Mama Never Sang Lullabies
by Jerry Vilhotti
The mother looked deeper into this polio infected son’s eyes, he whom she hadn’t wanted, really, what with a husband always falling into the smiles of all women and staying away for days; forgetting about her and the four children, stuck in the grip of the Great Depression, and unable to control her smile, that went into all directions the night she discovered her husband entwined on the couch with a bar maid whom he had taken home, that night she had haemorrhaged Tom out of her body - after seeing such a sight. And God would bestow upon this son, Tommy Tom Tom, that sin of the father’s in the form of infantile paralyzes.
She whispered harshly: “So you spent it! Look into my eyes and tell me you didn’t spend any money you got shining shoes — bum!”
Tom tried to fix his deformed leg steadier to the floor. He placed both his hands together behind his back and made his eyes fall deeply into her eyes while shaking his head as his tongue secretly scraped away from his teeth the remains of the chocolate bars he had eaten while watching Tom Mix silently killing bad guys mking the world a better place for corperations to grow. Silently, steadily, invisibly the tongue did its work. He had to make very sure his mouth was totally cleaned for fear she would next ask him to open it wide - to gather up any evidence of a spending.
“Leny and Flab dished me out, Mama. They took away all my corners so got all the shoes!” Tom said, referring to a brother and a brother-cousin who laughingly did outrun Tom easily.
All during supper, “the tiger” scowled at the boys who were the ages of six and seven. They called their grandmother that name - behind her back - since she did look like a scowling tiger that they had seen in Tarzan movies, if they had found enough shoes to shine or if seven year old Leny One N had been successful in his robbing forays at the candy store while the bookie owner was in the back room with the preety prostitute the syndicate corperation sent up as aaa bonus for the monies he was reaping in from all the dying of hunger people trying to find gold in the streets of the land of the rich.
Leny flashed a similar face back at her but Tom was becoming more terrified; only able to cover this up by doing a big grin but when an even deeper scowl began to etch itself on her face he shouted out of control: “Mama! Mama, she’s going to bite me!”
The Grandmother looked into her half empty dish saying in a hurtful, whining tone, “No, I wasn’t.”
When Tom’s mother turned toward him, the Grandmother gave him an even bigger scowl - for him to feed on along with his food.
Tom did his polio infantile paralysis charge at her as he screamed: “See Mama? See? See?”
She looked but the expression on her mother’s face had faded into one studying a slice of bread with bite holes in it.
The mother rose from the table not knowing whom to believe and began carrying dishes to the sink.
Now the scowl had in it the promise that Tom would get his and indeed from that second on when peeing Tom would stand sideways; walking by a dark room, he would peek in first and then throw a shoe, with holes in its sole, at the darkness or when reaching for anything it would take him twice as long since he would turn so often remembering fearsome shadows.
While his mother stayed in the same room with them Tom was brave saying, in the way vendors did their sing-song shouts when selling their produce on Arthur Avenue, before Mayor La Guardia took them off the street and put them into an enclosure called “The Market”, “Grandma’s a bum! She’s no good! She pees on the floor like Papa says and not in the bowl!”
Their father would not return until his wife’s mother left.
His mother smacked Tom across the back of the head.
Leny laughed hysterically at Tom’s surprised expression for he had been watching only the tiger for a reaction; thinking he had regained his mother’s love.
“Don’t tease your grandmother that way - cripple!” his mother said.
The tiger, with fleeting movements of her hand which she purposefully made to resemble a paw, showed a smile half hidden behind her spoon.
“Mama! Look! See?” She’s fucking doing it again!” Curse words had little effect when said in another language.
“Stop it! All of you just stop it! I have other things to worry about!”
The old lady, using a sly gesture, began to twirl a finger next to her temple as she rolled her eyes; making sure Tom saw - and then she began hypnotizing his stare to her scariest face of all: puffing up her cheeks while pouting her thin lips and then squinting her little black eyes that were encased in a murky haze of gray.
“Mama!”
When his mother turned she only saw her mother with hands folded on her lap; doing a little smile before saying,”I think his mind has polio too.”
