Seeley let down the window as he backed out of Leonard's driveway and the fragrance of eucalyptus again flooded into the car. Turning onto the main road back to the freeway, he thought about how careful Leonard had been with his money long before he haggled with caterers over wedding bills. Into a pickle jar in their bedroom closet he would deposit the coins and dollar bills that he collected from babysitting neighbors' children and making deliveries for the corner grocer. The squat barrel-shaped jar left the closet only when the little miser carried it to the grocer's to change coins for bills. So when, one night, Lenny offered Seeley every penny, the entire hoard, in return for his help, Seeley knew that his easily panicked brother had this time truly blundered into catastrophe.
It was late spring, Buffalo's most temperate season, and close to the end of the school year. Even in this sullen neighborhood of Poles, Litvaks, Ukrainians, and Germans, where resentments hung in the sooty haze like a premonition of bloodshed, neighbors called to each other from stoops and porches, and modest hopes stirred around the patchy, sprouting flower gardens. Seeley, freshly showered from baseball practice, was stretched out on his narrow bed, reading for a history final. Lenny was at his end of the card table that the boys used for a desk, fidgeting with a pencil and pretending at his math homework. In the half hour since Seeley came in Lenny did little more than trace the wood-grain pattern of the vinyl tabletop with a fingertip while a foot tap-danced ceaselessly below. Seeley was certain his brother was going to piss his pants.
It was the dinner hour, as their mother called it, even though the hour itself usually stretched past six o'clock to eight or nine or even later. The rule, cast in iron, was that no one in the Seeley house-hold sat down to dinner before Leonard Seeley Sr. returned from the Germania Social Club to take his place at the head of the kitchen table. Seeley's father had for years worked on the assembly line at the Chevrolet plant, but, with the plant's closing, the after-work detours to the Germania grew longer, filled with complaints to anyone who would listen that the new job, assembling windshield-wiper arms at the Trico plant, was depleting his soul. The Germania was in truth little more than a bar with stuffed stag heads and the heraldry of several German provinces on the wall, and on those rare evenings when her own boiling resentments had sufficiently stoked Mrs. Seeley's courage-a church group meeting might have required that the family eat at a normal hour-she would send Mike to the Germania to collect his father. The stale reek of smoke and beer permeated Seeley's memories of those trips, memories painted in the varnished yellow light of the place.
Once, when Seeley was eleven or twelve and searching through his parents' bureau and closet shelves for some key to the secrets that enshrouded the small, dark house, he found in a compartment of the carved box on top of his father's dresser a stamped brass key, the kind that might open a suitcase or a trunk, and a worn envelope with a translucent plastic sleeve the size of a postcard inside. The stained sleeve contained what Seeley took to be an identity card or visa. It bore the photograph of a man in his twenties-from the steep jaw and violent eyes, it was unmistakably his father-and the name Lothar Seelig.
That mystery lasted until, exhausted by her sons' pestering, their mother explained that, when he arrived in the United States in 1951, Lothar Seelig had changed his name to Leonard Seeley to escape the vilification of Germans that persisted even after the end of the war; indeed, during the war her own family had sloughed off the name Huber to become the Hubbells. The explanation only complicated Seeley's sense of his father's depravity. Even on his finest days, pitching a shutout or topping the school record for completed passes, Seeley's awareness of himself was that he was the son not of one but of two madmen. Alone in their room, he and Lenny entertained each other by walking about like cartoon monsters, legs goose-stepping, arms straight out and frozen into sticks, abjuring the other to beware, I am Lo thar! I vill seize you and destroy you!
Beneath the card table, both of Lenny's feet tapped wildly.
“For God's sake, Lenny, go to the bathroom if you have to pee.”
“You've got to help me, Mike.” The boy's lips trembled. “I'll give you all the money in my jar. You have to get rid of this for me.”
It was past eight o'clock and the aroma of roasting meat loaf had long since faded. Their mother had by now settled in the parlor and was knitting or mending or on the telephone with one of her church friends. In the empty kitchen, the television played at top volume; on the evidence of the laugh track, it was tuned to a sitcom. In Seeley's memory, the television, though rarely watched, was always on. It could have been a fifth member of the family and the only one to be counted on for laughter.
From under the card table, Lenny brought out a package and pushed it toward his brother. When Seeley only looked at it, Lenny, his voice breaking, said, “Take it, Mike. You have to get rid of it.”
The bag, an ordinary lunch sack creased and stained from his brother's handling, was tightly wrapped around the object inside, and the moment Seeley lifted the package, he knew from its heft what it was.
“Does he know you took it?”
Lenny shook his head.
“Put it back before he gets home.”
“I can't.” Beads of moisture had formed on his brother's upper lip. He nodded at the bag. His voice pleaded. “Open it.”
Seeley emptied the bag onto his bed. In the bright light of the room, the chrome barrel glowed. The gun was intact and the cartridges, which Lenny had emptied from the cylinder, were all there. Then Seeley saw why Lenny couldn't return the revolver to their father's dresser. The barrel was scarred and abraded as if it had been smashed repeatedly with a rock. Black shards of some hard material clung to the cartridges. Seeley looked at the gun's grip. Lenny's efforts with the rock had shattered the cast black rubber. The larger pieces he had reattached with rubber bands and what looked like library paste.
