Famous Builder (6 page)

Obediently we fill the bag with gristle, bone, fat—all of which will be emptied into our little collie’s bowl, even though she almost choked to death on last week’s scraps.

His face is calm, expectant. He glances at the family to his left, at the cast-off pieces of steak on their plates. I know that look; his eyes shine as if he’s been possessed of some idea.

NO!
I think.

“Would you mind if we took your scraps?” he says to the father of the family.

A wave of dread rises from my feet to my face.

He says it again.
Would you mind if we took your scraps?

NO!

“You can’t do that,” I murmur.

My father glances up at me.

“You can’t. You can’t, Daddy. It’s just not done.”

“Oh, it’s perfectly fine,” says the other mother in a hard voice. “I’m glad someone else has the sense to ask for it. Here,” she says, and scrapes the food off her plate into the outstretched bag with the edge of her steak knife.

Where
am
I? I exhale, exasperated, shaking my head back and forth.

“These kids,” says my father with a smile. “Always worried about what other people think.”

“You mustn’t worry, son,” says the other father. “We’re certainly not offended.”

“Don’t be a snob,” says the other mother. “Think about your puppy.”

I look toward to the door. In twenty-five years, I’ll recognize him in my duty to work hard, to extend myself past my limitations, and beyond, in spite of resistance, fear—the possibilities of transformation he’s offered to me! A rush of love: I thank him. But right now I can’t see beyond this moment. In 1976, the whole story comes down to this moment.

My father doesn’t stop. One by one he goes to the un-bussed tables of the Bonanza, filling up Taffy’s bag with whatever he can find—biscuits, fried chicken wings, lukewarm baked potato skins.

“Time to go,” I call.

“We’re going out to the car,” says Michael.

My father walks to another table and starts a conversation with another family, all of whom find his request infinitely charming. My head pounds behind my eyes; my cheeks burn. Soon enough he finds more to add to the bag.

Is our embarrassment the very thing that’s egging him on?

What on earth is he trying to teach us?

“Stop,” Michael calls.

We cower by the front door of the restaurant.

“You’re the chairman of the Cherry Hill Planning Board,” says Bobby.

In a deep socket of an empty acre lot in South Jersey, a wiry boy with dark eyebrows, burnished blond hair, and thick lenses in his glasses clears pathways through the milkweeds, trying to preserve as many of the leafy, muscular stalks as he can. He works harder than he’s worked in weeks, so hard that he doesn’t even hear his father’s car engine in the distance, or his mother ringing the cowbell for him to come inside for dinner. This is Telegraph Hill: the first community he’s built that he’s genuinely proud of, from the curving of the cul-de-sacs as they wind through the woods, to the discrete street names he’s penned in meticulous, Early American script on scraps of faux-antique wood he’s pilfered from his father’s workshop: Saybrook Road, Weston Drive, Lavenham Court, Henfield Road. No wonder his fingers are cracked and cut, his toes sore from using the front end of his sneaker as a tool.

The wind rustles the weeds. He’s about to back up the slope, to look out over his first fully wooded community. His belief is so deep that he can practically see the lanterns trembling on, the hushed couples stepping up the sidewalks toward The Northfield, the most recent two-story model (vertical rough-hewn siding, copper-hooded bay window). Then Tommy Lennox, his neighbor, walks toward him with a football tucked beneath his arm, the faintest suggestion of a smirk around the corners of his lips. “What’s that?” Tommy says.

A ripple, a blush to his skin. The boy’s pleasure has been so private, so intimate, that he might as well have been making love to the land. He can’t even raise his eyes. “A development,” he says finally.

He swelters inside his shirt. The boy imagines Tommy stepping through the community casually, knocking street signs aside, crushing the tall can that stands for the silo at the entrance. Sweat drips down the center of his back. But when the boy finally lifts his head, he’s surprised to see the animation in Tommy’s face, the quizzical expression that suggests he’s waiting to be shown around.

