Life Detonated Read online

  “What does he look like?” I asked Paul as we moved toward the coffin.

  Paul glanced over my head at Bobby. “The truth? Not suitable for viewing.”

  Not suitable for viewing. Not suitable for viewing. The words echoed dully in my head as I stood staring at the coffin. Dozens of white roses surrounded the words Beloved Father. After a moment, I felt Paul and Bobby moving me to the right like a stand-up doll, so the people circling the room and passing the casket could begin to greet me.

  “There’s the bomb squad from Germany.” Paul motioned to the line that had begun to move toward me. I remembered when Brian traveled to FBI headquarters in Quantico to collaborate with the German bomb squad on their newest techniques, how I had missed him but knew then he would come home.

  I was a standing zombie, greeting one after another as they came with the same words. Sorry for your loss, sorry for your loss, so sorry, pain clouding their eyes, as though what was good and wholesome in this world had been smashed to pieces. I looked to them for solace, but what I saw was incomprehension. We were all thinking the same thing: Why did this happen?

  Finally, Father Donnelly arrived. “I would like to talk to you in private.” He smoothed his cassock and glanced at the crowd. “To go over the sermon for tomorrow.”

  On the way out I saw my father leaning against the wall near the door. He looked shrunken, his face a gray mass of wrinkles. The suit he wore was too big for him, its elbows and knees shiny from wear. A solitary figure, he was a man who fathered eight children he didn’t love. My husband had been the only person in the family who was ever kind to him, and I recalled when Brian insisted we invite my father to our Brooklyn apartment for dinner, and how I resisted. “But he’s your father,” Brian had said, and I relented, but hated every minute of the awkward evening and never used the iron he brought as a gift.

  From the outside, it looked like Brian had a much better life. There were no heroin needles on his sidewalks, no spray-painted gang symbols on the walls of his Brooklyn brownstone. His father owned Ray Murray’s bar, and provided for his five children. But his mother was an alcoholic, and although they had financial means, she was erratic, and sometimes downright crazy.

  Brian’s father died from a heart attack on a cold January day, and when the furnace ran out of oil, lay frozen on the living room couch for days before Brian found him. He didn’t know how long his father had been dead or how long his mother stayed in the freezing house with her husband’s body.

  His mother died seven months later, and again, Brian discovered the body. Liver damage, the coroner told him. When we cleaned out her house we found clothing with tags still attached, long outgrown, toys never played with, and thousands of Green Stamps now stuck together. The attic was filled with enough crystal, silver, and china to open a shop. Aubusson rugs were trussed and shoved under antique furniture, all covered with years of dust. She was a collector, a talented one. She just couldn’t share what she collected.

  Father Donnelly ushered me out of the reception room. I was thankful to leave behind the overpowering scent of flowers and followed him down a hallway with several doors marked Private. Behind those doors I pictured quiet offices with tufted chairs where families sat to make funeral arrangements. He turned the knob to the one of the doors and I stood in the dark room, exhaustion blanketing me in a thick wave, and listened as he fiddled for the light switch. When the room brightened I realized it was not an office, but a preparation room. The body of an old gray man lay on a table, small and thin like my father. Then I saw a rush of black, and I felt myself falling. The next thing I heard were the sirens racing me to the hospital in the ambulance I had seen waiting.

  Behind all your stories is always your mother’s story because hers is where yours begins.

  — Mitch Albom, For One More Day

  Faile Street

  Everything Brian represented died with him—safety, strength, life without fear. After we met and married, he had saved me from years of living in cramped tenement apartments, and, in the deepest part of me, I worried I would fall back into that poverty, and somehow my boys would slide into the hardship that I’d experienced as a child. I had been too young to understand that my father’s leaving brought the shift into poverty, and along with it, a Faile Street address with spidery hallways, dumbwaiters, and a chain toilet.

