I HAD NO IDEA how sick my brother would become. The hep C was only part of it. Diane’s death was the true disease he battled. It was as though he’d shut off a fan after her murder by not taking care of himself, its blade, although still spinning, turning slower each day. In due time, we all knew without saying, the blade would stop. And as I walked away from the cemetery that day, I could see in Mark’s eyes that he didn’t care any longer when that day came. Perhaps the sooner, the better.
I decided to take a ride by my childhood home on Hollister Drive, not far away from the cemetery. When you haven’t seen the house where you grew up for a long time, your initial reaction is one of shock. Everything seemed so much bigger as a child: the house itself, the street, the yard, the distance between your home and your best friend’s. Parked out front, staring, I wondered how four of us boys (ranging in ages from one to eleven) and my parents ever managed to fit into such a small space. But that was the rub where nostalgia and reality met: in memory it was all perfect; in person it was as though someone else had lived it.
The house where Mark, our brothers Tommy and Frank, and I grew up in East Hartford was one of hundreds of cookie-cutter, Pratt & Whitney “dorms,” I’ll call them, built on slabs of concrete in the 1940s and 1950s to house a growing number of immigrant workers flocking to the Hartford region to work on the war effort. That wistful desire, the inner yearning to step back into those childhood moments when life, in retrospect, seemed “so much simpler,” as they say, tugged at me. Just over my shoulder, twenty-three years before, I had sat atop a pony on my sixth birthday, decked out in full cowboy regalia, my ten-gallon hat and holstered cap gun, pretending to be James West from my favorite childhood TV series, The Wild Wild West.
I could still see the bookshelf on the first floor inside the old house with several random volumes of The Encyclopedia Britannica —DEM to EDW and GIC to HAR—my mom purchased from an endcap display at Andy’s Supermarket, a pink carbon copy receipt on the table she placed next to the invoice for the white aluminum siding and Kirby vacuum she bought from men who came to the door while my dad was at work.
Dad is a Korean War vet. He climbed his way up from inside a Hartford steel company warehouse to drive a truck and then took an office job, where he sat, hunched over his desk inside a cubicle, for close to forty years. Mom worked retail, Topps and Two Guys, stayed home with us kids, and then went to work, oddly and embarrassingly, for a paving company, tarring driveways, working with a guy who picked her up while Dad was at work.
Just the look and feel of the old neighborhood, staring at all the houses of old friends, where passing notes with that first crush made you feel devious and lustful for the first time, where we played football and wrestled in the circle, was enough to bring me to tears, which I understood for maybe the first time were shed on this day for Mark and Diane (I couldn’t cry in front of everyone else because I was supposed to hate her). The neighborhood back in the day seemed so big, so community-oriented and segregated by ethnicity. Grandma Castellassi, from my mom’s side, lived a mile away, in the Italian section; “Kitty” Grandma Phelps, from dad’s side, had a house just around the corner, next to the Irish. Blessed Sacrament Church was a five-minute walk; McCartin School, where I walked to and from every morning and afternoon with my Six Million Dollar Man metal lunch box with the stumpy matching thermos, was three blocks away. In my mind I went back to those days at McCartin putting on actual plays, celebrating those precious holidays we were allowed to call Thanksgiving, Halloween, and Christmas; where we had Field Day outside on the last day of school (and not every damn kid won a ribbon).
Our neighbors were like family. We played kick-the-can and terrorized Mr. Softie. Fastened playing cards by clothespins to the spokes of our bicycles. Hung around the grassy circle in front of my house. Made fun of the old lady drunk who never showed her face or cut her lawn or ponied up five bucks for us to shovel her driveway. Ran from the “project” kids when they hopped the fence and came looking for fresh ass to beat. The road where my brother Tommy—begging our parents for a minibike one summer—crashed the thing into the neighbor’s fence upon first ride. I can still hear the loose chain on the thing rattling, the engine puffing putt-putt-putt-putt, and feel the spongy grip of the throttle, the smell of gasoline fluttering out of the exhaust.
I was obsessed with Bruce Lee (that iconic velvet Enter the Dragon poster hung over my headboard) and jai alai (I badgered Dad until he bought me a cesta). Our “special,” once-in-a-while dinner was cube steak, surely not organic or grass-fed, but a piece of meat tough as rubber bands and no doubt loaded with antibiotics and other chemicals—and we fucking loved it. I remember Jeopardy, Adam-12, Walter Cronkite and the Daily Number every night at 7:30 P.M. Tang, Kool-Aid and Sea Monkeys.
Some things never leave you.
*
I MET A WOMAN five months after Diane’s funeral. We were married on New Year’s Eve, twelve weeks later. Moving in with her, I gifted Mark the apartment I’d moved into after coming home from an AA meeting one night to find a yellow summons to vacate the Susan Road premises wedged in the front door.
Mark shifted his focus in the months that followed. He didn’t much want to talk about what happened, at least not with me. He drank beer and maintained his opiate addiction, yet I will say this: He made a staunch effort to pull back and be the father he could manage to be. His kids grew. They lived with our brothers, but Mark spent more time with them every year. They got to know one another again. They did things together. They didn’t focus on the past, but they somehow managed to stay in the present. It was as though a barrier had been torn down between them. Strangely, in Diane’s passing, they started to be a family again.
Amends. Forgiveness. Isn’t that the only way to move forward?
We all knew the hepatitis was worsening. Mark settled into a new apartment in Rockville (a small urban section of Vernon) after being tossed from the one I’d gifted him. He was closer to his kids. He lived courtesy of state and city welfare. He took so many pills I couldn’t keep track of which were keeping him alive and which were killing him.
I’d stop by and say hello. My first book had come out.
“I’m proud of you,” he said one day. “You published a book.”
I walked away that day wiping my eyes on my sleeve.