The Removers: A Memoir (5 page)

I’m four years old. A spring morning, 1980. I’m in the passenger seat. Dad’s driving me to my babysitter, Betty. The radio says, “I saw the light in your eyes.” When he’s ready for another Camel, Dad lets me push in the lighter. I’m learning street names. We live on Oakland. Betty lives on Oxford. Everything I see has always been here. The sycamore tree out front, the brick Sears tower on Roosevelt Boulevard, the signs that hang like backwards
L
s over the front doors of corner buildings that say “Pat’s”; “Dell’s”; “Heron’s”; one that just says “Tavern.”

The row of cars at the curb is breaking up. People leaving the rows of houses, going away to work. One pulls out in front of us too close. Dad punches the brake. He throws the soft side of his forearm in front of my chest to hold me against the seat. “Asshole,” he says. “It’s okay, buddy,” he says to me.

We’re at a red light on Oxford Avenue by a graveyard. Lots of graveyards on this drive. A lady walks across the street in front of us. She has short hair. She’s wearing tight jeans and high heels. She’s younger than Mom. Dad’s tongue makes a noise like a motorcycle rev. I try to make my mouth a motorcycle but it comes out “brum.”

Looking back: He teaches creative writing at La Salle College, the school he graduated from in 1970. He’s getting poems published in literary journals of increasing prestige. He’s thirty-two years old. He’s been married to my mother for eight years but known her eighteen, since a picnic on Labor Day, 1962—the day before they started high school. He was fourteen. She was thirteen. It’s hard to shake the feeling of predestination around here. Predictability, though, will not do in a poem. She’s the little sister of the girl his big brother almost married. He’s the fourth of five. She is, too. Big Catholic families get all wrapped up and tangled around here, and even the brightest kids wind up not ever getting too far away. A few years ago he was studying poetry at the University of Florida with John Ciardi and James Dickey, and now he’s back in Frankford, driving on the Boulevard to La Salle past St. Martin’s, where he was baptized, where the Mass of Christian Burial will have been performed for both his parents before six more years pass. The Church is part of his tangle even more than he knows. And he knows it plenty.

Marian. The girl he married. My mother. She goes into the convent out of high school. He writes her letters. She leaves the nuns after six years. He marries her. The day after
the wedding they leave for Gainesville. He would’ve been happy to take the best job he could find after he graduated. Let his pedigree take him somewhere new in America. He’s never seen much of the country. Marian wants to have babies and raise them near her parents and sisters. He gets an offer at La Salle. It’s 1974. They find an apartment in Northeast Philadelphia. I’m born in 1975. A few days before Christmas 1976 they buy a row house in Frankford. The house is one mile from her parents and one mile from his. It’s one block from her father’s childhood home, one block from her mother’s. I’m baptized in St. Joachim’s, the same church where my mother, her brothers and sisters, and her parents were baptized. In the spring of 1980 her mother is knocked down for her purse while she’s shopping on Frankford Avenue, by Frankford Hospital, under the Frankford El. By Christmas 1980 her parents have moved across the Delaware to a single home in New Jersey. Her sisters are moving away, too. It’s starting to feel to him like they came back here for nothing. But now he has two kids. He’s been at La Salle six years. Raises and promotions are coming. But everything seems smaller all the time. He loves and hates the Christian Brothers who run La Salle for the same reasons he loves and hates his wife. They need other people. They believe. They cling to what they know.

He is thirty-two. He is thin and finally handsome. A late-blooming man with talent he’s just beginning to control. A talent no one else in the neighborhood cares about. He watches the woman cross in front of his car. His tongue rolls. He can’t
help himself. He’s reminding himself what he’s given up. He wants the boy to know, too. He purrs at the shape of her. He’s a lion. The light goes green.

There is so much I don’t remember. Not Mom coming home that day, or dinner that night, if I slept well, anything about school the following morning. My next memory is of being at work the next day, after school, in the rectory of the priests who taught us. Every Friday afternoon I would go to their house adjacent to the school and clean the bathrooms. It was a tan brick building, three stories, just like Carl’s, as long as a short city block, connected to the high school by an open-air bridge between the second floors. It was built in 1933 along with the school, Northeast Catholic High School for Boys, in a time when the sons of European immigrants flooded Catholic schools, and so there were bedrooms for scores of priests and several large communal bathrooms.

