It was a row house, connected to other houses on the side, differentiated from a suburb, though you’d be hard-pressed for what to call it. Marine Park was the part of the city, Aurora often said, least served by the train and bus system. If the oceans rose like people said they would, this part of Brooklyn would be the first to go. It was an hour with the walk to the Q train and the ride into the city to see a Broadway play, or to go to the Museum of Natural History, which meant lower real estate prices and a bit of sleepiness. One neighbor was a drug addict, supported by unknown funds. There was the neighborhood drunk, who was in and out of the house. Across the street the eldest son of a large family—who marked his adolescent growth year after year with new tattoos, sprouting in strange places across his body, reported one after another by a gleeful Tommy, who knew him from school—was gone one day after the Fourth of July: two years in jail. Their true neighbor, just to the left, shoveled snow for them if they woke up too late in the morning. He lived alone, and needed neither conversation nor pleasantries. He’d taken in their mail when they went to Canada for a week, years before. They stayed in Montreal, and then a few days in a cabin next to Lake Oromocto, where Vincent had gone fishing in the mornings and Aurora spent a small amount of time depressed on the back porch, then getting better in the afternoons, making penne vodka and a salad. When the children were born they did not travel.
When they were younger Vincent spent most of the day at the candy shop. Aurora stayed home. Besides the poll work, she mended clothes and tailored suits. For Halloween season she made the kids’ costumes from scratch. Salvy especially had liked to watch her sew, and for a while she got him interested in it, sewing his own moccasins like the Lenni Lenape Indians—who had lived right where their house was, she told him, those very blocks. They’d had a permanent settlement, and sometimes people found bits of wampum under the dirty sand by the water, and Salvy liked to dig for them and bring them back to Aurora, who had an open fascination with history and geology and the way things got buried and preserved.
Tommy was more Vincent’s son, even though when he grew up he became a banker, and after school he would go straight to the candy store on Ocean and Twenty-Sixth. Tommy would scratch the top of his head against his father’s lips and then hide in the comic book section. He liked to stand by the turning pedestal of greeting cards and write obscene things inside them when Vincent wasn’t looking, and once this got Vincent into trouble, when a customer came back with an anniversary card in his hand and loosened his jacket to show the .22 on his belt, sticking his tongue into the corner of his lip. That was after Korea, after returning soldiers had gone to the Fire Academy or cop school and moved in droves to their neighborhood in Gerritsen Beach, and sometimes they forgot they weren’t in Pusan even though it was years ago.
Tommy and Salvy still came to visit a few times a month. Tommy came every Sunday. The boys came in their sports cars with Italian bread and cookies from a bakery on Smith Street, where Aurora used to go for lemon ices. Salvy had married a Russian girl, but Vincent and Aurora didn’t care, as long as the wives helped out with the dishes between courses. In the kitchen Aurora labored over sauce. Vincent had once been a heavy drinker, but now he was happy with two glasses of pinot grigio at dinner. The wine enlivened his senses a little, then dulled them. He didn’t think there was anything wrong with this. From where he sat at the head of the table he could see Aurora, her hands folded in her lap if she wasn’t taking bites. She cleared the table; he did the dishes. The boys and their wives left. She sat in the living room and had the TV on, though she wasn’t really watching, more like meditating. The sound of the faucet drowned out the rest of the day. In the kitchen, it was Vincent’s daily ritual, his back turned to the rest of the house and his attention focused on the white wall in front of him, the metal sink. He washed dishes slowly, one after the other. If he let the wine glass sit without washing it, the dry dregs grew crusted, stuck on the side of the cup.
• • •
One evening, not long after Vincent’s sixty-fifth birthday, he got a phone call, the first of its kind in a while, late at night when Aurora was upstairs reading a biography and he was half-asleep in front of the television. It was large and monstrous, sticking out hideously into the center of the room, but the boys had bought it for them, Father’s Day that year. Vincent wasn’t used to how real it sounded, what a presence it was. He had thought the phone call was coming from the TV.