The Vault

The Vault

Dad looked proud, although it was all mom’s idea, and as I held open the trunk of the car he gave me a wink that told me we had joined the ranks of all the normal families in the neighborhood. I had the feeling that dad felt disturbed being the head of the only family on the block still watching television on a black-and-white set, but mom had told us each time we requested the upgrade, “Some people are color blind, and they’re not ashamed.” But we were ashamed, my father and I, and although the world was alive with color, our home was all gray. I noticed a brief expression of disappointment on his face when the trunk closed easily over the great cardboard box. He was looking forward to the neighbors seeing us drive through the neighborhood with our trunk tied open, bringing home our new TV.

Surprisingly, it was mom who suggested taking some money out of her savings account that day, and it was mom who suddenly realized the urgency of buying a new television. I was ten-years-old and then an only child.

My little brother drowned in a neighbor’s swimming pool four years before. His name was Eliot, and he had very soft blond hair. Our neighbors had been working on their pool and left the gate open; Eliot was just then learning how to walk and stumbled into their yard and into the murky puddle. There were only a couple of inches of water in the pool, but that was enough to drown my little brother. When I think about him now, I remember how filled with life he had been, and how it didn’t seem right that only a few inches of muddy pool water could take that all away.

That was almost four years before we drove out of the Sears parking lot with a brand new twenty-seven-inch color television. My mother seemed thoughtful as we drove, but my father beamed. He kept trying to catch my eye in the rearview mirror, winking and making faces. I am sure he had no trouble seeing the pleasure on my face. As we headed home I was already watching all of my favorite shows in bright, living color. I wondered what pitch Kit from Knight Rider was, if he was really pure black or if there was a tinge of dark blue, as I had always suspected, or if the three Brady girls were light or dirty blonde. I thought about watching “The Cosby Show” with my mother without musing on what color sweater Dr. Huxtable was wearing that day. I felt like everything was going to change, that my mother wanted color in her life again.

My little brother drowned the same day that I had my sixth birthday party, April tenth, nineteen eighty-two. I don’t remember what I got for my birthday that year, but I do recall that my mother had made me a birthday cake out of a pan shaped like Superman and that she had spent a considerable amount of time making sure the frosting was perfect. And it was, at least to me, yet that didn’t prevent me from devouring Superman’s bowels by the fistful. Eliot giggled as he watched me fiercely reduce the superhero to rubble. He climbed over the table, planted his face squarely in the trademark S, then pulled it out with a blue and red frosted smile. My father was unhappy with the scene, but my mother was in tears. Her sonorous laughter shook the marrow in my bones and made my body feel weak.

My father made much more of a scene extracting the television from the trunk than was necessary. “Well, let’s see here.” He looked down at me and at the keys in his hand as if trying to figure out just how to open the trunk. My mother had wandered to the porch and lit a cigarette. “I think I got it,” he opened the lock feigned hesitation.

“Can you carry it, dad?” I asked, imagining that it was so big that all three of us would have to help with getting it into the house.

“I don’t know.” He assumed a puzzled look. “Kathy, do you think you could lend us a hand down here?” My mother took a long drag off her cigarette and slowly walked over. She was trying to smile, but it looked unnatural, like some sort of deformed grin. “I don’t know buddy, maybe if we each take a corner we can get it out.” I laughed. His joking had an instant effect on me. My mother looked on with that strange glower and lit another cigarette. “What do you say, Kath, are you feeling strong?”

“Sure Jack,” she answered in a cloud of smoke.

I never saw my mother smoking before the accident. Her father died young from lung cancer, but after my brother died, she seemed to stop worrying about it. I remember after Eliot’s funeral I watched her light cigarette after cigarette in the graveyard, tossing the butts into an ancient mausoleum, one after another. My aunt Rita held my hand and walked me around the church for an hour that day. She told me about the angels that my brother lived with, about how sad he was to leave us and how happy he was in God’s bosom. “What’s a bosom?” I asked her. She gently touched her heart and wiped her eyes.

When we came around the church we heard screaming, a painful sound to hear, but I can only imagine the pain involved in producing it. Aunt Rita quickly moved in front of me and wrapped her arms around my head. Through the folds of her dress I was able to see my mother fiercely tearing at my father’s chest with open palms. Dad stood as still and immovable as the marble figures populating the graveyard.

Before we left for Sears, dad moved the old black-and-white to the basement and set up an area in the living room for our new television. My father and I carefully set the box on the floor and my mother went into the kitchen. “Whew.” My father wiped his brow and looked over at my mother, who busied herself with the dishes from breakfast. “Well, buddy, what d’ya say?” He couldn’t begin quickly enough. I urged him on by peeling the tape from the corner. Dad too seemed unable to contain his excitement. We soon had the television out of the box, hooked up the rabbit ears, and set it at the perfect angle, so that anyone passing by our front window could see a perfectly normal, happy family watching television together---in color!

