Not so for Claudia Scudder. I never saw her actually light one cigarette from the butt of another, but unless she was eating or sleeping she generally had a cigarette going. A carton couldn’t have lasted her more than three days.

  So three, four packs a day. When I was a boy a carton was two dollars, and a pack from a vending machine cost you a quarter. We never had much money, but even a heavy tobacco habit had minimal financial impact. Nobody ever had to give anything up in order to cover the cost of the next pack or the next carton.

  I just checked now, I let Google save me a research trip to the corner deli, and the average cost of a pack of cigarettes in New York City is $11.96. That’s what, sixty cents a cigarette? They were a penny apiece when my mother smoked them.

  Well, hell, they got her through the days, her cigarettes and her soap operas. On the radio for years, and then halfway through my second year in high school my father came home with a Philco television set, and before long she’d transferred her loyalties from mere voices and sound effects to characters she could actually see.

  Progress.

  It was the cigarettes that killed her, though they waited until just short of nine years after the drink killed him.

  It’s a slog, remembering all of this, writing it down. I think I’ll take a break.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  My father went from one job to another. I wasn’t always aware of when one job ended and another began, and I didn’t always know what it was that he did. For a while he drove a delivery truck for a bakery—I remember that because there were a couple of Saturdays when I rode along with him.

  At one point he owned a shoe store. A neighborhood store, in the South Bronx. We were living somewhere else when he bought it—another part of the Bronx, or it could have been somewhere in Queens—and after he’d had the store for a month or two we moved to be closer to the store, and sometimes I would walk over there after school.

  The shoe store failed before the year was out. We moved somewhere else. It’s all gone now, the block the store was on, the block where we lived in the upper flat of a two-story frame house. All flattened in aid of the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, and over the years I’ve never been on that stretch of highway without remembering the shoe store.

  So the jobs never lasted too long, but neither did the periods of unemployment. He was, not to put too fine a point on it, a drunk, and drink has its effect on one’s employment history whether or not one drinks during working hours.

  I don’t know what he may have thought about his drinking. He could have described himself, as I’ve heard quite a few people do, as a functioning alcoholic, and I understand the term, although I might change the modifier to dysfunctioning.

  More often than not, I think he left jobs of his own volition. They were dead-end jobs, they were boring, they were too much work for too little money. And I’m sure there were times when the jobs left him.

  He was an alcoholic and a depressive, although I never heard either of those words applied to him. He seemed to accept his condition—that his evenings would float on a river of whiskey, that nothing would ever quite work out for him, that the brief bloom of optimism that attended each change of occupation or residence would leave him back where he’d started, back where he’d always been.

  I remember one night, largely indistinguishable from any other night. She was in the kitchen, he was in his chair in the living room with a glass in his hand. Three Feathers, Four Roses, whatever.

  “Aw, Mattie,” he said, and held the glass aloft, and looked at the ceiling light fixture through it. “This world’s a hard old place. A man needs a little help to get through it.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I’ve told how he died. I’m pretty sure it wound up in one of the books, and maybe more than one, though like everything else in the books it may have been slightly shaped in the telling. The books are stories, and for all that their content is factual, they’re deliberately fashioned as stories, each with a beginning and a middle and an ending.

  I suppose human lives have those three things as well, though they’re generally more clear-cut in books. Charlie Scudder’s life was mostly middle, and I guess almost everybody’s is, except for his second-born son, my brother Joe, who went in the blink of an eye from beginning to ending.

  I hardly ever think about this brother I never saw and never knew. And now eighty years later it’s as if he’s right here in the room with me. Just at the boundary of my peripheral vision—which itself has been shrinking over the years.

  Hovering, if you will, at the edge of thought.

  Never mind. My father’s own ending came one evening after he’d boarded the eastbound Canarsie Line subway at one or another of the stations on West Fourteenth Street. I don’t know what had brought him into Manhattan that night, or what led him to take that particular Brooklyn-bound train.

  I have to assume he’d been drinking. At that hour he’d surely have had a few, and maybe more than a few. And at some point he walked from one subway car to another, or at least walked from one car onto the passage between it and the next car. You weren’t allowed to smoke on the subway, or anywhere in a subway station, but it wasn’t unheard of for a straphanger to go out onto the platform between two cars and have a quick cigarette.

  It was still illegal, of course. You were still smoking on the subway, even if you were no longer within one of its cars, and you were additionally in violation of a rule forbidding passengers from riding between the cars. Still, I never heard of anyone getting cited for it, or even cautioned.

  Maybe the train stopped or started suddenly, or lurched. Or not. What difference does it make? He fell, and enough cars ran over him to mandate a closed casket.

  There were more people at the funeral than I would have expected. Family, of course, but a lot of people I never saw before or since. Men, for the most part. I suppose they knew him from one job or another.

  He was forty-three years old.

  It was the end of August, the summer between my second and third years at Monroe. That’s James Monroe High School, on Boynton Avenue in the Bronx. I probably shouldn’t have gone there, I probably should have taken the test for Bronx Science, but that never occurred to me and no one ever suggested it.

