A Drinking Life

1

AT THE BEGINNING of my remembering, I am four years old and we are living on the top floor of a brick building on a leafy street in Brooklyn, a half block from Prospect Park. Before that place and that age, there is nothing. But in those remembered rooms are my mother, my younger brother Tommy, and me. It is the winter of 1939. I remember the kitchen, with its intricately patterned blue-and-red linoleum floors, and windows that opened into a garden where an elm tree rose higher than the house. The kitchen light was beautiful: suffused with a lemony green in summer, dazzling when winter snow garnished the limbs of the elm tree. I remember the smell of pine when my mother mopped the floors. I remember her whistling when she was happy, which was most of the time. I remember how tall she seemed then, and how shiny her brown hair was after she had washed it in the sink. And I remember my brother Tommy, two years younger than I, small and curly-haired and gentle. I don’t remember my father.

He was there, all right. Billy Hamill wasn’t one of those Depression fathers who went for a loaf of bread at the corner store and never came back. He moved through those rooms. He slept in one of the beds. He shaved in the bathroom and bathed in the tub. But for me, he wasn’t there. In some ways, it made no difference. On summer afternoons, I would sit outside the house, in a patch of earth near the curb, playing with a small red fire engine, telling myself stories.

Perhaps my father was in those stories. But he didn’t take me on those long green walks through the endless meadows and dark woods of Prospect Park. My mother did. Nor did he take me to see my first movie. My mother did that too. It was The Wizard of Oz, and the streets were dark when we came out of the Sanders Theater and she took my hand and we skipped home together, singing Off to see the Wizard, the wonderful Wizard of Oz, because because because because Because. I have no memory of him bouncing me on his knee or looking at the drawings I made each day with my box of eight Crayolas. I remember sitting on the stoop, watching Japanese beetles gnaw the ivy that covered the face of the brownstone next door and my mother teaching me a little song to be crooned to another insect neighbor: Ladybug, Ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire, your child is alone… But I learned no songs from my father. Not then.

In large part, my father’s absence was caused by his work. He left home before I awoke and returned after I was asleep. So in some ways, I didn’t really miss him. He wasn’t in my presence often enough to be physically missed. Besides, I was too busy learning the names of the world and even having small adventures. Once I went to Prospect Park with Billy Kelly, the boy who lived on the first floor. He was my first friend, a year older than I was, and his family owned 471 Fourteenth Street, the house where we lived on the top floor. Our adventure began in a very simple way. Billy said, Let’s go to the park. And I said, Okay, let’s go to the park.

And yet I knew that what we were doing was full of risk. Most important of all, it was the first time I’d ever gone anywhere without my mother and this act could lead to punishment. She might get cross. She might spank me. I went anyway, trusting Billy Kelly, certain we would be back before my mother noticed I was gone. I crossed the wide avenue called Prospect Park West, following the vastly more experienced Billy, watching for the trolley cars and the few big boxy black automobiles that moved through the streets in those days. We plunged into the park and wandered through that green world whose trees loomed high above us. Soon we were lost. We crossed streams, gazed at lakes, threw stones into the woods, but never could find the familiar playground and low stone wall beyond which lay home. I was filled with panic. I might never see my mother again or my brother Tommy or the kitchen at 471. We could end up in jail or someplace called the Orphanage, where they put kids without parents.

We were still in the park at dusk, when my mother found us. Her eyes were wide and angry, probably frantic. She did nothing to Billy Kelly; that was not her right. But she spanked me.

I’ve been looking everywhere for you, Peter, she said sharply. You had me worried sick.

I cried all the way home, full of remorse, and shocked too, because I had never before seen my mother angry, certainly not at me. And then we were at the house, going up the stoop in silence and into the vestibule and up the stairs to the top floor. Then, suddenly, quietly, she hugged me. And fed me. And put me to bed. The day had been the most turbulent of my short life; but from beginning to end, my father played no part in it at all.

In the summer of 1940, my mother started taking Tommy and me to visit my father where he worked.

You should be very proud of your daddy, my mother said. He only finished the eighth grade and he is working as a clerk. The reason is his beautiful handwriting.

She didn’t explain what a clerk was, but she did show me his handwriting on some sheets of ruled paper. I was just learning to print the alphabet on the same kind of paper, and the shape and steadiness of my father’s handwriting did seem very beautiful. He was working at the main office of a Brooklyn grocery chain called Thomas Roulston & Sons and brought home nineteen dollars a week. The Roulston company was housed in a redbrick factory building near the Gowanus Canal, more than a mile from where we lived. My mother would pack a lunch for him and put Tommy in a stroller and off we would go, first crossing along the parkside, then marching block after block, down the great slope. From Ninth Street, I could see all the way to the harbor, where there were ships on the water as small as toys. I loved arriving down near the canal, where the Smith and Ninth Street station of the Independent subway line rose high above us on a concrete trestle. On some days, a drawbridge would groan and squeal, rising slowly to allow some tough squat tugboat to plow through the canal’s oily waters to the harbor. There was a mountain of coal on one of the banks and a machine for unloading it off barges and another for putting it on thin-wheeled trucks with odd sloped fronts like the points of steam irons. I’d wait beside the bridge with Tommy while my mother took her plump brown paper bag up to my father’s office. He never once came down to the street to say hello to us.

But I do remember him sitting in the kitchen one bright Sunday afternoon in May. Suddenly among us there was a fat blond baby in a tiny crib. A white cake lay on the table and my father was there, bigger than he’d ever seemed before. He was celebrating his own birthday and the birth of my sister, Kathleen.

Through the door that afternoon came Uncle Tommy, gruff, friendly, my father’s brother, and his wife, Aunt Louie, followed by another brother named Uncle David, tall and lean and grave, and his wife, Aunt Nellie, who was chubby and large and laughed a lot. Behind them came other men, great huge men with sour smells clinging to their jackets and enormous feet encased in shiny leather. They all wore hats and smoked cigarettes and laughed very loudly and drank beer from tall glasses and giant brown bottles. After a while, one of them began to sing, a sad mournful song. When he was finished my father rose and started singing too. His song was funny. His eyes danced, he smiled, he gestured with his hands to emphasize a point, used his eyebrows for other points, and when he was finished they all cheered. The baby cried. My mother picked her up and went into the other room while my father filled his glass with beer, took a long drink and started into another song. For a long time, I sat on the floor near the window, watching this magic show.

2

IN THE FALL, I started kindergarten at PS 107, down on the corner. We played with blocks. We learned songs. We made paintings and cutouts. Then it was winter. Great piles of snow filled the schoolyard for weeks and once on a class trip to the park I took a great mound of pure fresh-fallen snow in my mittens and began to eat it. I didn’t know exactly why; the snow was just so clean and white that I wanted it inside me. But the other kids laughed. I was mortified by their laughter and wanted to run home, but the teacher said, It’s all right, young man; if you want to eat snow, there’s no rule against it.

My mother had friends on the street: Mrs. Hogan directly across the street, Mrs. Fox, Mrs. Cottingham, who lived near the corner across from the schoolyard. Now I had another friend: a beautiful girl named Roberta Perrin, who had dark hair and lustrous eyes and inspired in me some vague desire; her mother and mine were also friends. Roberta was in my class at kindergarten, and I liked being with her more than with my friend Billy Kelly, who was now in first grade. After school, I found my way to her areaway, which was always dark under great thick-trunked trees, and we played together. When I ate snow, she didn’t laugh. There was a grocery store on the corner, run by Syrians, but my mother didn’t shop there; she went to a Roulston’s branch a block away, loyal, as always, to my father. Except for those long journeys down to the canal, the world was a very small place.

Just before Christmas that year, we woke to the sight of a tree with shiny colored bulbs and tinfoil decorations my mother made from the lining of cigarette packs. We had no blinking lights. There must have been Christmas trees in our house before then, but I don’t remember them. This was a special Christmas. I was given some toys, some candy canes, and a copy of A Child’s Garden of Verses, by Robert Louis Stevenson. My mother read from it to me, over and over, showing me the letters and the words. Then it was summer again and we were taking our long journeys to the Gowanus Canal. Now Tommy was walking and Kathleen was in the carriage. My father still didn’t come down to see us. One sunny day I asked why.

Oh, he’d love to come down, my mother said. But the stairs are too hard on him. He works all the way up there.

She pointed to the top floor of the six-story building.

Then why can’t we go up and see him? I said.

Because they don’t let kids in the building.

Why?

Well, there must be two hundred men working for Roulston’s. If every man had three kids visit him at lunchtime, there’d be a riot in there.

She laughed, told us she wouldn’t be long, and hurried into the building. I stared at the top floor, wishing my father would come to a window and wave at us. He never did.

In the fall of 1941, I entered the first grade at Holy Name of Jesus elementary school. My mother took me by the hand to the schoolyard and then went away. A white brick school building rose like a fortress before me, three severe stories off the ground. At a right angle to the school was the back of the church, its bricks painted the color of dried blood. Those walls and the wire fence blocked any possibility of escape, and I was swiftly trapped in a wild sea of strangers. There were seventy-two boys in 1A that year, and a tall nun with creamy skin struggled to tame us. This was no easy task. On the first day, one frantic lank-haired boy danced on top of a desk. Others shouted encouragement, squealed in delight, whined, thumped each other, and slammed the desktops. I sat there, wishing I was home, alone on the stoop watching Japanese beetles or staring out the window into the safe stillness of the green garden. Somehow I got through the day. I was assigned a desk. I started writing letters of the alphabet in a composition book with a black-and-white cover. The boys calmed down. Sister asserted her command.

A few weeks later, there was great excitement everywhere: car horns blowing, bells ringing in a hundred church steeples, sirens screaming from firehouses. The Dodgers had won the pennant! I wasn’t sure what a pennant was, but it must have been a glorious thing to win, for we were given the day off from school and my mother took us on another long walk, to Grand Army Plaza. There we stood, among thousands of joyful strangers, on the new steps of the gleaming white Brooklyn Public Library and watched the Dodgers parade in triumph up Flatbush Avenue on their way to Ebbets Field. The ball players were huge tanned men with great smiles and enormous arms, sitting on the backs of convertibles, waving at us all. That night my father came home with two large bottles of beer and sitting alone in the kitchen (because my mother knew nothing of baseball) he celebrated the great triumph while listening to reports on the radio.

Just remember one thing, McGee, he said to me, in a grave voice. The Dodgers are the greatest thing on earth.

In school the next day, I told some of the other boys that the Dodgers were the greatest thing on earth. They all agreed with this, of course, and so did Sister, who had us pray for the Dodgers as they moved on to the World Series against the Yankees. But then a Dodger catcher named Mickey Owen dropped a third strike, the Yankees won the World Series, and we all had to wonder if God was a Yankee fan. That couldn’t be possible. God was a Catholic, wasn’t he? And since the Dodgers were from Brooklyn, they must be Catholics too. Or so we thought.

As young as we were, we were learning fast that year about the presence of calamity in the world. The Dodgers were only the beginning. On December 7, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. I have no clear memory of that Sunday or of Franklin Roosevelt’s famous speech on the following day. But I can still see my mother in the kitchen a few weeks later, cooking dinner and listening to music on the radio. Then an announcer interrupted to describe through veils of static the fall of Manila. He was telling us about explosions and gunfire and Japanese soldiers coming up the street when the broadcast abruptly stopped and another announcer, free of static, spoke softly about the war and this defeat. Suddenly, my mother was crying.

Those poor boys, she said, and hugged me. Those poor boys…

She then explained to me that we were at war. I started to cry too. Not because of the war or the poor boys in Manila, wherever that was (the name itself provoked only an image of vanilla ice cream). I cried because I had never seen my mother cry before and I didn’t like it. I could cry. Tommy could cry. Baby Kathleen could cry. We were kids. My mother wasn’t supposed to cry.

That night, when my father came home, he bumped into something and woke me up. I got up and tiptoed toward the kitchen, stopping in the dark of the next room. His face looked different, his jaw hanging loose, his slick black hair disheveled and wild. He sat down hard at the table and knocked over a glass of beer. My mother was no longer crying but she was what we kids called “cross.”

Ach, Billy, she said, and started wiping up the beer with a dishcloth.

Don’t say a thing! he said sharply. Just get me my bloody dinner.

