Final Appeal (18 page)

I keep running until I get to Maddie, who’s frozen with fear in front of the swings. I scoop her up and hug her tight. Over her shoulder I watch the young mother almost on the heels of the man. I pray to God he doesn’t have a gun as she grabs him by the sweater and they both fall hard to the ground.

The cop comes running from the entrance to the playground, but the young woman doesn’t need his help. She clambers onto the man’s back and wrenches his arm behind him. A group of teenagers playing basketball at the far side of the playground stop their game and come running over. It’s a done deal by the time the cop and the teenagers reach the middle of the huge field, which is when I guess the young woman must be an undercover cop, sent by Winn just in case.

“What’s happening, Mommy?” Maddie says in a small voice. “What’s going on?” She wraps her arms tighter around my neck.

“That man who was running, was he the one you saw on the playground at school?”

“Yes.”

I watch as the basketball players ring the prone man. “It’s okay now, baby. It’s all over.”

“What are they gonna do?”

“They’re gonna put him in jail.”

“Why?”

Because he’s a killer, I think to myself, and hug her even closer. I pick her up and walk over to the crowd around the man. The cop has handcuffed him and flipped him over on his back. The woman has her running shoe at his Adam’s apple. She gives me a brusque wave as I approach.

“We got him,” the cop says.

Please. “You had an assist, I think, from the FBI.”

The cop and the woman exchange looks over the unconscious man. “Are you with the feds?” the cop says.

“Me? Are you kidding?” The young woman laughs. “I’m a librarian.”

“What?” I say. “But the way you tackled—”

“
Arrgh
,” the man moans, regaining consciousness. He’s older up close but still a scumbag, like Winn said.

“He’s waking’ up!” one of the ballplayers says.

The librarian presses her ribbed toe into the man’s throat. “Stay right there, asshole.”

“Grace?” the man says, disoriented, looking up from the grass.

“How do you know my name?”

“I gave it to you, for chrissake.”

“What?”

He spits grass out of his mouth. “I’m your fuckin’ father.”

Bernice glares through the gate of her Fisher-Price prison, eyeing with canine distrust the stranger who is my father.

“Lucky for me that dog wasn’t with you today,” he says. Underneath his sweater is a ropy gold chain; no shoulder holster, as far as I can tell. “That’s a big mother dog.”

“Watch your language.”

“Sorry.”

“You want coffee or not?”

“Yeah.” He holds up his mug.

“How do you take it?” I pause over him with the pot of coffee. Maybe he needs a hot shower.

“Black is fine.” He looks up at me with blue eyes that eerily mirror my own, which stops me short. I can see the years on him; the deep crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and a softening around the jowls. He must be over sixty, but he looks fifty. His hair is jet black, like Robert Goulet’s; I wonder if he dyes it. I pour him some coffee, then myself, avoiding his eyes.

“You’re mad, aren’t ya?” he says.

“You know me so well, Dad.”

He winces when he sips his coffee. “Christ, this is hot!”

I stop short of saying, Good, you burn yourself? “So what are you doing here? In the neighborhood, thought you’d drop by?”

He frowns at my sarcasm but evidently decides not to send me to my room. “Look, I wanted to see my granddaughter.”

“Why?”

“I just wanted to see her, okay?”

“Why now? She’s been around for six years. It’s not like she’s been booked up.”

“I just retired.” He clears his throat, but his voice still sounds like gravel. “I moved back to Philly.”

“So you
were
in the neighborhood.”

“I figured it was time to settle up, you know?”

“No, I don’t.”

“When you’re my age, you’ll know.” He slurps his coffee, wincing again.

“We have a telephone. You could have called.”

“I know, I looked you up in the phone book. That’s how I knew where she went to school.” He glances into the living room, where Maddie’s teaching herself to make a cat’s cradle with a pink string he brought her. “She’s a little lady. Just like you were,” he says wistfully, but I have no patience for his wistfulness.

“You scared her, you know. And me.”

“I’m sorry.”

I pull out a chair at the side of the table, two seats away from where he sits. Even from here I can smell his aftershave, something drugstore like Aqua Velva. He doesn’t say anything for a minute, staring down into his mug. I’ll be damned if I’ll fill this silence. I sip my coffee.

