The Best American Essays 2016 Part 8

3. "PTSD: A Growing Epidemic," NIH MedLinePlus 4, no. 1 (Winter 2009), http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/magazine/issues/winter09/articles/winter09pgl0-14.html.

4. Janet Kemp and Robert Bossarte, "Suicide Data Report, 2012," U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, http://www.va.gov/opa/docs/Suicide-Data-Report-2012-final.pdf, 15.

5. Ibid.

LEE MARTIN.

b.a.s.t.a.r.ds.

FROM The Georgia Review.

The summer before I started high school, my parents said we were going home. We'd spent the past six years in a suburb of Chicago where my mother had taken a teaching job, but now that she was retiring, we'd decided to move back downstate. Instead of remodeling the house on our farm outside Sumner, we started looking in town. My parents ended up buying a modest frame house with a front porch and clapboard siding-a well-kept home.

"Now this is all right," my father said. "This is just fine."

He insisted on vigilance, perhaps because when I was barely a year old his life, and my mother's and mine, irrevocably turned because of his own carelessness. On a November day in 1956, he lost both of his hands in a farming accident. He was harvesting corn when the shucking box on his picker clogged. Instead of taking the time to shut down the power take-off, he tried to clear the corn from the box while its snapping rollers were still turning. The rollers caught his hand, and when he tried to free it with his other one, the rollers took it too. As long as I could remember, he'd worn prostheses, or as he called them, his "hooks."

Our new house sat on a double lot. My father plowed the second lot and put in a large vegetable garden, then lined a row of peach saplings down the center of the backyard. We tilled and hoed and weeded. We watered and mowed and raked. My mother's flowerbeds were lush with peonies, zinnias, marigolds; she planted iris bulbs, tulips, daffodils. Our gra.s.s might have been full of clover, as most yards were, but we kept it mowed and trimmed.

A family was known by how well it took care of what it owned, my father said. On the farm, we could let things slip a bit if we got too busy to keep it all s.h.i.+pshape. There, our house sat at the end of a long lane and was invisible from the road.

"That won't fly in town," he said. "Here, people are always watching." Evenings that summer, he walked through the backyard to check on the peach saplings and the garden. Then he sat on the front porch in a lawn chair and watched the night come on. In the twilight, he must have taken a last survey of our well-tended yard and felt the pride of having everything in order.

We were making a fresh start after those years in Chicagoland, where our lives had felt odd to us. My father was no longer a farmer. He didn't work at all and had a hard time knowing what to do with his days. My mother, a soft-spoken, timid woman, was ill-suited for her life among people who were bolder and more a.s.sertive; in fact, we'd gone to Chicago because my mother had lost her teaching job in Sumner when the school board thought she wasn't a tough enough disciplinarian. I, on the other hand, started to think too much of myself. I had entered my teenage years headstrong and ready to test my father's limits. We had raucous fights during which we shouted and swore and otherwise behaved like the heathens our neighbors in the apartment building surely believed us to be.

"I'll take you down a notch or two," he often said.

We ended up in confrontations that sometimes turned physical. We shoved at each other. He whipped my legs with his belt. We screamed at each other. We said vile things.

"Mercy," my mother sometimes said. "Just listen to you."

My father and I often ended up in tears and then retreated to the stony silence of our shame.

That was what we were trying to put behind us when we came back downstate. In our new house, though we never spoke of this, my father and I promised ourselves we'd be better.

We had a detached garage where he kept his Ford F-100 pickup truck. One night, someone let himself into the garage under cover of darkness and walked out with some of my father's tools.

"Thieves," he said. He padlocked the garage doors. "Let 'em try to get in there now." He banged his hooks together. "The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds," he said.

This all happened in our small town of Sumner, Illinois. Population: 1,000. A town of working-cla.s.s people in the southeastern part of the state, some 250 miles from Chicago. A town that prospered from the sweat of farmers like my father, and oil field roughnecks, and refinery workers, and those who worked in the various factories in neighboring towns. We were blue-collar folks, and we knew the value of hard work and what it took to have something worth having.

The three of us wanted to have kinder lives, and for a time in our new house, we did. Summer nights, my father and I sat at our kitchen table, listening to a Cardinals game on the radio. My mother popped corn and pared apples. We drank Pepsi-Colas and let ourselves imagine that such evenings could become our regular come and go.

My aunt and uncle and cousin paid us frequent visits. We had supper, and then we brought out the cards and played pitch, a bidding game that pitted a pair of partners against another pair. As we played, we engaged in good-humored teasing and taunting, and I reveled in the fact that my father and I could enjoy picking at each other the way family members did who didn't live in anger. A dig here or there surely wouldn't do any harm.