Tom refused to eat his last bit of broccoli rape nestled among pasta. The vendors would throw the bitter greens away that very day if not bought - so bitter they were which in time would become almost a delicacy priced twenty times more for a later generation.
“Tom finish. The Global Gobblers will rob even the little we have,” his mother pleaded.
“No! I’m never eating again!” he said limping toward the parlor.
“You know what will happen if you don’t eat,” his grandmother said in a soft purring way.
“What?” he shouted.
“You know what!” she said with a hint of a growl creeping into the last words.
“What? What? What?” Tom shouted in the grating way he did when not sucking pity.
That night when the whole apartment was engulfed in total darkness and everyone seemingly asleep, the tiger left her bed to begin a soft walk toward the boys’ room and just at the door, she knelt to begin a movement toward their bed while doing a soft growl. She approached Tom’s ear and whispered: “Then, I will love you!”
Within a minute she was back in her bed.
“Mama! Mama!” Tom yelled.
The tiger was the first to reply, “What’s wrong? Anything wrong? Jesus Christ - an old lady can’t even sleep in peace in this fuckless house!”
“Tiger, tiger,” Tom whispered; fearing he was going to be eaten all up.
He said “tiger” one more time as if the word were like eyes peering into the darkness.
What the mother would do for her favorite eleven year old son Leny One N, who lost the n from his name several years before on the day he killed to death the eggs of a mother bird that was flying over the waters of Orchard Beach because the breeze was not carrying his name from his mother’s mouth since she was busy giving her nipple to the last born Johnny with the blond curly hair whom Leny would hate for the rest of his life, was to make him her savior. A mother’s selection to make become what was lost in her husband who had fallen into the smiles of many women during their years of marriage. The doctor told the mother in his most somber way, hoping to get even more moneys from these poor people, that her Leny was afflicted with rheumatic fever and could die at any time if his heart gushed open. She tried to spread her sweater - which was given to her by her mother holes and all that allowed frost to enter for hundreds of years - over all of him; attempting to cover the noise of the bedsprings that were capturing her and her husband’s vehement movements. She threw her voice out saying: “What are you doing, Leny?” Her words had gone through the wall and into the boy’s ear. He was trying to go deaf so as not to hear his mother’s groaning and his father’s grunting.
This father he would also hate for the rest of his life though pretending he loved him when he needed him and he would need him often for like his father often told others: “Leny would always be obligated even to the rocks he walked on - when he wasn’t throwing them at birds and oceans!”
“Nothing Mama! Nothing!” Leny shouted back through the same wall. He imagined she came into his bedroom and stroked his hand. She became a dark beautiful figure looming in the darkness - leaving him with no eye. He broke hs penis off.
Johnny only wanted the plane so he could fly far away from his older sisters and brothers who wished he had been born catatonic so that much easier to throw away who thought he had stolen their father’s love angering his oldest sister Tina who called him. “Big ears!” He pretended he no longer had ears and when Tom tried to throw him down the steep flight of stairs to see if Johnny could fly - as he did when his father gushed him out toward the sky - but Johnny would escape away from Tom’s frantic calls to come to the stairs again so he could “catch” him but after the time Tom missed him he would no longer hear Tom or when Leny One N called him “Ugly” as he taught him to fight southpaw leaving hand-prints on his face because he wasn’t smart enough to duck; making sure he matched him against the biggest kids from Hewes Avenue so able to get better odds from the likes of a future John Garfield, Tami the fighter who would lose to the great Joe Louis and a football player with the Fordham Rams who was one of the seven blocks of granite denying teams all over the contry from scroing points. .
