THE FIRST BARBECUE OF THE SEASON

When I was growing up, boys weren’t given names like Conor or Jason or Chase or Tyler or Maddox – the kinds of names my daughters rattle off as they chatter on the phone with their friends, debating who likes whom and whether this one is cuter than that one. We were all Johns and Williams and Davids and Roberts and Michaels and Richards – names squarely in the American canon, names that we shared with our fathers or uncles or cousins. Presidents had these names. They were familiar, reliable, masculine. 

Even Patrick was considered a little bit exotic, because of course Pat could be either a boy’s name or a girl’s, a fact that wasn’t lost on one of my classmates who seemed to have been inexplicably listed on the official school roster as Patricia; a mistake that apparently went uncorrected year after year, as if the teachers had decided to hold onto a private joke at his expense.

And if somebody was called Chip or Skip or Toby -- well, you knew it wasn’t his real name, just a nickname that he’d been stuck with, probably as a toddler, either as an endearment or to distinguish him from a relative or another one of the boys on the block.

Parents of girls seemed to take a little more latitude in naming, and so there was the occasional Heather or Flora mixed in with the Donnas and Bettys and Carols and Annes and Lindas. But nothing even remotely like the myriad Brittanys and Ashleighs and Chiarras and Madisons that populate the pages of my daughters’ yearbooks. The priests wouldn’t have baptised children with names like the ones given out today. They had to be saints’ names, and preferably ones that didn’t need to be looked up in a book to verify them.

When did the rules about names change? Or did they change with every generation? After all, my parents had friends with names like Gladys and Bertrand and Edna and Rudy and Fanny, names that would have been the cause of great hilarity in my elementary school classroom. And I recently received a baptism announcement for a Clara Evangeline, a pair of names that seem to me very old-fashioned, like something from the Civil War era.

The city has changed of course. Even though I live no more than fifteen miles from the neighborhood I grew up in, I scarcely recognize the scenery on some of the streets I drive down when I go to visit my parents. Shopping centers have sprung up where there were open fields, or have been torn down and replaced with townhouse communities. Sometimes both have happened on the same lot during the forty years since I first started riding my bicycle up and down those streets. The house in which I was born was torn down three years ago, when the whole block was replaced by garden apartments.

I don’t remember living in that house, a two-family home that we shared with my grandparents. My family moved a mile or so away when I was four, because my sister had been born and we needed a house with more bedrooms. In the new house, my older brother Paul and I shared a bedroom, and my sister Elizabeth – we never called her Betty, although one of my aunts kept attempting to attach that nickname -- had her own room until our youngest sister, Katherine, came along a couple of years after that.

That second house, the one that I grew up in, sits on a corner, so we had streets along both the front and the left side, streets that seemed to attract the balls and Frisbees and model airplanes that we played with during the summer. Streets that were hilly enough to provide good sledding and "flying saucer" gliding in the winters.

Neither the front street nor the side street were particularly busy, but the one on the side did gain a reputation for being treacherous, because cars driving up the hill had only limited visibility as they approached the crest, which was where our house sat. That reputation was solidified after my sister Katherine was hit by an ice cream truck – an ice cream truck, can you believe it? – when she was six.

The ice cream truck was headed to pick up its load of frozen treats for the day, not trolling for business, and so the musical bells that would have warned Katherine and probably sent her running into the house for coins were not ringing. Katherine darted into the street to pick up a toy she’d been tossing into the air just as the truck appeared. Neither she nor the truck driver had time to react.

That happened on a Saturday morning, just before noon, when Katherine was playing outside by herself. I remember that I was watching TV – professional wrestling probably, since at twelve I was too old to be interested, at least openly, in cartoons anymore -- and I know that I probably had the sound up pretty loud, since my mother usually chose my Saturday morning TV time as her vacuum-cleaning time.