In no time at all, Tommy is building his own development, Willow Wood, in the open land beside the single pine along the back of the lot. He’s out there every day, just as the boy is, digging with his mother’s garden shovel, replanting tablets of moss until the knees of his pants are soaked through. But why doesn’t this feel right? The boy doesn’t have the heart to tell Tommy that straight streets intersecting at right angles went out with 1949. And what to make of the names Tommy’s assigned to them: Motapiss Road, Vergent Court. They practically carry an aroma, suggesting all sorts of things no one likes to talk about: flesh, death, the mysteries of the body. At least Tommy’s sister has the good sense to know that she should pay attention to what’s attractive. Although Cathy Lennox’s “Green Baye” is entirely misnamed (what bay? what water?), the boy cannot help but be impressed with the added
e
, and with the skillful way her streets meander down the slope.

Still, neither of their projects can stand beside the elegance and understated good taste of Telegraph Hill.

Today all the neighborhood children roam the field, some down on their knees, others carving out streets, all squinting, foreheads tightened in concentration.

The boy looks up at the houses across Circle Lane where he and his friends spend their time when they’re not in school or out here. Of course, it would be their misfortune not to live in a real development, but in a neighborhood in which all the houses are decidedly different from one another, with no consistent theme. Although his mother tries to invoke the word “custom” as often as she can, he’s not having it. Most of his fifth-grade classmates live in the newest developments, places where the wood-plank siding is coordinated with the trim (sage green with aqua, barn red with butter), always that pleasing sense of order and rhythm. Truth be told, he frets about living in a place with no name. Just to say “Timberwyck” or “Fox Hollow East” or “Wexford Leas” and be entirely understood! His dilemma even seems to bewilder that substitute teacher with the kind face and the gray, washed-out hair in whom he confides one day.

“You don’t live in a development?” she says. “How could you not live in a development?”

Flushed, he turns away.

“Have you talked to your parents?”

He shakes his head. He steps back from himself, watchful, distant. Silent boy, ghost, so weightless and emptied he barely has a body.

What would she say to the story the
Philadelphia Bulletin
’s just written on him: BOY, 12, LONGS TO BE FAMOUS BUILDER? He imagines her unfolding the newspaper at her kitchen table, spreading orange marmalade on a burnt piece of English muffin as her teakettle whistles on the stove. Would he be real to her now? Although the article tells of the 600 brochures he’s collected from developments all over the country, and of the fan letters he’s written to Bob Scarborough, whom he wants to work for someday, it frustrates him, if only because it’s written in that cheerful, yet patronizing tone that suggests his work is mere play, that he’ll come to his senses in a few years. Hard not to wince when he sees it tacked to his principal’s green bulletin board. How he hates being on display like that, lying on his stomach in the photograph, marveling at that brochure in his hands (is it Charter Oak?) as if he’d never seen one before. He’d like to tell the substitute it’s an ineptly written piece, a foolish piece, but he’s as guilty of the lies as anyone. Why did he simplify himself when he talked to that reporter? Why did he allow her to think there was something less than profound about the binders of street names he’d collected? Here he was, hiding the ferocious depths of his passion inside something harmless and benign, when all he really wanted was to move her, to show her he was in love.

When he looks up from his reverie, both Tommy and Cathy and all the others wander back toward their houses, the sky charcoal above the rooftops, the trees.

He gets down on his knees. He shivers inside his jacket, which he zips, chucking the skin of his throat, but he’ll work long after the street lamps have blinked on, defying his mother’s cowbell, ignoring his long-division assignment, the piano scales—all those dull, grinding duties that suggest his life has nothing to do with pleasure, the warmth of this soil in his hands.

1.

