THIS WAS HOW I came to interview Rudy Molinaro about his house. It made him into a sort of ally. I didn’t know any adults that weren’t related to kids I knew, or to school, so he was a first. Rudy made being an adult seem weirdly like being a kid—as if things happened to you, and you couldn’t really change the course of life. Like it was fated, somehow.
My dad took me over to Rudy’s on a Sunday afternoon, and sat on a bar stool by the kitchen counter reading the newspaper while I interviewed Rudy with my mom’s old pocket tape recorder—“the tools of the journalist’s trade,” she’d said as she rummaged in her desk for it and waved it triumphantly aloft.
“I know you,” Rudy said when we arrived. He pointed his stubby finger at me. “You go with that little blond girl. Hair white as an angel. I seen you around town.”
“Not so much anymore,” I said. “But yeah.”
My knees almost touched Rudy’s on the little brown corduroy sofa. A cigarette burn in the cushion next to my thigh distracted me: inside the hole I could spy tufty yellow foam and my fingers wanted to worry and pick at it. Finally I sat on my right hand to stop.
Rudy’s story was sad. He’d grown up in the house in the woods, and after high school he’d done an electrician’s apprenticeship with a firm over in Lawrence, and had eventually saved enough to move out of his parents’ place and rent an apartment in downtown Royston. This made him the first Royston apartment dweller I’d ever knowingly met. For a time, he’d had a girlfriend, and they talked about getting married, but she wanted to move to Boston, and he wanted to stay near home, where he knew everyone and everyone knew him. Then his dad had a heart attack while driving and crashed the pickup on the interstate, aged fifty-nine, and Rudy, himself aged thirty-one and single (the girlfriend having made her move), was faced with a tough choice.
Home alone in the woods, his mother, diabetic, had a bad leg, so she couldn’t drive. She couldn’t have moved to an apartment in town, where there would’ve been stairs. So Rudy moved back into the house on Vine Tail Road, and he got Bessie the German shepherd instead of a bride, and he loved her just as much, even though she wasn’t allowed to sleep in the house with him. Rudy spent most of his thirties there—he’d been let go from the electricians’ outfit in Lawrence in 2009, when the recession hit and they were downsizing, though he was the last employee not to be a blood relation of Doug Bergdahl, the owner and founder, and Doug had made much of how sad he was to see him go.
After that, it was odd jobs, and the security guard-cum-maintenance post for the Land Association, whose land included the asylum—a basic income boosted by short cleanup contracts, which didn’t pay too well, but for God’s sake, it was a job, they weren’t easy to come by, and it enabled him to look after his mother. She was deteriorating from the time he came home to her—missing his dad is what Rudy said, but later my father suggested that Mrs. Molinaro had been fond of a drink or two, which, he explained, is an even bigger problem when you’re diabetic. It got so she was essentially bedridden, and then Rudy became a bit teary remembering and we didn’t go into much detail, but he said that hospice had been great, he didn’t know what he would’ve done otherwise, and by that he meant specifically Bev Burnes. I could picture it, even though the double-wide where we sat and drank instant coffee obviously wasn’t the same as the vanished Cape, but I imagined it similarly uncleaned, with gritty carpets and dust balls and sticky rings on all the surfaces. I could see the bustling, voluminous, righteous Bev, crackling down the drive in her Civic, stethoscope dangling from her neck, ruddy-faced and a tad wheezy in her cloud of sweet scent with her candy fingernails aflutter as she made order, a little derecho of cleanliness in the house, wiping a surface, soothing a brow, taking a pulse, changing a diaper, and eventually—the Angel of Death—administering her seductive and essentially fatal morphine.
In all this busyness, Rudy would have been baffled and grateful, grateful. He was not—he is not—what my mother calls reconstructed, nor what she calls sophisticated either. Bev would have seemed to him like a lighthouse on a rock, a sturdy and gracious illumination that transformed his dark corner of Royston.
His mother died of a stroke—“a mercy,” he said that Bev had said, “because you knew her path was headed in one direction only”—in March of 2010, when there were not yet any signs of spring on the forest floor, or birds to sing consolingly in the branches, and Rudy had felt very alone, except for Bessie, who howled for three days straight as if to purge his grief.
So when the storm had come late that fall and flattened the house, destroying what remained of his known life, the devastation was complete. He didn’t say that—he wasn’t the kind of person who would say such a thing; in fact, he looked at his hands and mumbled, “It was bad. Real bad,” and for a full three minutes afterward said nothing more (I watched the digital clock on his stove in the silence, exchanged glances with my father, waited), as if letting those few words blossom into the room around us, the full and inexpressible badness of his loss. I gathered that he’d felt some dark justice was at work, that he was losing the material objects that represented what he’d already lost with his mother’s death, as if nature were forcing him to understand that he needed to begin again from the beginning, that nothing, ever, would be the way it had been before.
The night of the storm, he’d been at a poker game in town, a monthly gathering of old friends from high school. Because the bad weather was forecast, he’d taken Bessie in the truck—“She hates a storm; all dogs do. They smell it before it comes,” he said—and had locked her in the cab, where she sat in the driver’s seat with her nose to the steering wheel and her ears pricked. “In the worst of it, I went out to check on her, and she was crying. Okay, but crying a lot. I’d been careful not to park near any trees, just in case. Falling branches, you know. But the crying broke my heart. So I asked Ham, could I bring her in, could she stay in the kitchen, and he said sure, so I did. But the crying didn’t stop. With the guys, we laughed about it, a great strong dog like Bessie, afraid of a bit of weather. I thought it was the wind, you know? The sound of the wind.” He shook his head. “But later . . . Ham had me stay till the storm calmed down, all of us stayed, a poker marathon—I lost a hundred bucks that night—and later, when I drove back to the house and saw . . . well, then I figured Bessie knew all along. I think she knew when it was happening.”