The Angel on the Roof

The Visit

In late April of a recent year, I drove from my home in New York City across New Jersey to deliver a lecture at East Stroudsburg University, which is located in Pennsylvania at the southern end of the Pocono Mountains, not far from the Delaware Water Gap. I arrived a few hours earlier than my hosts expected me, so that, once there, I was free to drive twenty miles farther north to the small town of Tobyhanna, where my mother and father lived with me and my brother and sister for a single year, 1952, when I was twelve, my brother ten, my sister six.

For the five of us, the year we lived in Tobyhanna was the most crucial year of our shared life. It defined us: we were that family; we have remained that family. The following summer, my mother and father got divorced, and from then on, although we were the same, everything else was different. Not better, just different.

Looking back, I see that both my parents were careening out of control with rage, frustration, and fear. For years, my father had been plotting ways to leave my mother, whose dependency and hysteria had imprisoned him then, as later they would me. For her part, my mother had been just as busy trying to keep him from leaving, which only made him feel more trapped today than yesterday. He was thirty-eight; his life was skidding past. And he thought that he was somehow better than she, a more important person in the overall scheme of things than she, and he acted accordingly. This made my mother wild.

My father was a plumber, and he had been hired by a New England contractor as superintendent of all the plumbing, heating, and air-conditioning installation in an enormous Army shipping and storage depot being built in Tobyhanna. It was one of the first big postwar military bases commissioned by the Eisenhower administration. My father was the company’s man sent down from Hartford to run its largest out-of-state job, an extraordinary position for a young journeyman pipe fitter with no more than a high school education, a man whose biggest job up to then had been adding a wing to the Veterans’ Hospital in Manchester, New Hampshire. But he was bright, and he worked hard, and he was very good-looking, and lucky. People liked him, especially men, and women flirted with him.

He was a heavy drinker, though, starting at it earlier every day. And with each additional long night’s stay at the bar in Tobyhanna, he turned increasingly nasty and sometimes violent. The job he held was, in fact, way over his head, and he was terrified — not of being fired, but of being found out, and not so much by other people, as by himself.

I drove my car into Tobyhanna, a poor, bedraggled batch of houses and garages and trailers strung along a winding two-lane road abandoned long ago for the Stroudsburg-Scranton highway, and saw at once the bar where my father used to spend his evenings after work and as much of his weekends as he could steal from the house in the woods where he had established his nervous wife and three children. It was a small, depressing, impoverished town, despite the presence of the Army depot — or perhaps because of it.

I drew my car up to the bar on the main street, shut off the motor, and went inside. It was dark, dirty, and damp, smelled of old beer, sweat, and pickled, hard-boiled eggs, with a jukebox in the back, a U-shaped linoleum-covered bar that ran the length of the room, and several dim, flickering neon beer signs in the window.

I ordered a beer from the middle-aged woman behind the bar, whose exact, round, dun-colored double — her twin, I thought, or surely her sister — sat on a stool on the other side of the bar. She sat next to a man with a tracheotomy who was talking to her in a harsh, electronic moan.

A second man was perched on a stool a ways down from me — a scrawny fellow in his mid-fifties whose arms were covered with badly drawn tattoos. His head was wobbling on his neck above a bottle of beer, and he seemed not to notice when I sat down.

The place had not changed a bit in the thirty-four years since I last entered it. The doubling image of the round woman behind the bar and the woman sitting by the man with the hole in his throat acted like a drug or a mathematical formula or a vision, instantly doubling the place itself with my memory of it, matching my arrival in Tobyhanna today with my memory of a Saturday in winter, when my father drove me and my younger brother into town with him — ostensibly to pick up a few groceries or some such errand. It’s no longer clear to me why we three males left the house and hearth for town that day, just as it was not clear to me why I decided to drive north from Stroudsburg, when I more easily and pleasantly could have strolled around the college campus for a few hours, killing time. There was a powerful need to go there, but no remembered reason.

I remember my father bringing my brother and me straight into the bar with him, and I remember his cronies — soldiers and construction workers — buying my brother and me Cokes and potato chips. They teased us, because we were miniaturized imitations of men, and praised us for our manliness, because they were men, while down along the bar my father leaned over a friend’s shoulder and talked intently into his ear, then smiled at a fat woman (or so she looked to me) with bright red lipstick who sat next to him and patted her forearm affectionately, and soon he switched his attention completely over to her, leaving his male friend to drink alone for a while. I watched this take place.

