front door closing. Within the hour, he was back, and I heard him putting Da to bed. In another minute he came to my room and sat on the edge of my bed. Muddie was asleep, so he whispered his hello.
“Is Da okay?” I asked.
“He took all his clothes off in Murphy’s Bar,” Jamie said.
“All of them?” I began to laugh — I couldn’t help it— and Jamie joined in.
“He was naked as the day he was born, standing there on Wickenden. Somebody called the police, but we’re lucky, because it was Johnny Tatum who came. You know, Da plays cards with him sometimes? So Johnny says, ‘Mac, go inside and put something on.’ And so Da disappears back into the bar and comes out again — wearing somebody’s tie.”
I laughed again, imagining the scene. Jamie flopped back on the pillow, facing the ceiling. “You should have seen it, Kit. All the bar was there, laughing and clapping and whistling, and Johnny Tatum had to laugh, too.” He shook his head. “He’s lucky he wasn’t arrested.”
“What can we do? He’s bound and determined to humiliate us. At least he’s a crowd-pleaser. What would make him do such a thing, get so blind drunk like that?”
“The thing is,” Jamie said, “I heard the news earlier. Elena got married today.”
With Delia gone, we were poor again, truly poor where we had to worry about rent and food. Da brought home a salary from the American Screw factory but it wasn’t enough, so we all had after-school and weekend jobs. I found it was easier to wear my leotards to school underneath the blouses I couldn’t be bothered to iron. Sometimes I’d even borrow something of Jamie’s, or hold up my skirts with one of his ties. Girls whispered behind my back. Boys thought I was fast and asked me on dates, and I always said no. After a while they left me alone, too.
I walked home each night to save on carfare. That evening, I was coming from my voice lesson. I wanted to think about the radio show I was doing on Saturday and go over the song “It’s Magic” in my head. I had a new teacher now, and I’d learned I was a contralto. Just today she’d told me to stop imitating Doris Day and find my own style. “Listen to the words, not just the notes!” she kept saying, raising her hands from the piano keys. I thought I had been listening. I knew I wasn’t getting it.
I carried a bag with the first of the fall pears, brought home for dessert, because I’d probably missed dinner. Muddie would have kept something warm for me. She had taken over the cooking duties since we’d hit high school. She had given up on making the dishes from Elena we’d loved, and was making stews and fried potatoes and chicken. If it wasn’t as good as Elena’s cooking, at least it wasn’t as bad as Da’s.
I passed the gates of Brown and headed east. The university was expanding with the swell of new students and was knocking down buildings for dormitories, one after the other, making their way across College Hill and pressing into Fox Point. The factories were closing and moving outside the city, where land was cheap. Highways were being built, old roads widened for the cars that were being manufactured again. Squeezed from all sides, Fox Point was falling back into poverty, missing out on the postwar boom. Neighbors were moving out, going after the jobs. Da had heard talk that they might pave over the river, just so cars could cross more easily. A river turned into a highway. Da had swum in that river when he was a boy. And before him, people had fished in it. People had sailed away to Africa right from the harbor. Providence was turning its back on its heart.
I could hear the calls of the college boys as they tossed a football back and forth on the lawn of a fraternity house. That never changed — fresh crops of boys with haircuts and good shoes.
Suddenly, an object sailed into my peripheral vision and I almost dropped my bag of pears as I just managed to catch the football. Years of street games had given me good reflexes. The whoop across the street congratulated me, and I fired the ball back to one of the four boys on the lawn.