She turned away and I thought she was going to cry again. Then he saw me.

What the hell are you looking at? he said to me. Get into bed.

Billy —

I saw how upset she was and I started to whimper.

You’ve got damn all to cry about! he said.

Leave him alone! she said. You’re upsetting him! And you’ll wake the baby.

He ignored her and pointed a finger at me.

Into bed! he said. Make it snappy!

I retreated into the darkness of the second room from the kitchen, and lay facedown on a bed beside Tommy and listened. I heard his voice, blurting and hard; then her voice; then his again; then silence. I heard water running and dishes clacking sharply against each other. Then silence again. I stated back toward the kitchen. My mother was at the sink. My father’s arm was straight out across the table, his head resting on it, a fork still in his hand, though his plate was gone. He was asleep.

3

IN SCHOOL that first year, I learned two things that began to give me some sense of self. One, I was Irish. At school, kids kept asking: What are you? I thought I was American, but in those days in Brooklyn, when you were asked what you were, you answered with a nationality other than your own. Since my parents were from Ireland, I was from a group called “Irish.” There were other Irish in 1A, a lot of them, along with Italians and Germans and Poles. But because my name wasn’t obviously Irish, like Kelly or Murphy or O’Connor, they kept on asking me. My mother had to explain it all to me.

She started with a book. For months, she had been buying an encyclopedia called the Wonderland of Knowledge, known to us simply as the Blue Books. Every week there was a coupon in the New York Post; for the coupon and a dime the newspaper sent us a volume. We would soon have them all, and they truly were wonderful. My mother found the right volume and turned to some maps and showed me where Ireland was: a tiny spot off the coast of a huge multicolored mass called Europe. Then she tried to explain what it meant to be Irish.

I can’t remember her exact words. But she had a strong sense of history and injustice, so I’m sure she told me that day (as she told me in so many ways in the years to come) that Ireland had been an independent country for more than a thousand years and then, about eight hundred years ago, the British had come with swords, horses, and treachery to take it for themselves. They destroyed the language of the Irish and made them speak English. They tried to destroy their religion too, particularly during the reign of the wicked Queen Elizabeth. But the Irish kept fighting, kept resisting, almost always losing, but struggling on, until in 1916, they rose in rebellion on Easter Sunday and drove the English out. Or at least drove them out of twenty-six of the nation’s thirty-two counties. The way she told it, the story was thrilling.

What happened to the other counties? I asked.

They’re still occupied by the British, she said. They kept six of them: the counties where our people are from. My parents, Daddy’s parents. And there’ll be no peace until they’re free. Someday they’ll finish the job they started in 1916.

She told me that 1916 was also the year her father died. His name was Peter Devlin and he was a seaman. He fell off a ship in a dry dock in Brooklyn and was crushed. So my mother, who was a little girl in 1916, went back to Ireland with her mother and her brother, Maurice. They lived there until 1929, when her mother died and she decided it was time to come back to America.

Those two dates always make me sad, she said, 1916 and 1929.

The room seemed to fill with sorrow as she tried, so carefully, to explain herself to me. Her mother and father were dead and she had come alone across that great expanse of blue on the map to live here in Brooklyn. I was happy she was here; who else could be my mother? But I felt sorry that she had no mother or father of her own. That was unfair. She had nobody except us. Even her brother, Uncle Maurice, was in Ireland, far across the ocean.

And where did you live in Ireland?

In Belfast, she said. Right here, see that dot?

She paused and her voice grew soft.

We lived on Madrid Street, she said. It was named after a city in Spain.

She showed me Madrid on the map, and I thought it was a wonderful thing to live on a street with a name like Madrid instead of a mere number, like ours. But she was unhappy as she told me about Belfast (on that day, and many others). The city was divided between Catholics like us and Protestants, who were a different kind of Christian. And though she knew some decent Protestants, in Belfast most of them were bigots. She was a little girl in Belfast when the Troubles started and the bigots formed into the Murder Gang and came into the Catholic neighborhoods to burn down houses and kill Catholics. The British army was there too, with armored cars and machine guns, terrible men who hated the Irish and hated the Catholics. All of that was in Belfast, where the bigots ran everything.

This was at once scary and thrilling, and I made her tell me the stories many times. I couldn’t imagine myself on streets where gunmen shot rifles from the shadows, where soldiers came rolling upon you in iron trucks, where you could be beaten or killed because you were a Catholic. But my mother seemed to me to be an amazing woman, someone who had seen things when she was a little girl that were more terrible than any movie. And here she was. Smiling. Whistling when she was happy. Telling me that she loved America for its freedom.

Freedom is a lot more important than money, she said. Remember that. Here we’re free. And you must never ever be a bigot.

What is a bigot anyway?

A bigot is a hater, she said. A bigot hates Catholics. A bigot hates Jews. A bigot hates colored people. It’s no sin to be poor, she said. It is a sin to be a bigot. Don’t ever be one of them.

No, Mommy, I said. I won’t be one of them.

And imagined a bigot with yellow eyes and a tall black hat and fangs for teeth. I said I would watch for them and if a bigot came to our street I would tell her and she could use the telephone in Mr. Kelly’s kitchen and call the police.

After I learned that I was Irish, I came to understand another big thing: my father was a cripple. That’s what the kids in 1A said. He is not, I said (not knowing what they meant, thinking perhaps that it was something like being a bigot). He is too, they said. He’s a cripple.

Yes, my mother said, he is a cripple. He lost his left leg in 1927. He was a soccer player. That’s a game they play in Ireland, with a round ball that they kick. They also play it out in Bay Ridge, another part of Brooklyn, and in a lot of other countries. She took a tobacco-colored photograph from a drawer and showed it to me. My father was sitting with other members of a team, all of them wearing short pants.

See, she said. He has two legs in this picture. But he only has one leg now.

She explained how he had to wear a wooden leg. He had a stump above the knee that fit into the wooden leg and straps that went over his shoulders to hold it in place. That was why the stairs at Roulston’s were hard on him. I hadn’t known that. She told me more, about how he was playing soccer one Sunday, here in America, in Brooklyn, in Bay Ridge, and he was kicked very hard and his leg was broken and they left him on the sidelines while they waited for an ambulance. It was a long wait. When the ambulance finally came, it took him away to Kings County Hospital, but there were no doctors to treat him and by the next day gangrene had set in and they had to cut off his leg.

How did they do that?

With a saw, she said. They had to do it to save his life.

You mean he almost died?

That’s what they said.

So that’s what they meant in 1A when they said my father was a cripple. He only had one leg. Why did they yell that at me? It wasn’t bis fault. The ambulance was late. There were no doctors at the hospital. And besides, he had a wooden leg. You could look at him and not know the difference. And being a cripple wasn’t as bad as being a bigot. It wasn’t bad at all.

That’s the way I reasoned to myself, but I’m sure I said nothing to the kids at school. After a while, boredom must have set in, and they stopped tormenting me about my father’s leg. But I looked more closely at my father after that and asked to see again the picture of him in his football uniform with two legs sticking out of his shorts. Sometimes when it was dark, the word “gangrene” would seep through me, and I would see my father in a hospital bed, turning green. His skin was green and rotting and his eyes were green and his hands were green and there was a man at the door with a saw.

4

THAT WINTER, after the war started in the Pacific, we moved out of 471, leaving behind the elm tree, Roberta Perrin, and the ivied walls next door. The Kellys had six children of their own, and after Kathleen was born there were simply too many kids for one three-story house. Mrs. Kelly wanted the rooms for a nice mild bachelor. Without warning, we packed everything into cardboard boxes and moved to the first floor right at 435 Thirteenth Street. The colors of the world instantly changed.

The new house was only one block away but it butted up against the dirty redbrick bulk of the old Ansonia Clock Factory, built in 1879 and for a while the largest industrial building in New York. The dark blue shadow of the Factory (as everyone called it) fell upon the stoop and across the backyard. Nothing grew in that bald, forlorn yard; it was made of tightly packed orange clay that cleaved as neatly as ice cream when you drove a shovel into it. To get to the backyard, we could climb out the kitchen window, or go down into a damp cellar and up a flight of slippery stone stairs. Usually we went out the window. Once, I planted watermelon seeds in the orange clay and was astonished when a tiny green plant shot up a few days later. The plant didn’t last; everything withered in the hostile clay and permanent darkness of that yard. It looked beautiful only when packed with fresh snow.

There were some advantages, of course. The rooms were larger and wider. More important, the apartment was on the first floor and my father did not have to haul his wooden leg up flights of stairs one step at a time. And the rent was twenty-six dollars a month, including steam heat.

Within days, I knew that life would now be different, and the principal reason was small, glossy-backed, and dark brown: the cockroach. I saw them moving along the hot water pipes, scurrying in corners of the kitchen, darting around the tin breadbox, rising from the drain in the bathtub, hiding in nests under the edge of the linoleum. They were everywhere. At night, I was afraid to sleep, certain that one of them would enter my ears and begin gnawing at my brain. We hit them with newspapers, stomped them, threw shoes at them. We learned what millions of New Yorkers learned: cockroaches were invincible.

Within months, we were settled. I convinced my mother that I could make my way to Holy Name without her beside me (fearful, as were all the others, of being called a momma’s boy). But the first few times I walked past our old house at 471 Fourteenth Street, looking up as I passed our stoop, walking under the familiar leafy canopy of our trees, seeing Mrs. Hogan or Mrs. Fox or Mrs. Cottingham, seeing Roberta Perrin with new friends, hurrying through that place that was once the center of my existence, the essence of my dailiness, then reaching the corner and turning right under the marquee of the Sanders, I was filled with a chaotic sadness. I couldn’t name what I felt. But for the first time, I sensed that there was such a thing as the past.

So I changed my route, using Fifteenth Street, where great boxy trolley cars rattled on steel tracks in two directions and the neighborhood’s only black man worked as a super in a large apartment house on the corner. There were no trees here either, but that street had one virtue: it did not make me sad.

In the roachy new house on Thirteenth Street, there were some compensations. I discovered that a boy from my class lived on the top floor. His name was Ronnie Zellins. He was my first friend on the new street. I did homework with him and went to the park with him and his mother, who seemed to me to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Best of all, Ronnie Zellins introduced me to comic books. He had a collection but he couldn’t read them yet, so he just followed the pictures. I could read them from the very beginning, explaining to him what was in the balloons and how the words helped make the pictures more exciting. When it was cold, we sat in the vestibule just inside the door, reading book after book and then reading them again. Other kids had collections too and would come to the door and shout: Wanna trade? And then we would go through an elaborate process, the most refined bargain being a decision to trade two ten-cent comics without covers for one copy of World’s Finest, which was thicker than the others and cost fifteen cents.

In the spring and summer, we were out on the stoop, which had only three deep slablike steps (unlike the narrower steps of the high stoop on Fourteenth Street). We played card games. We fiddled with some kind of punchboard that you pushed with a wooden match to find tiny printed messages on compacted paper. We went roller skating. The girls skipped rope or played potsy, and sometimes we joined them. Other times, Ronnie and I and my brother Tommy wandered down the street to look at the Alley, a wide noisy cobblestoned warren of ancient trucks and escaping steam and iron-barred windows. The Alley ran from Thirteenth Street to Twelfth Street, splitting the Factory into two unequal sections, and in the years of the war, it seemed always jammed with men at work. I would stand at the Thirteenth Street end, sometimes with Ronnie Zellins, sometimes alone, and stare into the sweaty turbulence. My mother told me to stay out of the Alley because I might get hurt, and I knew that disobedience was a sin. But after many months, I found the courage to dash through to the other side. When I confessed this to a priest in the confessional box at Holy Name, I was sure I heard him laugh.

Now too I started to see more of my father. After we moved, he left Roulston’s and took a job with the Arma Corporation in a place called Bush Terminal. The leg, his age, and his family combined to keep him out of the war, but he was doing war work anyway. He started working nights, earning the unbelievable salary of eighty dollars a week, four times what he made as a clerk. But because he was there through the night, my mother couldn’t bring him lunch anymore; she packed it into a black metal lunchbox that contained a thermos for tea or soup. I loved staring into the thermos, where glass seemed laid upon glass, layer upon fluid layer, in an impossibly perfect form.

