A Matter of Conviction

“I wanted to. How do you explain a punctured eardrum to an eight-year-old kid who only wants to know that his father was a hero? I heard him outside one day a little while later. This other kid was telling him that his father had been on a destroyer and that it had been sunk by Japanese suicide planes. When he was finished, Danny said, ‘You should see my Daddy’s stamp collection. I’ll bet it’s the biggest stamp collection in the world.’ A stamp collector against a sailor on a destroyer that went down.”

“I don’t think that had anything to do with—”

“Do you have any kids, Mr. Bell?”

“Yes. A daughter. She’s thirteen.”

“Girls are easier. I guess you’re lucky.”

“They’re not so easy.”

“Do you ever get the feeling that you don’t know your own kid?”

“Sometimes.”

“I used to get that feeling a lot, even before this happened, before the — the killing, I mean. I used to look at Danny, and I saw him growing up before my eyes, and I knew that one day soon he’d be a man, and I didn’t even know him. And I used to wonder when I stopped knowing him, when he became something less than my son, and something more than my son, when he became this person called Danny Di Pace who was a person in his own right, a person very different from the two people who’d produced him. I used to wonder where he’d come from all of a sudden, this stranger who sat at the dinner table with us and told stories about friends I didn’t even know. Where did he come from? Who was he? My son? Why, my son was just a little thing I used to hold in my arms while giving him his bottle. Who was this — this man almost that I didn’t even know? Do you ever feel that way, Mr. Bell? With your daughter?”

“Yes,” he said uneasily. “Sometimes.”

“But girls are different. You don’t have to worry with girls. I read someplace that five times as many boys as girls are arrested each year. And with girls, it’s mostly sexual offenses. They don’t get into the more serious trouble. The beatings and the... the killings.”

“I guess you’re right,” Hank said.

Di Pace nodded. The room was silent. Then he said, “You know, I remembered something the other night. It just came to me out of the blue when I was sitting and thinking over the things we’d done and said. It was something that happened right after I lost my job. I remember I was out covering some bushes. We were going to sell the house anyway, we’d already decided to come back to Harlem, you see, but I don’t like to see living things die, and that was a bad corner in the winter, the way the wind used to rip around it, the bushes could have been damaged, so I covered them every year. This was in the fall, I can remember it was a very bright clear day, but with a nip in the air, you know those kind of days. I was outside working. I had on an old brown sweater, I remember...”

(The housing development in which the Di Paces live is typical of the low-cost developments on Long Island. The house is priced at $11,990 and the Di Paces were required to produce a thousand dollars in cash when they first bought it. Monthly mortgage payments used to be $83, but they are now $101 because the house was finally assessed and also because the bank holding Di Pace’s mortgage says there is an escrow shortage, a term he does not fully understand. He does understand that the house is now costing him eighteen dollars more per month than he had figured on.