By 1990 the student body and the number of priests had dwindled. The rectory was less than half full. The hall lights were kept off in daytime, and, on cloudy days especially, desolation prevailed. It rained the day after Dad told us of his firing. I was still wearing my eyebrows high on my forehead. I must’ve looked like that all day in class, too. Along with shock there was another new feeling, something different from the hormonal crankiness I’d been soaking in for the past six months. I had become aware of every step I took, every swipe of the mop, every reach for a rag or bottle. I remember looking out the rectory’s
bathroom windows at passing El trains and thinking, There’s an El car. There’s another El car. There’s another El car. Anything like ease had gone from my brain and I felt as if I had moved into some inner chamber of myself where I observed everything but couldn’t be seen. Inside that command center the video monitors ran a steady loop of thoughts: the replay of Dad telling us, me wishing the four of us could go back to the time before he did, knowing the wish would always fail.

My French teacher, Father Kibbie, was also in charge of the rectory, where he maintained an office as wide as two bedrooms, in the middle of the second floor. He was rarely in when I pushed my bucket by, but his door was always left open, shades drawn. Next to his desk in the permanent dusk of that old room a parrot perched in a cage. I would stop and look at him from the hallway, and he would regard me, too. A few times, when I was down the hall, out of sight, I’d heard him talk to Father Kibbie, but in all the times I’d stopped to eye him he’d never said a word.

I knew that parrots could live close to a hundred years, and I wondered what if this weren’t Father Kibbie’s animal but had been in the room since 1933, passed down as a gift for each new head of the community. How many men had sat at that desk in sixty years and talked to him, spilled themselves in ways they wouldn’t to their fellow priests, the way one could only to a lover or a best friend? How many whispered names of longed-for men and women had he heard, how many doubts? How many joys, shared with this dull green bird, had taken on a sadness merely in the circumstance of their telling?

Only a few months went by while Dad was out of work. One semester he was teaching at La Salle, the next semester he was teaching at a community college in New Jersey. He might have been making half as much money and had lost his health insurance, but his exposure to public humiliation was mostly over. He was working, and no one seemed even to notice that he’d switched jobs. If they did, maybe they thought he’d been a victim of layoffs.

Circumstantial evidence:

Because of how invested she was in her religion, with its intolerance of divorce; because a teacher at a Catholic grade school, with no union on her side, could be fired at the whim of the pastor for getting divorced; because of how little money she made; because of the shame of disappointing her happily married parents; because of her faith in my father finding his way; because of her wanting my sister and me to grow up with both parents, my mother stuck it out. She stayed.

It never felt natural for one day.

The word
crisis
comes from the Greek, meaning “choice,” but my sister and I grew up thinking it meant the opposite. It meant a fate imposed and not to be questioned. It meant something bad happens and you endure it. It meant a permanent repeating of private humiliation. It meant no choice at all.

It occurred to me at some point not long after he was fired and they stopped talking to each other—maybe it was when I was reading
Death of a Salesman
for class—that because I became so aware of when my father or mother entered a room, home often felt like we were onstage.
Enter Dad stage right. Mom sighs, exits stage left.
In effect, we had lost our house as a home. The place we lived was now the least comfortable, the least private place any of us occupied in a day. We went to school and work to relax and be alone and be ourselves. At least my sister and I had our own bedrooms. Our parents had no respite.

If this was true, that the communal spaces in the house were all a stage, then my cassettes were switchblades that let me slice through the backdrop and step into a darkness where no one could see me. Or maybe this: If the depression that had started to grow in me felt like being locked in a command center full of surveillance monitors, then music opened a door from that room into a second room, a tiny, womb-like space with a bed and low ceilings painted gray. In this room I could forget myself, sleep if I wanted, let my body grow. And when I would forget myself, I would realize that the bands I loved—R.E.M. and the Smiths, mostly—were, elementally, families making sounds together. They were my families, these people I’d never met.

