A Crime in the Neighborhood Read online

  Aunt Fran had now taken off her blouse and was standing by the bed in her bra and white underpants. She looked like a giraffe, she was so tall and sinewy, so unnaturally unencumbered as she shifted from one leg to another, flexing her leg muscles, her smallish, sleek head lifting suddenly, blinking at the sight of herself in the mirror. On the bed, Aunt Claire leaned over to pull off her penny loafers and then her knee-high nylon stockings. Her pale back was spattered like a dog’s belly with large brownish freckles.

  She sat up again and fluffed the back of her hair with one hand, yawning, then looked toward the bathroom. “Lo?” she called. “Are you ready?”

  Both of my aunts sighed as my mother came suddenly back into view. She was wearing a green towel around her head; otherwise she was completely naked. It was a surprisingly sad thing to see my mother naked. I had seen her naked before, but not, it seemed to me, for a long time, and certainly not in this way. She looked diminished and ribby and white—and unexpectedly hairy. She also looked on display, like a store mannequin waiting to be dressed. A thin, pinkish scar I remembered but had forgotten sliced along her lower belly, ending in a grim bristle of hair.

  Was this what my father saw when he looked at her at night in their bedroom? I imagined my mother demanding that he touch it, touch her scar. He would be afraid; he would curl his fingers back at the last moment. And I guessed that this scar must be the root of their trouble, their fighting, their silence, that my mother’s body should have been perfect, as mine was perfect. She put one hand on her hip, one on the doorjamb, and waited.

  “Why look at you,” cried Aunt Fran. “Venus on the half shell.”

  My mother smiled blankly. The lenses of my glasses fogged up. I closed my eyes and counted twice to one hundred by tens. When I stopped counting, my mother had gone back into the bathroom.

  The very next night I was sitting on my mother’s bed with her and Aunt Claire, when my mother abruptly got up and flung open the bedroom closet where my father’s suits hung neatly on the rod. “I guess we should think about giving these old clothes away,” she said. Perhaps I imagined it, but the creak on the stairs seemed to be my father, shifting back down to the kitchen.

  “Lo,” said Aunt Claire. “This isn’t the way to handle it.”

  “Tell me another way,” said my mother, tightening her lips.

  By then she was already referring to my father in the past tense. “Larry used to like that show,” she might say if we were all in the living room trying to watch television.

  He would look up and lightly shudder.

  “Larry always ate his grapefruit after he finished his coffee,” she might tell my aunts at the breakfast table, “because if he had them together he said they left a moldy aftertaste.” And there my father would be, holding his coffee cup, his grapefruit untouched in front of him.

  Once she got going, she couldn’t stop. The fast put-down. The cruel, humorous revenge. Having the Mayhew Girls in the house inspired her.

  “It can’t be sex she wants him for,” she said loudly to Aunt Fran on the last morning of my aunts’ visit, just as my father was leaving for his office. “That thing hasn’t had batteries for years.”

  The twins smirked nervously at each other.

  “Lois.” Aunt Fran pointed her big chin at me over the cereal boxes.

  “Oh, they don’t even know what sex is,” said my mother.

  “Lois,” said Aunt Claire.

  But my mother had already added: “They’re his kids, after all.”

  And then from the doorway, my father said, “That’s enough.”

  We all looked up. He was standing in his dark blue overcoat, his hat in his hand lifted halfway to his head so that it looked as though he were doffing his hat to my mother. My note must still have been in the pocket of that coat; as soon as he put his hand in his pocket, he would feel it rustle against his fingers, slender as a fortune from a fortune cookie.

  As I recall that moment now, the pause thickens, grows greenish and dense; a shadow blows across the kitchen windows, darkening the room. From a street away, a dog begins to bark. In the flat chill of that morning, sound carries acutely; the dog could be barking in our own kitchen. Someone yells at the dog to shut up. The dog barks louder. My father continues to stand in the doorway, still in his attitude either of leave-taking or congratulation, or perhaps supplication, his hat cradled in his hand.

