You Can Say You Knew Me When (6 page)

“Actually, I think it’s learned.” I paused to figure out how much I wanted to get into this. “With me and my father, Andy, I don’t think it was about grandkids.”

“Jamie, Dad was in denial about everything,” Deidre said, her voice nearly a wail. “Look at the lawsuit! Look at the way he treated Andy at first! It wasn’t until AJ was born that Dad could even admit we were married.”

“But with me, he never
admitted
—” I cut myself off and lowered my voice. “Why should everything have been so tough for him? The rest of the world knows how to change. But he never did.”

“He was scared,” Deidre said.

“Of what?”

She shrugged, gave her hair a shake. The mystery at the core of our father.

After a long pause, Andy lifted his beer and said, “He’s in a better place now.”

“He found it in his heart to leave his faggot son a little something,” I said. They both flinched, but I just raised my bottle. “Let’s drink to that.”

That night I sat cross-legged on the bed, the San Francisco shoebox open in front of me. Inside was a stash of souvenirs: a collection of bar coasters advertising long-forgotten brands of beer, a map of the city, a tourist guidebook, a
San Francisco Examiner
announcing John F. Kennedy’s election. I flipped quickly through a small notebook filled with crude pencil sketches—eucalyptus trees, Victorian architecture, the Golden Gate Bridge—and scrawled handwriting, little fragments of a diary. I read one at random. It described an afternoon spent riding around with someone named Don Drebinski:
Seems like Don knows every madman and pants-wearing chick in Frisco, and he’s introducing me to all of them
. I skimmed a handful of letters from Aunt Katie, chatty with news of her engagement to Angelo, then sat transfixed over a single page written to my father from a woman named Ray Gladwell—a married woman with whom he, and evidently a couple of other guys, too, had been having an affair.
I believe in the freedom of the individual,
she asserted, spelling out her reasons for dumping him.

My father had gone to California to follow his beatnik dream, and remarkably, he seemed to have succeeded. Nothing in this box indicated the disdain with which he’d always spoken of his time there. After just thirty minutes I was light-headed with astonishment. This was indeed
material.

And there was more. Buried beneath an old, rippled paperback edition of
On the Road
was a photo, an actor’s head shot, the carefully lit and formally composed image of a beautiful man’s face. Beautiful in a sparkling, pretty-boy style—dark, inviting eyes, thick lashes, glossy hair, full lips in a full smile—like Frankie Avalon or Sal Mineo, an
ethnic
pretty boy, softened at the edges to make teenage hearts race. The name
DEAN FOSTER
was imprinted at the bottom. A message was scrawled on the photo in black ink:

To dip into the vernacular of Los Angeles, 1961, Dean Foster was a dreamboat, a pinup. And he was someone my father once knew. At the bottom of the box I found a dozen photos bound in twine, pictures of my father and this guy, snapped in the old neighborhood: blowing out sixteen birthday candles; dressed in suits and ties, squiring a couple of dolled-up girls to a dance; posed in front of a shiny Chevrolet, arms over each other’s shoulders. This dazzlingly handsome actor was at my father’s side for every childhood milestone. Dean Foster.
Danny.

One photo was so striking I gasped out loud. It was an image of departure, dated on the reverse side, in my father’s half-legible scribble, April 18, 1960. The rear of the Chevy fills the frame, the car showing signs of wear—a broken taillight, a dented fender. Dean/Danny clutches the handle of a suitcase he’s hoisting into the trunk. His arms and the suitcase blur with motion. His heavy-lashed eyes, meeting the lens just as his image is captured, reveal annoyance. Even so, his face is spectacular, its natural Mediterranean beauty more seductive here than in the doctored studio shot. I wanted to know where he was going in April 1960. Perhaps to Los Angeles, ready to transform himself into a Hollywood actor. Or maybe to San Francisco; he might have been the
someone
my father said he knew there.

You can say you knew me when.
But as I tried to remember if Dad had ever said anything about a Danny or a Dean, I came up empty.

The next day, I found my grandmother in the kitchen. “Nana, do you remember this guy? A friend of Dad’s?” I held up the photo of the boys in front of the Chevy.

