Car Trouble Read online

  He had to be exaggerating, but I did as I was told and sailed through the intersection. “I’m doing forty-five,” I said, tapping my fingers on the steering wheel.

  “Watch out,” Dad said.

  Bedford Avenue was lined with mighty old trees. The cloud cover made the colors of the leaves pop. The yellows of the silver lindens and the black maples were really sharp, and occasionally a leaf from one of these trees would float down and rest on the hood of the Black Beauty. Homes were set back from the sidewalk with stone porches that led to side entrances and allowed for wide picture windows on the first floor. Dad pointed to a one-story house done in chunks of rosy beige stone with a grand, curved picture window, and a double-door entrance painted white. “Gil Hodges lives there.”

  Gil Hodges. Savior of the New York Mets. The manager who had just won the team its first World Series. My parents worshipped him. Even better, he used to play with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the best team of all time to anyone who grew up here, when people still thought that baseball could save Brooklyn.

  “When he played for the Dodgers, I used to deliver the Brooklyn Eagle to his house every day.” His pride at having the most tangential connection to this legendary player was evident, and I smiled.

  There were Hasidic couples walking down the street past the Hodges house now. “Did the house look like this?”

  “The house has undergone some renovations now that he’s making the big money,” Dad said with a chuckle.

  His voice was especially raspy this morning. I think his body was rebelling against his two-pack-a-day habit, and he spent part of every morning in the bathroom coughing so violently he ended up gagging like some desperate animal. Listening to that from my bedroom, I resolved never to touch a cigarette.

  We were heading toward Kings Highway now, blocks past where we were supposed to be going. I wondered how much farther we were going to go before turning around. I could see the light turning red at the next corner, and I started slowing down; I knew I wouldn’t make it. Then I saw a familiar face crossing in front of us: Brian Ventresca.

  I honked the horn. “Hey, there’s my English teacher.”

  Dad looked out the window. “I didn’t know they were hiring hippies in the Catholic school system.”

  “They are. Can we pull over?”

  “Sure. This I’ve got to see to believe.”

  I pulled over in front of a white-brick saltbox with blue shutters and a flaming sugar maple in the front yard.

  Brian was carrying several books under one arm and was dressed even more casually than he was at school, in jeans, sneakers, and a bright-white hooded sweatshirt. His hair lifted in the breeze.

  Dad got out of the car and stuck out his hand. “Pat Flynn.”

  Brian shook it and introduced himself. He towered over Dad—he had to be six-four—and I watched Himself raise his eyebrows as he calculated the height difference. “Nicky can’t wait to get a car of his own, so I thought I’d give him a little practice.” He chuckled uneasily. “That’s between you and me, of course. The Brothers up at that school do not need to know.”

  “If they did, they’d start showing up at your house to take a spin in something this cool.” Brian took in the length and width of the Black Beauty, the chrome dagger embedded in the white trim on the side of the car and the twin headlights. Then he crouched to read the lettering. “Pontiac Parisienne. Fancy.”

  “Nineteen fifty-eight,” Dad said. “It was a very good year.”

  Patty was still a baby; there were only three children in the house. Was that what he meant? I nodded at the books in Brian’s hand. They were thick, maybe anthologies. “You live around here?”

  “On the other side of Ocean. I’m returning some books to the Brooklyn College library and thought I’d walk.” He looked at Dad. “When I’m not teaching high school, I take night classes. Getting my master’s.”

  Dad tilted back on his heels, his arms folded across his chest, to size Brian up. He’d never met any of my teachers, not even when I was with “the good sisters,” as he called the nuns at St. Maria Goretti. He left all that meet-and-greet crap to Mom. “So I guess you could say you’re a professional student.”

  Brian pushed a flying wisp of hair behind his ear. “I’ve got to get a college teaching job if I want to make more money. Living at home with Mom and Pop ain’t cutting it anymore.”

  I wanted them to get along so badly it took me a minute to hear him say that he still lived at home. I knew nothing about what jobs paid, especially teaching jobs, but I was still floored. Brian had to be in his midtwenties.

