Marked Man

41

“It was tough, what happened to Ralphie Ciulla,” said my father, rooted in position on his Naugahyde lounge chair. He sipped his beer, belched softly. However tough it was on Big Ralph, my father wasn’t taking it personally. “He didn’t deserve to get it that way, a bullet in his head in his mother’s house.”

“No one does.”

“Any idea who did it?”

“It looks like it was an enforcer for the Warrick Brothers Gang.”

“I didn’t know Ralph was involved with those clowns.”

“He was involved with Charlie Kalakos, which was apparently enough for them.”

“Who else they after?”

“Joey Pride, Charlie, the other two also, I would suppose. For some reason it looks like they’re going after everyone involved in the Randolph heist.”

“It could be a bloodbath.”

“It’s shaping up to be.”

“That’s tough.”

“Yeah.”

“Real tough.” Pause. You could see him think it over, my father, not so much working out the intimations of all our varied fates in the grisly death of Big Ralph, but more wondering at the appropriate period for remaining somber in the face of such news. I suppose, after due deliberation, he decided it wasn’t that long. “You want to get me another beer?”

“Sure, Dad.”

“And while you’re up, some chips, maybe.”

When I came in from the kitchen with the Lay’s and two Iron City Beers, the television was on. My dad had been itching to press the power button on his remote from the moment I stepped into his little house in Hollywood, PA. As proof of my theory that he would watch anything so long as it was on, there he was, staring at a little white dot hurtling across an impossibly blue sky.

“Golf?”

“The Phils are in L.A.”

“But you hate golf.”

“Except when they hit the ball into water and get the whiny face. I love the whiny face. ‘Ooh, I’m making six mil a year plus endorsements, but I just hit the ball in the water. Ooh.’”

I handed him his beer and the chips and then walked to the television and turned down the sound. He looked at me with the startled expression of a little kid who’d just had a candy bar snatched from his hand.

“What the hell are you doing?” he said as he pressed the volume-up button on his remote.

I killed it again. “We need to talk,” I said.

“What, are you breaking up with me?” He turned up the volume once more. “Just close the door on your way out.”

“Dad, do you really need for Johnny Miller to tell you that the guy should have made the putt he just missed?”

“It adds ambience.”

“We need to talk,” I said, “about why you owe a favor to that Mrs. Kalakos. She’s roped it around my neck like a horse collar.”

He looked at me for a moment, thought about it, and then let the volume bleed out until it died. He flipped open his beer, took a sip. I sat down in the chair catercorner to his and opened my own.

“It was my mother,” he said.

“MY MOTHER was an artist,” my father told me as golfers moved grimly and silently across the television screen. “Or at least she thought she was.”

“I don’t remember Grandma Gilda painting.”

“This was before you were born. Our house was filled with her paintings. She was also a poet, and she liked to sing. This was all when I was still young, after we left North Philly and were living in Mayfair.”

“Near the Kalakoses?”

“That’s right. There was an art class at the community center, and every Tuesday and Thursday night my mother would pack up her paints and brushes in her wooden artist’s box and go to class. And in that same class was guess who?”

“Mrs. Kalakos?”

“Right. One night I was hanging outside the community center with my pals when the class was breaking up. My mother came out with her little wooden box and her smock draped over her arm. But the strange thing was that she was laughing, which was not a usual thing for her. And next to her, laughing also, was a tall, ungainly man, stooped, with a shiny bald head and a pipe in his girlish lips. Not much to look at, but the son of a bitch was making my mother laugh. His name was Guernsey.”

“Guernsey?”

“Like the cow. And after that, I noticed my mother was distracted at home. Before, she was always telling my father what to do, complaining about all the stuff I wasn’t accomplishing with my life. But now she just stopped, as if she had other things on her mind. It was kind of peaceful and nice, until the night she went off to art class and didn’t return.”

“Guernsey.”

“She called my father so he wouldn’t worry. She was leaving him, moving in with Guernsey, becoming an artist. She was still young, in her thirties, and she said she needed to break out before she was swallowed whole by the narrow life of a cobbler’s wife.”

“How’d Grandpop take it?”

