Brotherly Love (20 page)

There is a letter for him on the table next to the
stairwell. He stares at it a moment, and then he looks in the
direction of the kitchen, knowing his aunt has opened the envelope
and resealed it, wondering if she has heard him come in.

He is late every night now; it is dusk before he
quits work. She waits in the kitchen for him and complains about his
cold, ruined dinner as if she had to eat it herself.

He thinks sometimes of taking an apartment in another
part of the city—the job pays full union scale, he could afford
it—but he is tied to the house and the small yard, to the park
across the street, to the room where he has waited—it seems like
all his life—and received the news of events that have marked his
life; the references for everything else.

He is protected here by what has gone before, by an
intimacy with the rooms. In that intimacy, there are moments when the
people he has loved are close by.

He knows he cannot stay here much longer—the house
is more his uncle’s and even his cousin’s now than his—but he
also knows this is the only place such an intimacy can exist.

The things that have occurred here have bled into him
and cannot be separated out for someone else to see.

Still, there is less intimacy all the time. Michael
intrudes into it; he is in every corner. He has begun to think of
himself now in a different way. He has come to believe that whatever
is not claimed is his.

The house, Peter himself.

It is part of what he is learning from his father.

The smell of scorched sugar hangs in the air—a
half-eaten angel food cake sits on the table, next to a single clean
plate. His uncle is out on business, Michael is probably with him. He
goes with him everywhere now. Aunt Theresa is in the kitchen watching
television.

The letter is from a lawyer.

He climbs the staircase quietly, opening the
envelope. The sounds from the television fill the house. His fingers
are dirty and he smudges the lawyer’s address in the corner.

Cape May, New Jersey.

He walks into his room, shuts the door, and sits
heavily on the bed. He pulls the letter out carefully, noticing the
weight of the paper.

Dear Mr. Flood:
Kindly
contact this office at your earliest convenience in regards to
probate of the estate of your mother, Catherine Estelle Flood.
Yours Sincerely,
Everett
Jordan, Esq.

He thinks of her then, lying in bed in her room. He
remembers the feel of the clothes in her closet.

He checks the postmark again. Cape May, New Jersey.
All this time only a hundred miles away; it makes him smile. He has
imagined her living in California.

He refolds the letter and slides it back in the
envelope, and then puts the envelope in his shirt pocket. He puts his
feet into his tennis shoes and goes back down the stairs and out the
door quietly, not wanting to fight the battle of ruined dinners now.

He closes the door and wanders into the park across
the street.

A tire hangs from a rope in the dark—a homemade
swing—and beyond it, in the light from a streetlamp, a small black
dog worries his way along the curb, his nose to the cement, as if
there were not time enough to smell it all.

Peter fits his hips into the tire and feels the
branch holding it bend under his weight. He looks up into the tree,
remembering small things about his mother, coming finally to the
afternoon she stood in the door and saw the bundle in Victor Kopec’s
arms. And the moment she understood what it was. Nothing after that
counted.

And with that taste in his mouth, he looks across the
park and sees a light in Nick DiMaggio’s living room window.

He wonders if Nick would remember him after so much
time. It is only a thought, but a moment later he pulls himself
through the tire and starts out across the park.

And then he is standing outside Nick’s house. No
idea what he intends to do, he is just there.

He does not touch the door knock—he has not thought
of touching it—but in a moment the porch light comes on, and then
the door opens and Nick steps out, wearing his reading glasses and a
T-shirt. He takes the glasses off, studying him. He begins to smile.

"Peter'?" he says. "How you doin’?"

The first time Nick has ever remembered his name.

He closes the few feet to the door, not feeling his
legs. "Come on in," Nick says. "You eat yet?"

Peter walks in the house with Nick’s hand on his
shoulder. The place is warm and smells good. Nick goes to the bottom
of the stairs and calls up. "Harry," he says, "come
down and see who’s here."

Nick’s wife sticks her head around the corner from
the kitchen. She smiles at Peter without knowing who he
is—disappointed, he thinks—then disappears.

Nick is looking at Peter, up and down, happy to see
him. "You got big," he says.

Old weights shift, and Peter Flood walks farther into
the room, needing to move, suddenly afraid he is going to bawl.

Harry comes down the stairs then, and he has gotten
big too.

He stops at the bottom, looking at Peter as if he
doesn’t know who he is.

"It’s Peter Flood," Nick says. "You
remember, he used to come up to the gym.”

Harry nods, the elements of a smile on his face, but
there is no smile there. "How you doin’?" he says. He
looks quickly at his father.

"So you been lifting weights or what?" Nick
says, touching his arm.

Peter shakes his head. "I got a job," he
says.

Which is true, but not completely true. His uncle got
him the job—got them both jobs. He thinks of the foreman of the
crew nodding as the supervisor told him he had to use them, looking
at the ground. He wouldn’t look at either one of them.

"What are we supposed to do?" Michael said
when the supervisor was gone.

The foreman looked back toward the job, as if they
weren’t there. "It don’t matter to me, as long as you stay
out of the way," he said.

Michael found some shade and sat down, and Peter
followed the foreman around the construction site all morning until
he finally gave him something to carry.

He hauled shingles and nails up the ladders at first,
then learned the job itself, squatting all afternoon on roofs thirty
and forty feet in the air, the glare of the sun all around him.
Surrounded by the noise and movement of the city, but isolated from
it too.