My father slept during the days, so we had to be quiet in the afternoons. I didn’t mind. He was helping the war effort. More important, he was there. I could see him, feel his rough beard, stare at the wooden leg. He never stripped his trousers from the leg; it stood in a corner beside the bed, with the tops of his trousers stuffed into the socket. Most days, he would rise late in the afternoon, pull on the leg, shave and dress, eat quickly, listening to the radio, smoke some Camels, drink a few cups of tea with milk and sugar, and then go out to the stoop, where some other men would pick him up in a car. He seemed to have two faces then: one long, the other round. He wore the long face when he woke up with his hair all black and spiky and wild. Then after he came out of the bathroom, his hair was tightly combed to his skull and his face was suddenly round. He shaved with a small heavy razor and used a bristle brush and a mug. Sometimes after he left for work I would use the brush to foam up the soapy block in the mug and cover my face with lather and try to scare my brother Tommy. He always laughed.

On Sundays, after I came home from the nine o’clock Mass at Holy Name, my father was usually in the bathtub. He was a man of routine. Bathed and shaved, he would go into a bedroom and return all dressed up. We had no washing machine, and the first launderettes didn’t open until after the war. So while my mother washed his work clothes by hand, or prepared his breakfast, he would look at the sports pages of the Daily News. He ate breakfast and talked to my mother. Sometimes there would be a pale blue one-page onionskin letter from Ireland, slipped into the mailbox on the second delivery on Saturday afternoon, after he’d gone off to Arma, held for my father’s inspection on Sunday morning. The letter was usually from his twin brother, Frank, and my mother would read part of it aloud, and he’d look at it carefully when she was through reading. They were always happy to hear from Belfast and always a bit anxious. After all, the Germans had bombed the Belfast shipyards; they might come back and bomb civilians, particularly on the Falls Road, where the Catholics lived. Whenever a letter arrived on a weekday, my mother’s face was a tight mask until she’d opened the envelope. On Sundays, she wrote letters back to Ireland; for all the beauty of his handwriting, I never saw my father write a letter.

After that late Sunday breakfast, after the talk, after the reading of the Irish letter, my father would go out, down the dark linoleum-covered hallway, into the street. He’d turn left outside the areaway, and walk up the block, saying hello to people. Sometimes I’d watch him from the stoop. He’d step hard on the good right leg and swing the wooden left leg behind him, and I thought that being a cripple wasn’t such a terrible thing; he walked in his own special way, and that made him different from the other men. Along the way, most of the Sunday people smiled at him. He was off to Mass. Or so he said.

And then one Sunday when I was almost eight, he said to me, Come on, McGee. I walked with him up to the corner and for the first time entered the tight, dark, amber-colored, wool-smelling world of a saloon. This one was called Gallagher’s.

In I went behind him, to stand among the stools and the gigantic men, overwhelmed at first by the sour smell of dried beer, then inhaling tobacco smells, the toilet smell, the smell of men. The place had been a speakeasy during Prohibition, and the men still entered through the back door. There was a front entrance too, opening into a large dim room with booths and tables; it was supposed to be a restaurant, but the kitchen was dusty and dark and nobody was ever there, except a few quiet women, who could not get service in the barroom proper. In that room, the men were jammed together at a high three-sided bar, talking, smoking, singing, laughing, and drinking. They drank beer. They drank whiskey. There was no television then, so they made their own entertainments.

Hey, Billy, give us a song! someone yelled. And then he started.

Laughter and cheers and off he went, verse after verse, even one about Hitler, added to help the war effort. Then everyone in the bar joined him for the song’s final lines:

They cheered and hooted and asked for another, and my father raised his glass to his lips, beaming, delighted with himself, took a long drink, and gave them what they wanted. From where I was huddled against the wall, he was the star of the place, ignoring the stools that the other men used, standing almost defiantly with one hand on the lip of the bar for balance, his face all curves, clearly the center of attention. Even the portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hanging in the dim light above the cash register, seemed to approve.

This is where men go, I thought; this is what men do. When he was finished, they bought him drinks and then someone else began to sing and then Bing Crosby was singing on the jukebox. One of my father’s friends slipped me a nickel, another gave me a dime, and Dick the Bartender, a mysterious shiny-faced fat man in a starched collar, passed me some saltine crackers in cellophane and a ginger ale with a cherry in it. Strangers rubbed my blond head. They told me I was getting bigger. And then my rather said, Go on now, go along home.

5

I WAS ALWAYS GLAD to leave Gallagher’s. I loved seeing my father in his special place, but I hated the sour smells of the bar and the cigarette smoke. Besides, the coins in my hands seemed to be burning. I had discovered money and what you could do with it. Darting out the side door of Gallagher’s, a fortune in my hand, I would go down three steps and hurry across the street into Foppiano’s candy store. The glass cases and boxes on the counter held amazing treasures: hard caramels, Houton’s (small chocolate bars that were sweeter and cheaper than the products of Mr. Hershey), gummy Mexican sombreros, chocolate-dipped twists of nougat, strips of paper with small dots of candy stuck to them, Black Crows and Dots, Clark bars and Sky Bars, Kits and Jelly Royals, Mary Janes and Winter Greens. I would buy what I wanted, and then go down the block, looking for my brother Tommy so we could share the sweet treasures.

But after the first great rush of chocolate days, when I was gorged on this junk (my body suddenly light and my blood tingling), I began to spend my fortune on more substantial treasures: comic books. Comics I could own, instead of borrowing from Ronnie Zellins. Comics I could read over and over again. Comics I could trade with others. These were the first great wartime comic books, thick plump sixty-four-page extravaganzas, all in color, for a dime: Superman, Captain Marvel and Batman, the Human Torch and the Sub-Mariner. The heroes were all masked or caped and far more powerful than any seven- or eight-year-old could ever hope to be.

More important, many of their secret powers came from laboratory accidents or the ingestion of secret formulas. There was the Blue Beetle, with a scaly chain mail costume, a thin black mask, and strength that came from the amazing vitamin ZX. In Police Comics, there was Plastic Man, the only superhero with a sense of humor, able to shrink or elongate or compact himself into any shape, thanks to his own secret formula. More baroque, muscular, and explosive was the great Captain America. Cap’ (as he was called) was really a mild fellow named Steve Rogers who before the war was just another skinny 4F, like the guy in the Charles Atlas ads on the back covers. Then he too drank a secret serum. Within seconds, he was transformed into a pile of muscles. The scientist who invented the serum was then killed by Nazi agents, the formula lost forever. No longer 4F, Rogers went into the army, designed his Captain America costume, and teamed up with Bucky Barnes, a teenager who was allowed to hang around the army post. For most of the war, these two were in steady pursuit of a ferocious Nazi saboteur named the Red Skull.

I was very worried about the Red Skull, who was always blowing up factories like the one where my father worked nights. One evening, I told my father to be careful when he went to work because the Red Skull might be around, lurking somewhere in the dark.

Who? he said. The red who?

The Red Skull.

What the hell are you talking about? he said.

I showed him a copy of Captain America. He laughed out loud.

You idjit! he said. That’s a goddamned comic book!

I know, Daddy, but —

It’s not real, he said. It’s a lie.

I never showed him another comic book. Somehow, I knew that he was right: they were all lies. If we had all these caped people on our side, if we had all those secret serums and magic formulas, the war could be ended in about twenty minutes. But they were lies as irresistable as candy or ice cream. They certainly couldn’t be the kinds of lies that were called sins in the catechism I was studying at Holy Name. To start with, they were patriotic lies. And I wasn’t telling the lies. The stories of Cap’ and Bucky were told by the men who wrote their names on the crowded, bursting first pages of each episode: Joe Simon and Jack Kirby. They must be the liars. Still, I couldn’t understand how their lies could be bad, if they were on our side, just like Joe Louis and God.

Until I learned the names of Simon and Kirby, around 1943, I didn’t know that men actually sat down to write and draw comics. That knowledge would change my life. But when we lived on Thirteenth Street, the content of the comics was driving deep into me. They filled me with secret and lurid narratives, a notion of the hero, a sense of the existence of evil. They showed me the uses of the mask, insisting that heroism was possible only when you fashioned an elaborate disguise. Most important was the lesson of the magic potion. The comics taught me, and millions of other kids, that even the weakest human being could take a drink and be magically transformed into someone smarter, bigger, braver. All you needed was the right drink.

Up at Holy Name, I went into the next grade, and the next, and the ones after that; listened to Miss Doheny and then Mrs. Hubbard and then Miss Smith, as they sketched the contours of the world and supplied the platitudes by which I must live: Birds of a feather flock together or Show me your friends and I’ll tell you what you are. I learned to write compositions and do arithmetic. But at night, when my father was gone to work, I would lie in the dark and drive away the fear of roaches and Nazis by imagining myself mixing secret liquids in a glass beaker.

6

ONE DAY my mother took us to New York on the subway. We came out in a place of immense buildings, and she started walking in her rushed, breathless way, all the way to the river. Here were the great piers for the ships I saw in the harbor. There were soldiers with guns guarding the entrances to the piers and high fences with barbed wire at the top and warnings about staying out and not using cameras. We could see giant cranes loading crates into the ships, and shirtless men heaving on ropes, and men with hooks in their belts showing passes to the soldiers. Seagulls careened around the sky. Deep throaty horns blew as one ship eased away from a pier out into the flowing waters of the Hudson.

Did your father work here? I said.

I’m sure he did, my mother said. But he didn’t do this kind of work. He was an engineer.

What is that?

He helped put in the refrigeration system, the air conditioning, she said. He worked for United Fruit, you see, and they had to keep the bananas from spoiling. That was his job. He was an officer.

Was he in the First World War?

No, she said. He was killed during the war, but he wasn’t in the war.

Then up ahead we saw a lot of people staring at something we couldn’t see. There were sailors in leggings holding rifles, Marines with.45s on their hips, New York policemen, all keeping people back; I paused, wanting to look at these men with guns, among the first I had seen in life. My mother walked faster, and then we saw what the crowd was looking at: the S.S. Normandie. The great French liner was lying on its side, wedged into the mud beneath the water, like a fat woman killed in a bathtub. The hull was scorched and tendrils of smoke still leaked from open portholes. I had never seen anything like it, even in the comics.

That’s the Normandie, my mother said. She was a great passenger ship before the war. A French ship. Then they were converting her for troops and she went on fire.

Wow, I said.

Wow, Tommy said.

They think it was sabotage, she said.

Wow!

I don’t know how long we stayed there but it must have been hours. All through the war, we would pester her to go back. Let’s see the Normandie, Let’s go back to Pier 88 and see the Normandie. And she took us there again and again, to gaze at the parched hull, more than a thousand feet long, its giant propellers high out of the water. In my memory, the ruined liner looks humiliated, like a drunk who has fallen down in public. But at the time, the Normandie represented something else to me: proof that not all the tales in the comics were lies. Maybe the Red Skull didn’t do the job, but somebody did.

7

ONE SUNDAY afternoon on Thirteenth Street, I looked up from the stoop, where I was playing with Ronnie Zellins and some other kids, and saw my father coming down the street. There was another man with him, taller, holding my father’s left elbow, while my father used his other hand to grip the picket fences of the areaways. I got up and hurried to him, certain he was hurt.

I looked up at him. His eyes were unfocused, his jaw slack.

Daddy, I said, are you all right?

He looked at me as if I were a stranger.

Zallright, the other man said. Just drunk as a skunk.

They went past me, and turned into 435 and my father wheeled, as if to fall. The other man grabbed him roughly and held him up. But all the kids laughed. One of the other kids was Brother Foppiano, the son of the owner of the candy store.

Hey, hey, your old man’s drunk, he said, in a singsong teasing voice.

Shut up, I said.

Your old man’s an Irish drunk! Your old man’s an Irish drunk!

As my father and his friend disappeared into the hallway, I had my first fight. I had never hit anyone before and had never been hit. But I threw myself in a rage upon Brother Foppiano. He hit me and hurt me and hit me again. My face went numb. Blood spurted from my nose. And I turned in tears and ran inside, full of shame. Behind me, everyone was laughing. Even my friend, Ronnie Zellins.

