My father worked nights as the desk attendant at a cheap hotel downtown. It was a thankless job behind bulletproof glass, which was all he had to shield him from demented drunks and screeching prostitutes, from seven in the evening until four in the morning, the poor man. But he had to do it. The next month’s rent was always due. Life cost money. I was in high school and growing so quickly that I needed new shoes all the time. And he had to pay my clarinet teacher and the girl who came to clean once a week. My mother hadn’t been able to work for years already. By the time I turned sixteen, she was completely blind, and so, while my father was downtown with the scum of the earth, it was my job to keep my mother company, to feed her and put her to bed, etcetera.
Our ground-floor apartment had no views but was crowded with city noises all the same. My mother insisted that we keep the windows shut at all times because, I think, it pained her to hear life happening outside. From our kitchen windows, all you could see was the gray courtyard, pale walls with marks like blood splatter from rain that had fallen before the cement had fully cured. Outside the bedroom windows, there was a two-foot gap of tinny air, like a laundry chute. Sunlight barely made it all the way down, and pigeons used the cool darkness for their mating rituals. My mother called them garbage birds.
Weekday mornings, my father and I walked together to St. Thomas, where he was a math teacher and I was a junior. Every so often, he’d buy me a pack of Twizzlers and himself a pack of NoDoz from the pharmacy. The NoDoz made it hard for him to keep still, so he was always doing something with his fingers, worrying a paper cut or picking at his cuticles. Anything to keep him occupied and busy, to distract him from his exhaustion.
He spoke constantly for the same reason.
“The people downtown, they are not like us, son.” He called me “son.” It was that dignified between us, or he pretended it was. “It’s a different world down there. You don’t see a single normal person. They’re all heathens and whores.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said and crossed myself, and so he did, too.
“And, you know what else, some of the whores look exactly like men,” he said.
“Dad!” came out of my mouth sometimes like a hiccup, not a word but a sound. And sometimes it felt like a common foreign word whose meaning I didn’t really understand. Like “gesundheit.”
“No, no, listen, son,” he insisted, as if it mattered at all what we thought. “A life like that is hard on a woman. They can’t be delicate creatures, I’m saying. I don’t know. It’s very confusing. It’s the wilds of Hell down there.”
I crossed myself again and whispered some fake prayer in Latin and snapped my fingers by one ear and then the other, as if to ward off the evil my father was attracting just by talking about it.
“I’m glad you don’t understand,” he said. But of course I understood. We lived not far from downtown, and every summer I’d bike around all the heathens and whores and sneak into the dirty cinemas and steal Twizzlers and cans of Coke from the deli and cans of beer from the liquor store, so of course I knew that downtown was where the interesting people stayed. They were not afraid of evil, and nor was I. My piety, my superstition was an act, a joke, and my father never got it. I had no faith at all as a young person. I thought the whole idea of God was made up.
“You know why nuns smoke?” he asked me. Whenever he felt he’d hit some kind of sharp corner, he’d pivot and turn back into a hapless, happy child with bloodshot eyes behind his thick glasses. He was an innocent. He was a simple, good man. All he wanted was to make me laugh.
“No, I don’t know, Dad. Why do nuns smoke?”
He shrugged. “Habit.”
His delivery was very flat and monotonous, like that of an announcer in the subway or one of the nuns taking attendance. I felt sorry for my father, and I could never laugh at him, even if his jokes were funny, which they rarely were. I suspected that he stole a lot of his material from his students or some old joke book in the library, but I could never corroborate this.
“You know why nuns wear pantyhose?” I asked him.
“I don’t know, son. Why?”
“So nobody recognizes them when they rob banks.”
He pretended not to get my jokes, knitting his eyebrows for a moment before putting on a patronizing smile and saying, “Oh, I get it, good one.” But I was naturally funny and glib. I was no fool. My father pretended this wasn’t true. And so he had to pretend not to notice that every time I bested him I snatched a little of his dignity to add to my own pile. That felt correct. I was the one who’d have to carry it out into the world. He was already out there, and we could both see how poorly he’d tended to his pile.