One night I made a bonehead move, leading with the king of hearts before the ace had been played. My father, who was partnered with my cousin, shook his head and said to him, "I can't believe that move. Can you, Phillip? Did someone just open the door and let Stupid walk in?"

Because he couldn't hold the cards in his hook, he kept them laid out and hidden behind the raised cover of a Look magazine. My aunt held up the magazine cover so no one else could see them. He would tell her which card to play and she would put it on the table-but when I led that king of hearts, he used the point of his hook to slide out the ace and take the trick.

My uncle tried to ease the sting by saying, "That's just one trick. That's nothing to worry about at all. Let's see what the old man does now. Let's see if he's got the cards."

Maybe everything would have been all right if I'd said, Yeah, old man. Show us what you've got. But then my father looked at me and said, "You've got to pay attention. You've got to know what's been played and what hasn't. You don't see Phillip making any goofs like that. Now get with it, or no one will want you as his partner anymore."

My aunt said, "Oh, leave that boy alone." Her defense of me only called attention to my shame. "I'm sure he's doing the best he can. No need to ride him like that. After all, it's just a game."

But it wasn't just a game. It was another reminder of all that boiled between my father and me, all that we tried to keep locked up on nights like this when we were with people, all that bad blood. My face was hot. An ache came into my throat and I choked back tears. I kept my head lowered and my eyes on my cards. I waited for the game to continue, but for what seemed like the longest time it didn't. The clock on the wall hummed. The refrigerator's compressor kicked on. My uncle cleared his throat.

I realized then that everyone was being cautious about what they said. My aunt and uncle and cousin knew my father's temper. They must have suspected that he and I were in the habit of knocking our heads together, and no one wanted to be the one to say the next thing, the thing that might cause us to explode.

Finally my father returned to the game and pushed a card out into the center of the table. Even he could tell we were on the brink of something dangerous and was trying to get us back on safe ground.

The one thing my father and I shared was shame. I wish I hadn't been so sensitive. I wish he hadn't been so rough. I wish he'd shut down that power take-off and made it impossible for his accident to happen. I wish he'd never had to put on those hooks and the anger that came with them. I wish he hadn't been so stupid in that cornfield. But I never said any of these things to him. I never told him I was sorry for all that he suffered. We never talked about his accident, which was one more thing we tried to contain and put away from us. Not until years later, after my father was dead, did my aunt tell me stories about him and the rage he brought into our home after his accident-stories I couldn't recall because I was so young at the time.

"Oh, it was terrible," she said. "He'd rant and rave. It was like he was out of his head."

I did remember the white packets of phen.o.barbital tablets, prescribed those days as a sedative, that I found in the medicine chest at our farmhouse years later, when I was still a small boy.

"That accident," my aunt said. "It changed him. It changed his whole life."

If it hadn't been for my mother that night around our kitchen table, who knows what might have happened.

What did she do? Nothing dramatic. She came into our kitchen and stood behind me. She laid her hand on my shoulder. She held it there, not saying a word, and finally my uncle took his turn and played a card, and then my cousin, and then I did the same, and the game went on, and all the while my mother was there, her hand the lightest thing I could imagine at that moment, so light that I barely felt her touching me at all, but I knew she was-and that, as it would so many times thereafter, made all the difference.

"Who wants cake and ice cream?" she finally said, and just like that we went on.

A few months later, in the days of short light and icicles hanging from the eaves, my father noticed footprints in the snow around our house-the snow that gave away the voyeur. We tracked him around the perimeter of our house, this man who wore Red Wing boots. We could see the outline of the wing on the heels pressed down into the snow and the blurred letters of words we knew were Red Wing Shoes. The man had walked around our house, turning at every window so he could look inside.

My father and I both owned Red Wing boots, as did a number of other boys and men in our town. I wore size ten, my father a size nine; whoever had left the prints in the snow wore a much larger size. How were we ever to know who it was?

"Well, it was someone," my father said, "and he better hope I never find out who he is."

On nights when I didn't have basketball practice-game nights-I came home after school and went to my room, where I stretched out on my bed, a quilt over me, and read until my eyes grew heavy and the blue dusk began to deepen into night. Most of the time I was alone in the house. In her retirement, my mother had taken a job at the local nursing home, where she worked as a housekeeper, a cook, a laundress. My father was usually either doing something at our farm or loafing in the barbershop before making his way home.