  “So how do you like teaching a bunch of teenage boys? Or maybe I should ask: Can they even be taught?”

  Brian laughed, perhaps too loudly. “Well, there are days when I realize no one’s done any of the reading I’ve assigned and I have to talk for forty-five minutes. That’s when I call on Nicky.” He squeezed my shoulder. Himself took note.

  I was actually a little behind on my reading for Brian, but I’d make up for it tomorrow. I also had a ton of French homework. I ditched the Latin as soon as I could and Himself didn’t mind because he had proven to me I had a knack for languages.

  Dad insisted that Brian accept a ride. So we went back the way we came. I sat in the backseat, pushing aside those old yellow ropes, so Brian could have the legroom up front. His knees were still brushing the dashboard.

  Himself took the wheel and made a sharp U-turn in the middle of Bedford Avenue.

  Brian sat back and looked out the enormous windshield. “This is some car, Mr. Flynn. Where’d you get it?”

  “Sixty-Ninth Precinct. My own private showroom. Buy all my cars at auction. You look pretty young to be a teacher. First year?”

  “Nah. I taught for two years at Christ the King in Queens, but the driving just killed me. So I switched over. How about you?”

  He told Brian how long he’d worked at the phone company: twelve years. “I’ve climbed poles in some of the worst neighborhoods you’ve never been in,” he said. “Just to install a phone. Last time I was in East New York, woman on the first floor answers the door to let me in. She’s got a pistol in her bra. Stood in the yard while I was doing the wires. I thought she was going to shoot me.”

  This was one story about the phone company I hadn’t heard, and it felt good to laugh. We passed Avenue K, a few blocks from the campus. The speedometer said forty-five mph. I wondered why he was slowing down, if it was for Brian’s benefit. And then he asked, “So what do you think of that peace march they are going to have in D.C.?”

  Why did he have to mention Vietnam? I shrank in my seat. Every night he watched the news on TV and glowered at the “agitators,” as he called them, protesting on college campuses, having “sit-ins” and other forms of civil disobedience.

  Brian looked back at me with a questioning glance. “You mean the Moratorium? I’m going to drive down with my brother and a friend of mine who served and we’re gonna check it out. It’s in two weeks.”

  Dad seemed shocked and said nothing. When we read The Red Badge of Courage, Brian would talk about the Berrigan brothers and the draft records they destroyed. He wanted to tell us priests protest the war too; anybody could. The blank stares of my classmates told me they’d never given a moment’s thought to the draft. Me, I was just hoping the war would end before I turned eighteen and had to register with the Selective Service System.

  Himself didn’t need to know Brian was a fan of the Berrigans, though. I leaned on the front seat. “In our last car, he had a portable record player, and me and my sisters took turns playing our old 45s.”

  Brian turned toward me. “Really? Where did it go?”

  “Right under the dashboard. The needle bumped on the potholes, but it was better than the radio.”

  Finally, the campus buildings came into view and Brian exited by a tall, green wrought-iron fence. He touched the white leather on the seat once before shutting the door.

  “Thanks for the ride, Mr. Flynn.
Nicky, I guess I’ll see you in school on Monday. We’re going to have a surprise quiz.”

  Himself watched Brian walk onto the campus and I got back into the front seat. “Inside information,” he said, as we retraced our route. “He wants you on his side.”

  I didn’t know why Brian would need someone like me on his side. I was just one of his students, in one of several classes he taught. Plenty of his students must have liked him. Still, I didn’t know how to reply directly to this comment. All I could say was “He’s a really good teacher.” That must have sounded pretty lame.

  “I bet you fifty bucks that guy’s a draft dodger,” he said.

  I said nothing.

  “Ask him what his draft status is. I bet it’s CO. Conscientious objector.”

  “And so what if he is? No one wants to go to Vietnam and get their legs blown off.”

  “Georgie Olsen went. Died for our country.”

