Anthony Giardina - Recent History

On the bed, my mother’s head was turned against the pillow.

My father tried to overcome his anger by taking my hand. “Never never never,” he said on the way to my bedroom. “Do you understand, Luca? Never interrupt like that.”

He tucked me in, exaggeratedly, almost secretly gentle. “You’re scared?”

I said nothing. His face came very close. “New house. Your mother scares you, making those sounds?”

It was safe to nod, and he smiled, lightly and delicately. “Luca, that’s the sound of happiness you hear. That’s all.”

He went away then. I drew the covers tight, and heard their attempts to discipline themselves, to keep quiet. The trees that would need trimming made their scratching noise against the outer walls and I thought about what my father had said.

One night early in summer, he brought home from Vanderbruek a man named Bob Painter. Bob Painter was a good deal larger than my father, tall and gruff-looking, with a round red face. He worked on the grounds crew. My father made sure we understood Bob was one of the foremen.

Bob Painter’s effect on my father was a little startling to watch. He made this neat, taciturn man, who was always telling other people to temper their effusions, himself effusive, wanting to show off. My mother and I were both very quiet at the beginning. We were watching a man we thought we knew behave as we had never seen him before. He showed Bob Painter around our house, and, pointing things out, laughed at things that didn’t seem funny. He laughed in a high and irritating way, and there were times, doing that, when he seemed to be dismissing us, and our whole lives, for the benefit of a stranger.

We sat in the backyard, on the flagstone patio. My father cooked steaks on the grill. Bob Painter was uncomfortable being here, I could tell. To my mother’s question, he said he had three little girls, they lived in Woburn. Seven, nine, and eleven. “Like clockwork, we had ’em,” he said to my mother. “Every two years.” He was like a man you would see in an Army movie, a black-and-white one, a minor figure, the sergeant who loses his temper, gets in a knife fight, dies. Only at the end would you feel sympathy for him. I kept waiting for him to disappear, become as unimportant to our lives as he would be to that movie. His big round face had cracks in it, fissures. His cheeks were immense, long and drooping and marked by the outlines of broken veins. His face looked like it had been frozen in reaction to some sort of trouble. He had brought a six-pack of Schlitz beer, and each time he opened one of the cans he looked like he was in pain. He offered one to Mother, and she surprised me by taking it.

Did she flirt with him? I don’t think so. But as it grew dark, she began calling him Bob in a familiar way that irritated me terribly. “Another Schlitz, Bob?” she asked, though he was clearly in charge of that area, holding them between his legs. He had an orange fringe of hair that swept back off his crown.

“My brother-in-law,” my father announced, turning the steaks, “had an idea, Bob. This hill is going to be full of guineas.”

He had never said the word “guineas” before. Perhaps he said it at work. The light was falling, and you could see where the lawn was starting to come up, shoots of green still vulnerable to our footsteps. My father looked at the shrubs ringing the patio and seemed regretful, perhaps knowing he’d gone too far. On the days when he had planted the shrubs, it had been as though nothing was more urgent and important than to make things grow here.

Bob Painter was again on the verge of speaking. Then suddenly he appeared to be embarrassed, thinking better of his own impulse. He sat quietly in the chair. He turned to me at last. “You got a room there, Luca?”

I said I did.

“Can I see it?”

“Sure,” my father answered for me.

Behind me, in the hallway, Bob Painter’s step made a heavy tread. His breathing, too, was heavy. There was not much to show him in the room. I thought maybe he had asked to see it just to get away from the uncomfortable scene below, but I was embarrassed, because this called attention to me in a way I didn’t want. Like George’s room, across the street, mine was stripped down: bed, bureau, desk, heavy dark rug. Over my desk, however, was a print my teacher had given me, after the successful completion of “The Conquest of Mexico,” of an Aztec warrior. The warrior had a strong jaw, and a flaming burst of feathers grew out of his head. In his arms, he held a prone woman, a woman who had been overpowered somehow. He was, for me, a hopelessly romantic figure, and in Bob Painter’s presence, I found I wanted to turn him to the wall.

Bob Painter stared at the print, though, with great interest. “What is this, an Inca?” he asked, and breathed in his funny, sucking way.

I corrected him.

He went on staring at the picture, then at me. “I have three daughters,” he said finally. “You’ll like them.”

But why should I ever know them? I conceived for him in that instant a disgust so strong that whole sections of the evening are blocked out for me. All I remember after is wanting him to go, wanting the course of our lives, with its secrets and its blurred-over areas, to resume. We ate steak. The light withdrew. I went in to watch television. I listened to the sound of them on the patio, my mother’s voice, now drunk, the loudest. I imagined my father again using the word “guinea,” and I wanted my mother to lift a gun and shoot Bob Painter. Or me, I could do it. I could take an ax and finish the job. But my mother made her loud noises and then her murmuring assenting ones, and the men’s voices rode under hers. It was like they were going away from her secretly, under cover of night, throwing their voices like ventriloquists, so that she could not know how far away from her they already were.

It was a Wednesday in July when he finally didn’t come home. At first, it seemed only another of his latenesses. My mother kept his supper warm, we watched television together. When, the next day, we still had not heard from him, I thought she should call his work. I understood, though, that even if I suggested it, my mother wouldn’t act. For an hour in the morning I threw a rubber ball against the side of the house, and caught it.

By afternoon, the waiting had become too much to endure, so I took the trolley into Boston. I was old enough to do that then, usually with friends, today, for the first time, alone. I knew my mother wouldn’t know or care. I explored the streets of Boston, looking for a movie, finally settled on Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man at the Saxon. I remembered nothing of it afterward, save for one thing, one detail.

I took the trolley home and walked to the Hill, then slowed my pace, certain that when I got to the top his car would be in the driveway. When it wasn’t, I shut off a light in my mind and went and got my ball and threw it against the house. I must have made too much noise; there was a tapping at the window. Uncle John was there. He motioned me inside.

I remembered then what it was about the movie I’d just seen, the single scene that had lingered. The boy, Nick Adams, comes upon a boxer, punch-drunk, wasted, in the woods. Paul Newman played the boxer, and with him was a Negro. When the boy comes upon them, they share some melted ham fat, and then the boxer becomes excited. Something in the boxer cannot be contained. So the Negro knocks him out. Taps him, and he’s unconscious. That was wonderful, that small and vivid display of power and control.

I loved that scene.

By August of that year, the houses on the end of our street, and Uncle John’s, began filling in. Something was evident right away. A new kind of person had come here.