City of the Dead

By William Theodore Clemmons

Donald Fordyce is a married, rising business executive when his brother, Albert, approaches him with a problem. Albert Fordyce has had a difficult and violent life. He has always turned to Donald when he got into trouble. Albert explains that he has fallen in love with an alluring, mysterious woman from New Orleans named Karen Clarke. According to Albert, a former boyfriend of Karen's named Nelson Salzburg, is bothering her. Donald agrees to meet with Karen to see if he can help. When Donald meets Karen, the real problems begin. Donald falls in love with Karen and they secretly begin to see each other. As the emotions of love, passion, fear, and betrayal grow, so does the danger. But whom among these four will pay the price?

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Theodore Clemmons
• Release date: Aug 6, 2014

William Theodore Clemmons

Very little is known about William Theodore Clemmons. Many people believe he does not exist at all.

Book preview

City of the Dead - Part One: Acheron

The worst part of all was that even though I had been walking ever since I had left the house on Grayton and had had a lot of time to try to figure it out all out, I still could not. It seemed that whenever I got close to understanding what went wrong, something was always missing. It was like I was trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what it was supposed to look like when it was finished. I had all the pieces, sure, and to tell the truth I had a pretty good idea of what the picture was. But something was always missing.

When I left the house on Grayton, I knew I might walk a long time. I had only an ill-formed idea of where to go. I thought that while I was searching I would be able to sort through the whole story so that by the time I found her, I would understand it all. When I found Karen and released her from her restless wanderings, everything would be complete. But that had not happened. I had not yet found her, and I had not figured out the story either. I reasoned that if I just started at the beginning and thought through the story, it would make sense, as if there were something about what had happened that would force a structure onto itself. But I was scarcely on the road a day or two while I was still walking through the abandoned neighborhoods, but before I entered the forest, when I realized that I didn’t know where to start. I no more knew the ending of the story than I did its beginning. So instead, I just kept thinking and remembering. All the while, I had the sense that if I could just find the missing piece, the one thing I no longer could remember, then the whole story would make sense.

I kept telling myself that the easiest way to tell the story was to start at the start. But what was the start of this story? The day I was born? The day Albert was born? The day Albert came to see me, agitated, telling me about some woman named Karen Clarke that he had met? Albert was always meeting women. How was I supposed to know that there was anything different about this one? Was that the beginning? The day I met Karen? It sure seemed like the beginning of everything that mattered when I met her. But the more I thought about it, the more that seemed like the middle, or maybe the end. But if that was the end, then what about everything that happened after that? I realized that maybe there was no end yet because I had not yet found her again. But there had to be a beginning somewhere.

* * *

Since the day Albert did that terrible thing, everything seemed to me to have happened a long time ago. When I tried to look back and think about what life had been for Albert and me before any of this happened, all I could remember were just bits and pieces. Walking past the empty houses and abandoned cars, it occurred to me that Albert and I had spent thousands of days together growing up in that little house on Woodhall. There were just the two brothers in our family. Most of the kids we knew back then had much larger families. The Yaksich family who lived down at the corner of Cornwall had seven kids. Six girls and Stan. But our parents apparently had given up after Albert came along in February of 1965. I was already seven years old when Albert was born. I had gotten accustomed to being the only child, even though it did not mean privilege or anything. Both our parents worked, and that was odd also. Back then, most of the women in the neighborhood were like Mrs. Yaksich. They stayed at home while their husbands went to work in factories. But not our mother. She worked for the State of Michigan in the Department of Education. Both our parents worked for the State. Our father worked for the Department of Agriculture. That always struck me as odd, given that we lived in Detroit and there could not have been a farm within forty miles. I remember asking him once if he worked on a farm, and if so why he left for work each day wearing a suit and tie. He looked at me as if I had asked a very important question. After a moment, he explained that he did not work on a farm and that the Department of Agriculture did a lot more than help people with farms. He left it at that, as if I understood completely.

I remember that both he and my mother had to wear identification badges when they went to work. When they came home at night, they would put the badges on a little shelf near the back door. Their car keys hung from little hooks on the bottom of the shelf. I remember looking at the badges. They both had pictures of my parents, looking as if the photographer had just given them bad news. Their names were printed out in block letters over some sort of official seal: Henry Fordyce on his, and Emily Sumach Fordyce on hers. Even though my father’s name was Henry, everybody called him Hal. I never heard my mother use her middle name. I learned later that it was her maiden name. She put it on her driver’s license and on her identification badge, but she always said her name was Emily Fordyce.

