Don't I Know You? (16 page)

The woman had said her name. Had she
really
not recognized the voice? It was
her name
. How many people did she know? And why had she been calling?

It was amazing what a person could come up against in herself and still keep going. Shop, mail letters, do laundry, cook dinner. A million times she'd told herself that if she had it to do over again, she'd do things differently. She hadn't really wanted the chance, but here it was. Now, twelve years later, could she really stand by and watch him lose his father?

For all she knew, it
was
the father.

She tore the page from the paper, folded it, and put it in her purse. And then she sat back at the window and watched for her son to come whistling down the block.

L
ouise had no idea where the New York County Supreme Court was, and the paper said the arraignment was tomorrow. Downtown, she guessed, at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, with all those buildings crammed together like steerage passengers. Government made her nervous. Government buildings were no exception. She didn't even like going to the post office, though at least at the Gravesend branch of her childhood, all the workers had spoken Italian. Up here, those men and women in their wash-and-wear uniforms behind their oversized counters looked at her with her incorrectly addressed envelopes and her wrong denomination stamps and made faces. She tried not to make trouble for them. She tried to be a good customer, a familiar customer, but she knew she wasn't either. Still, she always thought, staring down whoever was behind the counter waiting for her to gather herself, what gave them the right to point out what she already knew about herself?

Muriel would know where it was, but Muriel would have questions. So who else was there to ask? It used to be her parents and
her brothers. Then Elia. One by one she'd watched each of them leave, or had shown them the door, and now she found herself with no one but Michael. And since the murder, she hadn't been big on questions.

She stood up and told herself to quit the sorry-for-herself stuff. If she had a question, she should find an answer.

She got the phone book from on top of the fridge. New York County Supreme Court, 100 Centre Street.

H
e'd swallowed the thimble when he was two. She'd been doing her weekend piecework, the cloth she was edging on her sewing table by the front window, her scissors, thread, and thimble on top of the pile. He'd been marching around after a rubber ball. She'd gone to the kitchen to start the sauce and she'd talked to him from there, giving him her usual running commentary. She couldn't have been gone longer than five minutes. When she got back to the front room, he was sitting on the floor.

She'd fished the thimble out quickly, two fingers down his slippery throat, and had talked to him the whole time. Afterward, holding him in her lap there on the floor, his raspy sobs quieting, she'd kept talking, and she'd understood that she was watching herself take two directions at once. There was what had happened just now, a story between mother and son, and there was what she'd tell Elia: another, different story between husband and wife. She'd pinned an amulet shaped in the form of horns to the inside of his undershirt. The same one her mother had pinned to
her to ensure them safety on the long voyage from Naples to New York. She hadn't known it would be so easy to keep secrets from a husband, even one she loved as much as Elia.

So, later still, when Michael started to seem a bit slow, a little awkward at socializing, easy to anger, stubborn, she thought of the thimble, but didn't share those thoughts with Elia, one secret having paved the way for others. And really, after it was clear that Michael wasn't just a little slow, a little awkward, after he'd dropped out of high school, lost or quit four jobs in two months, cost her much more than she had to spare to pay for all the breakable objects he took his frustrations out on, after all that,
why
didn't seem to matter so much.

So she could believe it was that small piece of metal; Elia, the coddling; Muriel, the drinking he'd done as a teenager; and Father Camini could say it was God's will. What mattered was that something in his head didn't work right. It didn't seem like something that could be repaired. It was something to bear.

He tried the army, but that didn't work out. He worked as a janitor at a private school, a night watchman for a youth center, a delivery boy for the grocery around the corner. He drank. Those boys from East Harlem and Monte Carmelo who she never trusted took him off in their cars, bringing him back drunk and confused. Sometimes the police brought him back, always with embarrassed low voices and sympathy in their eyes.

Sometimes there was trouble. Most of the time there wasn't. Most of the time, for the last several years, their life had been planning for the next meal, reading the papers, watching the TV. They concentrated on not getting in each other's way. The TV and
the radio were always on. Both at once. But they still listened for each other's sounds in the apartment, those sounds offering more comfort than anything else.

