Flesh and Blood, Page 4

  His mother came and crouched before Billy. She brought her colors and her stiff rustlings. “Is something the matter with your horse, honey?” she asked.

  He didn't move or speak. The crying continued without his permission. His mother took the horse out of his hand, looked tenderly at its wound.

  “It isn't much to want,” she whispered. Then, louder, she said, “I guess he didn't ask for a football, did he? I guess he asked for a plastic horse that costs ten cents and is made right here in the U.S. of A.”

  “He's got a million of them little animals,” Billy's father said. “He needs a million and one?”

  “For heaven's sake, listen to yourself.”

  “He wants an American toy, l'll get him a football.”

  “You and I can talk about this later,” Billy's mother said. “C'mon, Billy. Come in the kitchen with me, I could use a little help with the dishes.”

  He followed her, because he was unable to do anything of his own. He felt his father's silence pressing on the back of his head. In the kitchen his mother wiped his nose with a handkerchief that smelled like her. “We'll go out tomorrow and get a new horse,” she said. “Okay? Accidents happen, it's no big deal. We'll just get you a new one. Okay?”

  He nodded avidly. She smiled, deeply pleased, and told him he was a good little boy, a prize. She told him he deserved all sorts of good things, and if anyone tried to tell him differently, that person didn't know what he was talking about. Billy stared at her gratefully. She offered a practiced smile, one he'd seen thousands of times: a quick jerking upward of the corners of her mouth, a squeezing shut of the eyes, as if the act of smiling caused her a sharp and exquisite pain. Something bucked inside him, a feeling so unruly he thought he might be sick. She was his friend. She was the one who allowed. How could he dislike her? He heard, again, the sound the horse's leg had made, snapping off.

  1963/ It happened quickly. It happened because Constantine was Greek and because he stopped into a tavern for a beer. It upset everything he thought he'd learned about cause and effect. One damp yellow day just after the summer solstice he met a man named Kazanzakis, a thin man with gold buttons on his blazer. During his lunch hour Constantine had sought out the shade of a neighborhood tavern crowded with men watching the Mets game. The television, a big black-and-white, flickered on a shelf over rows of illuminated bottles. Beside it, a picture of an ice-blue mountain lake advertised beer. Constantine took the only empty stool, next to Kazanzakis, who watched the game and ate peanuts with unhungry avidity, as if his true objective was not to eat the peanuts but to reveal the bottom of the dish. Between batters Constantine and Kazanzakis started talking. They talked baseball, then they talked construction. Constantine was foreman on a job just winding up. Kazanzakis was a developer who'd started building sprawls of cheap houses—he called them planned communities—to the north and west of town. They introduced themselves and, upon hearing one another's names, declared their places of origin.

  Kazanzakis's grandparents, as it turned out, had lived in a village less than thirty miles from the place where Constantine was born. The two men spoke Greek to each other. They laughed, ordered more beers. By the end of the third inning, Constantine had a new job He was hired to oversee construction of Kazanzakis's newest planned community, which would soon be laid out on a flat brown stretch of reclaimed marshland twenty miles to the north. The men shook hands, ordered another round. Kazanzakis put his thin arm around Constantine's shoulders and announced to the bar, “Hey, sports fans, I want you to meet my new partner. A Greek, a man I can trust.”

  It was all chance, a throw of the dice. The unrelenting work of the past fifteen years had meant almost nothing, aside from what it taught Constantine about joists and sashes. What had made his fortune was the decision to go into a tavern on a Tuesday afternoon.

  What had made his fortune was being Greek. After all those years of Mary's insistence, “We're Americans, Con. Americans.” Once it started, his Greek good fortune refused to quit. Kazanzakis proved to have a sharp eye for human wishes, a sure knowledge of what people wanted to buy. His houses were inexpensive, but he dressed them up with picket fences and false dormers. He advertised their several opulent features: top-of-the-line appliances, rumpus rooms, two-car garages. Constantine, for his part, knew the corners that could be invisibly cut. He knew about using green wood and plastic pipes; he knew how much time could be saved if you told your men to forget about drilling through the studs for wiring and just smack dents in them with hammers. The houses sold nearly as fast as he and Kazanzakis could get them built. Constantine, who was raised on a thrift hard as bone, kept overhead so low Kazanzakis was often moved to embrace him and call him a magician. He'd never imagined a tract might be so profitable.

