The House Across the Street

Louis is sitting on his sunporch when the ambulance and two police cruisers pull full-speed into the driveway of the house across the street. A mechanic for much of his life, he notes again how mid-sized SUVs are replacing all the giant Plymouth and Ford police sedans he worked on over the years. Their siren-shrieking, pulsing-red-light presence means that the sound Louis heard minutes earlier may very well have been the gunshot he has been telling himself was just his imagination.

The house across the street is as old as Louis’s. All the houses on the street are old, tall and multi-tiered, with gables and dormers and house-wide front porches. The sun-faded wood siding and lacquered shingles look as if they belong on some sleepy leafy boulevard where people stroll in the evening and wave to neighbors.

But this isn’t that kind of genteel town. It doesn’t hide its sweat or smoke or love of work behind lofty oaks and porch pillars. It admits its faults. There are no trees overhanging the fronts of the houses; people walk this street with purpose more than leisure. In the early years of Louis and Anna Nagy’s life here, morning porch railings were often powdered with red dust from the mills, and over time the street has become busier, a thoroughfare for the west side of the city, traffic steady much of the day.

Louis now sees the woman in the house across the street appear briefly on the front porch to meet the policemen. Her dark hair, streaked with broad swaths of silver and usually pulled back in a bun, today has loose strands all askew; she holds her hands to her face. Even in the hazy evening light, Louis swears he can see a crazy pattern of dark spatters across the front of her pale blue dress.

~

Louis understands how the geometry of the neighborhood determines who knows what about whom. Most houses are close together, and he knows his next-door neighbors better than he knows the people across the street, although he looks directly at their house every time he glances out his front windows. It’s a network of backyards: people chatting across hedges, kids running through each other’s yards in play, neighbors exchanging garden vegetables and juice glasses filled with homemade wine—lip-puckering grape or lemony rhubarb or earthy dandelion. They hear each other's arguments, the slammed doors, the vapid threats, the kids scolded and shrieking. He knows the other side has its own grid of backyards, but the busy street is like a barrier, a border, as if a great distance separates the two sidewalks.

The families living on opposite sides of the street see each other elsewhere more often than when they’re home: at Little League games, in the suburban shopping mall, on the streets downtown. They wave to each other when they happen to be outside at the same time, planting flowers or sweeping grass clippings from their front steps, calling out greetings when the traffic is sparse enough to allow anyone to hear. Louis remembers early winter mornings, he and the neighbor across the street clearing snow before they each left for work, the rasp of their twin shovels ringing sharply in the hollow quiet of falling snow, and their shouts, little more than small talk about the weather, echoing in the cold air. Even now, Louis wonders why it was that in those still, gray moments, punctuated only by the metallic percussion of shovels on concrete, in those moments more than any other, he felt something close to friendship with that other man.

~

He hears the loud crackle of a distorted voice come from one of the cruisers, but it ends before he can make any sense of it. It looks as though every light inside the house is turned on. A cone of pale yellow in the driveway shines on the ambulance, which has its own rack of gleaming red lights across the roof. Everything is lit up, as if in eerie celebration. It feels like a long time, but Louis knows it has only been a matter of minutes since he saw the woman on the porch. He imagines that by now other neighbors have seen the ambulance and police cars, and he’s not surprised when he sees dark forms sidle along the sidewalk, inching closer to the house.

~

Louis’s wife is the nosey one. She gets most of her stories from gossipy neighbors on their own side of the street. Louis doesn’t exactly approve of it, but he often enjoys the gossip. Whatever Anna hears during the day, she generally relates to Louis over dinner. When their kids were young, Anna used a kind of code at the table, accenting seemingly random story-fragments with jerky eye rolls and shrugs and long stares, holding in midair her forkful of haluski or their homegrown string beans, until Louis nodded or arched his eyebrows in feigned understanding. He often couldn’t entirely crack the code, and waited until they were getting ready for bed to ask for a re-cap or clarification. When the children were older and having dinner elsewhere, and later still, when they had all moved out, Anna was more direct, although years of dealing with puzzling signals still left Louis frequently doubting whether he fully understood even the straightforward tales.

