Hope Street (36 page)

“But if my real—I mean, my biological father hadn’t made the scene, Mom would be home right now.”

“I don’t know.” Bobby lifted the muffin, then lowered it back to the plate. He ought to eat something, but he couldn’t. He was starving, but he wasn’t hungry. “Drew Foster opened a door we used to keep closed,” he said. “Whatever was behind that door existed, even when the door was bolted shut. Now it’s open. That’s all.”

“What’s behind the door, Dad?” Claudia asked, her voice hushed and gentle.

“I don’t think that’s your business,” he said, equally gently. She meant well, but Christ. She was his daughter.

“It
is
my business. The person who unlocked this door you’re talking about was looking for me.” She folded her hands on the table in front of her, like a schoolgirl praying to do well on a quiz. She was dressed in a flowery sundress. Claudia was the kind of woman who’d put on a dress at eight on a Saturday morning just to check on her father. There was nothing pretentious about it, no attempt to impress. It was just the way she was.

Her lovely grooming made him feel twice as rumpled. He hadn’t combed his hair, his cheeks were covered in stubble, the edges of his shorts were fraying and his bare feet were ugly. Thanks to Joelle, he’d learned not to be self-conscious about his scars, which had faded over the years. Along his side and back
was a faint graph of pale lines. As for his legs, he could wear shorts and not care that someone might notice the tracks his surgeries had left on his skin.

But even if he’d been left with huge, ugly scars, Joelle had accepted his body, and that had enabled him to accept it.

He managed to swallow a bite of muffin. “Your mother married me so you wouldn’t be born out of wedlock,” he said. “Is that what you wanted to know?”

“I already figured that out.”

“Okay, then. You get the picture. We didn’t marry for love.”

“But you
do
love each other.” Claudia studied his face, searching for reassurance.

“I love your mother. I don’t think she loves me.”

“Just because she went off to Ohio doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you.”

“I’m not talking about this.” He gestured toward the note Joelle had left him. “I’m talking about our lives. She married me because she had to, because she couldn’t see any other way to keep you. And we made a go of it for a long time because we kept that fact locked behind the door. If you don’t think about something, you can pretend it isn’t there.”

“She told me…” Claudia traced the rim of her mug with her finger. “She told me she would have gone out with you in high school if you’d ever asked her. You never did.”

Bobby sat back, surprised. For a moment he regressed to being a teenager, Joelle Webber’s best friend and secret admirer. “We were pals,” he said.

“You never asked her out. You were dating some other girl. Mom showed me everyone in her high-school yearbook. I don’t remember the girl’s name. She had black hair and too much eye makeup.”

“Margie Noonan,” Bobby recollected. Then he shook his head. “Your mother was out of my league.”

“She was a kid from the wrong side of the tracks, just like you.”

“She was a Tubtown kid, but she wasn’t anything like me.” He sipped some coffee. It tasted wonderful after the crap he’d brewed earlier. “She was going places. She was destined for greatness. I wasn’t about to stand in her way.”

“You were destined for greatness, too,” Claudia said. “Look at you, Dad. You own your own business. You own a beautiful house on a beautiful piece of land in a beautiful part of New England. You’re an American success story.”

“I never thought I’d wind up like this,” he admitted. Even scruffy and agitated, his wife gone and his future threatened, he allowed himself a moment of pride in all he’d accomplished. Then he acknowledged the truth: “Whatever success I’ve achieved, it was because of your mother. I wanted her to have the life she’d dreamed of. When I came back from the war, I was a mess, inside and out. She had two babies to deal with, not just one. You and me. She deserved so much more—and I’ve spent my life trying to give it to her.”

“That’s not the way she tells it,” Claudia argued. “She’s always told me you were the bravest man she’d ever known.”

“There was nothing brave about getting drafted.”

“She isn’t talking about your service in Vietnam,” she clarified. “She’s talking about when you came back. Mom said you were in a million pieces and fought your way back to health—and all the while, you were taking care of me. That took a lot of courage.” She smiled nostalgically. “She showed me this old music box you used to play for me. Do you remember? It played ‘Edelweiss.’”