  Mary could hardly believe how the money grew. Now, finally, she could give beautiful things to the children, although her daughters consistently preferred the cheap and garish. Susan wanted more Barbie clothes and a toy oven in which a lightbulb scorched pans of batter into little round scabs of cake. Zoe wanted Lincoln Logs and a toy rifle and a ratty “coonskin” cap made of dyed rabbit fur that smelled faintly of urine. Mary bought those things and bought others as well, hoping her daughters would learn to see the shimmer that true quality produced in the air of a room. She bought gold bracelets and mohair sweaters and jewelry boxes that opened to reveal a tiny ballerina twirling to the tune of “Fur Elise.” Those gifts were briefly embraced and then discarded. The ruffled dresses were thrown indifferently onto the floor. The imported dolls were left outside, their delicate, hand-wrought faces smiling graciously up into the rain.

  Of Mary's children, only Billy wanted the things she wanted to give. He was a dreamy boy who brought books home from the library, who sought hiding places where she could always find him. When she bought him an alpaca coat he wore it to church on Sundays in a spirit of miniature masculine sobriety that rinsed her heart with affection. Although she loved all three children, Billy was the one she could read. For him she bought soft V-necked sweaters from Scotland. She bought a burgundy leather briefcase when he started fifth grade, and a deep-green hunter's cap. For the girls she furnished a dollhouse, which sat first in Susan's room and then in Zoe's. Dust gathered on the intricate wooden furniture, the lamps that really worked. Mary cleaned the dollhouse periodically and, with a pang of guilty pleasure, rearranged the furniture.

  1964/ Susan led them onto the golf course. Before, there had been only fenced yards and the playground. There had been buildings and the alley with its rotting smell and the empty factory where weeds curled from the concrete. Now there was this bright field of green. Dead leaves sent up their smoke and a bird sang “Cree-cree-clara?” again and again.

  Susan knew her father had gotten all this for her. She felt flattered and afraid.

  “Come on, Billy,” she called sternly. Billy was dreaming along, twenty feet behind, stirring up leaves with his sneakers.

  “I'm coming,” he answered. Zoe had run ahead. Susan turned to see Billy shuffling his feet as leaf shadows made bright and dark shapes on him. His ravaged beauty got under her breastbone and squeezed her lungs, a sharp inner contraction. She sometimes imagined dragging her brother from a burning building, knocking the incipient fire out of his clothes and hair.

  She would rescue him. They would escape into the woods together and live there, away from the big immaculate house her father had bought for her. There must be woods, somewhere.

  “Come on” she said. Her shadow stood before her, serrated on the leafy ground.

  “What's your hurry?” Billy said. “We're going for a walk, right? We're not late for anything.”

  “I don't want Zoe to get lost,” she said. “She keeps running all over the place, I can't stop her.”

  “She isn't lost,” he said. “She's right up there, climbing that tree.”

  Susan turned and saw Zoe clinging to the lower branches of an enormous pine, working her way up. The colors of Zoe's clothes, her pale yellow
shirt and indigo jeans, were cut into shapes by the pine needles.

  Susan shouted, “Zoe. Stop that.”

  “She doesn't have to stop,” Billy said. “She can climb a tree if she wants to.”

  Susan stood between Billy and Zoe, and her sense of her own promising future drained away. She would always be young, always unheeded, always insistent on rules of behavior no one else seemed willing to bother about. The world should have been so simple. All everyone had to do was speak softly but clearly, avoid fights, walk neither too fast nor too slow.

  “She'll fall,” Susan said, though she believed that Zoe was rising toward an accident, more endangered by the sky than the earth. “Zoe,” she called again. “Come down.”

  She imagined herself catching Zoe in her arms.

  “I can see the house,” Billy said. “Look. That patch of white over there. You see it?”

  Susan started for the tree. “Zoe, I mean it,” she said.

  “This is our home now,” Billy said, although Susan had gone too far to hear him. “We're rich. Well, we're semi-rich.”

  Susan marched to the bottom of the tree and stood with her hands fisted on her hips. Standing on the level grass, squinting up into the canopy of pine needles with her shadow slanting behind her, she might have been a young handmaiden to a goddess of domestic exasperation. She wore a white windbreaker, pink pedal pushers, and anklets with little yarn balls sewn on at the heels to keep them from slipping down into her tennis shoes.

  “Zoe,” she shouted. “Come down here this instant.”

  Zoe was struggling to boost herself onto a forked branch nearly thirty feet above the ground. She didn't answer, which was as Susan expected. Susan sighed, and liked the sound she made. It was an adult sigh, with depths of intention. She'd lived in this neighborhood less than a month, and already knew of three boys whose eyes—brown, darker brown, and blue-green—sought the particulars of her life.

  She imagined the boys stealing her from this new house, bringing her out here to the golf course. She would rule them, comfort them, make them behave.

  “I mean it,” she called. She thought, briefly, of her voice winding out among the tree trunks, following its own thread. Maybe there was a boy out here right now, walking heartsick and lost among the trees and the sand traps.