  He was a kid whose family lived on our street, in a tiny house next to a vacant lot on Snyder Avenue. I barely knew him, but Himself had raised a glass or five with his father. Many families on our block went to the funeral mass at St. Maria Goretti. I was even allowed to take half a day off from school. I was sure the war would end before I could be drafted. Eventually the Daily News would publish the draft lottery. Anybody over eighteen could check to see if their number was listed and what their chances were of actually getting shipped overseas. It was like finding out what day you were going to die.

  We were cruising down Nostrand Avenue now, past a large public school. I didn’t want to anger him—I knew what could happen—but I had to ask, “So does that mean we should all go over and get killed?”

  “It means that when the government tells you to do something, you do it.”

  I didn’t say another word until we got to my grandfather’s house. It was a stand-alone, three-bedroom house with a decent-sized lawn that flanked the front stoop. Everyone went in through the side door, walking across the driveway and around the backyard, where the lawn practically came up to the house. Somebody—Grandpa, I bet—had swept up the leaves shaken from the trees by last night’s storm into a neat pile at the edge.

  Himself led the way through a dim pantry and then the kitchen, spotless with the appliances and counters grouped in a line under windows that faced the driveway. “Hello, the house.”

  Grandma pushed open the swinging door that connected the dining room and the kitchen. Her Breezy Point tan, deepened on weekends she and Grandpa spent at their cabana, had faded; her blue eyes didn’t blaze the way they usually did. “Well, good afternoon. Your father thought you’d never get here.”

  “We stopped to help out an antiwar demonstrator.” He gave a cynical chuckle and opened the refrigerator.

  I wished I could go to the Moratorium with Brian, even though I suspected I was a little young to march on the White House. The protesters would end the draft. Then they would end the war.

  Grandma held a red leather cigarette case in her right hand. “Pat, if you want something to drink, I can get it for you.”

  On a Saturday morning, my mother usually wore corduroy pants with an old flannel shirt, doing housework with her hair tied back with a bandanna. Grandma was always done up. She wore trousers, khaki with a crisp crease and a coral-colored blouse. She had to have a cleaning woman. She had to.

  Dad was looking in the refrigerator, leaning on the door. Behind him, I spotted the bottle of prune juice my grandparents always kept on the second shelf. Dad handed me a root beer and took a Bud for himself.

  “At least wait till you have your lunch before you have a beer,” she said, frowning.

  He flipped the can open and raised it to his lips. “I’m thirsty now.”

  I let them squabble and went into the dining room. The china closet was already emptied. Its contents were stacked in boxes on the parquet floor. The table was a deep maple, with a lived-in gleam—we’d have it scratched up in a month. I’d only been allowed to eat at it a few times; on most holidays, I was relegated to the kids’ table, which was set up in the living room. The leaves were leaning against the china closet. I carried those outside right away and lay them on the backseat of the Black Beauty.

  It was hard to imagine someone as rambunctious as Himself coming from such a pristine environment. Now I understood the fastidious attention to appearance—at least he started out with good intentions.

  The open can of Bud on the kitchen counter was the first thing I saw when I came back into the house. In the dining room, Grandpa was helping Dad lift the tabletop off its legs. They pulled the table apart at the center and slid each half off its moorings. They then set these pieces against the wall under the stained-glass windows. I didn’t have to do the heavy lifting now but would be expected to memorize and repeat the steps later. Grandma leaned on the banister of the staircase, taking long drags on her Tareyton. “I bought that table at A & S in, well, I won’t tell you how long ago. It’s held up very well. Your grandfather’s in such a hurry to pack up and give everything away,” she confided in me, as if he wasn’t there.

  “What’s that?” Grandpa said, turning his snowy white head toward us. He was notoriously hard of hearing, but knew he was missing something. His eyeglasses looked thicker than ever. “There’s a house full of stuff. You can’t take everything with you.”

  She was taking all the living room furniture—a tweed sofa, end tables, a coffee table, and two wing chairs, and the Zenith stereo—but Uncle Tim had already stocked up on his share of the inventory: the twin bed and chest of drawers in the middle bedroom.