“What were you trying to do?”
His brother emerged from the closet with the half-full pickle jar. “I wanted to break it and throw it down the sewer.”
“Why didn't you?”
“I was afraid. Take the money, Mike! You have to help me.”
“I don't want the money.”
“You have to get rid of it!”
It seemed to Seeley that he had shielded his brother since before Lenny learned to walk. A table lamp shattered on the floor; grape juice splashed from a glass onto a lace curtain. It was easier for Seeley to absorb the blame than to have to listen to his brother suffer a beating. The logic that the role of the strong was to protect the weak was too ingrained for him to do anything else.
Their father could arrive home at any moment, and Seeley thought quickly. Outside it was still twilight, but even if the neighbors had gone indoors, the narrow backyard offered no place to hide the revolver. There was the shadowy cellar where his father spent long hours drinking beer and working on his hunting and fishing gear, but the man knew every spider-filled corner of the place. The living and dining rooms were hopeless: the sofa and easy chairs, covered in stiff transparent plastic, were impenetrable and the cabinet with his mother's collection of porcelain figurines was mostly glass. The two small dressers in the boys' bedroom were the first place his father would look. It seemed odd to Seeley that a house so filled with secrets should have no hiding places.
When Seeley opened the pickle jar and carefully shook the coins and currency onto the table, Lenny misunderstood. “Take the jar! You can have it! Just get rid of the thing.”
On his own forays into his father's bedroom dresser, Seeley had examined the revolver more than once. The grip and barrel now appeared shorter than he remembered and, in proportion, the trigger and guard seemed outsized. For some reason that difference now underlined for him the weapon's deadliness. He pressed open the cylinder and, one by one, inserted the six loose cartridges. The smooth movement of the parts-he clicked the cylinder back into place-was almost comforting in its precision. He quickly covered the bottom of the jar with coins, placed the revolver in the center of them, and distributed the rest of the money on top of the revolver and around it. He screwed the top back onto the jar. The hard black crumbs he gathered up from the bedcover and dropped in the wastebasket. Even if his father were to look there, drunk as he was by the time he got home, he would not connect them to the missing gun.
Seeley examined the jar doubtfully before returning it to its corner in the closet. “I'll toss the gun on the way to school tomorrow.”
Leonard said, “Maybe he won't come home.”
That was Lenny's fantasy, but Seeley had his own version. At around this time, the U. S. Justice Department had, with much publicity, initiated the prosecution in nearby Cleveland of a local autoworker for fraudulently entering the United States by failing to disclose that he had been an SS guard at two death camps in Poland. It took no great forensic leap for Seeley at age fifteen to conclude that Lothar Seelig, also an autoworker and immigrant, had himself been an SS camp guard. Surely the brass key in the carved box would unlock the incriminating evidence. Some day, like the Cleveland autoworker, neither of the two madmen would come home.
One sitcom had replaced another on the television when a slamming door shook the house. Seeley's mother must have come into the kitchen because his father's ancient tirade-booming, guttural, unforgiving-at once filled the house with its complaint of incompetence and betrayal. The sentences had lost their meaning long ago, but the fact that the words were English, not German, momentarily loosened the knot in Seeley's chest. When his father spoke English in the house it meant that his drinking had not yet carried him past the last edge of decency.
There was a heavy thump and again the house shook. From experience Seeley knew that his father had hurled his mother against a kitchen wall. Her cry, if there was one, was drowned out by the television. There was a long silence before the heavy boots staggered down the hallway, stopping at the closed door behind which, Seeley on his bed, and his brother at the card table, neither breathed nor moved. The boots turned into his parents' bedroom. Lenny started shaking and, though terrified himself, Seeley was astonished to discover, peeking out from some corner of his soul, a spark of mischief, even glee, anticipating the roar of the dumb, confounded beast pawing through drawers of socks and underwear as he discovered that his gun was gone.
Drawers opened and slammed shut in the next room. Then, as Seeley expected, the mindless, anguished cry. Wo ist es? Wo ist mein Revolver?
The door to the boys' room swung open-the latch had broken long ago-and the massive figure, all chest and gut, a blown-up version of the boys' pantomime monster, crashed in, the fierce stench of alcohol filling the room. He didn't ask who took the gun. The bloodshot eyes that locked onto Seeley's announced that he had already been convicted of the theft. Wordlessly, his father ripped one drawer from Seeley's dresser, then another, flinging them against the wall, before doing the same with Lenny's. Ignoring Lenny, who was frozen in his chair, the monster seized the table by a leg and flipped it over. The wastebasket he flung against the wall, and black shards rained onto the floor. He didn't notice. Pants, shirts, jackets, followed by wire hangers flew from the closet. The monster again turned to Seeley and glared at him.