S
he told Michael she was going over Muriel's. He was sitting in the window. He said what he always said. “Have a good time. Don't talk about me.”

He seemed good.

She took the one train to Franklin. 100 Centre Street was three blocks south of Canal. She'd looked it up on her street map so she wouldn't have to consult it down there. An old woman on a street corner with an open map? You might as well just hand over your bag.

There were steps, and by the time she made it into the lobby, she was out of breath. She paused. People pushed their way around her. She hadn't expected so many people. Most of them were black. She found a bench against a wall. In front of her, there was a circular desk with two tall empty chairs behind it. Cops in uniforms milled around the lobby. There was an impossibly small newsstand. A cafeteria, the source of the unpleasant smells. Behind the desk, telephones. Above it, a black ball of a clock with Roman numerals in gold. It said three-twenty. Louise checked her watch. It was ten after nine.

The ceilings were high. The floors were granite. The sounds were echoey and lost, like she was in a tunnel. Everyone was moving fast and knew where they were going. What was she doing here? Replaying an old argument about what her son was or wasn't capable of.

She fished a dime out of her change purse and called home.

He always said hello like he was the happiest guy in the world.

“You're calling me from Muriel's?” he said.

“Why not?” she said.

“It's loud,” he said.

“TV,” she said. “We're talking about you,” she said.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “Whaddya saying?”

“What are we not saying,” she said.

An officer came out of the men's room and headed behind the information desk. There was a line of unhappy women waiting for him. He took his time settling in.

“So you're okay?” she said.

“You were here five minutes ago,” he said. “I'm the same.”

“Well, that's good,” she said.

They were quiet.

“What's Muriel doing?” he asked.

“I don't know. She's in the bathroom,” she said.

“Ma?” he said.

“Yeah?” she said.

“You coming home soon?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Couple hours. Want me to make pizza?”

“Whatever you want,” he said.

“Okay then,” she said. She saw a green sign pointing down the hallway she had just been sitting in: Arraignments.

“Okay,” he said.

“See you soon,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Okeydokey.”

It was one of those things he said that made him sound eight or a hundred and two.

She hung up. She should've stayed on a little longer, gotten her dime's worth.

She headed down the hallway. At a set of double doors a woman with a baby pushed by her. A few typed pages were taped up next to the doors. Louise got out her glasses and waited for the teenager in front of her to finish looking at the list. Four columns:
Calendar, L, Case #, Defendant's Name
. Under
Calendar
was a long column of two-digit numbers preceded by
Part
. Under
L
was
AA6
, then a list of numbers starting with one. A small group piled behind her, trying to see the list. She found herself being pushed through the double doors.
AR1
, the sign said.

The room was like the waiting room of a train station. The benches were filled with people. No one looked like they were together. There were eight or ten people behind the low wall. The only one Louise could identify was the judge. To the left of the judge, in two rows of benches facing the wall, grim-looking young men sat waiting.

There were letters reading
IN GOD WE TRUST
behind the judge. There were what looked like bullet holes in the wall below it. She strained to hear. The whole place was making her anxious.

She went back out to the circular desk and handed the officer the newspaper article.

“Eleventh floor,” he said. “Room eleven hundred, Part seventy.”

She had no idea what “Part seventy” meant.

“Is there a time?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “You just gotta wait.”

She thanked him. He barely acknowledged her.

The elevator was jammed. Everyone was sweaty. The doors opened onto another hallway lined with more benches. More
teenage mothers with tiny babies. Toddlers climbed onto benches and marched the length of them. There was a long line for the one pay phone.

She settled onto another bench. She kept her coat and scarf on. She put her handbag on her lap and checked her wristwatch, a gift from Nick. Nine thirty. Here she was, waiting for an arraignment at nine thirty in the morning. What did she think she would do in that courtroom?

