A Nation of Amor Read online

  Detective Mullen says,

  “C’mon kid, let me in.”

  I say,

  “I don’t know any Rey Matos.”

  The man smiles again and leans against the door making the chain go tight. That puerko Husky is sucking on his teeth like a piece of rice got stuck somewheres.

  Detective Mullen says,

  “Why aren’t you in school honey? You look a little young to be at home during the day.”

  I say,

  “I don’t know any Rey Matos.”

  Detective Mullen says,

  “He’s not in trouble. That’s all over with. I know his sister-in-law lived here with her kids. You couldn’t miss him, tall for a PR, with wild curly hair. Why don’t you let me in? Just to put my mind at ease.”

  That little chain what can keep me in looks so helpless now that I want it to keep them out.

  I say,

  “He ain’t here, please go away. You’re scaring me.”

  And I make a tear come to my eye because a man always likes to see a little fear.

  Detective Mullen says,

  “I believe you honey. Smart girl, keep the door locked.”

  If I can’t play by Mano’s rules and get out of this crib, I’m gonna make up some of my own. My hands shake so much I can’t get the other lock to turn in the door. Not just my hands, breathing heavy and hard, knees feel like rubber, I back away from the door and into the table. A plate falls into pieces on the floor.

  The crashing sound makes me crazy, all berserk, and I’m running through the crib, kick a pile of clothes that rain down dirty around me, sweep my hand across a table and Mano’s tapes run like ants across the floor.

  The Kings will tell Mano that the cops passed by. But those punks are scattered, they couldn’t see if the cops came in or not. If I make Mano believe it ain’t safe for me locked up here, he’ll have to take me with him to school. If Mano thinks somebody touched me he’ll take me with him. He’s got to take me with him, even if I have to go back to school, he’ll have to take me with him to keep an eye on me. Mano be crazy like that.

  Mano thinks that if I ever get out alone the first thing I do would be spread my legs in the street for any punk that grabs at himself. I’ll tell’im it was Husky, yeah, Husky came by to hassle him, yeah, to check if he be in school for Mano’s PO.

  I’ll trash the place, put a baseball bat through the TV, throw his paint cans in the toilet. I’ll tell him they would’ve broken the door down. I’ll tell him that when I unchained the door they rushed in and the door hit me on the head. I’ll gangster Mano, my way, with a woman’s intuition, whatever that is. Practice my lines, I’m not safe, I love you, please let me be with you at school all day or they gonna come by again and mess with me …

  I ain’t never lied to Mano before. But if he found out I was lyin’ he’d just jack me up anyway so what can I lose? I might even win by lyin’ to him.

  I unlatch the chain and unlock the door. I sweep away broken glass and plates cuz I can’t be on top of what they broke after the door knocked me out, yeah.

  A teacher once told me the hardest part of a person’s skull is the forehead. Maybe school won’t be so bad. School was boring, but it was always easy for me. It will be nice to walk back and forth and see some people during the day. I kneel next to our old wood table. Can’t pass out straight away, got to see if I leave any blood on the table, that would look too fishy, right? Got to wipe it off with my hand before I pass out.

  I’ll tell Mano I’ll be good, won’t talk any shit at school, I’m not safe alone here. If his car got dented he’d park it someplace safer. I will dent myself to get parked someplace safer.

  I lean back, point my head at the corner of the table. Thousand one, thousand two, thousand three, here goes nothin’…

  THOMAS STOLARZ

  November 20, lunch with dad

  The waitress serves my father a steaming heap of pierogi. The potato-stuffed dumplings are awash in butter, dotted with bits of fried bacon and accompanied by a side order of sour cream. My father, immeasurably pleased, lovingly peers at the dish as if he were about to reach down and scratch it behind the ears. Knife and fork poised, he announces, “Thomas, Sophie’s will endure. No matter what changes this neighborhood goes through.”