“Not well. The next Thursday night, I stood with him as he waited silently outside the community center. When the students came outside after the art class was over, he confronted her. He begged her to come home. She refused. He spit out some words in Yiddish, and she spit them back. Enraged, he went after Guernsey with his little fists. I held my father back as the tall, stooped man recoiled in fear and then ran away. I remember the holes in the bottom of his big shoes as he ran. My mother pushed my father down before she went after Guernsey. It was all quite the scene. And when it was finished – the scene, the marriage, everything – Mrs. Kalakos, who had seen it all, came over to my father.

“‘Don’t you worry,’ she said in her thick Greek accent. My father, still on the ground, looked up at her with a pathetic hope in his eyes. ‘A wife and mother, she belong in her own house. I bring her back to you.’

“And she did. A week later Mrs. Kalakos marched into our living room with my mother following meekly behind, a suitcase in her hand. And the three of them, sitting across from one another, worked it out.”

“How?” I said.

“I don’t know. They sent me away. When I came back, it was as if none of it had happened. My mother kept house, my father hummed, my mother complained about my father, my father took it with a little smile. That was it. And it was never talked about again.”

“Grandma Gilda.”

“My mother, I think, always had a sadness in her eyes after that. No more painting or poetry or singing. But my father was always grateful to Mrs. Kalakos. Whenever he saw her, he would remind me what she had done and that I should never forget it.”

“Grandma Gilda. I didn’t think she had it in her.”

“That’s why I owe the old lady a favor. Can I turn up the volume now?”

“You don’t want to talk about it? How it made you feel?”

“Bewildered, abandoned, desperate for a hug.”

“Really?”

“Get out of here. It was just something that happened. But I’ll tell you this. First chance I had, I up and joined the army. Anything to get the hell out of that house.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“Good, now that’s settled.” He aimed the remote, the golf commentators started yapping.

We sat and watched the golf for a while, until the sun started slanting and the baseball came on. Whatever you can say about baseball on the tube, it’s better than golf. I got us both a couple more beers, and as I drank my Iron City, I began to think about my grandmother.

I remembered her as old and complaining, never happy, never satisfied with how anything in her life had turned out. But there was a moment when she had made that move to change her life, was living in sin with that big lug Guernsey, devoting herself to her painting. It was almost romantic, a woman abandoning her placid domestic life for love and art. Like Helen leaving Menelaus for Paris, or Louise Bryant leaving her middle-class life for John Reed, or Pattie Harrison leaving George for Eric Clapton. These were the heroines of epic poems, Oscar-winning films, classic rock ballads. And in that immortal group, at least for a few weeks, was my Grandma Gilda.

I wonder if it would have worked out for her, if a life with Guernsey would have been richer, truer than the one she fell back into. More likely, after a few brief weeks she would have started nagging Guernsey about the dishes in the sink and the clothes on the floor, about his lack of ambition, about the way he never took her out dancing. But she never would know, would she, my Grandma Gilda, because Mrs. Kalakos had taken charge.

The Furies of Greek mythology were three sisters who scoured the earth for sinners to torment. One of them, Megaera, was a shriveled crone with bat wings and a dog’s head. Her harping often drove her victims to suicide. I bet she also drank old tea and kept her shades drawn. I bet she burned incense to hide the scent of death on her breath. I bet she inveighed against freedom and risk, against free will, against any chance to rise and become something other than that which fate had decreed.

“By the way, I got a message for you,” said my father.

I grew suddenly nervous. “From Mrs. Kalakos?”

“No, from that Joey Pride. He wants to talk. He said he’ll pick you up tomorrow morning same time outside your apartment house.”

“He can’t. Call him and tell him he can’t.”

“Tell him yourself. I don’t call him, he calls me.”

“Dad, I’m being followed all the time. I think they followed me to Ralph. And they’re looking for Joey, too. If he picks me up outside my apartment, they’re going to find him.”

“Tough for Joey.”

“Dad.”

“If he calls, I’ll tell him.”

“This is bad.”

“For Joey maybe.”

“Your sympathy for those guys is overwhelming.”

“They were punks,” he said. “Always were, always will be. If they was involved with that robbery, like you said, then they stepped out of their league, and now they’re paying for it. That’s always the way of it. You got to know your limitations.”

“Like your mother.”

“Yeah, that’s right. You know, after she came back like she did, she threw out all her paintings. Never touched a brush again.”

“Were the paintings any good?”

“Nah. But she sure was happy painting them.”