Monkey Boy

guard impermeably raised. This new heedless candor is a manifestation of the somewhat premature dementia that has been overtaking her in recent years, possibly the result, doctors now say, of a stroke that wasn’t noticed, a commotion in her brain that caused a tremulous weakness in one leg that was misdiagnosed as a symptom of advancing age. But my sister and I also attributed her decline to the exhaustion brought on by having to tend to Bert during his unrelentingly demanding last years, when being repeatedly hospitalized for an array of health emergencies somehow only fueled his manic, cantankerous energies. By the end, it was Lexi who took over his care, moving home again, adamant that she was only doing it out of concern for our mother. Mamita’s condition seemed related to another medical mystery, that being the most dreadful insomnia that overtook her, when it was as if the more Bert exhausted her, the harder it was for her to get any sleep, her often reddened eyes encircled by darkly puffed skin. It was only when she had to go from the nursing home to a hospital in Boston because of a nearly fatal case of pneumonia and an adverse reaction to her medications that doctors, studying her puzzling medical history, also hypothesized that prior stroke. On my mother’s side of the family, there’s no known history of strokes or heart disease or even of dementia; there are a few old family stories that along with the little bit I’ve found out on my own do suggest that Abuelito was manic-depressive and maybe even schizophrenic. In the nursing home, Mamita’s doctors did finally straighten out her medications. She sleeps better now, though that fog she’s often at least a little bit lost in and from which she does sharply emerge, nevertheless seems to be slowly, ineluctably deepening.

Soon after Bert Goldberg’s beautiful young wife, Yolanda Montejo Hernández, came back from Guatemala with their sick little son, she became pregnant, with a girl this time, Alexandra. Husband, probably wife, too, must have felt blessed and redeemed, if not shocked, by this successful fast work, which won them the right and even the responsibility to turn their long separation into a subject never to be spoken of again, certainly not within hearing of the children. In the fall, living in our neighborhood was like being snugly enclosed at the bottom of a basket of flagrant fiery and more muted colors, replaced in winter by hues of snowy slopes, pine crests nearly black in the distance, frigid gray skies, flying flocks of crows, crimson-streaked Atlantic sunsets, followed by successive seasons that wove into our little valley every shade of green from sapling shoots to darkest boreal forest. How could my father even have suspected the viciousness lurking all around us? The Saccos, related to the contractors who’d founded and built our neighborhood, a brutal clan, lived around the corner on Enna Road in a little ranch house like our own. Whenever Gary Sacco called me dirty kike, I shouted back: So are you. You’re a dirty kike too!

Down Back, the weedy, stony field behind our houses, was where me and my few friends from school, especially Peter Lammi, who at school was called Lambi, used to stand shoulder to shoulder, throwing rocks at Gary, who was a year older than us, and his brother, Chris, and some of their friends, while they hurled and zinged them at us. We went to Dwight, the public elementary school, and they went to St. Joe’s. We faced off far enough away that we could usually easily dodge the rocks they threw. My rocks never even came close to reaching them, though I left that part out when boasting at the dinner table about my daring charges against the enemy and perfectly pitched throws. Peter Lammi was much stronger than any of us on either side. Come on, Pete, split a head open! He aimed his rocks relentlessly, one after another, but always so they’d miss but be close enough to make our enemy pull back and finally run away. He couldn’t bring himself to intentionally hurt even Gary Sacco. Peter launched those wild bombardments in part to protect me but to protect himself, too, because he knew the Saccos and their friends were desperate to see our faces covered in blood, if only they could get close enough. I also wanted to see their faces covered in blood, there was not a single thing in this world I wanted more. The serious problem of enemies, what to wish for your enemies.

We did have some nice neighbors, and Mamita even got along with Connie Sacco for a while. But then my mother decided we had to give Fritzie, our German shepherd, away and put an advertisement in the newspaper. Mamita couldn’t take Fritzie anymore, such a rambunctious galoot that he didn’t seem to even fit inside our little house, and he filled the yard with dog shit that it was my job to collect inside wads of newspaper and drop into the aluminum rubbish incinerator that resembled the robot in Lost in Space, a job I performed at best haphazardly. An elderly black couple came from Maine to see Fritzie. They drove an old-looking automobile and told us they lived on a small farm. They went into the yard to meet Fritzie, then sat in the living room with my parents over coffee and cookies, looking at vaccination and kennel papers. Two days later a petition was left in our mailbox, signed by our neighbors, maybe by every household on Sacco and Enna Roads, complaining that if we sold our house to Negroes, their property values would go down. No black families lived in our town, not one I’d ever seen anyway. “We, your neighbors, agree that we will take all necessary steps to prevent that,” the letter said, which my father, astounded, read aloud in the kitchen, and then he mocked: What, they’re going to