The bartender waddled over to me, picked up my nearly empty bottle, and studied it and set it back down. “Want another?”

I shook my head no.

She lit a cigarette, inhaled furiously, a large, red-faced woman smoking like a steamship, and she studied my face the way she had examined my beer bottle. “You’re not from around here,” she stated.

“Last time I was in here was thirty-four years ago,” I said.

She laughed, once, more a bark than a laugh. “It hasn’t changed.”

“Nope,” I said. “It’s the same.”

The man next to me at the bar, his head wobbling like a heavy flower on a stem, was alert, more or less, and watching me now. “You ain’t old enough to’ve been in here thirty-four years ago,” he growled.

“I was only a kid then. With my father. My father brought me in here.”

The man sat up straight and swept his arms around and pointed at each of the four corners of the dingy room. “This place, it hasn’t changed,” he said. “Where you from?”

“New York City.”

“Hah!” he laughed. “This,” he said, waving his arms again, indicating the three other people in the bar as if they were a place, “this is the way to live! You never lock your doors here. It’s safe,” he proclaimed. “Not like, not like your goddamned New York City.”

I nodded in agreement, got off my stool, and made for the door.

He called after me, “Hey, buddy! You’re welcome!” He grinned through loose red lips and broken teeth and started to cackle at his joke on me and then cough and finally wheeze and whoop with joy, while I hurried out the front door to my car.

On our way home from the bar, me in front in the passenger’s seat, my brother in back, my father said, “Listen, boys, let’s just say we spent the time at the depot. In the office. I should’ve gone over some drawings there, anyhow, so we might’s well say that’s what we did, right?” He looked over at me intently. “Right?”

“Sure,” I said. “I don’t care.”

I peered out the window at the pale curtains of snow falling, the houses that occasionally flashed past, the dark shadows of trees, and of the Poconos closing off the sky. I didn’t care.

My brother didn’t say anything, but my father never asked him to. I was the one he worried about; I was the one my mother would interrogate.

The house itself had not changed. Except for a coat of blue-gray paint, it was still the same two-story farmhouse with the long shed attached at the rear and the weather-beaten, unpainted barn across the circular drive. The two stone chimneys at the ends of the house were matched by the pair of huge maple trees next to the road. Hanging from one of the trees was a small wooden sign. RETTSTADT’S RESTAURANT, it said. SERVING DINNERS FRI.TO SAT. 5 P.M. TO 9 P.M. I could not imagine who would drive all the way out from Tobyhanna — five miles through the woods on a narrow, winding, hilly road, passing barely a dozen other houses on the way, broken-down and half-finished bungalows and trailers set on cinder blocks among car chassis and old refrigerators and tires — for dinner at Rettstadt’s.

I looked at my watch, 4:45, and drew my car off the road, pulled into the driveway, and parked by the back porch, facing the door that, when we lived there, opened into the kitchen. By now, my limbs felt weak and awash with blood, and my heart was pounding furiously, as if I were at the entrance to a cave.

By the time my father and brother and I arrived home, the snow was coming down heavily, and my father told my mother that the snow had slowed him up, he had got stuck twice, and, besides, he had to spend quite a while at the office at the depot working on some drawings for Monday. That was why we were so late getting home from town.

My mother looked at him wearily. It was the same old story, the same old challenge tossed down, the dare for her to take him on one more time: either believe the liar or enrage him by forcing him to tell the truth.

I know from photographs that my mother was a pretty woman— small, blond, precisely featured, with lively hazel eyes and a sensitive mouth. “Petite,” she liked to say of herself. People said she looked like beautiful women — Claudette Colbert, Ann Blyth, Bette Davis — and she did. Not like any one of them, but she belonged to that particular caste of beauty. I remember her that afternoon standing before the stove, a ladle in hand, a steaming pot before her — but that, too, is a generic image, like her beauty. It was a Saturday afternoon; it was snowing.

My brother dodged around her and disappeared like a mouse through the living room toward the stairs and the unused bedroom on the second floor, a kind of attic in the back where we had set up our electric trains. My sister — I have no idea where she was, possibly in the kitchen, possibly with a friend for the afternoon: country children often visited each other on weekends; it made the driving back and forth easier for the parents. I hung around by the kitchen door, as if waiting for orders from one or the other of my parents. They were looking angrily at one another, however, and did not seem to know that I existed.

My mother said, “I know where you’ve been. I can smell it on you. I can smell her, too.”

