Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

They know me from television. Richard did not know when the habit of narrating his own life had begun; now this omnipresent voice spoke to him like a stage whisper, stating the obvious whenever the obvious thing appeared at the core of his unconscious mind. How did people on television grieve? They didn’t. They kept it together until they could retreat. He’d seen the clip of Cronkite telling the world about Jack Kennedy, taking off his glasses: From Dallas, Texas, the flash, apparently official, President Kennedy died at one o’clock p.m. Central Standard Time, two o’clock Eastern Standard Time, some thirty-eight minutes ago.

And today that internal voice had been particularly insistent. The walk home from the television studio had been riddled with reminders of his past. The voice had said, You are now walking on Thirteenth Street Northwest. The place where Richard first saw a prostitute; he was eleven years old, and the street then was nothing but liquor stores and Doc Johnson novelty shops with their twenty-five-cent peep shows. On this street, an ancient janitor in military greens had offered to give him twenty dollars for his Fruit of the Loom underwear, and Richard asked for twenty-five, because to a kid of that vintage, twenty-five dollars was a nearly incalculable sum, a lottery’s worth of mischief and pinball and junk food. He stepped into the restroom of a liquor store that wasn’t even there anymore. He remembered the man’s callused hand palming him the bills, his breath medicinal and sharp as he said, “You are an excellent businessman. A tough negotiator.”

He didn’t tell his mother until years later. And even once he’d admitted it, in the manner of her generation, she simply denied it. “I don’t remember you saying that at all,” she’d say back to Richard as she put together a cheese tray or refilled a wineglass. “I would remember that,” she insisted, but never once looked him in the face. “If a thing like that had actually happened.”

He told his sister that very afternoon. Mary Beth’s reaction: she marched him by the wrist to the police station, found the desk sergeant, and told him the whole story, never once letting go of Richard’s wrist and making him feel very much the little boy. The sergeant smelled of juniper and sweat and came around from behind his desk to appraise Mary Beth, a predatory look, the look older men give to teenaged girls that says, My, how you’ve grown. Richard slipped from his sister’s grasp, bolted out the double doors and into the cleared lot across the street. Mary Beth found him sitting on a short stack of cinder blocks at the edge of the construction zone; he had crossed his arms over his chest and rocked gently back and forth as if he could not be consoled, and now he recognized that as the very moment his internal voice began to speak, the message ex cathedra of Catholic guilt and fear: he’d be punished for losing his underwear, he’d have to give back the money; he worried most that he’d have to tell this story to his father, whose intolerable dinner-table soliloquies were about the decay of modern society and the predators who roamed the modern city.

Now, at a distance of some thirty years, Richard could identify the janitor who asked for his underwear as nothing but an old drunk with an Eastern European accent so thick and comical, Richard had not even understood his request until the visual clue of a twenty-dollar bill was there to help him decode the entire sentence. What the voice said to him as he prayed for consolation on that pile of cinder blocks was the same message he kept hearing now, on his balcony, his hands tight on the steel safety railing as his knuckles whitened with the fierceness of his grip: You will always remember this. His face gathered its musculature into a mask that spoke as well, saying, Here is a stricken man, his body a conversation unto itself. This is a moment you will always remember.

And what would happen to his nephew now? Gabriel. Named after the messenger of the Lord, he’d joked after the child had emerged in full-throated howl. That was the message. And this, then, was Richard’s vision: Gabriel running in a backyard as wide as a meadow. The afternoon unbearably bright, the sky yellowed like an overexposed snapshot from thirty years past, and the boy wearing a T-shirt in candy-cane awning stripes, utilitarian green shorts, a functional garment whose pockets could be counted on to be filled with penny candies, odd-lot pieces of Legos, chewing gum, even a goldfish in a plastic sandwich bag. Richard imagines the boy running and ticks off the distinguishing characteristics of the landscape: a toolshed, a short course of feed corn growing in five-by-five rows, a barn that he’d once watched burn as a teenager. He knows this is not literal, this is Gabriel running through time, and to Richard, grief is not the dour monochromatics of a winter’s day but vivid and bright and rendered in primary colors.

He tried to force his mind to focus on his sister. Yet the city intruded, the street four stories beneath him percolating with the sounds of a holiday evening: shouts and car horns, but also the low and dull moans of idling traffic and the trumpeting of cars and buses accelerating away from a too-long signal light and the conversations of lovers and groups of friends headed to the restaurants that dotted his neighborhood. Everything about the place felt like a diluted imitation of more famous and progressive neighborhoods in larger cities. The weather had turned, and the breeze carried a cutting chill, a reminder that said January. At the Hilton Towers, a few hundred feet to his right, the window lights glowed with the dim refraction of televisions, the curtains closed and permitting just the hint of escaping light. Death arrived with duty. He understood this instinctively and could think of only the one duty that would be required of him: the boy.

The first weekend of his life as a divorced man, four and a half years before, he’d stood on this same balcony with Mary Beth; he supposed that had been her last visit to Washington. They’d had a few drinks and pretended as if divorce weren’t the end of their known worlds. It was Independence Day, and Richard’s place provided a great view of the fireworks, the sky filled with concussive shocks, colored phosphor raining down in patterns that looked like stars.

His father had been a sentimental man and liked to preach a bit on the holiday. He talked about parades and memorial services, about how his own father used to make him cut the grass around the base of the stone monument to the soldiers of his hometown who had died in the First World War. Somewhere in that anecdote, Richard knew, was an explanation of why his father always teared up at the sound of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” even when he was watching the Redskins and having a few pops with the boys from the office.

Richard knew he wasn’t remembering a specific holiday but an amalgam of many: Lew inviting the neighbors over for hamburgers, homemade with his two secret ingredients of Worcestershire sauce and powdered onion-soup mix; Lew behind the grill, dousing the fatty flare-ups with a stray ounce of beer. On the Fourth, Lew smoked a cigar, a gift from his boss, the congressman, claiming to his son that the cigar smoke chased away the mosquitoes. At dusk, as the fireworks exploded over the National Mall, Lew and Richard and some other kids from the neighborhood wandered out onto D Street, in the shadow of the Capitol, and lit off firecrackers and bottle rockets, Lew igniting the stubborn fuses with the burning cherry of his stogie. Richard knew that most of what his father had been teaching him was how to be a man, and those were lessons he could pass on, the difference between a Windsor knot and a four-in-hand, shaving first with the grain and then against it, all of Lew’s little rituals that to this day Richard unconsciously followed. Lew allowed Richard to hold the cigar and light a bottle rocket, and hold the cigar and pantomime taking a puff, and Richard fetched cans of beer out of the basement refrigerator, the one with the wonky-sounding compressor, and Richard pocketed the pull tabs because his mother had asked him to keep count, a request he hadn’t understood until years later.