Recent History

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Three Teachers

I Inca Boy

1

2

3

4

5

II History Teacher

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Praise

Other Works

Copyright

About the Publisher

Three Teachers

Carmello Chiarelli

1924–1985

Janice Slotnick

1914–1983

Jeffrey Kresser

1950–1997

1

When I was eleven years old, in April 1961, my father arrived at school one day to take me into the woods. It was half-day, Wednesday. I usually walked home for lunch but that day he was waiting beside the Fairlane, in the suit he wore to work, the only man among the group of older, nervous mothers who insisted on coming and walking their children home from school.

On the drive—unannounced, with a mysterious destination—he tapped the wheel and hummed an odd little song that let me know he was nervous. I tried to follow the song, but couldn’t. My father was a small, secretive man, quiet, well-dressed. He was known in the family into which he had married, a large and clamorous Italian family (as he was Italian, himself), as one who habitually stood back from the passionate center of action. You can see even now, in the home movies that survive from those years (he never took them, my Uncle John did), how he stands aside from the others on the beach, hardly noticeable sometimes, smaller and more compact and less expansive than the other, heavier, laughing men. What those movies don’t tell you, though, is how he spoke, and the power he wielded because of the way he spoke. “Should we dig for clams?” someone on the beach would shout, trying to draw one last drop from the day. “No,” he’d say, and point. “The tide’s coming in.” The others would stand back then, nod. How foolish they’d been.

That day, he’d brought sandwiches for us to eat, meatball; they were on the seat between us. By the time we were into the woods the submarine rolls had gone soggy, and the bag had a wet stain on the bottom. We had to park at the bottom of the hill where the road ended—the hill was adjacent to the old Girl Scout property, a large undeveloped tract in our town, which had been dominated once by a mill and watch factory, then, after these had closed, had managed to hold on to its population by becoming a bedroom community for the city of Boston. There were still large wooded patches left, one or two farms. My father led me up the hill, as if following some sort of map that existed nowhere but in his head.

We found a rock—a large, flat boulder—that seemed to be what he was looking for, then ate the sandwiches. He still hadn’t spoken. He held a napkin six inches under his chin, a formal gesture, so as to catch any of the drops of sauce. Then, finally, he leaned toward me. He nodded once, and his lips made a small, familiar pursing motion.

“We’re going to live here, Luca,” he whispered.

He took another bite, then gestured, with his mouth full, across the ground in front of us. “This, this is our lot.”

My father’s voice had a slight rasp to it, as though he were in fact tougher than he appeared. It mixed with what was subtle and educated about him, and it was one of the things—there were many others—that gave the effect of there being at least two of him, two things not fighting it out so much as living inside of him in some interesting kind of harmony.

“That, over there, you see those sticks with the little orange flags? They mark out lots. Of course it’s only trees now, but they’re going to build a road up here. Everything you see …” Here he hesitated again. “They’re going to blast away. The rocks and …” He gestured with his fist. “Make houses. You can’t see it, but there’s an orange stick way over there. That’s where Uncle John’s house is going to be. We’re starting a neighborhood, you could say. The family. The Italians.”

He laughed a little after he said that, as if this last part of it, the Italian part, so important to my Uncle John, could never be as serious to him.

Then there was a silence. I looked where he’d asked me to look, and took in all this strange information, strangely delivered; delivered, that is, as though while he was telling me one thing, he was also telling me something else. So I listened harder than I was used to. I listened for the second story.

We kept a photograph prominent in our house in those days, a photograph taken when my father was in college. He’d gone to Boston College, the first in his family to go beyond high school, on a hockey scholarship. The photograph was black and white: him and his teammates, a row seated, a row standing, hockey sticks crossed in front of the seated row, “Snooks” Kelly, famous in our house, stood beside them, heavy, jacketed, the coach. They were either jug-eared boys or else big-jawed boy-men who looked thirty when they were only twenty, and I suspect your eye would be drawn to my father even if you didn’t know him. Seated in the front row, he is smaller and more delicate then the others, the one who appears most singular, and therefore blessed. There is a smile he is wearing that I used to sit and study. It was the smile of a man announcing: I am in this world, but not of it.

It was there now, curiously so, as he looked off into space, and ate his sandwich.

“Listen,” he said. “This is for you. Here, living here, so you can have a better life.”

I watched him consider his words carefully.

“Candace Road, that’s a decent street, Luca, a nice neighborhood, but this is really something else …” Suddenly he trailed off. Something had begun to trouble him.

He had stopped—that was my father—as if too bold an announcement would trap him. He smoothed the wax paper in his lap. He took several seconds and then he looked at me. “You almost finished?”

I said that I was, though I still had half a sandwich in my lap.