Back in the days before Albert came along, when there were just the three of us, Hal, Emily, and me, Donald, I used to wonder about these other lives my parents seemed to have. I knew who they were at home. They were just Mom and Dad. But apparently, when they went off each day all dressed up and wearing badges, they became somebody else. I used to think that being able to wear a badge with your name on it would mean that you had become somebody important. I even made a badge for myself to wear to school when I first started. I copied the one my father wore, and it was rather elaborate. I think I only wore it for a day or so until I realized that I was making a fool of myself. The next time I got a badge to wear was when I went to work for Detroit Edison. The people in personnel took my picture and affixed it to a seal and made a badge. I had to wear that to work every day after that. Riding alone in an elevator up to my office one day, I saw myself in the dull reflection of the mirror and saw the badge. I did not look anything like the picture on the badge, but then I did not look anything like my reflection either.

It seemed to me that the world was much larger when I was a kid. My parents weren’t just going off to work; they were going off to a whole other world. They would be gone all day, and I had no idea where they went. I used to imagine that they were in very interesting places, doing very interesting things. I could imagine my father on great adventures, but I always had trouble imagining my mother doing anything interesting. Later, when Edison promoted me to be Director of Customer Service, I worked in an office building that was only a mile or so from my father’s old office in Southfield. I drove by it most days on my way home, and it always struck me as a typical government building, nondescript to begin with, probably built by the lowest bidder. A lack of maintenance had made it even worse over time. It was so much different than what I thought of when I imagined my father going off to work. I used to think he worked somewhere special. Once I realized he had gone off all those mornings to come to a run-down office building on a crowded corner in a suburb, I wondered why he did it.

Even after I found out that my father did not work on a farm, I still imagined that he was doing something important at the Department of Agriculture. Farming was so foreign to the life I was living in a small house on a crowded street in the city of Detroit that I could not say what something important in agriculture might be. I never asked my father what it was he did all day at work. Albert did, though. One day when Albert was around ten, he got mad at my parents for something. I can’t remember now what it was. I’m sure, though, that it involved something he wanted to do that they wouldn’t let him. Almost from the time Albert was old enough to walk and talk, he wanted to do things that my parents did not want him to do. It seemed to me that Albert had skipped right through those years that any parent looks forward to, that early time in life when a child is compliant and accepts whatever his parents tell him. But Albert seemed to have been born a rebellious teenager. When he was just a toddler and the four of us would go someplace, say to the grocery store on a Saturday morning, Albert would have his own ideas about where he wanted to go. And it wasn’t just to the aisle where they kept candy or plastic toys. Albert would take off as soon as we got into the store and race around. If my mother or father tried to bring him back to walk alongside me by the cart that my mother was slowly filling with those few items she thought worthy of paying for, he would get angry. I couldn’t understand even then why a young boy, say three or four, would be mad that his father was dragging him out of the cereal aisle. Once, the Farmer Jack’s grocery store where we used to go put in a fish tank. They had all kinds of fish swimming around it, and not those little brightly colored ones that you find in fish tanks in offices. These were big fish, like in an aquarium. When we went to the store, Albert used to go and stand in front of the tank and watch the fish swim around. Of course, they couldn’t get very far before they would have to turn up or down or side to side. One day when I found Albert in front of the tank, we saw the butcher reach in with a plastic net and pull one of the fish out. He showed it to some woman, holding it with one thick hand while the fish thrashed in the air. When she nodded, he put it down on a chopping block behind the display cases and cut off its head. Albert said something I didn’t understand, but it was clear he had enjoyed the display. We were still standing there when my mother found us and dragged us off. Albert begged my mother to buy a fish, but she was not listening.

But Albert didn’t need fish or anything else animated to entertain him. Like I said, he could wander in the cereal aisle or in the shadow of a display of cans of canned tomatoes. He couldn’t even read then, so it was not like he was comparing one brand of tomatoes to another. It was more like he just needed to be on his own and moving, no matter what. At first my mother or father would go find him once they noticed he was not with the three of us, walking slowly down an aisle as my mother compared the offerings to see which one she wanted. I always stood right by the cart, no matter how long it took for my mother to decide that one box of spaghetti noodles was somehow superior to another. My father always stood there, too, not saying a word. But Albert did not.

After a few years of this, my parents gave up trying to keep Albert with us. They would let him wander all around the store. Albert got used to this and started looking forward to going to the Farmer Jack’s. Sometimes I used to get the urge to do the same thing, just to break free from the slow march up and down each aisle at the side of the rarely moving cart. But I never did. If we did not see Albert for a long time, I would go look for him. It would bother me after a while if I did not know where he was. I used to imagine all the trouble he could get in, wandering around a supermarket by himself. As we walked along, I used to listen to all the announcements coming over the small speakers in the ceiling of the store. They were all the same thing, a request for a manager to go to the front or a check on the price of some item at register four. But I listened to them all, waiting for the announcement about the lost boy who had been injured playing with the butcher’s knives.