At school, nothing was more shameful to me than seeing my father drinking from the water fountain, sucking and gulping. The cuffs of his trousers rose up when he bent over, and everyone could see his stringy, naked Achilles tendons. Paper-white skin crawling with wiry black hairs. He rarely wore socks. I was glad that I didn’t look anything like him. He had rows of hard, tiny pimples on his forehead along his hairline. He’d scratch at them during our calculus exams, writhing as if his own fate were on the line. I’m sure it was the NoDoz that made him do this. He’d sit behind his desk, stare off into nothingness, gouge out his pimples, and then clean out his fingernails with one of his sharp canine teeth and spit the results into a handkerchief he always kept balled up in his pants pocket.
The other boys at school did laugh at my father. They thought it was hilarious that he could be so good at math yet so bad at normal behavior. He wore shoes that were a half size too big, and his gait was comical. He walked like a duck or a clown, often with a scab of toilet paper stuck to the sole of one shoe. I think he did this on purpose, for the attention. And still I had to pretend to admire him; I had to smile at him proudly in the hallways. He thought that was what it meant to be respected—to be admired when other people were watching, like a woman.
And, much like a woman, he was always grasping for some perfect version of himself, always seemingly exasperated that this perfection was just out of reach. As if somebody had moved it. Who had moved it? This silliness, the silliness of his arrogance, was actually funny to me. He was nothing and nobody, and nobody cared, and he thought that everyone was watching him, that even I was watching him.
My mother certainly wasn’t watching. She had no future, so she played the old-fashioned, agreeable wife. She knew that he liked it when she spoke to him in a small, sweet voice, so she did that. “Sweetie,” she called him. And sometimes “Honey.” “Daddy.” “Darling.” “Dear.” My father seemed to accept these words as proof of her affection.
The voice she used on me was very different. Efficient. Almost professional. “Where’s Peter?” she’d ask me. Not “Where’s your father?”
She called me “son” like he did, but, when she said it, it felt as though she could mean anyone, anyone’s son. A neighbor kid or the newspaper boy. It seemed not to matter to her who I was. It was a real gift, her great detachment. No matter how helpless she became or how much I did for her, she gave me nothing. As if I were merely a houseplant and I would bend stupidly toward whatever light I could find. She did not have to shine, nor would she shine for me.
School was aggravating, but home was worse. I had a perfect attendance record because, when I got sick, I preferred to stay in the nurse’s office at St. Thomas, in the still and quiet comfort of the narrow bed covered with white tissue paper. The smell of iodine and the nurse’s hair spray. I could cough and blow my nose freely around her. I could breathe. One time, I stole a penlight, and when I went home to my mother that afternoon I tried shining it in her eyes, back and forth, left to right, again and again, curious if it might inspire something, any reaction. She barely blinked. Her eyes were murky green and always cast upward and to the left. I’d stare at them shamelessly, sometimes taunting myself to feel something like pity, or compassion, or sadness for her. It was a game I played with myself. She barely noticed me. The penlight went dead after just a few days.
The only thing that I could do to punish her was practice my clarinet. Although I was not untalented, I hated the clarinet, and so I knew how to play it very badly. I practiced the same Weber Concerto in F Minor for a year and a half, and only the second movement. I was able to produce a self-pitying, pleading noise like an animal lying on the side of the road, begging to be put out of its misery. Twenty minutes was all her nerves could tolerate, my mother said, so I chose to torture her during her bath time in the evenings, when she was supposed to relax. It was all I could do, squeak and squawk while dinner cooked on the stove, while the rice and chicken boiled—my mother didn’t trust me to use the oven or to fry anything in oil. The taste of my clarinet reed was the bitter taste of my own hunger, and I loved it, my own dried-up hunger from the evening before, while the rice boiled, and so forth.
Her vision had been slowly waning for a decade, and yet she’d refused to learn how to accommodate her disability. She was the one prone to accidents, but somehow she protected herself by controlling me. No television. No going out onto the fire escape. No leaving my book bag or shoes or anything at all in the hallway. Still, I’d seen her trip and fall and had held my breath while she got up. She turned bright red. Her fury scared me because, when I was little, she’d slapped me across the face a few times, and it had been horrible for both of us. There’d been nothing to do afterward but pretend that it hadn’t happened.
