The Blue Suit
Mom shakes me awake, her hand on my chest. “Danny.”
I open my eyes. I’m surprised the sky is dark outside the high windows in the back bedroom. Mom is dressed for the day.
I smell of Vicks menthol ointment, which Mom rubbed on my chest last night. My nose is stuffy and it’s hard to breathe. When I swallow my throat hurts and my eyes get sticky in the night time and feel like they’re glued shut when I wake up in the morning. I have a cotton cloth—one of Samantha’s clean diapers—pinned to the inside of my pajama top. It’s supposed to keep the Vicks from staining everything, Mom explained, but the diaper makes me feel like a baby and I hate it. I still have to keep it on, though, since Mom’s mainly the boss around here. She has let me stay home from first grade for two days in a row because I’m sick.
“Danny, honey, your father passed away last night,” Mom says. She puts her hand on my cheek.
Why is Mom waking me up to tell me this? Why is she sitting on the side of my bed while it’s still dark outside? And what exactly is passed away? I think it must be something like passed out, and that’s not good, especially since he’s been sick, too. I mean really sick. I know because a few days ago the ambulance came to our house and took him out on a stretcher. I wondered at the time why he didn’t just walk to the ambulance and ride to the hospital with the driver and his helper, but it was night time and I guess he was too tired. I didn’t like the way some of the neighbors stood around on the sidewalk and watched and whispered, with their heads tilted towards each other. It made me feel funny. The blue light on the ambulance kept blinking over and over and I wished somebody would turn it off.
Mom’s not crying but has a strange look on her face, mad and sad at the same time. Maybe she doesn’t understand. I think I need to tell her that all the cowboys who get knocked out on TV and in the movies wake up in a minute or two, so I do. She begins to cry and I know it’s my fault, but I don’t know what I’ve done to make her sadder than she already was. I tell her I’m sorry.
She brushes the hair away from my eyes with her fingers. “Go back to sleep, honey.”
* * *
It’s light outside when I wake up again, so I get up and slip out of my pajamas and put on my brown corduroys and my long-sleeve blue pullover shirt. I unpin the sticky Vicks cloth from my ‘jama top and throw it on the bed and skip through the hallway to the kitchen. I’ve decided that skipping is a really fast way to get from one spot to another. It’s not as boring as walking. Mom and Jake, my older brother, are sitting together at the breakfast table. Jake isn’t looking at Mom, he’s picking at the old tablecloth, Mom calls it oilcloth, and it’s flaking a little bit and pieces fall on the floor. I think he must be mad at her. Where’s Jeannie, I wonder, because she’s the one I see most of the time sitting here with Mom. Samantha must still be sleeping. She’s tiny and sleeps a lot. It’s warm in the kitchen. The stove is on and something is baking and there’s a sweet cinnamon smell that I love, but the linoleum is cold on my bare feet. Mom is drinking coffee. The coffee smells nasty to me, bitter, and it ruins the cinnamon smell in the warm air.
“Go put your shoes and socks on,” Mom says.
I don’t mind because I know how to tie my own shoelaces. Jake and Jeannie taught me. Well, Jeannie, really, cause Jake called me stupid after a little while but Jeannie just kept showing me until I understood. When I return to the kitchen Jake’s gone and Mom motions with her fingers for me to come to her. Her eyes are red. It worries me because I don’t know what’s going on, but I walk over to her and wait. “Daddy died last night at the hospital,” she says, and she leans over in her chair and pulls me to her in a kind of bear hug.
I understand died. But I don’t understand why.
“He won’t be coming home anymore, Danny.”
“I know,” I say.
“He’s in heaven.”
Heaven. I don’t want him in heaven, I want him here. In my mind I say the most horrible words I can think of about heaven, words I’ve heard Jake and the older kids on Mulberry Street say that I know are nasty. Shit on heaven, I think, though I know I can’t say it out loud. But I feel mean, and bad, because I know heaven is supposed to be a good place, fluffy and pretty up in the clouds where everybody’s happy, and I wonder if I’ll ever be able to get there with Daddy since I’ve said those words.
I like my daddy a lot. He’s a nice man and rides me on his shoulders and I know he’ll never drop me. When he carried me out of Mass at St. Elizabeth’s one time for crying, he didn’t spank me. I could smell the Old Spice he used when he shaved, and after I stopped crying we took a long walk around the block and talked about everything. He said he was going to make fried chicken for our Sunday dinner. I love Daddy’s fried chicken. He held my hand on the way back and we went into the bakery next to church, where he bought me a powdered doughnut.
