Car Trouble Read online

  I felt and heard the bump at the front end of the car. We were hit or had hit something. I looked over at Himself. “You mutt,” he said under his breath, already getting out of the car. I looked out the windshield. The back fender of the Buick was sort of tucked under the hood of the Black Beauty. The driver got out of his car slowly. He was older than Himself, with a thick head of silvering, wavy dark hair and a deeply lined forehead; frowning, he walked past him to look at his fender and taillights.

  In the few minutes it took me to check the weather, something clumsy and stupid had happened. Through the tinted windshield, Dad’s eyes looked bluer than usual. I heard him say “I didn’t hit you, pal. You must have backed into me.”

  He was lying. I hoped he wasn’t going to slug the guy.

  The Black Beauty came with a thin green sun visor you could pull down like a shade to keep the sun off the front seat while the car was parked. I didn’t want to watch Himself do what he was doing and I checked at the top of the windshield to see if I could pull down the visor. I’d only seen him use it once, this summer in the parking lot at Manhattan Beach. I began to pull it down when I saw the driver’s wife come around the front of the car, to hand her husband some folded papers—insurance? registration? Then Dad reached inside his jacket and pulled out his wallet. Bills—I couldn’t count how many—were passed from one driver to another. And then he walked away, while the couple from the Buick wrote something down, perhaps the Black Beauty’s license plate number.

  He opened the door with such force I half-expected it to come off. The sunshade snapped back into position. I slid over to the passenger seat. “What happened?”

  He slammed the door behind him and turned on the ignition. “Nothin’. Dumb guinea has a dented fender.” He shifted the car into reverse. “He wanted to see my insurance. In a pig’s eye.”

  No way did he have insurance for a crate like this. “Why did you give him money if you didn’t do anything wrong?”

  He shot me a look. “That’s a case where you give the guy fifty bucks to make it go away. No information exchanged.”

  Why wouldn’t he admit he’d done something wrong? I sat back, determined to hold my tongue. He hadn’t touched me since that night we got lost in the Green Hornet—I wondered if he even remembered smacking me and had given up expecting an apology—and now would be the wrong time to set him off, even if he was sober.

  He backed up the car and we tore out of Holy Cross, ahead of the Buick, shooting down the main road toward the Tilden Avenue gate. We passed under the double archway, made of charcoal-colored boulders with a green-tile roof and a gold cross on top. The first building we came upon was the King Kullen supermarket, a box in pedestrian white brick. Giant white sale signs for Tropicana orange juice, Tab, and veal cutlets papered the windows, a humdrum reminder of the lives we lived outside the kingdom of the dead.

  Home was two minutes away, already too long for me. We’d started out having the kind of day we never had and then in a flash, it was gone, with Himself’s temper and his petty, unpredictable—I didn’t know what to call it because I didn’t understand him—taking over.

  The Black Beauty turned right at the Sunoco station on Snyder Avenue and made the first left. When I saw Grandpa’s stately Chrysler, done in a frosted champagne color, with the brand name New Yorker written in chrome script above the front tire, I smiled. It was always good to come home to company because Himself would have to be on his best behavior.

  “Not a word about this to your mother,” he said as we pulled into the driveway.

  Everything with him was a big secret and I agreed not to say anything.

  He strode to the garden, bearing the bags of peat moss in his arms as if they weighed no more than a breakfast tray. I carried the rosebushes, one in each hand, leaving the trunk open for the second trip.

  Mom was in the garden with Grandpa. Her father, who had the opposite temperament of Grandpa Flynn. “What took you two so long?” She wore a yellow kerchief tied behind her ears, her car coat, and green-stained canvas gardening gloves. In her left hand, she held a dirty trowel.

  “We took a detour.” Dad set down the bags on the dirt and shook Grandpa’s hand. “Don, let me introduce you to the next Mario Andretti.” And then he raved about my vehicular prowess. His mood had changed again.

  “Claire, we’ve got to get you behind the wheel next,” he said, walking back to the car to get the rest of the supplies.

  Mom retied her kerchief. “Driving lessons with you? You must have rocks in your head.”

