I’d asked him if he pulled the trigger.
“I didn’t.”
“Do you know who did?”
“I know who did.”
I’d left it at that, though I had no doubt Pop knew exactly what had gone down, and it would be a helluva story. Pop was right. I didn’t want to know. Nobody did. It had been three years, and nobody had been charged with his murder, despite the coverage and the publicity. Maybe the authorities considered it “family business,” and no one really wanted to get involved.
I considered leaving this story alone too. It also had “family business” written all over it. Which made the whole thing even more bizarre. Pop had his rules, but he’d never brought me into his dealings or involved me in his work.
“Why did you take me to Shimmy’s last night?” I asked.
Pop was silent, his hands clasped in front of his mouth. For a minute I didn’t think he’d even heard me, and when he finally started to speak again, the story he told was his own.
“I didn’t have music like you do. I wasn’t good at anything. I was big and strong . . . and mean. Just like my father. You look just like me. I looked just like him. Nothing we can do about that. I didn’t like looking in a mirror ’cause all I saw was him. I hated him. He gave me every reason. But I loved him too. And that love never made any sense to me. I wanted to make him proud, yet I wanted to be nothing like him. Now I have a son who wants to be nothing like me. It’s a funny world.”
“Pop.” I sighed, shaking my head. He patted my cheek, and his eyes were wet.
“No. It’s okay, Benny. I’m not a good man, and maybe you can’t be a bad man and a good father at the same time—I don’t know. I know you saw too much. You knew too much. You know who I am and some of the things I’ve done. Not all. If you knew all . . . well, you’d hate me more than you already do.”
“I don’t hate you, Pop. I have never hated you.” I’d been angry. Disappointed. Scared. But I had never hated him.
“Well . . . that’s good.” His hand was still on my face, and he patted my cheek again. “But I did hate my father. I didn’t hate him because he hit me. I didn’t hate him because he swore at me and made me miserable. I didn’t even hate him because he drank what little money we had, and I was hungry and cold. I hated him because he hated me.”
“Why did he hate you?”
“Because I looked just like him?” Pop shrugged and his hand fell away. “Because I needed him? I don’t know. I think he probably just hated me because he had nothing but hate to give. When I won my first big bout, I bought him a case of the best wine I could afford, which was still pretty damn cheap. He drank it all. And he drowned in his own piss and vomit.”
I hadn’t ever heard this part. I was quiet, waiting for more, but he shrugged it off, leaving his father’s memory to lie forever in his own waste.
“When you came along, I promised myself I would be different. I would take care of you,” he said, his voice stronger.
“You have,” I said.
“I swore you would never be hungry. I swore you wouldn’t ever sleep on the floor because there were fewer bugs there than in your bed. You wouldn’t ever see me drunk. You wouldn’t ever wonder if I was coming home. You wouldn’t ever feel my fists or get my boot.”
“And I never did.” He had kept every promise he had made to himself.
“In order to keep those promises, though, I had to provide. You know why money is the root of all evil?”
I shook my head. “Why?”
“Because if you don’t have money, it affects everything else. It’ll drive a man into the ground if he can’t take care of his own. That’s what men were put on earth to do. Protect. Provide. And I decided I could and would do anything to do that. I’m not smart. I’m not skilled. I can’t build or create or repair. After Bo Johnson laid me flat in the ring . . . and damn near killed me, I realized I couldn’t even fight.”
He stood abruptly, as if suddenly it was all too much. He took my plate and scraped the bones into the trash before he repeated the action with his own. I stood as well, clearing what was left on the table. I didn’t press him or ask for the rest of the story. He was stewing, gathering his thoughts. There was more. I didn’t know how we’d jumped from Bo Johnson to lost bouts and a father’s responsibilities, but I had no doubt it was all connected in Pop’s mind.
“I don’t expect you to understand. I don’t even want you to understand. But you gotta know,” my father said. “You gotta know.”
“What do I gotta know?” I asked.
“You gotta know that I loved you. And I tried to do right by you.”
“Pop? What is this all about?” I was so confused. Of course I knew he loved me, although neither of us had ever been good at saying the words.
He waved me away, waved his words away, like he could erase them from the air, erase the emotion from our throats. “Forget about it, kid. I’m getting old. I’m just glad you’re here. Why don’t you play me something? I don’t get to hear you much anymore. Go on. I’ll do that.” He took my empty coffee cup from my hands and set it in the sink with the other dishes. “Go on. Play for me, Benny,” he insisted.
I sat down at the old piano and ran my fingers up and down the keys, reacquainting myself with them. Every piano is different. The tension, the spring, the timbre. It always took a few numbers to feel at home on a new set of keys, but this piano and I were old friends. With my left hand, I played the opening bars of “Habanera” from Carmen, so distinct and low. Dum da DUM dum, dum da DUM dum.
My father smiled. “That’s it. Play that one for your mother.”
I riffed on the melody, not in the mood for the tempo and intensity of Bizet, and “Habanera” turned into something painfully slow and lonely. I didn’t know French, but I knew the story, and it was damned depressing. Carmen ends up dead—stabbed—at the hands of a man she’d teased, taunted, loved, and then rejected. The whole opera could be summed up in the opening lines of “Habanera”: “If you don’t love me, then I love you. If I love you . . . beware.”
I wrote a song, sitting there, and called it “Beware.” Inspired by Carmen. Inspired by my mom. It needed a horn section to bring it to life, and I scribbled out an entire score in the margins of the Sunday crossword puzzle. I played for so long that when I finally looked up from the keys, hours had passed, and Pop had turned on the lamp beside me. The dishes were tidied, and he was asleep in his chair, his hands folded across his stomach. It was dark out. The winter months made the night come early. I needed to wash up and change and retrieve my car before I went to Shimmy’s, but I thought I had time to close my eyes. I was suddenly exhausted, and the refrain of the last few hours clanged in my head. Beware, beware, beware.
I stood and walked to the couch, the same couch that had always been there, the couch where Bo Johnson sat the night he asked my father to help him. I stretched out on it, pulling a cushion under my head, and I closed my eyes, listening to my father breathe, listening to the sounds of the neighborhood beyond the window where my mother once sang. I dreamed of Carmen and Esther Mine.