A Crime in the Neighborhood Read Online Free PDF

groin. It was dark red and tender-looking, shaped like a rabbit with one ear. I recall noticing it one day when I caught him stepping out of the shower. It was a very innocent-looking birthmark.
    One Sunday evening my mother, my father, Ada, and Uncle Roger were sitting in our living room drinking beer and watching a news broadcast about President Nixon’s trip to China.
    This trip marks a new era, my mother said. The world is finally coming together.
    â€œHope Nixon’s not turning commie on us,” said Uncle Roger, who hated Communists the way people these days hate smog.
    â€œRoger thinks Communists should be branded with a scarlet C,” said Ada, flicking his thigh with her fingernail.
    â€œI’ve heard,” said Uncle Roger, “that real Communists all have a little tattoo they can show each other to prove party loyalty. They make them show it at the door before they can go into meetings.”
    And my father said: “Rog, I bet you think everybody with a birthmark is a Communist.”
    It was, naturally, only logical that at this moment Ada would giggle and say: “Like you, Comrade Larry.”
    â€œComrade Larry,” repeated my mother, her mouth extremely small.
    But I’m not satisfied with this story, although it’s the only one my mother ever told me about my father and Ada, and she told it only once. Despite her usual truthfulness, my mother has exaggerated. She is too stock in her role as the naive idealist, along with Uncle Roger as the red-faced McCarthyite, my father as the flawed social critic, and Ada as the tipsy adulteress who forgets to keep her mouth shut. While I do believe the four of them sat in the living room and watched Nixon wave from the Great Wall of China, and I do believe this was the day my mother realized her husband and her sister were having an affair, I don’t believe my mother’s realization happened as crudely as she has chosen to characterize it. Perhaps she liked this story because it’s just complicated enough to sound true, and because Ada and my father look sordid; especially Ada seems sloppy, thoughtless, a woman no one wouldmiss having as a sister. Anyone hearing my mother’s version gets Ada with her stocking feet on the coffee table. The living room flickers with blue light. My father hulks in his armchair, the top buttons of his shirt undone, displaying the collar of his undershirt. Uncle Roger chews pretzels on the sofa, occasionally elbowing Ada to get him another beer. My mother, through all, sits primly in the bentwood rocker; if she knitted, she would be knitting.
    None of these people bears much resemblance to the people I knew. Like cartoons, a few features remain recognizable in magnified form. Otherwise, my mother’s story seems received, a narrative she picked up, like the new shoes she kept buying, because it fit and because it made her feel a little better.
    However she found out, she found out. As I imagine it, my mother glanced up from the television set and saw my father looking at Ada. My version of the story has its received side, too: because I see in that look the sort of frank, sensual absorption I’ve glimpsed in the movies, once in a great while, between an actor and an actress who want each other and can’t have each other and never, in the movie at least, get each other. I think my father was looking at Ada like a man stirred by something he found beautiful. His stare was appreciative, alive with a current of desire. Desire on a man’s face can be ugly, but my father’s face that night looked almost pure. There he sat, a settled-looking man of forty-two, with a small chin, aviator-style glasses, thick, longish ginger-colored sideburns,and a broad, pale forehead—gladly subsumed. He wanted Ada, and his want concentrated his whole face into an unaccustomed severity, so that my mother could see bones where his face had grown fleshy, could see the outline of his skull, as