The sun was beginning to set and all the televisions on our quiet street were coming on one by one. My dad and I spent some time just looking at it while we waited for my mother to finish with the dishes. He looked like an overgrown child impatiently waiting after his chores have been done for the rest of the household to catch up with him. I sat on the floor and looked at the blank screen and experienced every moment of anticipation with undisguised eagerness.

My mother extinguished another cigarette and called from the kitchen, “You don’t have to wait for me. You boys seem ready.”

“Oh no, we need you to be ready too,” he answered with a timid jocularity. My mother often became depressed and moody after sunset. As the sky darkened she would progressively turn more quiet and thoughtful. She often spent hours standing in the kitchen, seldom diverting her gaze from the window, which looked out on an English garden in the neighbors’ back yard.

After Eliot drowned, the neighbors had their pool filled in. They were a nice elderly couple who were simply heartbroken over my brother’s death. A few months afterward they asked us to come over and plant flowers, bushes, and trees over where the pool used to be. My father and I spent the whole day there. He planted while I sat and watched my mother’s dark silhouette in the kitchen window of our house. My father told me on the day that roses can symbolize any emotion depending on what color they were, and they can be any color at all. I wondered how many shades of gray roses come in and if anyone ever thought of giving gray roses to someone who has no clue as to which way they should be feeling.

“Really, Jack, you’re making much too big of a thing out of this,” my mother said after the last of the dishes were dried and stowed away. “It’s a little childish, don’t you think?” The comment did not daunt my father’s spirits at all. He gave me a look that expressed relief and gratitude. The sun had completely set, and we were all together.

I remember feeling that our lives were going to change, and in my bones I felt the weakness that I remembered so well and missed so dearly when my mother held me in her arms, and sang me to sleep. Dad looked down at me and nodded towards the T.V. With a slight gesture of his head and hand, he asked me to do the honors. I timidly approached the set and pressed the button.

The flood of light that filled the room made the prior darkness in the living room seem ten times darker. A voice on the screen was in mid-sentence before the tubes warmed up enough for us to get a good look at the speaker. The color was glorious. It was a new world, a new everything, a place in which the truth was no longer disguised by a varnish of black and white. There were definitions and contours until that moment unseen, on everything from the speaker’s dark mustache, to the rocks and debris behind him, to the glare of miners’ hard-hats, and the sheen of their red jackets. It was as if we had opened a portal to a new reality.

First, I looked up at my father. He had an expression of complete satisfaction on his face, and as he felt my eyes on him he gave me another wink and a smile. I turned my head around and saw my mother on the couch watching the screen with an interest that I had not expected. I couldn’t tell if the color from the screen was producing it, but I thought that she had tears in her eyes. When she looked down at me and smiled, I saw that I was mistaken, and her eyes were dry.

“What d’ya think?” my father asked us both as he sat on the couch and draped his arm over my mother’s shoulders.

“It’s awesome,” I replied, pleased both by the new sights and the true nearness I felt towards my family. “Isn’t it awesome, Mom?” I asked her and turned my gaze back towards the television. When I didn’t hear her reply to my question I turned back towards her, “Mom?”

“Oh, yes.” She blurted out. “I heard about this. It’s Al Capone’s vault.” She turned to my father. “Betty Hathaway told me about it. They discovered this vault beneath the Lexington Hotel, in Baltimore, no, in Chicago. Geraldo Rivera is going to open it for the first time in I don’t know how many years, live.”

I looked at my father as if searching for meaning in her words. Dad looked at her quizzically, eventually saying, “Oh yeah,” then he questioned the screen similarly.

“Dad-” I sat up straight and turned towards my father- “let’s see what cartoons look like.”

“Shush, dear,” my mother interjected, the words halting my father as he was getting up from the couch. He sat back down in his seat and gave me a nearly imperceptible shrug of his shoulders. Fearing to put my mother into one of her moods, I slumped onto the floor and began watching with her. I focused more on the subtle changes in color and shades of silver and gray stone than the actual progression of events.

Maybe it was my age, but I couldn’t understand what was going on. For quite a long while the man with the mustache stood in a basement while a bunch of other people worked digging a big hole. A repeating clip of the mustached man attacking a concrete wall with a drill before and after every commercial appeared with tedious regularity. Mom mentioned that she was impressed by his stick-to-itness, but it was just the same shot shown again and again. He really didn’t do anything but talk. My dad looked interested, but I imagined that he was doing it for my mom’s sake. She was riveted; she watched their movements as if they weren’t merely digging a hole, but achieving something monumental and one-of-a-kind. Every now and again she would comment, “God, what could he have hidden in there?” or “It wouldn’t be a wonder if there were gangster bones or gold,” and other similar conjectures.

