I looked at the photograph for a long time. Then I looked at my son, who was fifty three years old and shaking like a leaf, and I said the thing I had waited forty nine years to say. “Mark, I know who Danny Kowalski was.” He stared at me. “Your mother told me in the spring of 1967, the week before our wedding,” I said. “She sat on the steps of St. Augustine Church and told me she was carrying another man child. I asked her one question. Did she want to marry me? She said yes. That was the whole conversation.”
Mark sat down hard in the kitchen chair. He picked up the photograph and held it close to the light. “Dad, you knew,” he said. “You knew my whole life.” I told him Danny had been my best friend. We grew up on the same block off Butler Street, and we learned to fix machines in my father cigar store. Danny was the better mechanic, quick and funny, with a laugh you could hear across a bar. He shipped out to Vietnam in the winter of 1966, and he passed in the Ia Drang in the spring of 1967. He never knew about the baby.
“Your mother loved him,” I said. “She loved me, too, in a different way, a slow way that grew every year. Neither of us ever pretended otherwise. And you were never anything but my son. I want you to hear that, Mark. I signed your birth certificate with a steady hand.” My son put his head down on the oilcloth. His shoulders shook for a long time. I did not touch him yet. Some tears need a minute alone before they are ready for company. Then I reached across and laid my hand flat on his back.
Eleven gold keys on a kitchen table, a photograph of a stranger with a familiar face, and a husband who had known all along.
When he could talk, he pushed the little pile of gold keys toward me. “Dad, I took these out of the coin box because I thought it was jewelry,” he said. “I thought I was protecting Mom. Lisa told me you were hiding something, and I was angry, and I broke into your basement.” He wiped his face with his sleeve. “I am so ashamed.” I picked up one key and turned the tag to the lamp. First Federal, Monroeville. The next said Mellon, Oakland. Each tag carried a box number and the date 1968. I had never seen them in my life.
The next morning we drove to the eleven banks in my old Buick, one at a time, with a pocket full of keys and a certified copy of Irene will. At the first bank, a gray haired clerk led us into a vault and slid out a long steel drawer. Inside lay a manila envelope marked MARK. In it was a stock certificate, a savings bond, and a note in Irene hand: This is Danny money. The Army insurance, ten thousand dollars, which I invested in Pittsburgh steel and Westinghouse and never touched. Mark, it is yours, and it is his. It is how I loved you both.
We opened all eleven boxes by evening. Irene had put Danny military insurance into stocks in 1968, a little at a time, in eleven different banks, so no one could ever add it up. She had reinvested every dividend in green ledgers I had always taken for the shop books. The total, by the time we sat in the lawyer office in Oakland, was one million, nine hundred and forty thousand dollars. Every cent was left to Mark in a will dated 1999, with a note that said only, Stan will want to tell you himself. He sat there stunned, with the lawyer pen in his hand.
Mark looked at me across the conference table. “Dad, I do not want it,” he said. “I want to give half of it to you.” I laughed out loud. I said I had sold the route for four million and I was fine, and that Irene had left it to him because she wanted his father, the one who passed in Vietnam, to leave something behind. “What would Danny want?” I asked him. He thought a long time. “A good arcade,” he said. “One with a mermaid on the backglass.” I wiped my eyes with my napkin and said that was exactly what I had in mind.
The warehouse stood empty by then, swept clean by the Chicago company men. But Mark and I drove out there once, on a gray afternoon, and stood in the great echoing room where eleven hundred machines had once rattled and sung. He ran his hand along the painted concrete where Danny Kowalski had once stood with a screwdriver, according to the old photographs. I told him stories until it got dark, about Butler Street and the bars and the bucket of quarters, and my son listened to every word as if it were scripture.
Lisa came to my door that Sunday with a pot of golumpki and a face the color of paste. She apologized in the entry hall, and I let her. I said my table had room for people who made mistakes, because I had a long history of mistakes myself. We ate together, the four of us, and nobody mentioned quarters. Afterward the grandson who had made the joke carried the dishes into the kitchen on his own and asked me, red to the ears, whether I would teach him how to fix a flipper.
On the first Saturday in November, Mark and I carried the mermaid backglass up the basement stairs, wrapped in a quilt, and we remounted it on the Gottlieb under the lamp. The colors were as bright as 1966. I slid a dime into the slot and the machine woke up with its old cheerful clatter. Mark stood at the flippers, with his mother eyes and his father jaw, and he pulled the plunger back. The silver ball ran around the lights like a living thing. “Dad,” he said, “how do you play this?” I said, “Easy. You let it go.”