Life with Sudden Death. Michael Downing
down at the desk beside mine and said someday she’d be voting for me for president of the United States. That was it. She said she hadn’t wanted to embarrass me in front of the other kids. And before I stood up, she said, You should be proud of yourself.
I wasn’t stupid. I didn’t repeat the “be proud” part at home. I did drop the news of my presidential timber.
My mother said, Why would Mrs. Shaw say that to you? She said it quickly, in her flat, adult voice, and I instantly knew that she was taking this way too seriously. As if I’d declared my candidacy and started to raise funds already, she said, Are you sure you’d like the job of president? She pulled the plug on the mangle—a sort of freestanding pasta press that she used to iron all of our bedsheets once a week. Mangling made her head sweat, and it didn’t often bring out the best in her personality. She explained that being president was not all spelling bees and multiplication tables, at which I excelled, she admitted. It was obvious she was not jumping on Mrs. Shaw’s bandwagon. After she recited the president’s daily duties, she said, Don’t you think someone like your brother Gerard would make a better president?
Mrs. Shaw was my first lay teacher, so it made sense that we were both prone to exaggerating.
After dinner, we all knelt down in the parlor on the thick red Oriental carpet donated by a local rug-store owner, another of my father’s best friends. We said the Rosary facing a painting of Jesus over the fire-place. He was ripping his own bloody Sacred Heart out of his chest. It was shining and tattooed with a cross. Above the piano, my father smiled a benign black-and-white smile from his perch above the color high-school graduation photos of the older kids. When I’d entered first grade, my brother Joe had pointed out that nobody else would be at home by the time a picture of me made it onto that wall.
By the time we had finished the Rosary, I completely doubted I was missing any teeth, so I persuaded Joe to check my mouth. He made me sit on the toilet in the half-bath under the stairs, and he used a flashlight and a clean Popsicle stick. He said it was pretty clear that I’d lost one tooth, and then he added, “at most.” That stung. He was already famous for having some of the worst teeth in the family, and I told him so. We started wrestling then. My mother came in and told me she wanted to speak to me in the kitchen. She must’ve spotted Joe’s dentistry kit, because she mentioned that it was time for another visit to Dr. F.
I hadn’t yet learned to fear the dentist. I did know it was my right as a third-grader to walk from school to his North Street office without supervision, which my mother confirmed. She told me again she wanted to see me in the kitchen.
I liked Dr. F., and I knew that his credentials were impeccable. He had all the latest equipment. He had eight kids, and they were in our parish. And after my father died, Dr. F. never charged any of the Downings for his professional services, which was something we let him do to demonstrate Christian charity. He was the best dentist in Berkshire County and better than the dentists in Boston. If his name came up at dinner at our house, you’d discover that a seat in Dr. F.’s office was more coveted than box seats at Tanglewood. When any of my brothers and sisters had a dental emergency at camp or college, the previous work done by Dr. F. was admired and even envied by his peers.
My father had dedicated the last years of his short life to promoting tourism and industrial development in the Berkshires. After he died, my siblings and my mother and I carried on his work amongst ourselves, selling to each other claims of singularity and excellence. When I met people who chose other dentists—and in a town of 50,000, some did—I didn’t criticize them, for the same reason we didn’t criticize Protestants.
In the kitchen, all evidence of dinner had been wiped up and put away. My mother was seated at the oval table with her back to the stainless steel sink. She asked me how many teeth I had swallowed.
I knew I’d lost two teeth. I knew she didn’t believe me. I knew there’d be trouble if I changed my mind right in front of her. I said, Two. It had become a preposterous lie.
Sometimes my mother seemed to be making an effort not to look disappointed, and I felt bad because she already had too much work to do. She had dark curly hair and dark eyes. I could tell she was pressing her tongue against the back of her front teeth. She had a lot of ways of showing you she was not showing you her emotions.
I said, You can ask Joey T., and told her I’d even written him a note about it.
She said she didn’t have to ask Joey T. or read any notes.
Well, you can, I said, though I knew that note was long gone, like the bad boy’s penmanship homework that supposedly went over the bridge. Instead of developing a new sympathy for the bad boy, I took this as an opportunity to deepen my hate for him. If he hadn’t lied about his homework to Sister Jeanne Arthur—a story I’d naturally retold at dinner more than once—I’d have stood a decent chance of selling my mother the story of my own truly lost note.
I didn’t say anything else. My mother didn’t say anything else. She handed me two quarters. I ended up giving one of them to the Missions, a contribution Mrs. Shaw recorded under the Boys column on the blackboard and Joey T. later recorded as a waste of five perfectly good packs of Sweet Tarts. I never tried to collect on another tooth.
I did walk down North Street alone about a week later. The five or six blocks from my school on Melville Street to Dr. F.’s office constituted half of Pittsfield’s commercial downtown. Only a few of the storefronts meant anything to me. I really didn’t do a lot of shopping, except to buy cigarettes for Roberta. She was eighteen years older than I was, and besides reminding each other that she was at her senior prom when I was born, we didn’t have much to talk about. Luckily, she loved to smoke. After she graduated from college and started teaching at a junior high in Pittsfield, Roberta was too busy to buy her own cigarettes, so she took to writing notes to shopkeepers within biking distance of our home. She’d give me the notes with a dollar for two packs of extra-long filter tips. She always said Keep the change in a way that made you notice her lipstick, which mostly ended up on her cigarette butts. This was the sort of behavior that got Roberta identified with my father’s older sisters, whom we learned to love and judge harshly for their wild ways.
Most of my older brothers and sisters worked part-time during the school year in department stores and jewelry shops on North Street owned by men who had known and loved my father. When we did have to buy anything, we always went to a store owned by a friend of the family. This was just good manners, because they usually wanted to offer us discounts. England Brothers department store was our hometown Macy’s, and though the England brothers never came to our home, even my sister who worked in their wrapping department was on a first-name basis with them. I’d never been introduced to Ben or Dan England, and I suppose I resented the exclusion and thus decided I liked shopping at Besse-Clarke better. There, men you were supposed to recognize as famous former high-school athletes sold us our school uniforms and gym clothes every August.
Besse-Clarke was almost directly across the street from The Bridge, a notorious hangout. It was exactly two blocks west of the identical bridge on which Joey T. and I stood every day after school. On North Street, the concrete rail seemed to be there to keep drunks from falling off The Bridge to the railroad tracks below. Typically, at least four or five guys were leaning on that wall with brown bags of beer purchased at the nearby Pipe and Tobacco shop, which sold dirty magazines, rolling papers, Narragansett and Schlitz singles to the regulars, and pipe cleaners to boys like Joey and me when we were feeling brave enough to lie and say we needed them for a school project.
I could’ve avoided The Bridge by crossing one more block on the Besse-Clarke side, but the denizens of The Bridge were magnetic. I often tried to catch the gaze of one of them to see what he’d make of me. As a very young child, I’d cooked up a recurring nightmare featuring those scary guys, and by third grade I’d turned it into a wild fantasy that one of the booziest guys might lunge toward me, grab me by my blue school tie, and dangle me over the tracks and demand something from me. I’d have given them whatever they wanted. They were the nearest thing to pirates Pittsfield had to offer, and most of them were decades ahead of the fashion curve with their shaved pates and stubbly unshaved cheeks and chins.
It