She’d been rinsing dishes in the sink—she never used the dishwasher, considered it
money down the drain
—but suddenly she stopped and dried her hands on a towel. She took the photo from me. “Angelo’s brother.”

I thought she misheard. Danny did look a bit like Uncle Angelo, Tommy’s late father, but—“No, this isn’t Angelo. This is someone else. I think his name was Danny.”

“Yes, Danny, the brother of Angelo.”

I was unprepared for this. If Danny was Uncle Angelo’s brother, that made him a Ficchino, practically family—my uncle by marriage—which made it all the more surprising that I’d never heard a thing about him. “Is he alive?” I asked.

“He went to California.”

“And never, ever visits? Or calls?”

She shrugged. “I don’t keep track.”

I held up Dean Foster’s head shot. “I also found this one.”

She stopped wiping and came closer for a look. “Dear, yes.” Her stare softened. “He was going to be a movie star. We saw him once, in a picture. We all went to Times Square when it opened. Everyone from the neighborhood.”

“That must have been exciting.”

“Sure, and we dressed in our Sunday best. Danny came out of a limousine, wearing a white tuxedo jacket, with an actress on his arm.” In her broadening smile, the first I’d seen on her all week, I understood the pleasure of the memory, the trickle-down glamour of the spot-lit movie premiere, everyone dressed up to celebrate a local boy made good. “It was a picture for teenagers, one of those beach movies. He was in a bathing suit, with a surfboard. We were so excited when he came on the screen.”

“I’ll bet,” I muttered. Visions of dreamy Dean Foster: shirtless and sun-drenched.

“Mrs. Ficchino yelled, ‘That’s my son!’ You remember Mrs. Ficchino? She sure had the gift of the gab.”

“I remember her. But what happened to him? Danny?”

The sound of the car in the driveway intruded. Deirdre returning from grocery shopping.

“There was some trouble. With the police, maybe.” Nana narrowed her eyes, as if peering into a dark corner. “You could ask Katie.”

Deirdre entered, arms heavy with stuffed paper bags. I tried to squeeze in one last question. “Do you think he’s still alive?”

Before Nana could answer, Deidre asked, “Who are you talking about?”

“Danny Ficchino.”

Her eyes did some kind of mental search. “Oh—him.”

“You know who he is?”

“Yeah, sure. Uncle Angelo’s brother.”

“How come I’ve never heard of him?”

“You probably weren’t around when it came up.” Her gaze moved past me to Nana, trying to determine, I think, if I’d said anything about our conversation last night. She maneuvered from cabinet to fridge to cupboard, a blur of dyed-blonde hair and Old Navy primary colors, putting everything in its place, all the while recounting the successes and failures of her shopping trip. “They didn’t have the ______ so I got the ______ instead. The such-and-such was on sale. The whole place was a zoo.” At some point during her masterful navigation of the kitchen, she glanced down at the head shot and then back up at me, and I saw something in the set of her expression that reminded me of our father’s brand of silent disapproval.

“I found it in the attic,” I said, but she only looked away.

AJ was moving through the doorway, struggling under a grocery bag loaded with bottled juice. I stepped toward him to help, but he was determined to go it alone. “I can carry one bag at a time,” he announced with the pride of someone granted an honor.

“There’s more where that came from,” Deirdre said to me. “Get to work.”

I shuffled off obediently to make myself useful.

My last night in New Jersey. Deirdre came over to say good-bye and to find out what progress I’d made on the do-list.

I poured her a drink, made her sit down. I told her about the San Francisco box, the photos, my conversation with Nana. I asked her what she knew about Danny Ficchino. She said that Dad had mentioned him only once or twice, general stuff about running around the neighborhood with Danny and losing touch with him after Danny became an actor. He’d hinted that Danny might have had
a run-in with the law,
which led to a falling out between Danny and the Ficchinos. Deirdre wondered if it had been over money. “It sounded to me like one of those Italian things,” she said. “
You’re dead to me now
. You know what I’m saying?”

“I know it firsthand,” I said, with a gulp of the strong cocktail I’d poured.

