“That was a good magazine,” Hank said.
“Yes. Then, of course, I met Mary. She’s a wonderful girl.”
“Yes.”
“And now my son is a murderer.” He shook his head. “If you understand it, Mr. Bell, please tell me. Because I don’t. I’ve wracked my brain trying to understand it, and I can’t. Jesus, I can’t! I can’t understand the damn thing!”
His face was in anguish now, and Hank felt he would begin crying at any moment. “Mr. Di Pace,” he said, “there are lots of things we...”
“Do you know what I’ve been doing ever since this happened?” Di Pace said. “I’ve been going over everything, everything we ever did, every word I ever spoke to my son, every slap I ever gave him, every present, every place I took him. I’ve been reliving his life. I’ve been going over it step by step, inch by inch, and trying to find out why he did this. Because if he did this thing, he’s not to blame. What did I do wrong, I keep asking myself. What? What? Where did I fail my son?”
“You can’t blame yourself for a slum environment, Mr. Di Pace. Danny might have been all right if...”
“Then who do I blame? Who do I blame for getting fired when I worked out on Long Island? Who do I blame for the decision to come back to Harlem? Mr. Bell, who do I blame for the fact that I’m a failure and my son is a murderer?”
“You’ve got a shoe store. You’ve got—”
“I’ve got a life that’s a failure, Mr. Bell. John Di Pace, failure. Even Danny knew it. Mary? Mary loves me. Whatever I want to do is all right with her. But you can’t expect the same love from a child. You’ve got to prove yourself to a child. And what did I ever prove to Danny? I can remember when he first found out I hadn’t been in the service. He came in one day and said his friend’s father had been a sailor, and he wanted to know what I had been. I told him I hadn’t been drafted. I told him I had a punctured ear drum. He asked me what that was, a punctured eardrum. I told him it was a hole in my ear through which poison gas could enter, that gas masks hadn’t been designed to stop this possibility. He said, ‘But weren’t you in the Army?’ I told him I wasn’t. ‘The Navy?’ he said. No, not the Navy either. ‘Then what? The Marines?’ No, not the Marines. ‘Nothing?’ he said. ‘You were nothing?’
“I was nothing, Mr. Bell. You were flying bombers over Germany, and I was nothing.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Nobody wanted to go fight a war.”
“I wanted to. How do you explain a punctured eardrum to an eight-year-old kid who only wants to know that his father was a hero? I heard him outside one day a little while later. This other kid was telling him that his father had been on a destroyer and that it had been sunk by Japanese suicide planes. When he was finished, Danny said, ‘You should see my Daddy’s stamp collection. I’ll bet it’s the biggest stamp collection in the world.’ A stamp collector against a sailor on a destroyer that went down.”
“I don’t think that had anything to do with—”
“Do you have any kids, Mr. Bell?”
“Yes. A daughter. She’s thirteen.”
“Girls are easier. I guess you’re lucky.”
“They’re not so easy.”
“Do you ever get the feeling that you don’t know your own kid?”
“Sometimes.”
“I used to get that feeling a lot, even before this happened, before the — the killing, I mean. I used to look at Danny, and I saw him growing up before my eyes, and I knew that one day soon he’d be a man, and I didn’t even know him. And I used to wonder when I stopped knowing him, when he became something less than my son, and something more than my son, when he became this person called Danny Di Pace who was a person in his own right, a person very different from the two people who’d produced him. I used to wonder where he’d come from all of a sudden, this stranger who sat at the dinner table with us and told stories about friends I didn’t even know. Where did he come from? Who was he? My son? Why, my son was just a little thing I used to hold in my arms while giving him his bottle. Who was this — this man almost that I didn’t even know? Do you ever feel that way, Mr. Bell? With your daughter?”
“Yes,” he said uneasily. “Sometimes.”
“But girls are different. You don’t have to worry with girls. I read someplace that five times as many boys as girls are arrested each year. And with girls, it’s mostly sexual offenses. They don’t get into the more serious trouble. The beatings and the... the killings.”
“I guess you’re right,” Hank said.
Di Pace nodded. The room was silent. Then he said, “You know, I remembered something the other night. It just came to me out of the blue when I was sitting and thinking over the things we’d done and said. It was something that happened right after I lost my job. I remember I was out covering some bushes. We were going to sell the house anyway, we’d already decided to come back to Harlem, you see, but I don’t like to see living things die, and that was a bad corner in the winter, the way the wind used to rip around it, the bushes could have been damaged, so I covered them every year. This was in the fall, I can remember it was a very bright clear day, but with a nip in the air, you know those kind of days. I was outside working. I had on an old brown sweater, I remember...”
(The housing development in which the Di Paces live is typical of the low-cost developments on Long Island. The house is priced at $11,990 and the Di Paces were required to produce a thousand dollars in cash when they first bought it. Monthly mortgage payments used to be $83, but they are now $101 because the house was finally assessed and also because the bank holding Di Pace’s mortgage says there is an escrow shortage, a term he does not fully understand. He does understand that the house is now costing him eighteen dollars more per month than he had figured on.
Di Pace’s house is a six-room ranch on a corner plot. The plot is seventy feet by one hundred feet as opposed to the sixty-by-one-hundred plots most of his neighbors own. But because the house is on a corner the back yard is really a side yard, and this disturbs Di Pace. He has always wanted a true back yard. The fact that he must barbecue on the side of his house where all the neighbors can see him embarrasses him. He is working in his side yard now, covering his bushes with tarpaulin. The houses of the development stretch in endless symmetry toward the horizon. There is a flawless blue sky overhead. The leaves on the spindly maples which sprout on the front lawns of all the houses are turning brown. There is a sharp wind, and it lifts Di Pace’s hair as he works. The sunshine is very bright. It is a good crisp fall day. It holds the death of summer and the promise of winter.
Di Pace works tirelessly and fastidiously. The brown sweater he is wearing is torn at the elbows and unraveling at the throat. But he likes this sweater. It was given to him by Mary years ago, when they were just kids going together. When he received it, it reminded him of an Army sweater. It smells of perspiration now, and there are streaks of paint on it from previous household chores, but it is a warm sweater and it fits him well. He has not gained a pound since the time Mary gave him the sweater. He knows he will never gain any weight or lose any. He is what he is, and he’ll be that until he dies.
When Danny approaches him, Di Pace does not look up. He continues working on the bush, securing the tarpaulin with cord, tying the cord tightly about the thicker lower stems. Danny is almost thirteen years old, a tall boy who is beginning to fill out, his awkward long-leggedness giving way to the well-proportioned body of a young man. He watches his father silently for a moment.)