More than once, some woman would find Albert wandering around the store and take an interest in him. When they did, these women would always drag Albert around the store until they found a clerk or a manager who would lean into the nearest microphone, usually by one of the check out aisles, and announce they had a lost boy at the front of the store. As often as we went to that Farmer Jack’s, and as often as some woman brought Albert forward as a lost child, I would have thought the clerks would have stopped classifying him as lost. But they never did. When the announcement was made, my mother and father would look at each other, silently deciding who needed to go and redeem their wandering child. Sometimes they would let me go. In fact, most times I would go. I was more than seven years older than he, and I guess they figured that was good enough for me to go and fetch him back. The funny thing was, every time some woman would find Albert and bring him to the manager, she was always pretty. I was only ten or eleven back then, but even without knowing why I could tell there was something about these woman, something important but distant. I think maybe Albert understood that himself back then. He certainly understood it sooner and better than I did later when we were both grown up. Half the time when I would claim Albert, the woman who had him acted disappointed to see him go. They couldn’t let him wander away in my company without squeezing him or giving him a kiss on his cheeks or on his forehead.

Anyway, one day Albert asked our father what he did at work. I happened to be nearby, and I stopped to hear the answer. I tried to imagine what our father was going to say, guessing it involved animals like cows and pigs or maybe fields of crops like corn. But after a pause, our father told Albert that he gave licensing exams. I nodded as though that meant something, but in truth I had no idea what my father had just said. I was willing to let it go, but Albert looked at our father and asked him again what he did, as if our father had not answered at all.

Well, our father said, pausing as if to think of the best way to explain something complicated. Say you want to go into business, say you want to run a pet shop. Or maybe you want to be an exterminator. Or perhaps you want to buy and sell milk. Or sell food, even, from a booth or some other location. Well, you cannot do any of these things unless you have a license. And you can’t get the license from the State unless you pass an examination. Well, I am the person that gives those examinations.

Even though he was not talking to me, I nodded. Albert looked at our father as if he had just turned into some other person. When I left the room, Albert was still pestering our father about what he did at work. I had the impression that Albert was going to repeat his question until he got our father to admit that he was really a super hero or a spy who pretended to give tests to people who wanted to kill bugs for a living. But I knew our father better than that. He had more patience than Albert ever did, and he would be content to repeat his job description over and over until Albert gave up. That never took very long because even as a child Albert could never concentrate on any one thing for very long.

I think that’s why he had so much trouble in school. When Albert got bored with something, he would just give up. In school, though, they would not let him wander around like our parents did in the grocery store.

* * *

It was Albert’s trouble at school that got our mother’s attention. She worked for the Department of Education, and she always insisted that I not only do well in school but that I make a good impression also. When I was just a child, even before I went off to kindergarten, she used to sit with me, trying to teach me things. I learned to read before I started school. I could do some basic math, like adding single digits together. She also taught me to tell time. She had a little plastic clock that she could move the hands around on. She would set the clock for three or nine-thirty and show it to me. It didn’t take long to figure out, though I would sometimes give her the wrong answer. I had learned along the way that I got more attention from her when I said the wrong thing. Right answers did not bring much notice. Because of all my mother’s attention, all the books she read to me, all the math we did together, I did real well in school. Sitting in a classroom all day learning things did not bother me. In fact, I enjoyed it and wished that we could learn more and do it faster. The teachers all loved me, and I could tell that my mother was pleased.

I was already in the third grade when Albert came along. I was sure that our mother was going to do all the same things for him that she had done for me. I knew she couldn’t teach him to read when he was still a baby, but I thought that once he was up and walking around and talking that she would pull out that plastic clock. But she never did. She did not teach him to read. She did not go over the flash cards with him, teaching him how to add all the numbers up to nine. I used to wonder why our mother had not done all that for Albert. But mostly I was happy that I knew something he did not. I remember that I used to ask him what time it was, knowing he could not tell. I would watch him struggle before making up some answer. Even then, Albert would not give up on a challenge. Most times I would correct his guesses, adding in just how dumb he was for not knowing. After a while, though, I stopped telling him the correct answer, figuring that it was better to hold certain knowledge over him. I think even then he hated being in that spot. But it was a pattern that was going to hold for a long time. Right until the end, actually.

It was for that reason that he came to me in the first place about Karen. Until now, I had never drawn the line that connected those two things. Maybe it was because I pretended to have some secret about time when Albert was just a boy that all those years later he came to me when he did not know what to do about Karen. I must have made such an impression on him when he was a baby that he thought I would always have the answer when he got stuck. If only he had known how it was going to turn out, he never would have come to me. If I had known how it was going to turn out, I never would have listened. I would have turned him away, told him that he had had plenty of problems with women before and that he had always done all right. I couldn’t help but speculate how all this would have turned out if I had just not listened when Albert came to me almost two years ago, back in September of 1999. If I had not listened to him, if I had turned him away, I would not be sitting at the edge of a river across from an abandoned factory, listening for the feral howling of a dog I could not see. But I also would not have my memories of her. And without my memories of Karen Clarke, none of the rest of my memories would matter. Without her, it was like all the events of my life were the billions of stars in the universe, suddenly freed of gravity and free to fly off randomly.

