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J. Lorraine Brown | Ohio Blue TipsWe were the poor relations, forgotten for the most part, except during a summer heat wave and at Christmas. That’s when my father packed us all into our rusted Chevy, and we made the trek up Route 1, over the Mystic River Bridge to Revere, to the third floor of a triple-decker where my childless Aunt Muriel dropped silver dollars into our open palms and felt good about herself for yet another year. Carrie and I sat side by side on her itchy horsehair sofa, never allowed beyond the heavy purple curtain that separated the parlor from the rest of the rooms. We sat, our scabbed and bony knees straight out over the edge of the sofa, and waited for her charity.
Not once, in all those years of visits, did my Uncle Joe come into the parlor to say hello. We knew he was there, on the other side of that velvet drape. We heard his slippers slap against his heels. We heard him slurp his tea, and the smoke from his cigar curled out from around the drape and floated above our heads, settling onto our shoulders like the tail end of a dream. “It’s just his way,” my mother said in the car on the way home. “Never you mind about him. It’s just his way.” Try as I might, I don’t ever remember meeting Uncle Joe.
In the heat of the summer, the other aunts thought about us and delivered their bored children to my mother so they wouldn’t have to deal with them, oftentimes not collecting them for weeks on end. Children need to breathe in good fresh air, they said. My mother didn’t mind. She could use the crumpled dollar bills they tucked into her apron pockets. This time, however, it was my mother’s idea Robby stay with us. She sent my father to Billerica to get him.
“Nora has gone too far, I’m afraid,” my mother said. “God knows what will happen to him in a place like that.” My father was sitting on the back step, smoking a cigarette. My mother stood in the doorway. Carrie and I were at the kitchen table, pretending to play a game of checkers.
“They’re your relatives,” my father said.
“And yours are better, I suppose?”
“Stay out of it, Mary.”
“That’s been the problem all along,” my mother said, “but not this time. We should have done something when he was just a little boy. Someone should have. What kind of a monster locks her child in the closet?”
“Suit yourself.” My father stubbed out his cigarette on the step.
“You’ll get him then?”
“Will you leave me alone if I don’t?”
My mother turned in the doorway and saw us. “Tom? Carrie? Not a word of this,” she said.
Robby was my Aunt Nora’s only son, born after twenty years of marriage. He was the cousin my mother talked about in sad little sighs. “Poor Robby,” she began every time she brought up his name in a conversation. He was always running away from home, always getting into trouble. Nora sent him to the Billerica Home for Boys. Uncle Jack didn’t stop her.
I never liked Aunt Nora. Her voice hurt my ears, and it upset me the way she inched forward when she spoke, shrinking the distance between us. “Here’s Tom,” she’d say to me, holding her arms out wide. Her smile spread across the bottom half of her face and pulled my eyes like a magnet toward her wet mouth, forcing me to back up and flee. Her words were always lost somewhere in the wake of my escape. Uncle Jack was a meek man, pasty-faced and thin. Nora overpowered him with her size and with her voice. Jack Sprat could eat no fat: his wife could eat no lean. That old nursery rhyme floated round and round in my head whenever I looked at the both of them.
“What’s that place like?” I asked Carrie later.
“Juvenile delinquents,” my sister said.
I was twelve that particularly hot summer and Robby a few years older. He arrived with his duffel bag, his shoebox of baseball cards, and a milk case of Frank Sinatra albums.
“All Robby ever does is listen to Frank Sinatra,” Carrie said to me. “Tom,” she said louder when I didn’t answer, “did you hear what I said?”
I shrugged.
“He looks like a bird,” Carrie continued, as though we were actually having a conversation. “With his beady little eyes. It gives me the creeps the way he keeps licking his lips. I’m glad I don’t have to hang around with him.”
If I had been truthful, I would have admitted to Carrie that I wanted to hang out with Robby. He was the closest thing to a big brother I’d ever have. If he really was a juvenile delinquent, he could teach me things. Maybe we could talk about girls. I knew he smoked. I saw him take a box of matches out of his duffel bag.