Only a few weeks after the firing, Father Kibbie fell from a ladder and shattered his heel.

This meant that French II moved to a classroom that could
accommodate his wheelchair. In the new room’s arrangement I found myself seated next to Mr. Gazz. I didn’t know much about him—he was on the soccer team and the back of my head was his spitball target—and I didn’t like him. But we got used to each other. One day he was filling out a form to get free cassettes from Columbia House. He was ordering tapes by the Smiths, Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, all groups that I thought I was the only kid in the room who liked. It seemed like every other boy at North, nearly 100 percent of them white, only liked hip-hop. I liked it too, but my freshman year there had been a melee between white kids and a few of the school’s only black kids, and by this year, nearly all the black kids had left. I found it maddening that in a place that felt so unwelcoming to blacks, everybody wanted to be a rapper. My sympathies and my underdeveloped sense of irony drove me to the whitest music around. Pretty soon Gazz and I had turned our corner of French class into a private booth. It wasn’t just the same music we loved. We spent time that should have been devoted to the passé composé passing jokes about local sportscasters, sharing story notes on the previous night’s episode of
Thirtysomething
, wondering how we’d make it until the new R.E.M. album came out. Once his soccer season ended, we got into the habit of talking every day after school, too, while he waited at the bus stop. One day it came up—he told me not in any way meant to win sympathy, just as an answer to a question about his family—that when he was twelve his nine-year-old brother had died from leukemia. Right away I loved him more than before. Right away the
ritual that marked our daily parting—his bus approaching, us nodding a farewell, the both of us reaching for our headphones before turning away—made more sense.

Theresa’s bedroom had a window air conditioner, so on the hottest summer nights I slept on her floor. One night in June 1991—she was twelve, I was fifteen—she woke me up. “Look at my eye,” she said. It was swollen shut like a boxer’s. She’d already been awake examining it in the bathroom. Now it was the two of us. She sat on the toilet lid in her boxer shorts and tank top crying soft enough not to wake Mom and Dad. She threw up in the toilet and then sat back down on it. The flesh around her eye grew while she sat there until it was bulbous like a fly’s eye. I remember this sense of dread in my stomach, not just that she was sick but that our parents couldn’t take another calamity.

The next morning Mom took her to the pediatrician, and from there to the emergency room. At first doctors thought she’d been bitten by a spider. Several days later someone concluded she had a staph infection in the orbital bone around her left eye. In the middle of her hospital stay I went to Nags Head as the one Meredith representative on what had been planned as our family vacation with the Hallers, my parents’ best friends, and their kids. I spent the week as only a selfish child could, lost in Wiffle ball and basketball games and on crabbing expeditions where we would tie a length of twine around a rotten chicken leg and drag it slowly through the low
tide waters of Oregon Inlet. When we got back to Philadelphia, Theresa was out of the hospital and healing from surgery to reduce the swelling. She was left with a scar that runs inside the bridge of her nose. It was only later that my mother told me there had been a few nights when I was away on vacation that the doctors had told my parents she could lose her eye and that dying from the infection was not impossible. Without insurance, they paid off Theresa’s hospital bills over the next several years. Their debts and stresses mounted.

A few days after Orville, I’m standing in a dead woman’s bedroom with a retired cop named George. We’re putting on our rubber gloves when a guy we hadn’t yet seen in the house comes storming down the hall toward us gripping a pair of long scissors like a knife. He’s wiry and short with long, lank hair and a mustache. His left eye’s a different shape from the right. The first word that forms in my head is “Manson.” His face is red, his mouth open as he comes at us. I assume that the removal of this woman’s body has deranged him. In these seconds I try to gauge whether he’ll stab us before we can wrestle the scissors away.

But in his manic frenzy Manson moves past us and vaults himself up on the bed. He straddles the dead woman. He clips a few locks of her hair, whispers to her. He bounces off the bed and stalks away without ever having looked at us.