That is the quality I remember of that day: my settling into a journey I believed was to be slow and luxurious, then being hurried by him, as if the direction in which he’d pointed us were being altered midstroke.

I have to say that in the days and weeks afterward, my father seemed more excited by what he was doing than he had that day in the woods. Sometimes, even months later, he would take out the architect’s renderings and sit with us—that is, with my mother and me; I was their only child—at the kitchen table, pointing out this nicety and that. It wasn’t uncommon that as he was speaking he would touch my hair. I would run down the street, afterward, on a kind of cloud. And return, an hour or so later, to find he had retreated to his office, my mother setting the table for the two of us.

She never complained. He was a law unto himself. There were things he required: silence, immense space. She kept his food warm, then, only at the end, when it was clear he would not be coming out, for hours perhaps, wrapped it carefully and put it in the refrigerator.

I thought, in those days, that I knew more about him than she did, and made a child’s judgment as to her stupidity. I thought I knew something of my father’s darkness, though that would not have been the word I’d have chosen then. I knew at least what he did at night. From my bedroom window, I could watch him in the backyard, sitting for hours some nights in the Adirondack chairs that had been set up near the rock garden, smoking Pall Malls with his head tilted at a slight angle, as though listening to a difficult voice coming at him. The words he heard disappeared from time to time, so he had to move his head forward, to catch something he might otherwise miss, which was out there in the dark.

Afterward, he would come inside, and if I was still awake, I heard their noise. My mother made a low besotted groan, and it took off from there, took off and ascended, and became like the sound of her dying. I associated those sounds with violence. I was young, and it scared me, but since in the mornings she was all right, even cheerful, after a while I stopped worrying.

Still, there were always two things about my father to consider. One was the nights when he elicited those sounds from her, and then, afterward, in the morning, by some alchemy I couldn’t figure, made her happy. The other was what he did on Saturdays, when men came to our house. In addition to his work in the accounting department of Vanderbruek, the defense plant he’d been hired at out of college, and at which, over the course of fourteen years, he’d steadily risen, my father opened our house on Saturdays to men who wanted their taxes done, or men who had special financial problems, “tricky things,” he called them. They were an odd assortment; the only thing that held these men together was the ridiculous way they all dressed, half in the world of weekend chores, in flannels and chinos, and half in the world of business.

Something in my father’s bearing, I knew, made them want to appear respectable.

I would sometimes pass the window of my father’s office, which faced our backyard, on the pretext of throwing a ball up into the air and catching it, and, in the light over my father’s desk, always on, even on the brightest day, watch his alert, handsome face staring into the face of another man, some doughy, awkward stranger, with an intensity he only rarely directed at my mother and me. It was as though the man had just said something, and my father wanted to stop and ask him to explain. But I do not know how to tell you it wasn’t a word or a piece of business my father wanted explained, but something else, a hazy thing that the man embodied, so that while he was listening, I knew my father wasn’t really listening at all.

After the men were gone, there was another waiting to be endured. For the rest of the afternoon, my father sulked. Sometimes he took off in the car. I imagined he was chasing down one of the Saturday men to point out an error in judgment. Supper was always eaten in silence. Later, in the evening, he would go out and consult with himself in the backyard. His Saturdays followed that pattern, without fail. But just before dusk, in the spring and summer, the boys on Candace Road always gathered on the street to play Wiffle ball. It was a quiet street, full of small houses into which sound penetrated easily. By the time the game was in its second or third inning, the fathers had all come out of their houses to watch.

They were not, for the most part, successful men. They were tire salesmen, mechanics. Among them was a retired Army sergeant. No visible trajectory attached to their lives; the neighborhood houses lacked the silence and absences of ambition.

But at dusk on summer evenings, they came out and rested inside a moment of grace. Their sons on the quiet street. The soaring of the Wiffle ball, which, even sailing far, would break no windows. The smell of lilacs, apple blossoms in May. The fall of light in a suburban neighborhood early in the reign of John F. Kennedy. I do not want to romanticize, but there it was.

Frequently, my father was the last to come out. Even when he did, his mood was often such that he didn’t greet the other fathers, merely stood there, stiff and in the white shirt he had worn to prepare men’s taxes. But even he was capable of being seduced by this scene. At a certain point his shoulders settled, he’d light a cigarette, and the compulsion to leave—so strong, while reined in, so much of the time—leaked out of him.

Even guarding second base, I sensed this. In this game, in the perfection of boys at play, lay my power.

In October of that year, Uncle John’s house was completed, and he held a party in celebration.

We’d often visited Uncle John and Aunt Emma in the two-family they lived in on River Street. Their sons were Bobby and George, who used to entice the younger cousins outside so they could piss off the roof onto them. But that night, when my parents descended the stairs and noticed that I was wearing my everyday clothes, a look crossed their features, as though there was something profound I didn’t get.