“Yeah, I remember that.” He shared her smile, then grew solemn. Would Joelle really have gone out with him in high
school? They’d been such close friends, dating her would have seemed incestuous. “The bottom line was, your mother hoped to marry Drew Foster,” he said quietly. “She had to settle for me.”

“I think she loves you more than you realize,” Claudia said, reaching across the table to squeeze his hand.

“And I think you’re a daughter trying to keep her parents together.” Noticing a darkness on the inside of her elbow, he frowned. He’d glimpsed it earlier and assumed it was just a shadow, but when she extended her arm he saw more clearly that it was a bruise. “What happened to your arm?”

“Oh, this?” She glanced at the discolored skin just below the crease of her joint. Then she met his gaze. “I went for a blood test yesterday.”

“A blood test.” His heart pinged, like a car engine with a malfunction.

She squeezed his hand again. “Whatever happened in the past wasn’t that boy’s fault. I don’t know how I feel about everything else, but I can’t just turn away and let that boy die. He’s my brother.”

That boy might die anyway. Claudia might not be a match. And all the pain, all the brutal truths that had rampaged through that door when Drew Foster had forced it open might have been exposed for nothing. If Foster hadn’t barged back into Bobby and Joelle’s lives just one week ago, they might have gone on happily, forever.

But now Claudia believed she had a brother. Not just Mike and Danny, but another brother. Drew Foster’s son.

She broke into his ruminations, as if trying to tear him away from the idea she’d just presented to him. “Seeing a marriage counselor might be a good idea.”

“I hate that stuff,” he said, not ready to be torn.
He’s my brother,
Claudia had said. Foster’s kid was her brother.

“Sometimes it’s easier to talk your problems out with an objective outsider. You could get it all out in the open. You could say things to the counselor that you can’t say to each other.”

“Like that’s such a great idea,” he muttered, then sipped his coffee. “I don’t think there’s all that much inside me, anyhow. And if there is, maybe that’s where it belongs. Inside me. Left alone.”

Claudia finished her coffee and stood. Her hair was the color Joelle’s used to be before a few streaks of gray had sneaked in, but straighter. It fluttered around her face as she carried her mug to the sink and washed it. After propping it in the drying rack, she faced Bobby. “Either you and Mom can talk to each other and get things out into the open, or you can go back to pretending everything’s fine when it isn’t.”

“We can’t go back,” he said.

“Right. You can’t. Because even if you wanted to pretend everything was fine, you can’t pretend that I’m…” She drew in a breath and let it out. “You can’t pretend I’m your daughter anymore. I mean, I
am,
but…”

“Yeah. I know.” From the living room drifted the sound of Jim Morrison singing, “You’re lost, little girl.” Bobby considered storming into the living room and shutting off the damn music—or maybe dragging the CD player off its shelf and stomping on it. What more did he need in his life? His wife gone, his daughter telling him she wasn’t his daughter and the Doors providing the sound track. And violent urges rising in him. Maybe they’d been behind that door, too, just one more nasty bit of truth, his father’s legacy. The door was open and now he was going to become the beast his father had been.

He’d denied Claudia her genes. Maybe he’d denied his own, as well.

“I’d better get back home,” she said. “Gary’s probably tearing
his hair out by now. The kids can be pretty demanding first thing in the morning.”

Bobby nodded. He pushed away from the table, stood and wondered whether he should kiss Claudia goodbye.

She answered that question by crossing to him and kissing his cheek. “Things will work out, Dad.”

“You’re sure of that?”

She shrugged, then patted his arm. “Promise me you’ll remember to eat. I’ll call you this evening to see how you’re doing.”

“I’ll be fine,” he swore, hoping his words weren’t just another lie. “Will you tell me the results of the blood test when you get them?”

“I’m not sure,” she said, then turned and left the kitchen.

He should have accompanied her to the door, but he couldn’t bear to watch her walk out of his house and away. She was right; he could no longer pretend she was his daughter.
You’re lost,
the song reminded him.

As if he didn’t already know.