Robby was strange, though. My sister was right about that. He had big hands, a big round head, big feet. He looked like those stick people kids draw, and he bounced up and down when he walked as though he had springs on his feet instead of the red Converse high tops he always wore. He twitched. He drummed his fingers on tabletops. He was forever moving, forever tapping on something. There was always a drop at the tip of his nose. It hung there like a glass bead, and Carrie and I watched it hover dangerously over the kitchen table, over his mashed potatoes.
Carrie and I grew up in Hull, a beach town on the South Shore. Flanked on one side by the bay and on the other side by the ocean, it jutted out into the water like someone’s middle finger. Houses clung with all their might to the hills that rolled down to meet the bay, reminding me of the squashed little cottages in Sweethaven where Popeye lived.
An amusement park stretched down the length of Nantasket Avenue. On the opposite side of the street was the broad expanse of the parking lot. A seawall began here too and traveled from one end of town to the other. The sound of the ocean was as natural to me as my breath on the air. Twice I made the news because of the ocean: the first time, I drifted out too far on a tire tube, and an observant lifeguard pulled me and the tube back to shore; the second time, I was caught in an undertow, sucked in, gasping and clutching, waiting for my short life to pass before me, plucked in time from the current by a neighbor who jumped in fully-clothed and got her picture in the Hull Times for her efforts.
Paragon Park provided jobs during the warmer months. Nantasket Avenue was awash with people then. The park and the lure of the ocean swelled the population until the town was bloated with day-trippers. Their voices echoed across the water and drifted into my open bedroom window. I went to sleep listening to the thundering rumble of the wooden roller coaster, hurtling headlong down the track.
In the summer the town came alive with noise and confusion, the smell of suntan oil and burnt popcorn. In the summer, my father had a job, repairing rides, like the Ferris wheel when it broke down and stranded someone in the top seat, or the Caterpillar when the canopy wouldn’t close. Or he stood behind the counter at the ring toss, the wooden rings dangling from his arm. “HOOPLA, HOOPLA” he barked. “THREE FOR A DIME; TEN FOR A QUARTER. STEP RIGHT UP,” he’d say, catching some guy’s eye. “WIN A STUFFED BEAR FOR THE LITTLE LAYDEE.”
The whole town breathed in time to the rise and fall of the Atlantic, but even as a young boy, I felt its sadness. There were no expectations here. Lives copied lives over and over again into eternity. For more than half the year, there was nothing to do. Nothing to do if you were my mother but have a cigarette and watch the clothes you just hung on the line flap in the breeze. Nothing to do if you were out of work like my father but sit on the porch and drink or hang out at Sweeney’s.
In a town where bars seemed to outnumber people, Sweeney’s was the favorite, especially during the dreary New England winters when the town was truly isolated. Nothing fancy about Sweeney’s: beer from a tap, peanuts in a bowl. My father met his cronies there: shoulders hunched over their sweaty glasses, cigarettes burning worm-shaped ashes between their yellow fingers before they unwound their legs from the bar stools and staggered out the door. The kind of place where no one noticed when an ash fell, squirming for a moment on the counter, eventually pushed onto the floor by a flannel elbow or a soggy napkin. I hated it when my mother sent me to bring him home.
Our house sat on the edge of the sidewalk at the top of the steepest hill. Our backyard was a slope, and several feet from the foundation, at a chain link fence, it dropped abruptly to the street. The only usable section of yard was a patch of tired grass next to the side stoop. On hot summer nights, when my father’s hands were too shaky, he’d hand me the box of matches. “Here, Tom,” he’d say. “Do your old man a favor.” I’d light the grill, and we’d sit on the steps and eat hot dogs and hamburgers.
From the chain link fence, you could see the alphabet section of town, short streets named after letters and crisscrossed with cottages, and beyond that, the cemetery hill, and the remains of Fort Revere, a lookout station for the Army during the War of 1812. Kids hung out here: the younger ones playing war games, the older ones experimenting with cigarettes and sex.