  Sophie’s Polish Diner, a vestige of the prior Westtown, a lump on Division Street not unlike the small mass of inert tissue which rests at the base of the human spine. We once possessed tails, did we not? The uneven Formica tables brandish smeared marks worn from decades of succumbing to heavily laden crockery. Patrons linger, not from hunger, but to escape the elements. It’s been raining Puerto Ricans for fifteen years in the old neighborhood and Sophie’s provides the only public Polish shelter. Of the four times each week I choose to rest an elbow here, the probability of encountering a Colón or a Torres is less than that of meeting a Windsor or von Hapsburg.

  My father smiles indulgently at the old Polish women serving him. He, as did I, came here with my grandfather, and because of this, neither one of us will ever mature past the age of 11 while under the sweet, blue-eyed gazes of the babushka-clad staff. To humor both father and my surrogate aunties, I ordered galumpki, stuffed cabbage, and politely pick at forkfuls of the leaden, neon orange sauced mess.

  My father swallows, noisily washing the heavy dumplings down with a gulp of beer. “Progress report on the house?” he chirps.

  In preparation for my impending, recklessly ill-conceived reply, he wipes his hand on his napkin and pinches the bridge of his red veiny nose between thumb and forefinger.

  “I’m still on a bit of a learning curve.” I set aside my fork and continue, “The contractor now contends that all the wiring will need to be replaced. I’ve got the new fence up. Now, I’m working on gutting the top floor. The workmen are finished with the new stairs and the decks on the back of the house.”

  I have retained my soiled work clothes from this morning’s manual labor session in hope of eliciting either empathy, sympathy, or respect from my father. None appear forthcoming. Two hours of token toil have mummified me in a fine sheen of plaster dust. When I sat down my clothes emitted a white puff. Nonplused, father has refused to note my primping. I feel like a woman in a negligee who is unable to pry her husband’s attention from a bunion on her toe.

  My father nods, chews, then produces a calendar from his breast pocket and leafs through it. The days and months are flipping past me, upside down, and I can see notations he has made on certain dates.

  “Have you finished the tuck pointing?” He demands.

  “A crew arrived Monday, left assorted tools and equipment, but I haven’t seen them since. The contractor assures me they’ll finish this coming week,” I lie.

  Oh I do lie … In much the same way, I suppose, that you lied to my grandfather, as only sons and daughters lie to fathers and mothers; untruths, mistruths, half truths, which when scrutinized are not lies to the parent but lies to ourselves. You were frightened of becoming my grandfather, and I am frightened of becoming you. The absurd cycle continues like the hands of a clock, twelve hours forward, twelve to return, to arrive at the zero point of conception and of self-realization, to discover that you haven’t moved at all. So my purposeful malfeasance and unabashed mendacity are really only meager stopgaps, delusions I employ to try and convince myself that I will not grow into your reflection.

  You have always felt cheated by the short, fat, ethnic straw you drew from the great Catholic triumvirate of Chicago. In the name of the Irish, the Italian, and heaven help the lowly Polack, amen. A sense of inadequacy further exacerbated by grandfather’s lack of respect for the spiritual and social eminence of the Catholic Church. Here lunches the immigrant’s son who chomped for elitism; who begged to be sent to St. Ignacious Catholic Prepatory School for Boys and feel the mystic oils of Jesuit intellectualism upon his brow. But grandfather paid property taxes, was instrumental in the establishment of Lane Technical High School, and believed that every young ma
n, regardless of wealth or background, should be given the opportunity to prep for university in a public high school. He sarcastically advised you, his mortified sprog, to tell your snobby peers that you were to attend St. Lane.

  The Micks were cops and politicians, the Wops owned small businesses, we Polacks worked in the stockyards. At Lane, none of your classmates assumed you were wealthy; with a name like Stolarz everyone thought that you suffered an hour-long bus ride from Back O’ The Yards and toted boiled potatoes in your lunch box.

  Decades before plastic surgery, you developed methods of achieving the same results without the use of a scalpel, forceps, or silicone. I know that from adolescence you ate no starch. Though never plump, you mortally feared the appearance of more than one chin beneath your face. By refusing beer for gin, you cultivated the web of fine red veins on your nose more lovingly than any octogenarian Italian tended his zucchini crop. You ran track, 880 and 440, and threw the javelin; a fleeter Polack never graced Westtown. This kind of athletic success devastated my grandfather. He envisaged a young Bronco Nagursky knocking bricks from the walls at Wrigley Field; at worst, an imposing Ted Kluwinski lumbering to home plate.