My mother was out with Tommy and Kathleen, so I went into the bathroom and saw the blood on my hands and shirt, then watched it drip into the sink. I turned on the taps and the water made the blood thin and pale, forming a rosy whirlpool before vanishing down the drain. I held a cold washcloth to my nose. The inside of my mouth was slippery and sticky, and I lurched aside and threw up into the toilet bowl, feeling as if my insides were coming out through my mouth. The stench was disgusting. I looked at the water pipes and saw cockroaches moving in steady lines, their long hairy feelers out in front of them. I flushed the toilet and closed the door behind me.

My father was facedown on a bed, his wooden leg hanging off the bed in an awkward position. He smelled like vomit too.

For a long time after the fight with Brother Foppiano, I didn’t play with the other kids, not even Ronnie Zellins. I had cried and run away from a fight, and that was a humiliation. So I went to school, I came home, I passed them on the stoop and retreated into homework, the Wonderland of Knowledge, and my comics. No book revealed the ingredients of any magic potion. I could not emerge from my room in mask and cape to avenge myself upon Brother Foppiano. I could not, like Billy Batson, the orphaned newsboy, say the word Shazam! and be transformed into Captain Marvel. My mother said nothing that I can remember, but she must have known that something awful had happened to me. Winter came. The yard filled with snow, and I would stand at the window and gaze at the blue shadows of the piled snow and the redbrick walls of the Factory and remember the light and the trees of the lost window on Fourteenth Street.

Around this time, I also started reading Big Little Books, squat thick bricks of text and pictures that were sold at the five-and-ten-cent stores. The text was on the left-hand page, the illustrations on the right. Their heroes were different from the great baroque four-color visions of Simon and Kirby, or from Captain Marvel pursuing the mad scientist Dr. Sivana. Here were Dick Tracy, Dan Dunn, Tailspin Tommy, Smilin’ Jack, Don Winslow of the Navy, all neatly contained in square black-and-white panels. They were more mundane heroes, men without masks or capes or occult powers, but I liked reading the text and glancing at the pages to see if the drawings matched the images in my mind. My mother looked at them and explained that these were comics that first appeared in newspapers.

This is my favorite, she told me, pointing at a comic strip across the top of a page in the Daily News. It was called Terry and the Pirates. The drawing was beautiful, full of realistic detail, oiled guns, perfect airplanes, skies or mountains brushed in with great rich blacks. But the balloons were dense with dialogue that I didn’t really understand. Terry was definitely made for grown-ups. Still, I was thrilled that my mother could also care for a comic strip. She didn’t say, This is my favorite lie. And because of her, I started looking at the newspaper comics.

One day I ran into Brother Foppiano again. He was nastier now, because he had bloodied me and made me cry and run. Your old man’s an Irish drunk, your old man … I realized I was being watched by other kids, including my former friend Ronnie Zellins, and I knew that this time I couldn’t run. So I piled into Brother, frantic, afraid, but determined not to cry, not to “give up.” He hit me and hit me, but I held on to him, tripped him, fell upon him, hit him, then felt his hard wiry arms lock around my neck. I struggled. I jerked. But I couldn’t get free.

So I whispered the word: Shazam.

Nothing happened. Brother Foppiano tightened his grip and I tightened mine on him.

We might be locked in that violent embrace to this day if Ronnie Zellins’s beautiful mother hadn’t come along and ordered us to stop. I watched Brother walk away, his green striped shirt as dirty as mine. There was a sneer on his face, but he didn’t say anything; he didn’t speak badly about my father. I felt better for another reason: the humiliation of public crying and loss was erased. Then Ronnie Zellins came over to me.

Want to go down the Alley? he said.

No.

What about comics? Want to go trading?

No, I said. I don’t want to do anything with you.

One Sunday afternoon, a week after my second fight with Brother Foppiano, my father ordered me out of Gallagher’s. His face was loose and bleary again, the way it had been the day I first saw him drunk. I imagined him leaving the saloon, helped by one of the men, staggering down the street to our house, and Brother Foppiano emerging from hiding to start his cruel chant. I asked him to come home. Maybe I whined. Maybe I was annoying. I know I was holding on to his coat. He jerked the coat out of my grip, looked down at me, and ordered me in a harsh voice to go home to my mother. Hurt and angry, I ran outside.

But I didn’t go home. I went directly to Foppiano’s candy store. I was desperate now, even willing to fight Brother again to be sure that he wouldn’t see my father drunk. I could punch him. I could tease him. Or I could talk to him, argue with him, maybe even try to make friends with him. I just didn’t want him to see my father being helped down the block. But Brother wasn’t around, not behind the counter, not in the back room. His father sat there, reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette. And with a sense of relief, I looked at the comic book racks near the door. I had read most of the new comics and was not interested in the books about funny animals or high school girls. Then I found the very first issue of Master Comics. I began to read the story of Captain Marvel, Jr., and was lifted out of Brooklyn. Hey, Mister Foppiano said, ya gonna read or ya gonna buy?

I handed him a dime and rushed home, clutching my copy of Master Comics. Back at 435, I read this issue over and over, watching a crippled boy named Freddy Freeman hobble on his crutches. Suddenly he said his magic word — “Captain Marvel,” the name of his hero — and was transformed into a lithe, strong hero in a sleek blue gold-trimmed costume. After my fight with Brother, I knew that “Shazam” didn’t work for me; it probably was just a lie. But maybe it could work for others. Maybe words, like potions, were also capable of magic. And I wished that my father had a secret word too. He would come home from Gallagher’s and sit in the kitchen and whisper … Captain Marvel. A lightning bolt would split the sky and there he would be: two legs, young, whole, like the man in that old photograph, his eyes sharply focused. He would smile at me and reach over and hug me and off we would go together to play ball.

That never happened.

After two years in the first floor right, we moved again.

8

THE NEW FLAT was only a few blocks away, but it was another descent, into a harder, poorer world.

Seventh Avenue was a wide avenue with trolley cars of the 67 line moving in both directions. The steel wheels of those sleek green-and-silver “streamlined” cars ran on steel tracks, and we would hear their squealing clattering sounds through the night; some of us heard those trolleys for the rest of our lives. The power lines were hidden in steel poles that made a deep bonging sound when you hit them with bats or pipes; from the tops of these poles cables fed the lines that ran above the trolley tracks. Those poles and lines and the steel tracks gave the avenue the look of an artist’s exercise in perspective, with diminishing lines flowing away into infinity, or its equal: Flatbush Avenue at one end of the avenue, Greenwood Cemetery at the other. In the mind of an eight-year-old, both were as far away as Madrid.

Our building was 378, a tenement rising four ominous stories above the street. It was in the middle of the block, between Eleventh and Twelfth Streets, with a butcher shop on one side of the doorway and a fruit and vegetable store called Teddy’s to the right. That first day, it was a place in another country.

I stood on the sidewalk with my mother and Tommy and Kathleen, who was bundled in a red snowsuit in a stroller and bawling. My mother moved the stroller back and forth, shushing Kathleen, while I gazed around at this new piece of geography. There was a barbershop across the street, with a red, white, and blue pole turning slowly outside. On one side of the barbershop was a dry cleaner’s, the windows opaque with steam, then a notions shop, a variety store, a fish store, and a diner. To the left, filling the corner of Eleventh Street, was Rattigan’s Bar & Grill, dark inside, with men going and coming through the front door. Nobody used the side door.

Across the street, on a diagonal from Rattigan’s, there was one glimmer of the familiar: the red, white, and blue sign of still another Roulston’s store. But otherwise I felt like a stranger as we waited outside for the large men from Gallagher’s to arrive in a truck with our furniture and our stuffed cardboard boxes. My mother said, You’ll like it here. But I looked up and saw fire escapes climbing the brick face of the building, as if drawn with rulers, and a strange canopy hanging over the edge of the roof, and a flock of pigeons circling against the hard sky. I shivered in the cold, and my mother told me to wait in the hallway. But I was afraid to go through that door. I didn’t think I would like it here at all. I wanted to go back to 471 Fourteenth Street, my real home.

Do they have roaches here? I said.

My mother laughed. I hope not, she said.

I don’t want to live here if they have roaches, I said.

Well, she said without much hope, let’s wait and see.

Then the truck arrived and my father eased out of the cab, smoking a cigarette, while the large men unloaded the furniture and started moving us into 378. Groups of nameless kids were gathering at the corners, watching us with a mixture of curiosity and hostility; some of them were my age, and all were wearing long pants while I still wore knickers and knee socks. Faces appeared at the windows of Rattigan’s. Someone wiped a peephole in the steam of the dry cleaner’s. Maybe they had come to see the cripple. Or maybe they had heard about the Irish drunk. Or a crippled Irish drunk. Or maybe they just wanted to look at the kid who still wore knickers.

When the truck arrived, my mother took us into the warmth of a candy store, two doors away, and I felt better. Nobody could watch us in here. The place was called Sanew’s (we pronounced it Sen-you). Immediately inside the door, atop a glass-topped counter, nickel candies were arrayed on a stepped rack, like a sugary stoop. Beside it, a small change dish, advertising Dentyne gum, sat on top of a pebbled rubber mat, with the cash register next to it. There were racks of cigarettes on the wall behind the counter, including my father’s beloved Camels. That was good. He could walk next door to get his cigarettes, even in the snow.

Most of the good things of Sanew’s were on the right as you walked in, including a soda fountain with four swivel-topped stools. Behind the marble counter, spouts poured soda, seltzer, a variety of syrups in endless combinations (egg creams and lime rickeys and cherry Cokes), and below the counter were silver-covered hidden places filled with tubs of ice cream. That first day, Mrs. Sanew mixed soda for us kids and made tea for my mother, looking distracted in a way that would soon become familiar to all of us. Mrs. Sanew had gray-streaked black hair pulled into a tight bun, thick eyeglasses wedged on a longish nose, a pinched sour mouth. She always wore thick-heeled sensible shoes and a wine-colored wool sweater that buttoned in the front. The sweater had two pockets, and sometimes, when distracted, she would jingle coins in those pockets, her eyes seeing something that was a long way from Brooklyn. Behind that counter, seven days a week, from seven in the morning until ten at night, Mrs. Sanew made egg creams, or filled dishes with ice cream, or prepared tea, or poured coffee. She sold cigarettes, cigars, candies, and newspapers; she rang up purchases on the cash register; she made change. There was simply no time for joy or laughter. There also might have been some darker cause for her permanent air of distraction, some fierce Catholic denial of self, some permanent act of mortification or penance. In all the years we lived there, I never saw her eat or drink even one of the treats she made for others; it was as if that would be some sign of weakness, some surrender to illicit pleasures or desires she held in contempt. That first day, as she served my mother, her face was locked into a sad or angry mask.

There was one other ornament of Sanew’s: a rack on the wall to the left of the door. The top row was filled with movie magazines or copies of Collier’s, Liberty, Life. The next was thick with pulps, with their garish, disturbing covers. But the two bottom racks were full of comic books. Comics with titles I didn’t know, covers I’d never seen, comics that could have been from another country. Blue Bolt. Sheena, Queen of the Jungle. The Spirit. They were completely different from the comics at Foppiano’s and I must have stared at them with something like passion and desire, because I remember my mother saying to me: “Well, you’ll be happy here.”

Then we walked back to 378, entering through the street door for the first time. There were brass mailboxes on the left of the vestibule, white octagonal tiles on the floor, then a second door, filled with a panel of frosted glass, leading into the hallway. For a moment, I was scared; the hallway space was high, narrow, murky; the dark air was stained by strange odors, as if something was rotting. On the left a passageway led into the back of the hall, where I could see three battered garbage cans. On the right were the narrow stairs, with strips of ridged metal tacked to the lip of each step, to protect the linoleum from the assault of thousands of footsteps. My mother lifted Kathleen from the baby carriage and parked it against the wall on the left and started leading us up the stairs, into a deeper darkness. The rough plaster walls were shiny with paint, dark brown from the floor to the height of my mother’s shoulder, then a paler ocher to the ceiling. I could smell meat cooking. I could hear radios: music on one floor, announcers talking on another. On the second landing, dogs barked from behind a door. On each landing there was a small bare yellowish light bulb, which heightened the feeling of deep rich earth-colored darkness.

We went up three flights, to the top floor right, where a door was open to the kitchen. This was where we were now going to live. I paused in the hall, unable to move. Maybe if I just stood there, they would change their minds and we would put everything in the truck and drive away, skipping 435 Thirteenth Street, going all the way back to Fourteenth Street. My father and some of the large men were standing there, drinking beer from quart bottles, laughing and smoking cigarettes, using saucers for ashtrays.