It was my job to avert my eyes and hold up the towel to protect her from me as I helped her out of the bath. Her legs had purpled from the hot water, the veins on her shins bulging like bludgeoned earthworms. I waited outside in the hallway so she could dry herself in private.
“Slippers,” she’d say, and I’d open the door and guide her feet.
She was hasty and didn’t like being naked, I assumed, so the polyester nightgown—she had seven in rotation—would cling to her hot skin as she shuffled down the hall toward the kitchen, one hand dragging along the waxy wallpaper even as I took her other arm.
I helped her sit down at the table, put the fork and knife in her hands, poured her a single glass of Chianti, then left her to eat alone while I went back into the bathroom to drain the tub and pick up her soggy, wet towel off the floor.
If I was very quiet, though, I could stand in the hallway and watch her eat. She never actually used the fork and knife. She would feel for the wine first. I made sure to pour it full to the brim each time, so, no matter how light her touch, the wine sloshed onto the tablecloth, then dribbled down the stem as she drank and dripped onto the pilly nylon lace across her chest. Her nightgowns were all permanently stained.
When she was done with the wine, she put her hand on the plate, lowered her head, and ate with her fingers. This was always messy, because everything I cooked got doused in jarred turkey gravy or barbecue sauce, which I heated up in the microwave. Pieces of her wet hair fell and stuck to her face, and she’d smear sauce on her cheeks trying to get a strand out of her mouth. She required very many napkins. Also, she rarely brushed her teeth. Perhaps this was another reason that the food she demanded was mushy. Like a little baby’s.
It was immensely boring to be with my mother. After dinner, she went to bed to listen to the radio. She liked only very solemn, funereal church music. If something was too quick tempo’ed, too unrestrained, or if there was any singing in it, she’d snap at me to change the station: “Quick, quick. Before I go deaf, too.”
I made terrible faces when she snapped at me. I gave her the middle finger. I mouthed “bitch” and “cunt” and “fuck you.” She could have changed the station herself. The radio was right beside her on the nightstand, the nob to turn the dial easily within her reach. I did my schoolwork sitting next to her, on my dad’s side of the bed. This was her preference; if she needed something, I was right there. She never had to raise her voice.
When she fell asleep, I stared at her close up, counted the wrinkles in her lips, the hairs on her chin. She wept in her sleep sometimes, and the tears would pool in the hollows of her eyes. I often fell asleep there beside her, with the lights on. She was a very heavy sleeper, actually, so only I woke up when my father got home. I’d hear him kick off his shoes, then I’d see him as I headed to my own room, in the eerie yellow light that filled the kitchen when he cracked open the fridge. The palest yellow light, sunshine pouring in from another world.
The nuns hated us. Sister Brigida, who taught history, flung chalkboard erasers at the ground by our feet, and the yellow dust clung to our dark polyester trousers. She did this randomly, just to make sure we were paying attention. Her teeth were tiny and gray, like an elderly cat’s. Her ass was very big and square, and she must have liked the way it looked. She was the only nun at St. Thomas who elected to wear a rope belt. Her waist was very narrow. When she reached up to pull down the world map, she grunted a little. I liked her.
But I preferred Sister Veronika, the English teacher, because she was young and easily overwhelmed. All it took was one teasing question, one interruption, and she’d lose her concentration completely.
“Excuse me, Sister, did you say ‘ship’ or ‘shit’?” I might ask.
“What?”
“We can’t hear you.”
“What can’t you hear?”
“We can’t hear you clearly. Did you say ‘ship’ or ‘shit’?”
“ ‘Ship.’ I said ‘ship,’ didn’t I? I said, ‘When they boarded the ship.’ ”
“I heard ‘shit.’ ”
“No, I would never—”
“I heard ‘shit,’ too,” someone else might say.
And then for the rest of the class she’d cough and bang on her chest and say, “Turn to page . . . Turn to page . . .” And then she couldn’t find the page.
So we went on. “ ‘Shit.’ ‘Ship.’ ”
“Does ‘but’ have one ‘T’ or two ‘T’s?”
“ ‘Cunt’ has one ‘T.’ ”
“ ‘Cunt butt,’ yes.”
