But they were sixteen and they were drunk in Uncle John’s basement while everyone else finished up the Labor Day barbecue in the yard and Michael had told him.
So that was his father. The nameless son of a nameless family who at one time had lived about an hour’s drive away.
What Doug had already known—what everyone knew—was that by February 1965, his mother was pregnant and without a boyfriend, let alone a husband. She stayed with her parents that year and for a year or two after, while Doug was a toddler. Her parents were religious people who never renounced their obligation to love their daughter or their obligation to be ashamed. They continued to share a pew with her at St. Mary’s, though now the family sat at the back of the church. She had many different jobs but by the time they moved into the apartment on the top floor of the blue triple-decker on Eames Street, she mostly cleaned houses and cooked. They had a small backyard that ran down to a creek, and through the trees on the far side of it you could hear the cars moving along the state route. Back then there had been nothing along that highway but a few warehouses and a depot for the Alden town trucks. But when Doug had turned six an auto-parts store had gone in. Soon after that came a mattress discounter, then a gas station, and six months later a Burger King. They cleared land for the first mall, an oval of white concrete with an open-air courtyard and fountain, surrounded by the largest parking lot anyone had ever seen, which backed right up to their creek. Once the cineplex went in with its own vast parking lot, lit by even brighter lights, Doug’s bedroom never got fully dark anymore, the glare of the strip strong enough to color his shade a pale yellow into the small hours of the morning.
On Saturday evenings Doug and his mother went to Mass and again on Wednesdays, and though he hated it from an early age, mostly for the pity shown him by the adults and the pity shown his mother, before he even knew why, he followed obediently along until thirteen or so when he told his mother he didn’t believe in God or the Church and didn’t care what she thought about it. She’d lost most of her bargaining power to the drink by then and didn’t much resist. Daytime was a raw period for her, a time to be endured, after which the relief of the first glass of wine came, a routine that left little margin for argument or delay. He was taller than her well before he reached high school and there weren’t many places in the apartment for her to hide her bottles. Early on he’d learned he could cut her off more or less at will, and after that he never needed to; the threat alone sufficed to win whatever concession he needed from her.
Never a talkative woman, she said even less when she’d drunk three or four glasses.
After the first bottle, her silence deepened into something more profound, her daily withholding of words buoyed up into a principle of sorts, an almost enjoyable one it seemed, a queenly disregard for the commonplace of chatter or conversation, as if he were a man in whose presence she was determined to remain permanently coy. Conspicuous in her withdrawal. She had her television and her magazines, and as long as he was there to watch her getting along without him then indeed she could. And when she fell asleep on the couch at the end of the night Doug would carry her to her bed and turn out the light.
Once he’d gotten his license he had taken control of the car and begun to drive her to work. Heading down the state route you always knew exactly where Alden stopped and Finden began because the strip ended. After the muffler shop and the liquor store strategically placed on the town line to serve the residents of the dry community next door, you came to a traffic light. Beyond that it was as if time had stood still. Just the fluted gray railing running up the side of the highway and behind it, on either side, woods. It continued like that all the way east, seven miles or more toward Boston, until you reached the next town, where another liquor store stood just over