Now Louis is thinking about that hot Sunday afternoon in August of 1985. He liked to say he took Sunday afternoons “completely off,” and was in his chair on the sunporch, a section of newspaper across his lap, a small electric fan cooling the sticky air and rhythmically lifting the corners of the paper. Across the street, a bronze-colored ’83 Mazda RX-7 pulled into the drive, a sporty, modernistic looking car, a model Louis had never worked on, had never been inside. And out of the front passenger’s side climbed the neighbor’s son; Louis figured he was about twenty-five at the time. He was wearing the oversized baggy pants and shirt that so many young people were wearing then, which puzzled Louis, who had grown up on hand-me-downs and had come to appreciate clothes that fit. The young man was six inches taller than his father and twenty pounds lighter; his curly hair had an un-Italian reddish tint that Louis suspected had embarrassed his father ever since it had first appeared when the boy was ten. Out of the driver’s side climbed a woman, slender but also wearing outsized clothes, a jumpsuit of billowy olive-colored material, her blond hair cut very short. The jumpsuit brought to mind the gabardine mechanic’s overalls Louis had worn for years, and he smiled rakishly at the image in his head of a woman wearing overalls.

The woman and the son took each other’s hand as they rounded the front of the car. What Louis could tell even from across the street, what caused him to rise up from his seat in a half-standing motion, was that the woman was older than the young man by, Louis guessed, at least fifteen years. (Later, Anna would confirm that it was seventeen years.) What he could see of her face revealed her age, but it was also her movements—confident, unhurried, not the impatient motions of the young. The neighbor and his wife came out to greet them, but it was an awkward greeting, and Louis could see the tension in the way they all shook hands, the uncertainty in their stances, as if one of them might suddenly bolt away, down the sidewalk. The two couples stayed on the front porch. No one stepped inside. No one fetched a tray of cannoli or pitcher of iced tea. Louis could see that the woman was not welcome. He thought the four of them—three in white wicker chairs, the son perched on the railing—were like actors in a bad movie, stiff and exaggerated, the parents grim faced, the woman sighing and toying with a cigarette she never lit, the son frenetic with phony energy, clapping his hands and squeezing his forearms. Ignoring his newspaper, Louis watched with uncomfortable fascination until the couple (he couldn’t think of them as the “young” couple) left after twenty minutes, with blank faces and slumped shoulders. The sporty Mazda sped off quickly.

Anna learned the details second-hand over grocery carts in the supermarket. They knew the son had become a social worker; they had sent a card with money when he graduated from college. The woman was a psychologist contracted to the agency where the son worked. Anna surmised that the parents were upset about the age difference, mostly because they wanted the boy, their only child, to have children, to carry on the family name, and they were convinced no children would come of this relationship.

Louis heard variations on those details for twenty years: as it turned out, the son’s relationship with the woman lasted longer than the span of their age difference. Still, as his mother and father expected, there were no children, and the son had become essentially estranged from his parents because of the woman, and they had never reconciled. The relationship’s end was surprisingly contentious, and the son, devastated, apparently took a long time to get over it. But even then, he didn’t turn to his parents for solace.

In this matter, Louis didn’t need help with Anna’s code. He understood enough about families, how the seeds of discontent and anger were sown in unexpected places. Ultimately, his neighbor couldn’t make his son give him what he wanted, and over time he began to blame his wife for not having “given him” more children. He wanted the big noisy family of his youth. Most of his brothers and sisters had their own large broods; he was embarrassed to bring only his tiny family when relatives gathered. He wanted to be the gruff but lovably eccentric patriarch portrayed in movies and TV shows. He wanted tradition and procreation and little kids stuffing themselves at Christmas dinner. Louis had never talked to the man about such things, but he felt certain they were true. That’s what he read between the lines.

When they got hooked up for cable TV, Louis became fond of dramatized history shows, and when Anna told him what she had heard about the latest argument across the street, he felt he could comment. “He’s like one of those old English or French kings who really wants an heir, and gets crazy, and wants to change wives until he gets one who can give him an heir,” he told Anna, who frowned and waved her hand dismissively. “Technically he has an heir,” she said. But she paused thoughtfully. “It’s really old-fashioned to blame his wife that way. And it’s flat out wrong.” Her voice rose. “For all we know, it’s him not her. They could have adopted. They could have become foster parents.” He understood that this was Anna calling their neighbor arrogant and selfish without saying the words. Louis nodded to himself at what he felt was his insight.

Louis and Anna have three children, all grown now, but three always seemed plenty for Louis, who, on some exasperated days in the early years, swore he was ready to loan one of them to any other family who wanted more. He knows people who want a particular number of children, even plan it out, but he’s been happy enough with the children he has, and with his four grandchildren. He always figured it’s what life gives you.

~

They went to each other’s church festivals, not specifically because they were neighbors, but simply because that’s what they did.

The Slovaks had their summer festival in steamy July, with polka bands and kegs of beer, haluski and pierogi and nut rolls, chuck-a-luck and blackjack booths, the Slovak priest agreeing to say an outdoor Mass in the picnic pavilion. On Saturday night there were accordion players and always a group of men who got drunk and rowdy and insulted each other until their mortified wives insisted that they stop before fights broke out.

