Tom Mendicino - Probation

Two weeks ago, thumbing through the Christmas cards she’d received, I’d opened a reproduction of a Bellini Madonna and Child and was confronted by the printed salutation.

Season’s Greetings from the King of Unpainted Furniture

Curtis maintained two Christmas mailing lists, one for the recipients of Italian Masters religious scenarios, the other for those who were sent the Currier and Ives seculars. After all, the King explained, Tar Heel Heritage, the world’s largest manufacturer of unfinished pine furniture, can’t offend its Jewish friends, but we gotta remember that most of our Christian friends think, well, if it weren’t for Christ there wouldn’t be any goddamn Christmas anyway. Curtis’s staff could effortlessly spit out catalogues, spreadsheets, and quarterly statements; certainly they should have been competent enough to hit the DELETE button and purge my mother’s name from the Italian Masters mailing list.

This benign little outing is turning into a full-blown exercise in tactical maneuvers. The crowd looks harmless enough. A young man and woman, their first Christmas together as a married couple, giggle and spit hors d’oeuvres into paper napkins. An old man with hairy ears corners them to gloat over the American Civil Liberties Union’s failure to persuade the Mecklenburg County emergency judge to order the removal of the crèche from the entrance to City Hall. They feign interest, caring less about civil liberties and the Baby Jesus than in finding a trash can. A spinsterish woman in a Fair Isle sweater folds her arms and pretends to survey the cookie table, trying to make eye contact so she can strike up a conversation with me. A tired little girl in a velvet party dress skates across the hardwood floor on the soles of her patent leather Mary Janes. Braking with her toe, she looks up and asks me my name. Andy, I say, and ask hers to reinforce her lessons on good manners. Brandy, she answers. She must be the aftermath of an evening of one-hundred-proof induced lust, her name a commemoration, like winter babies named April or June. Our names rhyme, I say, making conversation. Whatever, she snorts, tossing her head.

Someone is tickling the ivories in the next room. The piano player runs through a few scales to loosen up his fingers. I recognize the opening bars of a Broadway show tune.

“You coax the blues right out of the horn…”

His booming voice crushes the weak harmonizing of the members of the chorus.

“…MAME!”

J. Curtis McDermott. Having located ground zero, I can avoid him, escaping to the kitchen. A martinet caterer is bullying a platoon of exasperated college kids who persevere because she pays fifty bucks a night under the table. No one is permitted to leave the room without her approving the arrangement of toast points and smoked salmon on their serving trays. She dresses to intimidate, with short-cropped hair and a Chanel skirt under her kitchen smock. She’s oblivious to the fact that people take one look and assume she’s a lesbian, a creature to be pitied because she can’t get a man.

An effeminate boy sweeps into the kitchen, tossing his empty tray aside: “It’s snowing! It’s really snowing!”

The college kids ignore their boss and rush to the kitchen windows. The pots stop rattling and voices are still. The windows are wide and high and someone hollers that everyone can see if we just squeeze a little closer and y’all in the back stand on tippytoes. A high girlish voice, probably the sissy boy’s, starts singing “White Christmas” and everyone joins in.

The snow doesn’t look like the big fluffy Hollywood downpour at the end of the movie. These snowflakes are aggressive. An advance attack secures the front line, melting on impact with the still-warm ground. The swift, hardy infantry assaults the rhododendrons and azaleas and chokes the lawn. A strong wind rattles the pine trees and slaps the power line, heralding the arrival of the cavalry. The final victory is swift, eerily quiet. The powder is accumulating.

Merriment dissolves into nervous apprehension as the snow starts to drift. Bing Crosby had snow tires; no one in North Carolina does. The caterer snaps at her crew, telling them to circulate, fast, before everyone deserts the party. She wants them to push the paté on melba.

I see one of the servers shooting her the finger behind her back. Caught red-handed, he gives me a bashful shrug. He’s a tall, lanky boy, probably a track and field star, a Country Day School type. I wink to let him know I approve. She deserves worse than the finger. The track star offers me a piece of bruschetta. We’re conspirators now. “Super cunt,” he whispers, “what a lezzie.”

Curtis and I spot each other at exactly the same time. He’s slipped into the kitchen to be incognito since it’s a dry party. He sees me when he looks up from the silver pocket flask tipped at his lips. I’m smiling at the obscenities the teenager is whispering in my ear. He couldn’t have caught me at a worse moment. It’s not the booze flushing his cheeks. His hatred of me has not diminished one bit in the six months since our last encounter.

Life is nothing more than a succession of what-ifs?

What if I had had more than ten bucks in my wallet when it came time to post the bond?

What if, having finally summoned up the courage to call Alice, fate hadn’t intervened in the form of a malfunctioning automated teller that swallowed her one and only debit card?

What if I had thought to tell her the holding cell wasn’t like the snake pits you saw in the movies, but was a spotlessly clean little corner I had all to myself, no bruising inmates to corrupt and abuse me?

What if her judgment hadn’t been so clouded by worrying about my safety that she would have thought twice before calling her father and telling him she needed three hundred dollars, now?

He would have killed me if Alice hadn’t jumped on his back, trying to pry his hands from my throat. He came close enough as it was. Those huge fists crushed my vocal cords and left me hoarse for weeks. But that was minor compared to the damage he wreaked on his own flesh and blood. She cracked her skull against the hard tile floor when he threw her off his back. The police arrived, summoned by a report of a domestic disturbance, the second time in twenty-four hours I found myself confronted by a badge and a blue shirt. Fire rescue was close behind.

Curtis insisted I’d tried to kill her. Alice, groggy from the concussion, refused to press charges. There’s no charges to press, she insisted in her soft drawl. Daddy’s wrong, she said, I fell. I remember the way “fell” tripped off her tongue, sounding more like “fill” or “feel.” Most likely the effects of the concussion.

Her first instinct was to protect me. Given time, she might have learned to accept “it,” “this.” Someday, not right now, but maybe in the not-too-distant future, soon, once things got back to normal, we could come to an understanding over pinot grigio and Orange Milano cookies. She read about things like this in Cosmopolitan; she’d seen something like this in a movie of the week. It wasn’t so unusual, was it? You don’t pick up and leave if someone is paralyzed from the waist down in a car accident, do you? Was this really all that different?

Yes.

I knew it and Curtis knew it. It took Curtis to do what neither she nor I could: cut me out of her life.

Another man slips into the kitchen and accosts the King, wanting a sip from his flask. I take the opportunity to escape. Curtis reaches out to grab my arm. I manage to slip away from his fingers. He hates me not for betraying his daughter, but for betraying him.

I slither into the crush of bodies around the bishop, who’s crouched over the keyboard, crooning “What I Did for Love.” His dry voice resists the emotion he’s straining to squeeze into every note. A fey young acolyte, most likely a seminarian, stands at attention, his long fingers ready to flip the sheet music at just the right moment. He seems to be the only person in the room who hears music in that voice. It’s obvious to everyone in the room that His Excellency is sending a valentine to the boy. No one dares to wince, but one or two of the more irreverent stifle the clearing of throats, their amusement peeping from behind closed fists.