trees that would take me over: result, the explosion of my insides, a loveless life.

  Insulted, I called her the worst thing I could think of, which happened to be something I’d picked up from a fight between Kenneth and her.

  “Sure,” I said, “you cunty old cow.”

  She immediately picked me up—I was small for my age, but no baby—tucked me under her arm and climbed the stairs. Certain that she planned to kill me, I decided to behave and maybe win her over. She opened the door to Mike’s room and heaved me in. He was sitting cross-legged by the pillows, reading a book. My head landed between his feet.

  “If you’re so smart,” Suzanne yelled at him, “if you’re so in charge, you take care of this. She’s filthy enough to be your job.”

  Mike looked at me upside down, raised one eyebrow, then the other. “Don’t know what you did, kid,” he said, “but I bet you done good.” He shook my hand solemnly.

  And so I was delivered to Mike. At twenty-three, he was the youngest of our boarders by a couple of years and, in some ways, the flightiest. Kenneth Graves could be counted on for his quotidian oddness, but Mike sometimes disappeared for a week at a time, off on what he called “a bender.” On his return, smelling of beer and women, gambling and cigars, he danced a little around the house, touching my hair, Jackie’s, saying, “Ah children, ah houseplants, ah purity.” The wild red hair, the mustache that he groomed at the breakfast table, told nothing of his real self: he was a tough, sweet guy from Brooklyn who drank bourbon, read Poe, Whitman, and Raymond Chandler. I always thought that a fedora and a suit with razor lapels would suit him better; as it was, he favored overalls and faded T-shirts, and his words—sly, sharp, nasal—slid out from underneath the fringe of his mustache.

  Jackie and I agree on this: after Dad left, I was brought up by Mike; he, by Bobby.

  “It could’ve worked out the other way around,” says Jackie. “Maybe things would’ve evened out; we’d be more alike.”

  “Half crazy, half organized?” I ask.

  “Sure.”

  Never. I love Bobby, still do, but found him distant, rigid. Men of principles have never been my favorite sort. Bobby would have combed my hair daily, he would have turned my sweaters right side out, he would have put me through the whole course of manners that, ever since my airborne arc into Mike’s room, I have sorely needed. Mike, given Jackie, would have tried to inject him with poetry, the ability to shoot baskets. These lessons, for me, for Jackie, would never have taken. Mike’s handshake was utterly serious. It meant: you may behave as badly as you like. Just relax when you get thrown.

  Suzanne gave up cooking. She volunteered to clean, but she wanted, under no circumstances, to be anyone’s mother figure. This she said to Kenneth Graves, who was asleep on the sofa. Bobby and Mike took over in the kitchen, like one of Dad’s comedy teams, two men inexplicably together. Bobby specialized in casseroles involving leftovers; he was a little unsure of how to come up with meals of origin. Mike set the table and washed plates. As Bobby stirred the mysterious food, Mike peered over his shoulders—an effort, since Bobby, at six feet two inches, was almost a foot taller—and said, “St. Noonan and the Miracle of the Stewing Meat.” Bobby was a Catholic; Mike, who’d been brought up that way, couldn’t fathom sticking with it. Mike was right: face blushing from steam, his apron spattered with sauce, Bobby looked no less than saintly. “Please,” he murmured, “call me St. Bob.”

  “St. Noonan and the Resurrection of the Turkey Carcass,” answered Mike. “St. Noonan and the Conversion of Last Week’s Pot Roast.” Once, as Mike had his mouth open to say something, Bobby, not looking around, smacked him on the ear with a ladle and said, “St. Noonan Smites the Infidel.”

  Two men, two kids—for a while, it was on your marks, get set, go. Whose child would be best adjusted, most charming, most likely to be invited to the White House as either guest or occupant? Mike’s kid was older, but Bobby had the head start: Jackie was already his miniature—studious, wanting explanations, not doing things that needed to be explained. Bobby bought him a telescope, and the two of them stuck it out an attic window and peered through it together for hours, hoping for undiscovered comets, for a shy galaxy to drop its robe like an unaware bather in a lit-up window. Afterward, the two of them polished shoes in the kitchen, buffing wingtips, the black polish winking out of the broguing, stars revealing themselves there, in their hands.

