Forgive and Forget

I was lying on the floor. My stepfather stood over me, his stern Italian face filled with rage. His eyes, such a dark shade of brown as to appear almost black, were truly frightening to behold. He had just thrown me against a wall and had every intention of doing it again. I was seven years old.

But that happened twenty years ago. I pushed aside the memory and looked at the house. It was smaller than I remembered. I had to laugh, because I'd always heard that happens when one returns to his childhood home.

When Sam opened the door, I was too stunned to speak. His face was as I remembered it, except that it had more lines in it. His eyes were as piercing as ever. His hair had turned gray and he was shorter than I. That was the biggest shock of all. He'd always been tall, dark, and handsome, as they say.

"Yes?" he asked. "Can I help you?"

I couldn't speak, so I tried to smile. He had the same commanding voice I'd always remembered. I wondered if perhaps I should have called first.

"What do you want?" he asked impatiently. "Who are you?"

"Michael."

"Michael who?"

"Michael LaRocca." Then I remembered that I had the same name as his father. "Your son," I added.

He looked at me hard for a moment. "Michael. Oh. Come on in."

Sam was uncomfortable, I realized. He wasn't the only one. This was the first time I'd seen him since the day Mom left him.

Mom raised my little brother, Barry, and me by herself. She never received child support because, in her words, "I was too proud to ask for it, or maybe too stupid." But honestly, the money didn't matter. We had food, clothes, a place to live, and each other.

I liked keeping up with all the different towns we lived in and bragging about them in school. I also liked moving because it always meant a chance to start over and maybe make some friends this time. Mom eventually admitted that we moved so much because she had trouble paying the rent.

I reminded myself that I was here to forgive him for all the brutal spankings with his belt and for slamming my frail young body against the wall of his den. As for hitting Mom, that wasn't for me to forgive.

"I'm sorry I didn't recognize you at first," Sam told me as we walked into the house. "I'm always advertising things for sale in the paper, so I thought you were somebody answering one of them. I'm sorry about that."

"It's okay," I replied. "It has been a while."

Sam's back was no longer ramrod straight. He was hunched over, but even if he hadn't been, I was taller. In my mind, he was a tall, strong soldier. Now he was just an old man. He led me into the den. Returning to the scene of the crime, I thought. It hadn't changed a bit.

"Have a seat, Michael."

Sam sat in the same chair that he always had. It still looked new. I suppressed a shudder and sat on the couch.

Colonel Salvatore (Sam) LaRocca was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, of Italian immigrants. While his family members were being assassinated in garment workers' strikes, he was excelling in the Army. He belonged to the 82nd Airborne, the pride of the service.

Colonel LaRocca was in the Officers' Club at Fort Bragg with my mother when his ex-wife came into the club with a black general. After the fight and the court-martial, Colonel LaRocca became Drill Sergeant LaRocca just in time to lead some kids into Vietnam during the war. He spent two years on the front lines, jumping out of planes and leading the first assault in every battle.

Sam returned from the war that was not a war and retired from the Army as a Staff Sergeant. To those unfamiliar with the U.S. Army, this is not a rank that a veteran of 23 years can be proud of. Especially not one who was once an officer. Mom would later tell me that the war changed him, making him an angry and bitter man.

"I live in North Carolina now," I told him. "I've been meaning to come see you, so I finally found the time to do it."

"I thought you were still in Florida."

"You remember when Mom died."

"Yeah. You know I tried to get a flight from Fort Bragg down to MacDill Air Force Base..."

"I know. Well, my Daddy - I mean Jim Drake - came down." My biological father, the one that Mom had left when I was two. "After Mom's funeral, he offered to build me a house in North Carolina and sell it to me at his cost. I always wanted to come back and buy a house some day." All I'd done in Florida was watch my brother and my mother die.

Sam nodded. "So you live close to him?"

"Yeah." At age twenty-six, you and he are all the family I have left.

"It's good to see you again. Are you married?"

"Not yet."

Sam's voice was different than anyone else who I'd grown up with. It wasn't Southern, nor was it "New York Italian." I always thought of his voice as having an Army accent.

"Not married," he repeated with a nod. "So what do you do now?"

"I used to fix copy machines, but I just got a computer programming job a few months ago."

Sam nodded. "Computers, huh? Here, let me show you around the house. I've added a lot since you were here last."

I forced another smile as we rose to our feet. "You always were building onto it."