She imagined telling someone that in fifty-plus years of being his mother, she'd never seen him act like he'd acted in those two days after the murder. That in the year after Steven moved away, Michael had written letter after letter to him. He had given them all to Louise to mail, and she had walked to the post office and mailed them, unread.

He wasn't a murderer.

Her heart was going nuts. She took some deep breaths. What did she really know? This wasn't knowledge. This was the opposite of knowledge.

For now, she'd wait. Soon, she'd go into Room 1100, and then she'd see what she would see. What else could she do?

A
t first, she got excited when he told her he liked a girl. He had his eye on someone. There was someone he thought she'd really like. She couldn't remember when that gave way to a clutch in the stomach, a knowledge of what was coming. When had she gone from asking when he was going to bring this someone by, to asking him nothing, trying not to pop his bubble but to deflate it slowly?

Since the murder, he hadn't mentioned anyone. She didn't know whether that was a good sign or a bad one.

In his bottom drawer there were girlie magazines. There'd been the time when those East Harlem boys had come by to pick him up, a small giggly girl in the backseat, the whole car throbbing with music.

He wasn't going to get a girlfriend, have a wife. At some point he must've understood that too. Who knew what his sadness and anger felt like? All she knew was that he deserved to feel both.

I
n Room 1100 a woman standing at the table near the empty jury box read lazily from a big stack of papers. People came and went. Louise sat in the second row, and still it was impossible to hear what they were saying. There were fewer people on the benches than there'd been downstairs. More single women and their babies.

Giant light fixtures that looked like upside-down tables hung from the tall ceilings.

She was worried she was sitting in the wrong seat.

She hadn't been to confession in twelve years. She was surprised at how easily she'd slipped out of the habit. Her mother had gone to mass every day, finding time for it between the garment shop and the hours at home making artificial flowers. Her father went only on the big days—Christmas, Easter, first communions, confirmations. And sometimes not even then. He worked on the docks even longer hours than her mother, leaving so early, coming home so late, that sometimes Louise wouldn't see
him for days, and when she did see him, coming out of the bathroom, sinking into his chair, rising from his bed, it often took her a second to recognize him. Like seeing a child before and after a growth spurt. She wished for her mother and father on the bench next to her. Her mother and father before she'd become the biggest disappointment of their lives, before she'd been the cause of so much suffering. Running away with Elia had been the right decision, but still, at seventy-three, she wished for parents.

The judge was a lady. Louise strained to hear. “Part sixty-two,” the judge said. “Ten twenty.” The judge put her hands up to stop the negotiating. “Wait a minute,” she said to the lawyer presenting. She stared at a man standing by the front row of benches. “Mr. Sere,” she said, “have a seat.”

The last few weeks, food hadn't been so interesting. She unwrapped a cracker from her bag. An officer appeared out of nowhere, touched her on the arm, and pointed at the signs on the low wall.
FRONT ROW FOR ATTORNEYS AND POLICE OFFICERS ONLY. NO FOOD OR BEVERAGE IN COURTROOM. NO READING OF NEWSPAPERS IN COURTROOM. THANK YOU.

She blushed, avoiding the eyes of a man across the aisle.

Everywhere she went, she was wrong. Why couldn't life be easier?

But there, in the front row of seats, to the far left, was the boy. Not a boy anymore. Tall, with that same hair.

His mother always had big plans, compensating maybe for having no father around. But then she'd lose interest, and all the birthday parties turned into the chaos of ten or fifteen boys running up and down the building's stairs with toy guns or slingshots,
jumping the last two or three stairs in one leap, flipping like acrobats over the banisters. “Sorry,” they always said, disappearing down the next flight. “Sor-ry.”

She got up to find a water fountain. She was dizzier. She sat back down and rested her head on the bench in front of her. She could see divots in the wood.

When Michael was a child, she rarely let him touch anything in the city. It was the thing she remembered being told most as a child,
Non toccare
. He took to walking stiffly, his arms glued to his sides.

The man across the aisle asked if he could help. She sat up. She was fine, she told him. It was stuffy in here.