67, Memory of a Season

 

It still amazes me how little’s changed here. Sure, the only people remaining from the block as I knew it are in this room now. If you’re one of those people who believes that any neighborhood is its people, then you’d think that the place I knew ceased to exist long ago, perhaps when I left this block. You’d be right, in a way, I guess.

When I think of change, I’m not thinking about which houses have disappeared and which ones have been built, or what stores opened and closed, or what kinds of cars are parked around here. To tell you the truth, I don’t recall many of the places, at least not exactly. I’m not completely sure—except for the house where Adam lived and the one where mother and I stayed—which ones were here and which weren’t. Maybe it’s just as well: I’ve never had attachments to rooms, furnishings or architectural details. Good thing, too: When you have to move from one place to another as often as I have, sentimental attachments are the spindly heels that can break under you as you step up onto a curb.

But then there’s something else I recognized as soon as I got here. Some may call it a “feeling in the air.” It has to do with the light, which is the only thing that truly defines any place. No matter where I’ve woken, I’ve always known where I was—or, at least, where I wasn’t—by the light of the place.

The light on this block, even though it changes through seasons, cannot be mistaken for any other. The kind I recall most clearly seems to’ve begun today, or within the past few days. The sky is overcast, but the air is not completely gray: It’s been tinged by shingles and painted wood that’ve just begun to show splinters that were hidden by summer shadows. The day is also tinged with flecks of rust escaping from crumbling bricks.

In other places, they call the season with this light “autumn,” and it’s pretty. Here, it’s fall and it’s not melancholy, not sad. It just is, and everybody knows that winter—with or without snow—follows. And the gray, the white, will fill the street, the alleyways and ground between the houses like ash. When it clears away, some of the people—the women—you saw during the fall will sit on stoops, or scrape and poke little patches of ground around their houses. And sunlight will glare off pores of skin—faces, then arms and sometimes legs—newly uncovered. For what seems a brief moment, the faded paint and flaking bricks fill your eyes with echoes of colors struggling to rise from gaps of soil between slabs of concrete.

This cycle of light, my most vivid recollection, is now the only reason I could ever have to return to this block after mother’s gone. And I’m sure it’ll never change.

66. For Them

 

Weddings were always for other people. Just like graduations, or any prize I’d heard about. They handed kids diplomas in the schools we attended, but I don’t remember anybody I know getting one. And the ones who exchanged vows—they always came from someplace else, away from this block. And we never saw them again.

Other people. For all I know, mother’d never been married. Or maybe she was never not-married. Not until I got away from this block did I realize that kids learn, at some time or another, their parents were children who probably didn’t know each other. Then there was the ceremony like the ones I used to see in church. For one brief moment, they were as clear, as unambiguous, as black and white—because they bathed in the glow of whatever color of glass was struck by that day’s light. That hue would tinge whatever pictures people carried with them—even after the marriage dissolved—like the sepia in old photographs.

Mother never talked about whoever fathered me, much less about whatever circumstances brought them together, or how they came apart. Or, for that matter, if they were ever really together in the first place. Or, for that matter, where—much less how—she came to have me by him.

Other people got married. Other people had children. The kids on this block are like the houses, the church, the stores on the avenue—they are always in a moment, one that extends from the first to the last anybody can recall. They’re always there; nobody knows who or what was there before them; nobody remembers when they’re gone. And nobody sees them graduating or getting married: If they do those things, they’re somewhere else.

But the funerals…Mother, now. The man who got my former name when they found his body in the basement. Sammy and Don—two men I called “uncle” until they ended up in caskets that weren’t opened while I was at their funerals. Anthony Giordano, who volunteered for the Navy because he knew he was going to get drafted, who came home in a body bag. David Held, who was drafted. And—I know I’m jumping back and forth in time, whatever that is—Jimmy McCulley, who, it was said, “fell off the pier”—so close to this block, though I’ve never seen it—where his uncle used to unload boats. Freddy du Maars—all I ever heard was that he “fell.”

And, of course, Adam. From him to mother, death was always somebody I knew well—or at least as anybody I’ve known since. Except for the man in the cellar, I felt sorrow for them but I could’ve felt even more than I did if I hadn’t felt relief—and yes, I admit, envious—that they were finally out of that endless moment we all occupied. For Adam, and now for Mother, my sense of relief is heightened because they were—are—at least to my knowledge—no longer suffering on this block.