  The garden was deep and rectangular, and separated from our neighbor’s by a waist-high cyclone fence. We had more flowers than the Provenzanos, though: a red climbing rosebush, a willowy Japanese maple tree, and a peony whose buds were just beginning to turn white on one side. Wild ivy crawled across the stone garage wall. The mimosa tree and the new rosebushes were going in the back of the garden.

  “What possessed your father to take you driving?”

  “Something about the cemetery,” I said, shrugging. I picked up a shovel leaning against the fence, and with my foot on the blade, drove it into the earth. The ground was dry and brown with an orange cast. I picked out the pebbles and small rocks and tossed them aside.

  “He’s lucky a cop didn’t see him,” Grandpa said.

  “Nobody saw us. We did it in Holy Cross.”

  Grandpa giggled. He was tall and stooped, and wore an old blue shirt over gray pants. A blue cap shielded his head, completely bald now, from the wind. He worked in a grocery store way down Church Avenue, Esposito and Sons. Mom would send me down there on the bus to pick up baskets of oranges and grapefruit, and I would wait to be called into the back of the narrow store, wedging past the women shoppers who were picking up pieces of fruit and inspecting them. In the back room, there were boxes of unpacked produce stacked on a dark wood-plank floor. And that’s when Grandpa would give me the package. There were always customers asking for him so I would say a quick goodbye and get back on the bus, the fragrance of peaches in summer or apples in the fall still fresh in my nostrils.

  Grandpa had driven in all the way from his house on Long Island, a sylvan retreat that we had visited a few times when we were very young. Coming from the kingdom of concrete, we called it “the country” because the place smelled like newly mown grass, with split-rail fences along the property. Out back, there was a tree house and a vegetable garden. In the evenings, Grandma and Grandpa watched Lawrence Welk. Oh my god, it was beyond boring. I would sit there with Maureen—we must have been ten and nine years old—listening to the King Family sing and staring at the dancing couples in their old-fashioned evening attire and not say a word. We were guests and if we had complained, my step-grandmother, a stern Lutheran who had some kind of secretarial job on Wall Street, would have reported back to my mother.

  Dad dropped off the flat of portulacas and disappeared inside the house. It felt so good to be out of the Black Beauty and that crazy scene in the cemetery. I loosened the rosebushes from their containers by gently pressing the trowel between the dirt and the green plastic pot. The yellow bush was called Amarillo and the coral Jump for Joy. A white plastic tag attached to a branch on each bush included a miniature photo of what the flowers would eventually look like when they bloomed. After I’d dug the holes, about eight inches deep, Mom shook in some of the peat moss and tossed in a handful of bonemeal. Then she loosened and lowered the bushes into the ground, her hands protected by the gloves. She usually tended the back garden by herself. I had become involved last year when she needed me to cut down a dead peach tree. I used Dad’s Sears and Roebuck saw, and the resulting flood of light on the bushes underneath the tree, a bright blue hydrangea and a pink azalea, had really helped them flourish.

  I filled in the holes and patted down the dirt with the shovel.

  “Good job, Nicky,” Grandpa said. I didn’t ever remember doing anything like this, something so ordinary, with Grandpa Flynn. We only saw him at events—holidays,
parties, summer barbecues. He never visited us without my grandmother as his ally. I always got the impression he thought children should be seen and not heard so this visit from Mom’s dad seemed special.

  Then I heard Himself coming down the back porch steps. He was dragging over the green garden hose. The color of the hose reminded me of the visor on the windshield screen I almost pulled down in the car before he paid off the guy in the Buick.

  “Nicky, go in the house and make yourself a sandwich,” he said, aiming the nozzle at the Amarillo rosebush. “I’ll pick up from here.”

  “Okay.” I leaned the shovel against the fence and rubbed my hands together. I was starving. And there was a Ring Ding waiting for me in the bread box under the kitchen clock. I was happy to leave him there with Mom and Grandpa, two gentle souls who would never know about the guy whose car we hit in the cemetery. Before I went into the house, I saw the Black Beauty parked in the driveway, back end facing me, and went down the alley to take a closer look. I felt the curve of the Continental kit, half-black, half-white, like the car itself, and smiled. I drove this car today and couldn’t wait to tell my sisters. The sooner I knew how to drive for real, the sooner I could see the USA in my Chevrolet. Like he said.

