Broken Symphony by Alan Lee

Author:Alan Lee [Lee, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sparkle Press
Published: 2023-05-03T16:00:00+00:00

22

That night Ronnie and I sat on the swinging bench on the front porch, and Manny in the rocking chair. Manny and I each held a highball glass, margarita over ice. It was chilly so I wore a windbreaker. Manny told me real Americans don’t feel the temperature, and he reclined without shivering in his rocking chair. Ronnie was curled under a blanket.

We watched the cars motor by. Fifteen cars in the last twenty minutes. in our sleepy neighborhood. We thought we’d seen the same white sedan three times, and we mused perhaps it was Doyle making rounds, or someone sent by Doyle looking for an infant.

I finished my second glass and felt the alcohol loosen a few restraints, relax the deeper muscles, ease the weight. A nice sensation. Until I had to pee in the middle of the night.

“Doyle driving by our house,” said Manny. “And we just sit here.”

“We don’t know it’s him.”

“It’s him. Pendejo’s breaking the rules. I might break them back.”

“These rules you have,” said Ronnie. “Does anyone follow them?”

“The upstanding gangsters do,” I said. “Like Marcus.”“Doyle doesn’t. You aren’t mad enough, ese. Be mad like me.”

“I’m angry. I’m furious.” I bent forward on my chair to look at the floorboards, hands in my coat pockets. I looked at the floorboards and through them to the solid earth below. “I’m furious with Doyle. But also at myself. At men. And women. At the 1960s and moral relativism and Atlanta.”

“Goodness,” said Ronnie.

“I found Mary Starlight at a bar where the women don’t wear much,” I said. “I felt uneasy about it but I hate to moralize. So I said the women were wise to make hay while the sun was shining. She asked if I was disappointed and I said no, that it was a free country. Which is what a coward would say.”

“What should you have said?” Manny asked.

“The truth. Instead I gave her a lie—that I thought her rights were more important than her soul. I should have said, come home. Quit chasing idiot men. That consequences were real and they might be more than we could bear.”

“Would she listen?”

“Ronnie and I were probably the closest thing she had to parents. To family. Families love. Even when it’s hard. Families don’t pander to illusions.”

Ronnie yawned. “Which illusions in particular do you mean?”

“Okay, but. Hear me out.”

“Ay dios,” said Manny.

“The world has never been as ideal as we wish, but I wonder if it got worse in the 1960s. In the 1940s, the world threatened to break and the greatest generation goes off to save it. They do. They come home, mission accomplished, having looked evil in the face and denied it, and now they’re scarred and limping, and they make kids. The greatest generation makes a generation who goes nuts. These are kids who didn’t have to fight Hitler, or sacrifice everything, but they get mad anyway. They don’t like the rules their parents put on them. They’re told not to have sex with everyone, not to do drugs.

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