One evening shortly after my father had discovered the tracks, the house was, as usual, still. The only sounds were the roof joists popping as the sun went down and the frigid temperatures of night set in, and the wall furnace clicking on and off, the gas jets roaring to life. I made myself cozy in that silence. I didn't have to be on guard, worried over the next thing I might do or say to provoke my father. I was free to settle into a sound and peaceful sleep.

But now I had the eerie feeling of knowing that someone had stood at our windows and looked into our house. I hated thinking of what he must have seen-my fights with my father, my mother kneeling each night before bed to say a silent prayer, the times when my father called upon me to help him with something: to settle his eyegla.s.ses on his face, to hold a drinking gla.s.s so he could close his hook around it, to unzip his pants so he could use the bathroom, to zip them back up when he was done.

Those things were the hardest to imagine a stranger seeing, those private times when my mother was at work and my father had needs only I could fulfill. His voice was shy when he made these requests. He became even more timid as he pa.s.sed into his old age, on the occasions I had to bathe him or clean him after he'd used the toilet. Our eyes would never meet, embarra.s.sed as we both were. We'd be on the other side of our anger by then, but our language would still be the language of old foes, wary and reserved. The language of men who mistrusted our right to this love born from scars, considering it of questionable origin.

I wasn't sure I wanted my father to find out who was watching us. Part of me cringed to think of our privacy violated, but another part of me wondered whether the fact that someone was watching would keep us on the straight and narrow, make us kinder to each other. For several days running, no anger rose up between us. I came home from basketball practice to the supper my mother had kept warm for me, and as I ate, my father sat at the table with me. We talked in normal tones about how the team was playing, the games that were coming up, how I was doing in school. My father had always taken an interest in my athletics and my schoolwork, but now there was no criticism in what he had to offer, no "you can do better." We were just a father and a son chatting on a winter's night, and when I'd finished my supper I went to my room to do my homework and then later came out to watch television. My mother and father watched too, and we were just a family like that, finally switching out our lights and lying down to sleep.

One night the movie In Cold Blood was on television. I sat in front of our black-and-white Zenith set, totally immersed in the world of 1950s rural Kansas and the story of the murder of the Clutters on a November night in 1959. They'd been a family-a mother and father and a boy and a girl. They'd been living their lives without a thought that something like this might happen. The mother belonged to the local garden club; the father was a successful farmer. The girl was busy with her boyfriend, the way girls are at that age; the boy played on his high school basketball team just like me. The depiction of the killers moving through the dark house set me on edge, and when they bound and gagged the Clutters and then shot them one by one, I felt that this was all too real, as it had been of course on that November night when Perry Smith and d.i.c.k Hick.o.c.k-not the actors Robert Blake and Scott Wilson, who portrayed them-had committed those brutal killings.

I went to bed that night unable to close my eyes, afraid to sleep. I kept seeing the Clutters, hands and feet tied with rope, tape over their mouths. I kept hearing the shotgun blasts. Then I thought I saw a shadow move across my bedroom curtains. I imagined I heard the squeak of boots on snow. I even swore I heard a faint tapping on the gla.s.s.

Who was out there, or wasn't it anyone at all? I was too afraid to lift the edge of the curtain so I could look outside. I didn't sleep at all that night, one of the longest nights of my life, and in the morning there were no fresh prints in the snow.

But something had changed for me. Even now, it's hard for me to say what it was. Something, perhaps, about what it cost to live in fear, to live with the prospect of violence, to always be on guard against it. I'd acquired some knowledge of all that my father gave up when he had his accident: the joy and ease that came from living in the present moment, with no thought about what haunted him from the past, no dread of what might be waiting ahead of him. That's what I'd inherited from him: this unsteady hold on life, this mistrust, this suspicion. Something about watching In Cold Blood and then later imagining someone at my bedroom window had made me understand what I'd long felt but always lacked words to call by name. I was imprisoned, locked up inside my father's rage, held in a place I didn't want to be but didn't know how to escape.

On a night soon after my In Cold Blood scare, our back door opened. My father and I were in the living room with the television on, but we heard the door, and we both turned toward the kitchen, where my mother was finis.h.i.+ng the dishes.

I heard her turn off the water at the sink, and I knew she was gathering up the hem of her ap.r.o.n so she could dry her hands as I'd seen her do so many times. I heard footsteps on the linoleum floor, heavy steps I knew didn't belong to my mother but to whoever had opened our door and stepped inside-a man, from the sound of those steps, a man who was wearing heavy work boots.

I heard my mother's measured voice. "What is it that you want?"

My father was already pus.h.i.+ng himself up from his chair, the evening paper he'd been reading sliding to the floor.

I felt cold air on my legs, and I knew the intruder had left the back door standing open.

"We don't have anything you want," my mother said, her voice rising just a bit. "Are you lost?"

Her question pierced me. Yes, I wanted to call out. Yes, I'm lost.

But I didn't, of course. I got up from my chair. I followed my father into the kitchen, toward whatever danger might be waiting there.

The intruder was a boy of maybe twenty years of age, a tall, skinny boy with a CPO jacket too short for his long arms. The k.n.o.bs of his wrists were blanched white from the cold. His face was red and inflamed with acne. He wore a pair of Red Wing boots with stains-oil? blood?-darkening the toes. His wild eyes darted about, first to my mother, then to my father, then over my father's shoulder to me.

"Are you lost?" my mother said again. She actually took a step toward him. "Are you looking for another house?"

The boy swallowed. His Adam's apple slid up and down his gullet. He held his mouth open, and his thin lips quivered. His long blond hair was in tangles. I saw he had an ugly gash in the meat of his left hand, and just as I noticed it he tried to stanch the blood by wrapping his palm in the hem of his coat.

"Are you hurt?" my mother said. "Let me see."

She reached out her hand to him, and the boy looked at it-veined and wrinkled and chafed raw from the detergents in the laundry at the nursing home. The boy lifted his eyes and looked at my mother with what I believed was yearning, the same desire for her refuge and protection that I had often felt, the same desire to finally be unburdened. I didn't know this boy or what his trouble was, but I knew what it was to want to be free from this life that pressed down on me, this b.a.s.t.a.r.d life, a life that was spurious and counterfeit, a poor imitation of the happier one that might have been mine if my father hadn't made a mistake that day in the cornfield, if he hadn't lost his hands and become an angry man.

The boy let his hand come free from the hem of his coat. He studied the cut. Then he looked at my mother again, and in my silence I urged him to go to her, to let her take care of him. I wanted to watch her clean his wound, put ointment on it, bandage it. I wanted her to speak to him in her soft tones, to tell him, It's fine, it's fine, everything will be just fine.

The rest of my life was out there waiting for me. I wanted it to be a life of goodness. And I think I wanted to be able to look back at that moment someday and say it made all the difference.

But I can't say that, because just as the boy was about to reach out his cut hand to my mother, my father banged his hooks together.

"Who the h.e.l.l do you think you are," he said, "to come into my house?"

That's when the boy got spooked. He turned and ran, his boots loud on our floor. He ran out into the cold night, and I felt my heart go with him. I felt something leave our house, some measure of hope. If there had been more room for my mother's kindness that night, there might have been a healing, one that might have saved me.

"You better run," my father said.

I would need years and years to escape the anger of that house, and even now, when I live a more gentle life, I still feel I'm fighting the rage my father left inside me, always trying to tamp it down, always on guard against its return.

I'd lock it up if I could, forget the combination, let the tumblers go to rust, so no one could ever turn them.

"That poor boy," my mother said that night.

I'll always wonder what drew him to our house. Was there a mercy there that my father and I were too blind to see? Was it ours for the claiming, if only we would? Maybe we were too busy feeling hurt to see that we could forgive ourselves; in spite of my mother's influence, we couldn't accept that we, the damaged and the maimed, had a right to a kinder way of living.

My father closed the door that night. He fit the curve of his hook to the underside of the k.n.o.b and pulled until the door was latched. He opened his hook and concentrated on grasping the tab of the lock inside the k.n.o.b. He didn't ask for help, and neither my mother nor I offered any. He took awhile, but he kept working at it until, finally, the door was locked.

"That kid was wild," my father said. "He was out of his head." He banged his hooks together again. "To come into our house? What kind of person would do that? What's happened to people? What kind of life does that kid have?"

"He was in trouble," my mother said.

Something in her voice shook me-a note of weariness, a resignation. It was as if she were giving up on my father and me, and maybe she did for that brief moment. Maybe she thought, G.o.d, help them.

I could tell my father heard the same thing I did: my mother, the eternal believer. His face crumpled with confusion. Had he heard what he thought he did? This was the woman he'd married when he was nearly forty, the woman who'd loved him before the accident and beyond, the woman he'd counted on for so much.

When he finally spoke, his voice quavered. "I know he was," he said. That was as close as he could come to telling my mother he was sorry for all the anger he'd brought into our home. I was ashamed of my own part in that anger. I was ashamed of the two of us.