  Five

  Brian Ventresca was the only teacher at St. Michael the Archangel who allowed students to call him by his first name. What was even stranger, he asked us to.

  The first day I walked into his English class, I thought he was a substitute. He looked so out of place standing under the black crucifix planted above the blackboard that if he were any younger, he could have passed for a senior. He even dressed like us. His idea of work clothes was corduroy pants and a tweed jacket with elbow patches. The tie and shirt didn’t match the jacket and the shoes were Hush Puppies. He was skyscraper-tall—well over six feet—and rangy, with long arms and longish, grown-out brown hair that was bleached a tawny color on the ends. His hands were the size of catcher’s mitts, made for playing nine innings in a Brooklyn sandlot, not holding open a dog-eared copy of Stephen Crane’s stories in front of thirty-five boys on the roller coaster of puberty. But here he was, St. Mike’s first hippie, telling us, with an earnestness that completely beguiled me, that he wanted to “read some good books together.”

  I was a sophomore now, and going to school was like attending some apostolic police academy. One year in, I still wasn’t used to going to an all-boys school and St. Mike’s “us vs. them” dynamic didn’t help. We, the students, the long-haired, corduroy-clad assembly, were “us”; the teachers, a smattering of married, bland laymen and a phalanx of Franciscan Brothers, imperious in their black soutanes, were “them.” As the only teacher with a first name, Brian was somewhere in between “us” and “them.”

  When the Brothers were teaching, they paced back and forth in front of the blackboard, black rosaries swinging from their waists like pendulums, so Brian’s calculated casualness quickly put us at ease. I did well at St. Mike’s, but I didn’t love it. I may not have been the most sophisticated kid in the world, but the guys here were way too Bensonhurst for me, Vinnie Barbarino to the tenth power. Suddenly I felt I had lucked out. The coolest guy in the joint was my teacher.

  How he found his way to St. Mike’s, I had no idea. I was there because if I’d gone to Erasmus, the public high school for kids from my neighborhood, I’d most likely end up getting jumped or knifed. St. Mike’s had opened ten years ago, the last hurrah of the diocesan school system, a four-story box built in dun-colored brick on the edge of East Flatbush, but no one would have argued with you if you’d said the school was in Canarsie. The students came from far-flung parishes I’d never heard of: Saints Simon and Jude, St. Rose of Lima, Our Lady of Grace, Our Lady of Refuge, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Resurrection, Most Precious Blood.

  The school was bordered by a playground, a brand-new McDonald’s, an auto body shop called Collisionville that spit out hubcaps and greasy tires onto the sidewalk, and a desperate tarpaper shack that was actually a bona fide landmark—the Pieter Claesen Wyckoff House—whose sinking foundations dated back to 1650, when this asphalt jungle was still farmland. Classrooms at St. Mike’s were situated on the first three floors and in the basement. The Brothers lived in quarters on the fourth floor so I imagined them always listening in on us. They must have hired Brian because he had been in the seminary. I didn’t know that until I’d been in his car a few times, but that didn’t happen right away.

  An almost priest. A prodigal hippie. No one could resist his natural charisma.

  He wanted every class to be different. One time he played a record of Vincent Price reading “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe, complete with chilling sound effects. When we read some scenes from Romeo and Juliet, Brian also screened West Side Story in Kingsmen Hall, the small auditorium in the school basement. Instead of making us suffer through A Farewell to Arms, Brian took a class vote, and we picked Slaughterhouse-Five, a new book I took out of the library. I suspected the Vonnegut novel was his choice all along, but he made us think it was ours. An antiwar novel while Vietnam was still raging—I don’t know how he got away with it.

  Somehow St. Mike’s remained sheltered from political or social schisms, as if the archangel’s protection were truly in evidence. Both the Kennedy assassination and the escalation of the Vietnam War occurred during its decade of operation, but that all happened at a remove on television. Students were much more likely to join the track team than march on Washington.