When I had left the house on Grayton two weeks ago, or whenever it was, to go find Karen, I had so many gaps in my memories that I could hardly remember most of what had happened. I tried to order my thoughts, thinking that if I recalled the story from the beginning, the missing pieces would return. But my thoughts were never chronological because I thought of her constantly. But unless I could understand what led up to what had happened, I was afraid it was never going to make sense, even if I did find her and free her. So I tried.

* * *

It seems to me now, looking back, that Albert was never going to do well in school. Like I said, Albert’s problem was that he couldn’t sit still. When I was just a child, our house was so quiet, it was like a mortuary. We had a television, but we rarely turned it on. Most of the time, my mother and father sat in their chairs on opposite sides of the small living room and read. My father preferred long books with hard covers, books about sailors going around the world or climbers going up tall mountains. When my father was reading one of his books, he would concentrate so hard that sometimes he seemed to disappear altogether. I used to think that if the house caught on fire, he might just sit there, turning pages, until he burned right up. When he got to the end of a chapter or paused for some reason, he would put the book down on the little table next to his chair and look up. It was as though the wall across from him had turned into a movie screen and he was watching the men he had just read about. It was only when he was finished watching that he would look around, acting as if he were startled to find himself back in a quiet living room in a small house in Detroit. After a moment or two, he would take up his book up and disappear back into it. If he was still at work or off somewhere else, I used to pick up his books to look at them, see what held his interest. I even tried reading the first few pages, but they were so long and so heavy that I could not even hold them up to read them.

My mother used to like to read, too. But she did not prefer long books about adventures on sea or land. She read a lot of shorter books, some of them hardly any longer than the books they took out of the library for me to read. She had a table next to her chair also. But while my father’s table was always neatly organized with his books on it, my mother used to stack hers up with books and magazines and even the mail she picked up at the base of the door after the mailman pushed it through the slot. My father could read for hours without reacting, but my mother was animated. If she read something she disagreed with, she would make a noise, a sort of disapproving cluck of her tongue. But she never said what it was that bothered her. We never asked either. I doubt that my father even heard her. If she read something that she agreed with, she would nod her head as if the author were standing before her, reading to her.

When I was a child, I never thought about the fact that my parents had a past. I just assumed that they were there because I was here. It seemed to me that they must have been born in the size and shape they were now and had not changed at all. But as I got older, I tried to find out more about them. I never learned much. Neither my mother nor my father had much to do with their relatives. A lot of kids in our neighborhood were always going off to see their aunts and uncles or their grandparents who lived in Ohio or Pennsylvania. One kid, Denny Achyl, who lived across the street and down three houses, used to have the biggest birthday parties. Denny was one year younger than I was, and we used to walk to school together sometimes. Denny’s parents were always entertaining. Every weekend, cars would be parked up and down Woodhall. I used to sit on our porch at dusk on Saturday, watching all the people going to Denny’s house. I think he got more visitors on one weekend than ever passed through our house in the entire time I lived there.

We did get guests, but not too often. I got cards from my two grandmothers on my birthday and on Christmas, but I can’t remember either one coming to the house on Woodhall more than a half-dozen times. Both of my grandfathers were dead by the time I was old enough to understand that such persons as grandfathers existed.

Once I was old enough to understand that my parents had been young once, I tried to understand more about their pasts. But it was hard to learn anything. Neither of them had much to say about what they had been like as they grew up. I knew some basics about them, like the names of their brothers and sisters. But that was about it. It was as if they had both escaped from something and now did not want to talk about it. I used to wonder about how they met. I tried to picture my father as young and in love, but I never could imagine him being so taken with desire for my mother that he would be willing to do anything, to risk anything to have her. But if that was not in him, not part of his make up, then where did I get it? Maybe my father was more like me as a young man, maybe he went along doing what he thought he was supposed to and never knew that there was any other choice. I’ll bet he felt about my mother the way that I felt about Judy when I met her. I don’t think my father ever felt about any woman what I felt for Karen. I know that he did not, because if he had everything would have changed.

I tried to think of how things would have been different for my father, but I couldn’t come up with anything. I realized that he had to fall in love with my mother and marry her. And once he was married to her, he had to stay married to her. Only so many men in this life will have something like what happened to me occur. That’s why my father was at home now, retired and reading a book. And that’s why I’m sitting here at the edge of a river that didn’t even used to exist. And that’s why what happened to Albert happened. If this sort of thing were more common, it would be chaos. There would be nobody to live in all those houses you pass by as you walk or drive to somewhere else. There would be nobody to work in those tall office buildings, no young women worrying about whether to wear their blue shoes or their black shoes, no men who started thinking about where they could go to lunch the minute they sat down behind their desk each morning. Nobody would go out and mow his lawn on Saturday, nobody would go to the grocery store on Friday night. If what happened to me happened to everybody, we would all be sitting along a river across from an abandoned factory, listening to the sound of a dog barking and trying to remember.

