Page 7

Theo awoke late. It was a Saturday and he’d been allowed to sleep in. He opened his door nervously, worried that the hostilities of the night before might be continuing, but to his surprise, he heard the sound of singing coming from the kitchen.

Crossing the living room to investigate, he caught sight of his father with his arms out and his head thrown back, giving an impassioned impersonation of Enrico Caruso, singing “ O Sole Mio ” to his wife, who was standing at the sink with a dripping dishmop, trying not to laugh.

Michael broke off when he saw his son. “The sun is shining,” he said, waving expansively toward the golden glow coming through the open window. “And not just on your mother’s beautiful face; it’s shining on Manhattan and on Brooklyn and on Coney Island too.”

“Coney Island!” Theo repeated the name incredulously.

“Yes. Coney Island. Where you and I are going, just as soon as you get dressed and eat those eggs that your mother’s cooked for you.”

“Why?” Theo asked, sitting down. He felt utterly confused. Last night his father had hurt him and reduced him to tears, and now for no apparent reason he was taking him to Coney Island, of all places.

“Your mother’s got housework to do and she wants us out of the way. And I’ve been thinking that we don’t spend enough time together, you and I. There’s more to life than work, you know.”

Theo nodded. There was nowhere in the world he wanted to go more than Coney Island. It was his personal pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. He’d been there twice before, each time for his birthday, and the most recent expedition had been spoiled before it began when a thunderstorm had come up out of nowhere, closing the rides and sending everyone scuttling back into the subway, from where they’d traveled back to Manhattan, packed miserably into the train like wet sardines.

But would going with his father mean that he was caving in again? Agreeing to give up on his school and his running? He’d given in the night before, but only because he’d been forced to, and he remained determined to try to find a way to change his father’s mind.

“What? Don’t you want to go?” asked Michael, looking surprised himself now.

“Of course I do. I just—” Theo broke off.

“Going has nothing to do with anything else,” said Elena, intuitively understanding her son’s anxiety. “It’s a chance to do something fun with your father. That’s all. Other things can wait.”

Theo looked over at his father, who nodded encouragingly. He was not one to admit he’d been wrong, and Theo realized that this was as close as his father was ever going to get to an apology.

The subway train was full, but there were straps to hang on to as they crossed the Manhattan Bridge and were carried swaying through Brooklyn until they reached its southernmost tip, where they joined the tide of visitors pouring out onto Surf Avenue and surging forward from there into a razzle-dazzle wonderland of sight and smell and sound.

So many people, so much noise. Theo could hear thousands of clamoring voices, mechanical pianos mimicking the up-and-down whirl of the golden carousels, hucksters bellowing invitations through their handheld megaphones, and closer to the boardwalk, the sound of crackling gunfire, from which he instinctively recoiled until he saw that it came from the roadside shooting galleries where hawkeyed boys with thin, narrow faces peered down the sights of real rifles at pockmarked tin targets, watched over by their forgotten girls.

They began with food, queuing at Nathan’s Famous for nickel red hots and, at Michael’s insistence, knishes—potato cakes flavored with onions and fried in deep fat. Knishes —Theo remembered both the word and the taste, taking him back to the hot tenement kitchen on the day he was taken and to his grandmother standing over him, naming the dishes on the table and telling him where each one came from. His grandmother with the emerald-green eyes. His father’s mother, whom his father never saw. Theo tried to imagine what it would be like to never see his mother and wondered how his father could stand it, or his grandmother either. This easy capacity for estrangement was mysterious to him. It made his father seem alien, which scared Theo and made him remember his contorted, angry face the night before, thrust up against his own. What would his father do if he defied him? Would he turn his back on Theo too?

The compact of silence that his father had sworn him to in Washington Square eighteen months earlier weighed heavily on him. The invisible, unspoken-of past felt like a malign silent force, guiding the present and the future, and Theo instinctively looked for a way to open it to the light and break its hold.

“Did you eat knishes when you were young, when you were ...?” Theo’s voice trailed away as his courage abandoned him.

“A Jew?” Michael finished his son’s sentence. To Theo’s surprise, he looked amused, not angry.

“Yes.”

“I did,” said Michael. “And I eat them now when I’m not one anymore. Just like I loved Coney Island when I was a kid and love it now just as much—especially the knishes.” He laughed, taking another bite.

“Did you come here with your father?”

“Of course not!” said Michael, laughing even more. “You’ve met him. He’d rather have died than be seen here. ‘Sodom by the Sea’ was what he used to call this place. He’d have beaten me with his belt if he’d known where I was going.”

“But you still went?”

