clattering electric fans, and radio music wafting out to where young Henry lurked, peeping from the shadows.
One day he discovered he had cousins, Peter and Paul, one older and one younger than himself, whose parents brought them to live at the decaying keep so they could get to know their dying grandmother, and whose favorite game was sitting in adjoining stalls in the hotel’s echoing communal restroom and discussing all the whimsical things their turds resembled, as if describing constellations or cloud formations:
Ooh! Mine looks like an old man with whiskers!
Mine looks like a pointy wooden shoe!
I made a rattlesnake!
An only child, Henry was jealous of the clannishness of his cousins, as well as the sense of their being privy to a branch of the family from which he was strangely excluded. Also there was their rough-and-tumble boyishness, so different from his hesitance and general awkwardness.
This became only more pronounced as time went by, though to some degree he bonded with Peter—the two of them being the older ones. But any time Henry started to feel truly accepted or complacent about his position, there would be some little reminder of the barrier between them; evidence that he could never be one of them.
In the presence of their wizened elf of a grandmother, who spoke no English but only a peculiar mixture of Italian and Attic Greek, his cousins continued to natter fluently long after he had become estranged from that dialect, so that Henry could only tag along and nod, clumsily hanging on whatever sparse vocabulary he still possessed: “Buon giorno, Nonna. Come stai?” “Panta rhei, panta rhei.” But he was outside the loop, imagining that they were pityingly discussing him.
Over time the strange sticking point—the difference between them—became excruciatingly clear: Henry’s cousins had a father, while he did not. The sternly generous man who appeared from time to time to take them all on beach outings in his camper truck belonged to them, not him.
In some ways this was good. It meant that when they got into trouble, Henry didn’t have to share the whippings—as Peter and Paul were dragged off to face the leather belt, he could just retire to quarters with his mother. But his exemption from the bad was echoed in the good: it increasingly felt like charity.
Henry doesn’t remember exactly how or when the situation was explained, but at some point it came out that his own father died before he was born. This was not by itself a traumatic discovery—he did not feel the lack of a father, except insofar as it set him and his mother apart from the others. He did not want a father, per se. What he wanted was to be the same as everyone else.
But alike or not, his cousins were stuck with him, just as he was with them. Whether resentful or pitying, they had no other playmates, there being an extreme scarcity of children in the industrial gulag of the harbor district.
As the boys got older, approaching school age, their wanderings increased to encompass the street and the train yard beyond, so that they became spectators of the mechanized drama of the harbor, and connoisseurs of the varied modes of freight-hauling, their favorite being a spindly, spider-like truck that rolled along on tall struts which enabled it to drive over large cargo boxes, tuck them up underneath itself, and scoot off down the highway. To Henry and his cousins, the operator of this vehicle, seated up on his thrillingly high, exposed perch, was the monarch of the road, even more to be envied than the train engineers who waved back at them as they walked beside the tracks.
But there was still something that outshone the cargo trucks and all the other harbor commerce. That literally soared above the mundane activity of the terminal:
The gleaming white seaplanes of the Catalina ferry line.
These planes—classic specimens of the tubby, boat-like Grumman Goose, now to be found only in the aviation museum of the Smithsonian—would land and take off from the harbor many times a day, yet Henry never got over the thrill of seeing them, nor of hearing the roar of their fat, wing-mounted engines as they revved for take-off, wreathed in spray. There was magic about these things; the spectacle of their uncanny, amphibious flight so much like something out of the movies, and movies—especially given the proximity of Hollywood—were a big and increasing part of Henry’s early life.
Then, not long after Henry’s fifth birthday, the shit hit the