Against All Odds Read online

  “Married?” My mother took it like a sucker punch, a verbal smackdown as good as anything she ever got later from the brute force of another man’s fists. After our return to Wakefield, my parents had been talking about reconciling, and from there, my mom had probably made the leap to a full reunion. People did it all the time. Hollywood stars in their glossy romances came together, broke up, and reunited. I didn’t know what reconciling was; I only felt the displaced fury of my mom.

  In her view, C. Bruce Brown had been stringing her along once again, just as he had two years before in Portsmouth, with his excuses and his pockets stuffed with numbers scrawled on the back of matchbook covers. This time, my mother had been his fallback in case this other woman, Delores, didn’t pan out. Or perhaps she was only one on a long list of other women. And the sting soon became greater. Delores was pregnant. My father was going to be a father again, with a new wife and new children. I can only imagine my mother’s despair and her desperation at having been abandoned twice. But I lived with the bitterness that resulted. A high school graduate who had rejected art school for the altar, she could lay all her disappointments at the feet of one man, C. Bruce Brown. From that day on, my mother could barely stand to be in the same room with him, and when time or circumstance or their shared son forced them to be face-to-face, it seemed like only moments before the insults flew and the deep needling began. And as his son, I was a daily reminder of him.

  Now decidedly stuck in Wakefield, my mother was itching to leave, not the town itself, but the confines of her childhood home. Her high school friends were married, as was her sister, who had her own children and home, while my mother was curling up each night under the covers of her teenage bed, in the same room where she had practiced her cheerleading chants and had dreamed of her senior prom. As soon as she could, she rented an apartment, one of the many anonymous places we would live in—converted houses that had been split into clusters of rooms with efficiency kitchens. One of the first was a rental place on Avon Street, sandwiched between the railroad tracks running along North Avenue and Main Street. I went to nursery school in a red house a few blocks away on the other side of the train tracks. I still remember sitting in the back room and learning on a Friday in November that John F. Kennedy had been shot. I watched tears roll down the teacher’s cheeks, and I also cried and cried. At home, on Avon Street, I had a little ring with Kennedy’s picture on one side and an American flag on the other, and I twisted it around so Kennedy’s face was always pointing in.

  Avon Street was where we were living when Dan Sullivan came home.

  I don’t remember meeting Dan, or going with him to the park or to a diner for a milk shake. It was simply that one day he appeared in our small space, and my mother announced that she was marrying him. They were married quietly in the living room of my grandparents’ home on Eastern Avenue by a minister who lived next door. Dan was a truck driver, a short and long hauler of petroleum products for a local oil company. I remember his rough, callused hands with fingernails that were always gray or grimy under the rims. He was a rugged Irish guy and handsome, with hazel eyes, fair hair, and ruddy skin that turned bright red in the heat. In the summers, his arms and neck were almost always burned, from driving with the windows down and moving his loads out in the sun. I can barely recall him without a beer in his hands. My mother probably met him along Route 1. She was pretty enough to waitress at Caruso’s Diplomat, a swank cocktail lounge that considered itself to have a touch of Vegas but was really just another pull-in place along the highway, where motels, strip clubs, roadside diners, and blue-and-orange Howard Johnson’s restaurants rose from the landscape. In the 1960s, though, Caruso’s Diplomat was a destination. John F. Kennedy held a fund-raiser there, and hockey great Bobby Orr later had a party at the Diplomat to celebrate turning twenty-one. But my mother didn’t come home with any of the suit-and-tie men who drank dry gin martinis or scotch on the rocks. She came home with Dan.

  Dan was a loner, something that may have been an advantage for hauling, but even off the road, he kept mostly to himself. We never went places, except occasionally down to the truck yard, where I climbed up high in the cab and looked around, or rode for a couple of miles on a very short haul with him. I didn’t know it then, but he was apparently stealing things from the company, extra supplies and other stuff, and selling them on the side, hot off the truck or from the shop, for cash that I doubt he ever brought home. What time he didn’t spend behind the wheel or on the couch he spent with his car, a shiny Mustang that he kept polished and waxed. He would lose himself there, head buried under the hood. He could make the engine purr. Perhaps he should have been a cylinder, a transmission, an inanimate thing.