And so on and so forth.
She tried so hard to contain her frustration sometimes that it seemed to reverse course deep inside her and come out as laughter and mucus sputtering from her nose.
I was always well liked by the other boys in my grade, but I reached the zenith of my popularity after I wowed everybody at lunch with my impression of the principal, Sister Margaretta. I’d practiced among small circles of friends until I was sure I could command a real audience, and then, in the cafeteria, when I was confident, I stole a dish towel from the lunch lady and draped it over my head. I could perfectly mimic how Sister Margaretta cleared her throat. Everyone turned to look. I started shuffling around like a robot, my mouth opening and shutting like a sock puppet’s, my head moving up and down as I read names off an imaginary attendance sheet, the way Sister Margaretta did every morning, when we all assembled in the chapel.
“Ivanov, Kalashnick, Krachenko.”
The boys cried out, “Here! Here!”
“Kovalenko.”
“Here!”
“Kowalski.”
“Here!”
“In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, beep beep,” I said, finally moonwalking backward across the greasy linoleum.
Later, my father said, “I don’t get it.” He hadn’t been there to witness my great performance, but my classmates in calculus told him the story, each trying and failing to re-create my imitation. “Yes, I understand the robot part, but Sister Margaretta doesn’t wear a dish towel on her head. She’d never do that.” My father’s mind was not built for irony of any kind.
The girl who came to clean once a week had freckles and blue eyes and wore heavy black eyeliner. I loved her. Her name was Priscilla. She was a few years older than me. She smoked a lot and had a habit of spitting onto the rug and then rubbing at it with the sole of her tennis shoe. My mother acted brain-damaged whenever Priscilla was around, I don’t know why. Sometimes it looked like she was drooling a little, her head shaking ever so slightly. It was hostile, I felt, like my mother wanted to horrify the poor girl. Maybe she sensed Priscilla’s undeniable beauty, and that made her crazy. I never understood it.
As a result of the pretend brain damage, Priscilla thought my mother was dumb as well as blind. She used to flash her breasts at her as she dusted the coffee table. Then she’d cluck her tongue in pity at my mother and look at me like I was some kind of monster. Of course, she knew I was right there. Priscilla wasn’t blind. And I wasn’t blind. I was always watching her.
Her breasts were very small, like dumplings. Is it terrible to describe a girl’s breasts as dumplings? My mother’s breasts reminded me of bowling balls.
When Priscilla went down to the basement to do the laundry, I’d look through her purse and kiss and lick the things I knew she would hold in her hand later. Her Pac-Man key chain. Her cinnamon Binaca. Her ChapStick. A dwindling bottle of Charlie perfume. Sometimes I stole a Life Saver or some cigarettes, but I never smoked them.
When Priscilla found a few dozen stale Marlboro Lights rolling around in the back of my desk drawer, she asked, “Is it you that’s been stealing my smokes?”
I nodded.
She looked up at me in disgust. I was taller than her, thank God.
“Sit,” she said, and pushed me down on the bed. She shut the door, sat beside me, lit two cigarettes, and put one between my lips. “Go ahead,” she said, “if you’re that cool.” This silent mortification was more like erotic asphyxiation, and it frightened me, because now I had her alone to myself and I didn’t know what to do. So I tried to smoke. I choked and cried. She just watched me.
“What’s your name again?” she asked me finally, then ashed into her cupped palm. I could feel my face turning red, but I told her my name and kept smoking. She said my name three times, like a witch practicing a spell.
“Where’s your dad?” she asked.
“He goes to whores,” I told her. I meant it as a joke, but, as I sounded the words out, they weren’t funny.
“Which whores?”
“The ones downtown.”
“You ever go with him?”
“I don’t like whores, no,” I said. “Only my dad likes them. And sometimes he likes the ones who look like men.”
She took a long drag. I wasn’t sure she understood me, and so I was full of self-doubt. Had they been men dressed like whores or whores who looked like men? I had no idea. She lifted her shirt.
“What are those, potato dumplings?” I asked.
“You wanna touch them?”
Of course I did. But I thought she was taunting me, and I had to fight her. So I rolled my eyes and said, “I don’t like whores, I told you.”