“Come back here and have some cereal,” Mom says.
* * *
When Aunt Mary arrives it’s close to lunch time. I’m hungry, but I can’t find Mom. I haven’t seen Jeannie all morning and wonder if she knows about Daddy. Jake knows, I think, from the frown on his face this morning in the kitchen. If I see Jeannie, I’ll tell her. Samantha doesn’t understand anything yet. She doesn’t even talk.
I find bread in the bread box and drag a chair across the floor so I can climb on the kitchen counter to reach the peanut butter and jelly in the cabinet. I make a sandwich, pour myself a glass of milk without spilling any, and sit at the kitchen table and eat. I wonder where everyone is. Aunt Mary seems fidgety, kind of like a honey bee when he’s buzzing around in the clover, going from one little flower to another. She hurries back and forth between the dining room and Mom and Dad’s bedroom. From where I’m sitting I can see her shadow moving and crooked across from the window seat in the dining room.
I start thinking about Daddy and I remember it was maybe a week ago, or a month, maybe, that he took me with him to George Rogers Clark Park. Just the two of us. I liked it because most of the time Jake and Jeannie hog all the attention. Samantha, too, because she cries a lot and Mom or Dad leaves right in the middle of Old Maid or a story I’m reading to them and they go to her. Daddy showed me some little trees when we were at the park, brand new this year, not even as old as Samantha, he said, and he found a stick and dug one of the trees up and we brought it home with us, and I can still see the little clumps of dirt holding on to the tiny roots, and we went into our back yard and found a spade and planted the tree on our side of the fence that runs beside Mister Heimerdinger’s garage, and Daddy got a tomato stick from our basement and hammered it in the ground next to the sapling—he called it a maple sapling—so no one would run over it with the lawn mower, it was so little.
“Take care of the tree, Danny,” he told me. “Water it if it’s thirsty. Tie it up to the stake if a storm knocks it down. It might need your help.”
I promised I would. I carry water in my sand bucket to it almost every day.
* * *
I finish my sandwich and milk and wander into the dining room. It’s a big room with a table and six chairs, a china cabinet against one wall, a buffet—Jeannie taught me that word, she says it’s a word from France, a country really far away, and I like the way it sounds—a buffet against another wall, and across from it a window seat under a row of three windows. We eat supper here every night. The television sits in a corner of the dining room. I know why it’s here.
About two weeks ago, I’d gotten up to go to the bathroom, and on my way back down the hallway to my bedroom I saw some flashing lights on the wall of the living room. Almost like someone was taking pictures with a flash bulb in the camera, over and over, really fast, only not so bright. It scared me a little because I could hear something, kind of like someone mumbling, and I didn’t know what it was. Tiptoeing through the dining room, I peeped around the corner into the living room. There, lying in the middle of the floor, was my brother Jake. I looked at the clock on the wall. Eleven forty-five. I am good at telling time; Jeannie taught me. My bedtime was nine, though, and I knew Jake got to stay up to ten because he was five years older than me. He was sneaking a late-night movie.
“I’m telling,” I said.
I saw his shoulders jerk a little bit, but he didn’t act mad or anything. He looked at me and shrugged. Then, as if offering to share a secret, he said, “Com’ere,” and nodded his head in that direction.
“What?” I asked when I was next to him.
“Charlie Chan and the Mystery of the Living Mummies,” he whispered in a scary kind of way.
Charlie Chan. I loved Charlie Chan and his honorable sons. “Is it any good?”
“You want to watch it with me? You can, but you have to be really quiet.”
I agreed, and we’d been watching for about ten or fifteen minutes when Charlie and one of his sons found themselves in a dungeon lit by torches and occupied by mummies who were supposed to be dead, but Jake and I both knew they weren’t, and Charlie and his son were slowly walking into a trap, and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it, and right when they were in the worst danger, and the music was really spooky, Jake grabbed my leg and whispered, but it was a loud whisper, “Boo” into my ear, and I screamed.
“Shit,” Jake said. “You’re such a little turd. Now you’ve done it.” And he was right. Mom was in the room almost right away and started fussing with Jake, threatening him if he didn’t get up on time for school the next morning. She shooed me off to bed without a word, but I knew I’d hear plenty from Jake the next time she wasn’t around. He got me with a mean look before I turned for my bedroom.
When I came home from school the next afternoon, the TV was in the dining room, where it would be easy for Mom to hear from her bedroom door at the end of the hall. I knew exactly why she did it, and I blamed Jake. It looked silly there, and I figured that watching wouldn’t be as much fun, either, because I wouldn’t anymore be able to stretch out on the floor with the shag carpet beneath me, a fluffy pillow from the sofa under my head.