If his father had gotten Johnny the plane, he would have flown over the “rouna cawna” gang’s territory to see what trouble they were up to - always getting ready to attack the younger kids on Arthur Avenue - of whom Johnny was considered the leader having become the mascot of the original Baldy mob and then he would land on their roof of the five storey tenement that had hot water unlike the kids on Hewes and tell his good friends “Prunes” and “Cherries”, who would be waiting, what was going down and they would tell the rest of their guys and with that all done, Johnny would take to the sky again and if anyone came near him and his plane up around near the clouds and sun: he would say, “I live on Arthur Avenue near Fordham Road. No, I’m not lost. I just live on ….” Johnny would say it in his father’s voice and italic way and then in the stern way his mother had but just once as she placed a finger on each word. He wanted really to say it in his own voice and way but again found himself saying it like his father who told him - and made him repeat it all the times he had said it and then Johnny said it in the different ways Alice, who pretended Johnny was her little doll forcing him to dance with her while she was on her knees to songs, coming from The Make Believe Ballroom Time like “perfidia”, “Serenade in the Night” “La Mere” he would remember for the rest of his life. Tina, Leny and Tom told him to say it; trying to use their particular facial expressions and then again he tried to get above a cloud to say it in his own way and voice but all the words got all jumbled up: stern, loud, whispering, left out words like the address numbers his brothers changed, but often no voice came out - only the howling noise of a sea shell he once found among the sands of Orchard Beach after his father had pointed Johnny’s penis out to the ocean where dolphins swam which his sister Tina of the Troy and his brothers threw out of the window to become smashed pieces of ocean.
There among the room full of objects hung blinds that were blinking eyes when a breeze or wind blew from outside, as the window did not set firmly within its frame, making the boy of nine run downstairs yelling for help; leaving all the invading monsters to crawl in a low light that he had asked his mother to leave on; telling her he was afraid of the dark but never saying he was more afraid of his older brother who constantly tried to enter his being with his heavy breathing beating into the young boy’s ear and out of guilt for this child she had to leave alone often in order to go work, she would squander a few pennies until surface sleep overtook him and then quietly tiptoe back into the room to close the light which created even more monsters for him while hearing her sounds through tightly closed eyes; hoping the footsteps were not and his older brother’s entering the room and so many a night his voice would shout out from painful nightmares to all the menacing clothes hanging from atop doors; becoming shapes of lurking monsters ready to swallow him up; to become all gone. His mother insisted he sleep in that room.
The new home in Burywater stood by the swamps where mosquitoes roamed like antelope. If Johnny were naked and freezing his brothers, sisters and mother would not have been able to give him - this favorite child of the father - dry wood to warm his bones; instead, they threw chunks of spat-on wood to the direction of frostbite. Their house, the shape and colors of all the other houses on the street, grew darker and colder as his parents became older still; having produced him in their old age making him become an old born baby, and Johnny cried as he blew upon the black-purple colored coals he had heaped into the green furnace to make them hot so heat could happen around the house and into all the rooms. He knew there were not enough pieces of coal. He knew. He knew.
There was the green-eyed monster lurking downstairs in the dark. It would wait there in the cellar by Johnny’s chemistry set with which he had made a solution that prevented fire from eating paper and wood or the green-eyed monster would walk under the tomato basket used by Johnny who tried honestly to make baskets for both teams he was representing. The green eyes, invented by his older siblings since they believed Johnny had stolen their parents’ love after he had come among them in a crash landing out of a thirty-nine year old mother’s body who really didn’t want another mouth to feed during the end of the dying of hunger days - euphemistically called the Great Depression - stood in the dark peering; its eyes shining, glowing would follow him about as he walked to get the jar of tomatoes his mother had wanted for the meat gravy that would cover her home-made pasta. He hurried quickly to the shelf that held all the different shape of foodstuffs and while reaching he knocked over some cans. He had to stand on his tiptoes to get the jar. He turned never looking about as he walked hastily toward the stairs and as he began climbing them, his pace became slower–even though he could feel the green-eyes on him. He turned and defiantly threw an imaginary basketball into the basket. He imagined it rimmed twice before falling in for the score. He closed his fist and shook it to the darkness. He remained there a full moment like that but the green-eyes did not show themselves; yet, he knew they were there hiding in the inner shadows. He finally climbed the stairs and closed the door hard and like an eye lid the eyes were covered. His heart was still beating as he placed the jar on the table. The nine year old called his mother’s attention to it. He said he had gone into the dark and got the food for her.
She only nodded.