  The shadow blows past; sunlight washes back through the windows; the dog stops barking. My father stares at my mother, and she stares back.

  “That’s enough,” he says.

  And in a reasonable, almost pleasant voice my mother says, “I agree.”

  Three

  My father and Aunt Ada betrayed themselves with the sort of small, deliberate indiscretion people always seem to make when they have done something they’re ashamed of. My father had a birthmark the size of a plum on his right hip, just above his groin. It was dark red and tender-looking, shaped like a rabbit with one ear. I recall noticing it one day when I caught him stepping out of the shower. It was a very innocent-looking birthmark.

  One Sunday evening my mother, my father, Ada, and Uncle Roger were sitting in our living room drinking beer and watching a news broadcast about President Nixon’s trip to China.

  This trip marks a new era, my mother said. The world is finally coming together.

  “Hope Nixon’s not turning commie on us,” said Uncle Roger, who hated Communists the way people these days hate smog.

  “Roger thinks Communists should be branded with a scarlet C,” said Ada, flicking his thigh with her fingernail.

  “I’ve heard,” said Uncle Roger, “that real Communists all have a little tattoo they can show each other to prove party loyalty. They make them show it at the door before they can go into meetings.”

  And my father said: “Rog, I bet you think everybody with a birthmark is a Communist.”

  It was, naturally, only logical that at this moment Ada would giggle and say: “Like you, Comrade Larry.”

  “Comrade Larry,” repeated my mother, her mouth extremely small.

  But I’m not satisfied with this story, although it’s the only one my mother ever told me about my father and Ada, and she told it only once. Despite her usual truthfulness, my mother has exaggerated. She is too stock in her role as the naive idealist, along with Uncle Roger as the red-faced McCarthyite, my father as the flawed social critic, and Ada as the tipsy adulteress who forgets to keep her mouth shut. While I do believe the four of them sat in the living room and watched Nixon wave from the Great Wall of China, and I do believe this was the day my mother realized her husband and her sister were having an affair, I don’t believe my mother’s realization happened as crudely as she has chosen to characterize it. Perhaps she liked this story because it’s just complicated enough to sound true, and because Ada and my father look sordid; especially Ada seems sloppy, thoughtless, a woman no one would miss having as a sister. Anyone hearing my mother’s version gets Ada with her stocking feet on the coffee table. The living room flickers with blue light. My father hulks in his armchair, the top buttons of his shirt undone, displaying the collar of his undershirt. Uncle Roger chews pretzels on the sofa, occasionally elbowing Ada to get him another beer. My mother, through all, sits primly in the bentwood rocker; if she knitted, she would be knitting.

  None of these people bears much resemblance to the people I knew. Like cartoons, a few features remain recognizable in magnified form. Otherwise, my mother’s story seems received, a narrative she picked up, like the new shoes she kept buying, because it fit and because it made her feel a little better.

  However she found out, she found out. As I imagine it, my mother glanced up from the television set and saw my father looking at Ada. My version of the story has its received side, too: because I see in that look the sort of frank, sensual absorption I’ve glimpsed in the movies, once in a great while, between an actor and an actress who want each other and can’t have each other and never, in
the movie at least, get each other. I think my father was looking at Ada like a man stirred by something he found beautiful. His stare was appreciative, alive with a current of desire. Desire on a man’s face can be ugly, but my father’s face that night looked almost pure. There he sat, a settled-looking man of forty-two, with a small chin, aviator-style glasses, thick, longish ginger-colored sideburns, and a broad, pale forehead—gladly subsumed. He wanted Ada, and his want concentrated his whole face into an unaccustomed severity, so that my mother could see bones where his face had grown fleshy, could see the outline of his skull, as if the force of his longing had begun to waste him away.

  What told my mother everything was not that my father had never looked at her like that. She knew the look, although she hadn’t seen it for some time. She knew where it came from, which was not from a fantasy experience but from the anticipation of a real one.