Don’t stand there like an idjit, my father said. Come in.

The large men laughed.

Come on, my father said. Give us a hand.

So I went in and the large men shook my hand and said to my father, We shoulda brung some soda for the kid, Bill.

And my father said, We’ll bring some back.

And one of the men said, Hell, he’s big enough for a beer, ain’t he, Bill?

My father smiled, and turned away, lifting silverware and glasses from a Campbell’s soup box, discarding the newspapers that wrapped them, then laying them in the sink. It was as if I’d disappeared.

For a long time, the large men shifted furniture, grunting, sweating, while my mother asked them to move a chair here, a couch there. I wandered through the rooms of the railroad flat. There was a small bedroom off the kitchen, then a larger bedroom, then the living room, with two windows looking down at Seventh Avenue. The new building was only one story higher than the flat on Fourteenth Street, but after two long years on the ground floor at Thirteenth Street, the height here amazed me. I could see the roofs of trolley cars, the tops of the black steel poles that supplied their power, the bobbing hats and shoulders of passing strangers. Unlike Fourteenth Street, there were no trees to break a fall, no branches or tree trunks to supply direction to the eye or the illusion of safety. If I fell from this window, I would die. It was like coming to the edge of the cliff I saw in the advertising on the back of the comics, all about the Rosicrucians, whatever they were, and the secrets of life.

To the right of the living room, facing the avenue, there was a small room with a window that led to the fire escape. We called this the Little Room and it was unique: it had a door. From the Little Room’s window, I could see across the avenue into the apartments of strangers, turrets and chimneys on the rooftops, and away off, the distant ridge of Prospect Park. I thought: This must be what it’s like to be a giant.

In a rush of excitement, I ran back into the kitchen. This wasn’t so bad, maybe. Up here in the top floor right, the world was bright again after the darkness of the hall. The kitchen windows looked down a long slope toward the harbor, and I could even see the concrete railway trestle where the subway went over the Gowanus Canal. That astonished me. I had been under that trestle many times, waiting for my mother when she brought my father his lunch; now, I was above the trestle, up here at the top of the long slope. From this back window, I could see the receding rectangles of a thousand rooftops and the skeletal shapes of ten thousand winter trees and the steeples of a hundred churches rising above the houses. There were ships moving in the distant harbor, sailing away to fight Hitler, and my mother came over and pointed out the Statue of Liberty, green and tiny, and the skyline of Manhattan, naming some of the buildings. But there was something missing.

Where’s the backyard? I said.

Well, my mother said, that’s a wee bit of a problem. There’s no backyard.

I looked straight down from the window and saw fenced-off yards filled with the scrawny shapes of stunted trees and patches of blackened snow. But those yards belonged to the smaller houses on the side streets. The tenements on the avenue had no yards. This was hard to imagine: a house without a backyard. And I wished I still had the backyard on Fourteenth Street or even the bald shadowed clay of Thirteenth Street. After all, if there was no backyard, where would I play on summer afternoons?

Suddenly the moving job was finished and my father and the large men started to go out.

Will you bring me a soda, Daddy?

Sure, he said.

Hell, Billy, one of the large men said. He’s gettin’ pretty big, the kid. Whyn’t you bring him over the bar?

Yeah, my father said, not meaning it.

But you gotta get him outta them knickers, another man said. Ya can’t go drinkin’ in knickers, kid.

Yeah, one of these days, my father said.

And they went out. My mother then turned to look at the boxes and bags, the mounds of clothes, the cluttered table, the dishes in the sink. She sighed.

Mommy, I want long pants, I said.

You’ll have long pants soon enough, she said.

I hate knickers, I said.

We’ll talk about it later, she said. Let’s get moved in first.

And so we moved in. All that afternoon, we began to explore this new place high above everything. The kitchen was to become the center of almost everything we did; we ate there, talked there, listened to the radio there, did homework there. I can remember every inch of it, with the table of much-painted pine in the center under a ceiling light whose cord bobbed in the air. There were four chairs around the table, with a sugar bowl in the middle beside my father’s ashtray (my mother didn’t smoke or drink). Just inside the door was a shallow corner closet shaped like a triangle. It had no door, only a drape hanging from a rod. Sometimes on rainy days, when we kids played hide and seek, I would huddle in there under piles of clothes and sheets, burrowed into a cave, wishing that I’d never be discovered.

On that first day at 378, my father came home hours later, bleary with drink. My mother tried to get him to eat some sandwiches and soup. He couldn’t do it. He tried to sing but the words stopped coming, choked in a phlegmy cough. Finally, he rose from the kitchen table. I was in the first room in a narrow bed that fit tightly against the wall. As he went by I said, Hello, Daddy. He didn’t hear me. From the next room, I heard him removing his trousers, change jingling in the pockets, then the straps and the leg being slammed against the wall before he fell heavily into bed. Then there was silence from my mother in our brand-new kitchen. Except for her sad breathing.

9

WE LIVED to the rhythms of the war. Years later, we even marked time in a special way: Before the War, During the War, After the War. There were other wars, Korea and Vietnam, and American invasions of too many other places, but for people my age there was only one War. That war was in our comics, our movies, our dreams. The radio was filled with it. Every evening, my mother listened to Edward R. Murrow and Gabriel Heatter, and in school we followed the war on maps. There was North Africa. And Tobruk. And somewhere in all that yellow emptiness, El Alamein.

At Holy Name, I heard about the war from new teachers every year, each of them rolling down the maps and showing us the places that were in the newspapers and on the radio. There was much excitement when the Allies landed in Sicily because the parents of most of the Italian kids were from that island. They wanted the Americans to win. They had brothers in our army and some of the brothers died in those first battles. All of them said their parents were worried. I got an aunt there, said Vito Pinto. My grandmother is there, said Michael Tempesta. I got an uncle over there, said George Poli. The war went on and on.

I’d like to give that Hitler a boot in the ass, my father said one night.

Billy, my mother said. The children …

I would, he said. I mean it. Let him walk into Rattigan’s and drop one on his chin.

That struck me as a wonderful idea. Hitler goose-stepping down Seventh Avenue, with Göring and Goebbels and Himmler behind him (for we knew each of their names), all of them marching into Rattigan’s, and my father walking over and punching Hitler right in the mout’. Then my father’s friends could mop up the rest of them, the way Captain America went after the Red Skull. That would be that. No more war.

But the war went on. We learned its common and proper nouns: bomb, rifle, pillbox, Guadalcanal and grenade, camouflage and convoy, submarine and torpedo, Salerno and Monte Cassino, Rommel and Montgomery, infantry and air force, destroyers, PT boats, cruisers and carriers, casualties and conning towers, depth charges and bomb bays, antiaircraft, bazookas and howitzers, wounded, ambulances, shrapnel and flak, generals, colonels, majors, lieutenants, sergeants, corporals, privates, along with admirals, commanders, captains and seamen, WACS and WAVES, 1A and 4F, Tojo and Mussolini, 45s and.88s, tanks and jeeps, occupation and refugee and resistance. And in comics and radio serials, in movies and schoolyards, we heard the words Secret Weapon. Hitler might have one; we had to get one.

In the windows of the neighborhood now you saw small flags bearing a star for each son who had gone to serve the country. Some flags had as many as four. And after the invasion of North Africa, some of the stars were gold, telling us that a son had died. There were more after Sicily and many more after Anzio.

Up on Eighth Avenue and Thirteenth Street, a sandlot football team called the Arrows erected a sign on the wall beside Foppiano’s, listing the names of all the men who were away in the service. Even after we moved to Seventh Avenue, I passed it every day on my way to Holy Name. The lettering was small and neat, but before the war was over, the sign was completely filled and many of the young men were dead. The sign was there for years After the War, battered by weather, the names bleached by sun and washed by rain, then repainted, then washed away again, until the names were gone for good and nobody was left in the neighborhood who could remember the living or the dead.

Like other families, we experienced the war in small ways. In addition to the vocabulary of the war itself, I learned the word “shortage” and the phrase “black market.” There was a shortage of sugar. There was a shortage of meat. Butter was rare and there were no more bananas because of the German submarines in the Caribbean. The Germans were sinking all of the ships that used to come to New York Before the War.

Ships like the ones your father worked on? I asked my mother one night.

Yes, she said. Exactly like the ones he worked on. He was all over South America, you know. He used to write letters to my mother from all those places. He was even at the Panama Canal when they were building it.

In the Blue Books, we found maps of the Caribbean and Central America and located the Panama Canal. She showed me a deck of playing cards adorned with scenes of the canal’s construction, cards sent to her mother long ago, and all the while, I was trying to imagine my mother when she still had a father. He certainly existed, because she had a photograph of him, in a dark suit, taken in New Orleans. And she told me that I was named after him. Or I was named after my father and her father: William Peter. But they called me Peter anyway. So I had some connection to that lost grandfather who had died. But when I asked her to tell me about him, she always got busy doing something else, and became very quiet.

When she talked about the black market, I imagined some terrible place down near the Gowanus Canal, a huge building painted black and filled with men in black suits and black masks.

No, she said, it’s not like that.

A bunch of terrible people she called reprobates cheated the government by hiding things that were part of the shortages. If you knew the right people, you could get all the sugar you wanted, all the meat. You just needed to know the black market people, the reprobates. Why didn’t we know them?

Because they’re bad people, she said. They love money more than they love their country. Are they bigots? I asked.

Probably, she said. For sure, they are gangsters.

At some point, my mother received ration books and tokens. When she went to buy meat or butter, she needed to hand over the ration stamps or dime-sized cardboard tokens. She saved bacon fat in tin cans, and when she turned in the bacon fat at Semke’s butcher shop, she was given more tokens in exchange. Once a month, she said, the government picked up all the cans of bacon fat. One day, I asked my father why the army needed bacon fat.

To grease the guns, he said. And for the soldiers to put on their boots to keep out water.

I tried to imagine this. Wouldn’t the Nazis smell breakfast when the Americans tried to sneak up on them in a raid?

There were some questions that could never be answered, particularly about the war.

10

FOR THE CHRISTMAS of 1943, my mother bought me a pair of roller skates. They were strong and tough, with clamps over the front of your shoes that were tightened with a skate key. The wheels were shiny; they would never wear out, filling with those ruinous holes we called skellies. They had probably cost her a lot of money, at least three dollars. But on a frigid Saturday a week later, there was a huge scrap metal drive, men in trucks moving slowly along the avenue, shouting to everybody to haul out their old metal and iron so we could turn the stuff into bombs and bullets. People came out with beaten-up old metal chairs and lengths of pipe and broken bicycles. I thought it was my duty to make the ultimate sacrifice. I threw in my skates.

But as I watched the truck pull away, I began to cry. I wanted those skates back. And then felt as if I were a traitor, a regular Benedict Arnold. I stopped crying. I walked around the block. A cold wind was blowing off the harbor. I went home and lay down on my bed and started to read a Newsboy Legion comic to restore my sense of patriotism. Yes: I had made a sacrifice. But it was worth it. Somehow, my skates would help beat Hitler and the Japs. Then my mother came in and asked me what was the matter.

Nothing, I lied.

Come on, something’s the matter.

Nothing’s the matter.

What happened?

I was quiet for a moment and then I whispered: I gave my skates to the scrap metal drive.

Mother of God.

She looked upset and I said, I’m sorry, Mommy.

Oh, she said, this damned war.

Then she went into the kitchen and started cooking in silence. But that wasn’t the end of it.

An hour later, my father came home drunk. We sat down to eat dinner. And he learned about the skates.

What? he said. What? You gave away your skates?

I didn’t give them away, I said. I gave them to the scrap metal drive, you know, the war effort.

You bloody idjit, he said.

And he reached over and slapped my face.

My head seemed to explode. I went off the chair and got up and ran into the other room, my face stinging, my ear ringing.

Billy! my mother shouted. For the love of God, he’s only a boy!

Tommy was crying, and that set off Kathleen.

I had to work for those goddamned skates! my father shouted. And he gave them away?

Billy, he’s a boy. He wanted to help with the war! He meant nothing bad, he —

I covered my head with a pillow. I didn’t want to hear any more of it. I was full of shame, a real idjit. My father had worked at Arma all night and paid for the skates and I gave them away. Skates I loved. The first real pair of skates I ever had. An idjit, an idjit.

