Chapter 11
“Ronald, this is George’s Mother and his grandmother and his Uncle John. This is his sister Linda and her husband Robert and their children Roberta and Robert Junior.”
Ron tried to smile a hello to everyone and put his hands in his pockets and stood there looking at his shoes. His mother had married George Bombasco two months earlier but they had kept their marriage a secret, until George could find a way to break the news to his family. He had started spending some nights at their apartment and though Ron had kind of liked him initially, when George started telling Ron what to do, difficulties began.
“You can sit there until it’s time for dinner, Ronald,” said George’s mother.
Ron sat and watched women work at the table in the basement of the house. Uncle John had the newspaper spread open on one section of the table and he was looking at the ads from the food circulars. “Look here,” said John, “carrots for 12 cents for two pounds at Pathmark and bacon for 67 cents a pound at the Acme. We can go out and get both of those things tomorrow.”
“I saw a box of Cheerios for 24 cents at the A&P,” said George’s mother. “Isn’t that good?”
Ron listened and tried to find something about the conversation that was interesting.
George’s mother said more emphatically, “Isn’t that good?” She was looking at George. Her chins wobbled. She scrunched her glasses back up against her face with a questioning grimace.
“I think so,” said George, “but I’ll have the Foodtown circular tomorrow and you can see if it’s better there.”
Ron stared out the back window at the garden. He saw the plump tomatoes bulging the vines, and the white strips of cloth that were used to tie them to the wooden stakes fluttering in the late summer breeze. He closed his eyes and inhaled the smell of the tomato sauce and felt a little sick to his stomach.
When he stood up, it seemed to signal everyone to stop and stare at him. “I’m going to go outside for a little while.”
“Stay close,” said Uncle John. “The shines are out on their porches down on Broad Street.”
Ron looked at him with a quizzical expression. “I just wanted to see the garden.”
John shifted, a little uncomfortable with this information. His thin grey hair sprouted out to the sides over the top of the black rims of his glasses. “Be careful not to touch anything,” he said.
Linda came out of the back of the basement holding Junior in her arms. Roberta followed her with her hand holding her mother’s skirt like it was a reassuring tether. Ron did not make eye contact with any of them as he went out the door.
Ron had never seen a vegetable garden before, and he looked at it with some reverence. Then he found a spot in the shade back by the garage and squatted back against the wall. The garden was split in the center and had distinct rows on each side. It was very green. Ron saw the tomatoes and the peppers on the vine. He thought that they looked like magical apparitions. He had seen pictures on the early morning show, The Modern Farmer, but this was so much more real and alive. At least he had found one thing that he liked.
Chapter 12
Jake Clifford smiled broadly when he saw Celeste and Angel getting out of Ron’s squeak mobile. He walked towards them with an athletic glide in his step. “So this is the lucky guy that has you smiling,” said Jake. He extended his hand to Ron and they shook.
“How’s everything, Jake?” said Celeste.
“Things are great. I heard from Spalding and I think that they are going to buy it.” Jake grinned and put his head down and shuffled his feet back and forth a little.
Celeste turned to Ron with an excited grin on her face. “Jake has an invention that he’s about to become famous for,” she said.
“Why don’t you and Ron come over later? We can toot some lines.” He sized Ron up and asked, “Do you play ping pong?”
When school was over Ron was out the door like a sprinter. His book bag was slung over his shoulder and he was running south on Summer Avenue towards Bloomfield Avenue. He veered left at Elwood and then picked up speed when he got to Lincoln. He ran the length of Lincoln Avenue and right up the stairs and into the Boys Club.
Off to the back of the huge room, under a hanging cloud of smoke, the old men were playing chess. Ron’s book bag dangled from his shoulder as he walked over trying to look inconspicuous. He really wasn’t supposed to be there yet. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, the Club was taken over by the Retired Men’s Club and they played chess and pool and cards until 3 in the afternoon. The chess players were allowed to stay longer though. They were out of the way and brought their own pieces and plastic chess mats.
Ron was always very quiet and careful not to move around. The men were cranky and usually his presence was more tolerated than accepted, but he loved to smell their pipe smoke and watch the way that they manipulated the pieces and sometimes, if there was no one else to play, he was allowed to sit in for a game.