“Okay, so it wasn’t the best way to go about it,” he says finally.

“On the contrary. It was the worst possible way to go about it.”

“Now I got your Irish up.” He laughs softly, but I’m not laughing.

“You want a drink? Little sweetener for that coffee?”

He looks at me, stung. “I haven’t had a drink in a long, long time.”

“Right.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Good for you. Where do you live?”

“Philly, now. South Philly.”

The Italian neighborhood. “What do you do?”

“I used to teach.”

“You were a
teacher
?” I can’t hide my surprise. I would have figured him for a bartender, maybe a trucker. But a teacher? “What did you teach?”

“English.”

“
What?
” He can barely speak it. I almost spit out my coffee.

“You’re surprised at your old man, eh?”

“Please. Let’s not leap ahead with the ‘old man’ stuff. Where did you teach?”

“In high school. In Virginia.”

It was his car, the black one. It’s parked out in front of my house like an official Mafia squad car. “Have you been following me?”

He shifts heavily in his seat. “Not exactly. Just watching, a little.”

“Why?”

“Tryin’ to decide, you know. When to make my move. In the beginning, I just wanted to see what you looked like.” He appraises me for a minute. “You grew up nice, pretty. Very pretty.”

Let’s change the subject. “So they let Italians in Virginia. You like it there?”

“No. No
calamar
’, no nothin’. I had nothin’ keepin’ me there, so I came back. That’s my life story.”

“Never remarried?”

“No.”

“No other kids?”

“Not that I know of.” He laughs, then spots my glare. “No.”

I shake my head, and another silence falls between us. We have nothing to say to each other; we have everything to say to each other.

“You’re a lawyer?” he says.

“Yes.”

“Here’s a good one. You’re in a room with Adolf Hitler, Genghis Khan, a lawyer, and a revolver loaded with two bullets. What do you do?”

“What are you talking about?”

He waves his hand. “It’s a joke.”

“Okay, what?”

“Shoot the lawyer twice.” He laughs, but I don’t. “Okay, strike one. Here’s another. What’s black and brown and looks good on a lawyer?”

“Listen—”

“A Doberman.” He laughs again, his eyes crinkling at the corners. An attractive man for his age, with a kind face. Except that he’s a wife beater. Did I mention that appearances are deceiving?

“You beat my mother, didn’t you?”

“Did she tell you that?”

“In a way.”

He exhales heavily. “
Madonn
’.”

“Well?”

“I never laid a hand on your mother. Never.” He points a thick index finger at me.

“Bullshit. I remember.”

“You remember wrong, lawyer.”

“The hell I do. Don’t you dare come here and tell me what I remember,” I say, my voice rising. “I know what I remember.”

“Mom?” Maddie calls uncertainly from the living room. The child has been traumatized enough; now her mother is going off the deep end.

“You want to go play outside, honey?”

“No.”

“You want to watch a tape?”

“Even though I watched cartoons this morning?”

“Yes.”

“Yeah!” She leaps off the couch.

“You know how to put it in?”

“I do it all the time, Mom. Jeez.” She rummages under the TV for her tapes.

My father watches Maddie slip a tape in the VCR. “Smart little girl.”

I feel a knot in my chest. “She sure is. So was I.”

He pushes his mug away and folds his hands. “You want to know why I left?”

“For starters.”

He looks down at his wrinkled hands, the only giveaway as to his age. “I met your mother at the Nixon, at Fifty-second and Market.”

“We’re beginning at the beginning, I see.”

He gives me a dirty look. “As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted, the Nixon was one of the biggest ballrooms around. Cost a couple bucks to get in. Had a mirror ball, spotlights, ten-piece band. Soup to nuts. You had to wear a tie and jacket.”

“Very classy.”

He nods, missing the irony. “
Very
classy. Why your mother was there that night, I still don’t know. She was from Saint Tommy More. She was a great dancer, the best.”

“My mother, dancing?” I blurt out. It’s inconceivable, she barely smiles.

“God, yeh.” He nods. “I was there with the goombahs, the boys from the corner. Louie, Popeye, Cooch. She was there with the Irish girls. They were all in a corner, talkin’ to each other. The Italians never asked the Irish to dance, the Irish never asked the Italians to dance. They weren’t from the neighborhood. Lady of Angels.” He smiles, lost there for a minute. “I remember her eyes, she had gorgeous eyes. Bedroom eyes.”