My father’s face reddened, and he glowered down at her from his full height, which, because my mother was small and I was only twelve years old, seemed a considerable height, though he was never any taller than six feet, which turned out to be my height as well. He began to shout at her. It was at first a welling-up and then an over-flow of anger, wordless — or no words that I can recall — a kind of sustained roar, which she answered by letting loose with shrieks, cries, calls, wails — again, with no words that I can recall now and surely could not hear then, for the tone was all one needed in order to understand the sad rage this man and woman felt toward one another, like a pair of beasts caught side by side, each with a limb in the jaws of the same cruel trap, and then they begin to gnaw on the flesh and bone of their own trapped limbs.

What in 1952 had been the kitchen was now a restaurant dining room, the floor covered with bright green, indoor-outdoor carpeting, the walls paneled over in imitation pine with five-and-dime framed pictures of a trout stream with a deer bending its head to drink, a barn and silo and amber waves of grain, a covered bridge with throngs of fall foliage behind it. I smelled food cooking and walked through the door that had once led to the woodshed behind the kitchen and discovered that it led now to a large, open room filled with stainless steel counters, dishwashers, sinks, and stoves. I saw in the far corner of the room a small man in white pants and T-shirt scrubbing utensils in a sink. He saw me and waved, as if he’d been expecting me. He was in his late fifties, I guessed, square-faced, short, thick-bodied.

I said, “I’m not here to eat, don’t worry.”

He smiled and nodded. “We’re not set up yet, anyhow. Too early, friend.”

“Yes, well, I’m not here to eat,” I repeated. “I used to live here.”

He squinted across the room at me. Then he pursed his lips and pronounced my last name. My very name!

“Yes!” I said, astonished. “That’s right!” I did not know this man, I had never seen him before. I felt my father loom up beside me, huge and red and full of heat, and I looked automatically to my left, where I felt his presence most, and leaned away from him, then recovered, and stood straight and regarded the small man in white before me.

He put down the spoon he’d been scrubbing and took a step closer. He said my father’s first name and his last. “The plumber. Right? The plumbing guy?”

“Well, yes. My father. I’m not him, though. I’m his son.”

He examined my face for a few seconds, as if he did not believe me. He was looking at a gray-haired man in his late forties, a man nearly a decade older than my father had been in 1952. I was, however, more likely my father than my father’s son.

I told him that my father had died over five years ago.

He was sad to hear that and asked what he died of.

I said, “He pretty much drank himself to death.”

He nodded. “Yeah, well, those construction guys. They all hit the booze pretty hard. I ran the food concession for that job your dad was on, down there at the depot,” he said. “I was a kid then, just out of the service. I knew your dad. What a guy he was! Memorable. He had what you call real personality, your dad.” He wiped his hands with a towel and stuck one out to shake. “George Rettstadt,” he said. “I bought this place a few years after your dad lived here. He rented it, right? Brought your mom and the kids out from someplace in New England for a while, right? C’mon and look around, if you want. I’ve made loads of changes, as you can see,” he said, waving his arms at the four corners of the room, like the drunk at the bar.

I agreed. There had been a lot of changes. But even so, it was the same house, and it smelled the same to me, the light fell at familiar angles through the maple trees and tall, narrow windows, rooms opened into rooms where they always had. Rettstadt had turned woodshed into kitchen and kitchen into dining room, he had covered walls and floors, and he had lowered ceilings, hung brass lamps and tacky pictures. He had altered the whole function of the house — though he still lived in it, he assured me, upstairs. The living room was now a large second dining room that was for private parties, which he said was most of his business. “You know, Lions Club, Boy Scouts, stuff like that. Reunions, weddings, like that.”

Rettstadt walked ahead of me, pointing out the changes, while I saw only the house that lay hidden beneath this one, the white house under the blue one, the drab, decaying farmhouse in the woods where a young man had stuck his unhappy wife and bewildered children while he drove into town to work every day and to drink every night and tried to invent a man he could never become.

On that snowy Saturday long ago, while my mother shrieked at my father and he barked back like an angry dog at her small, spitting face, I finally darted past them and fled the kitchen for the bedroom upstairs that I shared with my brother. It was a corner room with a pair of long windows on one side and our twin beds on the other. I remember lying on my bed, the one nearer the windows, reading a comic book, probably, with my wet feet on the clean bedspread, my arm crooked back to support my head, when suddenly the door flew open, and my mother was hovering above me like a great bird, clutching my shirt, and yanking me up beside her on the bed.

