gold.”
But Milton persisted, “I’d say where thinking ends, stupidity begins.”
“That’s how people live, Milt”—Michael Antoniou again, still kindly, gently—“by telling stories. What’s the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? ‘Tell me a story.’ That’s how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything. And what story does the Church have to tell? That’s easy. It’s the greatest story ever told.”
My mother, listening to this debate, couldn’t fail to notice the stark contrasts between her two suitors. On one side, faith; on the other, skepticism. On one side, kindness; on the other, hostility. An admittedly short though pleasant-looking young man against a scrawny, pimply, 4-F boy with circles under his eyes like a hungry wolf. Michael Antoniou hadn’t so much as tried to kiss Tessie, whereas Milton had led her astray with a woodwind. D flats and A sharps licking at her like so many tongues of flame, here behind the knee, up here on the neck, right below the navel … the inventory filled her with shame. Later that afternoon, Milton cornered her. “I got a new song for you, Tess. Just learned it today.” But Tessie told him, “Get away.” “Why? What’s the matter?” “It’s … it’s …”— she tried to think of the most damning pronouncement—“It’s not nice!” “That’s not what you said last week.” Milton waved the clarinet, adjusting the reed with a wink, until Tessie, finally: “I don’t want to do that anymore! Do you understand? Leave me alone!”
Every Saturday for the remainder of the summer, Michael Antoniou came by O’Toole’s to pick Tessie up. Taking her purse as they walked along, he swung it by its strap, pretending it was a censer. “You have to do it just right,” he told her. “If you don’t swing it hard enough, the chain buckles and the embers fall out.” On their way down the street, my mother tried to ignore her embarrassment at being seen in public with a man swinging a purse. At the drugstore soda fountain, she watched him tuck a napkin into his shirt collar before eating his sundae. Instead of popping the cherry into his mouth as Milton would have done, Michael Antoniou always offered it to her. Later, seeing her home, he squeezed her hand and looked sincerely into her eyes. “Thank you for another enjoyable afternoon. See you in church tomorrow.” Then he walked away, folding his hands behind his back. Practicing how to walk like a priest, too.
After he was gone, Tessie went inside and climbed the stairs to her room. She lay down on her daybed to read. One afternoon, unable to concentrate, she stopped reading and put the book over her face. Just then, outside, a clarinet began to play. Tessie listened for a while, without moving. Finally, her hand rose to take the book off her face. It never got there, however. The hand waved in the air, as if conducting the music, and then, sensibly, resignedly, desperately, it slammed the window shut.
“Bravo!” Desdemona shouted into the phone a few days later. Then, holding the mouthpiece to her chest: “Mikey Antoniou just proposed to Tessie! They’re engaged! They are going to get married as soon as Mikey he finishes the seminary.”
“Don’t look too excited,” Zoe told her brother.
“Why don’t you shut up?”
“Don’t get sore at me,” she said, blind to the future. “I’m not marrying him. You’d have to shoot me first.”
“If she wants to marry a priest,” Milton said, “let her marry a priest. The hell with her.” His face turned red and he bolted from the table and fled up the stairs.
But why did my mother do it? She could never explain. The reasons people marry the people they do are not always evident to those involved. So I can only speculate. Maybe my mother, having grown up without a father, was trying to marry one. It’s possible, too, that her decision was a practical one. She’d asked Milton what he wanted to do with his life once. “I was thinking of maybe taking over my dad’s bar.” On top of all the other oppositions, there may have been this final one: bartender, priest.
Impossible to imagine my father weeping from a broken heart. Impossible to imagine him refusing to eat. Impossible, also, to imagine him calling the boardinghouse again and again until finally Mrs. O’Toole said, “Listen, sugar. She don’t want to talk to you. Get it?” “Yeah”—Milton swallowing hard—“I got it.” “Plenty of other fish in the sea.” Impossible to imagine any of these things, but they are, in fact, what happened.
Maybe Mrs. O’Toole’s maritime metaphor had given him an idea. A week after Tessie became engaged, on a steamy Tuesday morning, Milton put his clarinet away for good and went down to Cadillac Square to exchange his Boy Scout uniform for another.
“Well, I did it,” he told the family at dinner that night. “I enlisted.”
“In the Army!” Desdemona said, horrified.
“What did you do that for?” said Zoe. “The war’s almost over. Hitler’s finished.”
“I don’t know about Hitler. It’s Hirohito I’ve got to worry about. I joined the Navy. Not the Army.”
“What about your feet?” Desdemona cried.
“They didn’t ask about my feet.”
My grandfather, who had sat through the clarinet serenades as he sat through everything, aware of their significance but unconvinced of the wisdom of getting involved, now glared at his son. “You’re a very stupid young man, do you know that? You think this is some kind of game?”
“No, sir.”
“This is a war. You think it is some kind of fun, a war? Some kind of big joke to play on your parents?”
“No, sir.”
“You will see what kind of a big joke it is.”
“The Navy!” Desdemona meanwhile continued to moan. “What if your boat it sinks?”
“You see what you do?” Lefty shook his head. “You’re going to make your mother sick worrying so much.”
“I’ll be okay,” said Milton.
Looking at his son, Lefty now saw a painful sight: himself twenty years earlier, full of stupid, cocky optimism. There was nothing to do with the spike of fear that shot through him but to speak out in anger. “Okay, then. Go to the Navy,” said Lefty. “But you know what you forgot, Mr. almost Eagle Scout?” He pointed at Milton’s chest. “You forgot you never win a badge for swimming.”
News of the World
I waited three days before calling Julie again. It was ten o’clock at night and she was still in her studio working. She hadn’t eaten, so I suggested we get something. I said I’d come by and pick her up.
This time, she let me in. Her studio was a mess, frightening in its chaos, but after the first few steps I forgot about all that. My attention was arrested by what I saw on the walls. Five or six large test prints were tacked up, each one showing the industrial landscape of a chemical plant. Julie had shot the factory from a crane, so that the effect for the viewer was of floating just above the snaking pipes and smokestacks.
“Okay, that’s enough,” she said, pushing me toward the door.
“Hold on,” I said. “I love factories. I’m from Detroit. This is like an Ansel Adams for me.”
“Now you’ve seen it,” she said, shooing me out, pleased, uncomfortable, smiling, stubborn.
“I’ve got a Bernd and Hilla Becher in my living room,” I boasted.
“You’ve got a Bernd and Hilla Becher?” She stopped pushing me.
“It’s an old cement factory.”
“Okay, all right,” said Julie, relenting. “I do factories. That’s what I do. Factories. These are the I. G. Farben plant.” She winced. “I’m worried it’s the typical thing for an American to do over here.”
“Holocaust industry, you mean?”
“I haven’t read that book, but yeah.”
“If you’ve always done factories, I think it’s different,” I told her. “Then you’re not just glomming on. If factories are your subject, how could you
“You think it’s okay?”
I pointed to the test prints. “These are great.”
We fell silent, looking at each other, and without thinking I leaned forward and kissed Julie lightly on the
