51. From The Ground

 

Even if nobody here recognizes me, even if none of them recall me from the days when I lived on this block, I’ve got to get away as soon as mother’s in the cemetery. She’s not going to be buried in the plots at either end of this neighborhood; nobody—at least nobody from this block—‘s been buried in them for a long time.

They all ended up under a lawn about an hour and a half’s drive away from here. White slabs blister the ground; on a bright summer day you have to squint to read them. Each one’s the same: name, date of birth, date of death. The only differences are that some slabs have crosses carved into them between the names and dates, while others’ names and dates are separated by the Magden David. If you grew up on this block, everybody you knew was Jewish or Catholic. You realized there were “Protestants;” later, Presbyterians and Baptists and such: all those Christians separated and converged, never speaking to each other unless forced to do so. Like the Hasidic and the Orthodox and Reformed Jews: If you grew up on this block, those are the distinctions you make between people.

And if I’d ended up in that graveyard, as mother soon will, they’d consider me Catholic, like her. It wouldn’t matter, really, how or where I died: Whether the blood was in my crotch or on my hands, it would be the same. Nor would it matter that she didn’t make me kneel next to my bed and pray every night, or even that she said nothing even though she knew that I’d stopped attending church not long after she ran out of money to send me to Catholic school.

But what would they make of me now? The cemetery isn’t religious, at least to my knowledge. It’s not like one of those Orthodox cemeteries that won’t take you if you get tattooed or pierced, or one of those Catholic burial grounds that doesn’t allow anyone in who’s “died in sin.” I never understood how they defined that one—after all, people who’ve killed are allowed in.

Maybe that’s what spooks people about cemeteries. The bones and flesh, if they aren’t already dust, are on their way to becoming that. They can’t hurt anyone. Actually, that’s the reason I never felt uncomfortable when I was alone with the tombstones at night. Maybe the “voices” people claim to hear, or the specters or whatever they claim to see, escaped like bottled genies from the ones who’ve been killed by the ones whose names and dates are etched in marble or granite.

Every cemetery, as best as I can tell, covers, with a blanket of amnesia, at least one person who’s killed someone else. Of course some of the killers were themselves murdered, and a person who doesn’t kill isn’t necessarily more innocent or noble than one who does.

Under some grassy plot, under some rocky piece of ground, in a vault—somewhere—lie what remains, if anything, of Adam. Wherever it is, I know it’s not a Catholic or Jewish cemetery. For all I know, he might be in the same ground as Adolph Eichmann or Martin Bormann. Actually, I know he’s sharing the same ground with his killers: It doesn’t matter if he’s in Jerusalem or Cracow or the same state as this block. He must be; he ran from Bergen-Belsen and ended up—on this block.

I started here. Adam ended up here. Mother started and ended here. For a long time, I thought life was one of those board games you played as a kid with other kids. In some of those games, you end up some place different from where you started. In others, the idea is to get back to the start. And some players, due to an unlucky roll of the dice or draw of the cards, don’t get much past the start or always end up there.

I know what I must—or at least want—to do: get away, as soon as possible. But I had no more choice, really, about coming back today than I did about which body I had when I was born. Maybe a similar fate will determine whether I get away. I hope not.

I know I must get away—at least to continue my life and culminate my transformation. But there is no other reason why I’m obligated to move: As far as I know, there’s no law of nature or psychology that says so. Not that I know much about such things. I only know that I must, only for the vision of myself to which I’ve become acquainted, and of which I’ve learned, through some process I can’t name.

People look like they’ve been doing double-takes, but no one’s asked me. That confusion—which could aid my escape or get me killed—is also, at least in part, a matter of fate.

My name—take that back, the name I had when I lived on this block—is on a tombstone in one of the cemeteries. This is not a metaphor: I saw it on my way here. My former name, a date of birth, a date of death—whose? The former, that of the person who carried that name. The latter, the date someone calculated after the body was examined, was ID’d—by whom? August 4, 1967- June 18, 1992.

Someone—who avoided indictment for a daughter’s murder, according to some people, only through a spouse’s ability to pay—once said, “Two people know who killed her: the killer and somebody the killer confided to.” Funny, how she could’ve been talking about that person whose tombstone has my former name and my date of birth etched into it. Not only is there the confider and confidant; there is someone who knew that body was older than the person who had my old name would’ve been on the date of death. Or that he would’ve had no more reason to be on the block than I would’ve had—or so it seemed.

Stranger still, no one seem have any record or recollection of who ID’d that body, even though it wasn’t so many years ago, not really. In fact, no one’s ever said how the cops or the coroner or whoever connected—pieced together—the name and body. Was it the wallet, the driver’s license, what? They don’t know when he showed up here, on this block, or why. And I can’t say how he ended up in the particular cemetery in which he’s buried.

And here’s something else nobody talks about openly, I’m sure (and, I’m equally sure, kids get slapped when they ask about it): They found the body, bled and bloated, on the concrete floor eight feet below the house. Lying on his side, hands zip-tied behind his back, gray duct tape over his mouth. And a clotted gash where his penis had been. That detail spread, the way any other truth somebody doesn’t want the children to know spreads through the neighborhood: by word of mouth. Except, nobody knows where the first kid who knew the story heard it.