  Billy came and stood beside her. He had a smell, not strong but unmistakable, a combination of bleach and stale bread. Susan wondered if he kept himself clean.

  “She's not gonna come down till she's ready,” he said. “You know that.”

  “She's going to break her neck,” Susan said. “I promised I'd look out for her.”

  “I'm gonna climb it, too,” Billy said. “I bet you can see the whole town from up there.”

  “Billy, no. You stay right here.”

  But he hoisted himself up onto the lowest branch, and then wriggled into the crotch of the tree. Susan watched his skinny butt twitch inside his dungarees and wondered, again, what sort of girls would someday want to ease his pain.

  “Bill—ee,” she cried. “Darn you.”

  He went quickly, and was soon pulling himself onto a branch just below Zoe's. She sat with one knee drawn up under her chin and a dirty hand rummaging through her hair. “Hey, Zo,” he said, a little breathlessly. He had scraped his hands on the rough bark, and the small abrasions tingled in the moving air. She didn't answer. He watched her until he was sure she was firmly balanced on her branch, then turned and looked out through the scrim of needles down into Garden City.

  “If you two don't get down here in exactly one minute, I'm coming up there after you,” Susan called.

  “Pretty,” Billy said. From this height he could see the streets of his new neighborhood, neatly gridded, lined with trees in red and yellow leaf. He saw a sparrow hovering over a bird feeder, its wings making a little brown disturbance on the air. Farther away were steeples, the brick hulls of stores and banks, a gathering pale blue distance.

  “The animals can see us,” Zoe said. “They can climb this tree and look right down into our house.”

  “Are you afraid of that?” Billy asked.

  “No. I like it.”

  Zoe pulled at her hair, scratched her knee. Although she had never told him, Billy knew Zoe thought of herself as an animal. She snatched food off her plate and ate it in small, eager bites. She slept curled up in a nest she made out of blankets and sheets.

  “This is where we live now,” Billy said, half to Zoe and half to himself. “Now we're semi-rich, and we live here.”

  Zoe nodded. “This is the tree kingdom,” she said. “That's the cottage where the people live.”

  “It creeps me out a little,” he said. “I mean, a new school and everything. You're lucky to only be in second grade.”

  Zoe watched time pass through the town. Billy found he could speak into Zoe's animal self and say things he'd never say to anyone else. She cupped a lost little glen of watchful quiet he could breathe with her.

  “That's it,” Susan called. “I'm coming up.”

  “Our babysitter,” Billy said. Zoe smiled. She was a wiry little girl with black hair and heavy brows. She wore rubber beach thongs in October.

  “Do you think well change, from being rich?” Billy said. “Do you think it'll make a difference?”

  “We still get two more wishes,” Zoe said.

  “It could make a difference,” Billy said. He settled back on his branch, feeling the small tremors Susan sent through the tree as she worked her way up.

  “Darn you,” she said finally, from several feet below. “Darn you, both of you. I think I tore my pants.”

  “Look,” Billy said. “You can see the high school from here.”

  “We have to go back,” Susan said. “It's getting late.”

  “Not yet,” Billy answered. “I don't think it's safe yet. We should give it, like, another half hour.”

  “Everything's fine,” Susan said. “Honestly, I don't know why you have to make such a big deal out of everything.”

  “You go home,” he said. “We're gonna stay here awhile. Maybe we'll build a tree house up here.”

  “You're not building any tree house. This is private property.”

  “We're going to move here, Zoe and me.”

  “We have to go,” Susan pleaded. “Come on, dinner's probably ready.”

  “You go,” Billy said. “Zo and I are gonna stay here awhile.”

  “Don't you worry. I'm going.” But she stayed where she was. A squirrel hopped through the leaves at the base of the tree, raised itself up on its hind legs, and disappeared as suddenly as if it had been snatched down into the earth. Susan looked away from the tree, down to the house her father had built for her. She knew herself as a thin and erect fourteen-year-old girl sitting astride a branch among the smells of leaves. She wanted to claim the house that was hers and she wanted to live up here, silent and fierce as a young mother of the wild. Cloud shadows shifted over the flat land. A tree lost its light and the copper roof of a steeple flashed suddenly, like something huge and precious risen from the bottom of the ocean. Briefly, with the changing of the shadows, Susan saw that she was powerful. She saw how much could be built for her, and how much brought down. A flush of excitement passed through her. She thought of a dam bursting. She thought of a silver wall of water tumbling down over the churches and the stores, the orderly streets. She could see it. She could see the water engulfing everything, shattering windows, lifting roofs up off their eaves, roiling on as ordinary objects—a cup, a wig, a bar of soap—bobbed to the surface and were caught in the suck. She saw the water churn its way over the rise and stop, finally, halfway up this tree, just below the branch on which she sat. Only she, Zoe, and Billy would escape. Afterward, there would be a brilliant brown silence. There would be a steeple, the top half of a stopped clock, the upper twigs of a few oaks and elms. There would be flocks of ducks and geese, settling down. And gradually, as the water began to subside, there would be rings and necklaces caught am
ong the branches. She would lead Zoe and Billy back down to the wet, empty world and she would bedeck herself as they climbed down, orphans now, serene and grieving, facing a future in which anything could happen. She would arrive at the bottom covered in jewels.