  We stayed in Wakefield for a while, living in that same, small place, which was really half of a house tacked on to someone’s old barn. It had a screened-in porch, and about four rooms inside. It didn’t face the street, but was tucked back behind another home. You got in by parking the car on a gravel space and walking along a narrow gravel path to the small square of front yard. Inside, I had a bouncy horse that I could ride for hours, rocking on its metal springs, and a little metal chair, where I sat to watch television.

  The Christmas after I turned five, I got a cat, probably in my stocking. It was a small, vulnerable orange tiger kitten, which I named Tiger, with a soft coat and spindly legs. I would put toys in its path, let it chase string, watch it as it methodically washed its face or curled up in a tiny ball, its pink nose twitching ever so slightly as it slept. Cats were easy. They were allowed in rental places; they did not need to be walked; they ate very little. They were compact. But my kitten was not compact enough for Dan Sullivan. One evening when he was spread across the couch with his can of beer, the kitten hopped up, and Dan smacked him with his burly arm. He wasn’t sharing his sofa. The kitten gave a startled cry and sailed into the air. It landed not catlike, but in a heap on the ground. I picked it up, but it couldn’t stand. It mewed, and I ran my hands gently over its fur. My mother took it to the vet the next morning. He said the kitten’s leg was broken and it wouldn’t ever heal properly in such a little thing. There was no recourse but to put it down. This was the first sign to me that Dan was trouble. It was also the first time I learned about the feeling of hate. I hated this man, the man who had killed my kitten.

  Not long after that, we moved east to Revere, the blue-collar town that bordered the ocean and the place where Dan was from. In Revere, we lived far away from the water, in a split-level home that had been broken up into two dwellings. Our apartment was on the bottom floor, with a basement and a garage underneath; the owners lived above us on the second floor. There was a public beach where I could go, if my mother took me, to dig with my pail in the sand; I still recall the special excursion to eat dinner at Kelly’s Roast Beef.

  But my first clear memory is not of the beach or the old brick hall in the center of town, or Boston being a mere five miles away. It is of Dan, in bed, early one morning. My mother was in the hospital, giving birth to my sister Leeann, and I was supposed to wake Dan up in the morning, either to see his newborn baby or to be there for the birth. I never quite understood which one. The sun was already up when I tiptoed into the bedroom and watched him sprawled on the bed. And then I shook him. Just a small tug, but nothing happened. I tugged harder. I pulled and I prodded, the smell of alcohol stinging my nose. I had never quite understood before what drunk was, but I learned that morning. He was a combination of drunk and hungover, and he would not get up. But I had been told to wake him, and I knew that my mother needed him. For over an hour, nothing worked. I prodded and poked and climbed on the bed, and then finally his eyes opened. But it had taken me a very long time.

  He rubbed his face and caught sight of the clock, and the next thing I knew, he balled his hands into fists and began smacking me around. He pounded my head, my back, and plowed into me with those massive knuckles and flat, sandpapery palms until I was shaking and sobbing a
nd snot was pouring out of my nose. My skin stung from where it had been smacked red. I tried to drop my head and pull up my arms, but he was big and strong. If I tried to sit down and make myself small against the floor, he would haul me up by my arm, his fingers squeezing like a vise against my bone, and with his free hand deliver a clean hit again. I had made him late. It was all my fault. “Stupid-ass kid,” he yelled on the day his own daughter was being born.

  Then he was done. I was still sniffling, and I cringed as he raised his hand. But it was only to cock his finger, not unlike the way other men cock the hammer of a gun. “If ya tell your mother,” he barked, “I’ll kill ya.” I was still sniffling, but I nodded my head. “You hear me? Tell her and I’ll kill ya.” And I knew right then that he would. When I looked at Dan Sullivan, I already knew that he had killed my kitten. And I knew that he could well kill me. I was six years old and completely alone with him. It was a feeling of fear and of helplessness that I could barely comprehend. From that moment on, I could no longer be a regular child, no longer run down the block or in the door without looking over my shoulder. I had to grow up faster than the other skinned-knee kids around.

