Victor looked down at his legs, long, thin, and pale, with fine dark hairs just beginning to coarsen near his ankles. With his dark eyes and hair, he favored his mother in looks, he had none of his father’s sandy coloring and stocky build. His mother had mentioned to him once, long ago, that of all the people in the family, he most resembled her brother Anthony, who was evidently some years older than her, and who died in Vietnam, when she was just a little girl. Anthony was, in fact, Victor’s middle name, and a name he liked much better than Victor, but when years ago he asked his parents if he could go by that name, his mother, though she said nothing, stiffened like a corpse and continued, as if he had said nothing, to call him by his first name, Victor.
While he remembered these things the wind that came in from off the water picked up, and the two cousins sat silent for awhile, listening to the sound of the breeze against their ears and the raucous cries of the seagulls and the crash of the waves and the squeals and shouts of the children running to and fro on the sand and splashing about on the water. The sense Victor had when they arrived, that the beach was as much of a participant in itself as the birds and the people inhabiting it returned to him with renewed strength. He had a sudden urge to walk out into the water, and he was about to stand when Shelby spoke again. “So, if your Mom is Italian, are you Catholic?”
Victor had a sudden image in his mind’s eye of the tiny gold crucifix his mother habitually wore around her fat white neck. “I’m not anything,” he said.
Shelby knocked him lightly on the shoulder with the back of her hand. It was the first time she touched him. “You know what I mean,” she said. “If you were some kind of religion, that’s what you would be, right? You get your religion from your mother. So, would you be Catholic?”
“I guess,” said Victor. Though he could not specifically remember ever having been inside of a Church, he knew, in some vague way, that he had been, and that the Churches he had been inside were Catholic churches. He knew that his mother, for all that she had not attended a church service since long before her divorce, still considered herself a Catholic, and received newsletters and other mailings from at least three of the Roman Catholic Churches in the city. He also knew that he was baptized in a Catholic Church in New York, and that before they moved to North Carolina he was in classes being prepared for his first communion. He had, then, a very vague memory of those preparations, of being herded every week or so with other children into a brightly painted classroom, then herded back out again to present some piece of artwork to the adults congregated in a dark and fragrant sanctuary. All of this ended with his families move South, this and other, more meaningful but sketchy scenes of being one among a dozen or so children at large gatherings of what might have been his mother’s extended family, of sleeping in the backseat of the car at night while his parents sat side by side in the front, driving home from somewhere, cocooned in a rare companionable silence. It was as if everything connected with his mother beyond her life with him and his father ended when they left New York, but she never, even after his father left, said anything about returning to it, or anything at all about her family up there, her friends, or her church. Victor asked her once, years ago, when his father was still living with them, why they had moved from New York, and she had said simply that there were better opportunities for his father in the south, and that she liked the warm weather.
But there was more to the move than this, and even as a child he’d sensed it. After the move, Victor saw less of his father, and watched more television than he’d ever been allowed to watch in New York. His mother had slowly and steadily put on weight until her once prominent cheekbones and chin became lost in the swollen roundness of an overweight face. Her dark hair, before always kept set, became stringy and streaked with gray, and her work as a nurse seemed to be constantly interrupted by some illness or injury. And his father would disappear for longer periods of time, during which his mother would only say he was on a business trip, until finally he was gone for good, leaving Victor with the present of a ten speed bicycle and the promise that they would spend every summer together at his new house in South Carolina, and that no matter what he was only a phone call away. “Your mom and me,” his father had said, deadly serious for once, as he sat on the edge of Victor’s bed the day he left, “can’t agree any more about too many things. Sometimes, son…” Victor remembered that his father, at that point made a very characteristic gesture, something he often did when he was tired, of rubbing his entire face with the flat of his right hand, as if he were washing it, or wiping it clean of something that had been dashed into it, “…things just don’t work out, and their ain’t anything anyone can do but say to hell with it. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, son, but I don’t know what else to tell you. All I want you to know, son, is that I love you, and I’ll always be your pop. You got that?”
At that Victor had nodded, feeling nothing but bewilderment. His father’s obvious distress seemed out of all proportion to what was happening. So he was leaving. It wasn’t such a big deal. He was never around anyway.
Sitting on the beach beside his cousin, Victor involuntarily shuddered at the memory. Shelby reached into the enormous straw bag she’d brought along and handed him a small plastic bottle. “The suns getting to you, paleface,” she said. “You better put this on.”
Victor took the bottle from her and looked at the label. It was sunscreen, with a high SPF, and he squeezed a bit onto his hand and applied it to his face and forehead. He was too shy to take off his shirt, though it was only a tank top, in front of Shelby. She watched him bemusedly, and then reached in her bag for something else. “What were you thinking about?” she said.
Victor looks out to sea. “New York,” he said.
“Do you miss it?”
“Not really. I don’t remember it very well. We moved down here when I was about six.”
“How come?”
“I don’t know.”
Shelby pulled a pack of cigarettes out of the bag, offered him one, then took one for herself. “Gum likes your mother,” she said again.
“I know,” Victor mumbled this around the cigarette in the corner of his mouth as he attempted, for the dozenth time, to light it with Shelby’s clear green plastic Bic lighter. It was impossible to sustain a flame in the strong sea breeze. Shelby cupped her small hands expertly over his, and finally it got lit. “My mom likes her, too,” said Victor. “I don’t think my mom talks to anyone in her own family. But she talks to…” he hated to say that silly name, but he said it. “…Gum. Not all the time, but more than she talks to anyone back in New York.”
Shelby turned to him, her eyes wide behind the enormous sunglasses she’d brought with her in her bag. “Why doesn’t she talk to her family? I thought Italian families were close-knit and warm and loving!”
“Not hers, I guess,” said Victor, smiling a little, though, for Shelby’s stereotype stirred a memory of one or several large gatherings of his mother’s extended family, in which food was served in the backyard of a row of houses, and dozens of other children were present, and his father and mother were absorbed into separate clusters of women and men. The memory was a pleasant one, and he remembered being presented to a very old woman, wizened and bound to a wheelchair and smelling of baby powder and urine, a figure so ancient that she seemed to be beyond speech or even thought, but who had seemed pleased with him and had babbled something in what he imagined now must have been Italian and stroked his head with fingers as rigid and fragile as a bird’s claws. All the children there, he remembered, had been older than him, but they had included him in their games anyway. He remembered his mother seemed to be more relaxed than usual at such gatherings, letting the rowdier older children roughhouse in their way with him as if she could trust, somehow, that he would not get hurt. He tried to remember the other children’s names or faces, but he couldn’t, and when he tried to remember who, among the grown ups at the gathering, were his grandparents and aunts and uncles, there was no distinction among them. Only one woman’s face stood out in his memory, a face younger than his mother’s but strikingly similar, though more heavily made