  The walls of the Faile Street alleyways belonged to the Crypts and Diablos—stabbings and gang wars as constant as the sirens along Bruckner Boulevard. At first, our building had seemed a kind of oasis, with gleaming marble steps that led to, what seemed to my young eyes, a palatial lobby adorned with a chandelier and mirrored walls. But then, our mother led us to the basement where we would live as janitors. Long pipes ran across ceilings, the walls were coated with black soot. We made ten trips down to the basement, toting our clothes stuffed into pillowcases in the flexible flyer we’d used to bring our belongings to our new address. The steps were so steep we had to slide against the wall to keep from breaking our necks.

  A thin slice of watery sunlight peeked through the kitchen window, and I could see outside where old snow piled up against the building, thawed and refrozen, and then dulled by city dust.

  “I can manage here without having to pay rent,” my mother said as we stood around waiting for her to tell us what to do. But she stared ahead like we weren’t even there, her eyes transfixed on a cockroach crawling on the stove. She hadn’t put on stockings even though it was cold out, and the veins in her feet looked like blue lightning.

  My mother, Sarah Martin, was thirty-five in 1954, overweight, and the mother of eight. She didn’t have any money, but she had a job and a rent-free apartment, and she was finally rid of a husband who had blackened her eyes and knocked out her teeth for nineteen years.

  “I’m going to smash in Dad’s head with this baseball bat if he comes back,” Corky said to no one, holding onto the bat he used for little league.

  “It stinks in here. I want to go home,” I cried to my mother, reaching for her hand. Home had been an apartment on Hoe Avenue, sunshiny bright, where you could watch the world from the window seat.

  My mother took her hand from mine and brushed crumbs off a red Formica table. “This is home.” Yellow stuffing poked out from chairs that someone left behind. A flattened garbage can cover and an empty box of Nabisco crackers littered the floor.

  In a small back bedroom where an alleyway blocked out the sun, I watched my mother smooth sheets across her bed, and then she closed the door and turned the lock. I stood outside her door calling her name until Gracie took me by the hand. “Let her rest,” she said.

  Gracie let me sleep in her bed that first night in the basement on Faile Street. She painted my nails pink, and read to me a chapter from The Good Earth, a book we had begun on Hoe Avenue, about Chinese people whose lives seemed much worse than ours. I wondered if that was why she had chosen it, to make us feel better than those poor people in the story. The next morning, Gracie cleaned up the bathroom so we could all take baths, and then swept up the garbage in the cellar so it wouldn’t smell so bad.

  “Stay away from the boiler room,” my mother warned me, but, of course, I had to peek into the room that held a giant furnace where flames licked the iron door. It was my mother who fed that furnace coal, answered the tenants’ bells when the water wasn’t hot enough, mopped the marble steps from the roof down. I was too young to understand that my mother couldn’t tend to me then because she was exhausted from dragging behind her a baggage-load of broken dreams.

  Once upon a time my mother had been redheaded, blue eyed, lusciously curved, in love with a boy from the neighborhood. It was her own father who had forced her to marry Tom Martin, my father, twelve years her senior.

  “I need you to be a big girl for me,” she would tell me, but I didn’t want to be a big girl. I wanted her.

  “Do you love me Mommy?”

  “If I di
dn’t love you, I would give you away.”

  “Who would you give me to?”

  “Don’t worry. No one wants you.”

  She didn’t have time to love one child with seven more pulling on her skirts, and I was never the good little girl, my frizzy red hair and freckled face weren’t cute enough. When anyone cooed over the five little ones, their smile faded when they came to me. My second-grade picture showed bangs zigzagging across my forehead, barrettes at opposite angles. I wasn’t smiling. I was afraid of everything, bums who loitered in the alleyways with their brown paper bags of whiskey, loud noises, cats, dogs, boogymen who were always waiting to pounce.

  In my play-cave on Faile Street I hid under the covers, waiting for my mother to wonder where I was. My cave was a sheet tied over the top bunk bed. From it I could see into the living room where Danny ran in circles around the coffee table. Blue safety pins that held up his diaper peeked through a hole in his rubber pants. I watched him pick up the glass ashtray, almost too heavy for his small hands, raise it over his head, and drop it into the cradle where Patrick was sleeping. Patrick’s screams brought my mother in. When she found Danny trying to climb into the cradle, she backhanded him.