Some of the men were happy to teach him and it didn’t take Ron long to become a regular at the end of these Tuesday and Thursday gatherings. Ron thought that they played the game with an elegant flair and though he knew none of their names, he did have his favorites.
He was just settled into his second game of watching when he felt a hand on his shoulder. “Ron, can I speak to you for a moment?”
It was Danny McCarthy, a short red faced man in his thirties who always wore a lanyard and whistle around his neck.
“Sure,” said Ron. He got up and walked past the pool table and towards the windows where there were six ping pong tables set up next to each other.
They sat on the low window ledge in back of the table and in front of the windows. Danny looked very serious. “Ron, you know that there is no gambling here, don’t you?”
Feeling the heat rise to his face, Ron tried to control his reaction. “Sure, I know.”
“Is it true that you beat Joey Baltiari for so much money playing ping pong that he gave you his bankbook?”
“I didn’t take any of his money,” said Ron.
“How much did you beat him for Ron?”
“I don’t know. I kept saying that I wanted to quit and he kept wanting to do double or nothing and he couldn’t beat me.”
“But you know that there is no gambling here. You told me that you knew.”
“I took $4 in cash and he owes me another $125,” said Ron. The guilt had overtaken him and he wanted to be rid of it.
“Ron, this is wrong. You know that it’s wrong. You knew it was wrong when you did it.”
“I gave him a spot,” said Ron defensively.
“But you knew that he couldn’t beat you, didn’t you?”
Ron nodded and hung his head.
“And now the boy is so upset that he got sick and wasn’t able to go to school today and finally he told his mother what you had done to him and she called me.”
Ron stared out the window. Then he looked over at the smoky cloud of chess players. He waited for what was going to happen next.
“I want you to return his bankbook, Ron and promise me that you’ll never do anything like this again.”
Ron reached down into his book bag where he’d kept the bankbook hidden. He fished it out and gave it to Danny without saying anything.
The Director took the book and opened it to look at the balance. He was interested to see how much Joey had, and he wanted to check to see that Ron hadn’t been able to make any withdrawls. “Ron, I want you to tell your parents what happened and I’m going to take your membership card until one of them comes it with you to get it back.”
Ron’s mind went blank. The words “Oh shit” formed in his brain. This was going to be bad. This was going to be really bad.
He didn’t eat much of his dinner. He sat across from George and Marjorie in their third floor apartment toying with his food. They didn’t seem to notice that he wasn’t eating and George was shoveling the food in at a rate that did not allow for conversation.
“Something happened today,” started Ron.
George stopped eating and Marjorie lit a cigarette. “What happened?” she said.
“Sometimes at the Boys Club we play ping pong for a dime or a quarter a game,” said Ron trying to ease into it. George and Marjorie exchanged a look that was a mixture of anger and fear.
“How much did you lose?” said George.
“I didn’t lose,” said Ron. “I beat this kid for all his money and he went home and told his mother that he had to give me his bankbook and she called the Boys Club, and now they won’t let me back in unless you go down there with me to pick up my membership card.”
“You’re just becoming a hoodlum, aren’t you?” said Marjorie. “Is this the way that I raised you?”
“Look, I didn’t try to take all his money. He kept wanting to play double or nothing and I kept winning.”
“Why didn’t you just say no and give the boy his money back?” said Marjorie. She began to cry. “Is this what I’ve raised you to be? Your grandmother would be spinning in her grave.”
George looked at Ron and gave him a disgusted grimace and before Ron knew what he did he said, “Well at least I won.”
George’s face got very red. Ron knew that they were still paying off George’s gambling debts. He knew that George had to work a second job just to keep up on the payments.
“You’re a bastard,” cried Marjorie.
“What you need is a good beating,” said George.
Ron had gone too far to quit now and he said, “Look my dad taught me how to gamble. It’s not my fault that I did it right.”
“Let your father go and get your card back,” said Marjorie. “I’m sure that he’ll be very proud of you.”
Chapter 13
Anna spent her mornings on the telephone. She sat in the kitchen with her Chesterfields and her coffee. She lived a sedentary life, but seemed to come very alive when she was on the telephone. It would not be unusual for her morning telephone
marathons to go on for several hours.