  One day Brian asked us to rearrange our desks around the perimeter of the classroom, so we dragged the nicked, heavy desks across the floor, exchanging sly glances through the strands of hair that hung in our faces. I was worried he’d decided to turn the class into some kind of encounter group, where I would have to share my feelings with guys I barely knew and suspected I wouldn’t like. But all he wanted to do was start our discussion of Twelfth Night.

  “We’re going to try something different,” Brian said, as if we didn’t already know that. “We’re going to do the play. Here in class.”

  You could hear the pages of Folger Library paperbacks turning. Even I thought Brian was expecting too much. Shakespeare wasn’t written for the marble-mouthed cadences of me and my fellow Brooklynites.

  Brian anticipated that reaction. “You don’t have to look so petrified,” he said, standing in the center of the circle, his smile not exactly persuasive. “This is an experiment. We’re just going to listen to the language and talk about the play. If you see how Shakespeare made poetry conversational, maybe you won’t be afraid to read more of it. But first I need some volunteers.”

  He looked at us a minute longer, his tapered brown-black eyebrows raised in amusement. “Okay, time’s up. Thanks for that enthusiastic response. Now I get to play director. Don’t worry about changing your voice for the women’s parts.”

  For those of us who didn’t know there were women’s parts in the play, there was some nervous darting of the eyes. “Women’s parts?” asked Larry Cahill, who sat next to me in the circle. He was a tall, stocky kid with thick blond hair and olive skin. He wore black-framed glasses, like Clark Kent. “Now you’re talking. If you can get me some women’s parts, I’ll definitely read Shakespeare. I might even compose a sonnet.”

  Everybody laughed. Larry had never been in any of my classes, but I knew who he was from all the practical jokes he played. He once took the microphone used for announcements in the cafeteria and, in the middle of fourth-period lunch, intoned, “This is God. And I am tired of eating the meat loaf in that kitchen.”

  Brian was ready to begin. “Okay, Nicky, why don’t you read Duke Orsino and, Dominic, you can do Valentine and, Larry, you do Curio. Act one, scene one. Whenever you’re ready.”

  I licked my lips and looked at the compressed stanzas on the page. It was just an experiment, so what could go wrong? I began at the beginning and deadpanned the opening, “If music be the food of love, play on.”

  The guys in this class would
interpret the slightest enunciation as proof of queer-bait behavior.

  I looked up, thinking how funny my voice sounded when I spoke aloud. I didn’t get very far before Brian interrupted me. “Nicky, the duke is hopelessly infatuated with Olivia, and he’s a little on the dramatic side to begin with, so I’d like you to put some oomph into it.”

  Whatever that meant. I nodded, flushing. The sun, coming in through the windows, beat on the back of my neck. I read the passage again, this time with more of a flourish, even though I felt the rhythm of the verse fracture in my mouth. Larry said his two lines with bold emphasis, like an extra who wants to be a star. His friends gave him a round of applause. Dominic Fiore, sophomore class president and member of the speech and debate team and honor society, read Valentine in a loud and clear voice, as if drily making an announcement over the school’s public address system.

  Brian skipped ahead to the scenes of the play that were written in prose, casting Bensonhurst wiseasses Vinnie Sorrentino and Tony Stavola to read Olivia and Viola.

  “For those of you who haven’t read the play,” Brian said, “Viola is disguised as a man here.”

  Vinnie and Tony were the kind of guys who liked to “surprise” the rest of us from time to time by jumping on mayonnaise or ketchup packets stolen from the cafeteria as we walked up the stairwells. They had beauty parlor hairdos, with bangs, terraces, layers, ridges, and wings, all blow-dried to perfection. I didn’t know if Brian picked them to read the women’s parts because they had the right hair, but the result was pure comedy. They hammed it up in their thick accents. Everyone cracked up and the boys blushed. When the reading was over, Brian applauded. “Well, I can see we have a real bunch of budding thespians here,” he said. “Let’s have a round of applause for today’s cast.”