I knew a little about my father, but my mother was more of a mystery. I knew that her maiden name was Sumach because she turned that into her middle name after she married my father. I knew that she married my father at Assumption Grotto Church on June 12, 1954. I knew this because I found a wedding album when I was a kid. I found it one of those nights when my mother and father had gone to sleep while Albert was still out somewhere. While I waited for him to come home, I went into the basement and then into the storage room behind the water heater. I was so restless with worry that I had to do something. I am not sure what it was that I was looking for in the storage room. I think I had looked at everything else in the basement as I paced around, wondering where Albert could be at 2:30 in the morning. In an unlabeled box on the shelf nearest the cement floor, I found a thin photograph album that bore just a date as a label. It wasn’t until I opened the album that I realized that these were my parents’ wedding pictures. It took me only a few minutes to page through the album. There were no unusual shots, nothing that looked candid. Mostly, there were pictures of my parents posed in front of the church, and then inside. A few photographs showed just my mother standing in front of the trunk of a tall Maple tree, her hands clasped around a bouquet of flowers. There were no pictures of my father by himself. The last few photographs showed my father and mother standing in the middle of a few other people, all lined up in front of the church. Nobody looked particularly happy. My father looked serene, but then he always did. I looked around for more photographs, all the while listening for the sounds of Albert’s return, but I did not find any more. That did not surprise me; we hardly had any pictures around our house when I was a child.

When I married Judy all those years later, I was surprised by how many pictures the photographer took at our wedding. When he delivered the prints, it took us a week to sort through them. I was sure that Judy would order just a few, perhaps a group shot of our families and maybe a few of the better shots of the two of us. That would have made sense since we had so little money then. We had both just finished at Wayne State, and she was starting into graduate school at Wayne that fall. But she wanted to order them all. When I pointed out that it would cost several hundred dollars, money we didn’t have, she got mad. In the end, we bought all the pictures.

I remembered thinking that if we had saved more money on things like wedding photographs, we could have both gone to graduate school. Back then, I pushed ideas like that to the back of my mind as soon as they arrived. Maybe it was because I didn’t think it through then that it built up and got so bad later. Maybe if I had been more resentful and angry sooner, I would not have been so resentful and angry later. Maybe if I had taken up all these things with Judy right when it started, when I met with Karen at Albert’s insistence, nothing would have happened.

But then I knew that was not true. Everything was going to change the first time I saw Karen. Everything was going to change as surely as if my name and face had changed, as surely as if everything about me were erased and not replaced with anything. Something about her was so profound that I felt as though I were too insignificant even to be near her, as if only the stars that burned in the night were magnificent enough to be in her presence.

But then I told myself that when I left the house two weeks ago, or whenever it was, that I had to think about the events that had brought me here. I knew that if I allowed myself to think only of her, I would make myself mad before I had walked a mile. When I left the house on Grayton, I knew that I had to be prepared to walk forever. I knew only to search off Mack Avenue, and I could not go back and ask for more details or even a clarification. Nobody was still alive who could tell me more. To make it worse, I still could not remember much. I had hidden upstairs from the police for so long and then lived alone for so long that my brain was dull and unresponsive. So I told myself that I had to think of something else while I searched. So, sitting by the side of a river that does not appear on any map, Karen’s coin in one pocket and Albert’s letter in the other, I told myself once more that I had to concentrate. I had to tell this story so that it made sense. I knew that unless the story made sense, nothing else that followed was going to. I was sure that I had found what I had been looking for when I had left the house on Grayton, whenever that was, but now I saw that this was not enough.

I drew in a deep breath and let it go slowly. Somewhere off in the distance, I heard the dog barking. The unrestrained barking and howling was the first sign of life I had encountered as I walked ever deeper into the woods that had once been the city of Detroit, following the five rivers. I could not tell just how far away this dog was, but I could hear that he was unsettled by something.

I told myself to concentrate, to think about the past. My mind looked backwards over the years, trying to find a place to light. It was like flying in an airplane over mountains, only the peaks stood out. I suspected that what I needed to remember was not those few things that came readily to mind, but all of the details that were hidden among all those years that had come and were irretrievably gone. I decided that I would try to think about Albert when he was a child to see if there was something he had done or said back then that would have warned me of what was to come. When Albert was older, especially when he just about flunked out of Finney High School and had gone off to join the Army, there was plenty of notice that something was wrong. I had noticed earlier than that, but I had managed to ignore it. I had more reason to worry when Albert came home early from the Army, with no explanation. Maybe if I had looked into it further, maybe if I had paid more attention to what happened after Albert and Traci got married and moved out by the airport, I would have been more assertive when it came to Karen Clarke. Maybe I would have done more to protect her, maybe I would have insisted that we flee to Arizona much sooner.