"I don't do that as much as I used to, but I still do it sometimes. So where do you live?"

"Watha."

"Where's that?"

"Outside Burgaw."

Sam shook his head. "Never heard of it."

I laughed. "Nobody has. It's a little north of Wilmington."

"I don't know where that is."

That surprised me. Everybody in North Carolina knew where Wilmington was.

"Wallace?" I volunteered.

"No."

"Warsaw? Magnolia? Rose Hill?"

"Rose Hill," Sam repeated, choosing the smallest of those three towns. "Duplin Winery. I've been there, back when I was starting my own winery. Now I know right where you live."

"Yeah, what ever happened to the winery?"

"I had to close it. I couldn't make any money."

Walking through the kitchen, I remembered the smells of Sicilian cuisine, which I still love. Sam had taught Mom how to cook it as well. I knew only one of his recipes myself, spaghetti sauce. But looking at Sam now, it was hard to picture him cooking anything so extravagant anymore.

The additions to the house were like a labyrinth, filled with an abundance of treasures that didn't belong together and barely left room to walk. Sam described some of the things he'd bought at various auctions and antique sales. The antique bar was especially nice, free of dust but obviously unused.

"I know I've got too much stuff," he explained. "So, are you married?"

"Not yet."

"Did you say you work on copy machines?"

"Yeah, I used to."

"Maybe you can help me, then. I just bought two old ones and I don't know what's wrong with them. They're back in here. They're really old."

"I've worked on a few old ones," I told him.

"If you can fix either one then I'll probably have a real bargain. But if not, it's no big deal. I paid almost nothing for them."

Sam showed me the copiers. They were in a small room, along with some scraps of wood and other junk, and they were covered with dust. I chuckled, but I took a quick look inside the machines anyway.

"Sorry," I told him. "I've never seen anything like these before. They're older than I am."

"Mm hmm." Sam picked up a bottle of toner from the floor. "Will this work in either one of them?"

"No, that's powdered toner. Both of those copiers use liquid."

"Mm hmm. Any idea where I can get some liquid toner?"

"If you call a tech who can fix them, he'd know where to get some. But I doubt it'd be worth the money to fix them."

"Mm hmm. Like I said, I didn't pay anything for them. Let's go back into the den."

"I like what you've done to the house," I told him as we walked.

"It's just something I enjoy doing. Like buying all this stuff, even though some of it's probably not worth much. If I buy any more I'll have to build some more rooms to hold it all."

When we returned to the den, Sam stopped. "Michael, do you remember this den?"

I turned around to face him. Oh yes, I wanted to say, I definitely remember this den. But instead, I simply nodded. I wondered if this would be an apology.

As children, Barry and I were never allowed in the den. But one day I walked through it anyway. It was a lot faster to get to the kitchen that way and I didn't think Sam would know if I was fast and quiet. But Sam was sitting in the den. He leaped angrily from his chair and ran toward me. I was too scared to do anything. He grabbed my arm and flung me against the closest wall. Mom rushed in from the kitchen, holding a chair, and swung the chair at him. Barry watched it all from the doorway. "You get away from him!" she screamed. "You can hit me all you want, but don't you dare touch my son!"

Sam smiled. "At first I didn't want you and Barry coming into the den because I was afraid you'd break something or make a mess or whatever. But you were always good. I remember how you used to sit in the den with me all the time, reading or doing your homework."

I stared into his dark brown eyes. They seemed to have lost some of their fire. All I saw in them now was an old man. Was this his way of asking for forgiveness? Or was this really how he remembered things now?

"I always knew you'd grow up to be a fine man," he added.

I tried to smile, too stunned to do much else. Sam sat in his chair and I sat on the couch.

"Michael," he said, reaching to pick something up from the table beside him, "Do you remember this?"

"Yes."

"The LaRocca family crest," he said. "I did a little checking on the LaRocca name, just out of curiosity. It goes all the way back to the Roman Empire. The earliest known LaRoccas were known to exist back in 500 BC." He chuckled. "Julius Caesar probably had some LaRoccas helping him out."

Or stabbing him in the back, I thought, then immediately regretted my bitterness.

Sam seemed to gaze at something beside me for a long moment. I waited.

"Where did you say you live again?" he asked.

"Outside Rose Hill."

"That's right. Is that winery still there?"

"Yes, it is. I took the tour myself a few months ago."