I’m sure that she knew everything I’m recalling now. But she never said so. In fact, knowing her, I don’t know who, if anybody, she told. The lady whose name I never knew, maybe. And perhaps someone else. But not the police, I’m sure. I’ll bet she denied knowing who might’ve killed him, or his reasons for doing it.

And mother was one of those people nobody questioned—at least not openly. Nor would she question me, or anyone else, about that body in the basement. She never asked whether I was here or anywhere else near this block at the time he was killed. She didn’t have to; she just knew. And she’d’ve never told, at least anybody who’d want to know.

Some people would say she’s responsible for letting the killer get away. Not that they’d necessarily want the killer to be punished,  at least not much. A few people might’ve missed him—a few, but not many. Others who knew him probably cared about him the way his killer did.

So now mother’s going to that field out in the country, with soldiers and sailors and their wives and children. Her father’s there. I don’t know whether he was in “The War”—the one Adam mentioned —or any other. Mother didn’t talk about such things. And she won’t have to, ever. Hopefully, after she’s buried, I won’t have to either.

50. More Stories

 

I suppose mother’d’ve wanted this. Or at least she wouldn’t’ve railed against it. But me, a part of me still wants to rescue her from it, to protect her against it.

She wasn’t one to protest things as they are, or at least as she knew them. If anybody knew what hypocrites, criminals and pure-and-simple liars the priests and nuns were—and are—it was she. That some of them could collect money and spend it on everybody and everything but the poor and broken—she knew—she told me herself before I left this block. It didn’t—at least, I didn’t think it did—surprise her, years after the fact, when I told her that a priest tipped my hand when I poured wine into his chalice during mass or that in the vestibule behind the altar he insisted that I—and he helped me—remove more than my surplice and cassock I, like the other altar boys, wore over my school uniform when I was on the altar. Well, I didn’t hear surprise in her voice anyway—I told her over the phone, months after I left. I’d stayed in so many places by then that I can’t remember now where I was when I made that call.

I’m sure she also knew that some took their vows of celibacy no more seriously than they took their vows of poverty. Madge, whom I’d gotten to know about the time I realized that I’d sleep with a man only for money or in self-defense, told me about the convent she left. “They’re all alike,” she said. As a noviate, she’d also taken the vow of silence, and the Mother Superior enforced it, she said, “for your own good.”

If mother hadn’t known about such things, surely she wouldn’t’ve been surprised to find out. After all, what woman doesn’t know that all bonds that hold any community—whether a family, convent, school, church or any other organization I know of—all consist of some unspoken, unwritten code of silence enforced by economics, blackmail and/or outright physical force? Just about every woman—I include mother; I include her mother and their friends, and now I will include myself—has, at some time in her life, acquiesced to those codes, out of habit or necessity, or because she was unaware of any other option.

The men—or the women who’ve joined forces with them—who coerce, blackmail, beat or starve their daughters, sisters, wives and mothers—either haven’t any idea of what they’re doing or see it as part of their entitlement, their very existence. Even the most consciously benevolent of them fall into their habits around women and girls, and with their students, employees, parishioners and other charges.

Mother had to’ve known this. Why else would she’ve raised me only with occasional help from her mother, with no men anywhere in sight? But then again, she made no attempt—perhaps she wasn’t capable of such a thing—to find a more worthy man, or to turn the man who impregnated her with me into my father. Nor did she stray very far from the church. True, she went only on special holidays or when she felt the need to light a candle and say a prayer for someone, for something she hoped for. And, as I’ve said before, she sent me to Catholic school for as long as she could afford it. The church wasn’t willing to help the “bastard child” of a single woman. But as long as he paid, or someone paid, I was allowed to stay in their school.

And for all that she complained about how meaningless such things are, she arranged for a wake and funeral as traditional as this one for her own mother. I don’t think she’d’ve wanted it any other way, hypocrites and all.

But once I left this block, she never talked to me about church, unless I mentioned the things I’ve been thinking about. She never used that stale argument I heard from others: “Well, church is like anything else. Some people are good and some people abuse it.” Others—someone else—said that. But not mother.

But even after I realized there are hypocrites everywhere—that one was in bed with me, lying with another—I still hated the church and its ceremonies. Even after I learned how employers use sex and other forms of extortion in much the same ways as priests and teachers do, I still despised them, it, all of them, all of it.

Mother may’ve thought this frivolous but I can’t stand to hear any living being say “thee,” “thy” or “thou,” even in prayer. In fact, I can’t stand the “th” sound: It sounds like the fanning of a flame that would otherwise die, and should, after it’s burned the house and killed all the innocents in it. I never could stand that kind of pompous artificiality that echoes voices that have authority only because they’re repeated. I mean, there’s just no reason—at least no reason that I can see—to say what doesn’t need to be said to make meanings out of things that aren’t there.