May 1987

T
HE SPRING SUNLIGHT WAS LIKE
a warm, white bath soaking Joelle as she sat on the stiff folding chair. To her left was her mother, who’d traveled all the way from Ohio for this day. To her right were the boys, Mike flipping through the program and Danny squirming incessantly, kneeling, sitting, climbing down from his chair to get a closer view of an ant plodding through the grass. On their other side sat Claudia, just a couple of weeks short of sweet sixteen and acting as if she had no idea who the two rambunctious little boys beside her were.

Joelle didn’t care if the boys were restless. She didn’t care if Claudia wished she were seated in another row, a member of another family. She didn’t care that Wanda was there—her mother could be a pain, but she’d insisted on coming and then requested that Bobby and Joelle pay her airfare, since she couldn’t afford it herself. None of that mattered.

This was truly one of the greatest days of her life.

Twenty rows in front of them, under a white canopy, a man in
a long, black robe spoke ponderously into a microphone, his voice distorted by echoes and amplification as it drifted across the field.

“I’m bored,” Danny whined.

Joelle dug in her tote bag and pulled out an Etch-a-Sketch. “Here,” she whispered. “Play with this—but don’t talk. People are trying to listen to the speech.”

“It’s boring,” Danny muttered, although he subsided in his chair, crossed his legs and twisted the Etch-a-Sketch’s dials.

Amazing that they’d gotten here, Joelle thought. Amazing that they’d reached this day, this place, this sun-blessed corner of western Connecticut. Amazing that Bobby was graduating from college.

How did people get from point A to point B? she wondered as the orator droned on. How did sixteen years fly by so quickly? It felt like mere days ago that Bobby returned his cane to the V. A. hospital. “I hate New Jersey,” he’d said as he’d left the rehab clinic for the last time, walking with only a slight limp. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

One of the physical therapists he’d worked with had a cousin who ran a masonry business in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Bobby and Joelle knew nothing about Bridgeport, Connecticut, except that it wasn’t New Jersey—and it wasn’t Ohio. Bobby phoned the cousin and got himself hired.

Joelle and Bobby decamped for Connecticut and moved into a two-bedroom apartment they could barely afford. Bobby learned how to do brickwork and stonework for the new subdivisions and office parks sprouting across the region. People hated talking about the Vietnam War, but they seemed happy to hire a veteran. When Joelle suggested to Bobby that she’d like to return to college, he told her to go ahead.

Claudia, fortunately, was an easy child. She loved her pre
school and didn’t cling to her mother—probably because she’d spent so much time with Bobby during her first few years. Joelle was able to schedule her classes at Fairfield University in the mornings, so Claudia attended preschool for only a half day, which saved on the tuition. In the afternoons, Joelle played with Claudia and taught her the finer aspects of shopping: “Always use a coupon if you’ve got one,” she’d explain as she pushed Claudia up and down the grocery-store aisles in a shopping cart. “Always look for a Sale sign,” she’d instruct in a clothing store. After a while, Claudia began to recognize the letters.
Sale
was the first word she ever read.

Bobby’s job healed him as effectively as the surgeries and physical therapy had. Bending, lifting, laying stone and lugging thirty-pound sacks of concrete powder honed his body. He came home every evening filthy and exhausted, but smiling. In the evenings, after dinner, he would play with Claudia while Joelle studied. Seated in the kitchen with her textbooks and notes spread across the table, she would hear Bobby and Claudia chatting and laughing and watching
The Muppet Show
together in the living room. Before bed, Bobby would always read to Claudia. “Make Eeyore’s voice,” she’d order him as he worked his way through
Winnie the Pooh
with her. “Make it funny, like you did last time.”

He would summon Joelle when Claudia was ready for her good-night kiss. Joelle and Bobby would tuck her in, turn on her seashell-shaped night-light and close her door. And then they’d retreat to their bed.

As expensive as it was, a two-bedroom apartment was worth every dollar it cost them. Back in New Jersey, Joelle had finally moved Claudia’s crib and changing table out of the bedroom and into the living room. She’d hated having her baby so far away—
and stuck in a room that clearly wasn’t a bedroom—but she and Bobby couldn’t have sex while Claudi a was in the room with them.