After a half hour I was fatally bored and I looked at my dad to ask whether we could change the channel. He anticipated my question and shook his head with a quick gesture towards my mother. Expressing my frustration with an audible sigh, I turned my attention back towards the screen and tried to understand what was so interesting about a bunch of people digging a hole and one guy talking about other people digging a hole.

“Mom?’ If I could at least get her attention, maybe she could help me understand.

“What is it, dear?” she answered, on a commercial.

“Mom, what made Al Capone so special?”

“Oh, he was a terrible man. He was a gangster who did terrible things to people.”

“But why are people so interested in him?” I asked, half hoping my father would answer, but he was curiously silent.

My mother bit her lower lip and took out another cigarette. As she blew out her first drag she answered, “Well, it is because he was so successful.”

“How do terrible people become so successful?” I asked.

“Honey, mommy’s watching TV.”

The mustached man reappeared and updated the progress of the hole, apparently unfatigued by his latest drill. He began his mantra-like repetition of the same anticipatory “update” on the status of the hole. They were coming closer to the vault-I could tell because the grinders ground at a more furious pace and also because my mother showed a heightened attention towards the events on the screen. My father’s downcast look diverted my gaze from the television. He looked at my mother with the colors of the television trembling on his profile. “What could it be?” my mother repeated under her breath. “It could be anything hidden away in there for so long.” He reached out for her hand, but she shook it off, as she would an insect, and my father turned away.

The look on my father’s face was the same that I saw directly after Eliot was buried, while we drove home after relinquishing my mother to my grandmother’s care. I was very young. I looked to my father to help me to understand how I should be feeling at that moment. I watched him intently as he drove, but his expression was one that I had never seen before and I was unable to translate it into feeling. I had seen enough of grief that day to be able to recognize it in so many different shades, but his look did not convey grief or even sadness, anger or thoughtfulness. It was a hard look, but not apathetic or aggressive. It was a distant expression, but not one confused or contemplative. Seeing that expression again on my father as we sat watching television, for the first time I was able to understand that look was complete helplessness. He was as helpless as I was, and I felt a closeness with him that I had never experienced before.

I tried to catch my father’s eye, to give him some sign that I had marked and understood his feelings. He looked down at me, tried to smile, and nodded his head as if we experienced a telepathic agreement.

“Kathy, let’s watch something else.” My father was timid now, an attitude that was normal in his nocturnal dealings with my mother. She didn’t even answer him, just kept repeating, “It could be anything, anything.” Her eyes did not seem to be even looking at the screen.

The drilling on the screen became louder and the mustached man raised his voice over the workers. “We are moments away. Here the drillers have tunneled through twelve feet of reinforced concrete and the world is about to get its first glimpse of the mystery of Al Capone’s vault.” As I listened I felt tremors run through my body.

I thought about whatever it was waiting to be found there and if it was right to disturb its peaceful incarceration. To be freed after so many long years of darkness and solitude while time steadily progressed above ground, where the loneliness of the living looked at the darkness with different eyes, eyes accustomed to light. What Al Capone had buried he had buried to keep safe, out of the sight of the living, in his deepest and most secret caverns. As I watched, I was a helpless accomplice to a tomb robbery, and it was through my helplessness that I began to scorn the person who hoped to keep his treasures so secure that they crumbled to dust without ever having the chance to be known, to be loved or remembered. I was helpless to stop it.

There was a loud crash and a large concrete slab fell to the ground, making a cloud of milky white dust on the television screen. After a few moments the figure of the mustached man began to emerge. He stood fanning the dust away with his arm, then ran into the opened vault. My mother grabbed my father’s arm in excitement, and he looked up at the screen, suddenly seeming extremely curious about what had been kept inside, rotting away for so many years.

The dust was settling, and there was a look of perturbation on my mother’s face. The vault was empty. As the mustached man apologetically tried to create some semblance of a climactic reward, my mother sat back in her seat with a strange grin on her face, as if to say, “I knew it.” My father looked at me and seemed tired, but at the same time relieved that it was all over.

“You can change the channel,” my mother said. She walked over to the kitchen window and began to gaze into the English garden.

It really could have been anything locked away in that vault, but I doubt that anyone expected it to be nothing. I watched my father follow her and stand behind her in the kitchen. He softly placed his hand on her shoulder, but she was like a stone. I stood and walked over to the window beside my mother and began looking into the English garden, which was lit beautifully by a blue, crescent moon. I remembered Eliot and thought about the tiny coffin so deep under the ground. I felt my mother’s hand in my hair, and it was real, her coarse and tender hands were stroking my head like they did when I was small.

In the blue light of the moon we stood as a family in a window that looked out on the backyard, the remnants of a family that expected anything but never expected nothing. I noticed a rose bush blooming.