You Can Say You Knew Me When (4 page)

“Aunt Katie.” I was unsure if I should lean in for an air kiss of my own.

She stood stiffly, eyeing me up and down. “I was just saying to your sister, ‘Where’s your brother? He better have shown up.’”

“Here I am,” I said, bowing my head deferentially.

“I said, ‘Don’t tell me Jimmy didn’t show.’”

“I showed.”

She raised her chin. “What’s that? You don’t shave there?”

“A little San Francisco style,” I said, rubbing the arty triangle of auburn hair—the
soul patch
—growing under my lower lip.

Nana said, “You look scruffy.”

“At least he got rid of the earrings,” Aunt Katie said. “Remember that? When he came home with the earrings?”

“Haven’t had earrings for years,” I said, my face burning up.

“And that tattoo, with the snakes.” She visibly shuddered.

“Aw, leave the guy alone, Ma.” From around her side, Tommy extended a beefy paw.

I shook his hand. “How’s it going, Tommy?”

“Can’t complain. Never does any good.”

“Jamie got in a couple days ago and he’s really been helping out a lot,” Deirdre said to no one in particular.

“I’ve been helping, too, Mommy.” AJ was suddenly there, tugging on the hem of her skirt and looking shyly at his cousins.

“Yes, you have. All my boys are being very good.”

Katie sighed—so drawn out it was nearly a hum—her eyes still glued to me. She stepped closer, uncomfortably close. Maybe she’d comment on my breath, smoky from the cigarette I’d sneaked in the parking lot. “Let me tell you something,” she said, swallowing hard before continuing. “Your father deserved better.“

I sucked in air, backed away reflexively. This was the judgment I’d been dreading, though I’d started to think I would get away unscathed. My head ricocheted with response lines—everything from
I’m sorry
to
Back off, bitch
—but I held my tongue and withstood Aunt Katie’s hex, my face flushed but, I hoped, inscrutable. Finally, Deirdre, bless her, took command, helping Katie out of her coat and passing it to me. “Jamie, give this to the guy in the hall. Not you, AJ. It’s too big for you.”

Walking away, hauling fifteen pounds of raccoon fur, I averted my eyes from the crowd. Who in the room had seen what just happened?

I turned around and found Tommy behind me, passing a pile of coats to the attendant. Tommy Ficchino stood out in this room, a swarthy half-Italian in the midst of a lot of pasty Irish stock. As a kid, his hair had been light brown, like wood varnish, but it was almost black now, with little flecks of gray. He wasn’t quite as handsome as his father, Uncle Angelo, had been, but Tommy’s face had the same big, expressive features: a wide nose, dark eyes, a rosy mouth surrounded by the perpetual shadow of a beard. Angelo had died of a heart attack about six years ago. I’d come back for that funeral, too—a southern Italian affair, lavish in its grief. A wailing Nonna Ficchino had to be carried out of the church, her tight black shoes fumbling along the carpet as her grandsons bore her weight.

The Ficchinos and the Garners had been neighbors in Hell’s Kitchen. Angelo and Katie were high school sweethearts, a few years older than my father, whose nickname in those days was Rusty. I’d grown up listening to their stories of taking Rusty on dates with them, then telling him to
beat it
so they could have their privacy. There was the time a cop caught them necking in the back of Angelo’s car. The time Rusty got lost in Central Park for an afternoon. The time they crossed paths with Joe DiMaggio and he shook my father’s hand. The stories were so recycled, even I, who hadn’t heard them for years, could recite them in detail.

Tommy’s hands were rising in front of him, palms up. I knew this gesture, which all the men in his family shared: He was preparing to speak without quite knowing what to say. I scrambled to fill the silence. “I guess this must be tough for you, Tommy. You’ve already been through this, with your father.”

With a shrug of his shoulders, he replied, “Aw, whaddaya gonna do?”

I had to bite my lip to hold back a smile.

“Any time you got a death’s lousy,” he went on. “My dad died too young, but I got no regrets there. You and your dad—that’s another story. You being, you know, the black sheep.”

I nodded cautiously. “We had our difficulties.”

“Jesus, he was pretty tough on you, right? Pretty tough, period. Gotta be a lot of mixed emotions here.” He patted his belly.