When I realized I was thinking of Karen again, I forced myself to stop. It had only been a few moments since I decided to think about Albert when he was a child, and this line of thought had led right back to Karen. I had spent all this time walking through the city, deep into this new-growth forest that had come up where the abandoned neighborhoods had once been, the trees and bushes and flowers coming right up through the concrete and blacktop. I had managed to find what I was looking for. Now was not the time to lose my concentration. I was too close.

What I remembered most about Albert as a child was how he disrupted everything. When my mother came to me and told me that I was going to have a baby brother, I remember thinking that this meant trouble. Even my mother did not seem to be very enthused about this development. But then, my mother was never very enthused about anything. Maybe work. She would sit at the dinner table and tell my father in long monologues about how bad the Detroit Public Schools were and how if things did not change the entire system would collapse. She would tell him stories about how incompetent her co-workers were and how little they knew about education. My father always listened patiently. He never interrupted, and he never corrected or challenged her. I didn’t realize how hard that was until I tried to do it years and years later, listening to Judy telling me all of the things that Jennifer and Meghan had done and how much smarter they were than all of the other children. I used to think of my father sitting across from my mother and listening to her monologues, apparently paying attention. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized he was just pretending to listen, nodding when he was supposed to and saying, Yes now and again. But his thoughts were with the characters in whatever book he was reading at the time. His reactions and his interest were pretend. I wish I had realized that sooner so that I could have begun to practice that skill earlier in life.

Before Albert came along, it seemed to me that things made sense. There were just the three of us, and we were all alike. Anybody passing by our house on Woodhall might think that nobody lived there. My parents were at work all day, and I was in school. When we were home in the evenings or on the weekends, we mostly stayed indoors and read. Sometimes an entire Sunday might pass without anyone saying much of anything. The only time anyone ever said much was when my mother would get upset about work and tell my father about it. Otherwise, it was mostly quiet. My father rarely spent any time on the lawn. A lot of the fathers in the neighborhood made second careers out of mowing and trimming their lawns. The houses on Woodhall were quite small, and the lawns were even smaller. But a lot of men could spend an entire Saturday morning out there, working away. I could always tell it was Saturday because as soon as the sun was up, the lawn mowers came out. The sound of the mowers’ engines filled the neighborhood. The smell of freshly cut grass was everywhere. But my father would go out and push his old lawn mower around the small lawn once a month or so. And he never trimmed around the sidewalk or did any other detail work. When he was done mowing, he put the mower back into the garage and apparently didn’t think about it again until the grass was tall enough to wave in the wind, like some sort of crop. I’m sure that the other fathers thought that my father was lazy, but he didn’t seem to care. He only did enough around the house to keep it from falling down. The story that everybody in the neighborhood told was that Belgian immigrants had built the neighborhood and tried to make it look as much like a city in Belgium as possible. That probably explained why the houses were all so small and built on such narrow lots. I never did get to Belgium or anywhere else in Europe, for that matter, so I can’t tell if that story was accurate or not.

When Albert came along, he changed everything. I don’t know what I was like as a baby. I can’t remember it, of course, and nobody ever talked about it. But I couldn’t believe that I was like Albert. I had never seen an infant up close before my mother came home with Albert in February of 1965. I was seven years old then, and I think I was sure I knew everything. I expected that when Albert came to live with us he would be a curiosity, a small version of the rest of us. But I was mistaken. From the time he arrived in our house, it seemed as though he did not want to be there. When my mother brought him into the house and showed him to me, he was screaming. Not just crying, not just complaining a little about his change of scenery, but screaming. I was shocked that anything that small could make so much noise. My mother offered to let me hold him, but I backed away without saying a word. She never offered again after that. Years later, when Judy told me she was pregnant, after I got over the shock and anger - and that took a long, long time - I hoped for a girl. I remembered what Albert had been like as a baby, and I knew that I could not go through that. I figured that girls were quieter. As it turned out, I was right. Neither Jennifer nor Meghan ever carried on the way Albert did. I wonder now if any infant anywhere ever screamed and cried as much as Albert did. I never saw many babies other than my own because Judy did not want to associate with any other parents. But of the babies I did see, none of them acted the way Albert had.

I know that Albert disrupted my life. He never slept for more than a few hours at a time, either at night or during the day. He seemed to have a schedule that called for him to scream and cry for two hours and then sleep for two hours. This went on around the clock, with little variation. I thought that after a while his screaming would become just background noise, like the sound of the cars out on Warren Avenue. But Albert was like an opera singer with his screams. He could vary them in pitch and intensity and duration. I used to wonder if this was his secret language. If we could have interpreted what he was screaming, maybe we could have found out what was so wrong.

It seemed to me that somebody should be worried about Albert. I kept waiting for my mother to take him to the doctor to find out what was wrong, but she never did. She took him to see Dr. Caradonna at his office over on Moross, but only to get his shots. Dr. Caradonna was the same doctor that our mother took me to. I knew from experience that Dr. Caradonna was not going to do much. I don’t think he liked children. It may have been because he hadn’t been a child himself since the time World War I ended. My mother took me to see him once because my ears were infected. I remember that the pain and the pounding in my ears were so intense that I couldn’t hear, I couldn’t swallow. Every time my heart beat, it felt like an explosion deep inside my ears. Dr. Caradonna looked at me, put his hand on my forehead, looked disapprovingly at my mother for wasting his time, and sent us both home.