Then my brother Tommy was beside me. He put a hand on my head.

Don’t cry, Peter. Please don’t cry.

I took a deep breath and stopped. My face was still stinging.

Come on, Tommy whispered. We’ll go in the Little Room and read comics.

And so we did.

11

IN THOSE FIRST YEARS at 378, the roof became our backyard. It was directly above our heads, reached by a flight of stairs. A small tarpapered building sheltered the staircase, rising off the roof itself like a second house with its own skylight. When we first moved to 378, there was a wooden deck running the length of the roof, with structures like goalposts at each end and clotheslines strung between them. On sweltering August afternoons, nothing was more pleasurable than walking in shorts through the cold wet wash. But in winter, the clothes froze and if you hit them you would hurt your hands; when it was that cold, my mother hung clothes on a line in the kitchen.

From the roof of the little house above the stairs, we could see forever. In one direction, facing the harbor, we saw the hills of Staten Island and the distant smudge of New Jersey and the Narrows opening out to the Atlantic. The harbor traffic never stopped; every day, ships moved out through the Narrows, going to the war, while others arrived in lines as steady as the trolley cars on Seventh Avenue. To the right, we could see the towers of the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges, the giant building ways of the Navy Yard, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler. We could not see the piers where the Normandie lay in water and mud.

The New York sky was crowded with birds then, and I would stare at some brave and lonesome hawk as he caught an air current and careened away, heading for the skyline until he vanished, and I would have dreams that night about flying: magically possessed of the secret powers of my heroes, weightless and strong, high above Brooklyn, soaring to the towers of Manhattan.

One afternoon on that little roof, as I lay reading in the sun, there was a deep churning sound in the distance, growing steadily louder. My brother Tommy suddenly burst through the door below me, looking at the empty sky. I reached down and pulled him up. Then, above us, came a flight of B-17s. Ten of them, twenty, then more and more, hundreds, and we were frozen, suddenly jumping, as the sky darkened with airplanes, the two of us yelling without words, trying to roar with them, waving triumphant fists at the Flying Fortresses as they flew over us, heading for the Narrows, heading out over the Atlantic, going to get Hitler.

When my father woke up, we started telling him about the airplanes, the words coming in a rush, and he told us that out at Arma, they made bombsights for those Flying Fortresses. We got very excited. This was war information. The Red Skull would kill us to know this; he would kidnap my father and threaten to drop him into a pool of sharks if he didn’t give him the plans to the bombsight.

Now don’t tell anyone, he said, going in to shave. Remember, he said: Loose lips sink ships.

Loose lips sink ships. That was one of the mantras of the war. I was sure that loose lips had sunk the Normandie. But that night, I didn’t want to talk about the Normandie. I wanted to tell everyone about the bombsights, and how my father might be a cripple, he might not be a soldier, he might be a drunk, he might be a crippled Irish drunk, but he was helping beat Hitler too! He was doing it every night, going out to Arma, out there in Bush Terminal, and making bombsights that would help our men blow up Nazi shipyards and Nazi bases and Nazi tanks. And I remember thinking, up on the roof one day, that maybe that’s why he was a drunk. Maybe it was very hard to carry that secret around, to have that inside him, knowing that he could be captured. Maybe he thought that if he was drunk he wouldn’t be able to talk. His loose lips would not sink ships.

Yeah, I thought. Maybe that was it.

When I left our cramped rooms for the roof, I always felt free. The sky was limitless, the turmoil of the street far below. The tenements and their roofs were all connected and I explored every inch of that open terrain: roofs with white or black pebbles, others with plain tar paper, some with clotheslines, others with rough planked decks where people sat on summer evenings. There were metal chimneys on some rooftops, brick on others; the buildings without hot water had no chimneys at all. A few tenements were higher than the rest, and between several of them there were air shafts.

One air shaft was wider, deeper, more foreboding than the others. I sometimes stared into it, holding tightly to the ledge beside it, and could barely see the black distant bottom, which was a rubble of broken bottles, rusting cans, old clothes. I dropped a pebble down the shaft; it took a long time to hit bottom. Tommy and I called the shaft the Bottomless Pit.

Then one afternoon, I was on the roof with Tommy and two kids, Billy Rossiter and Billy Delaney. We wandered to the edge of the Bottomless Pit. Rossiter, tall and skinny, suddenly pushed me, then grabbed me before I could fall, and laughed at the fear on my face. My heart thumped.

I dare you to jump across, Rossiter said.

Nah, I said, still full of fear.

I can do it, Delaney said.

What for? I said.

A dare is a dare, he said.

Then he backed up the width of one rooftop, took a deep breath, started to run, leaped, and hit the ledge on the far side of the Bottomless Pit. He didn’t make it! He was holding on to the edge, dangling, grunting, the darkness below him. Rossiter looked frightened, and then he and I and Tommy were scrambling around to the other side to save Delaney from falling.

But he held on and pulled himself up over the ledge without our help and rolled over on his back. He laughed at us.

Okay, he said, now it’s your turn.

Rossiter smiled thinly. He had made the dare. Billy Delaney had accepted it. Now Rossiter had to do it. That was only fair.

He backed up, the way the shorter Delaney had, a wan look on his face. He shook his hands loosely and then started to run on his long thin legs. He jumped. And landed cleanly on his feet on the other side. He laughed like a loon, jumped up and down, raised clenched fists to the sky.

Now it was my turn. Tommy was too small. I had to be the last to leap across the Bottomless Pit.

Tommy whispered, Let’s go home, Pete. Come on …

I remembered my shame after Brother Foppiano made me cry. I imagined Rossiter and Delaney laughing at me down on the street, telling all the other kids. I had to do it. Maybe I would die, but I had no choice. A dare was a dare.

I backed up the way the others had, not looking at them, not looking at the air shaft. I imagined Robin Hood leaping across the parapets of castles. I saw Gene Autry on his horse Champion, jumping across canyons. Then in my mind my father was on that roof. At my age. With two legs. He would do it. I must do it. Even if I fell to my death in the Bottomless Pit.

I ran in a burst, my legs pumping, head down, came to the lip of the shaft, closed my eyes and made a roaring sound as I jumped.

I hit the other side and rolled. When I opened my eyes, I saw the sky. And Tommy’s face. He looked terrified.

I got up and hugged him and then Rossiter and Delaney were there, laughing and excited. Rossiter said, That was beautiful, wasn’t it? Whatta ya say we do it again?

No, I said, let’s get something to drink.

We turned away from the Bottomless Pit and went down to Sanew’s to share an icy bottle of Mission Bell grape soda.

On hot summer days, we went to the roof in bathing suits. So did other people on the endless expanse of rooftops that we later called Tar Beach. One humid August afternoon I was alone on the roof and saw Billy Rossiter’s sister in a bathing suit, lying out on the rooftop. His sister was much older than Billy, maybe twenty, and she lay there alone, not knowing she was being watched. She lathered suntan oil on her bright pink body, rubbed some on the tops of her breasts, then lay back with her eyes closed and her abundant black hair spilling onto a large white towel. I didn’t know why but that made me feel funny. I turned away and went down to the street. I did not tell my mother about this.

Projecting upward from the edge of the roof, out over Seventh Avenue, was a sloping tin canopy, its peak two feet higher than the roof itself. It must have been designed to dress up the building from the avenue side and to keep kids like us from falling to our deaths. Sometimes I’d lie back against the canopy, watching the clouds form horses or lions against the sky. Other times, I’d lie with my head over the canopy’s edge, staring down at the life of the street, or into the apartments across the avenue. When winter ended, people laid pillows on the windowsills and watched the street for entertainment. Usually, the watchers were women, looking for their children or their husbands or any signs of danger. My father never gazed out the windows, but neither did my mother. She was always too busy.

But on the top floor above Rattigan’s, there was an entire family of Syrians who took their places in the windows, all day long: a grandmother, a mother, a middle-aged son, three daughters. They watched everything and talked back and forth from window to window. My mother called them the Gapers Club.

On our roof, with just my head showing over the edge of the canopy, I’d gape at the Gapers Club, trying to make them nervous. Once I even succeeded. Fixed in my stare, the grandmother heaved herself inside. And that afternoon, down on the avenue, the mother complained to my mother that I was a Peeping Tom. I didn’t know what this meant when she told me about it at dinner. Did it have something to do with brother Tommy?

A Peeping Tom is someone who looks at women in their homes, she said carefully.

But the Gapers Club looks at us every day, I said. Even at night sometimes.

A Peeping Tom, my father said, wants to see women take off their clothes.

That scared me; I didn’t mention looking at Billy Rossiter’s sister. I couldn’t be a Peeping Tom. After all, I couldn’t see into her house.

Anyway, my father said, a Peeping Tom’s worse than a masher.

A potato masher?

No, no, he said. It’s different.

Billy, my mother said, you’re confusing him.

Well, he’s got to learn, sooner or later.

I said, Is Tommy a Peeping Tom?

My father laughed and said, I’ve got to go to work.

I looked at my mother. She was laughing too.

12

ON DAYS of heavy rain, I sat inside the roof door, watching little rivers carve their way through the glistening black pebbles to the drain that emptied into the backyards. Sometimes the water flowed in torrents. The rain came in driving gray sheets off the harbor. And I felt safe and sheltered, like Bomba the Jungle Boy in a cave in the jungle.

I found my first Bomba book in a dingy little store on Sixth Avenue near Tenth Street. The store sold old comics and loose cigarettes (two cents each, two for three cents, just like the pretzels in Sanew’s). But on a shelf I saw a book called Bomba the Jungle Boy at the Moving Mountain. The ocher cover showed a line drawing of a boy wearing an animal skin that went over his right shoulder. He was holding a bow in his left hand, while a mysterious animal — either a monkey or a small jaguar — peered from the jungle. The book cost six cents. I had a nickel in my hand. I asked the old man at the door if he could trust me for the penny.

Are you kiddin’? he said. Dat’s a hard-cover book!

I went home and told my mother about the Bomba book and she gave me a milk bottle and told me to bring it to Roulston’s and get the deposit. I took the bottle to the grocer, was given two cents, and ran to Sixth Avenue, my heart pounding with fear that someone else might buy the Bomba book.

It was still there. I paid my six cents, held it in my hand, smelled the paper. I hurried home and went to the roof. The first sentence reached out and grabbed me: “As silently as a panther, Bomba climbed the great dolado tree, the giant of the forest. …” I soon learned that Bomba was about fourteen and lived in a cabin deep in the jungles of the Amazon, wearing the skin of Geluk the Puma, armed only with a machete and a bow and arrows. With him was a white-haired old naturalist named Cody Casson, who gave Bomba some education but was evasive about the boy’s origins. The old man was frail and had lost most of his senses in an accident; he was really in the care of the boy.

That first book, and all the others in the series, were driven by Bomba’s search for his lost parents, and therefore a solution to the riddle of his own identity. The entire series was a classic quest.

Once, when my father shouted at me, I ran to Prospect Park and crawled into Devil’s Cave, which was hidden beside a stream that fed the Swan Lake. In times of peril, Bomba almost always took refuge in a cave. Mine was low, narrow, extending about six feet into the hill. I sat there alone, wishing for a thunderous Amazonian storm, fierce lightning, the stream transformed into a swollen river. Instead, a parkie came over and said, Hey, kid, you better beat it. It’s gettin’ dark.

When I went home that evening, my father was gone. I took down a Bomba book and retreated into the jungles of South America, moving through the swamp of death, wary of anacondas, using a pole to test for quicksand, the rubber trees so tall that there was no light. In a way, I hoped Bomba would never find his father. He might be sorry.

13

AT NIGHT FROM the kitchen windows, we could not see New York. There were wartime blackouts, every light in the city extinguished so that German bombers could never find us and so that German submarines couldn’t see the freighters and navy ships as they left New York Harbor. Mayor La Guardia was in charge of all this, talking in his thin squeaky voice over the radio, asking all New Yorkers to cooperate. Everybody did, because almost everybody loved Mayor La Guardia, except one of my aunts, who lost her job when Jimmy Walker lost his. To keep out the light, people began buying blackout shades, which were, of course, black, and on some nights there would be air raid drills, with sirens blaring from the firehouse up the block and air raid wardens walking around in the dark streets shouting orders at the deaf, the careless, or the indifferent.