And sex with Bobby was a revelation. In the months after his return from Vietnam, Joelle had learned so much about physical pleasure, partly because she’d had so much to learn and partly because Bobby’s body was broken. He had no strength in one leg. His balance was off. He was thin and fragile and, despite her reassurances, embarrassed about his scars. The nightmares would strike without warning and he’d shout his friend’s name while his body jerked and flinched. Joelle pleaded with him to talk to a therapist, but he hated the idea of opening up to a stranger.

He opened up a bit to Joelle, at least. They would lie beside each other in the dark, and he’d tell her about his platoon’s routine patrols, how frightening they were, how pointless they’d seemed. He’d tell her about the bone-deep envy he’d felt whenever one of his platoon mates finished his hitch and got to leave. He’d tell her about the heat and the humidity and the insects as big as a woman’s fist. He’d tell her how he would keep his fear of dying at bay by reminding himself that if he died, she and the baby would get widow’s benefits, so something worthwhile would come from his death. He’d tell her about the mud and the eerie green cast of the morning light and the sense he sometimes had that he was standing in quicksand and would never escape—until he pulled out the photo she’d given him, taken the evening of the senior prom. And he would gaze at her, looking so pretty, so clean and healthy and lovely, and he’d be reminded that a life was waiting for him back home, if he could only keep himself from getting killed.

These bedtime conversations were as intimate as making love. And when they weren’t talking, they did make love. Bobby would ask her to try different positions. When his leg and back
were hurting him, he’d move her around on the bed and use his hands and his mouth on her. Their bed was their own magical world, a place of adventure and safety, a place where Joelle believed that everything would work out, that her marriage would last her lifetime.

The clouds that had followed him back to America from Vietnam gradually dissipated. Months would go by without his shouting Schenk’s name in his sleep, and then years. A Vietnam veterans’ group in southern Connecticut sent him invitations to events, but he never attended. “That’s over,” he’d say. “It’s history. I don’t have time for that stuff.”

Wanda didn’t come to Connecticut for Joelle’s college graduation. She was still working full-time at the Bank Street Diner then, and Joelle and Bobby and Claudia had driven out to Ohio during Joelle’s spring break less than two months earlier, where they’d spent four hideous days shuttling back and forth between Joelle’s mother and Bobby’s father. Louie DiFranco had been surly and vicious, reeling from the news that Bobby’s brother, Eddie, was gay. “I never shoulda let him go to college,” Louie had railed. “Shoulda made him join the military, like Bobby. That woulda made a man out of him.” Eddie had wisely moved to San Francisco, leaving Bobby to receive the brunt of his father’s bitterness. One morning, as he fumed about his pathetic younger son, Claudia beamed a smile up at him and said, “I like fairies, Papa Louie. They can do magic.” That had shut him up.

At least Wanda didn’t have a temper. But she did little to conceal her disappointment that Joelle had married Bobby when, had she only played things right, she could have wound up with Drew Foster. “You say you’re happy, so okay,” Wanda would mutter. “But honestly, Joelle. For years you had to work to support him, and now that he’s finally able to work, he’s a
laborer. He comes home every night with dirt under his nails. And he limps.”

“Hardly,” Joelle had defended Bobby. “And he knows how to wash his hands.”

Joelle graduated from college with only Bobby and Claudia to cheer for her as she accepted her diploma, and she landed a kindergarten teaching job in Arlington. “That takes some pressure off you,” she told Bobby. “I’ll be working, we’ll have two incomes—things’ll get easier.”

“Easy is boring,” he argued. “I don’t mind pressure. I’ve been thinking, Jo. Now that you’ll be earning a steady income and we can get insurance through your job…I want to start my own landscaping business.”

Bobby knew bricks and stones. He knew grass and shrubs. But running a business? What did he know about that?

She kept her doubts to herself. “Go ahead and do it,” she said.

His boss in Bridgeport mentored him. He went out in search of customers far from the city and discovered communities in the northwest hills where New Yorkers were buying up old properties and hiring contractors to fix them up. He enrolled in an evening class in marketing at the local campus of the state college system. Just to get a little business knowledge, he’d insisted. Just one class.

