Against All Odds Read online

  Some nights she was itching for a fight, but others she was too tired to notice if I’d eaten or done my homework. Then there were the nights when she was simply gone, out for the evening with her friends to a club or a bar, where they laughed long and loud and left behind lipstick stains on the cigarette butts and liquor glasses. When we were short on rent, she waitressed in one of the places out along Route 1, flirting I think with the middle-aged men who were the ones to get the check and who she hoped would reach in their wallets for a stack of bills, saying, “Here, honey, keep the change.” Her other gigs were mostly on the weekends, when she dressed in black and served identical plates of catered food for extra cash at wedding receptions or banquet meetings. If there were uneaten meals, she might take those home in foil tins, extra portions of chicken breasts with congealed mushrooms and cream, rice gone a bit dry, cold tomatoes that hours earlier were baked and bubbling with bread crumbs. The nights when she had a catering job were the nights when I, as I got a little older, was most likely to take the car for a spin. I was twelve when I first slid behind the wheel.

  I began by backing the car out of the driveway of our duplex so that I could get to the basketball hoop, just easing it out and angling it along the curb down the street. But gradually I became more daring. Months passed and the distances got longer, until at some point, I was driving. I learned to drive by watching some of my older friends when they picked me up for league basketball games, staring at the way the steering wheel rolled through their hands, how they flicked the turn signals with a quick tap of a finger or a thumb and pressed down effortlessly on the gas or the brake, rocking their large basketball player feet up and down on their heels.

  There were even times when I would drive one of the older kids home after he’d knocked back a couple of beers in someone’s basement and tossed me the keys. I was tall, I looked old enough to pass for seventeen, and my long hair hid what was left of any little-kid face. Other drivers might glance over, but they rarely glanced twice. I was like any other kid out with a parent’s car on a Saturday night. I was always very conscious of following the rules of the road. In retrospect, I was also just plain lucky.

  I taught myself to drive in my mom’s Chevy Impala, a bright white car with red vinyl seats and four doors, wide and roomy so everyone could pile in. If I knew she was going to be gone from three until eleven, hitching a ride with her friend, I would take the car out from five to eight, with two or three of my friends in the backseat. In the beginning, to teach myself, I drove the car down to the vacant parking lot outside the American Mutual Insurance building, which backed up against Lake Quannapowitt in Wakefield. It was the same building and the same company where my mother had worked, typing and filing, but the irony was lost on me as I practiced turning, parking, shifting the car into reverse, stopping on a dime. It didn’t matter if my mother had her purse with her; I had my own set of keys. One afternoon, I rode my bike down to the local hardware store and had a copy cut at the cost of some pocket change.

  At twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, I was not as smooth as the sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds, but I was nearly as tall, with a clear view over the wheel, and I was careful. I didn’t drive after I’d tried a beer, and I didn’t race or try to beat the light. I only stayed inside the confines of Wakefield. No highways, no busy routes with cars passing and pulling into and out of view. The driving became like a running joke, although I was always careful to put back in just the right amount of gas, so she would never wonder when she came down to start the engine in the morning.

  When she drove me home from Liberty Tree Mall, yelling at me for what a disgrace I had been, she never thought for a second that she just as easily could have gotten a call from a Wakefield cop on a Saturday night, someone in a blue uniform who had taken a second look and had busted me for being behind the wheel without a license, or, God forbid, for crashing into, injuring, or even killing someone else while I was driving underage. I never thought of it either.

  That night, as I did on most nights, I took my basketball to bed. I would trace my fingers over the black ribs and talk to the ball. It smelled of sweat and dirt and whatever had dropped from the sky or trees onto the court. And it listened companionably in the darkness. I slept with my hand resting alongside its worn pebblelike surface.

  I assume Mom called my dad that night or the next morning, if only to say, “Look at what your son has done,” but I never heard from him after the incident at the mall. He didn’t come around afterward, and there was no father–son talk. His absence was as loud as the proverbial slam of the screen door when I was mad and raced out, wanting to be anywhere but home. After that, I was forbidden to see my older friends, the guys who drove and who had driven me to the mall, but my mother exercised no control over the basketball court, and we still met up there, where we rebounded, took free throws, guarded, and jumped, and never said anything about what had happened on that July afternoon. And we still hung around anyway. I didn’t even know if anyone else had gotten a summons, and I didn’t want to ask. I had two weeks to wait for my court date at the Essex County Courthouse.

  The morning arrived and it was hot. I wore a shirt and tie, and the suit that I had lifted from Park Snow, sweating in the heat. The Impala had air-conditioning, but air-conditioning burned more gas, so we drove to Salem with the windows down.

