But in the morning, my father pushed through the swinging kitchen door while I was still eating my cereal. He tapped two fingers on the table just in front of my bowl. “Time to go,” he said. “Right now.” Andrea was nowhere in evidence. The girls were still in Maeve’s room (they slept there together, as per Bright’s prediction), Sandy and Jocelyn had yet to arrive. I didn’t ask him what had happened, or remind him that his wife and her daughters were supposed to come along. I didn’t go and get the book I planned to read on the train coming home or tell him we were supposed to leave two hours from now. I left my bowl of half-eaten Cheerios on the table for Sandy to find, and followed him out the door. We were ditching Andrea. Easter was late that year, and the morning was flush with the insane sweetness of hyacinth. My father was walking fast and his legs were so long that even with his bad knee I had to run to keep up. We went beneath the long trellis of wisteria that had yet to bloom, and all the way to the garage I thought, Escape, escape, escape. We beat the word into the gravel with every step.
I could scarcely imagine the courage it required to tell Andrea she couldn’t come with us, and she in turn must have started the kind of argument he found untenable. All that mattered to him was getting out of the house before she came downstairs to make another point in her case, and with that imperative, we fled. We were in the car hours earlier than we had planned.
If I asked my father a question when he was quiet, he would say he was having a conversation with himself and that I shouldn’t interrupt. I could tell he was having one of those conversations now, so I looked out the car window at the glorious morning and thought about Manhattan and my sister and all the fun we were going to have. I wouldn’t ask Maeve to take me to see the Statue of Liberty, Maeve got sick on boats, but I wondered if I could talk her into the Empire State Building.
“You know I used to live in New York,” my father said once we were on the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
I said I guessed I did. What I didn’t say was that Andrea had just brought it up at the dinner table.
Then he put on his turn signal to work his way towards the exit. “We’ve got plenty of time. I’ll show you.”
For the most part, what I knew about my father was what I saw: he was tall and thin with weathered skin and hair the color of rust, the color of my hair. All three of us had blue eyes. His left knee was slow to bend, worse in the winter and when it rained. He never said a word about it but it was easy enough to tell when it hurt him. He smoked Pall Malls, put milk in his coffee, worked the crossword puzzle before reading the front page. He loved buildings the way boys loved dogs. When I was eight years old, I asked my father at the dinner table if he was going to vote for Eisenhower or Stevenson. Eisenhower was running for a second term and all the boys in school were for him. My father clicked the point of his knife against his plate and told me I was never to ask a question like that, not of him, not of anyone. “It may be fine for boys to speculate on whom they might vote for because boys can’t vote,” he said. “But to ask an adult such a question is to violate a man’s right to privacy.” In retrospect, I imagine my father was horrified that I might think there was any chance he’d vote for Stevenson, but I didn’t know that at the time. What I knew was that you had to touch a hot stove only once. Here are the things I talked to my father about when I was a boy: baseball—he liked the Phillies. Trees—he knew the name of every one, though he would chastise me for asking about the same kind of tree more than once. Birds—likewise. He kept feeders in the backyard and could easily identify all of his customers. Buildings—be it their structural soundness, architectural details, property value, property tax, you name it—my father liked to talk about buildings. To list the things I didn’t ask to my father about would be to list the stars in heaven, so let me throw out one: I did not ask my father about women. Not women in general and what you were supposed to do with them, and definitely not women in the particular: my mother, my sister, Andrea.
Why it was that this day should have been different I couldn’t have said, though surely the fight with Andrea must have had something to do with it. Maybe that, along with the fact he was going to back New York where he and my mother were from, and he was going to see Maeve in school for the first time, prompted a wave of nostalgia in him. Or maybe it was nothing more than what he told me: we had extra time.
“All of this was different,” he said to me as we drove from street to street in Brooklyn. But Brooklyn wasn’t so different from neighborhoods I knew in Philadelphia, neighborhoods where we collected rent on Saturdays. There was just more of everything in Brooklyn, a feeling of density that stretched in every direction. He slowed the car to crawl, pointed. “Those apartment buildings? When I lived in the neighborhood those were wood. They took the old ones down, or there was a fire. The whole block. That coffee shop was there—” He pointed out Bob’s Cup and Saucer. The people at the window counter were finishing a very late breakfast, some of them reading the paper and others staring out at the street. “They made their own crullers. I’ve never found anything like them. On Sunday after church there’d be a line down the block. See that shoe shop? Honest Shoe Repair. That’s always been there.” He pointed again, a shop window barely wider than the door itself. “I went to school with the kid whose father owned it. I bet if we walked in right now he’d be there, banging new soles onto shoes. That would be some sort of life.”
“I guess,” I said. I sounded like an idiot but I wasn’t sure how to take it all in.
He turned the car at the corner and again at the light, and then we were on Fourteenth Avenue. “Right there,” he said, and pointed to the third floor of a building that looked like every other building we’d passed. “I lived there, and your mother was a block back that way.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder.
“Where?”
“Right behind us.”
I kneeled on the seat and looked out the back window, my heart in my throat. My mother? “I want to see,” I said.
“It’s just like all the other ones.”
“It’s still early.” It was Maundy Thursday, and the people who went to Mass had either gone early or they would go late, after work. The only people walking around were women out doing their shopping. We were double parked, and just as my father was about to tell me no, the car right in front of us pulled out like it was issuing an invitation.
“Well, what am I supposed to say to that?” my father said, and turned into the space.
The day had turned overcast since we left Pennsylvania but it wasn’t raining and we walked back down the street a block, my father limping slightly in the cold. “Right there. First floor.”
The building looked like all the others, but to think that my mother had lived there made me feel like we had landed on the moon, it was that impossible. There were bars over the windows and I raised my hand to touch them.
“Those keep out the knuckleheads,” my father said. “That’s what your grandfather used to say. He put them on.”
I looked at him. “My grandfather?”
“Your mother’s father. He was a fireman. A lot of nights he slept at the station, so he put bars on the windows. I don’t know if he needed them, though; not much happened back then.”
My fingers curled around one of the bars. “Does he still live here?”