There was a list of people with whom she spoke daily. These included her sisters, several cousins, and her daughter. The fact that she would see many of these people on a daily basis did not change the need for the morning calls.
Today’s theme was her outrage at the ungrateful Celeste, who never seemed to pass up the chance to find a new way to screw up her life. She began with Vivian.
“Can you believe the shit that she is trying to pull now?” said Anna in a rhetorical opening.
“What’s wrong with her?” said Vivian. “She has a nice home and a safe place for her daughter. There’s no pressure on her and she wants to throw all that away.”
“Stars in her eyes over another loser,” said Anna. “It wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for Angel. That baby is happy here.”
“Wouldn’t you think that she would have learned to start putting her child first? She’s not twenty-one anymore. The party is over.”
Vivian had been a hard worker in her youth and it was true that Celeste had never been afraid of work either. But in their eyes she had thrown away nursing school, then married a photographer who considered himself too much of an artist to open a shop and take graduation and wedding pictures. She’d left him and hooked up with Angel’s father who they both knew was a humorless jerk the first time that they met him. At least he worked. She left him and found out she was pregnant and had run back home. Everyone in the family had pitched in to help her. Janine’s husband had redone what had been the girls’ shared room upstairs and turned it into a beautiful nursery. Tina’s husband had helped her refinish the basement. Mario had kept quiet about her being back home. Everything had been perfect, but now Celeste had dragged home this stray dog and his squeaky junk of a car.
They reviewed this litany together and Anna was sure that Vivian was on her side. “I swear that when I see my precious Angel strapped into a seat in the back of that deathtrap that my heart is in my mouth.”
“If you don’t think that his car is safe, you shouldn’t let her go,” said Vivian.
“How am I supposed to stop her?”
“Raise a stink,” said Vivian.
Anna laughed bitterly but thought that an event like that might drive Ron off.
Her conversation with Janine didn’t go as well.
“Is he cute,” Janine made the mistake of asking.
“I don’t know,” said Anna. “I can’t bring myself to stand to look at him. Besides, what difference does that make to me?”
“I’m not disagreeing, Anna, but if Celeste sees a future with him, shouldn’t you try to make the best of it?”
“No,” said Anna resolutely.
The she added, “Can Jimmy find out about this guy?”
Janine’s husband Jimmy was Angel’s godfather. He had a good job working in a school and he coached and knew other coaches.
“Find out what?” said Janine.
“If it turns out that this guy is a loser, like her other losers, maybe she would listen to Jimmy and not want to screw things up again.”
“I’ll ask him but you know how Jimmy is.”
Anna laughed, “Ask him after he’s just had a ride on that Napoli ass of yours.” Napoli was Anna’s maiden name and the power of their posteriors had been a running family joke among the women for a long time.
Janine and Anna giggled.
Chapter 14
Sister Wilma Dolores inspected the boy that the rectory had called about. She had been directed to accept him into the school, but she insisted that she wanted to meet him first. The idea of a non-Catholic boy in her school angered her and made her queasy at the same time. This one would be going into 7th grade, an age when things could get out of hand if the school wasn’t careful.
Ron sat in the hard wooden chair with his hands folded. He was nervous. He had never spoken with a nun before and their costumes made them look other worldly.
“What brings you to us, Ronald?”
“I’m not sure, Sister,” said Ron. He’d been told that he should call of them that. It was respectful and it saved having to remember their names.
“Why aren’t you sure, Ronald? This is no place for the undecided.”
“To be honest, Sister, it was decided for me,” said Ron, quite honestly. Then he hurried to add, “But I like to read and I think that I can be a good student.”
“You know that you’ll be expected to study Religion, just as all of the students here do and that you’ll be expected to take part in daily prayers and attend Mass.”
“I know, Sister.”
“Of course you won’t be allowed Communion and you’ll be expected to able to recite the necessary prayers, which you will learn as soon as possible.”
“I think that I already know most of them,” said Ron.
“Oh?” Wilma Dolores raised an eyebrow. She was wearing summer whites, but the tightly fitting, starched habit gave her face a puffiness in the heat. It fitted across the forehead and over her ears and under her chin. A round white heavily starched bib projected from under her neck and the black nylon strings that held her crucifix lay across it.