Although I stayed in the kitchen, some part of me went with my father as he moved on into the living room. I heard his hook sc.r.a.ping at the k.n.o.b of the front door as he locked it, closing us in, sealing us up.

"You don't have to worry now," he said. In his bl.u.s.ter, I heard what I'd never been able to distinguish in the noise of all our fighting. He was proud. He was watching out for us. This was his secret. His world was always tilting. He was on guard. Let the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds come. He'd be ready. Wounded, as he was, he knew no other way to speak of love.

LISA NIKOLIDAKIS.

Family Tradition.

FROM Southern Indiana Review.

On my twenty-seventh birthday, in a two-bedroom bungalow in New Jersey, my father murdered his live-in girlfriend, her fifteen-year-old daughter, then shot himself. I never sensed the shots. I should have felt them in my gut, having been born of the same blood, the same inheritance, the same home. It should have been like that feeling one twin gets when the other is in trouble, a hand burned on the stove matched with the other's intuitive pain. But the six pints of Guinness I'd slaughtered in celebration of my birthday kept everything m.u.f.fled. Instead I felt only the fog of drunkenness, that genetic trait of its own, and spent the end of the night pa.s.sed out in a chair, coc.o.o.ned in a deep, black silence.

Twenty years earlier, my mother somehow sensed her father's shot and left her s.h.i.+ft at Olga's diner early, certain, never once doubting herself that it had happened. When she came home, my father and I were sitting at the kitchen table, the food before us long grown cold, the news of my grandfather's suicide having quieted any chatter, my younger brother having fortunately spent that night at a friend's house. My mother took one look at us and threw her ap.r.o.n down, the smell of it thick with fryer grease, and cried, her shoulders shaking as she gasped for breath. With an arm's embrace, my father consoled her while she buried her face and wept into a tuft of chest hair that escaped his s.h.i.+rt. When she raised her head, my father pressed his forehead to hers in a rare moment so tender, I knew I was supposed to cry. My first experience with grief. Instead I sat motionless, a robotic reflexiveness, a brief denial of my mother's pain as I watched the outpouring; it wasn't until my father told me to go to my room that I felt anything, my fists curled into tiny b.a.l.l.s. And later, months later, when my mother still cried and, worse, stared vacantly, absently, into nothingness, I began bargaining and making promises to G.o.d to make it all stop.

My grandfather's suicide wasn't shocking in the traditional sense. His letters mailed to my mother in New Jersey from the Arizona desert had become increasingly desperate-sounding. He'd been a flyboy in World War II's Air Corps, a fact that made him seem infinitely handsome to me, the pictures of him in uniform epitomizing for my young mind what a man is supposed to look like: broad-jawed, trim, dedicated to his country. I suspect he'd written letters to his first wife, a woman he'd married just months before he left for England, sheltering her from the horrors of war, rea.s.suring her that they would unite again soon, would start their real life. But when the war neared its end and he returned home fifty missions later, he found her pregnant. Within a year he was officially divorced and remarried to my grandmother, who, from what my own mother tells me, looked eerily like his first wife. A ghost of a replacement. Perhaps if the first wife hadn't wronged him, hadn't cuckolded him in front of the neighbors and waged a separate war of infidelity on him, he would've been a good husband and father. Instead he was changed, bitter, violent, and would remain that way for the rest of his life. Years later my grandfather contracted emphysema, a disease that he first tried to pacify by smoking more, and his letters, always handwritten in a scrawling, thoughtful script, revealed his increasing loneliness, isolation, and pain.

I wasn't supposed to read the letters-especially the last one-but I snuck them into the bas.e.m.e.nt when my mother was at work, tried piecing together the parts of her that I knew little about. Their content was considered too adult for me, but even at the age of six or seven, when a vase would shatter against the wall and the chase continued into the bedroom, the thuds and shrieks making it apparent what was going on, I'd slip my feet into my mother's abandoned shoes, tiptoeing through the field of shards, broom in hand. There were hints, clues in the chunky, ambiguous phrases and references to events in the letters, that told me vases were smashed when my mother grew up as well, though she likely held the dustpan back then. Sometimes the letters asked for forgiveness, other times they demanded it, but most often they pointed the finger at my grandmother, accusing her of provoking and prodding and pus.h.i.+ng until the violence that he held tight beneath his skin erupted, usually with the a.s.sistance of alcohol. And while my mother contends that my grandmother never antagonized, her looking so much like a replica of the woman who initially broke his heart seems to have been enough for him to justify the abuse.

