Truth in Advertising Page 0,42
And maybe he didn’t realize that the person he was grabbing and throwing against the wall was our father. He probably knew when he grabbed fistfuls of my father’s shirt, tearing it, pushing him against the wall so hard that my father’s head bounced off the wall and for many years after there was an impression in the plaster. I was standing in the hallway, just outside the room. I had been on my way to go hang out with Kevin when my father marched by me and told me to stay out. I stood there and saw the whole thing. I saw as Kevin took his hands away from his face that they were bleeding. He must have cut his hands, I thought. And for just a moment I thought he’d put something in his mouth, some Halloween-like thing to make it seem like blood, only it wasn’t a Halloween thing, and he spit up real blood on the floor, and he was shaking, and my mother went to him, held him, took the sleeve of her shirt and held it to his nose and she looked up, at me and Maura, and shouted for Maura to take me away. Only Maura couldn’t pull me away. She stayed behind me and put her arms around me while Eddie’s hand went to my father’s throat and clutched it and squeezed it, so that my father winced in pain. Eddie was almost as big as my father then—not as wide, maybe, but strong and fit and angry. He and Kevin are two years apart in age. They rarely got along, rarely even spoke. And it was common knowledge in the neighborhood and at school, at the skating rink and the parks, that Kevin was a sissy and a fag and a homo and all the other words people used. But God help the person who dared harm Eddie Dolan’s brother.
My father’s hands went to his own throat. He couldn’t breathe. Eddie’s face was contorted in rage and he was biting his own tongue so hard that he had blood on his lips. He was throwing punches now, at my father’s head and neck and chest, hitting his own hand holding my father’s throat. My mother looked up from the floor, from Kevin, holding him still, and screamed, “Stop it!” Only Eddie didn’t hear her. I think perhaps Eddie meant to kill our father, to finally stop him, stop the rage and outbursts—Eddie, even when he was smaller, standing up for my mother, taking the slapping and beatings because of it. The fear we all felt every moment our father was home.
Eddie pulled his hand away from my father’s neck, which was pink and red. My father slumped a bit, breathing erratically. He looked around and must have seen the horror on my face and Maura’s, too, and his bleeding, scrawny, harmless, lovely gay son, and his small wife crying, and his oldest boy, standing at the ready, sideways, right fist clenched so tight his knuckles were white, prepared to go again, wanting to go again, to beat him to death if need be.
My father left the next day for work and did not come home again.
• • •
I measure time in memories, fixed points, a street corner where a thing happened, where I will sometimes wonder, years later, why that same thing doesn’t still exist every time I pass that street corner. Where did the event go?
Right now I am sitting in the kitchen of our house on Willow Road, eating a fried bologna sandwich because I have a slight fever and stayed home from school. Mostly I think my mother wanted the company. The table is Formica-topped with stainless steel legs, one of which wobbles, so we keep a folded napkin under it. There is a picture window looking out onto the backyard and the Carneys’ house beyond. There’s a radio tuned to a station that plays swing music, and my mother is smiling. And then it’s gone. I run out of film.
We would hear about him from time to time. Occasionally we’d get a visit from one of the cops in his precinct. They’d take a collection and give my mother an envelope. Kevin told me that Eddie went looking for him after he left, waited for him outside the precinct house one night. There was a scuffle, some punches thrown. My mother heard about it. Kevin said she sat Eddie down and begged him to stop what he