I felt my eyes dampen—not from grief but from gratitude, like a patient receiving a diagnosis after previously being told it was all in his head. “One day at a time,” I said.

“Right. Today, tomorrow. Little here, little there, that’s how it goes. Whaddaya gonna do?”

“Hell if I know,” I said, letting the smile break through this time. He nodded with finality, and we stood together for a moment, silently perusing the crowd.

“So how’s it out there, you know, in San Fran?”

“Crazy times, lots going on. The Internet. The dot-coms.” Tommy’s accent was contagious. I heard myself saying
dot-calms.

“We gonna hear you on NPR again?” he asked.

“Sure, sure. Someday.”

“You got anything coming up?”

“Not right now. Things have been a little quiet.”

In fact, my career in radio had been very quiet. About six months earlier I’d lost a regular producing job for San Francisco’s public radio station, and since then I’d worked freelance. Barely. The show I’d produced,
City Snapshot,
a daily report on offbeat cultural events in San Francisco, was one I helped create, and I took its cancellation—its
re-branding,
as the station manager dubbed it—personally. Before that show, I had produced a handful of reports for National Public Radio. Tommy had heard one of my segments on
All Things Considered
and called to congratulate me, and since then I’d been the “NPR guy” to him and all the Ficchinos. I didn’t bother to correct this; the lack of a permanent professional affiliation always took too much effort to explain to people not in my field. There were plenty of things I couldn’t remember about Tommy’s life, too, like were he and his brothers still running the refrigeration and air-conditioning business their father had passed on to them? Judging from Tommy’s expensive-looking suit and the fat Rolex on his wrist, he had moved on to something more lucrative.

Tommy went chasing after one of his daughters, who was making a break for the front door, and I slipped back into the main room. I leaned against a wall and watched my sister in action. Deirdre carried herself with great presence, like an event planner
,
one of those take-charge corporate types who stands in the middle of the action, wearing a matching skirt and suit jacket (this one was black, with padded shoulders), and with precise orders keeps everyone else moving. She and Andy were both performing just fine as far as I could tell, juggling guests, accepting mass cards from well-wishers, keeping AJ out of trouble. Up at the coffin, Aunt Katie was on her knees, dabbing her eyes. On either side, in sharp black suits, knelt one of her dark-haired sons—Tommy’s older brothers, Mike and Billy—looking like Secret Service agents assigned to protect her. All around me swirled this big family, everyone performing his or her role just so, a portrait glowing with tradition: functional, ritualized, structured to endure the dark storm of death. I saw myself as they must surely see me, standing apart from the crowd with my alien facial hair and my thrift-store suit, displaying no obvious emotions, and I wondered what I was doing here, why I’d set myself up for this kind of scrutiny.
Most of the trouble that comes along is trouble we cause ourselves.
My father again, his voice ringing out from the past: a lecture delivered one night after I’d been picked up by the cops in the passenger seat of a parked car. At the wheel was a tipsy Eric Sanchez, whom I was trying to persuade to hand over the keys.
You could have walked away,
Dad had said, and he’d been right. But for all my ambivalence about my family, I had never been one to walk away from a friend.

And then, unbidden, another memory: a fishing trip we made with some of his co-workers and their sons, a cluster of men and boys on the shore of a lake in upstate New York. My father stood behind me, his arms encircling me and his hands covering mine, guiding me through the proper way to cast. My discomfort at this physical closeness melted as he helped me reel in my first catch. I couldn’t have been more than twelve, but I caught three fish that day, more than anyone else. They were small, none bigger than his outstretched hand, but that didn’t stop us from hauling them home and insisting my mother fry them for dinner. And where the memory ends is here: me recounting for her the story of each catch while he looked on, soaking up my little triumphs, taking none of the credit. The weightlessness that came from having made him proud, and the knowledge, confusing even in the moment, that the key had been to put myself in his hands, to not resist.

A rumble was building up in my stomach; I suddenly was sure I would vomit. But when I locked myself in the bathroom, what erupted from my mouth was laughter—loud, giddy, cathartic howls of laughter that I couldn’t contain and couldn’t stop. I slid down to the tiled floor, and I flushed the toilet again and again, imagining Deirdre scowling on the other side of the door. I thought of Aunt Katie’s ostentatious fur, of Tommy’s
Whaddaya gonna do,
of those three puny fish twenty years ago, shrinking in the frying pan until they were hardly even there, and I laughed some more, until my stomach tightened and the muscles in my face ached. The frantic laughter only
mixed emotions
can bring.