  We went to the hospital to see my mom, and I never told. If she saw any marks on me, I probably told her that I fell or Dan said that I was horsing around. Or she may have seen nothing. But I had seen those hands. After that morning, I knew that every minute I had to pay attention. Every second, I had to be watching. And I knew that he would be watching me as well.

  Now, when I walked around the house, I was always aware. I don’t remember the snowfalls in the winter when the sky turned gray and the trees, cars, and ground were buried in white. I don’t remember packing snowballs or making snowmen or lying down to make snow angels in the frozen ground. I was watching for Dan. I was listening. And one night it came.

  I woke in my bed to the sound of screaming and banging. I leaped from my covers and ran in my pajamas down to the basement area, toward the sound. My mom was screaming and yelling, and crying big choking sobs, and he was hitting her, his fists landing blow after blow. She’d grab at him, push and claw, but he always managed to free one hand and curl back an elbow for a hard swing. The last thing I saw was him balling his fingers and raising his hand. I dived down. His legs were hard and strong, but I grabbed on with both arms and then I opened my mouth and I bit him. I bit him right through his pants, as hard as I could. I was like a pit bull and would not let go. He tasted of soiled Dickies fabric, of coarse male hair and sweaty skin, but I bit down hard, right in the inside of his thigh, and just as I had seen him do, I made a fist and began trying to hit him. I kept one hand locked around his leg while I swung away with the other one, trying to make contact, aiming for whatever was closest, his backside, his groin, or his balls.

  He yelled, took a staggering step back, with me and my mouth still locked on his leg, and released my mom. Then he reached down with those massive forearms. He began pounding on my head until my brain rattled like a Jell-O mold turned upside down. But I knew I could not let go. When he hit me, I bit. Hard. Every time he knocked me away, I’d rush at him again, low and fast, like a crazed lion. He was beating the crap out of me, but I knew I couldn’t stop, and with every blow I grabbed and held on. I was like the lightning rod, the metal shaft that absorbs the jolt and conducts it to the ground. He hit and I absorbed, trying to channel the power into my teeth or my little balled hand and then back into him.

  The house’s owners lived in the apartment upstairs. They sometimes watched me when my mother was gone. Thank God they were home that night, and thank God they heard the screaming and banging. They called the cops and the cops came. And it was over. I never even heard the wail of the siren over the wailing in that room that evening.

  It took a few more months before Dan Sullivan was gone. But from that night on, I knew that I had to be the man of the house, that I had to be the protector above all other things. In my six-year-old brain, I told myself, “I’m going to save my mom and my sister.” That was where it began.

  Before Dan left, I was riding in the car with my mother, standing up in the backseat, goofing around. Suddenly she stopped short and I went flying forward, mouth open. My face hit first and some of my front teeth were embedded in the vinyl dashboard of the car. They needed to be pried out, one by one. They were only baby teeth, but they were so mangled that my mother had to take me to a dentist in Wakefield to remove some of them. I remember Dan’s voice, hollering, “How are we gonna pay for this? How? You tell me how?” My mother yelled back, and they started in. I did go to the dentist, and my grandparents ultimately paid to fix the teeth that had bitten Dan.

  Not too long after that, Dan Sullivan was finally and truly gone. Packed up and vanished. My mother boxed up our things, I rolled mine in a blanket, and we went back to my grandparents on Eastern Avenue. My sister was less than one year old. She has no memory of her father; she did not see him ever again. He never came to visit, never paid child support. We didn’t know where he had gone. Decades later, after Leeann was grown, we hired a private investigator, but we still couldn’t find him. In 2010, I finally located Dan’s brother and called him on a Saturday afternoon. He told me that he had heard of but didn’t know anything about Leeann. It was ironic, he said, because his own kids were working on a family genealogy and didn’t know that they had a first cousin.

  Dan’s loss, I thought. His daughter, my sister, is a great, warm, and loving person. It was truly his loss to not know her.

