by

John J. Dillon

          As a kid I never cared about marketable skills. Why would I? I was just a clueless youngster. But around when I turned nine my dad started needling me about acquiring “marketable skills in life.” In fourth grade I remember, “Do twice as much homework as you’re assigned. You need to get ahead of the rest of the class, get good grades, start thinking about marketable skills so you’ll get a good job. You don’t want to be a burden on anyone. Understand?”

          I had only a dim idea of what he was talking about. But I’d nod and say, “Yes, sir. I understand.” Dad was the type you never wanted to argue with because over and above that he didn’t tolerate disagreement,  he worked for the Silenza family. Even at the tender age of nine, I knew from rumors at school that the Silenzas were a feared presence in our town. So I walked on eggshells on top of whipped cream around him.

          Mom was always on my side, my dear angel of support. “Just be true to yourself, Tommy,” she’d say; “Follow your dreams and you’ll succeed. Don’t worry, I’ll protect my little soldier.”

          “I want to be a ballet dancer, Mom,” I’d say.

          “You can be anything you want if you work hard.” She’d kiss the top of my head and hold me as if something deep down saddened her.

          It didn’t take much to figure out the something was Dad, with his harsh orders, burning eyes, and the gun I’d once seen him slip into his overcoat on the way to work.  And who also thought ballet dancers were about as masculine as pink pony herders and organic avocado whisperers.

          “Get this into your head,” he told me. “The world runs on skills and profit. Forget girly dancing. Think about accounting. The world always needs someone who’s good at cooking the books.”

          I had no idea what “accounting” was, let alone why anyone would cook books. But I pretended to go along.

          Luckily, Dad’s job with the Silenza family required his traveling most of the time, so he was gone a lot while I was growing up, at first leaving my upbringing completely to Mom. With her, things were wonderful.  I’d tell her about all the famous ballet dancers in history and she’d watch me perform, calling me her “little Baryshnikov” when I’d dance the Nutcracker. She’d always reward me for my creativity by baking me her triple chocolate chip cake, one of my best memories of her, ever.

          When Dad came home we’d stop any talk of dancing, even if he seemed sky-high happy as if he’d accomplished something great while he was away.

          When I once asked him what kind of job he did for Mr. Silenza, he said in an unearthly low voice, “I work in the compliance department.”

           I asked Mom what “compliance” meant but despite our being alone together when Dad was away all she’d say was “Don’t worry about grown-up things, Tommy,” and hold my hand.

          One snowy day when I was twelve and Dad was traveling, I came home from school and Mom had a little suitcase packed for me and a big one for her. “We’re going on a trip, Tommy,” she said. “Far away where you’ll be very happy and won’t have to worry about Dad anymore.”

          “Won’t Dad be mad?” I said.

          “Leave that to me. It was a mistake, Tommy. It’s time we left. Don’t worry about a thing, we’ll be fine, just the two us. You’re my brave dancer.” She smiled and squeezed my shoulder and all of a sudden I felt better and excited to leave.

           But before we could leave Dad came home early from his trip and surprised us. He looked at us and the suitcases and his eyes became angry, the veins in his forehead almost bursting. “What’s going on here, Patricia?” he said.

          Mom grabbed me and hugged, whispered, “Tommy, go to your room and I’ll be up to get you in just a little while, okay? Don’t worry, Mom’s here.”

          I didn’t want to go but did it, reluctantly. Dad didn’t say a thing, watched me with his look, waiting for me to leave.

          In my room way upstairs I sat on my bed and listened. Mom would be up soon and then things would be all right. I heard Mom’s calm voice far away downstairs saying things I couldn’t understand. After a while I heard Dad yell once, an ugly sound I couldn’t understand either. Then there were voices all jumbled together. I was too scared to open my door. Then I heard the front door slam shut.

          I left the bedroom and watched from the top of the stairs for a long time. Finally Dad came back into the house with snow on his arms and hands and made a phone call. Soon Mr. Silenza, who I remembered from the Christmas party, came through our front door.  I watched them talk in whispers and shake hands. Then Mr. Silenza phoned somebody and in a while three policemen came through the front door too. Everyone shook hands like friends and went back outside.

          I hid in my room with my head under a pillow for what seemed like hours. Finally Dad came up into the bedroom and told me that Mom had slipped on the ice outside our house and hit her head hard on the sidewalk.

She wouldn’t be coming upstairs anymore.

                                                          ***   

          After the funeral Dad never talked about Mom. I spent a year in a cold cloud, missing her day and night.

          I couldn’t look at Dad without being afraid. Had he done something to her? I couldn’t decide. I tried to carry on.

           In the following years one nanny after another became my “Mom” for a while--Lola, Zuzana, Nini... None of them was anything like my real Mom but Dad liked them all just fine. He continued to travel most of the time and I continued to live in my bedroom with my secret dream of becoming a dancer. The few friends I had always ended up moving to other towns.

          Through high school I was a recluse and Dad’s orders to become marketable and self-sufficient were stronger than ever. I ended up reading a lot.

          “I want to go to college,” I told him at the beginning of my senior year. “I want to major in accounting.” I’d decided that was the best way out.

          “Good,” he said. “As long as you stick to accounting, get marketable skills, learn about profits, I’ll even pay for your tuition. I want to see you successful, maybe start your own business. And--”

          “Not be a burden.” I’d been practicing the words.