To avoid the man's gaze, Seeley's eyes swept past Lenny and the telltale closet, fixing instead on the ocean scene that decorated the wallpaper directly opposite his bed. Against a blue-gray ground, horizontal rows of sailboats alternated with parallel rows of tropical fish. The sailboats were the same color as the sea, separated only by a thin red outline tracing the hull and sails. The fish bore pastel stripes and spots, but, like the boats, were otherwise transparent to the color of the sea. Improbably, the fish were three times the size of the boats. The gross unreality of the images cemented Seeley's terror, as if the fact that these forms could coexist on his bedroom wall implied that any horror was possible; that in this house so rarely visited by outsiders, anything could happen.
The gun's discovery was inevitable. The house was too small, the furnishings too spare, to hide the smallest secret from this man's rage. As if reading Seeley's thoughts, his father swung back to the closet. For an instant, the single swiping movement of his boot threw him off balance but then shoes and sneakers hurtled out into the room. Bracing his bulk against the doorframe, the man leaned in and brought out the squat glass jar. He twisted off the top and, staggering across the room, emptied the jar onto the foot of Seeley's bed. Propped against a pillow, Seeley watched as his father pawed the coins, quickly uncovering the revolver. With a startling delicacy, he lifted the gun so that the scarred weapon rested in his palms. He could have been cradling some small injured animal.
Beneath Seeley's pounding blood, the perverse sense of mischief peered out again, taunting. “ Lo thar,” Seeley said. His brother shot him a horror-stricken look. “ Lo thar,” Seeley said again.
If his father heard, he gave no sign. “This is what you do to my possessions?” The voice was heavy with alcohol. “The man, your father, who gives you a roof over your head”-he aimed a thick finger at the ceiling-“who feeds you? This is how you repay me? Dolchstoss! A stab in the back!”
A hand the size of a baseball mitt seized Seeley by the collar, and he didn't resist when it pulled him off the bed, onto his feet. The fl at of his father's hand propelled him through the door and down the narrow hallway, the tip of the gun barrel pressed into Seeley's skull, behind his ear. Lenny remained in the bedroom. He must have pried himself from the chair because Seeley heard the door close behind him.
“Let's show your mother what a fine son she bore me.” They were in the kitchen, where Seeley's mother had pressed herself against the far wall. On the stove, a pot boiled violently and the evening's dinner congealed in its roasting pan. As in the bedroom, the raw smell of alcohol filled the room. Formerly a student of wallpaper, Seeley now fixed on the television screen. Two women his mother's age, but elegantly dressed, chatted amiably in a stage-set living room.
Seeley's father cried out, “This is the ungrateful monster you raised.” He threw Seeley against the stove, and brought the gun up to his son's face. “How are you going to pay for this?”
Inside Seeley, the snapping spark of mischief fired into something fiercer. His eyes, when they caught his father's, turned defiant. As if on its own, his hand shot up and in a single swift motion seized the gun. His other hand, clenched into a fist, swung forward, striking his father high on the jaw. Seeley felt every whisker of the man's stubble. As much from surprise as from the force of the blow, his father dropped in an instant, crashing onto the floor, blood pouring from his nose. Seeley stood above the sprawling figure, his heart throbbing, but holding the gun steady with both hands. He aimed at his father's heaving chest. He heard himself shouting, “What kind of bully threatens his family with a gun? What kind of coward does that?”
His mother came away from the wall. “Don't speak to your father like that! You put that gun away and apologize this instant!”
Squeeze the trigger. Seeley remembered the seasoned cop instructing the rookie on some long-ago television show. Squeeze, don't pull. Seeley tasted metal at the back of his mouth. Carefully, he pointed the barrel toward where he imagined his father's heart would be, inches from the center of the man's chest. He squeezed. Nothing happened; the trigger, locked by the safety catch, failed to move.
His father lay motionless, the blood now bubbling from his nostrils onto the linoleum. Seeley's mother came away from the wall and grabbed for the gun, but Seeley caught her by the wrist, wrenching her arm upward. An emotion flashed behind her pale eyes that Seeley had seen before, but this time he didn't know whether it was hatred or fear, or both. Her look stopped him as he realized what he had almost done. He had never struck his father before nor stopped his mother from striking him. Now everything had changed in an instant. He felt an overwhelming sense of relief, but at the same time he understood that when he seized the gun, when he aimed it at his father, when he squeezed the trigger, he had crossed a line from which retreat was impossible. He could no longer live in his parents' house.
Seeley took a room that night at the downtown Y and for the remaining years of high school he shuttled between the Y and couches in his teammates' homes. He went to a local college, Canisius, on an athletic scholarship and took a one-room apartment off Chippewa Street, downtown, supporting himself from tutoring and part-time jobs. He did much the same when he left Buffalo to go to Harvard for law school.
Thirty-two years later, adjusting the heater vent in the rental car, Seeley could still smell the fumes of his father's alcohol. He could see the four of them frozen there in that afflicted house: him holding his mother's arm aloft, as if he were a referee and she a victorious prizefighter, her mouth locked in a wordless O; his father, sprawled dumbstruck and bleeding on the linoleum floor; and Lenny hiding in the bedroom behind the closed door. It was at that moment, Seeley now remembered, that a burst of canned laughter exploded from the television.