Authors: Tom Winton
"Mom, I'd like you to meet Dean." She beamed when she said my name, then completed the introduction gesturing with a nervous hand, "Dean, this is my mom."
I rose from the sofa, tucking in the tail of my shirt as I stepped across the narrow room, then clumsily extended my hand, "How do you do … Mrs. Wayman?"
"Whooa, honey … " she said to Theresa as she switched her Pabst to her left hand then took my right, " … this here's a good one!" Her thin hand was cold and still damp from the spilled beer. I felt awkward shaking it and weirder yet when she wouldn't release it. Closer to her now, I noticed her body was rocking slightly, a slow, rhythmic shift of her weight from her heels to her toes and back again. She was pretty well snockered.
Nevertheless, she was undeniably Theresa's mother. Face-to-face with her, I could see their likenesses went far beyond just stature. She had passed on to Theresa a dark, subtle, exotic beauty, and skin pigment, that could only have originated somewhere along the shores of the Mediterranean, the same place her surname originated, a name that surely ended in a, o, or some other vowel.
She may have relinquished that name, whatever it was, for 'Wayman' but her physical traits had easily dominated those of her fair-haired, fair-skinned English husband when Theresa was conceived. Looking at her face now, was like looking at Theresa's template. She had also passed on to her daughter her dark intriguing eyes, though her own had settled deeper within their sockets. Webs of thin lines networked from her temples despite her efforts to hide them with heavy make-up. Like her daughter's black hair, hers hung long, but it wasn't as thick or as lustrous, and more than a few contrasting gray strands were clearly visible.
Mrs. Wayman inspected me, up and down very slowly and, while she did, her cherry-red lips pulled tight into a vixen's smile. She said to Theresa, "If you don't want `im, Terry, I'll take `im."
Again, her gaze swept slowly down the front of my body but this time it rested just below the buckle of my madras belt. She acted as if she and I were alone in the room, no, alone in a bedroom. I felt naked, like some kind of sex novelty. A rush of blood heated my face.
Then Theresa stammered, "Stop it, Mom, rrright now," her voice breaking up like a radio beyond its range.
Mrs. Wayman let go of my hand, and I thought, thank God. But then she touched my flushed cheek, caressed it and said, "What beautiful blue eyes you have, sweetheart. And, where did you get those long lashes?"
Now Theresa had had it, her own mother doing this. She screamed out, "DAMN YOU TO HELL, MOM!" Then she lunged for my elbow, gripped it tighter than I'd have imagined possible, and yanked me toward the door. Over her shoulder she hollered again, "I HATE YOU, MOM! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU!"
The last words her mother slurred before Theresa slammed the door behind us were, "You always were one selfish little bitch."
Hurrying down the hallway we could hear the locking of chains and deadbolts and her mother yell, "AND DON'T COME BACK EITHER CAUSE I AIN'T LETTIN' YA BACK IN."
Out on the sidewalk, the chilly night air seemed heavier now, like it might rain. "Come on, Theresa, let’s go. I’ve got to call home. There's no way I'm leaving you alone tonight."
But still, she broke down. The hurt from her mother's betrayal poured from her eyes. All she wanted was for our meeting to go well. It had been so important to her. I put my arms around her, snuggled her close. Her body was tremoring and lurching so I held her tighter and rocked her gently. Beneath the street lamp's glow, we did this silent dance for what seemed a very long time. Then that bluesy music started up again and I said, "Come on, Theresa, let's find a phone. I’ve got to let my mother know I’m not coming home."
I hated like hell to have to call her, to deal with my own dysfunctional mother at a time like this. I knew she'd make a big deal about my not coming home. It would be doubly difficult now that she'd developed her newest delusional kick, her newest in a long litany of unfounded fears, the Mafioso. She believed they were after our family, even though none of us had any kind of a relationship with any such people. She also believed that, except for Father Bianchi, everyone with black hair was a mobster, even her shrink, Doctor Santangello. She was certain that the medicine he'd prescribed for her condition was in reality designed to slowly kill her.
Theresa and I scrunched inside the phone booth at Bogart's Bar and I called home. told my mother I'd be sleeping at Jimmy's house but, just as I figured, she wasn't going to let me off the hook all that easy. Not without first hammering me with a battery of peculiar questions, “Are you alright? Is anyone hurting you? They won't let you come home, isn't that it? What was that noise? Did you hear it? Someone's on the line! They're tapping the phone!"
I rolled my eyes to the booth's ceiling, left them there for a moment before looking down at Theresa beneath my arm. Her head rested against my chest and both her arms were locked around me. I put the phone in the crook of my neck and caressed the top of her head. She looked up to me with pink waterlogged eyes and I felt something tear deep within my chest.
Damn it
, I'm thinking,
why do I have to put up with this shit now?
But still my mother went on, "Them bastards hurt you … " she said, in the hardest, most threatening voice she could muster, just in case The Don or one of his soldiers were tapped in, " … I'll go right to the F-B-I, and, oh yeah, I just happen to know an assistant DA from Queens," she threatened. Only after I ran off a succession of assurances that I hadn't yet gotten the kiss of death did she finally let me off the phone.