          That was one of the only times I saw him smile. It always bothered me to see his mouth crack open across his face. “You’re learning,” he said.

          My grades weren’t great but Dad said that Mr. Silenza would “fix things” with a local pol and get me into nearby Riverbend State.

          On the day he drove me to the dorm, he said, “Study hard and don’t get sidetracked, understand? The keys to success are skills and profits. I don’t want any son of mine wasting my money on junk courses—art, drama, dance. Or girls, either. I can stop the tuition payments anytime I think you’re goofing off. You’re here for one reason only, to slam those accounting books. Got it?”

          “Yes, Dad, got it.”

          I seldom saw him over the next four years. I even stayed in the dorm during the summers and took extra classes to avoid going home. I studied hard, did okay. In my sophomore year I showed him an outstanding accounting student certificate I won for the highest grade on a mid-term. He was happy at that and left me alone, aware I was doing what he wanted.

          But I was doing more than just boring accounting. I was also secretly monitoring a few dance courses. In fact I quietly played bit parts in student dance shows, once in the Nutcracker. I felt electrified and wished Mom was alive.

          In my senior year I needed an easy elective so I took an English course that required only one simple term paper. By that time Riverbend was my home so I decided to write a short local history of the town itself. I checked the college library for starters, but there wasn’t much local history there--Riverbend was a tiny unimportant town on the Mohawk River long past its manufacturing heyday. Eventually I found my way to the local town library housed in a converted Victorian house about a mile from campus.

          I introduced myself to an elderly librarian lady who brought me to a back room with wooden tables and chairs next to shelves of very old books. “You’ll find some interesting local history sources here that are available nowhere else,” she said.

          Sure enough, I found many dusty historical-society type books, memoirs, monographs, and news journals from the decades before the Riverbend State campus even existed. I learned that the town of Riverbend had been a lawless place: whore houses, gambling parlors, opium dens, smuggling warehouses, all brought to life by the barge and boat traffic up and down the Mohawk River during the Great Depression.

          After years of rampant crime and political corruption, power centers began to form around a few local gangs. There were turf battles, marauding highwaymen, murders galore until one gang in particular began to brutally wipe out most of the rivals and rose to the top of the heap about thirty years ago, a few years before I was born: the Silenza family.

          I dug up stories from smalltime newspapers that had come and gone during that time. They were mostly dull farm reports and church news, as if the crime of earlier years had disappeared. But that wasn’t true.

          One newspaper, the Loud Hailer, came into being and the editor, a man named Vander, managed to publish a few gutsy stories about the Silenza family and their methods just below the surface. Like extortion. Bribes. Arson. Trafficking. And odd fatal accidents.

          The series ended abruptly with Vander’s obituary, written by a Loud Hailer staffer.

          Vander had fallen down his cellar stairs, smashing his head against the concrete floor.

          The Loud Hailer went silent for a week then came back with a new publisher on the masthead: Mr. Silenza.

          I ended up writing my paper on the local dairy industry.

                                                          ***

          Graduation day was in late May.

          I couldn’t believe I’d made it, a degreed accountant at last. It was an outdoor ceremony and Dad had told me he’d attend, a ­really big deal for him since he’d always kept himself hidden from public events. But despite that and all his needling of me over the years, he was still proud of me for obeying his marketable skill and profit manifesto and wanted to attend my graduation in person.

          He’d told me he’d be keeping a low profile in the audience and since it was open seating he didn’t know exactly where he’d be sitting. We arranged a little signal so we could spot each other.

          Sitting onstage, holding my diploma, I listened to our college president ramble on about choosing the correct lane in life. I looked out at the crowd of hundreds of parents and family populating the big lawn on the sunny spring day. In the mass of heads I eventually spotted a slightly raised hand waggling a red cap, with a twist of the wrist, our signal. I responded with a tip of my own black cap.

          Then the ceremony was over, cheers thundered, and the two crowds merged into a huge mass of people. I made my way through to Dad to hug him, but was repulsed by the touch of his meaty hands on the back of my head. I pushed away suddenly and gave him a slap on the back. “Thanks, Dad, for everything,” I forced myself to say.

          We shook hands and made plans to meet next week for lunch and then he faded back into the crowd just as I saw two familiar goonzillas maneuvering toward us. I retreated and the crowd closed in and took all three out of sight.

          Sad to say, that was the last time I saw Dad alive. Later that day I learned he’d been killed in a hit and run car accident, no witnesses.

          The sudden news was a shock but I recovered quickly that evening after baking a delicious triple chocolate chip celebration cake using an old family recipe.

                                                          ***   

          One thing I do regret is that Dad never knew how much I really came to love accounting--the numbers, the debits and credits, the balance sheets, and especially the profit margins. In fact I loved accounting so much I started my own successful accounting business in Buffalo. Normally that would have been impossible for a new college grad. But I had plenty of seed money after I’d fingered Dad to the rival Mangler gang goonzillas, who were only too happy to finally eliminate the Silenza torpedo responsible for damaging so much of their personnel and customers over the years. In fact, they’d given me a bonus for such a smooth “month end close.”

          So I had to admit the unthinkable, that Dad was right all along: a marketable skill and a hefty profit margin were indeed the keys to success.

          To hell with stupid silly ideas like dancing ballet for a living.