‘I’ll tell you what he left,’ she said as they started up Broad Street Hill. Bobby already wished he hadn’t asked, but of course it was too late now. Once you got her started, you couldn’t get her stopped, that was the thing. ‘He left a life insurance policy which lapsed the year before he died. Little did I know that until he was gone and everyone — including the undertaker — wanted their little piece of what I didn’t have. He also left a large stack of unpaid bills, which I have now pretty much taken care of — people have been very understanding of my situation, Mr Biderman in particular, and I’ll never say they haven’t been.’
All this was old stuff, as boring as it was bitter, but then she told Bobby something new.
‘Your father,’ she said as they approached the apartment house which stood halfway up Broad Street Hill, ‘never met an inside straight he didn’t like.’
‘What’s an inside straight, Mom?’
‘Never mind. But I’ll tell you one thing, Bobby-O: you don’t ever want to let me catch you playing cards for money. I’ve had enough of that to last me a lifetime.’
Bobby wanted to enquire further, but knew better; more questions were apt to set off a tirade. It occurred to him that perhaps the movie, which had been about unhappy husbands and wives, had upset her in some way he could not, as a mere kid, understand. He would ask his friend John Sullivan about inside straights at school on Monday. Bobby thought it was poker, but wasn’t completely sure.
‘There are places in Bridgeport that take men’s money,’ she said as they neared the apartment house where they lived. ‘Foolish men go to them. Foolish men make messes, and it’s usually the women of the world that have to clean them up later on. Well . . . ‘
Bobby knew what was coming next; it was his mother’s all-time favorite.
‘Life isn’t fair,’ said Liz Garfield as she took out her housekey and prepared to unlock the door of 149 Broad Street in the town of Harwich, Connecticut. It was April of 1960, the night breathed spring perfume, and standing beside her was a skinny boy with his dead father’s risky red hair. She hardly ever touched his hair; on the infrequent occasions when she caressed him, it was usually his arm or his cheek which she touched.
‘Life isn’t fair,’ she repeated. She opened the door and they went in.
It was true that his mother had not been treated like a princess, and it was certainly too bad that her husband had expired on a linoleum floor in an empty house at the age of thirty-six, but Bobby sometimes thought that things could have been worse. There might have been two kids instead of just one, for instance. Or three. Hell, even four.
Or suppose she had to work some really hard job to support the two of them? Sully’s mom worked at the Tip-Top Bakery downtown, and during the weeks when she had to light the ovens, Sully-John and his two older brothers hardly even saw her. Also Bobby had observed the women who came filing out of the Peerless Shoe Company when the three o’clock whistle blew (he himself got out of school at two-thirty), women who all seemed way too skinny or way too fat, women with pale faces and fingers stained a dreadful old-blood color, women with downcast eyes who carried their work-shoes and -pants in Total Grocery shopping bags.
Last fall he’d seen men and women picking apples outside of town when he went to a church
fair with Mrs Gerber and Carol and little Ian (who Carol always called Ian-the-Snot). When he asked about them Mrs Gerber said they were migrants, just like some kinds of birds —
always on the move, picking whatever crops had just come ripe. Bobby’s mother could have been one of those, but she wasn’t.
What she was was Mr Donald Biderman’s secretary at Home Town Real Estate, the company Bobby’s dad had been working for when he had his heart attack. Bobby guessed she might first have gotten the job because Donald Biderman liked Randall and felt sorry for her