  In the next breath, Dan’s brother told me that Dan was no longer around. He had died in New Hampshire in 2002, when he was seventy years old. Fell down and hit his head, his brother said, was what happened in the end.

  Chapter Three

  Where They Take You In

  Eastern Avenue, with its assortment of small 1920s Cape Cod–style houses, looked different now that we were back living on it. It looked like home. It was exciting for me to have a house, rather than an apartment, and a yard with leafy trees that rustled with the constant breezes. I settled into the brown, peaked-roof clapboard house with its living room in the front, den or study behind, dining room, tiny kitchen in the back, and four bedrooms upstairs. I have no idea what it must have been like for my mother to go fleeing back to her parents, with little more than the wreckage of two marriages trailing behind her, and with a baby daughter and a nearly seven-year-old son.

  “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” the New England poet Robert Frost wrote around 1915. In 1966, five years after the aged Frost had read at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, my grandparents took their youngest daughter in, again. In his room, my grandfather no longer slept alone. At night I bedded down in the same room, in a second twin bed with a nightstand in between.

  I was old enough to explore outside, to visit the neighbors up and down the block, and to make friends with their kids. I already had a bicycle, a Stingray with the high handlebars. I had learned to ride out on the street with my mom watching. I’d pedal, fall, scrape my knee or elbow, and then get up again, until I figured out how to balance and keep going. By now, I was an accomplished rider. I could pick up speed on the hill and feel the icy New England air slice through the buttons of my jacket, burning the back of my throat as it rushed into my lungs. In the cold, I could breathe smoke, crystallized puffs from between my lips like a dragon. In the summer heat, speed was my own private gust of wind. With my legs pumping against the pedals, I could out-race everything, forgetting the time when I had first learned to ride and thought I could race down the hill of the Avon Street sidewalk with no hands. I lost control and flipped over the handlebars, sliding down the road on my chin and splitting it open. Fortunately, a doctor lived on the street, in a white house with a beautiful bay window. My mother took me over, and he stitched me up with nine stitches in his small home office.

  Not long after we moved back to Wakefield, my dad showed up a few times aga
in. I don’t remember him coming at all during the time we lived with Dan, but perhaps he did. Or perhaps he had waited until there wasn’t a man around again, or perhaps my mother kept him away. I just knew that Dad had temporarily returned.

  I would wait for him at the front door of my grandparents’ house starting sometime on a Saturday morning. If he said 10 a.m., I would be ready at 8. I can remember one time standing at the door with my nose to the glass, making circles in the air with a toy airplane. I spun it through my fingers, letting it soar, roll, and dive-bomb, all the while keeping my nose firmly against the cool of the glass. My plane flew as far away as Chicago in the hours that I spent at that doorway, and my father never came.

  When he did come, it was on his own time. He might pull up around noon or later. Hours on the clock were long and elastic to him. We’d go for a drive, maybe stop at a diner, and it could have been all of an hour before he was angling the car’s wheels back against the curb, shifting gears and receding down the block again. I don’t remember what we did; I just remember the waiting.

  With Delores and his new family—which included my half sister Robyn, and soon thereafter a second son, Bruce—my father lived about thirty-five miles away. He had a place over in Newburyport, along the edge of the Merrimack River before it empties into the Atlantic above Boston. It was a quaint, old saltbox-style Colonial with high ceilings and old pine floors, large windows, a shiny new kitchen, and a comfortable living room. Newburyport was a run-down fishing port then; the houses were old, but cheap. There was a time when you could barely give away real estate there. But my father saw potential in it. It was also part of his sales territory, and a place where he could buy a nice, comfortable home. There were plenty of bedrooms, for him, his wife, and their two children, but no spare room for me. The rare nights when I did stay over, I bunked on the couch with a pillow and a blanket. My father often left me with Robyn and Bruce, under the theory that we were all his kids, and thus siblings, and so of course we would play together and get along. But I didn’t see it that way. They lived in this nice house; they went on vacations, to the beach, to Disneyland. I had never even been to Boston; I knew nothing of the Public Garden or Faneuil Hall or Fenway Park and Red Sox games. I only had to glance around to see the incontrovertible evidence of his new life.