Famous Builder (2 page)

“Done?” he says, with a soft incredulousness.
“Done?”

I follow him out to the dock, attempting to mask my disappointment, but my face has fallen for sure. Certainly I want to help. Certainly I want to be a good boy, a generous, benevolent, dutiful son, but I want to be my
self
, too. I don’t understand why we don’t get to fix up our house and make things of beauty like our neighbors: the Foxes’ wooden Japanese bridge, the Moores’ garden of herbs and wildflowers. Even worse, why is it that we never finish anything? Although we’ll work on the raft every Saturday for the rest of the summer (replacing the top boards with fresh lumber, shining the rusty bolts), it will sit on the lawn for two years until the boards silver, until the grass dies in a gray-brown rectangle beneath it.

***

Just as soon as our car has climbed the mountain, we go down, down into the heart of Allentown, home to all my cousins, home to more Lisickys per capita than any other place outside Slovakia. From our vantage point it twinkles with thousands of lights through a scrim of flurries, a landscape with the quality of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. I already hear the local accent (which my father has mysteriously lost), the vowels infused with a catch in the throat, a lilt, the slightest hint of a yodel, sentences invariably rising on the last word. There’s a ridged cylindrical gas tank, at least fifteen stories tall, topped with something like a flattened beret. Aunt Mary and Uncle John live behind it. To the left of that is the only skyscraper in northeastern Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Power and Light tower, known locally as the PP&L, a squat version of the Empire State Building, its crowned top bathed in crimson light. The redness of those lights reminds me of an interior human organ exposed to the elements, and sure enough, I feel a contained heat inside my chest in response. To the west, out of the range of our vision, there’s Dorney Park, home of the oldest running wooden roller coaster in America, where I’ll come down with the first symptoms of chicken pox three years in the future. But the row houses really snare my attention. We pass blocks and blocks and blocks of them (joyless, joyless), none of which seem to be individuated. Although the temperature is in the thirties, it feels like the coldest place in the world. All of it seems impossibly old, musty, dense with the smells of upholstery and cooking: holubky; apple butter; tuna, onions, and vinegar. The place says one thing alone to me:
You will always be you here.

Get out.

We stop at a red light, watching a window across the street. At the Harugari, the Hungarian club, people with beer bottles in one hand wipe off their florid faces with handkerchiefs. Hands are clapped, and a middle-aged couple in the center of the floor whirls to—I can only imagine it—a manic accordion. They dance so fast that I swear their shoes are in the air more than they’re actually touching the floor. “Now that’s dancing,” says my father. “Not like the crap you kids like.” And he takes his hands off the wheel, chugs his forearms like a go-go dancer with a brain injury.

My stomach groans with the same sensation that keeps me from eating my bowl of cereal on certain school days. If he really loves this place as much as he says he does, if he really feels the sting of its absence, then why have we been raised as if we haven’t a history, in a township named for its shopping mall filled with ficus, coconut palm, and cages of leering tropical monkeys showing us the pink of their gums?

***

My father is a storm. His presence charges the air with abstract particles: guilt, duty, fear of failure, fear of death. If he were a painting, he’d be a Jackson Pollack, all splash and squiggle, no open spaces, no room to breathe. If he were a piece of music, he’d be a Shostakovich symphony, brash, shot through with bursts of tympany and horn. I could keep going on like this. I could keep trying to count the instances in which he simply sat down to rest his weary bones, in which he didn’t read the stock-market page while shining his shoes then run down the hall to sweep off the porch, then go back to his shoes again.

The house of his childhood. 333 North Second Street, a narrow brick row house with two second-floor windows and a wide front porch, no lawn, no plants, no intimation of adornment. A sign hangs on the wooden porch rail (MODERN SHOE REPAIR), the name of my late grandfather’s business, which is later taken over by my uncle Steve, then his son, Stevie. On the block all the houses are similarly sparse, with no defining characteristics other than cleanliness. The front steps sparkle in the weak sunlight that’s offered. So clean, my aunt Mary says, that “you could eat right off them.”

