A family's slim facade is stolen

By Nola Cancel, Special to the Times
Published July 22, 2007

There were secrets in my house. Whispers at night hid them. Daylight would illuminate most. The shouting would announce the rest. Except for one.

For two weeks, things had been a little different. The whispers grew urgent, desperate. For a 9-year-old, these muted words suggested some new horror, some missing information, something that they were too afraid to openly argue about.

Their hushed voices went silent as soon as I, or one of my siblings, entered the room. Perhaps this one was even worse. Worse than an alcoholic father, a junkie brother or an emotionally stunted sister.

I looked hard for anything strange or unusual. By appearances, things were as they had always been. Ma went to work as a school aide, and Daddy stayed home and drank. Then she'd come home and he would drink some more. In between, they fought.

The only part of our day-to-day life that was new was the hair sprouting on Daddy's face. As far back as I could remember, he had never even grown a moustache and now, for a month, he had been cultivating a full-fledged beard. Certainly out of the norm but seemingly not enough to explain the frantic look in Ma's eyes whenever he glanced her way.

And there was also his constant scribbling. Whenever I got up the nerve to sneak into the kitchen, he was writing something with his good hand; he'd mangled the other when he cut his hand as a kid and it turned gangrenous. He studied his note, reading it over and over, discarding nine or 10 copies, until he, finally, appeared satisfied with the wording.

Then this: For the first time, my usually cold and distant old man was looking for opportunities to spend time with me. This act alone sent my juvenile imagination into a terrifying tailspin of possibilities.

Still, I didn't give any of it much thought. I had long since stopped trying to understand the inner workings of my parents' minds. These were the same people who decided to have five children, supporting them only on a part-time job. Daddy was once an accountant, but the drinking quenched any thirst for a job. So we were raised in the middle of a financially deprived, racially divided housing project in New York City.

The whispers continued. But from my perspective as the youngest child in a defective family, as long as this secret was still being whispered, no matter how desperate the sound, then it couldn't be that bad.

I remember walking to school that day through the concrete schoolyard, littered with cigarette butts and used needles and reeking of urine. In the normal course of the day's events classes, lunch, friends, I would forget all about the secret.

Until I got home.

The silence was the first thing I noticed as I got off the elevator on the 13th floor. Usually, you could hear the yelling from 11 on up.

I walked through the door and was confronted by the blank stares and open mouths of my brothers and sister, who were waiting for me. Ma had been crying and now bore the redness and swelling of too many tears. My stomach churned in the midst of this scene. As I felt my head begin to spin, she spat out the words:

"Your father robbed a bank and was caught. He's going away, and we don't know for how long."

It took a good five minutes before I understood the words my mother had just spoken, the words she would never whisper, repeat or even acknowledge, ever again.

Nola Cancel is a writer in Clearwater.

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[Last modified July 23, 2007, 10:24:48]