  Sometimes I think that tiny things that ought to be inconsequential have enormous consequences in life. Roads not taken, roads not even noticed in passing. Turn left instead of right, and a man who might have been CEO of General Motors winds up a second-shift barista at Starbucks.

  And other times I think the opposite. He was always going to be a barista, no matter how many right turns he took along the way. He could go chase an MBA at Wharton, and he’d still wind up sculpting cute designs in the foam of your latte.

  I lost a thread here. Where was I? Oh, right. At a funeral parlor on Gleason Avenue, looking at a closed casket.

  And it was August, and I would turn seventeen in a few weeks. I had a job that summer, stocking shelves and delivering prescriptions for Perlstein’s Pharmacy, but of course I had the day off.

  Five or six days earlier, my father told me to call in sick. The Red Sox were in town, there was a game that afternoon at Yankee Stadium. “Tell the boss you’re expecting a headache. And bring your glove. Maybe you’ll catch a foul ball.”

  He must have taken me to, oh, ten or a dozen games over the years. Always Yankee games. New York still had three teams, the Dodgers and Giants wouldn’t move west for another year or so, but I never got anywhere near Ebbets Field or the Polo Grounds. We might be living in Queens, but if we went to a ballpark, it was Yankee Stadium.

  He was joking about the glove. There were kids, and even the occasional grown-up, who’d bring a baseball mitt to a game, on the off chance that somewhat might hit a foul ball in their vicinity. But we both thought such a move was impossibly lame, although I suppose we’d have used a different adjective back then.

  I didn’t bring a glove, nor did I call the drugstore. I said I wished I could but I really had to go to work, and he said oh well, another time. And then a few days later he took a cigarette break on the subway and that was the end of that.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  “He was never the same after your brother died,” she said. She spoke the words in an undertone while we waited for the service to begin, and expanded on them hours later, back home, after the last hangers-on had left.

  He had always been a man of enthusiasms, she said. And that continued, and even after Joe’s death, he’d greet a new job or a new business venture with a rush of energy and optimism.

  But it wouldn’t last. His mood would darken and his energy would sag, and the new enterprise would be an echo of all the ones that had preceded it.

  “He was a good man, Matthew. He did the best he could. And he loved you.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  Is anybody going to want to read all this?

  I can’t see why anyone would. But I seem to want to write it. I’m an old man, and there’s something oddly bracing about a long look back at past years. Stir the pot and old memories bubble up. Most of them don’t need to be written down, but the bit of attention I give them lights up the corners of long-abandoned rooms.

  A woman writer—she was Southern, her name will come to me in a minute—said the bare fact of having survived childhood qualified her to be a writer. I suppose her point was that a person’s early years provide an experiential base to draw from, for what it’s worth. But what I took away from the remark was that childhood was something to be survived, and that every adult could take credit for that particular accomplishment.

  My childhood was all right, and for all the time I now find myself spending on reexamining it, I’ve no need to share these reflections.

  I’m not sure when my childhood ended. I don’t know how one decides where to draw that line, or if there’s an actual line to be drawn. Was I still a child up to the day my father died? In certain ways, perhaps, and not in others, and I’m not sure it’s a question that needs to be asked, let alone answered, but one thing at least is clear. When he died, my childhood was over.

  And I’d survived it.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  If he’d lived, would I have gone to college?

  That’s hard to know. I was certainly bright enough for it, but my grades didn’t always reflect my intelligence. I paid more attention in some classes than in others.

  If I’d gone to Bronx Science, it would have been assumed that I’d go on to college. Nobody went there to prepare for a career as a longshoreman or a letter carrier.

  But I’d gone instead to James Monroe, and some of my classmates went on to college and others did not. I don’t know the numbers, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they ran around fifty-fifty.

  A coin toss.

  I think my parents wanted me to go, or half-assumed I would do so. I remember my father musing that his life might have been a lot different if he’d gone to college, a prospect I don’t think he’d ever entertained at the time.

  My favorite subject in high school was Latin. I can’t say what made me sign up for it my freshman year, and I remember my father rolling his eyes and observing wryly that it would come in handy when I entered the priesthood. I don’t know why I liked Latin, but I did, and it was one subject I always got A’s in. There was a kind of verbal logic to it that made perfect sense to me, and it improved my performance in English classes, too.

  In second-year Latin we read Caesar’s writing about the Gallic wars, and that same year in English we read Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s play, and the two went together nicely. I decided I liked Roman history, and looked forward to my junior year, when we’d be reading Cicero. And then a week or so before summer break, Miss Rudin asked me to see her after class.

  I wondered what I’d done wrong. Nothing, as it turned out. I stayed after class, and so did a girl, Marcia Ippolito, and Miss Rudin was close to tears as she told us we two were the only students who’d signed on for third-year Latin, and that the school in its wisdom had elected to cancel the course.