I close my eyes and hear loud, lilting voices. They shift back and forth between Slovak and English, even the occasional Hungarian and Yiddish, all rivaling for attention. Seven children live in these rooms: Anna, Mary, Steve, Joe, Catherine, Francie, and Tony, my father, the middle child. Their quarters are so cramped that several share the same bed. A modern bathroom with pink fixtures glows in the darkness. Aunt Catherine and Uncle Joe (who later move out to a newer row house close to the fairgrounds) do everything possible to make it cheery (doilies on the backs of the sofas, new curtains), but it feels as if the walls are about to compress all the life out of you.

I have to see it from the street again. I imagine my grandparents gazing out the two upper windows, my elusive grandparents about whom I know next to nothing. Alexander, my grandfather, stands in the left window, a man of medium height, utilitarian wire-frame glasses over his broad face, above thin Eastern European lips, a glass of red wine in his hand, the same wine he makes from the grapes of the backyard arbor. (He stores huge vats of it in the cellar.) Is his smile tinged with sadness because he doesn’t know how he ended up in this gritty, industrial city, so far from the vineyards of his birthplace? He takes another sip of wine (why did this batch turn out so sour?), putting off work for another few minutes. It’s so hot in his workshop that he sweats profusely, and in order to keep at this pace, he eats salt by the fistful to replace what he’s lost. He hears his wife, Mary, who’s straightening up the contents of the drawers, folding clothes in the next room. He doesn’t even remember their quarrel anymore, but he’s aimed his trademark screw-you gesture at her—he sticks out his tongue, placing his thumbs in his ears and fluttering his fingers—in full sight of the children. Tonight they’ll sleep in separate beds, separate rooms, though the truth is that they haven’t spent a full night together for longer than he can remember. (At some point, it will be a joke among his children that they managed to produce so many offspring. “Immaculate conceptions,” says my father.) Alexander dies at least six years before I’m born and is rarely brought up at family gatherings.

My grandmother stands at the other window. She wears a light blue dress patterned with nasturtiums; she’s doughy and pale in the arms. A babushka is tied beneath her chin. With her thick gray brows—she wears no lipstick or makeup or jewelry—she looks like an earthier, heavier Georgia O’Keeffe. Like Alexander, there is a tinge of sadness in her expression, but her sadness seems to run deeper, with complex chords in it. Is it that she’s been fighting with her husband, who’s been drinking, spending too much time playing poker with his friends? Is it that he’s been indifferent to the children, and abdicated his responsibility to Steve, the oldest male child, who’s begun to administer the spankings? Or is it that she, too, feels homesick and doesn’t want to learn this new grammar with its irregular verbs, its blends of consonants almost impossible to pronounce? (Years later, my parents will think she’s cursing until they realize that the asshole she keeps referring to is, in fact, our next-door neighbor,
Ethel
Friedman, whom she’s taken a shine to.) The weather feels foreign and sticky on her skin. The air doesn’t smell as it should. Where, where is the Danube? What are they doing so far from the Danube?

In the fall of 1998, at a Chinese restaurant in Fort Lauderdale, I ask my father a few questions about the grandmother who’s been nothing but an outline to me. To my surprise, I learn that she actually left my grandfather for a time. Back in Baltimore, their first home in this country, she wasn’t happy with the crowd Alexander was in (reportedly, there was even a shooting at their wedding reception), so she packed up Anna and Mary to stay with her sister, Tetka, in Allentown.

He stood guarding the door. “And what about me?”

“You can come live with us only when you’re good and ready,” she told him.

The lo mien on the buffet table across the room practically glows beneath the copper hood. For the briefest moment, I feel a presence—a warmth, pulse—then gone.

***

“Who do you think you are?”

My father weeps over his trig homework.

“I said, who do think you are?” Steve walks past the humble desk on the second floor, then sits on the bed, hunching forward. He crosses his arms. “You think you’re better than we are?”

“No,” says my father.