  Nixon waved from the Great Wall. Uncle Roger drank his beer. My mother rocked in the rocking chair. Finally she glanced at Ada. Ada was not looking at my father. She was examining her smooth fingernails, painted that night the moon color of pearls.

  I imagine my mother got through the rest of that February evening in the living room by paying careful attention to everything said on the news about Nixon’s visit to China. She leaned forward, her eyes fixed on the television screen as TV commentators speculated on how trade with China might alter domestic affairs. It became her passion for the next few weeks: Nixon’s visit to China and how the world had changed.

  The twins and I were also in the living room that evening, lying on the rug with our chins in our hands, watching the TV set, though I doubt we were paying much attention since we thought news happened to other people. In a moment, in a glance, life for us was changed forever, and we never saw a thing.

  “This is history,” my mother said again and again that year as she read aloud articles from the Post or reported what she’d heard on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. Governor Wallace shot in Laurel, half an hour from our house; the Watergate break-in; the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Olympic games. I hardly listened. “This is history,” she would insist, as though introducing me to someone I should already know.

  One night she tried a recipe for chicken croquettes that turned out to have too much salt. A week later the Chiltons, from next door, told us they were moving to Rhode Island and had sold their house to someone named Green. Julie failed a math test. A gutter fell off the side of the house. These incidents, too, struck my mother as historic. She noted them all with urgency. “What’s next?” she often said. “Could you please tell me what’s next?”

  It was only after my father left and Boyd Ellison was killed that I started to wonder myself what might happen next. Boyd Ellison’s family lived only two streets away, in a ’50s contemporary with a Japanese maple in the front yard. I passed it whenever I rode around the neighborhood on my bike. The Halloween before, I had knocked on his door, shouting “Trick or treat” when the door opened and a dark-haired woman looked out at me. The Halloween before that, Boyd had come to our door dressed as a television set; he wore a cardboard box with real antennae tied to his head with yarn. I often saw him on the playground, although he went to a different school—a short blond boy with a square head who was always asking for things: a bite of your sandwich, a ride on your bike. He once asked to wear my glasses. He was irritating and pushy, sometimes a bully. He asked for things he knew you’d rather not give.

  Steven, although two years older, had once briefly been in Boyd’s Cub Scout troop. Boyd sat cross-legged in my own basement tying bowline knots and whittling soap cakes when the Scout troop met at our house one Sunday afternoon. He had asked for an extra brownie. He wanted a sip of my mother’s coffee. He cut his thumb with his pocketknife and came out of the bathroom with one of my mother’s fancy hand towels wrapped around his hand, wondering whether he could take the towel home.

  “No,” my mother had said, more gently than I thought appropriate, and gave him a Band-Aid instead.

  Although it seems crazy, I find myself wondering if all that asking had something to do with what happened to him. I suppose I wondered that at the time, too. Somehow Boyd seems to have asked for it, the “it” that is always out there, ready to transform your life into something unrecognizable. Because this, too, is how life can change: you can ask for what happens to you, without realizing what you’re asking for. Perhaps this is supposed to be fate.

  But then again, fate could be something much more terrible: something that could have been avoided. Fate might be no more than a mischance—the look intercepted, the wrong thing said, the decision to take a shortcut on a hot July afternoon through the woods behind a shopping mall.

  After five days with us, Aunt Fran and Aunt Claire departed together, both with sore throats from so much talking and smoking and both anxious to see their own families, to relax back into caring for people with manageable problems. Both of them had tried to get Ada to come back with them for a visit, but Ada refused. “I’m happy where I am,” she was reported to have said. But before they left, they had each spent part of a day with Ada, “trying to get her story”; unfortunately, neither one seemed certain what to say about whatever story she gave them.

  It must have been shocking, to think that all these years they had imagined she felt herself a sister to them the way they felt a sister to her.

  “Well, it’s not that she’s any different from before,” Aunt Claire told my mother on their last afternoon. They were all three crowded into the pantry, putting away our blue-rimmed dishes. “It’s just that I feel I hardly knew who she was.”