On summer nights, these drills were exciting. Everybody would be out in the street, sitting on chairs or stoops or the front steps of the stores. Some of us even sat on Sanew’s newsstand. If it was hot, the big people drank hot tea, which was supposed to make you cooler. Most of the time they talked and joked and made fun of the air raid wardens, whose helmets for some reason were white, making them perfect targets for roaming Messerschmitts.

On one such evening, a warden started shouting into Rattigan’s. Someone shouted back. Then the warden went into the saloon. Then he came hurtling out of the saloon and landed on his back, the helmet skittering away into the gutter. A group of men came outside behind him. One of them was my father.

The warden stood up, shouting. On our side of the street, everybody was standing now, moving down to the corner. The argument got louder, the words still not clear. Then my mother started across the street. I followed her.

Billy, she said, come on home.

Stay out of this! he shouted.

What’s the matter?

This bum called Eddie Malloy a draft dodger!

Draft dodger! The worst words in the English language. Draft dodgers were rich guys. Draft dodgers were cowards. Some draft dodgers even wanted the Nazis to win.

Yiz are all a bunch of draft dodgers! the warden said, standing now, adjusting his white helmet, trying through his anger to look dignified.

Then a big suety guy with a flushed face came forward. This was Eddie Malloy.

You say dat again, you bum, I put you down the sewer! I got t’ree kids in de army. I got one kid in da navy. I went down an’ volunteered da day after Poirl Harba! Dey toirned me down on accounta as’ma. An’ because I’m too old. I tried da navy. I tried da Marines. Don’t call me no draft dodger, you bastid.

Then suddenly a police car with its lights out came around the corner of Twelfth Street and another one hurried along the avenue from Ninth Street.

Come on home, Billy, my mother said, taking my father’s arm as I watched from the doorway of the Gapers Club.

You go home, he said, shaking off her hand. This is none of your goddamned business, woman.

She backed away, shocked and hurt. Then the cops were piling out of the patrol cars, shouting, What the hell’s going on? The air raid warden pointed at the crowd.

They assaulted me while I was doing my duty! he said.

That’s a load of bullshit, my father said. He came in looking for trouble and he got it. Eddie Malloy was smoking a cigarette at the bar and when this idjit told him to put it out, Eddie laughed. Then he called Eddie a draft dodger.

The biggest cop said, You’re Mister Malloy? I went to Holy Family with your son Jackie. How is he?

Inna Sout’ Pacific, killin’ them Japs.

The big cop turned to the crowd and said, Okay, let’s everybody go home now.

Then he said to the air raid warden, Relax, pal. Go check out who’s smoking on Thirteenth Street.

Then to Eddie Malloy, Go inside now, and for Chrissakes, don’t smoke ‘til the drill is over.

The warden strode away in a fury. The cops got into their cars and left. The men were laughing and slapping each other on the back and then started inside. My father’s face was beaming. He’d told them, yeah. He’d told them. Then, as if remembering something, he separated from the others and came over to my mother.

I’m sorry, Annie, he said. Come in, we’ll have a drink in the back.

You can drink alone, she said, and took my hand and walked quickly back across the street.

14

THE WAR was always with us. On the radio, we heard about the men who were building Liberty Ships in two weeks and how, at the great plant in Willow Run, a complete bomber was coming off the assembly line every hour, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. But in the summer at Coney Island, we saw lumpy blobs of congealed oil on the beaches and were told they came from sunken ships. It was true: Loose lips sink ships, loose lips sink ships … We were losing; we were winning; everyone must play a part. At one point, we were told to roll up toothpaste tubes while we used them and were forced to turn them in before we could get another; my mother started buying tooth powder, which was cheaper, the canister made with cardboard; but after a while there was none of that left either, and we brushed our teeth with bicarbonate of soda or didn’t brush them at all.

On the radio now, they were singing Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me and I got spurs that jingle jangle jingle, and every morning, on a show called “Rambling with Gambling,” we heard Oh what a beautiful morning, Oh what a beautiful day from a Broadway show called Oklahoma.

I’d love to see that show, my mother said one day. I love those songs.

Why don’t you go and see it? I said.

It’s over on Broadway, she said, as if explaining it was in Madrid. It’s much too dear.

She said this as if ending the discussion. I was persistent.

Why can’t Daddy take you? He has money for Rattigan’s. Why can’t he save up and take you over to Broadway?

Well … maybe after the war is over.

I’d like to see Broadway too, I said.

She smiled and said, After the war …

During the second year of the war, my father started giving me an allowance of a dime a week, and with a few more cents (again, deposits on those bottles) I began to go to the movies with other kids. Almost always, on a Saturday morning, our destination was the Minerva, which was one large malodorous room, with two aisles and about twenty rows noisy with kids. There were usually three features, a serial (which we called the “chapter”), a cartoon, a newsreel, and coming attractions; all for twelve cents if we got there before noon. We never knew what time a movie started; we just went to the Show. And sitting there in the noisy dark, I was transported to other worlds.

I loved the Tarzan movies, with their lush scenes of jungles, tree houses, Johnny Weissmuller swinging on vines and bellowing his great triumphant calls. I also discovered the glories of the American West, vistas of amazing beauty, of deserts and mesas and mountains. Sitting in the dark of the Minerva, I could smell the leather saddles, the beans cooking in skillets on sagebrush fires, the dirty smoke billowing from an Iron Horse as it raced across the prairie. At the movies, I dove into mountain streams. I survived raging snowstorms and stampeding cattle. I faced down Indians, black hats, rustlers, desperadoes. I was pursued by posses and escaped into Mexico.

In those westerns, in the gangster movies, in the war movies, and even the love movies, the men were always drinking. They shot each other in saloons and nightclubs. They got drunk on leave and got into wild, hilarious fights in waterfront bars. Some of the movie drunks were comical, some mean. With the exception of a few cowboys, even the heroes drank whiskey. They never got drunk.

In the third year of the war, the Kilroy signs started appearing everywhere, brought home to America from Europe. They showed a long-nosed cartoon figure, his nose hanging over a fence, and the slogan: Kilroy Was Here. Nobody knew who Kilroy was. But he was everywhere (they said on the radio), he was every GI, he was every American fighting overseas. I mastered the head and nose of Kilroy hanging over the fence and chalked it on a hundred walls and fences. That year, Kilroy even made it to Brooklyn.

On the radio there were stories about zoot suit riots in Los Angeles, on the other side of the country; sailors were chasing the zoot suiters, most of whom were Mexicans, stripping off their clothes, shaving their heads, and then beating them to a pulp. Almost everybody seemed to think this was a good thing. A riot broke out in Detroit, blacks against whites, and people were killed by the police. Then there was a riot closer to home: in Harlem, over in Manhattan, where the Negroes lived. I saw pictures in the Daily News of black men with bloodied heads and tough cops with faces like slabs standing in front of them.

They oughtta kill all them niggers, a kid named Tommy Moore said, standing outside Sanew’s, as we looked at the headlines about the riot.

Why?

Why? We’re fightin’ Hitler and the Japs, and the niggers are rioting! Whose side are they on?

Maybe they got a good reason. The paper says they won’t let them in the army with whites.

Of course not! said Tommy Moore. They’re niggers! They won’t fight!

But they’re fighting in Harlem!

That’s different! You can’t fight the Nazis wit’ a knife!

This was a puzzlement. There were no black people in our part of Brooklyn except for one tall man in overalls, who worked as a super in an apartment house on Fifteenth Street. Nobody seemed to bother him; certainly he didn’t bother anybody. When we traveled with my mother on the subway, we saw blacks, but they behaved like everybody else: dozing or reading newspapers or talking to each other. Joe Louis sure could fight; but when I thought about blacks in the movies I understood what Tommy Moore was saying. In the movies, blacks were always wide-eyed and comical, full of fear, running from ghosts or bad guys or their own shadows. If they saw Nazis with guns, would they say, as so many did in movies, Feets, get movin’?

As always, I brought this to the kitchen table. My mother was rushing around, ladling out food. My father had gone to work.

How come niggers won’t fight? I said.

What? she said. What did you say?

The niggers, you know, from Harlem? How come —

Don’t use that word in this house, my mother said. They are called colored people. Or Negroes.

Everybody calls them —

Only bigots call them niggers, she said. And what does a bigot know about fighting? Bigots are cowards and bullies.

She knew everything.

When the rioting ended, we were back to news of distant battles. And other matters. A gangster named Lepke went to the chair, and everybody talked proudly about how he wouldn’t squeal on anyone, right up to the end, because he was from Brooklyn and if you’re from Brooklyn, you don’t squeal, ever. Jimmy Durante started saying “umbriago” on the radio, and though nobody knew what this meant, in school we said umbriago as if it were another version of Shazam: a magic word, a curse, a mystery. There were stories about strikes, and people cursed John L. Lewis, who was keeping the coal from reaching the cities. My father wondered how Lewis could be a union leader, anyway. He was a goddamned Republican.

Then one wartime winter, there were no cigarettes. My father was always irritated, smoking strange brands, like Wings and Fatima (because the GIs were now using up the entire supply of Camels); the black market had them, he said, and they were holding them back to drive up the prices. Paper matches suddenly disappeared too, so my father started using wooden kitchen matches, snapping the sulfur heads into flame with his thumbnail. Alone in the kitchen I tried to do this many times, and always failed.

The war went on and on.

15

AT 378, Big Jack McEvoy was the super. He lived on the first floor fight, with his wife, Mae, his son, Jackie, and his daughter, Marilyn. Everybody in the building thought they were strange people. For one thing, Big Jack was a Giant fan. We never knew another Giant fan, though there was a rumor that a Yankee fan lived on Ninth Street and Eighth Avenue. Both breeds were as rare as Republicans. Big Jack was probably a Republican too.

He’s a strange bird, my father said one Sunday morning.

Why? my mother said in an irritated way. Because he doesn’t spend hours in Rattigan’s?

My father gave her a hard look.

He’s making good money at the shipyards but he still works as a super, saving every dime, he said. He’s a cheapskate. He comes into the bar and never says a word and takes his pail home. I never trust a man that drinks alone.

In spite of the father who drank his beer from a pail at home, I became friendly with his son, Jackie. He was lean, taut, black-haired, and a great stickball player. We didn’t mind that he was a Giant fan too. He could play. Jackie was three or four years older than I was and he had a terrible temper, which was why the boys his own age wouldn’t play with him, even though he was a great hitter. But he seemed to like me. In the hall one day, a few weeks before Christmas, I asked him if he wanted to trade comics. Sure, he said, come to my house after dinner.

The McEvoy flat amazed me. Most of the living room was filled with a green-topped table upon which an entire model railroad line was operating in a perfect miniature world. There were mountains, a farm with cows and horses, a lake, streams, trees, stations, water towers, with the Lionel trains racing through them all.

My father built it for me, Jackie said casually, showing me how he operated switches, how he could make the trains move from one track to another, how they could even go backwards.

My father can build anything, Jackie said.

I said nothing in reply, thinking of my father calling Big Jack a cheapskate before heading for Rattigan’s.

I was awed by the McEvoy living room. In a corner of the room, an immense fat Christmas tree stood bright with bulbs, blinking electric lights, silver strands draped along the branches. Against one wall, a piano was covered with Christmas cards. Our own living room was barren in comparison; we wouldn’t have a tree until a few days before Christmas, when the prices came down, and we could never afford a real piano. Then Jackie showed me his collection of comics, great stacks of them. And added something else: comics he had drawn himself.

He had about seven of them, all in composition books, the pages broken up into panels like real comic books. Jackie’s hero was Smilin’ Jack, and the stories were all about his pursuit across the Pacific of a villain called the Red Bat. The panels were full, of ships and airplanes, desert islands and dying Japanese soldiers. At the end of each book, he wrote the ominous words: To Be Continued.

Pretty good, huh? he said.

Yeah, yeah, I said. They’re great, Jackie.

That night, back in our house, I started drawing my own comic books. I had one blank composition book and used a number 2 pencil to make my drawings. I asked my mother for a story and she said I should just make one up. So I did, sending Smilin’ Jack after the same Red Bat created by Jackie McEvoy. But in my story I made them roam the jungles of South America, using places from the Bomba books. The airplanes were hard to draw, so I looked at some comics, and tried to copy them. They didn’t come out well. The page grew rough and dirty from erasing, but when I was finished, they did look like airplanes.

