“Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”
“Did any famous actors grow up here?”
“I don’t think so. Unless you consider Joey Lawrence famous.”
We drank. I pretended to watch baseball—a Phillies night game. But mostly I was thinking about what my mother had said.
Grandmom Ellie was surprised to see me. I never dropped by unannounced. In fact, I usually tried to wriggle out of family commitments whenever I could. Not that I didn’t like to see my family, but I always found the first ten to twenty minutes of reacclamation to be awkward and painful. There was always an undercurrent of guilt to it—gee, it’s been so long, Mickey, you’re never around, you don’t seem to want to associate with the rest of us…but anyway, how are things? How’s the writing career coming along?
But Meghan took the edge off. Oh, how my grandmom fawned over her.
“Look at how beautiful you are! My God. Mickey, do you tell this beautiful woman how gorgeous she is every day?”
“Hi, Mrs. Wadcheck. So great to meet you.”
Meghan even pronounced the name like a pro. She was a quick study, that one.
“Oh, you’re so lovely.”
The interior of my grandmom’s bungalow hadn’t changed…ever. If I were to pop one of those white pills now, I have a feeling I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the early 1970s and now until I stepped outside and checked the cars. Everything was off-white or blinding yellow. Yellow is her favorite color.
Grandmom insisted on serving us giant tumblers of Frank’s vanilla cream soda—which let me tell you, does not go well with Yuengling or Johnnie Walker Black—as well as a tray of the most sickeningly sweet butter ring cookies I’ve ever tasted. If she noticed that I only picked up my soda with three fingers of my left hand, she didn’t let on.
Instead, Ellie Wadcheck smiled at us, but you could tell she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. You could count the times I’d dropped by just to visit on…my missing right arm.
“I wanted to ask you about something, Grandmom.”
Deep in the throes of sugar shock, I lied and said I was writing a piece about my father, and how he’d died. In my defense, I wasn’t totally lying. Maybe there was a magazine piece in this, or even a book. But writing about my father and his killer hadn’t yet occurred to me. It was just something to say to my grandmom.
She smiled at us.
“Billy Derace was the son of a whore.”
Meghan and I sat there, momentarily stunned.
“Don’t hold back, Grandmom. Tell us how you really feel.”
Grandmom laughed. She was pretty much the only relative who thought I was remotely funny.
“Oh, I didn’t know her. But she was notorious. I’ll never forgive that Billy Derace for what he did, but I’m not surprised, considering how he was raised. He was born to a very immature mother. She married young, but refused to stay home. She worked all day and went out drinking and dancing every night. Eventually the husband had enough, he left. Everyone in the neighborhood talked about it.”
“This was Frankford?”
“Yes—where I lived with your grandfather until I moved here. Anyway, there was a rumor that Billy had a younger brother who died when he was young—only three years old, they say. And Billy was the one watching him when he died.”
Meghan turned pale.
“What happened?”
“The story goes that he choked on a piece of cereal. Billy didn’t know what to do. This was…oh, 1968? 1969? Nobody taught children the Heimlich maneuver back then.”
“Where was his mother? In 1969, Billy had to be only nine or ten years old.”
“Yes, he was. His mother was out at a bar, and I suppose she thought that a nine-year-old was mature enough to care for a toddler. Billy and his brother were often left to fend for themselves.”
Meghan glanced over at me, eyebrow raised a little—but I was already taking mental notes. A three-year-old choking to death would certainly have made the newspapers back in the late 1960s, wouldn’t it? But then why wasn’t Billy taken from his irresponsible mother?
“So Billy was probably a little crazy.”
My grandmom paused.
“Well, he wasn’t a normal child.”
“And he probably grew up crazy, and then one day in 1980 attacked my father with a steak knife at random.”
Grandmom looked at me.
“I don’t think it was random.”
Throughout his short life, Anthony Wade never made much money. Some other dads, it seemed—the fathers of kids I knew in college—couldn’t help but walk out onto their front lawns and find $100 bills sticking to the bottoms of their shoes. Some fathers inherited their money; others chose careers that more or less guaranteed them a lot of money; still others worked very hard and eventually made a lot of money.
My father worked hard, but never made much money.
The Wadcheck men seemed to be drawn to the two professions that sound cool but suck ass when it comes to making money: writing and music. Unless you’re lucky. And if you’re lucky, you don’t need writing or music. You just need to be lucky, as well as the ability to open up your wallet as the greenbacks come tumbling from the skies.
My father gigged with his band or solo almost every weekend of my childhood, but the most he made was $100 at a time—and that was for two nights of performing, five hours each night. And that was in the late 1970s, early 1980s. When I was born, my mom told me, he’d be lucky to come home with $25 in his pocket.
And a lot of that money usually went to musical equipment—replacing guitar strings, saving up for new speakers or effects pedals.
My father was perfectly content with the amount of money he made playing music. His art supported his art.
What it didn’t do was support his young wife and infant son.
So Anthony Wade had to work at least two other jobs at all times—usually steady but grinding custodial work for whoever was hiring in Frankford at the moment. He also gave guitar lessons to whoever could cough up $5 for a half hour of instruction.
Even when I was a kid I knew my father was miserable with these other jobs. His mood determined the mood of the house. And many weekdays, his mood was lousy.
This probably explained why, when I embarked upon my own low-paying career as a journalist, I avoided the pitfall of a wife and kids. If my profession supported my profession, then that was C is for Cookie, good enough for me. At least I wasn’t dragging anyone down with me.
But I didn’t know the half of it. Because my grandmom started to explain that layoffs were so common, and money so thin, my dad would take other kinds of jobs. Jobs that, she said, broke her heart.
“Your father let them do all kinds of tests on him.”
“Who?”
“Those people at the institute. You know, the one up the boulevard.”
The ex-journalist in me started feeling the tingles. Stories were all about connections. Here was another connection with that lunatic asylum.
“You mean the Adams Institute? What kind of tests?”
Grandmom frowned as if she’d swallowed a fistful of lemon seeds.
“Government drug tests. This was around the time you were born. He’d signed up after reading an ad in the newspaper. Young, fit, healthy male subjects needed for government pharmaceutical studies. Two hundred a week, guaranteed for four to six weeks.”
“I thought the Adams Institute was a mental hospital.”
“Most of it is, but they also did tests. Oh, Mickey, you should have seen him. My twenty-three-year-old son suddenly looked like he was forty years old, bags under his eyes, yellow skin—he looked like he hadn’t slept in a week.”
The image of my father in my mind was of a man much older than his physical years. I remember being stunned when I hit my early thirties, and realized that I had just outlived my father. I didn’t look like I’d gone skinny dipping in the fountain of youth, but I also didn’t look as old as the father in my memory.
Meghan reached out and touched Grandmom’s hand.
“You never found out what kinds of drugs he was given?”
“Blind tests, Anthony told me. They didn’t tell him what they were pumping into his veins—they only promised there’d be no long-lasting side effects. I think that was nonsense. Your father was never the same after those tests.”
And I had a feeling I knew who’d been administering those tests.