  “Damn you all to hell!” she screamed.

  She picked up the ashtray and cigarette butts from the cradle and wiped Patrick’s face with the end of her flowered apron. Then she sat down on the couch that made a whooshing sound, took a Pall Mall from her apron pocket, lit a match, and tossed it near the ashtray. She left her two sons, seventeen months apart, to cry it out, never once glancing my way.

  The only time I had my mother to myself was when I made myself wake up early. Taking my spot on the edge of the claw-foot tub, I would watch her put on makeup, trying to cover up the bruises my father left when he showed up in a drunken rage. Like an artist, she put on a layer of pancake makeup over a dark spot on her cheek and let it dry, and then went back and applied another coat until I could hardly detect the black and blue.

  She had wavy red hair like Gracie and me, lots of curves, and long muscular legs. I watched her roll up her stockings and look over her shoulder to make sure the seams lined up. “Are they on straight?” she would ask. I backed up, scrutinizing the seams like they were plumb lines. “A little crooked,” I would tell her, but in truth I just wanted to see her roll the silk down her thigh, feel for the seam, and roll it back up again.

  It was our time together, the morning ritual of watching her dress for work in her pink and brown uniform and white apron. Those were the only times we talked like mother and daughter, and she would sometimes tell me stories about growing up one of four sisters, just like me. But once the day started, it was as if I became invisible, one of eight children who all wanted something from her, even if it was something important, like education.

  __________

  I often sat on the stoop to watch kids line up across the street at P.S. 75. Kids in our building who were my age had parents who combed their hair and dressed them up and held their hand as they crossed the street. I wanted desperately to join them for what Gracie told me was kindergarten. I pleaded with my mother, but all she would say is “next year.” Next year, she said, I could go into first grade, but I wanted to go now, so I asked Gracie.

  “Why can’t I go to kindergarten?”

  And my thirteen-year-old sister heard me. “Because you need special clothes for school, and Mommy doesn’t have the money to buy them.” She gave my hand a squeeze. “Let me see if I can dig something up for you.”

  And just as she promised, Gracie garnered some old hand-me-down school dresses. I was in love with those dresses even though one was a red plaid made of wool that itched so badly my stomach was raw from scratching. Another was a pink, frilly party dress with crinolines that made the bottom stick out and my brothers laugh, but I didn’t care. While my mother went to work and my siblings ran around the basement, Gracie combed my hair into a ponytail for my first day of school.

  School had been in session for a month, but for me, everything was brand new. The classroom smelled of wax and freshly sharpened pencils. The ABCs and 123s that Gracie had already taught me surrounded the room. I sat behind Angela from 4B, whose last name started with L. Both Angela’s parents were teachers, and she looked like she had been born in the schoolroom. She was wearing light blue ribbons in her hair. “They match my eyes,” she told me when we lined up. Across from me was just plain Jay, as the kids in our building called him because his brothers were James and Joseph. He was wearing a white shirt and tie, his usual unruly hair smoothed across his head, a miniature of his father.

  Every face in the room was familiar, Laura from 3C, whose mother ironed for Jay’s. Arthur, whose mother fed him so much that his kindergarten clothes strained at the seams. Bobby, whose mother was a janitor like mine, wore his older brother’s white shirt with grayed cuffs, the toes of his shoes scuffed from dragging his feet.

  Mrs. Rosen’s heavy black glasses hid her eyes, her thick heels echoed through the room. No one talked as she walked up and down the aisle, inspecting our drawings. “Now you will be examined by the nurse,” she said when she got to the front of the class. My stomach turned. Would I pass the nurse test?

  Angela and I stood together in the hallway as the nurse worked her way down the line. “Stick out your tongue.” She put a stick in Angela’s mouth first.

  I can stick out my tongue, I thought, and the pain in my stomach eased. The nurse put the depressor in my mouth and wrote something on a paper, then took what looked like chopsticks and parted my hair. She paused. “Kathy, go home and don’t come back until you get rid of the bugs in your hair.”