“Yes, whenever I could borrow a nickel for the subway ride. I had more freedom than you, I suppose, and less school. Maybe that was bad. I don’t know. I could have used some more learning. But one thing I was sure of was that this place was Paradise by the Sea, not Sodom. Everyone could have a good time. It didn’t matter where you were from or who you were, and it still doesn’t. Coney Island’s about families having fun, not starving themselves and wailing to Jehovah all weekend. It’s about people who work hard all week having a chance to let their hair down and eat hot dogs and relish and apple pie and enjoy the sunshine ...” Michael stopped, smiling at his own verbosity. “It’s America, I suppose. I felt it here when I was a kid, and that’s why I loved it. It’s what I’d crossed the sea to find, what I was hungry for, couldn’t get enough of ...”

He broke off again, looking out toward the ocean.

Theo suddenly felt a great wave of affection for his father. It was as if he was glimpsing another person buried beneath the driven, angry man his father had become. He wanted to know more, but before he could think of any more questions to ask, his father snapped out of his reverie, and the moment was gone.

“Enough of the past; enough of me!” he said, getting up. “This is your day, son. Not mine. Where do you want to go first?”

Theo didn’t know, and so his father chose for him. They went to Steeplechase Park and paid the quarter admission and stood with their heads thrown back, watching the roller-coaster riders flying up and down in tight, stomach-lurching loops. Theo felt a guilty excitement as he stared up at the legs and underwear of the shrieking girls whose summer skirts billowed up in the wind as they were thrown this way and that.

He looked down and saw his father laughing again. “Don’t worry. I was young once, too, you know,” Michael shouted. And Theo had to smile, even though he felt ashamed.

The ride his father loved most and kept returning to was the steeplechase. He and Theo rode gaily painted wooden horses on parallel steel tracks that ran around the whole of the park. They went up and over a miniature lake, and then stretched forward, running neck and neck down the slope, inspired by the speed and the rush to believe that they were real jockeys whipping their horses toward the finishing line. But twice running, a fat man sailed past them on the inside track and claimed the victory.

“You want to know my secret?” he asked, leaning into Theo with a leer as they climbed down from their horses.

Theo stepped back and shook his head, appalled by the rancid smell of the fat man’s breath.

“Well, I’ll tell yer anyway,” said the fat man, undeterred. “It’s me weight takes me down quicker. Laws of gravity that’s what it is. Just like ol’ Isaac Newton told it. Young scrawny lad like you ain’t got a chance against a big bloke like me.”

The fat man laughed unpleasantly and disappeared into the crowd, leaving Theo feeling deflated. But he kept the information to himself, not wanting to spoil his father’s illusions.

Or his father’s mood. It was as if Michael was determined to be happy and for Theo to be so too. He spent money extravagantly and insisted that they try everything: from the blue-sparking Dodgem cars to the penny arcades to pitting his wits against Mr. Memory, who knew more facts than anyone in the world, according to the sign outside his tent. Michael knew a fair number, too, but he was unable to get the better of Mr. Memory with his questions and left a dollar poorer, although still in high spirits.

“He’d be competition for your know-it-all Mr. Eames,” said Michael, digging his son in the ribs.

But the wounds of the night before were too raw for Theo to see the joke, and Michael quickly changed the subject, plying his son with more hot dogs—from Feltman’s this time.

It was hot and humid and Theo was glad that they hadn’t come to swim, wearing thick, itchy woolen costumes beneath their clothes like so many of the other pleasure-seekers. From the elevation of the boardwalk, they looked down at the multitude of people on the beach—so many bodies packed together across the expanse of sand that from a distance they didn’t seem human at all but instead a vast impersonal patchwork of cloth and flesh, deprived of individual meaning. Beyond the incoming waves, in utter contrast, the ocean faded into an empty blue horizon toward which the early-evening sun was now slowly setting.

Walking back up Surf Avenue, they passed the freak show, glimpsing through half-open tent flaps Laurelino, the man with the revolving head, and the “Woman without Limbs”—and name, too, it seemed. Where did the freaks go when the day was done? Theo wondered. Did they have a home? Was there any mercy in the dark world left over for them?

Luna Park was lit now with a myriad of colored lights—fifty thousand of them, according to Michael, ever ready with a statistic. But Theo could see that many of the bulbs were broken and that the paint was peeling on the candy-colored cupolas and domes. All day he had willed himself to match his father’s mood and be happy, struggling to deny this tinseled melancholy that had had its hand on his shoulder since the morning, and now held him tightly in its grip. He looked around at the ragtag crowd heading back toward the subway and understood that Coney Island wasn’t real. It was an escape and nothing more from the reality of the Depression that still held the city and its inhabitants in its cruel maw, refusing to let them go.

