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***
It was a golden Sunday morning, maybe summer’s last
Sunday. Second grade was about to
start. My old man put down the phone and
said, your brother is coming.
My brother?My old man pulled two framed photos from the top drawer of his dresser where he kept his socks and underpants. Each photo was of a man, a young man about the age of a soldier, like the soldiers I saw on television fighting the war in the jungle somewhere. The war my brother-in-law Francis was afraid to have to fight in.
The men in the photos were handsome and dark. They were smiling.
These are your brothers, Sam and Charlie.
Where are they? I asked.
I don’t know where Charlie is. He’s a busy guy and I lost track of him. But Sam is coming today. He just got married. He’s stopping by later with his new wife and his new car.
I asked my mother about my brothers.
They are not my sons, she said. Your old man was married before. I met Sam once, when you were still a baby. Charlie, he doesn’t want to come around. They’re grown men now, old enough to be your father.
Sam didn’t come in time for our dinner. My mother and old man liked to eat early. We ate at four like always on Sunday. My mother prepared drinks and snacks and we were waiting on the tiny porch when Sam rolled up. He was driving a bright red Pontiac Bonneville convertible. It was the biggest Pontiac on the road, as long as a truck and it was brand new. The top and the seats were white, leather white. It had big spoked wheels.
But a Pontiac, not a Plymouth! What would my old man say? I wondered. And was the tall dark man coming out of this Pontiac really my brother? He was a man and I was just a kid. There was a woman on his arm, beautiful, blond, like a television star. My old man rushed out the door and yelled, hello, he jumped down the walkway and slapped Sam on the back. He grabbed the blonde all over and kissed her. Sam tugged her away. Easy pops, Sam said. She’s mine.
They came inside the porch. Sam kissed my mother, shook my hand, and introduced the blonde as My wife Glenda. Glenda smiled with a mouth full of white teeth.
Sam was dark and thin like my old man. He had a deep voice and he sounded like my old man, like New York. He was loud and moved all over the place when he talked. Glenda sounded like New York too. Like my aunts and uncles. She’s a Yiddische girl, and Sam is a Yiddische boy, my old man said.
We sat on the porch around a card table and had drinks, eggrolls, and franks in blankets. I had soda. My mother had her Radler. She told the story of the Radler. From the old country, my old man said, she’s from the old country. I’m from Germany, my mother insisted. My old man had a drink, a booze drink with whiskey, the first booze drink I ever saw him have. Sam and Glenda had whiskey too, the way my old man had it, with Coke.
I’m in real estate, Sam said. We both are. We rent apartments. We just got married and we got this car and we’re going out to California for our honeymoon.
You’re doing good, my old man said. He turned to my mother and said, he always has an angle. Always a gimmick to make good. And what a car, a beaut.
Just bought it, Glenda said. My dad and mom helped us get it. She checked her lipstick.
You hear from your brother? my old man asked. Where is he?
Screwing around in New York. Working for the city.
Why don’t he ever come around? What’s his problem?
I don’t know, you ask him.
I can’t, I don’t know where the hell he is!
We ate our snacks and drank our drinks. They talked a long time. Soon it was dark, late summer night. I was cold. My mother put a sweater on me. Some mosquitoes got in the porch through rips in the screen and bit us. I scratched at the bites.
Calamine lotion! barked my old man. Don’t scratch like that! Calamine lotion!
I was almost asleep when I jumped because my old man and Sam were shouting at one another. But they were only talking loud, and not fighting.
Then Sam and Glenda left. Here kid, he said, and gave me a five-dollar bill. Don’t know what toys you like, so you can buy yourself whatever you want at the Woolworths.
Oh no, that’s too much, said my mother. Too much. He can put it in his bank.
Sam and Glenda waved and shouted and my old man yelled, Goodbye, come back soon! and there were the beginnings of tears in his eyes. The Pontiac came to life with a roar. Sam put the top down and zoomed away, honking once at the corner before disappearing for twenty years.
The next time my mother and I went for a Ride, I asked about my brothers.
Who is their mother?
Your old man was married before I met him, she said. They had two boys, Sam and Charlie. our old man drove their mother crazy and she had to go to a mental hospital, a place for people who are sick in the head. He wouldn’t take care of the boys, they were very little, so he sent them away to foster homes. They stayed for years in the foster homes until their mother got better, and she took them back. And that’s why they don’t come to visit, because he abandoned them, and they hate him. Some father he was.
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