He liked it on the roofs, and pushed himself toward
exhaustion, and the relief that came on the other side.

Michael quit the job after the first summer and went
into the business end of the business. His father was president of
the Trade Union Council then; the other unions had seen that he’d
cut the guys who ran things in the city—the young Italians who took
over after Constantine—out of the roofers’ business, and wanted
them out of their business, too.

"Lookit this arm," Nick says to Harry.
Harry looks at Peter’s arm, going along with his father.

Nick sits down on the couch and offers Peter the seat
next to him. Harry is still standing at the bottom of the stairs.

"So, what you been doing?" Nick says.

Peter tries to think. "Just working," he
says.

"You ain’t in school . . ."

He shakes his head. Not for a long time now.

"You ought to come by the gym sometime,"
Nick says.

Harry looks at his father again, half a second; he
bites his lip.

Nick’s wife puts her head around the corner one
more time to see if Peter is still there. Her table is set, and Peter
knows from the sounds coming out of the kitchen that she’s ready to
serve dinner.

"He going to stay, Nick?" she says.

Peter shakes his head no and begins to get up.
Realizing that he is still in the shirt and pants and socks he wore
to work.

"Stick around," Nick says. "She can
cook a little."

"I got stuff to do," he says, back on his
feet now, wondering what he will say if Nick asks him what stuff that
is.

But Nick lets him go. "You ought to come by the
gym, move around a little," he says again, walking him to the
door.

Harry stares at him as he goes past on the way out,
and then nods, barely. Nick shakes his hand.

The door closes and Peter
walks into the park. He feels the letter, stiff against his shirt. He
takes it out and reads it again in the light from the streetlamp, and
then folds it into thirds and puts it carefully into his wallet.

* * *

H
e carries the letter with
him the rest of the week, it and the visit to Nick DiMaggio’s
living room.

He remembers the words Nick said exactly, the dents
in the bridge of his nose from his glasses, the slippers half under
the couch, the expression on his wife’s face. He thinks of these
things in an order that is not quite as he saw them, and settles
finally on Harry, standing at the foot of the stairs, dreading to
have him there.

He understands that look without knowing the reason
for it, and he will not go back to the house.

He thinks of the gym though, all that week as he
works his way across the steeply pitched roofs of a development of
low-income town houses going up just off Shunk Street deep in South
Philadelphia.

A whole block of crumbling row houses was bought and
demolished to make room for the development, and for weeks, the
neighbors laid themselves in front of the bulldozers to keep them
away. But in the end, the federal government waited the neighbors
out, and built its town houses for the blacks.

Once in a while, he glimpses an old woman or an old
man behind the barriers that the police have erected, staring at him
as he climbs up or down—some of them come in the morning with
folding chairs to watch the despised buildings going up—and they
dread to have him there too.

But he cannot spend his life on roofs.

He cannot stay where he is
comfortable forever.

* * *

P
eter walks into the gym
on a Saturday afternoon. Harry is there alone, shirtless, doing
sit-ups on an elevated board in the corner.

He looks around the place—it is messier now than he
remembers it, but then the old man who liked to clean is
gone—thinking of his uncle’s admonition never to come here again.
His uncle doesn’t know where he goes anymore, though, and doesn’t
ask. He watches Michael himself now.

"How you doing?" he says to Harry.

The kid nods, his fingers laced behind his neck,
touching each knee with the opposite elbow and then dropping halfway
to the floor and bringing himself up again. The muscles in his
stomach appear and disappear under the skin.

Peter studies the walls, the yellowed pictures of old
fighters undisturbed since the last time he was here. He remembers
that last time, leaving Nick at the top of the stairs and following
Michael down, headed for a blow job at
Bandstand
.

The show is still on the air, but it’s called
American Bandstand
now,
and Larry Tock is long gone. Dead somewhere in Texas.

Harry does a final sit-up and stops, sitting uphill,
looking at Peter.

"Your dad around?" Peter says.

Harry stands up, almost as
tall as Peter but thinner. "He’s supposed to be back already,"
he says. He checks the clock. "I could give you a few rounds, if
you want."

* * *

T
he kid breaks his nose
live seconds after they touch gloves.

The bell rings, they come together in the middle of
the ring, and he breaks his nose with an uppercut.

Peter hears the sound distinctly, the break and then
a ringing, and then he hears his breath leaving his chest as Harry
hits him just below his rib cage on the right side.

He covers himself up, stumbling backward into a
corner, feeling Nick’s kid coming after him more than seeing him.
He takes a hook to the head, and then a right hand hits him in the
shoulder and knocks him off balance, and then he is hit again below
the ribs.

He grabs Harry in the corner, holding on until he can
breathe again. Harry jerks back, trying to get loose, twice as strong
as he looks, but Peter holds him until the stab of pain in his
chest—the thing that took his breath—narrows and shortens, and
then he pushes him away, back into the middle of the ring.

Harry is on top of him again before he can leave the
corner.

He pounds his shoulders and arms as Peter covers up,
hits him twenty times before Peter catches one of his gloves and
pulls him in and holds him again. He hears his own breathing against
Harry’s shoulder, and then the shoulder moves, bouncing into his
face, and the kid’s hands are loose and Peter is trying to protect
himself from punches he cannot see or predict.