“Eat.”
George forced food on me like I remembered my mother doing before she vanished. He raised his glass and said, “Eleftheria i thanatos.”
I nodded, repeated the words, and drank deeply.
Freedom or death.
Me and George took a stroll in Astoria Park to walk off the wine. We stopped to lean on the rail and look at the garbage floating in the water below. I wanted to drop into the Noguchi Garden Museum. I loved the smooth control and order of the marble and granite pieces. It reassured me.
George refused. “The fuck? All that cold stone giva me the creeps.”
“Some Greek you are,” I said.
“Malaka. Irish fucks only let gays and lesbians into their parade this year, for the foist time! St. Pat’s for all, my ass!”
“Greeks’d know all about gays.”
“We’re all getting old,” said George.
We picked divine olives from tubs in about three emporia, then stopped off at Noureddine’s for mint tea before the evening crowd arrived to smoke hookahs loaded up with honey-dipped sheesha. I’d heard the Pole say Noureddine’s place ran women behind closed steel shutters in the afternoon. I supposed it was possible. I supposed she’d know.
Noureddine was talking about an old lady who’d been robbed on her own stairs as she returned from the bank. The robbers were said to be local.
“You don’t do that on your own turf,” Noureddine said. He looked like he knew what he was talking about. Then he told us about a younger brother he was educating, who’d managed to get a job teaching Spanish in Texas.
“Sounds like sand to the Arabs to me,” I said.
“We’re from northern Morocco,” he explained. “Spanish is like a mother tongue to us. We go where it pays.”
We left Noureddine and headed off, George to Danny McGrory (my dad’s name for Nana Mouskouri and now our code name for George’s wife, also known as La Callas or La Diva) and me to the Swamp Rat, due back that evening.
“Bet you’re sorry now you didn’t finish your doctorate and get a chair of philosophy,” George said. “Never get off your ass at all.” His phony accent had disappeared. My problems were affecting him even more than me.
“Hit me now with the child in me arms,” I replied.
“Till the white rose blooms again,” he said as we parted.
Back on 12th Street, I surveyed the signs of Old Jessica’s daily visit — more spray-on polish, more quick-fix polluting solutions. Jessica was a failed Irish immigrant ten years older than myself. She needed the money, I couldn’t in all conscience fire her. The shine in the house was getting higher, but everything else was going downhill, except for the feng shui compliance.
Old Jessica appeared from the kitchen quarters. “You’d want to straighten up,” she said. “Yer gettin’ a dowager’s hump.”
“Don’t shit a man who’s already down,” said Sean, skipping down the stairs and out the front door before either of us could react.
Jessica shook her head indulgently. “I’da made two pairs a pants outta his one,” she said.
We mounted the stairs to Dad’s room, where Naïma was bedding him down for the evening. Mitch Miller was playing.
“I’m goin’ plantin’ spuds tomorrow, will ye help me?” Jessica asked Dad.
“I will,” he said.
“Have ye the tools?”
“I have.” He counted on his fingers: “I have two spades, two graips, and a shovel.”
“Right so,” said Jessica. “Be ready at dawn.”
I wasn’t sure I liked this kind of fooling with a man’s already fucked-up mind.
“Once a man, twice a boy,” Jessica said as she went by me.
“I want to be taken to the Astoria Sanatorium,” Dad said distinctly as soon as Jessica left.
Naïma smiled down at him. “They gave it a new name now. Mt. Sinai.”
“You should never paint bricks,” said Dad. “They do it all the time here.” Then: “The sanatorium must’ve laid an egg.” Then he spotted me. “Priest or minister? You’re doing everything wrong today.”
“What did I do now?”
“You sailed up the broad expanse of Killala Bay. Give me me box.”
This was a tin box containing mementos that he pored over from time to time. He pulled a collection of objects out of it and spread them over the bed: a silver dollar wrapped in tissue paper, a Rockaway Playland token, postcards, beaded Indian leather (Native American). He indicated the display to me:
“Wanna take a leak before I go?” Naïma asked.
“You only want to see my dick, that’s what you’re after.”
I told her to go ahead and lifted Dad back into bed. He was light as a feather.
“Ain’t you the big heavy lad,” I said.
“What good is it to you when you’re gone?”
We sat in silence. Then he said, without opening his eyes, “When did Da die?” I never heard Dad use that word before, and realized he thought he was talking to his brother Eddie.
“Long ago,” I said.
“What’d ya kill her for?” he asked, opening his eyes, now noticing me. “I think I’ll go to bed now,” he said, then seemed to doze.
The Pole arrived, still threatening to quit. The weather had already turned heavy.
“A storm is brassing,” she said. Sometimes I wasn’t sure what language she was massacring.
Dad said, with his eyes closed, “You’re a bitch and you never were anything else.”
After that, the house settled for a while. I tend to sit in front of the TV when I want to think. People leave me alone. I haven’t read a book in years, once my favorite occupation. My attention was drawn by an item on the World Cup about to be played out in Germany. Several players from the winning 1974 German team were paraded out, one a smart older business-exec version of his younger self with a name like Baking Powder, which is what me and George had dubbed him at the time. The other was a thicker-set man who left football in 1974 and opened a newspaper kiosk. “I wasn’t cut out for all that,” the man explained.
Perhaps this was what Dad should have done, long ago: something simple, no overreaching. There were horses for courses and that was all. It would have meant no Irish education for me and my sister, but what did that change? And perhaps Mom would still be with us. I recalled vacations from university when Mom seemed to be having an early “change of life,” as she called it to her friends (nurses with real problems and families to deal with). She talked of going into a convent, where she would have peace and quiet from them all. By then, Dad had settled down to controlled drinking, a cup with milk and whiskey under the bar at all times. As if trying to numb himself. At times I think she might be with some Little Sisters, atoning in peace and quiet, not far away. Unless she’s dead. Who was the woman Uncle Eddie killed? Was this a reference to the Civil War, or something more recent?
At 9 p.m. the Swamp Rat was poured out of a cab, laughing. The Armenian gallery owner helped her out, laughing also, wearing a beige cashmere coat that was too warm for the weather. Then he took himself off in the cab.