“You think you’re smart or something?”

My father hangs his head.

“Tony?”

“It’s just—”

“You should be out helping the family.”

“But
Steve.
”

“You’re a car mechanic, okay? You’re just a Slovak. You’re no better than the rest of us.”

My father cries again. His eyes blur on all the red slashes and X’s on the page. He can’t give up now. Not after so much work, not after all those homesick, harrowing times in the War (Texas, Belgium, Germany) when he lived off pennies a week and sent his earnings back home. Wasn’t that in payment for this? It had to be for something. He wipes his eyes on his fist. No, no. The work will tax him; it will come close to killing his spirit, but one day they’ll see how kind of heart he is, what he’s capable of giving.

No more scraps. Finally, he’ll be given the prime cuts at the table, just like his older brothers.

“It’s two in the morning,” whispers Steve. “It’s time for sleep, kiddo.”

My father blows his nose. He shakes his head. He sharpens his pencil and goes back to work as his brother looks on in fury and awe.

In two years he’ll earn his degree in electrical engineering and graduate, to the shock of family and friends, not far from the top of his class.

***

Unlike Slovak women, Anne Homan is tall with long, slender legs and thick dark hair. The daughter of a veterinarian and a schoolteacher, she’s half-English, half-German, both sides of her family having lived in this country since the 1830s. Not only does she draw and paint—her pastels and watercolors grace the walls of her mother’s living room—but she loves opera, Verdi and Puccini, and sings in the occasional recital. Her mother plays the piano; her older brother, Alfred, is a professional Broadway actor, now appearing in Cole Porter’s
Kiss Me Kate.
My father can’t help but be charmed and impressed by all these indications of culture. Although he’s only known her for a few weeks (they’ve met on Long Beach Island at an outing of the Collingswood Catholic Club), he’s eager to bring her home to his mother.

“She loves me,” he says, not two minutes after he’s introduced her to the family.

My mother smiles beside him, blinking, bewildered. She thinks, what a funny thing to say.

“She’s not so big,” says bald, red-faced Uncle John with his trademark joviality.

What has he told them about her? my mother wonders. An earlier boyfriend once called her “shapely, well-endowed,” but “big?” “Excuse me for a minute,” she says, and disappears down the hall to the bathroom.

“What do you think of her, Mom?” my father says.

His mother nods once, twice. She thinks, where are the broad apple cheeks, the thighs? Such a tiny nose.

“She loves me,” he says again, more softly this time.

He clenches his brow. He’s in awe of the fact that anyone so lovely could love him. After all, isn’t he just a “dumb Slovak,” as he himself would put it, from 333 North Second Street?

“Nice girl,” says my grandmother.

“You like her, Mom?”

“Fancy,” she says, nodding.

My father’s smile is shaded with sadness. He thinks, I wish Pop were still alive.

They face each other, waiting for my mother to come back from the bathroom, unnerved by the sudden uneasiness between them—where did this dizziness inside his head come from? My dad’s face glows; it’s heated from within. But how he wishes everyone had more enthusiasm! Can they already tell that the children they’ll bear won’t ever learn Slovak, nor appreciate the sweet, granular texture of kolache in their mouths?

***

***

They sit side by side on the chocolate brown sofa of their one-bedroom apartment in Haddon Hills. He gazes up at the white metal kitchen cabinets, half of which are filled with tools and engineering books. He knows she’d like that space for dishes and groceries, and he knows the place is a little cramped. He places his hands on my mother’s warm belly, feels a nudge, a slight kicking, then remembers the project due at work this Thursday. He smiles, though the bottom half of his face feels tight. He must do a good job, he thinks. He must present it with more authority and panache than any of his coworkers or they’ll see who he really is—a fraud. He’s a car mechanic, for God’s sake. What does he know about engineering, anyway? He’ll lose his job; he can
not
lose his job, not now, not with all these bills, especially with a baby on the way.

He gets up off the sofa and stares at the calendar on the refrigerator. “Maybe we should go to Allentown next week?”