Norumbega Park: A Novel - Softcover

ONE
MR. WANT
Autumn 1969
 
1
 
 
The Palumbo family, beholden to tradition, drives every year into the country on the last weekend before Thanksgiving to buy the turkey. Beyond Lexington, beyond Bedford and Concord, where the country opens up and darkens, there are still farms where large cages hold white, startled birds. “That one,” says Joannie, the little girl, pointing, then runs back to the car, and before she is even inside, she covers her ears against the knowledge her big brother chooses not to protect her from. In the backseat, keeping her company as he’s been ordered to, Jack repeats it: “They cut off their heads.” Already (he is eight), he has mastered a certain smile that will make him, years later, catnip to women. But not yet; now he is only Jack, her tormentor.
“I wish he’d be nicer,” Stella, watching the scene between her children from the cages, says to Richie, and Richie, chuckling mostly for show, touches her neck. He carries with him a keen awareness that people are watching them, that their lives are on display here and they must behave differently, affect a certain refinement. There are rural people here, of course, shopping for turkeys, but also men in pressed khakis, men who belong, mysteriously, to this world of “the country.” Something of who he and Stella are as a couple must not be too much on display. He tries to affect the smile of the native, and when he touches Stella, it is with the delicacy that he imagines other men, bankers, might adopt when touching their wives.
The children are waiting in their steamy warmth when they lug the bird back to the car, the look on Joannie’s face, Stella can see, remorseful.
“It wasn’t yours, Joannie,” Stella says. “That one was too small. Because remember we’re having Aunt Betty and Uncle Carl and Josie and Phil, and your cousins.”
For Richie, even the recital of these coarse-sounding names diminishes all of them in the car (he wants to tell Stella to hush, as if others might be able to hear) after this breath of a richer, subtler world. But Joannie’s face comes forward: Let it be so. Let me not have consigned a living creature to death. Jack, beside her, is smirking. He will tell her later that their mother lied.
It is a wonder to Stella, the difference between them, Joannie’s birth a modest one, the baby slipping from her without a sound, almost without a will to live, and what seemed a full minute of terror before a cry could be coaxed out of her blue form. After Jack, who broke her, ripped her open, all red limbs and blood-soaked organs, a butcher’s carcass they had handed to her and told her was a son. For eight years she has been trying to fold Jack’s excess into a being more manageable, a little man in a sailor suit, someone she might more wholeheartedly love.
As soon as the thought appears, she runs from it—not love him? Inexcusable. But then it’s only one of a great string of unhingements that seem to define her lately. Her sense of life (she thinks sometimes) was formed by a June Allyson movie, or a series of them, seen most likely in the early fifties, when she was a young woman, while Richie was in Korea and they were not yet married. She remembers nothing of the plots of those movies, only a sense of strong, bullheaded husbands, noisy, demanding children, and, hovering over them, June Allyson, pert and smiling, one end of her smile lifted to suggest that some joke lay at the heart of a married woman’s existence and if only women learned to get it, everything else would fall into place. Somehow Stella has failed to get that joke, and a more complicated set of feelings has emerged.
About sex, for instance. The way, over time, it has become more of a need: embarrassingly, more for her than for Richie. And about the house they are consciously looking for, the great upward move that has come upon them with the force of a demand.
Richie has been promoted—head of production control at ComVac, the defense plant where he works; he’s now making thirty thousand dollars a year, a king’s ransom. They have been living, since before the children were born, in a house on Bryant Street in Waltham, nice but too small now that the children are growing. And Richie has become dissatisfied with it—with the house and with their lives within it—for reasons that are mysterious to her.
Her three older sisters are wild with encouragement that she and Richie should join them and their husbands in the developments—heavily clustered with Italian Americans—that have begun pushing into the woods of Waltham and Winchester, Natick and Lexington. But the garishness of her sisters’ big new split-level houses puts her off, their air of immodesty. To her they are like houses with too much lipstick on them. Look at me, those houses seem to be saying. Find me alluring.