  We got envelopes from Dad all this time, always with a money order for Bobby and a postcard for Jackie and me. The cards said things like, “The poet Hart Crane jumped off a ship in his pajamas and drowned. His father invented Lifesavers. The candy, not the flotation device.” Or, “Dutch Schultz, the Needle Beer King of New Jersey, babbled nonsense for two hours before he died, all of it taken down by a police stenographer. His very last words were, ‘French-Canadian Bean Soup.’” Jackie refused to read the cards. I put them up on my walls, writing side out. My father’s penmanship was thin and slightly slanted, like he was. Only the postmarks were ugly: no seals from Istanbul, Kalamazoo. Always Cambridge.

  He gave us no return address, and lost out on the new stories. They might not have been to his taste. For instance, nobody died. Not in the house, anyhow. Kenneth Graves locked himself in Suzanne’s room one day and went through heroin withdrawal, which involved breaking her records, one by one. We felt a little like the man whose wife neglected to mention that she was pregnant before giving birth in the bathtub; nobody, except possibly Suzanne, realized that he was an addict. We had to call the police, who jimmied the lock and dragged him out, swearing and filthy, looking as if he’d grown a full beard since the day before.

  He kicked the stuff for good in a government house and moved to New York to escape, as he said, the bad influences around Boston. We got cards from him that said, “Seven weeks and still clean,” or, “Three months and no looking back.” Two days after we received the Christmas card that said, “Almost a year and going strong,” a friend of his called to say that Kenneth Graves had died of an overdose.

  “Curiosity,” the friend told Mike. “Nostalgia. A one-time-only opportunity. You know how it is.”

  No family could be tracked down; our house was listed in his address book under Home.

  That night, we sadly discovered that none of us could think of any really happy memories of him. Suzanne moved out a month later to marry a man we had never met. We thought that was suspicious.

  Somehow, Mike and Bobby saw us through the crises of childhood. Jackie, as far as I remember, had exactly one: he stepped out of the tub in the downstairs bathroom and fell, up to his right hip, through the floor, stopping when his foot hit a pipe. Stark naked, unable to reach a towel, acutely embarrassed, he stayed there until Gert opened the door, tilted her head, and said, “Now, there’s a scene that ought to be painted.” In a tired rage, Jackie threw a bar of soa
p over her head, then asked her to please get Bobby. He had broken his foot, and it doubled in size beneath the floor. Mike cut a wide hole around the leg while Bobby stood in the bathtub, supporting Jackie by the armpits.

  I kept Mike pretty busy. I started by splitting my pants in math class, revealing to the entire fifth grade that, unable to find underwear that morning, I had gone without—the office sent me home with my jacket tied around my waist. The next year, I sprung into school in a pair of pilled-up tights, one of Bobby’s turtlenecks, and a wig, announcing that I was the new girl. In junior high school, I tie-dyed the science teacher’s lab coat; intimated that the fat gymnastics coach could not do a cartwheel to save her life; was kicked out of Social Studies for making unpleasant remarks about the Crusades. Searching for new stories, I hung around the tough kids for a while. They were bad but uninspired—they stole liquor from their parents, drank steadily until a few delicate girls threw up, and continued until everyone in the room was passed out or weeping.

  Mike decided that his job was to teach me how to make trouble without landing in it. Together, we attended Sunday brunch at the Krishna temple and sang the “Hokey Pokey” during the loud prayers, then harassed hapless men dressed in saffron about the nature of life. He took me to tea at the Ritz and announced that it was essential for me to go into the ladies’ room, stand on the toilet, and steal crystals from the chandeliers. I did. My junior year in high school, we spent several afternoons in the balcony of a revival movie house in Cambridge smoking pot.

  He helped me with my schoolwork, too. On those nights, several times a semester, when I’d walk into the kitchen at seven o’clock and remark that I had a paper due the next day, he’d whisk me away to the Howard Johnson’s over the turnpike. We’d drink coffee from the thermos pot all night long—toward morning, Mike would drink right from the spout—and hash out the details.

  “Okay,” Mike said. “What’s the subject?”