“What is it exactly you’re doing here again?” said Jim.

“Your brother is involved in a very delicate mission,” I said, somewhat truthfully.

“What kind of mission?” said Jim.

“Oh, I can’t disclose anything more. You both understand, I’m sure, what with the current climate.”

“He’s into something, isn’t he?” said Jim. “Bobby was always into something. He liked to play with knives, poking and prodding. Does he still do that?”

“In his way, yes,” I said. “But in order to allow him to handle the sensitive matters which I’ve already described, we are required to do a customary background check. It’s quite usual. I just wanted to come to his boyhood home and find out if his childhood was normal.”

“Normal?” said Jim. “What the hell’s that?”

“You know, baseball, birthday parties, that sort of thing.”

“There’s never been nothing normal here,” said Jim.

“But Bobby did like baseball, Jim, you remember,” said Fran. “In the afternoons he used to sit in the backyard listening to the games on his transistor radio. He said, with the play-by-play and the cheers from the ballpark, it was like sitting in the bleachers.”

“I ain’t cared much for baseball,” said Jim, “not since they kicked away the pennant that year.”

“Don Young,” I said, nodding.

“Don’t get me started on Don Young,” he said.

“What we’re especially curious about,” I said, “is whether or not there were any childhood traumas that might affect Bobby’s performance on his mission.”

Jim squinted at me for a moment before looking at his sister, who gazed back with tenderness.

Just then another grunt from upstairs.

“You feed him yet?” said Jim softly.

“He spit up most of the oatmeal,” said Fran, “but enough stayed in to keep him till supper.”

“What are you giving him for supper?”

“Oatmeal.”

Jim laughed. He didn’t look so much like his brother, but they had the same laugh. Fran, on the other hand, was Dr. Bob in drag.

“You said you wanted some tea?” Fran said to me.

“That’s right, ma’am,” I said.

“How do you take it?”

“Just a little sugar.”

“That’s nice,” she said, remaining solidly on the couch, her raised slipper still twitching back and forth. “I like a little sugar, too.”

“So you want to know about childhood traumas?” said Jim, taking out another cigarette, lighting it with his Bic. “Well, let me tell you, mister. You come to the right place.”

It was the father, Virgil, at the center of the story. With his own father and mother and spinster sister, he had come up to Chitown from the hills of Appalachia as part of a famous migration north from coal country. There was a whole community in a part of the city called Uptown, mostly poor and struggling, but Virgil didn’t come up north to live the same life he had fled. He found a good job, ventured out into the city, met a pretty Polish girl on the elevated line one afternoon. Her name was Magda, Maggie, and she fell for his tricky accent and rawboned good looks. When he popped the question a month later, she was only too thrilled to get out of the stifling atmosphere of her father’s house with her seven brothers. Virgil’s factory job paid enough so that eventually he could buy a house south of Uptown, just a few blocks from the baseball field, and he and Maggie started a family. First Jim, then Franny, and finally, almost as an afterthought, little Bobby.

“It’s like the American Dream made real,” I said.

“Maybe,” said Fran, “except Daddy never was the dreamy type.”

He was a hard man, he worked hard, drank hard, was hard on his family. If the children misbehaved, they got the back of his hand. If they spilled their milk, they got the back of his hand. If they breathed wrong after he had been drinking, they got worse than that. And he was harder on Maggie.

“It wasn’t really his fault,” said Fran. “He was just born in a different place. He didn’t know no better. He used to tell us that was the way his daddy treated his mommy, too.”

“But his mommy lived till she was eighty-nine,” said Jim.

“True,” said Fran. “Got to give her that.”

It might have been easier if Maggie just took it, like Jim and Franny took it, but that wasn’t her way. She had a temper, too, and she liked her drink, too, and as she got older, she turned more than sturdy. Sometimes they would go at it for hours, the fight ranging over the whole of the house, pots flying, vases, invective screamed in two languages. In the middle of it all, the children would hide in the darkness of a closet, peeking out the crack of a barely opened door, helpless as their world imploded in on itself. Jim had learned that if he got in the middle, he would get hell, not just from his father but from his mother also, so he kept out of it, and he kept the others out of it, too.

“It wasn’t so hard keeping Franny in that closet,” said Jim, “but Bobby, he was a troublemaker.”

Little Bobby was more like his mother. He wouldn’t simply accept getting hit by his father as would Jim and Franny. Instead he would reflexively strike back whenever his father smacked him, and even though his blows had no real effect, they only made his father hit back harder. He was the youngest, but of the three children, he was the most battered. And when the three were hiding in the closet, with the cage match going on throughout the house, he was the one who wanted to run out and defend his mama.

“The little fool was small for his age,” said Jim. “An eight-year-old midget thinking he was going to stop them two. You know, when they got like that, they weren’t aware of nothing but each other. They would of killed him, he tried to get in the middle. So I held him back best I could. Sometimes he struggled so much I had to tie a rope around him to keep him from running out and doing something stupid.”

“How long did this go on?” I said.

“Until it stopped,” said Jim.

A groan from upstairs, a banging on the wall.

“Shut up, you,” yelled Franny. “I’ll change your pan when I’m good and ready. Didn’t I tell you we got a guest?”

“He still can be demanding,” said Jim cheerfully. “But he ain’t forty no more.”

“Wouldn’t matter much even if he was,” said Fran, “the way half his body don’t work and he lost his speech.”

“Thank God for that,” said Jim.

“Why did it stop, the fighting?” I said.

“He killed her, that’s why,” said Jim. “Stuck a knife in her neck.”

“Sad,” said Fran. “It was Bobby who found her.”

Came home from fishing. To find his mother. Dead. On the floor. He was ten. This was just after the Cubs collapse in ’69, the last baseball season any of them cared about. He rode his bike home from the lake, pulled up to the porch, left it there as he pushed open the front door. And saw the blood.

“Daddy got out after twenty years,” said Fran. “Parole, on account of his condition. We was still here, still in the house. He moved right back in, thought it would be the same. But it wasn’t.”

A groan, a bang, and then a thump as if a sack of sand had landed on the floor.

“Sometimes he thrashes about so much,” said Fran, “he falls right out of his bed.”

“You going to go haul him back up?” said Jim

“I will eventually. But first I’d like some tea. Would you like some tea, mister?”

“No, thank you,” I said. “I’m really not thirsty, and I do have to be going.”

“You got what you needed?” said Jim.

“Pretty much,” I said, standing.

“Our Bobby passed the test?”

“Oh, yes.”

A groan from upstairs, a single fist pounding the floor.

“You’ll tell Bobby to visit, won’t you?” said Fran.

“Sure I will.”

“We’d love to see him. And I’m certain he’d like to see his daddy. It’s been a long time since he’s seen his daddy.”

“You tell him we think of Mama every day,” said Jim.

“I will.”