Page 50 - Demo

My mother was spooning beef stew onto my fa- ther’s plate when I came into the kitchen.
“Tony died,” she said to my father. “Near Rockford. Millie called.”
“No, you were. You were about the only person he let in that room of his.”
I wasn’t surprised but I didn’t believe her. “What did he die of?” I said, and slumped into my chair across the Formica table from my father.
“You’ll miss him,” my mother said. “You’ll see. You’ll miss him.”
“They don’t know,” my mother said. “He had a weak heart.” So, it was true. She spooned stew onto my plate. “Is that enough? There’s more if you want it. Take some bread.”
I looked out the screen door to the backyard poplar tree. The evening glow was giving way to darkness. My father got up and turned on the overhead light. The outside darkness looked darker.
I took a piece of bread.
“I hope he wasn’t driving,” my father said. “He was at a rest stop.”
“Spending so much time in that room. After Claire died, he went off the rails with his drawing and painting.”
She spooned stew onto her own plate, put the pot on the stove, and covered it. Bowing her head a little, she took off her apron, draped it over the back of her chair, and sat down. I looked behind her at the win- dow over the sink and the cabinets on either side of the window and under the sink, imagining how Tony would paint them. Against Mondrian, he’d give sub- stance and life to the verticals and horizontals. He’d reveal the real kitchen counter and cabinets. Or he’d want to.
I wondered how a truck driver goes off the rails. What rails? And why not go off the rails?
“You were friends with him,” my father said.
“I put a lot of it down to Millie,” my father said. “Being a truck driver wasn’t good enough, especially after Claire died. No wonder he stayed in that room.”
He didn’t know of our work together and how much he had taught me. “I guess.”
“Well, now he’s dead, too,” my mother said. “When’s the viewing,” my father said.
43
Tony and Millie lived on the first floor of a red-brick two-flat they owned on the far west side of Chicago. I rode there easily on my bike from our near suburb. A few months after their daughter, Claire, died of meningitis when she was four, Tony built a room by putting planks of thick plywood across their closed- in back porch. Outside his room, the damp cellar smell came up from the basement below. Soon after he built his room, he started drawing and painting. He read books about great painters—Lust for Life,
Uncle Tony’s Funeral
“He’d gotten strange,” my father said. “What do you mean?” my mother said.
“That hit him hard,” my mother said.
“Painting’s all very well as a hobby, like golf or bowl- ing, but he got obsessed.”
I crammed stew into my mouth to stop myself from venting my anger. His art made Tony more alive and interesting than anyone I knew.
“Thursday.”
~
JosePh Biancalana