When the war ended and my grandfather returned home, he continued his work with what became the air force, and soon after turned dependently to the bottle, then compulsively to the pen. I imagine him walking toward a bar on Sat.u.r.day, the sun at its apex, his shadow stacked neatly behind him on the sidewalk, a block of shade, confident in its solidarity. By last call he'd stagger home in the dark with a bottle still swinging from his fist until he hurled it at a cat or a paper bag caught in the wind, the sound of the gla.s.s shattering resonating just loudly enough to remind the world that he existed, that he hadn't turned into a shadow himself.

Often I am lumped together with my grandfather in sentences uttered at family reunions, hushed asides of "You know, we had another writer in the family too." The resonance of those whispers appears in my mother's eyes whenever I speak of my habit of writing in a bar. While my laptop seems more evolved than his ma.s.s of scribbled-on napkins, I am aware that my pints are made from the same ingredients as the ones he drank alone. Sometimes I wonder when I first walk into a bar which seat he would've chosen if he were there; I wonder if the stool against the wall was his favorite too. I wonder all of this as I light a cigarette and ignore anyone who tries to speak to me, diligent and certain that my one task is simply to write.

In addition to the letters I know about, I a.s.sume he wrote stories, though he just as easily could've written rants or essays; I'm only certain he wouldn't have been a poet. I am sure, however, that his work was about the war and his bitter awareness of mankind's absent humanity. I imagine he organized his work geographically, the stories moving through the emptiness of the vast eastern front to the trenched and heavily populated western one; or maybe his thoughts centered around food, his writing recounting memories of home-cooked meals, their spiced aromas filling his boyhood home, pitting them against standard Air Corps rations of tins of bully beef, Diamond Brand tuna, and hardened Arnold's biscuits. He could have put things together according to the seasons, complaining of the bitter German winters, detailing the differences between the rigid expression on a frozen body's face and that of the warm and malleable corpse of spring. Or maybe he scripted his words by recounting his mental stages, remembering the fresh excitement of finally flying into combat coupled with complicated grief for the human beings he shot, those that ran for their lives before collapsing flat into the earth in a plume of dust. His work would have traced his movement, his emotional state from naive young pilot to hardened realist, over the span of many pages, although maybe he was just too horrified to share them with anyone else. But more simply, his writing was likely about how untrustworthy people, especially women, are. Whatever his subject matter, he wrote from the day he got home from the war until he fixed a shotgun between his dry lips and used a makes.h.i.+ft stick his step-nephew crafted for him, supposedly to help him move objects in his room closer to him, to pull his last trigger.

My own father had no war experience or disloyal first wife to justify how a man could carry around so much venom and pain from place to place. Instead my father jumped s.h.i.+p while in the Merchant Marine-a state-imposed military sentence in Greece-which, once he fled, helped perpetuate his paranoia. His fear of government imprisonment for his traitorous rebellion grew so deep that by nineteen he'd made his way to America in search of the kind of freedom that only people from other countries idealize-a belief so deep that it became an innate truth, not just another history-cla.s.s concept. He embraced America as if the epigraph on the Statue of Liberty were written expressly for him, a solitary huddled ma.s.s.

But something about that makes it sound innocent and misrepresented. Yes, he felt that America was the land of opportunity, but not so much for its const.i.tutional guarantees as for its being the perfect place, maybe the only place, for a street-savvy man with infinite charisma to exploit the good-natured and hospitable extensions of the people he needed for survival. My mother was one of the first, a waitress who had long struggled with her weight, self-esteem, and troubled childhood; she served as the perfect person to pitch a campaign of false love on. I'd seen him haggle car salesmen down thousands of dollars on multiple occasions, men trained to be impervious, shaking their heads and my father's hand as he talked them into an undoable deal. I can only imagine that my mother, who had never seriously dated a man, stood no chance against his persuasive platform of bulls.h.i.+t and charm.

Photos of my parents from the early years show them grinning, stuffing cliched cake into one another's mouths. Smiles all around at taking me to the park for the first time as I fearlessly chased swans deeper into their pond. But the real trouble comes when one knows the end of a story first; now when I look back on those early, gleeful pictures, I see only a ruse. While my mother tells me there were moments of genuine happiness, I can never forget that my father needed a green card more than anything, and my mother, who was subsequently subjected to totalitarian ruling, was ripe for the picking. And like any actor worth his weight, he played the part of the family man convincingly for a time.