What happened on the hill on Friday and Saturday nights? From my bedroom window, I watched the cars climb the steep grade. I watched the headlights flicker and dim and disappear, and I tried to imagine what it would be like to sit in the dark in a parked car with a girl on a warm summer night.
Robby had been with us for about a week, when he asked me to show him the old fort. He hadn’t paid any attention to me up until then. He just sat on his bed, listening to his music and sorting through his baseball cards. I agreed fast before he could change his mind.
We picked our way up the hill and moved to a spot against a crumbled half wall, out of the bright light of the afternoon sun. Robby hunkered down, his back against the wall. “Let’s sit here a minute, Tom,” he said. He patted the ground, and I sank down beside him. Robby reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a box of matches. Ohio Blue Tips it said in bold black print on the side. They were my father’s matches, the ones he kept on the ledge under the porch. Robby selected a match. I waited for him to pull out a pack of cigarettes. I imagined Robby smoked Lucky Strikes. He’d tap the pack, top side down, on the palm of his hand. He’d give me a cigarette, and I’d tap it on a rock. Then he’d roll the pack up in his sleeve after he took a cigarette for himself.
Instead, Robby snapped the match tip with his thumbnail. The match flared, and he stared into the flame until the very last minute, until it almost burned his finger and went out. He did this over and over, and each snap darkened his nail along its edge. I watched in silence, amazed he would dare do such a thing. The grass was dry. It would be easy for him to drop the burning flame and start a fire. It made me wonder what he had done to end up in a home for juvenile delinquents.
When he had nearly emptied the box, he put it down carefully and placed his hand wide open on the ground between us, on the stubble of scratchy summer grass. His thick fingers twitched beside my leg like an insect. They crawled across the grass and onto my bare skin. Robby stared at me, really steady, and his mouth went slack. His breath came in short little puffs. He hooked my gaze and rummaged about in his pants with his other hand, all the while watching me, watching me.
“Close your eyes,” he said, his voice unbearably soft. He closed his own eyes then and swayed a bit like the summer people hypnotized by Madame Zarifa. He eased his hand along my leg, closer and closer to my crotch. When he squeezed ever so gently, an uneasy warmth spread through me like quicksilver, and I went weak for a minute as though I had pulled back just in time from the edge of a cliff. I scrambled to my feet away from his hand. I pretended I didn’t hear him. “I don’t think this is a good idea,” I said, pointing to the matches. They lay in tiny piles like miniature wood heaps.
I ran home through the fields, the tall grass rubbing against my leg, reminding me of Robby’s touch. My mother was in the kitchen, scraping potatoes.
“What is it, Tom?” she said, wiping her hands on the towel that always sat across her shoulder. “You look all flushed. I hope you’re not coming down with something.”
“What’s wrong with Robby, Mom?” I said.
“Nothing that a little kindness won’t cure. Where is Robby?” she asked, looking behind me. I thought she would ask me then what was the matter because she looked at me hard, like she did sometimes when she suspected me of sneaking her cigarettes. She paused, just for a moment, and I wondered if I would tell her. I wanted to tell her. I wanted her to kiss my forehead like she did when I was sick. I wanted her to absolve me of any guilt like Father O’Brien did in confession. I held my breath and willed her to read my mind, but the moment ended. She turned her back to me. She scooped the peelings with her wet hands and dropped them into the brown paper bag folded open in the corner of the sink. “We’ll be eating dinner soon,” she said.
Robby pretty much left me alone after that, but I could feel him waiting, the heat of his gaze so intense I felt it burn on the back of my neck. What did it mean? Did he think I was queer? I knew he wanted something from me. I just didn’t know how to say no. He sat on the edge of the cot my mother had set up for him in the hall, Frank Sinatra crooning in the background. His fingers worked the chenille bedspread beneath him; his ever-blackened thumbnail picked at the loose yarn in the pattern, leaving loops my mother would have to pull back with a needle. I stayed in the kitchen at the table with a book or a crossword puzzle, as far away from his eyes as I could get. “You’re being very helpful, Tom,” my mother said when I offered to run to the market. When my father drove Robby home, I stayed in my room.