We had seen John’s new house in daylight, the most solid and finished of the several houses then in development, split-level houses surrounded by bulldozers and, in mid-fall, by heavy, dug-up mud. John’s house had pillars and second-floor tiers and a facing of pink-tinted marble. A large effort had gone into making it grand, and my father, in the past, whenever he’d driven to the Hill to check things out, had come back and voiced a certain skepticism about what was going on up there. “Versailles,” he had taken to calling John’s house. He splayed his lips and made a sound, which was frequently followed by a call to the architect of our own house, to see if ours couldn’t be simplified.

At night, though, the house underwent a kind of transformation. From far away, from half a mile down the hill, though the road was still unpaved and deeply rutted, we could begin to see the lights of John’s house coming at us through the trees. My mother gasped when we were close. John had set up spotlights outside the house; what they lit appeared larger and more imposing even than it was. Surrounding it, in the dark, were high trees, so that the house poked out of the wilderness like it was making some supremely confident announcement of itself, and I remembered what my father had said about John’s ambition, to make a neighborhood of Italians, and it began to make sense. I could not have said exactly what I apprehended when I looked up at the finished house, but I remember something quickening in me.

In the basement—carpeted, immense—there was immediately a competition for us. Who would we choose to sit with? The aunts’ arms all went out, as if to grab us, and when they shouted greetings, it was as though with one voice. There were three of them, including Emma, John’s wife. My mother’s sisters all had black hair, long and rich and falling out of the bobby pins and clips with which they tried to pull it back. That hair was like a shout in the dark. Family lore had it that they were all unhappy women, but they never seemed that way. My father explained it to me: “They came from an island, Luca. An island in Italy. You have to understand this. They were little girls, and they lived in Paradise. And then their father took them here.” (My mother, the youngest, was the only one born in this country.) “And since then, it’s been nothing but complaints.” Then he always added, low, conspiratorial, not for me to repeat: “Maybe it wasn’t really Paradise, you understand? But let’s keep that our secret.”

I tried. But it was difficult sometimes, to believe in the vaunted unhappiness, or to see it as the central thing about them. They were vivid, even in their voiced dissatisfactions, and they stuck together in a way I admired.

Emma, in her forties, was pregnant then, tired out by the series of miscarriages that had come between Bobby and George and this late, last child. She sat with her sisters Carmela and Lucy on the couch. Carmela and Lucy had both been wild girls, and they had married the sorts of men wild girls married, sailors and musicians. They owned small houses, packed with children, and not until that night had there been any indication that one day these lives would prove to be inadequate. But here, in this house, came the first suggestion of the movement of history and, with it, a kind of panic.

As soon as we entered, they tried to pull my mother down with them, onto the couch, to assert that nothing really had changed, but my mother resisted their entreaties, moved past them, toward John. He rose from his BarcaLounger. He smelled of aftershave and wore a smoking jacket, with patches of suede at the cuffs. He had a large, smooth head, a businessman’s head (he ran a fleet of trucks), with surprising blond hair—surprising, anyway, for an Italian—brush-cut, so that you could see the scalp through it. He planted a soft kiss on my mother’s cheek, and then looked at my father, who remained at a distance, as if asking him to come closer, to stand with him in a kind of solidarity of success.

The two other uncles, Mike and Tony, were gathered around the pool table, where Bobby and George, the former roof pissers, posed for the rest of us, their hair pomaded and combed back off their short foreheads. They looked like the dark, wrongful heirs in Shakespeare, who carry small knives concealed. They held pool cues, and pretended they knew the game, but after a while John and my father came and took the cues away from them and began shooting.

My father was a very precise athlete, a man who wasted no motion. He knew how to hold the cue, and his shots did what he wanted them to. He looked unsurprised afterward, even a little bored. John was clumsier. Once, after a particularly bad shot where he scratched the table, he leaned down and rubbed at the nap, and said to my father, “Meola’s bought a lot up here. Did you hear?”

“The dentist?” my father asked.

“Yes.”

My father made a motion with his mouth that was like shrugging.

“And Doc Semenza,” John said, preparing his next shot.

“So we’re up here with the hoi polloi,” my father said.

Someone, one of the uncles, had put on a record, Dean Martin, and when Dean Martin lapsed into Italian, Uncle Mike, who used to sing in a band that played at weddings (he worked for John now), began to sing along. At first John seemed amused by this, but as it went on, a kind of annoyance started to come into his face. Lucy, Mike’s wife, picked up on this, as though John’s shifting moods were setting the tone for everyone, and she shouted out, “You gonna get me something like this, Mike?” and then, glancing at John, as if for his approval, added, “In a pig’s eye.”