Richie, too, feels that those houses are inadequate, but there the agreement ends. He wants something else, something almost indescribable. Thirty-nine years old, Richie understands that he has caught a wave, his ascendancy buoyed by a distant war. Seventy percent of the contracts ComVac receives are for war-related materials. He can justify making his money on the blood of boys only because it could so easily have been his blood that was shed, in 1952 or 1953, to feather the nest of a veteran of World War II. Such economy always prevails; it doesn’t bother him. But something else gnaws at him. If they are inevitably to rise, he feels an obligation to rise in a certain way. It is not his brothers-in-law’s houses so much as their lives that disturb him.
His brother-in-law Frank, for instance. Frank has taken to wearing a peace medallion over his turtlenecks. He runs the AV department in their local school system and loves to goad Richie for his work in the “defense industry.” “How many bombs this week, Mr. McNamara?” Richie endures this; the sight of Frank, balding, with a paunch and those ridiculous sideburns he’s grown, never appears as a real threat. It is becoming like Frank that scares him, accepting a kind of upgraded Italian Americanness that takes the form of split-levels, of sofas and “artistic” lamps. There is another possibility he can sense—though never precisely enough (which is the maddening part)—for himself and Stella, for his children.
It comes to him at odd moments, his own dream of elevation. On shopping trips to Boston—when Stella, like her mother before her, gravitated toward the North End markets where peddlers hawked vegetables and grains from open wooden carts—Richie caught sight of an old Protestant church, or the glass-fronted S. S. Pierce on Tremont Street, where the Beacon Hill crowd bought tinned specialties, foodstuffs sealed behind colored wrapping. He wanted to be there.
It was an odd dream to have, for someone of his background. His father had been a mason, a Sicilian immigrant, a dark, sullen man who loved to smoke cigars under his grape arbor in Watertown. That Richie had chosen to get an education—even the minor, largely technical night school education he’d managed to piece together—had come as a surprise, and, to his father, not a particularly welcome one. The dream had started then, on Richie’s trolley rides into Northeastern in the early fifties, before he was drafted, when he was a young man taking night classes, his nose to the wind of a city that seemed to him thrilling. He’d developed a sense that value resided in the old parts of the city, the venerable buildings, in the feeling of life you caught while watching a man in a long woolen coat and a muffler walking at night, a newspaper under his arm, in autumn. Where was such a man going? To what set of rooms? Some elemental elegance existed, lay in wait, but how did you get to it?
The house on Bryant Street was not it. Returning each evening to the house, with its small, exposed yard, the sounds from every adjoining house intruding—the Lampports’ marital spats, Louis Antonellis yelling at his brood of daughters. No. This was too far from the man in the woolen coat, the muffler, the lit windows of the apartment houses near the Museum of Fine Arts, his stop for the Northeastern night classes. It was not enough, and this thought, this goad is with him so often now that even here, with the turkey in the backseat, in the warm, domestic enclosure of the car, thinking of the men he has recently been among at the turkey farm, the long-coated, mufflered man’s distant cousins, he finds himself distracted. He has not been paying attention to the road for several miles. Suddenly nothing looks familiar. Did he make a wrong turn or miss a right one? Rather than coming out of the bucolic turkey farm landscape into the world of gas stations and stores—an opening into civilization he would have expected by now—he finds he is going deeper into the wild, deeper into field and stream, thicket, stone wall, wooden bridge. He needs to turn around but doesn’t.
There is a new quiet in the car, though he is certain that none of them have yet caught on. Sometimes you can feel trust, as a father, and know how misplaced it is. How people—people you love—can look at you and see facial hair and largeness of feature and believe that along with these comes command. It doesn’t. Of course it doesn’t. But he cannot admit the mistake, cannot quite say to them, I have gotten us lost.
He is waiting for a road sign, the indication of a route. The dark is coming. The vegetation has grown heavier. Yet it is undeniably lovely out here, the dark trees stripped, the clouded November sky leaking a substance the color of chalk at its edges. Something keeps him going in this direction.
It is Joannie who says, “Are we going home?”
“Of course we are, darling,” Stella answers. It would not occur to her t...