The Italians’ festival was held in early fall, when temperatures and tempers had cooled. They had their own accordion bands in peasant costumes, and bocce tournaments, and ceremonies for the Madonna with parades of little girls in flowered wreaths. Louis loved the anise-flavored pizzelle and lemon biscotti, and insisted Anna buy extra to bring home.

Every year they would run into each other on the festival grounds, and act like they hadn’t seen each other in months, though they might have waved across the street that very morning. They laughed and slapped their backs as if their meeting was a surprising happenstance. Each thanked the other for coming to their festival, and although their exchange was only about familiar family details, they parted as if intimate friends.

~

Another car slows in front of the house across the street, this one an unmarked black sedan. The driveway is filled with the ambulance and cruisers, and the sedan pulls right onto the sidewalk. The people gathered there scuttle back as the driver gets out, a heavyset man, jacketless but wearing a dress shirt and tie and a holster under his arm. Louis knows this man is a detective, and believes that his presence pretty much confirms that the sound was a gunshot.

~

Louis was just a kid, sixteen, when he started hanging around dinky Simmons Garage, a hole in the wall tucked between a small brick apartment building and a men’s clothing store that sold chambray work shirts and heavy-soled boots alongside ties and fedoras. The overhead garage door folded open directly onto Newfield Avenue; cars waiting to be worked on were parked on the street or in the alley behind.

The place was narrow and dark, and old man Simmons was wide and sullen and cheap. Louis got ten dollars for two evenings and all day Saturday, cleaning up, handing tools, doing simple jobs that couldn’t hurt anything if he messed up. He loved the rainbow gleam of oil on the dank floor, the dull sheen of new brake drums, the efficient click of a socket wrench ratcheting bolts. By the time he finished high school, he had learned enough to get a job at a bigger garage, and then other places. When he landed the job at the Ford dealership, many years later, he knew that was where he would retire. It was one of those things that happened, a series of jobs stitching together a work life that was largely secure, if not glamourous. But he knows his neighbor across the street has had neither security nor glamour.

Louis remembers stories he overheard as a child, his parents and relatives talking about prejudice against immigrants, the ridicule and threats and grievances, most obvious with their parents; Louis’s grandparents had come to the country when they were barely out of their teens, and spoke only a handful of fractured English phrases. Louis gathered that the Italians got the worst of it, especially the dark-skinned Sicilians and others from the southern tip of the country. In the years when steel mills and coal mines dominated the region, the few Italians hired were given the dirtiest jobs and any role where the job title could be linked with, or twisted into, “monkey.” The Irish often didn’t get hired at all, and the Slovaks—his and Anna’s families—were considered big and dumb; they were given the jobs that required brawn. But the Slovak jokes were less threatening, and there were fewer confrontations and less intimidation. As young Louis tried to piece together the fragments and anecdotes he picked up eavesdropping when his aunts and uncles were visiting and drinking beer on the back porch, he was troubled by his inability to understand the nature of the unfairness he heard described. The stories frightened him, but also filled him with an ill-defined sadness. Even now, when he recalls the stories he overheard while secretly sitting on the radiator in his parents’ kitchen, he feels the same resonant melancholy.

Louis doesn’t know if his neighbor ever had to face discrimination, but he doesn’t think so. He had introduced himself as a painter in the mill when they first moved in, and although Louis never heard how he got started as an industrial painter, nor what exactly his job entailed, it clearly kept the man working in the mills for years. Until things went sour.

The city had known trauma before, and this time it was the steel business, which seemed to disappear overnight. After holding the region in thrall for seventy years, steelmaking shrank to a single specialty mill, and there was no tourniquet for the job loss. Louis, not yet with the Ford dealer, had survived well enough during those years because people couldn’t get by without their cars, and their cars always needed to be fixed. But his neighbor had to take a job at a small manufacturing company in another town, driving thirty miles each way. It sounded like the man basically had to start over, which apparently played havoc with his retirement plans, and made it necessary for his wife to keep her part-time job as a department store clerk.

She had taken the job when their son was grown; she wanted more to do with her time. Her husband discouraged her, claiming she didn’t need to work and that he disliked the idea of a working wife, although even before the mills’ closing, everyone found extra money helpful. But Louis felt sure there was more to it; he believed her job angered the man mainly because it was a reminder that she could only work in the first place because they didn’t have more children.