“I remember things easily,” said Ron.
“They aren’t just words to us, Ronald. They have a sacred meaning.”
“I can recite scripture too,” said Ron, trying hard to be cooperative.
This last piece of information was troubling to the school principal. She doubted if any of the students in the school had read the Bible. They read their catechism, lives of the saints, and the children’s book of New Testament bible stories. “That might be something that you should keep to yourself, Ronald. No one likes a showoff.”
“Yes, Sister.”
“Now, I know that you’ve been in trouble and that kind of behavior will not be tolerated here. You will be on a short leash Mr. Tuck and any whiff of incorrigibility and you will find yourself on the outside looking in.”
Ron thought that there wouldn’t be anything new about that, but it was the first time that he remembered anyone ever calling him Mr. Tuck. He kind of liked it.
Chapter 15
Dorothy Thomas told her nephew that she had something for him. She walked back through her kitchen and into her bedroom, the room furthest away from the place where her third and final husband slept. Even though it was midday and sunny, she needed to switch on the light to see. Ron had never remembered the drapes to his aunt’s bedroom being open. They were heavy drapes and contained multiple layers that both kept out light and muffled sound. They also blotted out the fact that this was a basement apartment that was given to the superintendent and family rent free.
Her bedroom set was pure and polished mahogany. It glistened under the overhead light, which she switched on as she opened her closet door. Ron’s eyes followed. There were two minks, one a full length coat and the other a jacket. Next to them hung a heavy black lamb’s wool coat. Dorothy pushed them to the side and revealed a stack of shoeboxes. The shoes, though not new, were in their original boxes and were still wrapped and rewrapped after each wearing into their tissue paper. Inside one of the boxes there was a velvet pouch tucked next black high heels. Ron’s eyes widened. It looked like treasure.
She opened the pouch and removed a set of black beads. It was a rosary. She slipped it into Ron’s hand and said, “Don’t tell anyone that I gave this to you. Your mother would have a fit.”
Ron’s family had always been staunchly anti-Catholic. When his great grandmother had been told that she had the “map of Ireland” on her face, she took it as a great insult. Dorothy was actually his great aunt. Marjorie had always suspected that she was actually her mother, but that family history had been so mangled over time, that there was no way to discover the truth. Dorothy certainly wasn’t going to tell anyone.
Ron fingered the beads. “Why do you have these?”
“When I was younger Ronald, I used to sneak into Catholic churches. I got these so that I wouldn’t look out of place.”
Ron was astonished. He stared down at the crucifix. She had kept them all these years. She was a woman of endless secrets. “Why did you go there, Aunt Dot?”
“Because they were beautiful and I loved the stained glass windows and all the gold. Our church was drab. I loved the smell of incense. I liked the pageantry. It was like going to a show and I didn’t have to buy a ticket.”
Ron smiled. He wanted to ask if it had anything to do with the religion but he didn’t. He didn’t want to spoil her secret by cluttering it up with facts. He slipped the beads into his pocket. She hadn’t given him the pouch, which she placed back into the box and then restacked with her other boxes. Ron wondered if more strangely wonderful things were concealed in them, but she was closing the closet door and turning out the light and then they were back in her kitchen and she wanted him to stay for dinner. Marjorie was working and she liked having him around.
“Sure,” said Ron.
“Go and say hello to your Uncle John,” she said.
Ron walked passed the birdcage and glanced down at the ceramic boxer that she kept of the floor guarding the entrance to her parlor. It was a long narrow corridor that led back to his Uncle’s room.
John Thomas was watching the Mets. They were an awful team and his love had been the Dodgers, but like his first wife, they had gone and he was stuck with this.
He didn’t mind the boy but when he stayed overnight John was forced into the twin bed in Dorothy’s bedroom, which only further reminded him of what he didn’t have.
“Hi, Uncle John.”
“Hello, Ronald.”
John was sitting in a Danish rocker and smoking his pipe. Ron slid down to the floor in front of the couch. He hated the Mets. He was a Yankee through and through. John disliked the Yankees and had tried to explain to Ron that they bought their success. Ron didn’t understand what that meant and rested his argument on his two favorite players, Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford.