Eddie frowned. “I don’t understand. Did we ever…meet? Did you ever come to the pier?”
“No,” she said. “I never wanted to see the pier again. My children went there, and their children and theirs. But not me. My idea of heaven was as far from the ocean as possible, back in that busy diner, when my days were simple, when Emile was courting me.”
Eddie rubbed his temples. When he breathed, mist emerged.
“So why am I here?” he said. “I mean, your story, the fire, it all happened before I was born.”
“Things that happen before you are born still affect you,” she said. “And people who come before your time affect you as well.
“We move through places every day that would never have been if not for those who came before us. Our work-places, where we spend so much time—we often think they began with our arrival. That’s not true.”
She tapped her fingertips together. “If not for Emile, I would have no husband. If not for our marriage, there would be no pier. If there’d been no pier, you would not have ended up working there.”
Eddie scratched his head. “So you’re here to tell me about work?”
“No, dear,” Ruby answered, her voice softening. “I’m here to tell you why your father died.”
THE PHONE CALL was from Eddie’s mother. His father had collapsed that afternoon, on the east end of the boardwalk near the Junior Rocket Ride. He had a raging fever.
“Eddie, I’m afraid,” his mother said, her voice shaking. She told him of a night, earlier in the week, when his father had come home at dawn, soaking wet. His clothes were full of sand. He was missing a shoe. She said he smelled like the ocean. Eddie bet he smelled like liquor, too.
“He was coughing,” his mother explained. “It just got worse. We should have called a doctor right away…” She drifted in her words. He’d gone to work that day, she said, sick as he was, with his tool belt and his ball peen hammer—same as always—but that night he’d refused to eat and in bed he’d hacked and wheezed and sweated through his undershirt. The next day was worse. And now, this afternoon, he’d collapsed.
“The doctor said it’s pneumonia. Oh, I should have done something. I should have done something…”
“What were you supposed to do?” Eddie asked. He was mad that she took this on herself. It was his father’s drunken fault.
Through the phone, he heard her crying.
EDDIE’S FATHER USED to say he’d spent so many years by the ocean, he breathed seawater. Now, away from that ocean, in the confines of a hospital bed, his body began to wither like a beached fish. Complications developed. Congestion built in his chest. His condition went from fair to stable and from stable to serious. Friends went from saying, “He’ll be home in a day,” to “He’ll be home in a week.” In his father’s absence, Eddie helped out at the pier, working evenings after his taxi job, greasing the tracks, checking the brake pads, testing the levers, even repairing broken ride parts in the shop.
What he really was doing was protecting his father’s job. The owners acknowledged his efforts, then paid him half of what his father earned. He gave the money to his mother, who went to the hospital every day and slept there most nights. Eddie and Marguerite cleaned her apartment and shopped for her food.
When Eddie was a teenager, if he ever complained or seemed bored with the pier, his father would snap, “What? This ain’t good enough for you?” And later, when he’d suggested Eddie take a job there after high school, Eddie almost laughed, and his father again said, “What? This ain’t good enough for you?” And before Eddie went to war, when he’d talked of marrying Marguerite and becoming an engineer, his father said, “What? This ain’t good enough for you?”
And now, despite all that, here he was, at the pier, doing his father’s labor.
Finally, one night, at his mother’s urging, Eddie visited the hospital. He entered the room slowly. His father, who for years had refused to speak to Eddie, now lacked the strength to even try. He watched his son with heavy-lidded eyes. Eddie, after struggling to find even one sentence to say, did the only thing he could think of to do: He held up his hands and showed his father his grease-stained fingertips.
“Don’t sweat it, kid,” the other maintenance workers told him. “Your old man will pull through. He’s the toughest son of a gun we’ve ever seen.”
PARENTS RARELY LET go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them—a mother’s approval, a father’s nod—are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It is not until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.
When the news came that his father had died—“slipped away,” a nurse told him, as if he had gone out for milk—Eddie felt the emptiest kind of anger, the kind that circles in its cage. Like most workingmen’s sons, Eddie had envisioned for his father a heroic death to counter the commonness of his life. There was nothing heroic about a drunken stupor by the beach.
The next day, he went to his parents’ apartment, entered their bedroom, and opened all the drawers, as if he might find a piece of his father inside. He rifled through coins, a tie pin, a small bottle of apple brandy, rubber bands, electric bills, pens, and a cigarette lighter with a mermaid on the side. Finally, he found a deck of playing cards. He put it in his pocket.
THE FUNERAL WAS small and brief. In the weeks that followed, Eddie’s mother lived in a daze. She spoke to her husband as if he were still there. She yelled at him to turn down the radio. She cooked enough food for two. She fluffed pillows on both sides of the bed, even though only one side had been slept in.
One night, Eddie saw her stacking dishes on the countertop.
“Let me help you,” he said.
“No, no,” his mother answered, “your father will put them away.”
Eddie put a hand on her shoulder.
“Ma,” he said, softly. “Dad’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
The next day, Eddie went to the dispatcher and told him he was quitting. Two weeks later, he and Marguerite moved back into the building where Eddie had grown up, Beachwood Avenue—apartment 6B—where the hallways were narrow and the kitchen window viewed the carousel and where Eddie had accepted a job that would let him keep an eye on his mother, a position he had been groomed for summer after summer: a maintenance man at Ruby Pier. Eddie never said this—not to his wife, not to his mother, not to anyone—but he cursed his father for dying and for trapping him in the very life he’d been trying to escape; a life that, as he heard the old man laughing from the grave, apparently now was good enough for him.
Today Is Eddie’s Birthday
He is 37. His breakfast is getting cold.
“You see any salt?” Eddie asks Noel.
Noel, chewing a mouthful of sausage, slides out from the booth, leans across another table, and grabs a salt shaker.
“Here,” he mumbles. “Happy birthday.”
Eddie shakes it hard. “How tough is it to keep salt on the table?”
“What are you, the manager?” Noel says.
Eddie shrugs. The morning is already hot and thick with humidity. This is their routine: breakfast, once a week, Saturday mornings, before the park gets crazy. Noel works in the dry cleaning business. Eddie helped him get the contract for Ruby Pier’s maintenance uniforms.
“What’dya think of this good-lookin’ guy?” Noel says. He has a copy of Life magazine open to a photo of a young political candidate. “How can this guy run for president? He’s a kid!”
Eddie shrugs. “He’s about our age.”
“No foolin’?” Noel says. He lifts an eyebrow. “I thought you had to be older to be president.”
“We are older,” Eddie mumbles.
Noel closes the magazine. His voice drops. “Hey. You hear what happened at Brighton?”
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Eddie nods. He sips his coffee. He’d heard. An amusement park. A gondola ride. Something snapped. A mother and her son fell 60 feet to their death.
“You know anybody up there?” Noel asks.
Eddie puts his tongue between his teeth. Every now and then he hears these stories, an accident at a park somewhere, and he shudders as if a wasp just flew by his ear. Not a day passes that he doesn’t worry about it happening here, at Ruby Pier, under his watch.
“Nuh-uh,” he says. “I don’t know no one in Brighton.”
He fixes his eyes out the window, as a crowd of beachgoers emerges from the train station. They carry towels, umbrellas, wicker baskets with sandwiches wrapped in paper. Some even have the newest thing: foldable chairs, made from lightweight aluminum.
An old man walks past in a panama hat, smoking a cigar.
“Lookit that guy,” Eddie says. “I promise you, he’ll drop that cigar on the boardwalk.”
“Yeah?” Noel says. “So?”
“It falls in the cracks, then it starts to burn. You can smell it. The chemical they put on the wood. It starts smoking right away. Yesterday I grabbed a kid, couldn’t have been more than four years old, about to put a cigar butt in his mouth.”
Noel makes a face. “And?”
Eddie turns aside. “And nothing. People should be more careful, that’s all.”
Noel shovels a forkful of sausage into his mouth. “You’re a barrel of laughs. You always this much fun on your birthday?”
Eddie doesn’t answer. The old darkness has taken a seat alongside him. He is used to it by now, making room for it the way you make room for a commuter on a crowded bus.
He thinks about the maintenance load today. Broken mirror in the Fun House. New fenders for the bumper cars. Glue, he reminds himself, gotta order more glue. He thinks about those poor people in Brighton. He wonders who’s in charge up there.
“What time you finish today?” Noel asks.
Eddie exhales. “It’s gonna be busy. Summer. Saturday. You know.”
Noel lifts an eyebrow. “We can make the track by six.”
Eddie thinks about Marguerite. He always thinks about Marguerite when Noel mentions the horse track.
“Come on. It’s your birthday,” Noel says.
Eddie pokes a fork at his eggs, now too cold to bother with.
“All right,” he says.
The Third Lesson
“WAS THE PIER SO BAD?” THE OLD woman asked.
“It wasn’t my choice,” Eddie said, sighing. “My mother needed help. One thing led to another. Years passed. I never left. I never lived nowhere else. Never made any real money. You know how it is—you get used to something, people rely on you, one day you wake up and you can’t tell Tuesday from Thursday. You’re doing the same boring stuff, you’re a ‘ride man,’ just like…”
“Your father?”
Eddie said nothing.
“He was hard on you,” the old woman said.
Eddie lowered his eyes. “Yeah. So?”
“Perhaps you were hard on him, too.”
“I doubt it. You know the last time he talked to me?”
“The last time he tried to strike you.”
Eddie shot her a look.
“And you know the last thing he said to me? ‘Get a job.’ Some father, huh?”
The old woman pursed her lips. “You began to work after that. You picked yourself up.”
Eddie felt a rumbling of anger. “Look,” he snapped. “You didn’t know the guy.”
“That’s true.” She rose. “But I know something you don’t. And it is time to show you.”
RUBY POINTED WITH the tip of her parasol and drew a circle in the snow. When Eddie looked into the circle, he felt as if his eyes were falling from their sockets and traveling on their own, down a hole and into another moment. The images sharpened. It was years ago, in the old apartment. He could see front and back, above and below.
This is what he saw:
He saw his mother, looking concerned, sitting at the kitchen table. He saw Mickey Shea, sitting across from her. Mickey looked awful. He was soaking wet, and he kept rubbing his hands over his forehead and down his nose. He began to sob. Eddie’s mother brought him a glass of water. She motioned for him to wait, and walked to the bedroom and shut the door. She took off her shoes and her housedress. She reached for a blouse and skirt.
Eddie could see all the rooms, but he could not hear what the two of them were saying, it was just blurred noise. He saw Mickey, in the kitchen, ignoring the glass of water, pulling a flask from his jacket and swigging from it. Then, slowly, he got up and staggered to the bedroom. He opened the door.
Eddie saw his mother, half dressed, turn in surprise. Mickey was wobbling. She pulled a robe around her. Mickey came closer. Her hand went out instinctively to block him. Mickey froze, just for an instant, then grabbed that hand and grabbed Eddie’s mother and backed her into the wall, leaning against her, grabbing her waist. She squirmed, then yelled, and pushed on Mickey’s chest while still gripping her robe. He was bigger and stronger, and he buried his unshaven face below her cheek, smearing tears on her neck.
Then the front door opened and Eddie’s father stood there, wet from rain, a ball peen hammer hanging from his belt. He ran into the bedroom and saw Mickey grabbing his wife. Eddie’s father hollered. He raised the hammer. Mickey put his hands over his head and charged to the door, knocking Eddie’s father sideways. Eddie’s mother was crying, her chest heaving, her face streamed with tears. Her husband grabbed her shoulders. He shook her violently. Her robe fell. They were both screaming. Then Eddie’s father left the apartment, smashing a lamp with the hammer on his way out. He thumped down the steps and ran off into the rainy night.
“WHAT WAS THAT?” Eddie yelled in disbelief. “What the hell was THAT?”
The old woman held her tongue. She stepped to the side of the snowy circle and drew another one. Eddie tried not to look down. He couldn’t help it. He was falling again, becoming eyes at a scene.
This is what he saw:
He saw a rainstorm at the farthest edge of Ruby Pier—the “north point,” they called it—a narrow jetty that stretched far out into the ocean. The sky was a bluish black. The rain was falling in sheets. Mickey Shea came stumbling toward the edge of the jetty. He fell to the ground, his stomach heaving in and out. He lay there for a moment, face to the darkened sky, then rolled on his side, under the wood railing. He dropped into the sea.
Eddie’s father appeared moments later, scrambling back and forth, the hammer still in his hand. He grabbed the railing, searching the waters. The wind blew the rain in sideways. His clothes were drenched and his leather tool belt was nearly black from the soaking. He saw something in the waves. He stopped, pulled off the belt, yanked off one shoe, tried to undo the other, gave up, squatted under the railing and jumped, splashing clumsily in the churning ocean.
Mickey was bobbing in the insistent roll of seawater, half unconscious, a foamy yellow fluid coming from his mouth. Eddie’s father swam to him, yelling into the wind. He grabbed Mickey. Mickey swung. Eddie’s father swung back. The skies clapped with thunder as the rainwater pelted them. They grabbed and flailed in the violent chop.
Mickey coughed hard as Eddie’s father grabbed his arm and hooked it over his shoulder. He went under, came up again, then braced his weight against Mickey’s body, pointing them toward shore. He kicked. They moved forward. A wave swept them back. Then forward again. The ocean thumped and crashed, but Eddie’s father remained wedged under Mickey’s armpit, pumping his legs, blinking wildly to clear his vision.
They caught the crest of a wave and made sudden progress shoreward. Mickey moaned and gasped. Eddie’s father spit out seawater. It seemed to take forever, the rain popping, the white foam smacking their faces, the two men grunting, thrashing their arms. Finally, a high, curling wave lifted them up and dumped them onto the sand, and Eddie’s father rolled out from under Mickey and was able to hook his hands unde
r Mickey’s arms and hold him from being swept into the surf. When the waves receded, he yanked Mickey forward with a final surge, then collapsed on the shore, his mouth open, filling with wet sand.
EDDIE’S VISION RETURNED to his body. He felt exhausted, spent, as if he had been in that ocean himself. His head was heavy. Everything he thought he’d known about his father, he didn’t seem to know anymore.
“What was he doing?” Eddie whispered.
“Saving a friend,” Ruby said.
Eddie glared at her. “Some friend. If I’d have known what he did, I’d have let his drunken hide drown.”
“Your father thought about that, too,” the old woman said. “He had chased after Mickey to hurt him, perhaps even to kill him. But in the end, he couldn’t. He knew who Mickey was. He knew his shortcomings. He knew he drank. He knew his judgment faltered.
“But many years earlier, when your father was looking for work, it was Mickey who went to the pier owner and vouched for him. And when you were born, it was Mickey who lent your parents what little money he had, to help pay for the extra mouth to feed. Your father took old friendships seriously—”
“Hold on, lady,” Eddie snapped. “Did you see what that bastard was doing with my mother?”
“I did,” the old woman said sadly. “It was wrong. But things are not always what they seem.
“Mickey had been fired that afternoon. He’d slept through another shift, too drunk to wake up, and his employers told him that was enough. He handled the news as he handled all bad news, by drinking more, and he was thick with whiskey by the time he reached your mother. He was begging for help. He wanted his job back. Your father was working late. Your mother was going to take Mickey to him.
“Mickey was coarse, but he was not evil. At that moment, he was lost, adrift, and what he did was an act of loneliness and desperation. He acted on impulse. A bad impulse. Your father acted on impulse, too, and while his first impulse was to kill, his final impulse was to keep a man alive.”