Excerpt from Book:
The world is heartless.
When the final disposition came down from family
court, confirming what surprised no one, that
he’d forfeited his shared custody rights to his
daughter, Peter Sanguedolce thought his world
had come to an end. And perhaps it had. It was
January. Ice dams climbed the roof. Wind moused
about the drafty casement windows. The front
door froze shut. In the basement the ancient
Lennox boiler bellowed, summoning itself for
another Western Pennsylvania winter, and, as
fresh steam hit the condensation in the pipes
and the radiators gurgled like drowning sailors,
he heard clear as a bell his mother forty-odd
winters ago asking his father worriedly, “Steve,
d’you think the furnace is going to blow up?”
It didn’t, it probably won’t.
Gloomy skies, purses of hardened snow beneath
the shrubs—all of it to set the affective
faculties going like the sympathetic murmur of
adjoining strings when a piano key is struck. He
loves music, he hates ice dams. Before
breakfast, Peter empties the four plastic
buckets in the attic that Mortie Siegel at
Savage’s Hardware and Sporting Goods sold him,
red, yellow, green, blue. A dual major in
college, materials science and English Lit.,
Peter guesses that Mortie’s buckets are
polypropylene, although Rubbermaid appears
close-lipped on the matter. The blue one is as
brilliant as the copper sulfate in his old
chemistry set. His daughter Jeanette loves
exploring these upper regions of the old house,
but it’s rare for Peter to have reason to mount
the narrow staircase to the attic. Light stabs
through the fissures between the browned roofing
boards; a bat, off-duty in daylight hours,
dangles by his toes; and around him, what three
generations of Sanguedolces failed to carry with
them into the afterworld: boxes of Literary
Guild novels; the duffle his Uncle Nico lugged
home from Korea; bags of petrified shoes; a
wardrobe housing suits with five-inch lapels and
slippers whose turquoise satin still retains the
shape of his mother’s toes. On a round-screen
television rests a capsized model ship, his
grandfather’s, gifted to him by a coke-puller in
lieu of payments for his child’s piano lessons.
It’s as if Nonno Franco’s folk art brigantine
has foundered and come to grief here. The canvas
sails, the size of ladies’ hankies, have torn
from their spars, and the ship’s string-ropes
become fouled with webs spun by the tiny white
spiders who have taken to living in its hold.
Someday, Peter vows, eyeing a crucifix with a missing arm,
I need to
do something about all this.
The day before the court orders were passed
down, the third week of December, he’d bought an
eleven-foot Fraser fir from the St. Ursula altar
boys. Their hands were chapped; their
chilblained toes squeaked in their cheap
sneakers. He tipped lavishly. The presents he’d
picked out for Jeanette, to be hidden beneath
the skirts of that regal tree that languished,
never erected, outside on the icy veranda, she
opened the day after Christmas, under the
critical gaze of her stepfather, Elliott Fields,
who, unshaven and dyspeptic, monitored disgraced
Papa and daughter’s sad, quiet holiday. His
fault, all his fault. Nobody to blame but
himself. Before abandoning the attic, Peter
ensures that his ice-dam leaks are striking
Mortie’s colorful pails dead center,
plop,
plop, then, nodding to the sleeping bat, he
descends in search of his chief consolation:
simple carbohydrates.
He’s lonely, he has no work; ergo, he
eats.
Baking whole wheat sourdough bread has become
his passion. He has his cultures, his
thermometer, his rattan proofing baskets and
Danish whisk, his 900° F oven mitts, his wooden
spoons, his organic flours. The loaves rise in
the shape of parsons’ hats. So much bread does
Peter manufacture, so many loaves lining the
counter like the hats of a gathering of country
clerics, that one person cannot possibly eat it
all. After dropping off extra loaves at the
rescue mission in town, he’s taken to fattening
up the birds, too. There used to be more birds.
That was before the removal of his neighbor’s
tall arborvitae hedge—and it was, by the way,
the sale and partial demolishment last fall of
Jacob Weiner’s house next door that started the
chain of events that led to the revocation of
his custody rights—but the chattering sparrow
nation hasn’t gone anywhere, nor have the
cardinals that also do not migrate and the
robins that no longer seem to, and, especially,
the mourning dove couple who appear to have
taken the cue and foregone the hassle of
seasonal relocation, as well. Spotting the fat
man maundering into his backyard in trench coat
over pajamas, the silky, long-necked doves lift
in a whistle of wings from their perches on
Jacob’s cockeyed roof, and, burbling
contentedly, join him for breakfast.
Butter, sometimes olive oil, Sundays, cream
cheese and lox.
In a corner of the yard stands a crab apple
tree. The crabs, no larger than peas, ripen in
autumn to marigold-yellow, then dim like dying
stars, withering, blackening. Birds, sometimes
whole murders of crows, descend on the crooked
tree to peck at the shriveled fruit and squabble
with the squirrels who hang out on the limbs
like trapeze artists. Beneath the tree, strewn
across its snowy apron, are the leavings of this
beggar’s feast: gnawed and decomposing fruit,
twigs, stray feathers, colonic splotches of
remarkable coloration. Once he’d been a
successful businessman. His father’s top
salesman, and, when his father died, owner
himself of the Ganaego Clay Works. When someone
in Ganaego pees, chances are his waters will
find their passage through Sanguedolce
sanitation pipes.
A sewer pipe salesman from Pennsylvania,
he liked to introduce himself.
That was before the clay works went bankrupt.
Peter tears his tangy peasant bread into
generous chunks and contributes to the disorder
under the tree. In the slanting light of a
Sunday winter morning, as he kills time waiting
for twelve-thirty so he can drive across the
river and spend the afternoon with his daughter
in a supervised setting—it’s all he lives
for—his shadow looks grotesquely distorted,
elongated, rendering him, weirdly and
splendidly, skinny again. He worries about his
daughter.
Something about his ex-wife’s household does not
feel right.