Death happened to them: the only two people, I believe, with whom I’ve ever truly empathized. Other people—if I could in any way relate to or care about their experiences—I could only imagine, or just think about, whatever pain they might’ve conveyed in my direction.

I’ve been to other funerals since I left this block. For a while, it seemed that every week someone I met in a bar or on the street died of AIDS or was shot or beaten to death. I went to their funerals whenever I could, not because I thought it would change anything, but because of something Mother taught me: You give respect to people whether or not they know you’re giving it. If she’s right—and nothing I’ve seen tells me she isn’t—then respect is all you can give the dead if you’re going to give them anything at all.

For that alone, she deserves my respect. And of course for many other reasons, the first of which is that she did something I’ll never do—not even after the surgery: She gave birth. To me.

65. Too Late For Laments

 

Soon I will no longer have any need, or reason, to feel shame or to apologize. I can’t recall mother having done either, or that she ever expected one or the other of me. When I was a child, some kids stole other kids’ bikes or jackets, insulted each other by questioning each other’s sexuality or practices, or damaged or destroyed property. I did none of those things, although they were done to me. Certainly that didn’t make me any more moral than, or superior to, anyone else.

I realize now that you only learn about shame and contrition when you’ve had to express them yourself. The only such experience I had growing up was having to say something called “The Act of Contrition” during mass. I didn’t understand it, even after I looked up the word “contrition,” probably because it made no sense for me—or anyone, really—to say it. Even at such a young age, I realized how silly it was, and how it was even sillier to talk to someone who wasn’t there, especially if someone told you he was there but couldn’t tell you where, much less how or why.

For that matter, all apologies now seem absurd—now there’s a word I wish I’d known then!—in the way that alarms installed after a burglary seem pointless and useless. The deed is done; the doer is gone—mentally, if not physically. He’s gone on to other things, unless of course he’s rationalizing or gloating over what he’s done. In which case he isn’t going to apologize anyway.

Even if I’d given that man a chance to acknowledge his rape of me, it wouldn’t’ve changed him, or me, or anything. You could even say that if he could or would see how he’d violated me, he wouldn’t’ve said he was sorry. I wonder now whether that’s what mother thought.

And so it wouldn’t’ve made any sense, or changed anything, if I’d apologized for having retaliated—had I done such a thing—in the moment after he attacked me, or in the future. Beating, mutilating, killing him wouldn’t’ve been acts of rage, an emotion that precludes—some say precedes, but I don’t see how—sorrow.

Mother never expected apologies from me, even though nothing I’ve done, nothing I’ve become, justifies the difficulties I caused her. I’ll never know—though I can guess accurately, I think—whether she’d wanted or planned for me. Not that she ever implied, even in anger, that I constricted her life, as other parents have told children who became some of the people I’ve met since I left this block. Vivian’s father always reminded her of his abandoned ambitions toward a musical career, or that he’d played drums behind guitarists and singers whose records kids—and sometimes their parents—in my generation, even on my block, bought and listened to. Maybe mother had no such aspirations, simply because she didn’t have time to have them. But if she’d had dreams, I never heard about them.

It’s no surprise, I guess, that she never even made me apologize for not having aspirations of my own. For one thing, I was never sure I’d grow up to realize them. In fact, I was sure I wouldn’t live long enough, or that if I did I’d end up in jail or a mental hospital. That’s what happened to the young men here—or else they simply disappeared. Even if I survived to seventeen, eighteen years old on this block, I’d had no idea how I’d finish high school, much less go to college. Not that I’d want either one. School, for me, was always just a place where I was prey and supposed to get used to it. And expect no apologies, no expressions of shame from anyone.

Not that I would’ve expected anything from the other kids—mostly boys—or the teachers, the principal or anybody else. Kids beat up other kids in the hope that someone else wouldn’t beat them. They won fights, games, competitions—none of which mattered away from school, much less this block—so they wouldn’t have to experience defeat for the moment, a day or—they hoped—forever. They did what they did—just as I lied, stole, sold my body and killed—and offered no apologies or explanations for the same reasons I didn’t, mother didn’t, why nobody on this block did. You don’t—or perhaps you can’t—justify anything you do to survive, to make it from one moment to the next. Some people—we often hear about them in the news—may try to offer an expression of contrition, an acceptance of responsibility, for their deeds or those of their parents, long after they’re done. But they’re not lamenting the deeds themselves: Usually, they’re ruing some outcome of it. Like that scientist who said “I have become death!”-- or something like that-- long after he and his colleagues exploded the first atomic bomb.