The Last Romantics. Tara Conklin
glassware cats—all crashed and shattered to the floor. Joe paused before the piano, and then he took aim at the photographs that stood on top: pictures of what we, the Skinners, had been until that day. Six together. Ellis and Antonia, Renee and Caroline and Joe and little Fiona. Crash. Six together on windswept New England beaches and before tinselly Christmas trees, grinning and mugging, arms over shoulders, holding hands. Crash. We were gap-toothed children and anonymous infants, full-cheeked within our swaddles. Our parents were proud and exhausted, bright, blameless, beautiful even in their polyester and plaid. Crash. All of it, gone.
I waited for someone to stop Joe, but no one did. The room echoed with the noise of his destruction, grunts and strained inhalations, but otherwise there was silence. No one spoke. No one moved to stop him. Even Noni remained on the couch, her face pale and stricken. I wondered then, and I would wonder for the rest of my life: why did our mother not take the poker from Joe’s grasp, wrap her arms around him, tell him that everything would be okay?
Finally Joe paused. At seven years old, he already stood four feet tall. A borrowed black suit showed his pale ankles and pale, knobby wrists. Plaster dust had settled in his hair, onto the shoulders of his suit, ghosting his skin. With a free hand, he wiped sweat from his forehead.
Then a man’s voice called out. To this day I have no idea who spoke, but one could say he changed the course of Joe’s life, of all our lives. “Antonia,” the voice said. “Your boy’s got quite an arm. It’d be a shame if he didn’t play some baseball.”
Someone chuckled. A child began to cry. With a dull thud, Joe dropped the poker. Renee removed me from her lap, and went to him. “Joe,” she said. His hands shook, and she took one in her own. Caroline sprinted across the room in her bare feet and threw her arms around him. I followed, stumbling like a drunk from sleepiness and overstimulation, and wrapped myself around Joe’s calves and feet.
I believe this was the moment when we each assumed responsibility for our brother, Joe. A lifelong obligation of love that each of us, for different reasons, would not fulfill. We would try: Renee in her studied, worrisome way; Caroline carelessly with great bursts of energy followed by distraction; and myself, quiet and tentative, assuming that Joe would never need me, not in the way that I needed him. Years later this assumption would prove to be wrong. But by then it would be too late.
* * *
THE FIRST THING Noni did after all the funeral food was eaten and we had returned to school was to inquire about Little League baseball for Joe. She could focus on one thing at a time, she thought. If she tried to fix everyone all at once, she would fail, she would fall to the floor and never get up again. It’s important to take small steps. This was what Mrs. Cooperton, our neighbor the social worker, told her at the funeral. One day at a time. Cross one thing off your list at a time.
Noni worried that Joe would lack a strong male presence in his life, and that worry eclipsed all others. Her inquiries returned the name of a baseball coach, Marty Roach, who was famous in Bexley. For twenty-three years he’d taught young boys the nature of teamwork and the beauty of a well-thrown ball. His office, Noni had heard, was festooned with birthday cards sent by former players, men now, who had moved on to cities and careers but harbored an enduring affection for old Coach Marty. This was what Noni wanted. Someone who would endure for Joe.
“Looks like the roster’s already full,” the man on the phone told her. “But for you, Mrs. Skinner, we can fit one more.”
Noni brought us all to that first practice. The team met at the Bexley High School playing field, which was rough, chewed-up grass bordered to the north by a chain-link fence. Beyond the fence lay thick scrub, densely packed bushes, brambles, and spindly pines that eventually thickened and stretched into the forest that covered Packensatt Peak, the closest thing to a mountain that Bexley could claim. High-school kids liked to jump the fence and wander into this wilderness to smoke and drink and light fires and have faltering, unforgettable sex. Noni looked across the field to the tangled trees and saw a defensive line holding steady against an encroaching disorder.
On the field a dozen boys stood in a row, a loose knot of fathers beside them. The air smelled of wet leaves and sweetness from the mulch that sat in huge piles around the field’s southern perimeter, spring preparation for later plantings. Off to the side was Marty Roach. Maybe it was the suggestion of the surname, but I had never before seen a man who so closely resembled an insect. He was short and stocky, with burly shoulders, a dark, ample mustache, and large meat-hook hands. Sparse black hair striped the white dome of his scalp, and I thought that at any moment antennae would sprout from his forehead. He looked designed to survive in hardy conditions, to find forgotten crumbs in a clean kitchen. Noni shook his hand uneasily.
“Hiya, Joe,” he said, leaning down to look my brother in the eye. “Ready to play?” He inclined his head toward the row of boys.
Joe nodded once and stepped away from Noni, took his place in line.
“Now, boys,” Marty said, stretching his arms out wide. “Today is our first day as a team. We are all learning our roles. As teammates you will come to rely on one another. You will come to know one another like brothers.” Coach Marty paused. “But for today let’s just have some fun.”
We sat in the stands with Noni and watched as boys threw balls to their fathers with loose, inelegant gestures. Marty stood alone with Joe and showed him how to hold a bat, swing evenly from the waist, trap a ball within the webbed leather of his glove. After a spell the boys divided into teams and began to scrimmage. Joe positioned himself in center field, just behind second base, where he looked both in the thick of it and dismally alone. Poor Joe, I thought. He stepped from one foot to the other, rubbed his nose, took off his hat and put it on again. The other players laughed or talked or waved to their fathers. Oh, poor Joe.
Batters took their turns at the plate. There were futile swings, dropped bats, tears. Finally a round-bellied blond stepped up. He was short but powerful, clearly experienced. A father lobbed a gentle pitch, the boy swung hard, and—crack—the ball arced forward into the field. And then, all at once, it was Joe like a toy on a spring who came up high to catch the ball. The force of the ball hitting Joe’s glove—whomp—took me by surprise.
The blond boy pulled up from running, a look of shock and dismay on his face.
“Wow! Great catch!” Marty called to Joe.
We clapped wildly, my sisters and Noni and I. Joe gave us a small wave. He smiled. Beside me on the bleachers, I felt Noni expand in the way of a hungry lung filling at last with air. She waved back at Joe.
* * *
AFTER BASEBALL BEGAN for Joe, one worry relaxed but others rose up to replace it.
Sometimes after dinner I heard Noni muttering. “One thing at a time,” she would say. “One thing. One thing.”
The casseroles stopped appearing on our doorstep. Our teachers stopped asking how we were holding up and gazing at us with grave, kindly faces. I slept soundly now. Joe and Renee, too. Only Caroline still suffered nightmares, terrifying dreams of darkness and a child with evil eyes. But after a spell, we became accustomed to Caroline’s bad dreams, and so it seemed, in a way, a return to normalcy.
One thing at a time. One thing.
Sometimes Noni yelled and threw objects at the wall—pencils and books and staplers. Papers littered the kitchen table and the study and Noni’s bedroom. At night Noni worried over a big gray calculator. We wandered in and kissed her and asked her to put us to bed, but she would say, “In a minute, just give me a minute,” and so we put ourselves to bed. We fell asleep atop the covers to the sound of Noni punching numbers with a jagged index finger, sharp and insistent.
Three months after our father died, we moved from our yellow house to a gray one-story ranch six miles away. This house had no stairs or swing set or much of a backyard, only a strip of gravel and a rectangle of sparse, yellowed grass that backed against a tall wooden fence. In the front yard sat a single tree, a large, humbling locust that threw a rough blanket of shade over the house. We loved our yellow house and cried more bitterly for this loss