  1965/ When Constantine took his night rides he imagined Mary sitting beside him. Not the Mary he lived with now but the Mary who'd been seventeen, a brisk mysterious girl latching a gate behind her. That Mary had managed to combine good sense with a scrubbed, feminine hopefulness. She hadn't yet begun to number his lacks. He was still in love with that Mary and he loved whatever traces of her remained—the self-possession, the devotion to order, the high-shouldered walk. When he went for his drives his companion was the young Mary, who sometimes blended in his mind with Susan. A smart girl who sat safely strapped in the passenger seat, watching the landscape with skepticism and stern admiration.

  He showed her the development, row upon row of houses; a whole village done in soft colors and simple, comforting shapes. Sometimes he parked on one of his streets and allowed himself to sit, taking it in, cushioned by the Buick's burgundy plush. He and Kazanzakis had built this entire town. These were their roofs defining the horizon, their windows sending light out into the dusk. On nights like those, he felt truly accomplished.

  It was a perfect village, new and orderly. Constantine's houses repeated themselves in series of three. One had a gabled roof; one a small front porch; and the third, his favorite, had a pair of bay windows trim and symmetrical as a young girl's breasts. The houses met the sky with their thrifty rhythms, and he was always surprised to see that they had in fact been called into existence. His days were made of details and arguments. Jerry, I'm telling you, we don't need felt between the roof and the sub-roof Who told you to order any goddamn stone, we can backfill the sewer lines with dirt. Only at night, on his drives, did he fully apprehend the houses that now stood because he had ordered Sheetrock by the boxcar, five thousand rolls of insulation, a whole forest's worth of pine. Sometimes at night he chose a house and watched it, always from a reasonable distance. He lit one cigarette after another and watched the windows light up or darken, watched dogs bark to be let in. Some nights a car stopped and let out a teenager; some nights a man or woman came outside to water the lawn. Once a hardy-looking man in green plaid slacks walked out and stood on his front lawn as the last light was leached from the sky and the stars began. Constantine had watched him until the man went back into his house, a gabled model that had cost, what, maybe one-fifth what Constantine had paid for his own house. Briefly, he'd loved and pitied that guy. That guy could have been his kid brother, or his oldest son. Constantine wasn't sure what he was doing, what he wanted here. He couldn't have said why, once or twice a month, he took himself on these spying excursions after he closed up the office. He always imagined young Mary beside him, or someone like Mary, and he imagined the lives being lived inside the walls. When he started his car again and drove home, he always did so in a chaos of yearning. He didn't permit himself to make these trips often. Once or twice a month, tops. He told himself he liked to check up on things, to keep abreast. He saw a girl sit waiting on the curb for someone who never arrived. He saw an orange-striped cat catch a thrush, saw how the nervous life went out of the bird quick as a burst balloon. He heard conversations and music and once he believed he heard the cries of two people making love. He drove home in a state of arching, rarefied hope that was almost painful in its intensity. For his family he had built a substantial new house on a full acre. He had given them two working fireplaces and thirty-eight windows and a front door flanked by carved wooden columns white and fluted as wedding cakes. As he punched the remote-control button to open his garage door he was aware of the constellations—the Hunter, the Ram, the Sisters—and of the interstate highway system along which nails and produce and shoes and tractors were even now being conveyed to their rightful homes. He was aware of the network of underground pipes that conducted water through a world of burrowing animals and the roots of trees. As the garage door opened on its pulleys and oiled chains he took leave of his ordinary, restless thoughts and entered a realm of joy. He couldn't explain the feeling. It was a sense of imminence, of titanic plates shifting in the night sky, rearranging themselves according to a plan too simple for human comprehension. Full of happiness, he steered his car into the garage. There were his tools hanging in perfect order on their white pegboard. There was his mower, his vise, his screws and brads in labeled jars. He allowed himself to sit for an extra minute in the cool silence of his car. Then he went through the side door into the kitchen, where Mary had kept his dinner waiting for him. On the refrigerator, old drawings of Billy's and Zoe's were held with magnets shaped like fruits. A plastic apple, an orange, a banana.