She laughed. Then she got up and stood before me so that, if I’d wanted to, I could’ve reached up her shirt, but I didn’t.
“Close your eyes,” she said. I figured she was going to kiss me.
She didn’t kiss me. I cracked open one eye and watched as she licked the tip of her index finger, dipped it in the cigarette ashes in her hand, then drew an “X” on my forehead.
“Much better,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said.
She laughed at me, retrieved her stolen cigarettes from the drawer, and went out, saying, “You don’t know where your father goes. You have no idea what men do.”
The next morning, it was raining. On our walk to school, my father talked about how he got plantar warts on the soles of his feet because he didn’t wear sandals in the shower when he was a student at Brooklyn Polytechnic. “Two years in Da Nang setting up radio lines, and not a single injury. But these warts were so deep, and they hurt a lot, and they didn’t go away until long after I graduated and married your mother and you came along. I think you were three years old and walking and talking when they finally disappeared.”
“What did I say that scared them off?”
“What?”
During calculus class that day, he went off topic and gave a long, impromptu speech.
“Faith and reason are not opposed,” he said, and then he said it again, as if he were trying it out on us. “Let’s consider pi. It is infinite, the measurement of the purest shape, the infinite circle, the shape of God, I think. Don’t you think?” He yawned. Then I yawned.
Nobody was paying any attention. The other boys were already filling out their worksheets that were due the next day. “What is irrational about an irrational number? The way I see it, the irrational numbers are the lucky people, like us, who look out at the world and all of human history and think, See, it all makes sense, because we are here now, and we’re alive, and we are not suffering like other people whom God doesn’t love as much. And the rational numbers are all the sad orphans and all the slaves and innocent prisoners and the people out there starving to death while we try not to get fat.”
I could see the skin under his left eye quaking. I’d never paid such close attention to him before. I’d always been so focussed on guessing what the other boys were thinking.
“But what makes us so special?” my father asked, his voice dragging a bit. It was clear to me that this was a rhetorical question.
A boy in the front row put up his hand.
“Yes, what?”
“It’s because we’re Americans,” the boy said.
My father coughed and turned his back. The NoDoz gave him terrible acid reflux, and now and then he’d choke, gag, and pound his chest until he caught his breath.
“We’re Polish Americans,” another boy said.
“I’ve never even been to Poland,” the first boy said.
My father seemed to crumple a little, shuddering, grabbing the edge of his desk to steady himself. Was he dying? I almost called out to him. I thought maybe he was having a heart attack. Then I saw that he was only laughing. He was right to laugh, of course. It took me a moment, but eventually I saw the humor in it all as well.
That day, after the bell rang, I did not go home to my mother. I waited outside St. Thomas for my father to finish grading papers, then, when he finally lurched out the door and onto the sidewalk, I followed him.
The Happy Clam was a Chinese restaurant near the Manhattan Bridge, in the basement of a narrow, soot-streaked four-story tenement. A bubbling tank of lobsters greeted you as soon as you made it down the stairs. Even though the restaurant was very dimly lit, I could see that the red carpeting, once plush, was worn and blackened with grease. The tables were sparkly red Formica, the chairs grimy and mismatched. The crowd was also mismatched. I watched my father casually take a seat at the bar. I hung back near the swinging doors to the kitchen, close enough to see him but not close enough to be seen. The busboys and waitresses ignored me.
The Chinese lady behind the bar served my father a bottle of Budweiser and a bowl of peanuts. He didn’t have to ask. He sipped the beer and pulled a stack of index cards from his inside jacket pocket. He looked at a card, mouthing words to himself, then mouthed them again, looking up at the television bolted to the wall above him. An old boxing match played on mute. I imagined, at this point, that my father had stopped in for a beer on his way to his desk-attendant job at the cheap hotel. But then he checked his watch, wiped his mouth with his cocktail napkin, snapped his fingers at the bartender, who flicked a switch, illuminating the shiny sky-blue brocade curtain across a small stage at the front of the dining room, which I hadn’t noticed. Customers angled their seats toward it as my father casually strode up and disappeared behind the curtain. When he came back out, he lugged a microphone stand with him.