With nowhere better to go, Theresa and I drug heels all the way down to that park by the water where, for a long time, we sat in the darkness on two damp swings and talked. Did we talk! We opened up to each other and talked our way to, through, and beyond the next step of our spiritual communion. But it wasn't all easy teenage conversation. A lot of it was weighty stuff. I told Theresa about my mother's mental problems, and then she told me about her own personal tragedy. When she did, it shocked me. I had always thought that beautiful people like herself always led easy, tidy lives. But I learned different that night. I learned that beauty may help deflect some of the smaller bumps in life's rough road, but it does nothing to smooth the potholes. Nobody, no matter what they look like, is exempted from random, fate-dealt heartache. And Theresa was no exception. But she was still very young. Her personal pain hadn't surfaced on her face or in her eyes like it had on her mother's. Dreams were still in Theresa's eyes. You could see them. But they no longer existed for her mother. Although you could still see shades of beauty in her mother's face, her eyes were tired, most of their brightness gone from too much booze. But, as I was about to learn, it wasn't just her excessive drinking that had hardened her.
Thankfully, Theresa had not been ruined by her past, but the pain of it shrouded her words when she told me about her father's death. A breeze had come up out of the north-west, sending a cutting chill across the Sound that our light jackets were no match for. Both of us shivering, our shoulders hunched and tight, we walked from the swings to a scarred wooden bench. There we held each other for warmth and to help give Theresa the strength to tell her story.
Chapter 6
Lifting her head from my chest, Theresa looked inside my eyes. Reading the authentic concern there, she prepared to open up.
She shook two cigarettes from her pack, handed me one, and I fired them both up with my lighter. Along with changing her style of dress for me, she'd also switched to Kools.
She took a deep hit, exhaled a long stream of mentholated smoke, then said in an almost poetic way, "Dean, I want to tell you who Theresa Wayman is … "
Her tone was mournful but there was also a hint of relief in it.
" … better yet, I want to tell you where I've been. Someone famous once said 'You are your past', so I guess it's all the same. Anyway, I'll begin with my father. He died when I was nine years old … I think I told you that already. But it wasn't a heart attack or cancer or even an accident that killed him." She drew a long breath, let it out real slow. "He was killed, Dean! Murdered! That's why my mother is the way she is."
I became all buggy-eyed from this shocker. "My God … what happened?"
"We were living in Bayside at the time, in an apartment. My parents were in the process of buying their first house … out on Long Island … in Smithtown. It was like two weeks from the closing, and we were all so excited. My parents had already started packing our things. I still remember all those cardboard boxes stacked to the ceiling in the corner of our living room. They … my parents … were like twenty-eight or twenty-nine, and they had been doing without, scrimping and saving for the down payment on a house since they first got married, something like eleven years."
Theresa dropped her cigarette in the new grass, ground it out with the toe of her shoe. She left her eyes down there and sighed. She was trying to be strong but couldn't prevent the shake in her voice. I took her small cold hands in mine and squeezed them reassuringly.
"Go ahead, Theresa.”
She went on with her story carefully, meticulously, wanting to get it all right.
"I can still picture that little house, an adorable little Cape with a white fence and a garage. It had a finished basement, too. I remember that because I thought it was going to be such fun playing in it with all the new friends I planned on making. And then there was that weeping willow tree … in the front yard. It was just a tiny thing, about as tall as I was. The people who lived there must have recently planted it … right in the middle of the lawn. Anyway, over the years, my mother and I have driven by the place a few times. Every time we moved back here, once we got settled in, we'd go back there. She still had a car back then, so we'd drive out to Smithtown, just to see that house. Each time that weeping willow was bigger. Last time we were out there it was taller than the house itself."
Dreamily, she paused for a moment, looking out to the black water before us, collecting her thoughts. The biting night wind had now strengthened and was whipping our hair. We shivered in spasms, the fits coming steadily and at shorter intervals. Along with its biting cold, the wind brought two blasts from a solitary tug offshore in the blackness. Small whitecaps began breaking on the pebbled beach as the Sound's mood grew fouler.
Returning to the moment, Theresa shifted her gaze from the roiling water to my face. She could see the deep concern in it.
"It was summertime and, for some reason, my father had gotten off work early that day. After supper he thought it would be nice if we all took a walk … to get Italian ices. I remember it was a beautiful summer evening, still light out by the time we got to the candy store up on Northern Boulevard.”
Anyway, on the way back, we're licking our ices and I'm on cloud nine listening to my parents talk about how it's going to be in the new house and all."
She paused then and smiled. She's back in time, a little girl again.
"God, we were sooo happy! I felt so secure seeing them hand in hand, planning our future. But Dean, in the next few seconds everything changed, our lives, our dreams, everything. We had come up to Bohack's supermarket ... do you know where it is?"
"The one near Bell Boulevard?"
"Yes, that's the one. Anyway, we're maybe thirty feet from the entrance when, all of a sudden, we hear these loud pops, gunshots, three of them, coming from inside. Then, two men with stockings over their heads come running out. They're heading our way, so my father starts pushing me and my mother off the sidewalk, between two parked cars. I remember dropping my ice then and everything going into slow motion. My mother had me by the hand, waiting for a break in the traffic so we could run across the boulevard. We both turned and saw my father looking back again. He was right behind us, still on the sidewalk when those guys come running past us. Both of them had guns and were carrying these heavy canvas bags."
At this point, sobs accentuated Theresa's words. "They … they were so scary looking with those stockings over their faces. There was no way we could make out their faces. All we could tell was that they were black. We could never have identified them. There was no way we could have been witnesses or anything."