After my father took him home, back to Nora and Jack, Robby ran away one more time. None of us ever saw him again. He worked for a while flipping pancakes at a Sambo’s in Florida. I pictured him in his white pants and white jacket and white paper hat, the drop still hanging from his nose. He worked on farms in Nebraska and Oklahoma, milking cows, raking hay, planting crops. He called my mother whenever he changed jobs, and each call, each time my mother mentioned his name, was another opportunity for me to ease my conscience, but I never told.
In the police report Uncle Jack showed my mother, Robby died in a fire, set by his own hand, in an abandoned barn in Biddeford, Maine. He had been arrested for molesting a fourteen-year-old boy. While in custody, waiting for his trial, he had walked away from a work detail and set fire to the barn. Police believe he intended to take his own life. I am as sure as if I were there that this is the true story. I wondered if things might have been different if I had told. That thought pained me for a long time, but it was a relief, I must admit – the fact that Robby was dead.
After high school, I joined the Navy, the quickest way I knew how to escape. I wish I could say all thoughts of Robby evaporated eventually like the dreams I could only remember first thing in the morning, dreams that disappeared as soon as I opened my eyes. I wanted to be well rid of him, but for a long time he followed me like a ghost. Some people say they see their loved ones after death, riding by in a taxi or standing a few feet ahead of them in the grocery line. Robby was like that: I’d be sitting at a bar, having a drink, and the man next to me would start tapping his fingers on the counter, or I could turn a corner on a bright afternoon and there he would be, loping along in front of me, and I would have to sidestep and walk around him.
Long after that summer – when I was a young man on leave – I was sitting on the toilet in a bus stop restroom, my pants in a pool around my ankles, my elbows on my knees, my eyes half-closed, when a hand reached out from under the stall next to mine, and grimy fingers grazed my leg.
“You bastard,” I cried. “You fuckin’ bastard.” I grabbed the wrist, yanked the hand downward, pressed it to the tile floor, and stomped on the squirming fingers with my heavy work boot. I left them bloody. And after the man had run out of the bathroom screaming, after I had pulled up my pants, I braced myself against the cool, metal sides of the stall and threw up in the toilet. In the empty bathroom, the sounds of my retching echoed off the tile walls.
I don’t know how long I stood there, bent over the toilet, but when the spasms ceased and I could breathe again, I opened the door, surprised at how calm I had become. I turned the faucet on full force, cupped my hands and filled them up. I drank from the bowl of my hands, splashed cold water on my face and combed my hair with my fingers. When the policeman came into the restroom, I was wiping my hands on the front of my shirt.
“What’s going on in here?” he said.
“Nothing,” I replied.
“You’re sure?”
“Yup,” I said, heading for the door.
“You won’t recognize the place,” Carrie says, when we pull onto the beach road. Carrie and I are the only ones left, and I’m already beginning to regret this trip down memory lane. It’s been years since I’ve been back. My job, working for an oil company, keeps me overseas most of the time. Carrie moved to New Hampshire. We decided to meet in Boston and take a trip to the South Shore for old times.
We drive without speaking into Hull. Ridiculous mansions have sprouted like dandelions in the middle of burnt-out fields. It’s November, and Nantasket Avenue is quiet, the parking lot as gray and empty as the sea itself. The odd scrap of paper blows across the pavement, rising and falling in the wind like a whitecap. The park is closed forever, and the roller coaster sits frozen in time like the bones of some prehistoric animal.
Frank Sinatra sings Summer Wind on the car radio.
“Do you ever think about Robby, Tom?” Carrie says.
“Hardly ever,” I say.
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