He spoke into the mike very flatly. “Welcome to the Happy Clam. If you’re here for the food, I’m sorry. If you’re here for the comedy, I’m more sorry, because tonight, like most nights, I’ll be your m.c., which stands for ‘miserable cunt.’
“Now, before I bring out the guys who still think being funny gets you laid, I thought I’d loosen things up with a few thoughts. You good with that? No? Doesn’t matter. What matters is the two-drink minimum.”
He wrestled the microphone from its stand and took a step toward a table for two.
“You, ma’am, are very fat, so let’s call it a six-drink minimum.”
A few people laughed.
“Is that your wife, sir?” he asked the man sitting with the woman. “No? But you’re paying for the six drinks, right?
“My wife couldn’t be here tonight, either. She doesn’t work, but, with all the ball-breaking she does, she’s a busy lady. To be clear, she doesn’t actually break my balls. She hasn’t even seen my balls in so long, she wouldn’t recognize them in a lineup. Because she’s blind.
“Sometimes I envy her, you know? She doesn’t have to look down at her saggy tits. But I can see them, right there, resting in her lap like a pile of mashed potatoes. And then I think, No, God, no, I don’t want to be blind. I like pornography too much.
“And I love reading the news. It makes me feel like I’m a good guy. By comparison, I mean, I’m a pretty decent person to be around. Imagine having to live with Ted Bundy. Or the Night Stalker. You ever notice serial killers, they’re so fucking principled? They have all these rules and routines. ‘I only kill on Wednesdays. During the full moon. Brunettes named Diane with crooked teeth.’ I can’t even finish a jar of peanut butter without losing my sense of purpose, and these guys are out there building shrines and naming bones. That’s dedication.
“My wife and I are raising a son. He takes after his real father. Obedient. Good in school. Loves his mother. That’s how I know the kid’s not mine. I can’t stand his mother.”
Someone in the back laughed loudly at that.
“The kid is pretty principled, come to think of it. I could see him getting sucked into the serial-killing life style. He plays the clarinet, so he won’t get laid until his late forties, and even then it’ll be supervised by the state. No, that’s a joke. He’ll die a virgin. You’ve never seen anyone so prudish. He crosses himself whenever I say the word ‘whore.’ So I say it a lot. Kid needs his exercise.”
I never told my mother what I’d seen that night. Why would I?
I found her banging at the bedroom window. She had her robe on inside out, the bottle of Chianti in her hand.
“What happened?” was all I could think to ask. I stayed far enough away that if she swung at me she’d miss.
“They won’t shut up,” she said. She was drunk and she was crying. She continued pounding at the glass. The pigeons were out there, a dozen or so, cooing and flapping around in the soft yellow light, loving one another. “Get a cat and throw it in there or something,” she said. “Do something. Where’ve you been, anyway?”
“Go sit down on the bed,” I told her. “I’ll get them to stop, but you’ve got to sit down first.”
She nodded. She had no choice. First, she finished the bottle of Chianti and laid it on its side on the floor. Then she got down on her hands and knees and crawled, the wrong way, toward me. I said nothing when her fingers hit the scuffed toe of my right derby. She took hold of my shoe and felt it. With both hands, she felt each fret of the tied laces, up to my ankle. It was only when she got up past my sock and felt my skin that she recognized that the thing she was touching was me.
It was obvious why my mother hated the sound of those pigeons. The very idea of courtship, seduction—it embarrassed her. I don’t think she believed in love, nor do I think she ever felt it, even accidentally. There are such people on earth, and we should study them, I think, and glean from them what we can. If it hadn’t been for the movies, I might’ve thought that this was a typical feature in mothers, to exude no love.
Perhaps you think I’m being cruel. I am not. She refused to know and love me. That’s the truth, and I know nobody likes to hear it. My mother wasn’t stupid, so how was it that she learned nothing from her miseries? She must have. Yet she shared none of her wisdom with me. What a waste, don’t you see? Did she think I wouldn’t understand? I would have understood her, better than my father ever could have, yes. Like the driest bit of dirt, I would have absorbed her completely. I would have worshipped her, had she been remotely willing to share. ♦
This story was inspired by Harold Brodkey’s “The State of Grace,” which was published in the magazine in 1954.