There were children in the room besides Bobby and George and me, five of them, some of them younger, and though they behaved in a respectful manner, every once in a while one of the smaller ones had to be reprimanded. This always came out louder, more angry than it needed to be. And every once in a while Carmela or Lucy would shout something insulting to one of their husbands, as though once that particular theme was introduced, it became a favorite.

Displaced from the pool table, my cousin George was leaning against a bank of windows, his hands behind him, staring at me. He had never much liked me, so his stare was unsettling, some hint of a challenge beneath it. That was the party: George staring at me, and bursts of noise followed by quieter pockets in which the only sound was that of my father and John moving around the pool table, the tops of their heads, my father’s smooth black hair and John’s bristly blond, lit by the glow of the lamp over the table. It was in one of these quieter moments that Lucy grabbed me, pulled me up close, and shouted, “So what are you gonna be when you grow up, huh, Luca? A fighter pilot?”

It had no meaning as a question, it was just Lucy’s way of bursting through the uncomfortable silence of the party, but they all reacted as if their ears had been cocked. John, my father, the uncles all laughed, and then when the words “fighter pilot” were repeated, a second wave of laughter followed. George narrowed his eyes and looked me over again. He moved across the room toward me, turning once, to glare at the others. He hadn’t laughed, the only one. When he faced me again, he said, “Come on. Come with me, fighter pilot.”

We went upstairs. He flicked on the lights that illuminated the living room, a deep, long room full of soft furniture, pastels, and light wood, a room full of turns and nooks, with, at the end, a great stone fireplace. My father had described this room to us; he had come back from his first viewing of John’s house and tried to make us laugh by describing the ornate furnishings, the sheer exuberance of John’s yearning for a life beyond that which he knew. That was when the word “Versailles” first entered our vocabulary, and my father began referring to John as “Louis the Sixteenth.” The memory of this derision stood between me and the room. I might have looked at it my father’s way, and his way alone, if I hadn’t been aware of the concentration with which George, standing next to me, was looking at it, a concentration that altered his breathing, made it reverent, and for a moment created a kind of intimacy between us.

He led me down the hall and opened the door to Bobby’s room and allowed me to look in. “Bobby’s room,” he announced. Then he opened another door. Inside was a crib and pink walls. “If they don’t have a girl, they’ll go apeshit,” George said.

George’s room was identical to Bobby’s. Both were brown and nearly bare, with only a bed and a dresser and a desk situated near the window. There were paintings on the walls, of boys catching footballs, boys playing golf. George sat at his desk and folded his hands. A neat pile of books lay on the corner of the desk: Geometry and Physical Science and Animal Farm. They had the overused look of books given to students in the lower depths of the high school, which was where George had always resided. The design of the room seemed a deliberate attempt to wipe clean the slate of George’s previous life, to make of him a more ambitious boy, a scholar. George drew one hand up, to pat his pomaded hair, and a shadow of trouble crossed his features.

George’s room was on the corner of the house, so he had two windows. He got up and went to the one that faced the side yard, the woods. His hands were in his pockets, and because of the light over his desk and the fact that there were no curtains yet, I could see the reflection of his face in the window, and the way he was looking at me.

He was short, shorter than Bobby, and less good-looking. Bobby was the handsome one, with a face like Fabian’s and a tall body in which he moved like a swimmer.

“So, welcome to our new lives, Luca,” he said.

He turned to me, and his face made a beckoning motion before he lowered his brow. He was thinking something over, whether or not to make some request. I said nothing, offered nothing. It was all too new, this sort of power shift between us.

“How old are you, Luca?”

I said eleven, soon twelve.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and touched his hair again. He looked at his school books, sullen and mistrusting, then reached under his bed. He pulled out a fat paperback and flipped through it. He chuckled. “This is good,” he said. “This is very good.”

He tossed it toward me. The throw didn’t quite make it. I picked it up. It was a purple book with a picture of a Victorian gentleman on the cover, a man with a long mustache.

“You go back downstairs, and the next time Lucy tries to treat you like a baby, you read her some of that, okay? Read it out loud.”

I knew that was not a good idea, but I nodded, because his face on the bed now wore a cruel little smile.

“You take it, and read it anyway. If you have any questions, you ask me.”

That was all. He dismissed me. And the next thing was, I was sitting alone in John’s living room.

I hadn’t known that was what I wanted to do, but I was drawn back there, rather than to the party itself. I sat and absorbed it all. The room was dark. The only sound was the bubbles sent up by the filter of the fish tank. I’d come to sit here for a reason, but I didn’t know exactly what that was. Our world was changing. I understood now why my parents had looked as they’d looked at home, preparing for this, charged and expectant. I sat there, and I tried to grasp it.