  It was the Salem of the infamous witch trials, where 142 people were accused of witchcraft and 19 were hanged. One man, Giles Corey, a cantankerous farmer, was pressed to death over two days, lying naked on his back under the September sun as one by one stones were placed on his chest until his ribs and lungs were crushed, because he had refused to enter a plea of guilty or not. But I hardly knew any of that. I knew nothing of Salem’s days as a port that shipped salt cod to the Caribbean and Europe and as the final destination for bags of sugar and barrels of thick, dark molasses from island plantations, or tins of Chinese tea, arriving on boats that had crossed around the bottom of the world. I was a boy who had at most been to Boston once on a class trip. To tell me that Nathaniel Hawthorne began The Scarlet Letter in the Customs House near Pickering Wharf would have done little more than bring a glazed look to my eyes. More appropriate to me that morning was the fact that Salem had been a hotbed of privateers seeking riches on the high seas; Salem ships captured or destroyed some six hundred British vessels in the Revolutionary War and struck again during the War of 1812.

  The courthouse was a reminder of that prior world of prosperity and commerce, a beautiful old building sitting in the middle of downtown.

  Inside were the sounds of footsteps on its glossy floors and men in suits and ties, clutching briefcases, moving with a purposeful stride. My case, I learned, was going to be heard by Judge Samuel Zoll, who stood six foot four in his flowing black robes. I walked into the courtroom with my mother, with my eyes down. A juvenile representative had been assigned to me. Judge Zoll looked at the defender and my mother and then at me and in a booming voice asked to see me in his chambers, just the senior probation officer and me, alone. I left my mother outside the courtroom and a bailiff escorted us back through the labyrinthine hall. Wordlessly, he ushered me forward, and I walked into the judge’s private chambers, my hair too long, my feet shuffling, my palms damp. Behind me, the thick wooden door shut, and across the desk, a single pair of eyes bore down.

  Chapter Two

  Dan Sullivan’s Hands

  My first photo, or the first photo that remains, was taken when I was about six months old. It is a picture of me surrounded by my father’s sports trophies, basketball mostly, but maybe a few other sports too. I am sitting in a onesie, a basketball on my lap, amid my father’s monuments to glory. In less than six months, the man and his trophies would be gone.

  I never got the exact story of how my parents met. In one version, my mother is a cashier and hostess in a restaurant along the thin slip of New Hampshire shoreline, with its clam chowder joints and seasonal souve
nir stores, and my father is an Air Force flyboy stationed at the nearby Pease Air Force Base, a World War II landing strip that was later transformed into a spanking new institution designed to wage “cold war.” The official Pease Air Force Base is just one year old. He comes in with his buddies, she seats them and rings them up, they talk, they flirt, she gives him her number, and he calls. In another story, she is the runner-up for Miss Hampton Beach, and my father is an Air Force logistics or maintenance guy, an enlisted man, not an officer. His name is Claude Bruce Brown, but he goes by C. Bruce Brown. My mother is Judith, Judy to her friends. She is the younger of two daughters, the captain of her high school cheerleading squad. Her father is an electrical engineer with Boston Edison, a proud graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Her mother keeps the home. Judy is a good student and very artistic, and is planning on attending art school. She has a full scholarship to an art school in Boston. She draws, sketches, and paints and has her creations framed to hang on the wall. But she never went to art school. Instead, with nothing more than a high school diploma, she married my dad.

  What I do know for sure is that my dad was handsome, and still is; my mom was beautiful, and still is; and they met in the summer of 1957. They were like a lit match, sudden, sulfurous, and nothing but flakes of ash and char after they had ceased burning.

  They married fast: six months of dating and then straight to the altar, saying their vows in the chapel on Pease Air Force Base. They were not love-struck teenagers; my mom was twenty, and my dad was twenty-one. But they ricocheted down the aisle as if it were a shotgun wedding. They set up house in Portsmouth, close to the air base, but never on the base’s actual grounds. Their home was the left side of a clapboard house that my mother’s father, my grandfather, owned, up the road from Portsmouth’s downtown cluster of sturdy redbrick buildings. Grandpa had split the house down the middle and rented out both ends. He came from New Hampshire, had been born in Portsmouth, and grew up there in a simple, saltbox-style house with no yard to speak of, on a quiet block. When his parents and spinster aunt died, they left him their homes, so he had some modest rental investments in addition to the narrow, single-family home he owned in Wakefield, Massachusetts. If he thought it was a bad sign that his new son-in-law couldn’t come up with a place to live on his own, it seems that he held his tongue.

  It may have been a love match to start, but after the first few months, my father began staying out later, disappearing to hang out with his buddies, coming home late or making excuses about why he had to spend extra time on the base. In the long nights, odd shifts, and flimsy excuses, there were hints of other women. A year into their marriage, my mother got pregnant; I was born, breech, at the Portsmouth Naval Hospital just over the metal suspension bridge in Kittery, Maine. I assume my father handed out cigars. The date was September 12, 1959.

  Pease housed long-range bombers and payload aircraft designed for nuclear strike operations, but I doubt my mother knew or cared. She had a crying newborn and a husband who was AWOL from his own home. The last straw was when she walked into a ladies’ dress store downtown with me in tow and heard a group of women giggling and gossiping. One was telling a story about an Air Force man whom she had been seeing. That man, my mother says, was C. Bruce Brown.

