Straight Man

why, that glory is lurking somewhere along the back line. But far more kids go right back to the spot of the first toss, where success is assured. Doing battle with Lou Steinmetz, it occurs to me, is a little like tossing the beanbag from the front stripe. This morning, at least, I have little taste for it.
    In the village of Allegheny Wells I head up the hill, and at Russell and Julie’s mailbox I pull into their drive. It’s occurred to me that maybe Russell is watching the house. If so he’s seen Julie leave and may himself have returned in the interim. There’s no sign of him or his car, however, just the sad, unfinished house that Julie, no matter how stubborn she wants to be, will have to sell now. She and Lily will decide all that. My job will be to keep my mouth shut until it’s a done deal. Then it will fall to me to figure out how best to sell an unfinished house. As is? Or do we—Lily and I—spend the money to finish it, then sell it, hoping to make the money back? I make a mental list of things that would be necessary. Shutters for the windows. At least minimal landscaping. Fill up the hole dug for the swimming pool and resod the lawn. And even then the house won’t be easy to sell. There are eight or ten houses for sale in our own development.
    Our work—Lily’s and mine—is cut out for us, and not just this stuff with Julie and Russell. We have spoken over the weekend. Not for long, partly because I was hazy and stupid with NyQuil, and partly because Angelo—her father—is a subject I tread lightly around. But at least I’ve been given a vague outline of the events Lily did not want to share with me on Friday. The reason that Angelo was not home last week when I called, it turns out, is that he was in jail. Apparently he’s been there for over a week, either too stubborn or too embarrassed toinform anyone of his whereabouts. He was arrested on several charges, ranging from public endangerment to discharging a weapon in the city. And despite Lily’s spending most of Friday trying to arrange for her father’s bail, he remained in the county lockup over the weekend.
    According to Lily, who pieced the incident together from a police report and a neighbor’s account, a young black man made the mistake of going up onto Angelo’s porch, ringing the bell, and then refusing to go away when Angelo, who met him at the door with a pump-action shotgun, advised him to. Clearly, there’s more to the story than this, but I’ve been reluctant to press for the kind of detail that would make such a narrative spring to life. As I said, Lily and I agreed long ago never to allow each other’s fathers to become the cause of serious conflict between us. The necessity of this arrangement became clear to us when we realized that we were each fond of the other’s parent. Lily found William Henry Devereaux, Sr., charming (which he is), while I found Angelo hilarious (which I still maintain that he is, though I admit he has never threatened me with a loaded shotgun). My father’s charm and Angelo’s ability to keep me (however unintentionally) in stitches were, of course, beside the point of these men, or at least beside what we, their more vested offspring, considered to be the point. It’s possible to overlook character flaws of in-laws for the simple reason that you feel neither responsible for them nor genetically implicated.
    Lily’s situation is far worse than my own. Her relationship with her father is complicated by the fact that she just can’t quit loving him, even though his rank bigotry both shames her and makes her crazy. But she cannot forget that after her mother’s death, which occurred when she was still a girl, Angelo’s devotion to “his little girl” was complete, and this devotion, more than anything else, got her through, finally, her mother’s loss. They were a team until she went away to the university, which changed their relationship overnight. In a matter of months she was no longer his little girl. Suddenly it was as if they spoke different languages. Every time she came home on vacation she’d learned more words that excluded him. Worse, she asked him not to use a lot of his favorite old ones in her presence. Where once father and daughter had been inseparable, they now found themselves strangers. Lily started dating the kinds of men Angelo had no use for and eventually married the worst of the lot. Me.
    I sympathize. It’s the dilemma of the lower middle class when it