A Crime in the Neighborhood (26 page)

He kept his eyes on my face, squinting a little. For another instant or two he simply stood there, sunlight streaming around him.

“Why,” he said at last.

Just that single word, not even followed by a question mark. I think I'd begun to hope he would shout at me, raise his fist, do something that would justify what I had said about him. But his voice was absolutely flat, almost factual, as if he were supplying me with information he felt I should know.

When it seemed that he wasn't going to say anything else, my heart stopped banging and I felt saliva flow into my mouth
again. Gradually the world fell back into place, hedges, grass, trees; even the sun faded a little.

Then he was gone. I watched him walk slowly back across his grass, sunlight sliding across his back in smaller and smaller patches as he passed under his big tree and then walked up the few steps to his back door, until he had vanished inside. His screen door slapped shut. And though by then I had opened my mouth to say something, I will never know what.

Mr. Green moved out of his house a week later, on a humid, tar-scented Saturday in August. It was right around the Republican convention, to which my mother listened obsessively on the radio, the same way she would a year later follow the Watergate hearings on TV.

From my bedroom window, I watched Mr. Green carry cardboard boxes out to a small rented van one at a time, just as I had watched him carry them in only five months before. No one helped him. When Mr. Morris or Mr. Sperling happened to step outside, they pretended not to notice Mr. Green's steady pilgrimage back and forth between the house and the curb. Mr. Morris got busy with his garden hose and Mr. Sperling stooped to examine the hinges on the screen door. As soon as possible, they ducked back inside. In the background, our kitchen radio transmitted an incessant dull cheering, broken only by speeches that to me all sounded exactly the same.

Although it wasn't raining, as the morning went on the sky pressed down closer and closer until the tops of the trees seemed to bend beneath it and a singed smell, like burning fur, drifted up from the pavement.

No children rode their bikes up and down our street; the Reade brothers quit playing basketball; even the Morrises neglected to take their terriers for a walk. Mr. Green carried out box after box, each sealed with masking tape, its contents invisible. Around ten o'clock he carried out a TV set, followed by a small cane chair, a single-bed mattress and box spring, his card table, and those four aluminum folding chairs.

No one asked him where he was going. For some reason I have the impression that he moved south, to Tennessee or Georgia maybe, some state where he could go back to being from the country. After all these years, I still find myself wondering about why he ever decided to move into our neighborhood in the first place. Maybe he had saved his money and someone told him to invest in real estate. That's the sort of advice I could imagine my father giving out. Good neighborhood, good schools, easy commute to the city. What could go wrong with an investment like that? He could have met a nice neighbor woman with a few kids, a recent widow or divorcée, someone a little odd, a little awkward and shy, and gotten married just when he thought his life was set and nothing new would ever happen to him again. Maybe that was what he'd come for, or at least to be near the possibility.

How could he have known how unsettling a quiet, nondescript
bachelor could seem to an entire neighborhood? A man who was polite and regular in his habits, who kept his yard neat and washed his car weekly. A man whose worst crimes now appear to have been clumsiness and a tragic lack of imagination, which kept him from perceiving how neatly he embodied everyone else's bad dreams.

The last item Mr. Green carried out of his house, before he shut the door and locked it with his key, was a large, ornate, gilt-framed mirror. It was the sort of mirror you would expect to find these days in a restored Victorian, one of those tall, drafty houses full of antique rocking chairs and chintz wallpaper. As he walked down his front steps he held it carefully sideways, looking down into his own reflection. Even from my bedroom window, I could see that it was an old mirror, with darkly speckled glass.

Perhaps someone had given it to him, or maybe he found it at a garage sale in the days before people realized that their grandmothers' furniture might be valuable. But somehow it struck me that he must have inherited a mirror like that, with its gilt and strange dark glass. It had the look of owning
him
, and I think of how he must have carried it with him, from place to place, wherever he tried to go.