Eight years later, he’d built DiFranco Landscaping into a thriving enterprise. He’d done extensive renovations on the fixer-upper he and Joelle had bought in Gray Hill. He’d fathered two sons. And he’d completed a degree at Western Connecticut State, majoring in business and minoring in botany.

“This I’ve got to see,” Wanda had said when Joelle told her about Bobby’s graduation. He himself hadn’t wanted to participate in the commencement ceremony, but damn it, he’d worked
so hard to get through college—when he hadn’t even had to, given that his business was thriving. No one hired a landscape designer for his educational pedigree. They hired DiFranco Landscaping because the company had an excellent reputation for getting a job done on time and on budget.

But he’d wanted the degree. Something beyond his business had motivated him. Two courses a semester, an occasional summer class…He’d fought for every credit, every B-plus. And Joelle resolved that he would wear a cap and gown and march with his fellow graduates and have the dean of the college place in his hand his very own diploma, rolled into a tube and tied with a ribbon.

The orator in the black robe finally ran out of steam. Joelle glanced to her right and saw that Mike had taken over the Etch-a-Sketch and Danny had curled up like a snail on the seat of his chair and was fast asleep. Claudia sat with her head back and her legs slightly angled, trying to maximize the sun’s rays so she could improve her tan.

Joelle felt a slight breeze against her left arm. Glancing in that direction, she found her mother using the commencement program as a fan. She considered suggesting that her mother might be cooler if she removed the jacket of her suit, but Wanda had boasted about buying the outfit new at Beldon’s just for this trip. The jacket’s shoulders had padding bigger than a line-backer’s. “Krystal Carrington on
Dynasty
has a suit just like this,” Wanda had insisted.

Joelle opened her own program and smiled to see they’d reached the “conferring of diplomas” portion of the ceremony. She pulled her camera out of her tote and removed the lens cap. She was seated much too far away to get a good shot of Bobby—she didn’t have a zoom lens—but she didn’t care. Even if all she
got was a blur of cap and gown, she would know that blur was Bobby, doing something no one had ever expected of him.

The dean intoned each graduate’s name. In alphabetical order, the graduates marched across the platform, accepted their diplomas, shook the dean’s hand and then walked back to their seats. They all looked so young. At thirty-five, Bobby was surely one of the oldest graduates.

“They’re starting the
D
s,” Wanda whispered to her.

“I know.” Joelle stood and edged past the kids’ chairs to reach the grassy aisle. She lifted her camera and waited.

“Robert L. DiFranco,” the dean announced.

Joelle snapped three photos. Three blurs of Bobby striding across the platform, his hair straggling out from under his mortarboard and brushing the neckline of his robe. Unlike some of the young graduates, who appeared to be wearing shorts under their robes, and sneakers or sandals, he wore black trousers and dress loafers. He held his head high, and Joelle could see his lips move as the dean handed him his diploma.

She sidled back to her chair and sank happily onto it. “He needs a haircut,” Wanda muttered.

“I like his hair that way,” Joelle defended him. “So does he.”

“Can we go now?” Mike asked in a stage whisper.

“Soon,” Joelle promised.

Once the graduation ceremony finally ended, Joelle had to shoot more photos. A photo of Bobby holding his diploma. One of him and Claudia and the boys standing in front of the student union. One of him with a groggy Danny in his arms and the plant studies laboratory in the background. One Wanda clicked of all five of them.

Joelle refused to quit taking pictures until she’d used up the roll of film. Only then, reluctantly, was she willing to leave the campus.

After Bobby returned his rented cap and gown to the student union, they piled into the minivan he’d bought last fall and drove to the Arlington Inn, where Joelle had reserved a table for six. She issued stern instructions to the boys through tight lips as the maître d’ led them to a circular table covered in a heavy white linen cloth. “I want your best behavior,” she warned. “No wild stuff. This is a fancy restaurant.”

“Can I get a hamburger?” Mike asked.

“Yes.”

“Can I get choco milk?” Danny wanted to know.

“If they have it, yes.”

They had chocolate milk—and also crayons and paper place mats with pictures on them that Danny and Mike could color. Claudia ordered a 7 Up and Wanda insisted on wine for the adults. Bobby reluctantly allowed the waiter to fill a glass for him.