Back at the house, I filled a plate with food and moved toward the back porch, an enclosed room off the kitchen where I could blow cigarette smoke out the window. The room wasn’t insulated, but putting up with the winter chill was preferable to hanging out in the living room, dodging Aunt Katie. Tommy saw me heading out and quickstepped behind me. “Hurry, before Amy decides there’s something I should be doing right now,” he joked. “Let’s make a break for it.”

Tommy and I were the same age, and as kids we liked to slip away from his bullying brothers and go off on our own, coming up with gentler alternatives to the older boys’ games: bike riding instead of ball playing, gin rummy instead of “I Dare You!” Over the years, on those rare occasions when we were both at a family gathering, we usually found ourselves, without quite planning it, one on one. That day, I had a bottle of vodka and a bottle of tonic at my feet, and Tommy was soon matching me drink for drink and cigarette for cigarette. We made small talk—real estate on Long Island, where he lived, versus in San Francisco—and caught up on each other’s lives—the refrigeration business had indeed been sold, and Tommy was working for a venture capital firm in Manhattan. We even talked a little about the wake. “Don’t pay no mind to my mom,” he said, lowering his voice. “She’s just broken up about it, is all.”

“She’s pretty hard to ignore,” I said. “If looks could kill—”

“If it was you in that coffin, Deirdre would be lookin’ for someone to take it out on, too. You know?”

“Yeah, I know.” It was true, my sister was loyal. Wasn’t that why she had done the hard work of caring for our difficult, declining father, and why she was so frosty with me now—because I’d stayed away? We weren’t always like this. We were allies through high school, hanging out with some of the same kids, bitching about the same teachers, helping each other with homework (she had a head for math, I was better at English). Then Mom died, and Dad sued the hospital, and Dad found me with Eric, and I went off to college, freaked out and heartbroken—and I couldn’t tell you what Deirdre was doing during any of this. In most families, a mother’s death draws the survivors closer, but when we looked at each other, we saw our wounded selves reflected back, and we kept our distance. Years later I finally told Deirdre about Eric. About me. She was more accepting than anyone in the family had been, but I was already living a separate life in New York, while she was dating Andy in New Jersey, pitching her tent in the camp I had fled. I no longer saw her as my ally but as my father’s; her proximity to him seemed a judgment against me.
You and your sister push each other’s buttons,
Woody would say, listening in on my end of a phone call with Dee that had gone suddenly brittle. I knew I shared the blame; I knew she wasn’t blameless. What I didn’t know was what was left between us.

My conversation with Tommy was interrupted by Amy, poking her head through the back door to complain about his absence. “I’ll be in when I’m in,” Tommy told her.

A few minutes later their eleven-year-old, Brian, showed up at Tommy’s elbow. “Mom wants to know if you’re still smoking.”

Tommy looked at the cigarette in his hand. “Whaddaya gonna tell her?”

“I don’t know.” Brian looked to me for help. I just shrugged.

Tommy roped his arm across Brian’s shoulders. “Let me ask you something. Who took you to see the Islanders last weekend?”

“You.”

“Right. And who picks you up after basketball?”

“You.”

“And who took you and your friends to see
The Matrix?”

“Yeah, okay, Dad—you.”

“So next time your mom tells you to go do her dirty work, to bug your dad, your pal, whaddaya gonna do?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re gonna ignore her.”
Ignaw huh.

“O
K
ay,” Brian said agreeably. “So, can I try your cigarette?”

“I ever catch you smoking I’ll smack your mouth,” Tommy said with a quick swat at the air. Brian darted back inside.

“Wow,” I marveled. “You rule the roost, don’t you?”

“It takes everything I got, lemme tell ya,” Tommy said through a weary exhalation of smoke. “I work hard. I pitch in around the house. I keep Brian and Lorrie out of the way when Amy’s taking care of the babies. She plays this game, though. Gets them to side with her. She can be a real ballbuster.”