  Angry and spitting, my mom packed up me and what little she had and left in a hurry. It was about fifty miles from Portsmouth to Wakefield, and my mother no doubt cursed Bruce Brown across every one. My father never acknowledged the other women; he just made references to being too young and being suddenly burdened with too much responsibility, primarily a wife and a baby son. My mother left him behind, but he is the one who vanished like an apparition. He left the Air Force and went into insurance, successfully selling all kinds of policies, big and small. He moved down to Massachusetts, but never close enough to mean anything. I would wait for him for hours on weekend mornings or afternoons, my nose pressed against the glass of the door, my breath making little rings. The harder I pressed, the quicker I might see him coming, catch that first glimpse of his convertible motoring down the block. But more often than not, he didn’t come. He was like a mirage in the desert, a picture that I created in my mind, which I could also slice clean through with a wave of my little-boy hand.

  There is one other photo of me from that time, about the age when I turned one, a studio shot with a perfect monochrome pearl-gray background in which I am clutching a small white bunny with floppy ears and wearing a checked playsuit with white leather lace-up baby shoes. I am smiling, but it is a tight, nervous smile. I must have been told to smile, to laugh. I do not look as if I want to, but my legs are not sturdy enough yet to do much beyond toddling. It has not occurred to me to run.

  When my meticulous grandfather cleaned out the remaining wreckage of the apartment, he found notes from women tucked away in drawers or a closet, loopy handwriting scribbled on pieces of paper or the torn covers of matchbooks with phone numbers and seductive messages. My father stuffed them into his pockets the way a salesman collects business cards out on the road and then empties them out at home.

  After my mother packed up and returned to Wakefield, we lived for a time in the home where she grew up, where my grandfather wore ties even under his sweaters and my grandparents never exchanged so much as a chaste public kiss or a hug, although I always knew that they cared deeply for each other. But at night, Bertha and Philip Rugg closed the bedroom doors on twin beds in separate rooms.

  I loved my grandparents’ home. It was a modest place on the quiet block of Eastern Avenue, with a living room to one side, a dining room to the other, and a kitchen in the back. There was a yard to play in and there were hot dinners at night, pot roast, chicken, and new potatoes boiled and bursting from their split skins. My grandmother could cook anything, from pies to vegetables; the toughest cut of flank steak became tender in her hands. My grandfather was not a talker. Occasionally, he’d point out something he found interesting, but he was a quiet, reticent man, opaque and flinty like his native New Hampshire stone.

  He had gone to MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, leaving Portsmouth to learn engineering, and even now at home he studied his electrical engineering magazines, worked crossword puzzles, played solitaire, and read the newspaper in his easy chair, the pages rustling as he turned them one by one. Sometimes he would put on the baseball game, and the announcer’s voice would rise and fall with the whistle of the pitch and the crack of the bat. Grandpa would watch, and say nothing. Although he took the train into Boston every day for work, I don’t think he ever attended a Red Sox game. He was a young man who married at the start of the Depression, and he was thrifty. He didn’t really have hobbies, except for solitaire, canasta, and reading books. He spent his remaining free time tending to his rental houses in Portsmouth, where he had the same families living for as long as twenty or thirty years at a time. Over the span of a decade, he barely raised their rents, preferring to keep everything the same. He liked tangible things, like property or a few bank or utility stocks that paid regular dividends.

  When my parents were newlyweds, my father had borrowed money from Grandpa to buy a car. He had never paid it back, and although my grandfather never openly spoke ill of my father in front of me, he never forgot that particular debt or forgave him. When I was grown, I borrowed $1,000 from Grandpa and promised to pay $100 in interest (cheap money at a time when most banks were charging 20 percent or so). I repaid the $1,000 and he reminded me about the interest, crossing off the obligation only when the last dollar had been delivered. He was meticulous in his calculations.

  Philip Rugg was a civic-minded man, joining the John Paul Jones Society to help refurbish the famous John Paul Jones House in Portsmouth. He was inducted into the local Masons, where he rose to become a parliamentarian. He and my grandmother were Unitarians, and I was dedicated, their version of a baptism, in the Unitarian church and went there many Sundays when I was very young. But when the church grew t
oo liberal for my grandparents, they quietly stopped attending.

  Along with his crosswords, he had a passion for putting together puzzles, and there was invariably one spread out on the puzzle table for us to work on. Even as a teenager, I still came over to work the puzzles with him.

  My grandmother had been a teacher, and she saw me as her private pupil. She taught me to sew, to knit (though knitting never really took), to iron, to clean, and to cook, including tests on safety, like how to place the pan on the burner, which way the handle should point, or what to do in the event of a grease fire. It was often just the two of us. My grandfather commuted to Boston, my mother was gone at her office or waitress jobs, and so in the daytime, Gram watched me alone in the house on Eastern Avenue.

  After some months had passed, my father did start coming around again. I don’t really remember his visits—I was too young—but he came over, sometimes to see my mother, sometimes to see me. One Saturday early in the spring, before the trees had leafed out, when it was more mud season than anything else, my mother dressed me up in my little Easter suit and hat and parked me by the door to wait for my father to appear. I had stiff, shiny shoes and she had wet my hair and combed it back under the hat. I waited and waited and my father never showed up. Eventually, my mother must have called or he did, and she said, “Where were you? Scott was waiting for you,” with a bit of a nervous screech in her voice. My father replied, “Well, I’m getting married.”