Julie and Steven returned from Amy Westendorf's beach house the day after Mr. Green moved away. They came home suntanned and leggy and restless, addicted to private jokes that
they whispered across the table and then laughed at too noisily. Both of them seemed much older. Soon after they got home, my cast was taken off. It felt odd to see my foot again; it was white and shriveled and didn't look like the foot I remembered.

Around the same time, my mother quit selling magazines for Peterman-Wolff and got a better-paying job selling cosmetics at Lord & Taylor on Nebraska Avenue. It was a job that would lead eventually to the realm of store manager, a position that required her to wear formidable-looking suits and pearl earrings as she presided over a pale green office that smelled of gardenia air freshener, a position from which she retired only last year, with a party, a pension plan, and a gold scarf pin. But all that was still in the future. For the moment, nobody asked her to lunch and she had to wear a white smock, which made her look vaguely medical. For the last week before school started, the three of us children stayed alone in the house during the day while she was at work.

“Have you been in my room?” the twins both accused me as soon as they got home.

“Little creep,” said Julie, pushing her face close to mine. “I know what you did.”

Most afternoons we lay on the carpet in the living room with a fan blowing, kicking one another's feet. Sometimes we watched television game shows and tried to answer the questions. The twins wanted to know all about Mr. Green's arrest, but my mother had told them not to ask me anything.

“It's been an upsetting time,” she said. “Leave her alone.”

At first I was glad they were home, but after a day or two it seemed they had never left. Julie painted her fingernails green and tried to make Popsicles out of grape juice in ice-cube trays. She called her friends on the phone and talked for hours, twisting her hair around her fingers.

Spying through the keyhole into Steven's bedroom, I would find him hunched on his bed with his sketchpad, no longer drawing pictures of breasts, but now naked men and women twisting around each other, their mouths full of teeth. And once I saw him lying back against the pillow with his shorts peeled back, his big knees drawn up, one hand a furious blur between them. For an instant he had looked up, straight at the door, and I thought he'd seen me. But his eyes were blank and he was smiling that same tight, appalled smile I had seen the day he'd almost succeeded in getting caught stealing cigarettes from the drugstore.

Then came one Saturday afternoon, a warm Saturday in September just before Labor Day, when my mother dropped all three of us off at a pizza parlor in Rockville, saying she would be back to pick us up after she finished shopping.

“Be good,” she said, not waving to us as we stood on the curb. Then she drove away.

He was sitting all alone in a booth near a window. The light cut across the top of his head and he sat very straight, not looking toward the door. Although I recognized him immediately,
he seemed more like someone you recognize in a dream: himself, but in the guise of another person.

He stood up as we came close to his table and, like Julie and Steven after their vacation, he looked both older and a slightly different color. He wore a tan suit, a white shirt, and a wide blue tie with pink squiggles on it, which reminded me of sea worms, and his ginger sideburns were bushier than before. When we reached him he held out his arms, lifting his elbows away from his waist in a gesture that might have been one of perplexity. Only Steven stepped forward.

Then Julie went up to him. She collapsed a little at the knees as he hugged her, but a moment later she stepped primly away and sat down at the booth beside Steven.

“Hi there,” my father said to me.

He held out his hand and after a moment I took it. We shook hands; then he pulled me against him and for a moment I smelled his lemony aftershave again, which hadn't changed, and felt his heart beating through his shirt and his sideburns scrubbing my cheek.

“I broke my ankle,” I said, pulling back.

“Is that so?” He gave me a puzzled smile, because of course my cast was gone, and to him I must have looked all in one piece.

I don't remember what else we talked about in the beginning, only that I sat next to my father and stared at the side of his face, amazed that it could seem so normal to be in a pizza parlor with him when only a few hours before he had been as
far away as another person can be and still share the same planet. I felt I had been holding my breath until this moment, but at the same time now that he was here, it seemed too late, as if he had missed whatever he had come back for. He drank two Cokes, I recall. And he smiled at everything Julie and Steven said, whether or not it was funny.

“Something more to drink?” he asked, sounding like old Mrs. Morris with her teapot. “Another slice of pizza?”

