Love and Fury Read Online Free

“dealing with a lot back then.” I had written about it in a memoir that sent that coach, who was still violating young boys, to prison. My father had been instrumental in putting the book in the hands of people who knew where the coach was. He took it on himself as a moral failing he had to put right, and I’d considered the account more than squared.
    While my father was with Amanda, I’d stayed home in the evenings, watching TV with my brothers, helping my mother care for them, and sometimes trying to console her as she wept and raged at my father.
    â€œAnd I imagine, I don’t know, but I imagine that it’s good for you to know that your mother and I got through that okay. She took me back. She forgave me. And we were in a real good period in our life together when she got sick. That’s the hell of it.” He took a moment to steady himself. “But I want to apologize to you two boys.”
    I remember thinking that yes, it was the boys to whom he wanted to apologize.
    I waited until I was sure he was finished, not wanting to risk the hand again. I recounted the enormous pressures he faced, day after day, caring for two sick and dying children, the financial pressures, the emotional pressure, the knowledge that there was only one end to the story. I said I didn’t blame him.
    â€œAw, you’re just trying to let me off the hook. You don’t need to do that. I don’t want you to do that. Not just-like-that”—he snapped his fingers—“I don’t want you making excuses for me.”
    He was right. As I was speaking it had occurred to me that my mother had been under all those pressures, too, had felt that despair, that terrible doomed love for her hopeless children, and had had to feel his rejection and betrayal besides. I am also my mother’s son.
    I remember her leaning on the sink, weeping over a stack of dirty dishes. I’d seen her from behind and her posture drew me to her. I placed a hand on her shoulder and she went on crying. Behind us, in the next room, my brothers were watching TV: Bobby, fifteen, in his wheelchair; Joey, eleven, hugging his knees on the floor; Mikey, nine, in the wheelchair that used to be Bobby’s. “What am I going to do?” my mother sobbed. “What am I going to do?”
    Before my brother Bobby grew weak, falling down, unable to get up, before he was diagnosed with Duchenne, and before my brother Joe was born, and then Mike, who never walked, my mother was a singer. She sang the whole day long:
Shine little glow worm, glimmer glimmer. Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered. Don’t sit under the apple tree with anybody else but me.
    My mother sang in clubs during World War II. My aunt told me this is how my parents met. Of course, I always imagined it Hollywood-style: my mother at the microphone, spotlit in a sequined dress, a band behind her in the semidarkness, singing some torch song while my father, looking handsome in his dress uniform, medals above his heart, his tie knotted just so (as he had tried to show me time and again before finally giving up and buying me a clip-on), listened appreciatively from a small table across the smoky room. Mood indigo.
    But recently my father told me the story a little differently. Oh, I’d already long since understood that my version was fantasy. My mother in a slinky sequined dress? Please. And my father was a private back from basic training, awaiting orders. And a “club,” in Allentown, is a bar room, dark, with usually only a diamond-shaped, face-sized window in the door and a few frosted glass bricks to let in some light. A couple of years ago I asked him about it and he smirked and waved his hand in that way of his that means “Bah.” Or “Go on,” a kind of erasure to make room for what he would say.
    â€œIt was up at the VFW, and your mother was in there with her mother and Kenny, her stepfather. Kenny was a blowhard when