  “We’re not moving until December, for Christ’s sake. Did it ever occur to you that I might like to have one last holiday dinner here?”

  “Nonsense. Tim’s offered his place for Thanksgiving. Let somebody else do the cooking for a change.”

  Grandma made an exasperated face. “Well, I guess that’s settled.” She sat on the landing at the bottom of the staircase.

  Dad nodded to me. “Nicky, why don’t you take these two halves of the table and put them in the car?” He gave me a pair of canvas gloves.

  I was glad to get out of there before Grandma started throwing the dinner plates.

  When the table was fully loaded in the car, we took a break for lunch, eating at a booth set into the wall. Dad carried his open Bud and sat across from me. Two sips and he was ready for another. Grandma had already set the table and put out platters of cold cuts and fresh turkey and a jar of bread-and-butter pickles. Everyone made their own sandwiches. Grandma was sitting next to me, and I asked her what she was going to miss most about the house.

  “Well, I thought no one would ever ask,” she said, smiling. She ate the smallest sandwich of all of us, turkey on rye with lettuce and mayo. “I’m going to miss the activity. Having everyone around. But to be honest, I don’t need a house this size anymore. My children are all married with children of their own. Well, almost. Regina doesn’t have children yet. And besides, your grandfather wanted to move the minute he retired. So I guess we’re going. I hope you’ll come down to visit us in Florida. It’s not that far away.”

  There was a melancholy twinkle in her eyes now, and she grabbed my hand. “We had your christening at this house!”

  I blushed and looked at Grandpa. He was devouring some kind of three-layer sandwich, all meat. “Ah, Marion. Can’t stay here. In five, ten years, you’re not going to recognize this place. It’ll be all black. The time to go is now.”

  “You’re like a broken record,” she said.

  Himself often made the same end-of-the-world predictions and now I knew where he got it from. They weren’t wrong, though. The white flight was well under way in my neighborhood. Church Avenue was filling up with faces none of us recognized. With the way Himself was going, somehow I knew we’d be the only white family left.

  Grandma got up and took her plate to the sink. “Nicky, you look good. Looks like your skin cleared up.”

  The Clearasil that I had been sm
earing across my forehead every night was working, and I was glad someone noticed. “Thanks.”

  “Bet there are lots of pretty girls who’d be interested in meeting you.”

  “You’ll be the first to know when that happens,” I said. Himself was smiling at me.

  “She was very quick to get me and your uncles married off,” he said, winking.

  Grandma brought over an Ebinger’s chocolate layer cake, still in the green cardboard box, and four cake plates. I had stopped eating anything that might make my skin flare up—tomato sauce, anything fried—but chocolate was chocolate.

  I cleared the rest of the lunch plates. When I came back to the table, Grandpa was eating a huge piece of cake. The filling was mocha. The aroma of the chocolate icing—dark and slick on top—smelled so delicious that I immediately picked up a cake plate.

  “Just a small piece. And I mean it.”

  Grandma cut me a slightly larger piece than I’d asked for and left the room. “Wait right here. I want to show you something.” After a few minutes she came back, clutching a navy blue leather photo album, the old-fashioned kind where the pictures are layered on top of another in plastic sleeves. She opened it and flipped about half of the twenty photos on the left side and presented the book to me, pointing to a black-and-white horizontal shot with a deckled edge. I looked down at a very young woman in catseye glasses—a dead giveaway for Mom—holding a bundle in a summer-weight blanket. That bundle was me.

  I was sure I’d seen this photo before, but I was struck anyway by the innocence of the image, how happy everyone was. The first grandchild.

  There was a girl standing on the sidelines, blond hair clipped behind one ear with a barrette. She had a tentative expression on her face, as if she’d just wandered into this intimate moment and didn’t know if she should enter the shot or back out.

  I pointed at the girl. “Who’s that?”

  “That’s your Aunt Regina. She was about ten years old.”

  The mention of her name got Dad’s attention. “Here, let me see that.”