Peter, a boy who sat beside
me in first grade, had died suddenly two weeks before.
My teachers, Ms. Russo and
Mr. Greene, had announced the news in the hall where we lined up to go into
class. Before the bell rang, Mr. Greene had told us, “Children, Peter is no
longer in the class; he died on Saturday of pneumonia.” Though I was anxious to
learn more about this deadly force, pneumonia, none of the other children
questioned the teachers about it, and I was too scared to ask myself. Mr.
Greene and Ms. Russo then shared a private joke and a giggle that struck me as
rather out of place in the circumstances, before leading us in into the
classroom in single file, exactly as they did every ordinary day of the year.
All that day, I stared at
Peter’s desk, perplexed as to when and how he could have become sick, as he had
never been absent. Even now I remember him as the tall, thin boy with the blond
hair and blue eyes who reached slowly and methodically for the pencils and
papers he kept neatly arranged in the cubby of his desk. He was quiet but
always attentive in class, invariably knowing the right answer when he was
called upon. After he died, Peter was never mentioned again. The lesson that
gave me was that death meant disappearance, a nullification of existence.
Every day after our
neighbor’s fire, I climbed the stairs to the attic and stared out the window at
the burnt-out house. The two-story structure, plus basement and attic, had been
clad in white aluminum siding, but now its exterior was stained by smoke and
only a hollow darkness could be seen through the swinging front door. The fire
had spared the frame but gutted the innards.
In the wake of that fire, I
came to the conclusion that our boiler was a similar disaster waiting to
happen. I had seen the boiler in the basement of the house. When the engineer
came to inspect the appliance, my mother, sister and I followed him down the
stairs to see how the white, deceptively benign behemoth converted boiling
water into the steam that hissed through the radiators of our house. “Don’t
stand too close,” my mother warned, “that thing is liable to blow up in your
face.”
We considered the basement
to be off-limits, because it housed the “monster” boiler and its confederates,
the rats, in what was a dark and unfinished part of our house. Before our
neighbor’s fire, we had never given a thought to the boiler’s potential for
devastation. We welcomed its ability to keep us warm in bone-chilling winters,
and simply took for granted that it would continue to do its job indefinitely
and without repercussions – even though we had heard of boiler fires in other
cities and witnessed, on our yearly Halloween walks through the neighborhood,
two-by-fours nailed across the doorways and blown-out windows of houses that
had suffered such explosions. Until, that is, the fire across the street filled
me with an obsession about saving my family from the consequences of its own
folly.
When everyone else fell
asleep upstairs, I snuck down the staircase, pulled a chair from the dinette
set in the kitchen and placed it by the fireplace so that I could reach the
temperature gauge and shut the boiler off. At that age, I was too short, my
fingers too stubby, to easily reach the knob on the gauge, which was located on
the wall high above the fireplace’s mantelpiece. But I stretched on tiptoe
until I was able to brush the knob with my fingertips, moving it so that the
needle backed away from the red “danger zone” on the thermostat dial. After I
finished, I looked around to make sure no one had seen or heard me. Then I
quietly returned the chair to the kitchen, crept back up to my bed and slept
soundly the rest of the night.
Once the boiler shut down it
didn’t take long for the chill of the night to penetrate our bones, making my
mother fearful for us, so that every night thereafter she made Alexia and me
wear coats, hats and gloves to bed. I was now of the unshakable mind-set that
my parents were ignorant, or had a criminally reckless disregard, of the
catastrophic consequences of using a boiler – as witness the fire at our
neighbors across the way. Why else would they have anything to do with such a
deadly device? From time to time, my mother paid lip service to caution,
adjusting the thermostat so that the gauge settled in mid-range, between 60 and
70 degrees; it was Capote who played Russian roulette with our lives. He
overworked the boiler, setting it at its highest temperature so that the needle
stuck firmly in the gauge’s red zone, contemptuous of the warnings of engineers
that temperatures in excess of 80 degrees could cause the gas to overheat and
explode.
He insisted on simulating
the tropical climate of his long-ago island home; he also refused to wear the
flannel pajamas my mother bought him, wearing instead a sleeveless undershirt
and cotton boxers to bed – a bone of contention between my parents, who argued
incessantly about whether he was asking for trouble in the form of a cold that
would claim his life.
A caravan of engineers came
to inspect our boiler; they never could give my parents an explanation for its
spontaneous nocturnal shutdowns. One morning, while we were all sitting at
breakfast, Capote raised hell over the temperature in the house.
“If you keep turning off the
boiler, Esperanza Suarez, you are going to kill us all,” he told my mother at
the table, as he shivered in his undershirt and cotton boxers.
“What are you talking about
now?” she would respond. “You need to worry less about the boiler and more
about dressing properly at night, before you catch your death of pneumonia.”
“Keep shutting that thing
off and not even your God will be able to save you from what’s waiting for you,
crazy woman.”
I listened to my parents
argue, oblivious to my responsibility in the matter. My main concern was to
keep us all alive, and to that end I had no compunction about keeping up my
nightly boiler adjustment duties. Until, that is, the night my father caught me
red-handed. That particular night he planted himself at the top of the stair,
watching me at my labors, climbing the rickety dining chair and stretching my
fingertips to their fullest extent, even then only just managing to slide the
temperature control to “off.”
After I’d finished, my
father broke into hysterical laughter, which miraculously did not wake anyone
else in the house. Not that his amusement deflected me from my task. With
dogged single-mindedness, I stepped down from the chair, pushed it back to the
kitchen and returned to my bedroom, all the while under the barrage of his
laughing. After I went back to bed, he sidled downstairs to turn the boiler
back on, then returned to bed himself. I, in turn, waited for him to
fall asleep, went back down, retrieved the chair from the dinette set, reached
for the temperature gauge and solemnly turned the boiler off a second time.
Next morning, when we sat
down for breakfast in our coats, hats and gloves, my father said nothing
directly about our joint, nighttime escapade. But he skewered me with his eyes.
Whispered at me: “You can’t hide from death, Barbara Bernarda; it gets
you when it wants you.”
At the time, I did not much
care for what I would come to characterize as my father’s “whatever will be,
will be” fatalism. I was fixated on my sacred duty to save the family from his
hubris, while he was equally committed to keeping warm, so we played out our
secret contest of wills, vying for control of the temperature in the house.
Every night before we went to bed, Capote set the boiler’s gauge to maximum.
Once I heard him safely snoring away, I scurried down and shut the boiler off.
On one occasion, I waited so long to be sure he was asleep that I accidentally
slept through the night myself. A stuffy, suffocating warmth awoke me,
prompting me to dash downstairs in a panic, barely before the whole house came
awake, drag a chair from the kitchen over to the mantelpiece and fumble with
the heat control.
***
No comments:
Post a Comment