Now, as I look in the living room for someone, anyone, I hear noises in the hall. I come back through the big doors between the two rooms, open almost always, and watch Aunt Mary as she puts a little leather suitcase on the dining room table. I go to her and give her a hug around her waist. She’s my favorite aunt.
“How are you doing, sweetie?” she says.
I tell her I’m fine and ask her if she knows where Jeannie is. Then it dawns on me that Jeannie might be at school. I’ve lost count of the days. Is it Friday or Saturday?
“Jeannie’s at church. She’s doing the Stations of the Cross, Danny. She’s praying for your daddy.” She watches me like she’s trying to figure out if I understand. “She’ll be home soon.”
I wonder why Jeannie is praying for Daddy. Does she want him to come back home? When I see her I’ll explain that he won’t be coming home again. But Jeannie is ten, and pretty smart, and I bite on my lip because I don’t really know why she’s praying for Daddy.
Then I remember something Sister Ignatius said. She got it, I think, from the catechism at St. Elizabeth Parochial School. She told us about the Catholic Church, about the one true faith, about how lucky we are to be members of Christ’s flock, a special group of people, she said, about how the poor people who aren’t Catholics can’t get to heaven, and I remember knowing she was wrong because my daddy wasn’t a Catholic, even though he sometimes went to church with us on Sundays or Holy Days of Obligation like Christmas or Easter. I remember Mom explaining that Daddy was a Presbyterian, which is kind of different from a Catholic according to Mom, but not very different, and I knew
Sister Ignatius was wrong about those people she called non-Catholics. I felt a little bit sorry for her because she was a grown-up and should’ve known about people like my daddy who are really, really nice, but she didn’t, and I was too shy to tell her, though I hoped at the time that she would find out her mistake so she wouldn’t keep making it over and over again. But I was a little bit mad, too, because I knew that everyone wants to get to heaven, and who was Sister Ignatius to say that my daddy couldn’t go.
I turn on the TV but can’t find anything good, though I keep switching back and forth between Channel 3 and Channel 11, so I turn it off and begin looking for the ball and jacks, which I’m pretty good at. When I go back into the living room, Jake is lying on the sofa doing nothing, just staring, and I ask him where the jacks are, but he’s still in a bad mood and he just shrugs without even looking at me.
I think I remember the jacks are in a cigar box we keep in the bottom of the buffet, and on my way to the dining room I see that Mom and Aunt Mary, who’s my daddy’s sister, are talking at the table. I wonder where Mom has been, and I’m surprised that Aunt Mary is holding Daddy’s suit coat in her hands, so I stop and watch. She holds the shoulders of the coat like she’s going to put it on someone, and then she brings the coat against the front of her body and hugs it to her. Her head is tilted to the side, and she takes a deep breath through her nose, like she’s smelling the sweet smell of a flower. Still holding the coat to her with one hand, she pets the sleeve with the other hand almost like it’s a cat, and she stops for a minute to pick away a speck of lint before she folds the jacket
into the suitcase on the table.
“How come you’re taking Daddy’s coat?” I ask. It’s the coat to his blue suit, my favorite, and I don’t want anything to happen to it. And then I add, “Daddy’s dead,” thinking someone has forgotten to tell my aunt, and I feel good, like a grown-up, that I’ve told her something important that she needs to know.
Aunt Mary’s fingers tremble at the cuff of the coat. She looks at me for what seems like a long time without answering, and then she sobs, her hand at her forehead, her head bowed like she’s praying.
I search my mother’s eyes. Mom reaches to me, her hand on my cheek, but as I drift to her, she looks past me, her fingers lift away, and I feel a space between us grow.
A hand jerks my shoulder back, slides to my arm, and I’m surprised to see Jake staring down at me, and he’s hot and mad as he pulls me into the darkness of the hallway, away from their eyes, which seem broken, like a saucer that’s been dropped. He’s not hurting me, but his hand is tight around my arm, and now he pushes me, pretty hard, against the wall near the door of my bedroom, like I’m a gangster or a crook.
“What?” I say. “What?” I’ve never seen him like this. He looks like he hates me.
“Listen to me,” he says. The deepness of his voice makes me afraid, and I try to look away from his stare. He grabs me across my mouth, his thumb on one cheek and his fingers on the other, and makes me look at him.
I don’t want to cry but I think I’m going to.
“Just keep your goddamn mouth shut,” Jake whispers furiously.
I nod.
And I do that.