Weeks passed and Theo’s unease grew as his fourteenth birthday got closer, and his father still made no reference to Theo’s future. He was torn between a reluctance to raise the subject for fear of provoking another violent outburst and a wish to force the issue and be done with the anxious suspense that was eating away at him.

Michael, in contrast, had seemed much happier since the expedition to Coney Island and frequently referred to their shared experience. Whole dinners would pass with Michael describing to Elena the thrill of the steeplechase or his failure to get the better of Mr. Memory, while Theo squirmed in impotent frustration, answering in monosyllables when his father reminded him of particular highlights. Elena sometimes became irritated by Theo’s reticence, telling him to “sit up straight and answer your father,” but Michael appeared unaffected, happily continuing with his stories. There was a new opaque quality to his father that Theo couldn’t penetrate, and he felt sometimes as if he were being played like a fish on the end of an expert angler’s line.

At school, Mr. Eames noticed the change in his star pupil.

“You’re thirty seconds slower,” he said, holding out his stopwatch accusingly as Theo finished his practice run, too out of breath to respond.

“Something’s changed. You’ve lost energy and concentration. You’re not going through the gears; you’re grinding them, acting like they don’t exist. Forcing the pace and then having nothing left. It’s like you’ve forgotten everything I’ve taught you.”

Each rebuke hit Theo like blows to the solar plexus, but he said nothing, keeping his head down so that Mr. Eames couldn’t see the effect his words were having.

“You can’t get away with going at this half cocked. I don’t know how many times I’ve told you that. Some meets you can still win because there’s not the competition, but when we go back to City College, you’re running against the best—athletes that have a chance of representing their country one day. And the way you are now, they’re going to eat you for breakfast. I don’t want Charlie Booker to see that. Not after what I’ve told him about you. Not after how I’ve built you up.”

“Don’t you think I know that?” said Theo, forcing himself to answer. “Don’t you know how grateful I am? I want to do well; I want to repay you, it’s just ...”

“Just what?”

“My father ...” Theo stopped. Talking about his father to Mr. Eames felt like a betrayal. He could hear his father’s voice on the night of the argument: “ He’s not your father; I am. You’d do well to remember that, Theo. ”

“What about your father?” asked Eames insistently.

“He says I have to leave school when I’m fourteen and go to work in his factory. He says running doesn’t matter, or school either.”

“Ah,” said Eames, letting out a deep sigh. “Now I see.”

The next day Mr. Eames asked Theo to remain behind after practice. They sat on the bleachers like they did on the first day they met, when Mr. Eames saved Theo from a beating by the O’Donnell boys, and just as he did then, Eames lit a cigarette and watched the blue smoke rise into the still late-summer air. He stayed silent for a long time.

“I spoke harshly to you yesterday and I’m sorry for that,” he said at last. “You’re not one to slack off, and I should’ve seen that something must’ve happened.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Theo, looking out across the cinder track to the brick wall of the school with the lead roofs of the classrooms rising beyond. Everything seemed monochrome—empty and forlorn.

“But that’s where you’re wrong. It does matter,” said Mr. Eames passionately. “You have a rare talent and I think—no, I know—you have a chance of doing something special, and I don’t want you to lose that opportunity.”

“Neither do I,” said Theo flatly. “But I don’t see what I can do about it.”

“How about if I talk to him? Maybe I can get him to see what’s at stake.”

“Would you?” said Theo, suddenly excited. “Would you do that for me?”

“Of course I would,” said Mr. Eames, clapping Theo on the shoulder. “It’ll carry more weight coming from me.”

It was amazing the effect that a little hope had on Theo. Or perhaps it was having an ally, somebody who would speak for him. He wanted to believe that his father would see reason, and he was encouraged when both his parents proved receptive to the idea of Mr. Eames visiting.

“You must keep an open mind,” Elena told her husband. “We must think of what is best for Theo.”

“You can rely on me for that, my dear,” said Michael, smiling broadly. “I’m looking forward to meeting this man whom I’ve heard so much about.”

At any other time, his father’s apparent change of attitude to Mr. Eames would have rung alarm bells for Theo, but his newfound optimism made him take everything at face value, and he happily reported back to his coach that six o’clock on Friday would work very well for his visit, and that both his parents would be there to hear what he had to say.

Elena was not used to having visitors and spent the whole day cleaning the apartment, dusting in invisible corners and scouring every surface not once but twice with disinfectant, so that the rooms smelled more like a hospital than a living space by the time she had finished.

