LITMIR.BIZ

       16

      I should have told my mother about Tilton chasing me into the alleyway, but for the next two days, she occupied herself with Mrs. Lorenzo, helping the widow to arrange the funeral, contacting the life-insurance company regarding Tony’s small policy, which would give the widow only a few years of security, and packing the deceased’s clothes to take them to the Salvation Army because Mrs. Lorenzo had no heart for the job. At the end of each day, Mom was tired and sad, and I didn’t want to burden her with my worries.

      By the time we returned to our usual schedule, I was hesitant to tell her what Tilton had done. By delaying, I had to some extent deceived her, which I had never done before, at least not about anything serious. Although my reason for doing so was honorable, I was concerned that she would in the future wonder what else I might be withholding from her, that this would in some way permanently change our relationship.

      Of course, I was keeping another secret: Miss Pearl, my guide through dreams of terrors both past and pending. The mysterious woman had instructed me to tell no one of Lucas Drackman, and I understood intuitively that the same discretion was required of me regarding Fiona Cassidy. Honoring Miss Pearl’s instructions meant being less than entirely forthcoming with my mother, and though that wasn’t the same thing as lying, it was not worthy of a well-churched boy. Miss Pearl had given me a piano, yes, but my mother had given me life.

      I adored my mother and hoped that she would always trust me. And so, having delayed telling her about my father’s pursuit of me, I made the further mistake of deciding to remain silent on the subject. Most nine-year-old boys want to be seen as more grown up than they are. Considering that I was now the man in the house, I convinced myself that I alone should deal with Tilton if he came around again, that I could deal with him, and that in this troubled time, I needed to spare my mother from unnecessary anxiety.

      The nation seemed to be sliding toward one existential crisis or another. Growing casualties in Vietnam spawned street demonstrations against the war, and a seventy-two-year-old woman named Alice Herz had even set fire to herself in protest. The previous year, during Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, marchers were beaten and trampled by horses ridden by state troopers, and a shocked nation watched it all on television. Malcolm X was assassinated, not by racist whites but by other blacks, probably Black Muslims, and everywhere you looked, there was discontent and anger, envy and loathing. Respect for authority was down, crime was up, and illegal drugs were being peddled as never before. Not in our neighborhood but in another part of the city, there had been race riots, as there had also been in Watts, a Negro section of Los Angeles, in which thirty-four people died and whole blocks were burned to the ground. And this summer was no less violent than the last one. A couple of times, I’d overheard Mom worrying about the future with Grandpa and Grandma, not about her prospects as a singer but about my safety and about the war and about what might be in store for all of us. By comparison, my father seemed to be more of a nuisance than a threat.

      The summer wore on, hot and humid and eventful. Search-and-destroy missions in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam led to nightly death tolls reported on the evening news. In July, in Chicago, Richard Speck stabbed and strangled eight student nurses in their dormitory. On the first day of August, an honor student named Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the twenty-seven-story University of Texas tower and with a rifle killed sixteen and wounded thirty, an unprecedented slaughter that alarmed the nation because it felt not like an aberration but like the start of something new.

      Mom came home from her job at Woolworth’s one afternoon and found that I, having returned early from the community center, sat mesmerized by TV-news film of the war and the raging riots. I was only nine, but I think even before I started to recognize the tumult in the world, I already had an awareness of how unstable life could be, born in part from my father’s inconstancy but also from the fact that, in spite of my mother’s undeniable talent and drive, her quest for a career as a singer encountered setback after setback. The L.A. fires, the explosions in Vietnam, the gunfire in both places, the dead bodies in streets foreign and domestic, the crimes of Lucas Drackman and the death-to-come of a girl named Fiona Cassidy, Mr. Lorenzo standing up from the dinner table and dropping dead of a heart attack, the two trash-talking thugs who followed Mom and me through the park earlier in the summer, Speck, Whitman: All of it came together like many different winds joining forces and spinning into one tornado, so that, sitting there in front of the television, I suddenly felt that everything I knew and loved might be blown away, leaving me alone and vulnerable to threats beyond counting.

      Riveted by the spectacle of destruction on the screen, I said, “Everybody’s killing everybody.”

      Mother stood watching the TV for a moment and then switched it off. She sat beside me on the sofa. “You okay?”

      “Yeah. I’m all right.”

      “You sure?”

      “It’s just … You know. All this stuff.”

      “Bad news.”

      “Real bad.”

      “So don’t watch it.”

      “Yeah, but it’s still happening.”

      “And what can you do about it?”

      “What do you mean?”

      “The war, the riots, the rest of it.”

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