  “Eeeeew.” Angela scrunched closer to the wall. A ripple went down the line of kindergarteners.

  “Next year,” Gracie said to me after trying to get the bugs out of my hair. “We’ll try again.”

  I never did get to cross Faile Street and stand in line with the kids who lived in my neighborhood, as the next year I was sent to Catholic school where my mother’s former teacher at Cardinal Spellman was principal, and where tuition was waived for the Martin kids.

  Instead of the warm classroom that smelled like wax where I dreamed I would learn everything, Catholic school brought the weight of Sister Joseph’s ruler across my knuckles if I talked out of turn, or the shame of standing in the wastebasket if I forgot my homework.

  It was a constant struggle to stay in school, and while I did graduate high school and find a job in Manhattan, life at home did not change. My mother continued to struggle to feed and shelter us, and when she wasn’t working, locked the door to her bedroom where she could find a few hours of peace and quiet.

  It was Brian who took me from that life of invisibility. It was Brian who saw me in a way no one really had before. Clean shaven, civic-minded, a decorated veteran with a career in law enforcement before him, with Brian I wasn’t a girl wearing hand-me-downs, I was a bomb squad officer’s wife, a mother, a beautiful woman who was loved by a hero.

  Nothing is permanent in this world,

  not even our troubles.

  — Charles Chaplain

  The Funeral

  The morning of the funeral brought the most beautiful September weather I could remember, crystal clear skies, and a warm breeze. It was a day we should have been at the park, pushing Chris on the swings, spotting Keith on the monkey bars. The sun was a dirty trick lulling me into thinking everything was okay. I expected something to happen—the sky to explode in dangerous lighting—and longed to feel pounding rain.

  Standing at the mirror, feeling thick from the tranquilizers doctors finally made me swallow at the hospital, I let my mother put yet another black dress over my head. We could hear the faint sounds of the media, could feel the pressure of them against the house. The polyester dress felt itchy.

  “What about my good black suit?” There was a dress code at the office. We couldn’t wear p
ants or skirts above the knee, and I thought the suit that cost more than I made in a week was perfect for a funeral.

  “This is more appropriate,” my mother said, and I didn’t argue. It was hot out, and the dress did feel lighter than my suit, but when she tried to put a mantilla over my hair, I backed away.

  “Are the boys coming?” Gracie stood in the doorway in an almost matching dress.

  “They’re with Amy across the street,” my mother told her.

  I was glad. I wanted the last memory of their father to be riding on his back, pulling a make-believe train whistle, not following his coffin out of St. Agnes Cathedral.

  St. Agnes was where a bishop said mass on Sundays, and where Keith and Chris were baptized, though Brian preferred Father Donnelly from his Brooklyn parish, who would officiate the funeral mass. We lived on Long Island for five years, but Brian was a Brooklyn boy and would have been happy to stay in our first apartment, a brownstone on Beverley Road. I thought about how Brian helped me paint the bedroom chartreuse even though he said he didn’t like the color, and how he laughed when I bought a sofa from one of the design centers we sold linen to without measuring the entrance to our apartment. We had to leave the sofa in the warehouse until we moved to Rockville Centre.

  Now I wished I hadn’t insisted we move into this house, wished that I spent more time with him instead of commuting into Manhattan to help pay for the home I now wanted to get away from. I wished a lot of things. That I didn’t feel resentment when Brian went to the firehouse on weekends where he polished trucks and drank beer with other volunteers. I wished we made more time for each other. I wished for one more night. But it was too late for wishes.

  Clinton Avenue was barricaded against the crowds. Out the limousine window, an ocean of blue uniforms and mourners, all silent, surrounded the Cathedral in the morning glare. The hook-and-ladder trucks from Brian’s volunteer fire unit looked like giant toys glistening in the hot sun, piled high with flowers. His firemen friends stood awkwardly together, dressed in their blues. Rows of military uniforms lined up along the cathedral steps, men who had served with Brian in Vietnam. I closed my eyes. This is all for you. They came to say goodbye.