The Evening News by Tony Ardizzone Page A

arms around her and drawing her close to him, and she put her arms up around his neck and relaxed, all at once grateful that he was holding her. She felt relieved; she was crying less bitterly; and it was then that she recognized what Tom was doing, that instead of comforting her and forgiving her and understanding her he was trying to unzip the back of her insulting and ridiculous dress.
III
    Her father, her real father, had been a tall dark man, thin, with large hands and an easy smile, an indolent laugh. By trade he was a salesman. His name was Constantine Tzeruvctis, and even as he emigrated from the lush expanse of Lithuania he was willing to make a deal: the stony immigration officer stamped Constantine’s papers but shortened his last name to Tzeruf; the exchange seemed fair enough. It was a big, new country. Constantine worked his way west to Chicago, sweeping floors, washing dishes, even polishing brass spittoons, and then for thenext thirty years or so of his life he peddled Dr. Cheeseman’s Liquid Wonder, a patent medicine. From door to door to door to door on Chicago’s North Side the immigrant tradesman worked: knocking, smiling, selling.
    All of this Bobbi learned from her mother, from the few photographs, from the yellowed newspaper clippings that described her real father’s death. And like a detective in the paperbacks she had read and the late-night movies she had seen, Bobbi had attempted to piece everything together. More than anything, she wanted to know, to understand. But of course that was impossible. There were pictures missing from the stiff album. There were questions her mother refused her the answers to. And the musty clippings from the newspaper dumbly reported only the
what
that had happened.
    The girl knew facts about her father. That he drank. That occasionally he attended baseball games, preferring Charlie Grimm’s Cubs. That he wasn’t religious. That both his birth and his death days fell in September. In the oldest photos her father smiled and sported a mustache. His discharge papers from the First World War listed his vocation as Tradesman and his character as Excellent. His complexion had been Ruddy. Next to
signature of soldier
was a neat, curly
X,
and beneath it was printed “His Mark.” Bobbi kept the papers in her top dresser drawer with her jewelry, her letters from Tom, and her cosmetics.
    In her parents’ wedding photograph Constantine sat, her mother stood. As a child Bobbi thought that her father was sitting because he was dead in Heaven. Later she realized it was custom. Her mother’s hand gripped the back of the chair. Her father’s eyes looked down. Neither smiled.
    The first child, a girl, had been stillborn. She was not named. The gray tombstone in the cemetery read B ELOVED B ABY T ZERUF . Bobbi saw it once. Green lichen grew inside the letters. She was born eleven years later, eleven years after herparents’ marriage, and was named for Robert, her mother’s grandfather.
    By then Constantine was nearly sixty. But when he was younger, oh, he had been quite a fellow. Bobbi’s favorite story about him took place one warm summer evening on the Near North Side in an area then known as Bucktown. Bucktown was a tough, tooth-and-nail Polish neighborhood, so named because so many of its residents owned goats. Constantine was young and ambitious, knocking on doors, the dark bottle of Dr. Cheeseman’s Liquid Wonder in his hand, when suddenly from the street a shotgun roared. Constantine shielded his head with his suitcase. The pellets were meant for him. He was not hit, but a lantern hanging from the frame house was, and there was a small fire. Constantine began to beat the flames with his jacket. Then the door of the house opened, ever so cautiously, and the barrels of another shotgun looked out at the tradesman’s face, and he raised his hands and started to explain. He showed them the contents of his suitcase. He