54. Omerta

 

The official reports called Adam’s death a suicide. Given the circumstances under which he was found, it wouldn’t—couldn’t—‘ve been ruled any other way. The police department, the medical examiner and others involved in the case would therefore not be required to investigate any further. And there wasn’t any reason for them to do so: They found no more physical evidence and after questioning people on the block—including mother and Mrs. Littington—they probably didn’t know any more about Adam, or why he filled his apartment with cooking gas.

The people of this block could stop any questioning or discussion of any incident—such as Adam’s death—even faster than the officials of the city or state ever could. Mother or the nuns—and later, the teachers—always told me I asked too many questions. I hadn’t seen him for several months—an era, at that time in my life—before the police marked off that front stoop with their orange bands.

Mother, who’d had more troubles than I’d realized then, said it’s something she could’ve done, but she could only think of those she’d leave behind. I’m sure other women on this block felt the same way. Sister Elizabeth said that in times of trouble everyone has a patron saint—and God. But what if…She wouldn’t say any more about it and would upbraid my mother for her child’s “morbid curiosity.”

Snow covered the stoop; it cleared away. The stoop, then the house, were painted over, but nobody moved in. Everybody, it seemed, could tell when I was going to ask about Adam, about what happened that night before Christmas Eve, when the wind that carried the snow and whispered its hissing admonition to close one’s eyes and leave the darkness under blankets, under layers of snow.

The sun had already disappeared behind heavy veils of clouds; the full moon—it was so bright I could sit next to the window in my room and read by it—illuminated the last clear sky I could remember seeing for a long time afterward.

During the spring that followed, it seemed that the woman whose name I never knew was taking more care than usual to keep her bushes from growing up over her flowers, or the sidewalk. Sunny days were full of overpowering glare we were used to seeing only on those summer days when people stayed inside their houses or in shade.

Out in the sun on such a day, you could exhale and it would feel like wind from the surface of the sun rushing back at your face. And the clouds, and even the rain, seized the flaking, peeling bricks and stained and tarnished metal sheets of the houses and bound them in a thick gray haze that seemed still only because the people of this block hadn’t noticed—or had forgotten—when it came and went.

Sister Elizabeth lost patience she never had and slapped me across the face for “thinking about evil, selfish deeds” and not keeping my mind on the day’s lesson. What did I care about base six numeral systems—I think that’s what she was teaching—anyway? What did that have to do with Adam or mother or me or anyone else on the block? About as much as patron saints had to do with Adam, I thought. Would he’ve been alive had he known what a polynomial or a declension was? Would any of the stuff they were teaching’ve made my father—whom I didn’t know, or rather, didn’t want to know—care enough to stay with me and mother, or made him able to help us, or at least not to hurt us?

Catechism, mathematics, all those subjects whose names come from languages nobody on this block spoke or would care to speak—What good would those things do him, me, mother, anybody? But mother still insisted I go to school and learn. She responded to my protests that “you never needed that stuff” with the same glancing glare she gave whenever I mentioned Adam or asked about the ones—almost always teenaged boys and men—whom I saw one day and were gone another.

Through that year, the sun glared more blindingly and clouds grew heavier and more impenetrable like secrets. The haze between them draped windows and doors all over this block.

Nobody wanted to hear the stories Adam told me, and after his death mother and Sister Elizabeth and everyone else wanted me to forget them. The cops’d asked mother, Mrs. Littington, the woman whose name I never knew—everyone, it seemed, except me—what they knew about Adam. At first, I’d thought they skipped me only because of my age: They didn’t ask the few other kids on this block, either.

Then again, the cops were like the adults on this block and the teachers in one way: If you were a kid, they’d ask you questions only if they thought you’d done something wrong, or knew who did. That is to say, they’d ask if they thought you could give the answers they wanted to hear. Certainly, I couldn’t’ve told them any more than they already knew about the circumstances of that night Adam died. By the same token, I’m sure they weren’t ready to hear me recount the stories he told me, any more than they’d have any use for one inescapable fact: The adults of this block were speaking in the same furtive, clipped tones—and were scolding me and other children into silence in the same ways—as they did after any death or other tragedy or mishap the people of this block would deny or try to wash away.