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Why Is the Moon Round? CHAPTER 15
Something For Over The Couch
PART 15 “Why is The Moon Round”
Perhaps you are wondering how I felt, knowing that my father had been murdered. And what about the place it happened; in an apartment over a bar in a run down part of our town? But it will not be possible to explain what it was like, because It can’t be explained even to myself. Try to imagine what it is like to pedal your bike down the street, and under the windows of the place where your father died. Then imagine doing it over again hundreds of times. You look at the people going in and out, you try to remember the plate numbers of their cars, trying to solve a riddle, like a caveman might wonder about the moon. Consider the moon just for a moment, why is it so round, not just almost round, but perfectly round? The earth, and all the planets are perfectly round. What does that say about the creator of the universe? The moon is perfect work, it is truly excellent craftsmanship. But try to find a nice perfectly round stone that nature made anywhere, and you will not have any luck. That was how I reasoned with myself about what had happened. The moon is perfectly round, and so is the earth, but you would never know it walking around and looking at things up close. Close up the earth is all crooked inexplicable chaos, without order or reason, but from a distance it appears to be perfect. So, when seen from a distance the tragic disappearance of my father from the world will fit into some pattern, some stupid, pointless, perfect scheme, an arrangement I know I will never see. But I know what you are thinking. ‘What was the man doing in some rundown apartment in the slums over a bar in the first place? Probably he was up to no good,’ you think. That is the exact reason my grandfather made haste to keep it a secret from everyone, because that is what everyone would have thought. But they wouldn’t know the simple and obvious explanation of what he might have been doing there, but I knew why full well. It was because he was an insurance salesman. An insurance salesman goes to all kinds of places, to bars and old apartments, expensive houses and the offices of corporations. I went with him very often, and as a matter of fact I had even been in the bar above which he died. It was in the afternoon, and we had lunch there, because it was also a restaurant. The owner, Nena, liked my father and would sit with us. The place was always empty in the early afternoon, and she would serve us fried pepper sandwiches on Italian bread. 48 • OCTOBER 2022 THE ARTFUL MIND The other aspect of his work he did not care for was the responsibility to remind the clients to pay their bills when they were past due. I did not go with him for those calls as a rule, but sometimes I did. Often he would become involved in the problems of his customers. One poor man, I recall, had his car insurance suspended, and his license revoked, and yet Dad spent the afternoon helping him get his car running. We went to the car parts store for him, and purchased some carburetor parts, a little spring as I recall for fifty cents. After the car was running, the guy drove off, no license and no registration. He was anxious to get to work. He was late and afraid he might get fired. He got about a block away and a policeman on a motorcycle pulled him over, because he was speeding. This upset my Dad because he felt responsible. We got in the car and drove up to the scene of the crime. The motorcycle was parked behind the guy’s junk of a car, and I started examining the motorcycle.
It was a monstrous Indian Motorcycle, the police department had just purchased five of them from Ember’s bicycle shop. I listen to my Dad talking quietly to the policeman, I don’t know what he said exactly, but he put away his pad, walked over to his bike and drove off. So, that was my Dad, always looking out for people, especially some guy down on his luck, and now he was dead, and it was a thing impossible to believe. Fortunately, until recently, I was the only person in the world who knew about the cause of his death, just me and my grandfather that is. Not my mom, and not my brother. Pops told only me, in his broken English, and made me understand the importance of the secret. He managed to keep the information out of the papers and the news reports because he had a friend down at the paper. Then there was a detective, a family friend who rewrote the police report, as a favor to my mom, and my family. The victim’s name was withheld, because of the ongoing investigation. It never even crossed my mind that there might be a person at the hospital that would know about the actual cause of his death. And now there was Hanna, my art teacher. It might seem odd that my grandfather told me, and only me about the stabbing, and I wondered about it for a long time. But now I understand it perfectly and I will explain it to you also. My grandfather lived alone in a small house in the Italian section, on Lansing Street. My grandmother having died, my mother got it into her head that I should go and visit him occasionally. It was 1957, and I was 13. I spent my days on my bicycle, a bicycle on which I would investigate every corner of our town. Now, occasionally I would stop to look in on my grandfather. He would always be sitting on the porch looking out into the street. He always smoked stogies, the buts of which he would crush up, and smoke in a pipe. He always needed a shave, but never had a beard. I would come up onto the porch, and he would turn his cheek for me to kiss him. To kiss my grandfather was exactly like giving a kiss to a wire brush suffused with stogie smoke. The memory of such a kiss is indelible, eternal. Having kissed him, I would sit in the chair next to him and also stare out into the street. He never said anything to me, nor I to him. After about fifteen minutes I would get up, and again kiss his sandpaper face, and then depart on my bicycle. These visits were repeated about once a week, for a few months, but then I stopped going to see him. I thought to myself, ‘He never says a word to me.’
One day my mother said to me, “Why is it that you no longer visit your grandfather anymore?”
reply. “He never says anything to me,” was my
“Go to see him, he looks forward to your visits more than anything,” she said. So, I resumed my visits to my grandfather, and we would sit in silence looking out into the street.
During this time, since I was only thirteen, I never once attempted to imagine what might have been going on in his mind. My father had four brothers, but it was my father he loved the most, calling him every day at a time when he knew he would be home from work. I would pick up the phone and hear his gravel voice always pronounce the same words, “Lemme speak a you Fatch.” Then I would hear a conversation in Italian lasting about five minutes. It seemed to me they were talking in a ‘real’ language, with words that had deeper meanings. To not know the meaning gave the words yet more significance, and I would say, “Teach me Italian,” and always the same reply, “It’s not really Italian, just a dialect, a southern dialect.”
I was discouraged from learning even a few words in that dialect, but I did learn to speak with the sound, gutteral, from the back of my throat, a sound like a gentlemanly and polite threat to murder, a pretend Italian spoken to friends for a laugh, in immitation of those old men talking together at funerals, and in clouds of smoke, sitting at round tables at wedding receptions. So it was grief, I realized, that prevented my grandfather from saying anything to me. It was fear of any conversation that might accidentally bring up the image of my father, standing in a doorway, lighting a cigarette, pushing his chair away from the kitchen table and saying, “Get me paper and pencil, I’ll explain to you how a transmission works.” To touch on those images with words most certainly would have brought forth an uncontrollable outburst of grief, the grief of women who throw themselves into open graves. The relationship between Dad and Grandpa was intimate. For some of their conversation that took place in the kitchen, I was sent out into the living room. What did they talk about? Dad was teaching him to read and write, and after that he corrected his arithmetic lessons. Their roles had become reversed and the old man became a child, that is the most intimate of familial relationships. So , In conclusion, you must read a short story, “Grief,” by Chekhov. It is the story of a cabby who can find no one to hear the tale of the death of his son, so he tells his horse, the only being with the patience and the time to listen. So, I was told of the murder of my dad, and I was the horse, and Grandfather was the cabby. Like the horse, I could not even begin to imagine the significance of the story.
—RICHARD BRITELL
PARTS 1 THROUGH 14, AT SPAZIFINEART.COM
EDWARD ACKER
PHOTOGRAPHER