  Rebelliously forsaking grandfather’s business, you left Lane and applied to one university and thereafter, one law school; Loyola, northside, Jesuit, and Irish. Henceforth establishing the firm of Scully, Stolarz and Martin. You, the glistening, pink slab of smoked kielbasa sandwiched between two dry slices of soda bread. My mother’s maiden name is Nelligan; raven-haired, green-eyed, thin-ankled, a splattering of auburn freckles concisely eye droppered across her well-defined cheekbones. You set up house in a north shore suburb, Glenview, because it is also both Catholic and Irish in composition, and joined the North Shore Country Club for not dissimilar reasons. And yet, in further emulation of any good Irishman, you have not accepted the Host in over twenty years.

  When grandfather died you reached the point of mortal realization. The hands of the clock reached 6:30, as far from that zero point as you could ever journey. At that moment you finally transcended the irrational, adolescent ethnocentrism which had fueled your first forty years and decided to dedicate the next forty to becoming the common Polack you always should have been.

  You bid adieu to Scully and Martin, ordered a tailor to let all of your trousers out a few inches, forced my mother to watch you eat Polish sausage for breakfast, and inherited the most valuable chunk of real estate in Chicago, Goose Island.

  But fate can be a wicked paradox. Now, a few years later, you are even more so the robust reflection of Ted Kennedy. Aquiline face atop a paunched frame, bright eyed, perennially flushed, you have incautiously evolved into a satire of your youthful aspiration.

  “How many days have I fallen behind your schedule?” I ask.

  Father sets the calendar aside, dabs a damp napkin at a droplet of grease marring his gray, pin-striped suit, and says, “Thomas, what the fuck have you been doing?”

  Staring into the spectacled, magnified, unceasing azure of your eyes, I wonder to what degree you can read my current thoughts? And if so, how successfully would Sara chip your enamel of correctness.

  “I’ll be frank …”

  “If you don’t mind, son.”

  “The teaching job is taking its toll. After eight hours of crisis management, I’m too exhausted to give proper consideration to the house.”

  The waitress drops the check on the table and my father reaches for his wallet. He slides a $20 bill beneath the tab, a corner of the note left visible.

  “Thomas, I have placed conditions upon you because I shall never be able to do so again. Life is not an idyll to those born more fortunate, nor a rigor for those less fortunate. Life is an opportunity, the sole binding element of all human beings. Every individual—rich, poor, black, white—has the innate responsibility to create as much goodness as their opportunities allow. You are a very fortunate young man. Everything to be desired from life has been provided for you, most importantly, the environment to succeed. You’ve had a stable home, you’re healthy, you’ve gone to the best schools and have been rewarded for your considerable achievements.

  “You always wanted that house. So I gave it to you, granting you sole control of a substantial trust. I chose to do this, under one condition. That you restore some of the advantages you have received in life to those less fortunate than yourself by working within and for this community. So you chose to teach. It is through your teaching that you will continue a cycle, not return a debt, in order to reflect your experience, your knowledge, your wealth of opportunity back into this community. To learn that no matter what course one’s life takes, a commitment to the advancement of the community is inescapable. It is simple to believe in ideals, but idealism ends when a man supports those ideals through his actions. Then he creates energy, energy that ensures the cycle you have initiated will continue.”

  The waitress attempts to return his change and he annoyedly shoos her away.

  “The proudest moment of my life was not when you were born, when you graduated from college, or even your decision to renovate the house. It was when you accepted a teaching post at that school.”

  But the recitation is not for me. If a lectern, stage, and microphone were on hand, you would happily use them to deliver your sermon to the aging, wayward, disillusioned flock in attendance at Sophie’s; to the waitress counting quarters while she rests her swollen ankles and sips from the current of a never ending succession of cups-o-coffee, to the portly old duffers in house slippers and mangy cardigans ingesting stout plates of artery-hardening lunches, to the cops near the back door sitting at a family-style table which always has a reserved sign posted upon it and where a bill hasn’t been presented for twenty years.

