I wondered where most of those former friends were now (none of them black, for Pearl River was a lily-white town, and we only encountered black kids at varsity games). I had lost touch with them after we left for Maine, but some were probably still living here. After all, Pearl River -clannish, fiercely protective of its own-was the kind of in� the kind place that became home to generations. Bobby Gretton had lived two doors down on the other side of the street. His parents drove only Chevys, and kept each car for a maximum of two years before trading it in for a newer model. I looked to my left and saw a brown Chevy Uplander in the drive of what had always been the Gretton house. There was a fading bumper sticker on the rear of the car supporting Obama for president in ’08, and beside it a yellow ribbon. The car had veterans’ plates. That was Mr. Gretton for sure.
The light changed at my old bedroom window, a cloud scudding overhead giving the impression of movement within, and I felt again the presence of the boy I once was. There he sat, waiting for the first sight of his returning father, or perhaps a glimpse of Carrie Gottlieb, who lived across the street. Carrie was three years older than he, and generally considered to be the most beautiful girl in Pearl River, although there were those who whispered that she knew it too, and that that knowledge made her less attractive and personable than other, more modestly endowed and self-effacing young women. Such mutterings did not concern the boy. It did not concern many of the boys in town. It was Carrie Gottlieb’s very separateness, the sense that she walked through life on pedestals erected solely for her own purposes, that made her so desirable. Had she been more down-to-earth and less self-assured, their interest in her would have been considerably diminished.
Carrie went off to the city to become a model. Her mother would tell anyone who stood still for long enough about how Carrie was destined to adorn fashion spreads and television screens, but in the months and years that followed, no such images of Carrie appeared, and in time her mother stopped speaking of her daughter in that way. When asked by others (usually with a glint in their eye, sensing blood in the water) how Carrie was getting along, she would reply, “Fine, just fine,” her smile slightly strained as she moved the conversation on to safer ground or, if the questioner persisted, simply moved herself along instead. In time, I heard that Carrie came back to Pearl River and got a job as the hostess in a restaurant, eventually becoming the manager after she and the owner got married. She was still beautiful, but the city had taken its toll on her, and her smile was less certain than it once had been. Nevertheless, she had returned to Pearl River, and she bore the loss of her dreams with a certain grace, and people admired her for it, and maybe liked her a little more than before because of it. She was one of them, and she was home, and when she visited her parents on Franklin Avenue the ghost of a boy saw her, and smiled.
My father was not a big man compared to some of his fellow officers, barely making the NYPD’s height requirement and slighter in build than they were. To my boyhood self, though, he seemed like an imposing figure, especially when he wore his uniform, with the four-inch Smith & Wesson hanging on his belt, and his buttons gleaming against the deep, dark blue of his clothing.
“What are you gonna be when you grow up?” he would ask me, and I would always reply: “A cop.”
“And what kind of cop will you be?”
“A New York cop. N! Y! P! D!”
“And what kind of New York cop will you be?”
“A good one. The best.”
And my father would ruffle my hair, the flip side of the light cuff he would dispense whenever I did something that displeased him. Never a slap, never a punch: it wply� punch: ias enough to cuff the back of my head with his hard, callused palm, a signal that a line had been over-stepped. Further punishments would sometimes follow: grounding, the withholding of my allowance for a week or two, but the cuff was the danger sign. It was the final warning, and it was the only kind of physical violence, however mild, that I associated with my father until the day the two teenagers died.
Some of my friends, tired of living in a town defined by cops, were wary of my father. Frankie Murrow, in particular, used to curl in upon himself like a startled snail whenever my father was around. Frankie’s father was a security guard at a mall, so maybe it was something about uniforms and the men who wore them. Frankie’s father was a jerk, and perhaps Frankie just assumed that other men who wore uniforms and protected things were likely to be jerks too. Frankie’s father had asked him if he was a fag when, at the age of seven, Frankie had gone to take his father’s hand as they prepared to cross the road. Mr. Murrow was a “royal sonofabitch,” as my father had once put it. Mr. Murrow hated blacks and Jews and Hispanics, and he had a string of derogatory terms on the tip of his tongue for every one of them. He hated most white people too, though, so it wasn’t as if he was a racist. He was just good at hating.
At the age of fourteen, Frankie Murrow was put in reform school for arson. He’d burned his own house down while his old man was at work. He’d timed it pretty well, so that Mr. Murrow was turning onto his street just as the fire engines were arriving behind him. Frankie was sitting on the wall of the house opposite, watching the flames rise and laughing and crying at the same time.
My father was not a heavy drinker. He didn’t need alcohol to help him relax. He was the calmest man I had ever known, which made the relationship between him and his partner, and closest friend, Jimmy Gallagher, so difficult for the boy to understand. Jimmy, who always walked near the head of the town’s St. Patrick’s Day parade, who bled Irish green and cop blue, was all smiles, and almost-playful punches. He was taller than my father by three or four inches, and broader too. If they stood side by side on those occasions when Jimmy came to the house, my father would look a little embarrassed, as though he felt himself to be somehow wanting when compared to his friend. Jimmy would kiss and hug my mother as soon as he arrived, the only man, apart from her husband, who was permitted such intimacies, and then he would turn to me.
“There he is,” he would say. “There’s the man.”
Jimmy wasn’t married. He said that he had never met the right woman, but he’d enjoyed meeting a lot of the wrong ones. It was an old joke, and he used it often, but my mother and father would always laugh, even though they knew it was a lie. Women didn’t interest Jimmy Gallagher, although it would be many years before I understood that. I often wondered how difficult it must have been for Jimmy, keeping up a front for all those years, flirting with women in order to fit in. Jimmy Gallagher, who could make the most incredible pizzas from scratch, who could cook a banquet to please a king (or so I had once heard my father tell my mother) but who, when he hosted a poker game at his house, or had his buddies around to watch a ball game (because Jimmy, being single, could always afford the best and most modern TVs), would feed them nachos and beer, potato chips and store-bought TV dinners or, if the weather was good, cook steaks and burgers on the barbecue. And I sensed, even then, that while my father might have spoken too d�ve spoken my mother of Jimmy’s secret culinary skills, he did not make such references carelessly among his brother cops.