“Nothing but the best for our friend, the coach,” said Michael, raising his eyebrows when he returned from work. But he seemed amused, not angry, as he settled into his armchair to await their guest’s arrival.

The doorbell rang at precisely six, and Theo felt a surge of gratitude to Mr. Eames as he went out into the hall of the apartment building to greet him, knowing the importance that both his parents attached to punctuality. And he was encouraged, too, by the effort that Mr. Eames had made with his dress. Gone was all trace of his usual extravagant getup, replaced instead with a gray, off-the-rack suit and a conservative navy-blue tie.

“Best not to smoke,” said Theo as he led the way down the corridor. “My mother doesn’t like it. And my father’s a Republican, but you’ve probably guessed that already. He’s got a picture of the president on the wall.”

“And I’ve got a picture of Joe Stalin in my bedroom,” said Mr. Eames.

Theo stopped dead, looking back at his coach, open-mouthed.

“Come on! I’m joking,” said Mr. Eames, laughing. “The point is, none of that matters. I’m here to talk about your running, remember? Not what I think of Herbert Hoover.”

Theo nodded, but now, at the last moment, he was seized with a terrible misgiving. He thought of the change in his father since the night of the argument. He was planning something. Theo was sure of it. His father wasn’t the type to give way, and Theo knew how much he wanted him at the factory. The running meant nothing to him. “Ridiculous”—that’s what he’d called it.

Theo wanted to run, and so he had wanted to believe he could. That had been his mistake. He’d built up his hopes like a castle in the sand on Coney Island’s beach.

He turned to his coach, searching for a way to explain. But it was too late. He didn’t even know how to begin. And like an automaton, he opened the door of the apartment and let the different halves of his life collide.

“Now, Michael, listen to what Mr. Eames has to say,” said Theo’s mother, having settled their guest in the other comfortable armchair across from her husband and the radio console.

“I certainly will, Elena. I’m all ears,” said Michael, who had courteously gotten to his feet when Mr. Eames came in, shaken his hand, asked him how he was, and wished him a cordial good evening.

So far, so good, thought Theo, perched beside his mother on the edge of the couch, positioned between Mr. Eames and his father. But then he immediately thought again that it was all too good to be true, and his nervous anxiety grew to match his mother’s.

Elena had convinced herself that Mr. Eames was going to spill some of his iced tea on the carpet. She had moved an occasional table close to his right knee, but he had not taken the hint and kept his glass in his hand, where it tipped dangerously from side to side as he made hand gestures to support his arguments. Elena stared at the movement of the liquid, willing him to put the glass down.

Finally, Eames was done, wrapping up with a rosy description of Theo’s prospects for athletic glory if he kept training hard and preserved his focus.

“What are you saying?” asked Michael. “That he could represent his country, go to the Olympics?”

“Yes, it’s certainly a possibility,” said Eames. “Theo’s got the talent; it’s just a question of how hard he’s prepared to work at it.”

“He’s always worked hard,” said Elena. “He’s a good boy and we’re very proud of him, aren’t we, Michael?”

Theo’s father nodded, but said nothing. He was looking hard at Eames with a quizzical expression on his face that Theo couldn’t interpret.

“I’m sure you are,” said Eames, glancing from one parent to the other. “You’ve every reason to be.”

“I’ll give it everything I’ve got,” said Theo earnestly. He had never heard his coach speak about the Olympics before. In five years, at the Games in 1936, he’d be turning nineteen, which would be the perfect age. For a moment he was there, imagining flags, a crowd like in Yankee Stadium, the touch of his feet on the track accelerating into the bend ...

And then it was gone. He was back on the couch, watching his father, who was talking in that same even tone that Theo so much distrusted.

“Well, all this sounds very exciting,” he said. “But I do have a couple of questions.”

“Of course,” said Eames. Theo thought for a moment his coach was going to say shoot or fire away like they did on the radio, but thankfully he didn’t.

“Well, first off, is this just your opinion that our son’s so special? I don’t mean to be rude, but you’re just a high school coach, and I’m sure there are plenty of other teachers in your position all over the country who think their pupils are star prospects, but that doesn’t mean that they are.”

“No. It’s a fair point, Mr. Sterling, and you’re right to make it. But the fact is that I’ve got a second opinion from a coach who’s far more qualified than me, and he thinks just as highly of Theo as I do.”

“And who might this person be?”

“His name’s Charles Booker. He runs the program at City College, and he organizes some of the interstate competitions too. He’s got a lot of experience.”