A Bright Soothing Noise

The Slaughterhouse

21 The Slaughterhouse After Dad got promoted to VP for accounting, he said even less to Mom and me. Now and then, if he’d had a third Dewar’s after work, he would make pronouncements from the head of the table in his bright white shirt and striped tie. Once, he passed me the carrots and pointed to my brother, Sam. He said that for a man to be happy, he had to work with his hands. Dad was a Protestant, like everyone else on our street. Mom claimed she was related to Spinoza. Mostly the Jews stayed several blocks east, although, by 1969 in Queens, that hardly mattered. Who trusted anybody? After the nightly news, our dinners only became sufferable when Mom learned to shut her mouth. Sam, who was almost old enough for the draft, sided with Dad. One wrong word from any of us as we passed the lamb or the ribs and the silence came down like a metaphysical meat cleaver. I kept away as much as possible. After classes I went straight to Holland Park where a few girls from Saint Theresa Ávila, the Catholic high school, hung out by the courts. Jimmy Brosnan always arrived before me with his basketballs, a flask of Christian Brothers brandy and a Marlboro box crammed with joints he sold for a dollar each. Those girls liked to get a little juiced and sometimes Jimmy and I invited two or three of them under the 22 A BRIGHT SOOTHING NOISE trees in back of the fence. Noreen Dobbins, with the long wavy hair and the freckles, stopped me once as I pressed her against the chain-link and asked me about Sam—Samuel Frydman Kane, as she called him—with a coy smile. I told her to forget him, he was a loser. “He’s too old for you,” I said. “Besides, he’s always miserable.” But she craved details. “Why miserable?” she said. “Where is he on the weekends? He has a girlfriend? He can use the car?” If I gave a few answers, I could kiss her again and touch her here and there. It was a bargain for both of us, but girls like Noreen never went out with me. They liked me for my connections to Sam and Brosnan, or for hanky-panky behind the fence, but nothing more. I was good in school but not in basketball. I always had a battered anthology of poems under my arm or in my jacket. I was only a freshman and besides, I already had a girlfriend, a French girl named Isabel DuValle who lived a block from the park. Isabel was a sophomore at St. Theresa’s too, with a devastating accent and eager green eyes. She invited me to go with her and her mom to French movies in the city. She got me into parties of college kids her sister knew and necked with me in the corner. Isabel never asked about Sam, but I knew by the way he cast his eyes down when I mentioned her that he was jealous. For this, I couldn’t understand him. He was taller than me and better looking and had been the point guard on the varsity basketball team until he quit to spend all his afternoons with his physics homework, or to help Dad refinish the basement. Sometimes on the weekend the two of them stayed up running a Skilsaw and hammering till three AM, which pissed me off and had to piss off the neighbors. Sometimes I shouted in at him as I went out the door on a Saturday morning, “What’s the matter with you?” He just looked at me and said, “What the hell is the matter with you?” The Slaughterhouse 23 On my fifteenth birthday, Dad bought himself a red pickup truck with an American flag decal on the windshield and a giant silver toolbox bolted to the bed. Two months later, he bought seven acres in west Jersey. I partied with Isabel and her friends more and more, overdoing it a time or two on an afternoon, although no one at home noticed. Mom had become skittish and self-contained, endlessly searching the pages of her gardening books. Dad taught Sam to drive, traveling to Jersey and back every Saturday and Sunday to check the progress of contractors or to work. Sometimes when the weather...