After a while Julie opened a packet of sugar and poured it on the table, then made designs in the spilled sugar with her fork. Whenever my father asked her a question, she said “yes” or “no,” in a voice like a sigh. Talking fast, interrupting himself, Steven described the Westendorfs' beach house, how he had learned to sail a Sunfish, how he and Amy had sat in the Westendorfs' sauna drinking jug wine stolen from Mrs. Westendorf's refrigerator. He told a story about sleeping outside one night on the beach, and how Amy Westendorf had found a garter snake in her sleeping bag. He winked and sniggered extravagantly. My father seemed not to be listening. “Is that so,” he said several times. When Steven finished talking, my father smiled.

Slowly he began to look more familiar. While he talked to the twins, I watched people walk by our table. I marveled that anyone walking by would have thought we looked like such an ordinary family. My father looked like an ordinary father in his tan jacket and tie, except that it was Saturday, and most fathers would be wearing shorts and a short-sleeved shirt.

“What else did you do this summer?” he asked the twins.

“Nothing,” said Julie.

“Nothing?”

“We survived,” said Steven in a tone that was meant to be sarcastic.

“Well of course you did,” said my father.

Outside cars drove in and out in the parking lot, sun flaring off their hoods. Slowly the pizza parlor emptied out until there was just us and an old woman in a yellow polyester pantsuit sitting alone in a corner booth, occasionally coughing into her napkin. Someone had left a vacuum cleaner in the aisle near our table, its long neck looped over itself. Julie opened another packet of sugar. Steven started to say something else about the Westendorfs' beach house, then stopped and looked out the window.

“Check, please,” said my father, holding up his hand.

While he was paying the bill, Julie suddenly asked, “So where's Aunt Ada?”

My father ran his finger down the bill's short column of numbers. He didn't look angry but only puzzled as he added up the numbers again, looking to see if they really totaled up right.

“Wasn't she with you?” Julie asked.

“She was.” My father looked up and his aviator glasses caught the glare from a passing car.

“Why isn't she with you anymore?”

He cleared his throat and leaned back against his seat. For a minute or so he seemed absorbed in staring at the old woman in the yellow pantsuit, as if he recognized her but was trying to figure out how. Maybe she had bought a house from him once. Or maybe she reminded him of someone he used to know. Finally he sighed and looked back at us again. He said, “You know, things don't always work out very well for people, kids. Sometimes that happens.”

He paused, staring at his hands, which he had stretched out flat on the table. A few minutes went by. No one said anything. Far away in the kitchen, someone dropped a tray of dishes.

At last my father looked up again and we all saw that his eyes were red. “I'm sorry, but it's very complicated. Nobody means for life to get complicated. I never meant it to. It just does. Sometimes it gets more complicated than you know what to do with, and so you just do the first thing you can. I don't mean to give you the runaround, kids,” he said. “But I'm afraid that's the best answer I've got.”

“Right,” agreed Steven.

“You didn't have to go,” Julie insisted.

“At the time I guess I thought I did.”

Julie put her hands in her lap. She had on her carefully arranged aloof expression, the one I had caught her practicing in the bathroom mirror. She said: “It's been rotten for Mom.”

At the mention of our mother, my father winced. He took
off his aviator glasses and polished them with his crumpled napkin. He put them on again and squinted at my sister.

“I don't expect for you to understand.”

Julie curled her lip, but she was shredding her napkin under the table. Bits of napkin fluttered onto the floor.

“I am sorry,” he said, “about everything that's happened. But I couldn't have prevented any of it.”

In many ways my father had always been a soft-hearted man, someone who hated to punish his children, who pretended not to notice small acts of boorishness or spite, but for the first time I began to understand that, like a true romantic, he had very little tolerance for guilt. That Saturday afternoon he embarked upon what was to become a long process of shifting responsibility away from himself, until he was able to tell me at my own wedding reception a few years ago that he'd always felt my mother
wanted
him to fall in love with Aunt Ada.