Beads, cones, pears, amber nets of foil-wrapped chocolate coins tied at either end. January 8th, and I’m placing ornaments inside the sturdy dividers of their boxes. My hands work faster. Enough of Christmas already! No more dull, obligatory parties. No more last-minute runs to the post office. No poignantly ugly sweaters (snow-flakes, argyles) doomed to feed moths at the bottom of a rarely opened drawer. But this isn’t like me at all. Point out the first sign of an end—a red, crinkled leaf of poison ivy in late July—and that’s it: brooding. Maybe I’m developing a better attitude, coming into a saner, smarter relationship with time. But just when I pull the tree out the door, some needles fall to the floor with,
what?
The sound of a shaken, blown-out bulb. I stop myself, blinking. 1938, the Christmas tree of my mother’s seventeenth year. Lights glow as her twin brother’s model train clicks around the track at its base. A gate raises. Signs shudder. Although it isn’t the holidays anymore, but February: Valentine’s Day cards scattered on the table. Something has happened; I can’t remember what it is this time, but my grandmother, Anna, has given in to Paul’s request to keep the tree up for one more week, because it’s cheerful; isn’t it? I think,
silly boy.
And I drag out the dried-up spruce through the door, its pitch gumming up my palms.

2.

My mother’s twin was killed not long after the winter of the February tree. I think I should know the exact date on which her family car was broadsided by a drunk driver in a municipal truck, but to do that I’d have to make a phone call, and when I think of my mother watching the canal from her sixth-floor balcony (bells ping, drawbridges open), I think: spare her.

Although I wish I could speak with authority. I never heard his jokes or his laugh. Never passed the salt to him at a dinner table, never hugged him with that stiff, halting quality one only reserves for saying good-bye to a sibling at the holidays. Never went crabbing with him, never showed him New World or my other planned cities, never pretended to enjoy a hockey game he bought me tickets for. I’ve never seen more than a dozen images of his face. (Inside the picture frame on our family piano he wears a sepia-tinted sport coat and tie, both painted atop his T-shirt by a photographer.) He’s blank space. I don’t have much to go on here. I’m clearly having trouble, though I need to conjure him up, at least to try, even if the effort feels about as possible as building a thirty-story temple out of struck matches.

A few essential facts:

1. He wore white, size fourteen sneakers on which he drew portholes and the words S.S. Homan—his and my mother’s last name—with a laundry marker.
   
2. Lanky, six foot four, he spent entire afternoons hurtling a basketball toward a hoop nailed to the side of the barn.
   
3. He had a cat (name?) who slept in bed with him.
   
4. He had more than a few friends, all drawn to his wit, cheer, and magnetic nature.
   
5. He often ate an entire box of cereal at a sitting, spooning soggy cornflakes from a silver mixing bowl.
   
6. When he learned that his father had shot himself in the front room, after a long period of estrangement from the family, he wept openly and hard, as his older brother and twin sister fell silent.
   

3.

My mother is quick to be silly, with a warm, endearing sense of humor about herself. Her face tightens yet glows when my brothers and I make fun of the expressions she used when we were children: “Hell’s Bells,” “Christmas,” “Tough apples.” Or when we imitate the traces of her South Jersey accent: “Delawhir” for “Delaware.” She’s not the kind of person who appears to be marked by grief. She looks and acts a great deal younger than her age. She knows more about Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez than I ever will and is an avid fan of tennis and classical music. She has a light mezzo-soprano voice, which she lent to church choirs and recitals for years. “If anyone ever said anything unflattering about her children,” my father has said, “they better watch out. She’s a lion.”

But she couldn’t have always felt the will to rise from the bed, to comb out her hair, to roll on a coat of lipstick. As early as I can remember, she spoke of Paul with such force and feeling that I couldn’t but turn my head, an admission I feel ashamed of as I write it. Was I jealous? I could never mean as much to her, could never do anything to bring that ring to her voice, even though I did everything I could to earn it. She’d say: Of the two of us, he was the one with the friends. She’d say: Of the two of us, he was the one who was kind. I didn’t yet know that this is the way we talk of the dead, the people we’ve known whose mouths, hands, and eyes fade from memory over time.

More than once she said, “He would have lived in our house.” I’m sure she didn’t mean that literally, didn’t mean to suggest he wasn’t independent enough to strike out on his own. Maybe she was doing the best she could to make him real for us, to create a future for him in which he’d brush out the mats of our dog’s tail or sit beside us in a dark movie theater, face blued by the light of the screen. But for years I pictured a casually handsome man with a warm gaze—a blurrier version of the photo on the piano—standing in the bathroom doorway with a towel, the slightest hint of goofiness around his smile.