  Miss Rudin. I don’t know how old she was at the time, old enough for gray hair, and probably thirty years older than I. Long gone by now, surely, but I never called her or thought of her as anything but Miss Rudin then, and apparently that hasn’t changed.

  Her first name was Eleanor. I’d forgotten that, but it came to me now, and it’s the only thing I ever knew about her.

  The woman who wrote about surviving childhood, her name was Flannery O’Connor. I knew it would come to me.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  A couple of years ago I was in the Barnes & Noble near Lincoln Center—and it must have been more than a couple of years ago, because that store closed a while back. Elaine was looking for something to read, and I wandered around until my eye was drawn by a biography of Cicero by one Anthony Everitt. I bought it and read it, and it didn’t make me go back and read Cicero, in Latin or in translation, but it was interesting enough to move me to pick up a nice three-volume edition of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

  I don’t know that I’ll ever make it past the first volume, but now and then I pick it up and read a few paragraphs or a few pages.

  I can’t see what difference it could have made if I’d been able to study a third year of Latin with Miss Rudin. Everything would have turned out the same. I’d have been a cop who’d read Cicero, and I’m not sure that would have been all that much of a distinction, not with all my brothers on the Force who’d gone to Catholic school.

  Cicero or no, I wouldn’t have gone to college. I don’t think I’d have gone even if my father had stayed away from the Canarsie Line, I think I’d have been ready to be done with school, ready to get on with my life, whatever I might have thought that meant. But his death sealed things. I needed to bring money into the house. I needed to support myself, and my mother.

  My first thought was that I’d drop out of school. I was within weeks of my seventeenth birthday, and I had my full height. I could get work.

  I could have just found a job and failed to show up for school, but I announced my intention at the funeral, to an aunt or an uncle, and in no time at all I was given to understand that this was not what I was going to do. It was important, everyone agreed, that I get my high school diploma, and my mother echoed all of this and told me very firmly that I would complete my junior and senior years of high school and she didn’t want to hear anything more about it.

  I’d never heard her say anything so unequivocally. It left me feeling I ought to apologize for having so much as thought of dropping out, and it was clear that the matter was settled.

  Meanwhile, there was a collection taken up, a metaphorical hat passed among the aunts and uncles. I wasn’t aware of this while it was going on, but two or three days after the funeral Aunt Rosalie and Uncle Bert showed up at our apartment with an envelope. To tide us over, they said. They gave it to my mother, and I never did learn how much it contained. It was months later before I managed to ask, and the only answer I got was that people were very generous.

  Uncle Bert told me that all I had to do for the next two years was get through high school, and that I should think about college. CCNY—that’s the City College of New York—was right there in the Bronx, a long walk or a short bus ride away from where we were sitting, and was tuition-free, and a smart young man like myself should have no trouble getting in. “Just because they’re mostly Jews there,” he said, “doesn’t mean it’s an official requirement. You could go to classes and find work that fits your schedule. Just think about it.”

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  I can’t recall ever giving it much thought. I continued at James Monroe, and took a full schedule of courses, even if I didn’t get to take Third-Year Latin. My junior year I stayed on at Perlstein’s, stocking shelves and delivering prescriptions from 3:30 until the store closed at 7:00.

  I had different jobs on Saturdays. Only one of them was interesting, and it only lasted a little over a month. It was for some sort of market research firm, and it involved going door to door in the Parkchester section of the Bronx and asking people how they felt about instant coffee. I carried a clipboard and a ballpoint pen, and I asked the questions on the sheet they’d given me and noted the responses.

  You had to wear a short-sleeved white dress shirt and a tie. I guess it was supposed to make you look serious or respectable or both.

  What made the job interesting wasn’t the shirt and tie, or what anybody had to say about instant coffee. What was interesting was that I never had the slightest idea what would be on the other side of the door I was knocking on. Half the time nobody was home, and a number of those who were found some way to tell me to fuck off, but a lot of doors opened for me and I got to look at a lot of people’s lives, however briefly.

  And, you know, it had a lasting effect. Early on, I had to force myself to knock on each of those doors. I don’t know that I was scared, but at the very least I was apprehensive. It wasn’t as challenging as door-to-door sales, I wasn’t asking anybody to buy anything, but there was an unwelcome element of confrontation involved.

  But I did it, and the more I did it the less it bothered me, which I guess is the way that sort of thing works. And some years later I remember an instructor at the Police Academy telling us all that the acronym GOYAKOD embodied the most essential basic element of police work. And what did it stand for? Get Off Your Ass and Knock On Doors.

  And I already knew how to do that.

  Oh, here’s an odd thing. There was a classmate of mine at Monroe who had the same job, white shirt and tie, clipboard, knocking on doors. His name was Eddie Towns, and I hadn’t really known him until we both landed the instant coffee gig. I noticed that his shift took him half the time I was spending, and we compared notes, and he was surprised to learn that I was actually knocking on all those doors and talking to the people who opened them.