“So?”

“So I asked her to dance, but she wouldn’t dance with me. I kept after her for the slow dance. Finally she did. I remember the floor was slippery from the powder.”

“Powder?”

“Yeh. Talcum powder, on the floor. Made it even more slippery, for slide dancing. Slow dancing, you know. Big band. Ah, your mother was good. So was I. You had to be good; otherwise you’d slip on your goddamn ass.” He laughs thickly. “They had a contest, too, for the best jitterbug. We won some money, coupla bucks, I forget how much.”

I hear the first strains of
Cinderella
coming from the living room and Maddie jumps back up on the couch, already lost in the fantasy world of Disney. Someday my prince will come. I should burn those tapes.

“Then we went outside for a drink. You couldn’t drink at these things, but we found a way to drink. We always found a way to drink. Then we got married and you came along.” His smile fades. “I decided to stop then, went to AA, the whole bit. But she didn’t.”

I don’t understand. “You mean
Mom
drank?”

“I tried to get her to stop, but she couldn’t.” He leans back heavily in his chair.

“But Mom doesn’t drink. Not even beer.”

“Maybe not now, but then she did. I tried everything. Hiding the bottles, throwing them away, pouring that shit down the toilet. I dumped her whiskey and she came at me—”

“Came at you?”

He reddens slightly. “That was the last straw. I couldn’t take it anymore. I knew if I stayed, I’d go down with her. So I left. Took off. The only thing I did wrong, the thing I regret, is I left you.”

My chest grows tight. I can’t say anything.

“I can’t even tell you I tried to get custody, because I didn’t. They wouldn’t have given it to me, not in those days, but that’s no excuse. I heard she stopped drinkin’ after I left, but I still didn’t go back. We were bad for each other, we would’ve gone down together. And you too.”

I swallow hard, disoriented. This isn’t my family history. My history is altogether different: a father who drank, a no-good, and a mother who suffered. A victim, a saint. I don’t know whether to believe him. I can’t look at him. “You should go,” I say.

“I’m not so dumb that I expected everything to be all right with us. I came because I wanted to make it up to you. I have a little money. Maybe I can help out.”

“You can’t. You should go.”

“Maybe you need to think about it. I know I sprung this on you. You can call me any time.” He puts a card down on the table.
EMEDIO “MIMMY” ROSSI, CERTIFIED ESL INSTRUCTOR
. “I’m startin’ a little business. I teach English as a second language. To Koreans, Vietnamese, like that.”

“Am I supposed to clap?”

“You’re tough, you know that?” He gets up to go, but I still can’t look at him. I have a thousand questions for him, but only one keeps burning in my head.

“Did you hit me?” I ask, when he’s past me.

“What do you mean, hit you?”

“When you drank, did you hit me?”

“No. Never.” His voice sounds louder; he must have turned around to face me. “Why?”

“I’m remembering things.”

He’s silent for a moment. “You’ll have to ask your mother about that,” he says. I hear him call good-bye to Maddie and leave by the screen door.

It closes with a sharp bang.

“
Roarf!
” Bernice says.

21

I
spend a long time at the dining room table, feeling awful as Maddie sits enchanted by her tape. What is he saying? That my mother drank too? That
she
was the one who hit me?

It never even occurred to me.

I’m not sure what to do; I can’t process it all fast enough. I can’t even deal with the fact that I have a father now. What does a grown woman want with a father? And is there room for a mother, especially one who would wallop a child? Then a more urgent concern pops into my head.

Maddie. Has my mother beaten her, ever? My God. I close my eyes. From time to time Maddie gets bruises, but she told me they were from falls. And first grade has been so difficult for her; her first year in my mother’s care. It all fits, and it sickens me. Would my mother really hit Maddie? It would be beyond belief, except that she apparently hit me, too.

When I was Maddie’s age.

What’s been going on in my own house? Maddie knows, but I have to pick the right time to ask her. It preoccupies me as I cook and serve dinner. Afterward, I clean up the dishes and let Bernice slobber over every plate, a silent payback.