In one of the last classes I attended, the teacher was quizzing us on a book with this sentence in it: There be the woods of Lo’thlrien…Let us hasten. If those words had been spoken or written by someone in King Arthur’s court, I could understand. But the person who wrote them had been a professor of the teacher who assigned it. That teacher—I’m forgetting his name now—was probably mother’s age, so the professor who hastened him him to the woods was—what, mother’s age, maybe a few years older. But not ancient or—What did he call it?—medieval.

I wonder if that teacher advised the person who wanted use The Village People’s In The Navy as a recruitment song. Maybe he’s the one who told Reagan to use Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA for his Presidential campaign. While neither of those songs has much to do with me or mother, they—especially Bruce’s lament—are at least relatable to some people who have lived and died on, or fled or been pulled away from, this block.

And all the prayers, epitaphs, eulogies and such have no more to do with mother’s life than the opening line of Tale of Two Cities. Not the best of times, not the worst of times. Only this moment. No heaven, no hell; no appeals to get her into one or keep her out of the other mean anything now. Only now—this moment—does. It’s all she had; it’s all I have; it’s all either or all of us could ever have.

In this moment, in any moment, I breathe, I wake, I wash, I dress, I drink, I eat, I leave, I come back, I leave again, I breathe, I hurt, I cry, I sleep, I wake again, I sleep again, one more time, for the last time. Any virtue some priest some other mourner, could attribute to mother means about as much as anything they could attach to me or anyone else. She lives; she’s dead. She died; she’s here now, on this block, where she and I began.

At least neither Mrs. Littington nor the lady whose name I never knew are trying to make a hero of her now. I won’t, either. Nor, do I suspect, will anyone else here—except for the priest who pleads some cause that didn’t need to be made before God or any living being. No one has to justify her life, her death or the passage between them any more—and I’ve only just understood this—than I have any obligation to explain the transition I’ve been making: the one whose outcome mother won’t witness. But then again, she doesn’t have to. I am the life she bore into this world—onto this block—and I’m here now as she’s leaving. And so are the others. They can talk, if they choose, about drinking each other’s coffee or what their kids and hers have become or gone to. But it all matters now about as much as the priest’s appeals to that to which he’s pledged his belief and fealty, or about as much as any story I can tell about the boy who confined me inside my body back before it’d ever left this block.

After today, I will never be able to speak of that one as a boy, or myself as a man, again. Nor can I tell anyone about the woman I will become, and the laws of this state will recognize, if I survive the operation.

49. Bodies

 

Two of the main streets that enclose this block—a Parkway and an Avenue—are named “Ocean.” Three thoroughfares—a Boulevard as well as a Parkway and an Avenue—are named “Bay.” And there are still other streets with “Ocean” or “Bay” in their names. Oh, and I mustn’t forget about the other streets that share their names with bodies of water that are found nowhere near this block.

I never connected the words “bay” or “ocean” with great basins of salt water. I still don’t, even though I finally got to taste the surf after I left this block. “Ocean” signified tides and winds only because some books, which I had to read for school, represented it that way. The same for “bay” and mirrors of moonlight rippled by breezes: that is how the books depicted such bodies of water. With Vivian, I hadn’t gone to the ocean; I’d gone to the beach and a town—a village, really—splintered like driftwood.

Where Bay meets Ocean, they couldn’t bury Adam. For some reason—the way he died, I was told—he wasn’t allowed into the Jewish cemetery there, at Bay and Ocean. He couldn’t be buried there—that’s what I’ve heard ever since. No one said he wouldn’t bury Adam there, only that he couldn’t be interred there.

He also couldn’t be buried in the other cemetery near this block, at Atlantic and Bay Bridge: It was Catholic; they wouldn’t have taken him either. One of the nuns—no, wait, it was a priest, who instructed me in I-forget-what before we made Confirmation—told us that the ground itself couldn’t take him, wouldn’t keep him, because it was sanctified, which was a fancy way of saying holy, which meant that they couldn’t keep him buried there.

Father—I forget his name—said it was because Adam killed himself. Same thing the rabbi said. Of course, neither of them talked to me or any of the other kids about him. We’d just heard what they said about him later on, one kid from another, though none of us knew who spoke first.

So they couldn’t bury Adam at Bay and Ocean or Atlantic and Bay Bridge because, they said, he’d killed himself. He couldn’t stay submerged like the bodies tossed by their killers at the beginning of winter. Those bodies stayed down, under the cunningly calm, cold surface, until the undercurrents warmed and lifted all things that wouldn’t wake for long, warm mornings to the light above the water.

When you grow up on this block, you learn at least this much: People don’t, by accident, end up at or in the water when they die. They’re always tossed, thrown, pushed, shoved or dropped in. Or, if they get to the water on their own, they die only after they’re held under, by themselves or somebody else.

I’ve never believed for a moment—oh, forget that, I’ve always known—that Adam’s death wasn’t what the priest, rabbi or everyone else on this block called it: a suicide. Whenever people from this block used that word in connection with Adam, they shifted their eyes from me and the word escaped from them, as if they’d sidestepped their own voices. And their echoes would drift away from that word,, creeping along like a ship that’s left its dock before its scheduled time and is slipping into fog.