  My mother caught sight of me sitting under the dining-room table a few feet away. “Marsha, go on out. Your aunts and I are talking.”

  I went into the living room and sat behind the sofa.

  “I don’t think Ada wanted this,” said Aunt Claire hesitantly in a lower voice. “At least, I don’t think she planned to want this.”

  “In my opinion, it’s all about sex,” said Aunt Fran.

  “Please, Fran,” said my mother irritably.

  “Do you think you’ll ever forgive her?” said Aunt Claire. “Really ever forgive her?” She handed my mother a wine glass to polish.

  They all three held glasses to the light, looking for water spots.

  “I think Ada’s jealous of you,” continued Aunt Claire, after a few moments when my mother didn’t say anything. “She’s always wanted what you have.”

  “Which is what?” said my mother, knitting her eyebrows.

  “Children. The whole ‘being settled’ thing, with Larry getting successful and all, or at least comfortable. This house. You’re always so busy—you know what I mean, in that way a woman with a big life is busy. School, errands, birthday parties.”

  “Errands,” said my mother. “Birthday parties.”

  “Look, I’m trying to tell you something. To her I bet your life has always looked … so set.”

  “It’s certainly set now.”

  “You’re not listening, Lo. You don’t have to let her take everything away. You still have a family. You still have your kids. I don’t think Larry wants to leave.”

  My mother picked up another wine glass and held it upside down by the stem, dangling it over the floor. “I’m no longer interested,” she said, “in what Larry wants.”

  “Don’t do it, Lois,” I heard Aunt Fran break in, and the rough pleading in her voice struck me, which is why I have always remembered this conversation. “Don’t do it,” she said.

  It would have blown past, my father’s infatuation with Ada. He was a mostly mild man with a weakness for passion, a suburban father burdened with the heart of a Russian hero without any sort of balancing grand intellect or ironic world view. The yearning itself, the recklessness, that’s what lured him. Ada had it, too, the desire to do something dramatic, large, doomed. Their lives were so ordinary, and they themselves were ordinary enough to think of a commonplace way to sha
ke it all up.

  My mother, however, was not ordinary.

  Very quickly her grief and anger vibrated into something less personal: my father and Ada became her punishment for ever having felt secure. She should have seen the affair coming. There had been signs, she told Aunt Fran and Aunt Claire—lingering smiles, too much help with a coat at Christmas, each one by chance mentioning the same restaurant on the same day. She had not been careful. In this way, their affair became her fault. It was her punishment for forgetting that the world is and always has been a disastrous place.

  My father moved out on a Tuesday morning, the day after my aunts left, right after we had gone to school. And for a little while, our lives didn’t seem to reflect the enormous changes under way. We were used to coming home and finding only my mother there; my father rarely drove into the driveway until half an hour before dinner, and often he was out of the house to meet a client before I had finished my orange juice. So for a few moments each afternoon after I stepped through the door and pulled off my jacket and dropped my bookbag on the floor, I could almost believe that nothing had happened.

  First my father stayed at a Howard Johnson’s near the new Watergate Hotel; after a few weeks he rented a studio apartment on MacArthur Boulevard, not far from his real estate office and near the reservoir. His front window looked across at a stocky little cement castle that had been built at one corner of the reservoir, probably to house pipes and part of the filtration system. When we visited, I often knelt on his new fold-out sofa and looked out at the castle’s four crenellated towers, imagining what it would be like to live there.

  My father seemed unable to furnish or decorate his apartment after installing that sofa bed. For months he ate standing up in his tiny, bare kitchen. He bought a small, black-and-white TV set, which he set up on a milk crate. He kept his underwear and his socks in one of his suitcases. Whenever we visited, we all sat on the wood floor and ate Chinese food out of the paper cartons, or ate pizza and drank Coca-Cola from plastic cups, which my father washed and kept to be used again. Otherwise he made no effort to keep his apartment clean, and after he’d been there a few weeks dust balls rolled in the corners when we opened the door while spiderwebs floated from the windowsills.