Rest, Perturbed Spirits

The year I was born Lucky Lindy flew the Atlantic and Babe Ruth hit his sixty home runs. Not often mentioned in the same breath but on my mind as I got older were Sacco and Vanzetti, executed that summer. My mother, raised in Plymouth, Massachusetts, knew one of the minor actors in their drama. He lived in the same rooming house as the two anarchists, and might, she thought, have established their innocence, had he been called to the stand. Beltrando Brini was his name, the beautiful sound of it inviting me down the road to the past. But he's dead, she's dead, and with them their truth or fiction. Perpetual twilight envelops the road leading back, ensuring that I won't ever know the truth it opens on.

At first there were only four of us in the house on East 26th Street—Mom, Pop, Spot, and Buster. I was Buster and Spot just a dog, but that didn't less endear him. At night, after Mom and Pop were asleep, he jumped out of his basket and wriggled under the covers with me. Pop, had he known, would have called down the wrath of Heaven. He'd have said what he did say when I brought home a stray dog: "We'd better put him out of his misery. First thing in the morning, he goes to the pound!"

I couldn't let that happen and invented a hundred stratagems to evade the pressure of Pop's unresting hand. I wanted to create a life for myself in the bits of quiet time between his explosions. They came round like clockwork, and I kept a weather eye on the rising color in his cheeks. If Spot had soiled the carpet overnight, I got up at the crack of dawn to scrub it clean before anyone noticed. The pathetic schemes I concocted were all in my head, however. Spot was the product of a small boy's overheated imagination, for I never did have a dog.

At St. Brendan's School the nuns, when I wouldn't kowtow to them, denied me the honors that were mine by right. They went to a boy who minded his p's and q's. In college I was graduated first in my class, but the printer omitted my name from the program; that his mistake was an honest one did not console me. My baseball team, the Brooklyn Dodgers of the National League, never did win the World Series—not when I was young enough to care beyond words. So my not having a dog fit in with my sense that things don't always work out for the best.

Pop's shadow looming over me did nothing to change this opinion. I was Buster to him—as in "Hey, Buster, what do you think you're doing?" He liked to follow this up with a slap to the ear, playfully, as if we were sparring. It stung, though. Pop-watching taught me to distinguish between humor and horseplay. He wasn't much of a kidder. But thinking about him from the safe vantage point of hindsight, I'd call him a comedian in spite of himself, like those monstrous gargoyles you see on old churches. They make your scalp prickle, but you can't keep from laughing.

Pop on the rampage did a passable imitation of the Old Testament God—"Behold, I will smite all thy borders with frogs." About a neighbor's son who'd sassed him he said, "Too bad he isn't my son for five minutes!" The time I lost the money he'd given me to pick up his shirts at the laundry, I was scared out of my wits. It must have slipped through a hole in my pocket on the way to the Chinaman's, but rather than tell the truth and face the consequences, I said a man with a beard had robbed me at knifepoint. Without a word he clapped on his hat, grabbed me by the arm, and marched me out the door. We scoured the neighborhood, looking...