~

Louis is suddenly and inexplicably agitated, disturbed that things are playing out across the street like a TV crime drama he has seen many times. But these are not actors, and everything is as real as a sting on his skin, a shudder in his limbs. He knows people put this kind of stuff on Facebook or somewhere else on the internet. They take videos with their phones and send them to friends. The longer the police are here, the more likely someone will show up in an SUV with a TV station logo on the side, a young man with his sleeves rolled-up, or a pretty young woman in a short jacket, with a notebook and camera operator. A uniformed policeman will come out of the house, tell them nothing, and irritably try to shepherd them further down the sidewalk, where, denied other news for the moment, the reporters will eventually talk to the neighbors. Louis expects that the coroner will be here soon, and maybe more police cars. Yet he still hopes for an ending different from the one being scripted.

Anna would know the best person to call for details, but she won’t be home for another hour; she’s at their daughter’s house. Louis could call someone himself, but he feels glued to his sunporch seat, upset by what’s happening, but unable to turn away. He wouldn’t dare cross the street.

~

Everyone had known about the worsening emphysema, and then, later, the failing heart. When they saw him outside he always had a portable oxygen tank slung over his shoulder like a giant thermos bottle, clear tubes winding up to the tiny saddle across his nostrils. Then they began to see even less of him, and the gossip turned to the stress of his confinement. The talk was that anger and fear had curdled inside him. He was being strangled by bitterness.

~

He had waited until his wife had come home. So that he could do it right in front of her. That’s what truly took everyone’s breath away.

~

Later, Louis will wonder why in the world his neighbor across the street might have had a gun in the first place. Louis never became a hunter like his father and brothers. When his father died, his brothers inherited the shotgun, the deer rifle, the twin lightweight .22s, and the pistol with a long barrel. As far as he knew, the man across the street didn’t hunt either. But then, Louis never owned a gun himself, and rarely had an occasion to talk about them, certainly not with that neighbor. Perhaps he had bought the pistol expressly for this.

As always, it was Anna who heard the whole story before Louis did. The man had been waiting in the middle of their living room, sitting in his wheelchair with the small gun in his lap. He had disconnected his oxygen, and was wheezing and gasping. His wife had come in calling his name, still holding the paper prescription bag from the pharmacy. Hearsay was that he didn’t utter a word as he lifted the pistol.

~

For some reason, even on this late spring day when warmer temperatures are beginning to linger, Louis is thinking about snow while he stares intently at the house across the street, as if the familiar porch and windows and steps will reveal something to help him comprehend. The quick, subdued funeral and burial are over. The son’s Honda is in the driveway; he has agreed to stay with his mother for a few days to help with those details of death that become pressingly practical after the initial emotional surge. The son was stoic and terse standing beside his mother and the closed casket in the funeral home. Medicated with something to calm her, she insisted on at least a few visitation hours, saying she needed to be able to meet those family and friends willing to come. It is much too soon to ask about what the woman will do, but Louis wonders how she could possibly stay in that house now, and if the taint of what happened will make selling difficult.

Usually, Louis and Anna would want to talk about something like this, framing it in disjointed fragments: “I was just thinking about . . .” “Remember what you said the other day . . .” “I hate to bring this up, but . . .” It was their way of inching toward difficult matters, laying out their thoughts in installments. But they are not yet ready to discuss what took place in the house across the street. They don’t want to talk about husbands and wives, or children and houses. Louis is grateful for this. He senses they are both too unnerved by the presence of such despair and disappointment in someone they knew; it is like avoiding touching something poisonous.

When he says to Anna, “I guess I didn’t really know the man,” his words sound foolish and naïve in his ears. Of course I didn’t know the man! It wasn’t just that he didn’t know his middle name, or how he voted in presidential elections, or whether decades of spray paint had fed his emphysema. Clearly, he hadn’t known nearly enough to be able to imagine what the years of anger and spite had done to amplify the dark capacities of his heart. Louis realizes that no one would fault him for that—who can know, really?—but he feels muddled and remorseful nonetheless, the way he felt paralyzed in his sunporch chair.

Shoveling snow. Not knowing why, Louis is still thinking about snow, remembering not only those long-ago mornings in their dome of snowy camaraderie, but more recent winters, after the neighbor and his wife had both stopped working, when Louis would see them clearing snow from their driveway, one of the few on the block that emptied onto the street, most houses having a back-alley access. They looked like a team, the husband using a wide shovel to open the middle, his wife with a smaller shovel or broom clearing the edges, tidying corners. They bent to the job, barely looking up. He had a hat with folded up earflaps, she wore a scarf tied under her chin. Stooped like that, with their steady, rhythmic, compact motions, they reminded Louis of old films he had seen of groups of laborers working on projects during the Depression, shoveling and scraping with those stilted cinematic movements that now seem comic. To Louis and anyone else watching, the couple would appear almost anxious, as if on the clock, hurrying to somewhere they absolutely had to be, although, Louis now understands, they would never get there.