INTERSECTIONS: Hudson @ Wadsworth

A BOY, LOVED

by Luanne diBernardo


I hadn’t seen him since he was seven years old, finely boned with skin of gold. He had the knobbed-kneed legs of a newborn colt and the curious keen of an immigrant, the first of his blood to be born here, more often than not, the only one in his house to speak English, a blessing for his grandparents who, (with the tired that followed them this side of the sea) looked after the boy while his father fostered heroin.

At seven years old, Little Anthony was the mouthpiece to whomever appeared on his grandparents’ doorstep: news boys, meter readers, Jehovahs, girl scouts, and each one scrammed by the bird-sized boy spitting first-hand Sicilian into second-hand English while his grandparents hovered behind him, their fear sifted into and out of the boy’s quick mouth with a sound deciphered as anger.

On the day I first met him, Little Anthony greeted me with an expression too old for his years, a look that knew to expect a problem. I was the new bride of his favorite uncle, and so he followed us through the room-after-room of his grandparent’s flat, his face onto mine like a hawk’s to a mouse before finally, (or as close to finally as I knew), his face morphed into a sweetness that just in time remembered him.

It struck me odd that Little Anthony and I were separated by the same math that subtracted me from his uncle. Odd that my own father went missing when I was the age Little Anthony became the bastard child of a seventh son. Of his mother, there was a framed photograph on the dining room buffet, her arms wrapped about her delicate boy, his smile the one that was watching me watch him.

Had she been in the room, I might never have noticed the tinted photograph, less distinct than the porcelain lamps with their wedding cake flowers, the sofa and chairs sealed in shiny clear plastic, the Virgin Mother propped center cushion. I might not have wondered how it came to be that a young mother rifled through drawers and closets for a sweater as pale as her toddler’s blue romper. I would not have wondered how many times she posed with her child in her arms, on her lap, mother and son face to face, and then this pose. No thought to her leaving the photographer’s studio that day, already impatient to return for the proofs, one pile to her left and one to her right, until finally she’d whittle her favorites to two: eenie, meenie, minie, moe.

Had she been in the room I would have had no reason to imagine her choosing an 8 by 10, maybe wallet-size too. To imagine the glossy sheets in their cardboard sleeve, then to K-Mart, then Sears, where Little Anthony’s mother more than likely spent most his naptime comparing gold frames to silver, painted to varnished, a decision she most likely doubted while pacing outside the bus stop portico. Had she been in the room, though she hadn’t for a very long time.

Sam and I parted seven years later, our son the age of Little Anthony the first time I saw him. In that time, my in-laws learned just enough English from daytime soaps to keep them confused, just enough misused words and phrases that their little linguist was no longer needed. In that time, Little Anthony saw his father until less became never, time enough to learn that a bike could be pawned for twenty, a grandmother’s watch, fifteen. Even a banged-up vacuum was worth something to somebody under just the right circumstances.

My in-laws learned it took more than a braid of garlic to keep bad spirits away, learned that three locks and two Doberman’s were useless to someone with gold in his veins. Little Anthony learned that even at fourteen years old, he felt oddly excited at the sound of his father’s name. That though he quit looking for him, he didn’t mind when he happened past the vagrant at Allen and Wadsworth, who (were he heavier and cleaner), reminded him of his father.

My in-laws grew saavy, learned words like bail and brutality, and though he rarely slept home anymore, Little Anthony learned words like accomplice and premeditated.

It was somebody else stealing somebody’s bike, he’d only been watching should somebody come. Somebody did. While the thief was handcuffed and taken away, a second cop carefully leaned Little Anthony, an obvious novice (and while smaller than most, no longer little), into the back of a squad car. He couldn’t understand why he felt safe and angry at the same time; couldn’t understand why the officer accused him of mouthing off, when all he was doing was explaining. By the time he was 17, Little Anthony learned that the sound of his name would change the manner in which a cop would lean him into a squad car. And so how he came to spending more time in holding centers than he’d ever spent in his father’s house.

When finally he entered Attica, Little Anthony passed his days lifting weights. Sometimes months, sometimes years, he never grew tired of lowering the pins, always surprised when his body did what it was told to do, no thought to the constant ripping and tearing of what was once good, no longer the slight of his father and grandfather, men not much bigger than Little Anthony when he first wore shackles. Several years after his Attica entry, Little Anthony would be paroled at two-seventy. And after only seven weeks of walking the streets in a form that even his father wouldn’t recognize, Little Anthony would pursue an accuser by car, then foot, until finally (or just a few seconds after) he would realize someone had pulled a trigger.

He had always had a short fuse, a screw loose, a fiery temper, or so someone said on the news. It was said by neighbors that he’d always been in trouble, that he respected nothing, a piece of shit like his father, found more times than not at the corner of Wadsworth and Allen. It was said that he’d never leave Attica, that it’s where he belonged. Sam agreed, said thanks be to God that his parents were no longer there to see it, may their souls rest in peace. It was said that Little Anthony would spend his life in prison, a place to think about what he had done and how he had single-handedly ruined his life.

It’s been thirty years since I’ve seen him, my own life a series of do and do-overs, of odd, sometimes useful distractions. A life so busy turning this way and that, that to not think about Little Anthony ever again would seem natural, even expected. But once there was a photograph on a dining room buffet. Since boxed and moved into somebody’s house, or set at a curb, plucked by scavengers, crushed by compactors. Or maybe its glass grew spidered from the stress of records and books in some neighborhood Amvets, or salvaged for its gilded frame by a junk man who placed the portrait on a chest or a bureau because he liked the story it told: how a little boy was somewhere loved, because once a young mother had taken the time to board a bus for no other reason than to frame the very truth of it. I know this because I almost saw it happen.