“Oh, please, Jamie. No one disowned you.”

“Dad basically did. Why can’t you admit that?”

“I’ve never denied that he was closed minded.” She looked down into her glass, clinking ice in a shaky grip. “But you stopped trying.”

“He didn’t want anything to do with me!”

“Well, you definitely returned the favor.”

“But he sure got the last word. Ten thousand dollars just about says it all.”

We tried to keep our voices down, aware of Nana upstairs, but each recrimination was louder than the last. It wasn’t a new quarrel—we’d swiped at each other over the phone for years, she insinuating that I’d abandoned her to Dad’s illness, me insisting that she never stood up for me—but it was more ferocious than usual, the situation more desperate. I was leaving the next day, and who could say when I’d be back? She wanted to know why I wasn’t staying longer, why I hadn’t done what she’d asked me to do, why I was dredging up
ancient history
when there was so much going on right now. She complained that I’d taken no interest in AJ; I replied that she’d taken no interest in anything in my life. Deirdre: “You have no concept of what it takes to raise a child.” Me: “You have no concept of anything else.” Dee: “You’re the most judgmental person I know.” Me: “You’re turning old before your time.”

We amped each other up and wore each other down until we were both crying. That is, she was crying, wiping fat tears as they spilled, and I was struggling with dry mouth, a tightened-up throat, eyes burning at the tear ducts—as close as I get to crying in front of anyone else.

Over and over she said, “I can’t think. I can’t think. I can’t think.”

I stared into the fireplace, which hadn’t been used in years, though it was always roaring when we were kids. It was our mother’s domain; she was the only one who could really get it going, and after she died, it sat cold. Its square black mouth seemed, in this moment, to be the very medium through which she’d been sucked away from us; and him, too. The long corridor to the underworld.

I moved nearer to Deirdre, and I said I was sorry. I’m not exactly sure what I was sorry for. Not for my accusations, which I felt, at their core, were true. More for upsetting her—for just being me, I guess, insensitive, defensive, emotionally retarded me.

Deirdre slumped toward me, and I let my arm fall tentatively around her. Having just fought, this physical nearness was unnerving. I smoothed her hair, which at the roots was a nondescript, mousy brown, so plain compared to the fiery red of mine. Slowly she emerged from her tears. Soon enough we were telling old stories, and laughing a little, remembering funny things about Dad and his bearing in the world, like the way he used to insist he was six feet tall, though he fell short even in shoes, or the way he shined those shoes every Sunday night, lecturing me on the importance of starting the week
with your best foot forward.
She told me how the dementia, before it got terrible, actually made him docile, even sweet, in his dependence. We talked about how much he loved our mother, how she had protected him from the world, how he had never gotten over her.

“Since he’s died,” Deidre said, “I’ve missed her all over again.”

“I can’t let myself,” I said. “I sometimes forget I ever had a mother.”

She looked at me with puzzlement, then blew her nose one last time and threw a damp, crumpled tissue onto the coffee table, where it bounced against the crumpled tissues already there. I walked her to the front door, and we said good-bye awkwardly, like strangers on a descending airplane who’d spoken too intimately and would never meet again.

“I do wish you could stay longer,” she said.

“I’ll make a point of coming back soon, to help out with Nana and the house.” I doubted either of us believed this.

Standing alone in the hallway, listening to her minivan move down the street, I felt myself very far away from all of them—physically far away, even from Nana, asleep upstairs. I phoned Woody, but got only voice mail; I phoned Brady, Ian, Colleen—my closest San Francisco pals. I left messages for them all: “Get the margaritas ready. I’m coming home.”

Back in the sewing room, I lit a cigarette and blew smoke out the window while I packed my bags. It didn’t take long; I hadn’t brought much with me, and the only thing I was adding to my load was the knife set. And, of course, that shoebox.

I shuffled through the box one more time, mesmerized by the photos. Rusty and Danny, in front of that Chevy: my father, pale skinned and broad chested, pulled in close by his impossibly good-looking friend. Two boys with nothing but adventure ahead. I heard the click of the ignition, the roar from under the hood, a doo-wop song on the radio.