Even though I knew Dr. Caradonna would have little interest in why Albert cried all the time, I thought my mother or father might. But they seemed little interested. More than once, the three of us would be sitting around in the evening reading when Albert would start screaming. My father would look up to see if my mother was going to do anything. When he saw that she was not, he would go back to his story about an escape from a pirate ship. My mother did not even look up. Eventually, it fell to me to go in the back to look in on Albert. Each time, I would find him in his crib, curled up against the railing on one side or the other, his hands made into fists and his legs pulled up into his bottom. I used to stand there, listening to him scream, and wonder what it was he wanted. But I was just a child myself, and there was nothing I could do. I was sure that if I stayed in his room too long, my mother might come by on her way to the bathroom and see me there. She had yelled at me once or twice when she found me in his room. So, after a minute or two, and even though Albert was still screaming, I would leave him there, alone.

When Albert was just short of his first birthday, he finally stopped crying and screaming. The first time I noticed he was not screaming on schedule, I got up and went to check on him. I didn’t even pretend to be going somewhere else. I went directly into his room and looked at him. My first thought was that he had died. As I stood there, I could not see him breathing. When my father fell asleep on the couch, I could always see his chest rising and falling and I knew he was alive. But with little Albert, I could not see anything. I knew it was silly to think that he had just died, but at the same time it looked as though he had. I moved up closer and closer to his crib, something I rarely did out of fear that our mother would catch me there, and looked for some indication he was breathing. I was thinking of how I would explain this to our mother. She would think I had done it. She would think I had snuck into his room and smothered him with his pillow or his blanket. She would have to call the police and tell them how I was always going into Albert’s room, how I was fascinated by Albert. The police would have no one else to suspect. Of course, they would think I killed him. Babies don’t just die, and there I was in his room. My fear was turning into panic so rapidly that I began to lose my senses. But then it occurred to me that I was just a child and no one would think I had done it. If anyone was in trouble, it was my mother who had let Albert die this way, without even checking in on him. I knew just what I would say to the police, and I was sure they would believe me. They would believe me because I would say precisely what a child would say. At that moment, Albert rolled over and looked at me. At least I think he looked at me, he was probably still asleep, appearing content for the first time in his life.

After Albert ended his screaming, he seemed to become more normal. He learned to walk, and then to talk. It seemed to me he was a little slow to learn to speak. He had trouble pronouncing even ordinary words, and his progress was not steady. When he was at the age where he liked to babble, I would say things to him, simple phrases. He would seem to understand and even repeat them back to me. But then if I tried them again the next day, it was as if he had never heard the words before. When Jennifer was about a year and a half old and just learning to talk, I wondered if she would be the same way. But she wasn’t. Nor was Meghan. Judy had decided that both of them were gifted from the time they were born, and Judy constantly updated me on how smart they were, especially Jennifer. Maybe it was for that reason that I remember Jennifer learning to speak so well. Maybe Jennifer and Meghan were both more like Albert than I knew. Judy was not going to admit any such a thing, and she was not going to let me get close enough to either of them to find out for myself. But as for Albert, he was much better at learning to walk than learning to talk.

When Albert first got himself up on his two legs, leaning against the couch, he was unsteady. He would take a few steps and then plop back down. But he kept at it with a determination that surprised me. He seemed to approach learning to walk the same way an athlete would prepare for an event. I know it sounds improbable, but it looked to me as if he were practicing walking, learning from his mistakes, and then trying again. Whatever the explanation, he quickly became good at it. Once he knew how to walk and could get around without falling, he worked on running. He was funny to watch as he moved his little legs underneath him, churning away until they got out of sync and he fell. But he kept at it, and within months he could not only walk without falling, he could run. And when I say he could run, I mean that he could go about as fast as his legs would take him, a full-out sprint as it were. A lot of children at that age run by shifting their weight from side to side in an exaggerated wobble. But Albert was able to put one foot in front of the other and take large strides in whatever direction he chose. I thought then that he was going to be some kind of an athlete, an Olympic runner or a baseball player. I mentioned this to our father once, but he did not respond. So many years later when Albert was always in trouble, I wondered what became of that determination and discipline he had as a child.