When I finished my first book, I took it to show Jackie McEvoy and he said it was lousy. I thought, Well, maybe it is, but let me try again. I started filling book after book with my own comics, all about Smilin’ Jack, then adding other characters, then changing my hero’s name to Bob Sterling, Secret Agent. My mother loved these books. She would actually read them and laugh. Once more, she showed me the comics in the newspapers, in particular Terry and the Pirates, by Milton Caniff. I still didn’t quite connect with this strip, but I liked Terry Lee, who was blond and in the air force, and his commander, Flip Corkin, and his friend, Pat Ryan. I just didn’t understand the talk.

But on other pages in the Daily News, I found Smilin’ Jack, who didn’t look anything like Jackie McEvoy’s version of the character. In the newspaper, he was a handsome guy with a mustache, who flew all over the Pacific, fighting the Japanese. He met beautiful women everywhere and had two friends: Fat Stuff, a black guy whose buttons kept popping off his enormous belly, and Downwind Jaxon, who was always seen in three-quarters view from the rear so that his face remained a mystery. The airplanes were great. But I could never draw Smilin’ Jack the way he really looked. That’s why I invented Bob Sterling, who was a kind of flying G-man, chasing Nazis through Brazil, where they had taken over a lost city in the jungles. Naturally, they had a secret weapon too, the incredible Death Bomb.

That summer I showed some of my later books to Jackie McEvoy. This time, he didn’t dismiss me with contempt. He got furious.

What are you doing? he shouted at me. Stealing my idea? I write comic books, not you!

I never showed him another one.

In a way, I didn’t care. Jackie McEvoy’s approval didn’t matter all that much to me; on the street, even the big guys didn’t want to hang around with him. Besides, I had begun to think that I could draw better than he could. After a year of practice, I could make a credible Dick Tracy or Flattop without looking at the Daily News. I could even turn out a pretty fair Smilin’ Jack. I couldn’t draw women at all. But I would sit at the kitchen table after dinner, filling pages with airplanes, jungles, submarines, and heroes, packing balloons with talk, ignoring the heat or the cold, the cockroaches or the radio. The truth was, I only wanted the approval of one person.

But when my mother showed him my hand-drawn comic books one night, he stared at them, riffled through the pages, nodded, said Nice, and reached for his cigarettes and the quart bottle of Trommer’s.

16

UP TWELFTH STREET, in one of the buildings across from the Factory, there was a woman with flaming red hair who was called Betty the Whore (we pronounced the word who-uh). We would see her in the late afternoons, coming down the street in very high heels, short skirt, and jacket with padded shoulders. She changed her hairstyle all the time, letting it flow out, piling it on top of her head, flattening it under a pillbox hat. She was also the first woman in the neighborhood to wear slacks, which caused people to stare at her just as much as that tangerine hair. Most afternoons, when she started her walk, men would slowly step out of the bars, just to look at her, and they’d yell at her and she’d yell back and then she’d get on a trolley car and go off toward Flatbush Avenue. The men would all laugh and nudge each other and then go back into the bars.

I remember asking my mother about her: what the word “who-uh” meant and why the woman wore slacks and why the men yelled at her. She smiled and then shook her head.

She’s just a poor unfortunate, my mother said. Her husband’s in the army and she’s all alone.

Why do the men shout at her?

Because they are horse’s asses, she snapped. If they had any pity in them, they’d pray for her.

Do you pray for her?

I will. And you should too.

That night I prayed for Betty the Whore and the night after that, and then I forgot about her. There were so many people in the world to pray for that I just didn’t have time for the Poor Unfortunate with the rolling hips and flaming red hair.

17

THEN one June afternoon, I came home from Holy Name and saw everyone rushing around, waving newspapers, shouting, pumping clenched fists in the air. D day! We had invaded France! Radios blared from hundreds of windows, telling about landings in Normandy and heavy fighting as the troops moved into France. My mother was happy, listening carefully as my father shaved.

Well, maybe it’ll be over soon, she said.

How soon? I said.

They say it might be Christmas.

I thought she was going to cry, but she didn’t. My father came out of the bathroom and I was proud of him. The radio said that men were fighting on the beaches near Cherbourg and flights of bombers were smashing the Ruhr, which I knew was in Germany; they must have been using his bombsights. He didn’t say anything for a long time, just listened to the news reports.

Good, he said at last. They can hang old Hitler from a telephone pole.

Off he went to work, and after a while I heard people coming up the stairs. Mae McEvoy and her daughter, from the first floor; Mrs. Halloran and Carrie Woods from the second floor. They had sandwiches and soda bottles and pails of beer and were heading for the roof. Across the hall lived the Caputos, who were wonderful people. Mike Caputo had a tough face and wore a tough longshoreman’s cap but he always smiled at us and remembered our names. Mrs. Caputo taught my mother how to make sauce for spaghetti, which we immediately wanted to eat every night instead of barley soup and stew. They had three sons, Sonny, Babe, and Junior, and they were always friendly. Then their door opened and all of them started for the roof too.

Let’s go, Mommy. Come on! Everybody’s going up to the roof.

She said, Okay, but be careful. It’s almost dark.

The roof was as packed as the street during an air raid drill. I saw people from every building on the avenue, and men from the bars, and they were all looking out at the harbor. Mr. Caputo asked me how I was doing in school and I said, Okay, vacation’s soon, and he said, Great, you can get a job f’ the summer. But I wasn’t thinking about a job. I was nine. Who would hire me at nine? The sun was now setting into New Jersey, the sky all red and purple, the skyline beginning to disappear into the darkness. We could hear the foghorns of dozens of ships. And then the sun set, the sky turned mauve and then black. The skyline disappeared as it did every night during the war. For a long time, people murmured to each other in hushed expectant voices.

What’s going to happen? I asked. Why is everyone here?

Just wait, my mother said. Watch the skyline.

And then, without warning, the entire skyline of New York erupted into glorious light: dazzling, glittering, throbbing in triumph. And the crowds on the rooftops roared. They were roaring on roofs all over Brooklyn, on streets, on bridges, the whole city roaring for light. There it was, gigantic and brilliant, the way they said it used to be: the skyline of New York. Back again. On D day, at the command of Mayor La Guardia. And it wasn’t just the skyline. Over on the left was the Statue of Liberty, glowing green from dozens of light beams, a bright red torch held high over her head. The skyline and the statue: in all those years of the war, in all the nights of my life, I had never seen either of them at night. I stood there in the roar, transfixed. And then softly, her voice trembling with emotion, my mother began to sing:

And the others joined in, most of them women, some of whom had men in the army, fighting or dying out beyond the Narrows, their voices now joined, singing hard and loud, some crying, all gazing at that blaze of light.

The war wasn’t over by Christmas. There was a lot more killing and a lot more dying. Across the summer, I played ball in the street, learning the mysteries of stickball. But the fall was very cold and the winter was brutal. The radio was on almost all the time. I read and drew more comics, and started drawing in sketchbooks. At the same time, I searched for Bomba books, pushing out beyond the edges of the Neighborhood to find little bookshops. I got good grades in school. In 4B, I was given the religion prize, a book about Thomas Aquinas, illustrated with silhouettes. I copied the silhouettes and then made some of my own.

Roosevelt died in April. Flags were lowered to half mast at the fire-house and the post office, schools were closed, and my mother prayed for Roosevelt’s departed soul. His picture remained on the kitchen wall. Truman became president. My mother didn’t like him but my father said, At least he’s a Democrat. Then on May 8, there was another collective roar in Brooklyn, and when I came home from school, people were out on the street, cheering and dancing while others banged pots from their windows and hung American flags on the fire escapes. The war was over in Europe! This was V-E Day. Hitler was dead, the Nazis had quit. Seventh Avenue was having a block party.

Patty Rattigan set up a keg of free beer on the sidewalk. Mrs. Caputo burst out of 378 with a huge pot of spaghetti. Other people brought down platters piled with sandwiches. My mother cooked a rhubarb pie. Even the Gapers Club abandoned the windows and came down to the street to gape at the food and drink. Radios appeared on fire escapes, loud with patriotic music and news from Washington. There was wild dancing, with grown-ups doing the Lindy Hop. Everybody was singing and drinking. My father was still asleep and he went to work that night without saying good-bye.

But V-E Day didn’t end the war. The fighting was still going on in the Pacific, getting more brutal as it came closer to Japan. In the Daily News maps I found Tarawa and Iwo Jima and Okinawa, showing them to Tommy, talking about them in the street. I added “kamikaze” and “flame thrower” to the nomenclature of war. And then on a still, thick day in August, Tommy Moore came bursting from his house with the news about the atom bomb.

We got a friggin’ secret weapon, he said. It blew up a whole friggin’ city!

I ran upstairs and turned on the radio. It was true. The American secret weapon had blown the entire city of Hiroshima to pieces. I ran downstairs again. To the kids in the street, this was great news. The Japs had bombed Pearl Harbor and now they were paying for it. Now the war would end. The secret weapon that was part of the plot in so many comic books was called the atomic bomb. And we had it.

But that night my mother was upset by the news, and for me that was confusing.

Those poor people, she said.

What poor people? my father said. They’re Japs!

They’re just people like us, she snapped back. Women and children and working people. They didn’t start the war. Some old politician did. But now thousands of them are dead.

They had it coming, my father said.

They did not.

What the hell do you know about it? he said in a hard voice. You’re not the president!

I know they’re just people, she said, holding her own.

He shut up then and finished his dinner and went to work. When he was gone, my mother hugged me.

Pray for the poor Japanese, she said. And I did.

Three days later, Nagasaki was bombed. And now my mother was more angry than sorrowful.

That old Truman, she said. He picked the one city in Japan where the Catholics lived.

How do you know? my father said. I never heard of a Jap that was Catholic.

It was on the radio, she said.

I don’t believe it, he said. Japs aren’t Catholics.

They are so, she said. Some of them. The Jesuits were in Nagasaki, the French and the Portuguese. My father was in Nagasaki.

With that, he went quiet. But I was in awe. Peter Devlin had been in South America. He had seen real jungles. He had refrigerated bananas. He had watched the building of the Panama Canal. And now I learned that he had even crossed the Pacific! He had been in Japan! In Nagasaki!

I ate fast and went down to tell everybody this news. Nobody believed me; what could an Irishman be doing in friggin’ Nagasaki? On the way home again, I met Jackie McEvoy coming down the stairs. I told him all about my grandfather and the Pacific and Nagasaki.

You’re such a goddamned kid, he said, and went past me to the street.

18

THEN THE WAR ended for good. And on Seventh Avenue, V-J Day was celebrated with the biggest, noisiest block party of them all. Strangers kissed each other. Georgie Loftus, the bartender, kissed Pat Mulroney, the taxi driver. Mrs. Irwin from the second floor even kissed a cop. Carrie Woods fell down the stairs, skinned her knees, and made Cliff bring her another whiskey. A wild young guy named Paulie McAleer vomited on a parked car and then smashed his fist through the window of the Kent cleaners. Teddy from the fruit store gave away free watermelon. My father took the night off from work and joined the crowd in front of Rattigan’s, where five kegs of free beer were lined up on the sidewalk. The firemen all got drunk. A firehouse dog bit a priest. Betty the Whore danced with three sanitation men. The trolley cars kept ding-dinging for passage but the avenue was so packed that the drivers opened the doors and let everyone take free rides. For that long day and into the night, everyone you saw was happy. This was the fabulous tomorrow from the song, the day when there would be joy and laughter and peace ever after. This was tomorrow. The world was free.

Going upstairs that night, gorged with watermelon, spaghetti, candy, and soda, I felt that I was about to begin my life. The next day, at last, would begin the time called After the War. The ballplayers would come home. My mother would see Oklahoma! All shortages would end. We’d be happy. Every one of us.

But on the second landing, I found my father asleep on the stairs. I woke him up and he looked at me with dazed, watery eyes, his jaw slack, saliva drying in the corners of his mouth.

What’s the problem? he said.

Come on, I said. The war is over.

Yeah, he said. The war is over.

I helped him up the stairs, like Bomba taking Cody Casson back to the cabin.