  This grim spectrum of humanity is not my jury, it is yours. A belief in law, democracy and enterprise allowed you to spend half of your life convinced that you were a brilliant law advocate for the underdog. You could have retired on the settlement of one airline crash victim.

  During the length of time it takes you to finish that beer, you could sell Goose Island, and even I would be challenged to squander the proceeds. Like grandfather, you want to play with an erector set, so you’ve spent over five years planning your landmark; the development of Goose Island and the renewal of Westtown. Embarrassed by the magnitude of your aspirations, you self-consciously crave approval from the local Puerto Ricans that are too poor to own erector sets. So you allow the novices to help, deluded that an even greater creation will emerge from the channeled energy of a communal workshop. Ahhh, but still a rich man at heart, you own all the toys, and are unaccustomed to sharing.

  Grandfather built Westtown, died watching it burn, his landmark, his achievement, his final injustice. You too may die here, still trying to convert Westtown to a revisionist, ethnically harmonious glory. Your persistence for including all these squabblers from the local community produces only the confrontation you sought to avoid with politicians, zoning officers, community planners, neighborhood leaders, and PTAs. They can help you create things, possibly: homes, buildings, maybe even a landmark … But they are not part of the Westtown where you envision yourself hovering paterfamilias above the babushkas, future Hall of Fame first basemen, sausage vendors, and corner taverns. You don’t speak Spanish, have never heard of a Coquí, and pasteles do not appear on the menu at Sophie’s.

  “I understand my debt to the community, but …”

  “Look at it this way Thomas. It’s like the Peace Corps. Devote a couple of years and you never have to feel guilty again.”

  Less than an hour ago I stood panting with Flaco amid a fog of plaster dust; goggled, masked, sledgehammers in hand, apparitions of destruction. The top floor of my house was where the servants quartered, a Polish family. As their numbers increased, so in direct proportion did the amount of closed, windowless space within the apartment. Grandfather allowed the family to erect beaver board walls within what was once an airy, open flat, thus converting it to a da
rk warren of minute bedrooms. Ironic, how overcrowding induced the desire to create yet more cramped rooms, for the sole purpose of depositing a bed, closing the door, procreating, and producing more intense overcrowding.

  Our task was to bring down the walls without damaging the original structure of the apartment. How apt, that structures so precarious and tasteless, borne of ignorance, should be felled in partnership between Flaco and myself. His remuneration aside, Flaco’s remarkable vivacity in the face of this task seemed to be derived from something within his soul rather than his mind or wallet. Chest heaving, biceps and triceps taut, Flaco looked like John Henry, the head of his sledgehammer poised beneath his chin. Yet he wasn’t building anything, so what unexposed nerve deep inside his being did this task penetrate?

  Is it an exceptional man that sees the beauty of possibility amidst the ugliness of destruction? Or does Flaco, like the rest of his peers, merely have a conditioned respect for destruction? He grew up knowing no other play than slap boxing, no other sense of expression than the defacement of property with spray paint. Whether consciously or not, perhaps Flaco senses the microcosm embodied in the simple partnership of he and I obliterating those prefabricated symbols of ignorance. Similarly, as he has demonstrated in the classroom, Flaco comprehends that one cannot build upon sand, renovate beaver board, master algebra before fractions, box a child healthy, nor restore a wall of brick without sandblasting the spray-painted crown from its face. But Flaco is the deviate, not the norm.

  “I’ve hired one of the students as a laborer.”

  “Splendid!” Dad chimes. “Use these experiences, don’t fight them. Use your intellect to adapt to the neighborhood.”

  “The student’s name is Flaco. Flaco Matos.”

  “Matos?”

  “The alderman’s nephew; my employer Reynaldo’s nephew, son of Angel the martyr.”

  “It is a small world. How are your students?”

  “They don’t listen, they won’t respond, they fight me every step of the way.” He nods in agreement so I continue. “They have no real sense of life. Nothing that is actually important—finishing school, getting a job, even staying out of jail—seems of consequence.”