“Tell me!” she cried. “Tell me where you went! Don’t you lie to me, too!” She raised her hand and held it, palm out, a few inches from my face, as if she wanted me to read it, and she said, “Don’t you lie to me, or I swear, I’ll go crazy. Tell me where you went all afternoon! I know he took you to the bar, and he didn’t go to the depot. He just went to the bar. And a woman was there, I know it. Tell me the truth.”

I did not protest, I did not hesitate. I nodded my head up and down, and said, “We went to the bar in town. Nowhere else. A woman was there.”

She smiled, wiped the tears from her cheeks, and stood. “Good boy,” she said. “Good boy.” She turned and left the room. I lay back down trembling, and in a few seconds the buzz of the electric trains from the attic room in back replaced the buzz in my head, and I believe I fell asleep.

When George Rettstadt asked me if I wanted to see how he’d changed the rooms upstairs, where he said he had fixed up a large apartment for himself and his wife, I felt my chest tighten. “No,” I said very quickly, as if he had invited me to look steadily at a gruesome object. “No, that’s okay, I’m in kind of a hurry, anyhow,” I said, easing toward the door. “I wanted to walk around the yard a minute. I wanted to see where my brother and sister and I used to play. You know.”

Rettstadt said, “Sure, take all the time you want. Look at whatever you want to look at, everything’s unlocked. We never lock our doors out here, you know.” He opened the door, we shook hands, and I stepped out, breathing rapidly.

I did poke into the barn, but there was nothing about it that spoke to me. I stood inside the dark, cluttered building, and it was as if I were resting, idling, conserving energy for a more strenuous exertion to come.

A moment later, I had walked around the back of the house, crossed through the tangled brush and crumbling stone walls in the gathering dusk, and had come to stand next to the house on the far side, just below my old bedroom window.

My father’s heavy footsteps on the stairs had wakened me. He swung open the bedroom door, and I knew instantly, as if I had been standing downstairs in the kitchen between my mother and father, what had happened between them when she returned from my room armed with my betrayal, and with utter clarity and an almost welcoming acceptance, I knew what would happen now between him and me.

Violence produces white light and heat inside the head, and it happens both to the person who administers the beating and to the person who is beaten. It is never dark and cold. It happens at the instant of violent contact, before pain is felt, or fear, even, or guilt, so that pain, fear, and guilt come to be seen as merely the price one pays after the fact for this extraordinary immolation. It’s as if violence were a gift worth any price. Beyond the light and the heat, it’s a gift that engenders gorgeous dreams of retribution, and they last for tens of generations of fathers and children, husbands and wives — it’s a gift that shapes and drives fantasies of becoming huge as a glacier and hard as iron, fast as light, and sudden, like a volcano.

When you are hit in the head or slammed in the ribs and thrown to the floor by a powerful man, you find instantly that you are already halfway into a narrative that portrays your return to that moment, a narrative whose primary function is to provide reversal: to make the child into the man, the weak into the strong, the bad into the good. Listen to me: you are locked into that narrative, and no other terms, except those present at its inception, at the very opening of the drama, are available for the reversal — and, oh! when that happens, I have risen up from my narrow bed in the upstairs corner room I shared with my brother in Tobyhanna in 1952, and I overwhelm my dead father’s rage with an awful, endless rage of my own.

I eventually moved away from that spot beneath the window of the bedroom and got into my car and drove back to Tobyhanna and then on down to East Stroudsburg University, where that evening I gave my lecture to a small gathering of students and teachers, who seemed appreciative and expressed it with good-natured, gentle applause. Afterwards, we ate and drank a little wine in a local restaurant, and I drove home to New York City.

I will not go back to the house in Tobyhanna or to the bar in town, just as — after having been there once — I have not returned to any of the other houses we lived in when I was growing up, or to the apartments and barrooms in Florida and Boston and New Hampshire, where I first learned the need to protect other people from myself, people who loved me, male and female, and utter strangers, male and female. I go back to each, one time only, and I stand silently outside a window or a door, and I deliberately play back the horrible events that took place there. Then I move on.

I have traveled a lot in recent years, and consequently have completed almost all my journeys now. And when I have returned to every place where someone beat me or I beat someone, when there is no place left to go back to, then for the rest of my life I will have only my memories, these stories, to go to — for the heat, for the light, for the awful, endlessly recurring end of it.