Once Albert had learned to run, he never quit. I think that if nobody stopped him, he might have run out of the house, down to the sidewalk and taken off. He was fearless in that sense. If our parents took him somewhere new, like Balduck Park up on Warren near Moross, he could hardly wait to be set free so he could explore. He would twist and thrash as my father held him, demanding to be put down on the earth. I used to wonder why it was that Jennifer and Meghan were not like Albert, but then I realized that most kids are more like my own. New places and new people are intimidating, and children want to move very slowly. I think Jennifer and Meghan were more extreme than most children, and I blamed their mother for so shielding them from the world. I never said that to Judy, mind you. The last thing Judy ever wanted to hear from me was a suggestion about how to raise the girls. She simply could not stand to be criticized about even trivial matters. If I asked her to please stop leaving all the lights on in the basement all day when nobody was down there, she took it as a personal attack. I think that was why she wrapped herself up so completely in the lives of her two daughters; she thought they would never criticize her. I blame her father for being so hard on Judy and her sisters. He expected too much of them, although her sister Monica had done well. Maybe that was why Judy used to make fun of her, castigating Monica for all the choices she made. Personally, I liked Monica. I always did, right from the minute I met her.

* * *

When Albert was about four months old, my mother returned to work for the school system. That meant that Albert and I went back into the care of Mrs. Brovenschen. Mrs. Brovenschen was a widow who lived down the street from us. According to the story Mrs. Brovenschen told me one day, told me without me asking, Mr. Brovenschen was determined to work at Fisher Body until he had finished four decades there. He wanted to do this even though it would not increase his pension or otherwise benefit him. Mr. Brovenschen finished his fortieth year, put in his retirement papers and stopped going to work. Three weeks later, he died when he fell off the roof of his small garage out behind his house. He had been trying to repair the roof because it leaked when it rained. Mr. Brovenschen had finished putting down new tar paper and shingles and was sure his repair had taken. But then it stopped raining, so he couldn’t tell if he had fixed the leak or not. One afternoon when a storm came up, Mr. Brovenschen went out into the garage and saw a puddle on the cement, next to his car. He looked up and could see the water gathering along the ceiling of the garage and then dripping down. Knowing that his repair had failed, Mr. Brovenschen took out this wooden ladder and immediately went up on the roof, even though the storm was still blowing through. As soon as he found the place where the water was leaking in through the roof, a gust of wind came up and blew him off the slanted roof. He hit the large oak tree next to the garage before falling down to the earth. Mrs. Brovenschen found him there an hour later, after the storm was gone and the last sun of the day peered in under the retreating clouds. When Mrs. Brovenschen finished with this story, I had the impression she felt she had taught me a very important lesson. I nodded, hoping that I had signaled to her that I had gotten the message. It seemed to work.

I had been staying with Mrs. Brovenschen after school and during the summers for many years before Albert came along. My mother usually left for work later than my father, and she would make sure that I got on the school bus. When I got off the bus at the end of the day, I walked down to Mrs. Brovenschen’s house instead of going home. Around 5:30 or 6, when my father got home he would come down to get me. That was the pattern I followed every day that school was in session. During the summers, I would go directly to Mrs. Brovenschen’s house each day from Monday to Friday to stay there until my father came for me.

When I first started to stay with Mrs. Brovenschen, I was afraid of her. I was afraid of her even before I heard about how her husband had died. Thinking about her now, I couldn’t understand why it was that I would fear her. I guess I thought she was going to be mean to me. The first time I saw Mrs. Brovenschen, she reminded me of my father’s aunt Sophia. The two women looked similar; both were short and thin with dark hair that was turning grey. But Mrs. Brovenschen turned out to be different from Aunt Sophia. Aunt Sophia apparently did not like children. Maybe she did not like anyone. I only saw her a half-dozen times when I was a child, and each time I did I disliked her more. She would rarely say anything to me, and if I came to close to her she would glower at me as if I were trying to steal her purse or give her a disease. I heard her complaining to my father about me once, telling him that I was ill-behaved and that I needed to learn respect. I waited for my father to respond to her, but if he did say something I missed it. After that, I avoided her completely on those few occasions she visited. Before Albert was born, Aunt Sophia moved to Florida with another old woman, somebody I never met.

My concerns that Mrs. Brovenschen would turn out to be another Aunt Sophia were misplaced. Mrs. Brovenschen was actually a kind-hearted woman who seemed genuinely to like children. It took me a long time to warm up to her, but once I did I enjoyed our time together. She would always have things for me to do when I got there, things like working on puzzles or coloring books. I never liked the coloring books much, but I always enjoyed the puzzles. When I sat down to one of these games, Mrs. Brovenschen would be right with me, making suggestions and offering praise. She would read books to me. Down in her basement, she had shelves filled with books for kids. When I was old enough, she would let me go and pick out a book for her to read. I would sit and listen while she read to me. I could tell she enjoyed reading these books because she was so animated. She would alter her voice for each character in the book and exaggerate the words so much that she was almost singing half of the time.

I remember how walking home with my father each evening, I had to transform myself. I knew that in our house things were different. Nobody was going to read to me once I got home. Neither my mother nor my father was going to fuss over me the way Mrs. Brovenschen did. It was as if I were two different children. Sometimes I would get a little confused and have to take a moment to reorient myself, but I always got it right. That was not a problem for me.

By the time Albert