Sam nodded. "I don't know why your mother left me. I gave her everything she wanted, a nice home and her own car. I even took you boys in. You know a lot of men, if they saw a single woman with two kids..."

"They would've gone the other way," I completed.

"Right, they would have. But I didn't go the other way. I took you all in and raised you like you were my own sons. As far as I'm concerned, you are my sons."

"I'm proud to be a LaRocca," I told him.

Sam turned silent for a moment. I thought perhaps he was trying to remember something, or maybe he didn't know what to say next. But now I think he was just wondering how to approach an uncomfortable subject.

"Do you have any idea why Barry killed himself?" he asked.

Now that's a complicated question. Maybe he wasn't good enough for himself as an adult because, as a child he'd never been good enough for Sam. Maybe it was a childhood filled with suppressed rage and sadness when men beat his mother in front of him. Maybe it was because his wife left him, or because he was a jail deputy seeing the ugliest side of life every day. Or maybe he was just the right age, a boy of twenty, blessed with looks and good sense and expectations he thought he'd never live up to, who happened to own a gun.

"No," was my only verbal reply.

Sam, our lives had nothing to do with you. Talking about Barry to you would be like talking about him to a total stranger. You never knew either of us. Why don't we just change the subject?

"Maybe if I'd been there..." Sam began, but then trailed off. "Maybe if I'd been a better father..." he began, but then trailed off again.

"It wasn't you," I told him.

"Then what was it?"

"I don't know. But it wasn't you."

"Barry was such a strong boy." He paused for a moment of silent remembrance. "Michael, are you married yet?"

I had to smile in spite of myself. Sam's memory was all but gone. "No, I'm still looking."

Sam smiled. "It'd be good if you could pass on the LaRocca name."

"Yeah," I said simply.

"I don't know if your mother ever told you about my Will..." he began, but trailed off again. He seemed to be searching my eyes for something.

"She did," I told him.

"This house is yours when I die. I left everything to her and you and Barry." He swallowed. "I don't talk to my family anymore. It's been years since I've seen anyone. Sometimes my brother wants me to come visit him in California or my sister wants me to visit her in New York, but I don't have time to go visiting people. I've got nothing to say to them anyway."

I nodded.

"I don't know why your mother left me," Sam continued. "Maybe she was looking for something. I don't know what it was. Maybe she didn't know herself." He paused. "I hope she found it."

"I think she did," I said simply.

"I always loved her." He paused. "You know I never remarried. I never will. I've got no time for that anymore. It's not that I couldn't have - I still could if I wanted to - but I'm just not interested. I'd rather just be by myself and do what I want to do."

I nodded again, still not knowing what to say. Sam noticed that he was still holding the family crest. He looked at it a moment, then set it back down on the table beside him.

"Do you still have the Airborne thing with the boot on the bottom and the skull on the top?" I asked him.

"No, I threw away all my Army stuff. I didn't need it anymore."

There was another uncomfortable silence. The Sam I remembered was so proud of his military service. I was surprised he'd thrown it all away.

"Well," I said finally, "I've gotta be getting back home now. It's a long drive."

We stood and he also seemed relieved that the visit was over.

"It was good seeing you again," he said.

"It was good seeing you, too," I replied. "Daddy."

Sam was still a master at hiding his feelings, it seemed, as he didn't react to what I'd called him.

"Oh, give me your address," he said after a moment.

I reached into my wallet and handed him a business card. He looked at it and then put it into his pocket.

"Computers?" he asked, looking up at me. "I thought you worked on copiers."

"I switched jobs a few months ago."

Sam nodded, then opened the door. "Come back again when you have more time. Maybe we can go out for supper or something."

I nodded. "Yeah, I'll be back. It won't be another twenty years." I tried to grin.

"Good." He paused. "I always knew you'd grow up to be a fine man."

"You had a lot to do with it." In ways you'll never understand.

I walked to my car and drove away. Sam did not watch me go. I was saddened by what the years had done to him.

A few weeks later, Sam sent me a Christmas card. Later, I sent him a birthday card. I remembered that his birthday was in May - Taurus the Bull, Mom had always said - and I found the date on my copy of his Will. He sends me postcards every Christmas and I write to him when I can. I can sense that we're both more comfortable this way.

When I returned to his house after all those years, I honestly wanted to forgive him. In the intervening years, his memory and his conscience had probably punished him enough. But I wasn't able to forgive him because he couldn't remember it. Perhaps it's better that way.