I do remember that the boy who came to our door telling us to come outside had to pound pretty hard and yell through the screen to get my attention. He was new to the neighborhood and his name was Inigo – definitely not one of the standard names in our part of town. His family was Portuguese, and while there was a pretty large Portuguese population in the city, his family was the first to move into the suburb in which we lived.

Inigo would be in my class that fall, but this was the beginning of August and at that point I only knew who he was because his family – the da Costas, they were called -- had gone from door to door on our block, introducing themselves and offering a plate of sweets to each household. My dad said they probably did this because they knew the neighbors would be concerned about a family of their ethnicity moving into our community. Dad was a liberal, and he urged us to welcome them and said that he really couldn’t understand the way people talked about the Portuguese immigrants, because they were white and they were Catholic and yet people talked about them the same as if they’d come from Pakistan or Ethiopia.

I understood why people reacted this way, because I was at home in the neighborhood during the day while Dad was at work, and I heard the kids making nonsense jabber to imitate the foreign talk that they heard coming from the da Costas’ house, and laughing about the fact that Mr. da Costa was only a few inches taller than Elizabeth, who was ten at the time. I know that Dad understood after a while, too, because he came home one afternoon when Paul and his friends Joe and Mike were sitting at the picnic table in the back yard making fun of the new family. I remember this because I was in the kitchen getting a glass of water when he called Paul in and threatened him with the belt if he ever heard him making fun of people like that again. Dad reminded Paul that our own grandparents had been immigrants and had been discriminated against – which I knew was true, although I also knew that the Irish immigrants had spoken English and I doubted if they had moved into neighborhoods where they were the only Irish people.

But anyway, none of that mattered the day that Inigo came to our door yelling that Katherine had been hurt and we needed to come outside right now. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, which I thought was strange until I got out to the curb and saw that he had put his shirt over Katherine’s forehead, which was bleeding. He knelt down beside her and told her reassuringly that help was on the way, providing what I am sure was a very welcome note of calm, set against the hysterical reactions of my family as we saw Katherine lying in the street near the front right tire of the ice cream truck. Mom screamed then ran back inside to call for an ambulance. Elizabeth started crying and shouting, "My sister’s hurt, my sister’s hurt," as if that weren’t completely obvious to everyone in the gathering crowd.

I just stood there for a few seconds, and then quietly asked Inigo, "What should I do?"

Inigo seemed to be in complete control. "Let’s just keep quiet and calm until the ambulance gets here," he whispered, stroking Katherine’s cheek softly. "Everything’s going to be fine. We just need to stay quiet and calm."

And everything was fine. Katherine had a broken leg, but other than that just cuts and scrapes. She spent the afternoon in the hospital but was home by bedtime. Dad carried her triumphally into the house, showing off her cast and bandages to the rest of us.

Inigo became a hero in my mom’s eyes. The next morning she worked furiously in the kitchen, and asked me what that boy’s name was, and after she saw the family arrive home from church she wandered down the street with a perfectly iced homemade cake to thank him. When she came back, she had Inigo in tow. "Why don’t you two boys get to know each other? You’re exactly the same age – I bet you’ll be in the same class when school starts. John, you show Inigo your room and I’ll make you boys some snacks."

I took Inigo upstairs and we were rooting through the closet full of board games I shared with my siblings, when Mom appeared with a tray of cheese and crackers accompanied by two tall glasses of soda. I’d never known her to do anything like this before. When she fed us snacks, they were always at the kitchen table and usually accompanied by a "you’d better eat your supper after all this junk."

Not today. She was effusive with Inigo. She marched him into the girls’ room to sing his praises to Katherine, who was lying propped up in bed reading a stack of comic books. When Dad and Paul came home from wherever they were that morning – the American Legion hall, I think, or maybe the church hall, where they had volunteered to help paint – Mom introduced Inigo as "the newest member of our family."

I learned that afternoon that Inigo was not a common name, even in Portugal, but that it had been his grandfather’s name, which of course was how he had come to be called that. My mother looked it up in some baby name book she had, and announced to us that it was a form of Ignatius, as in Ignatius Loyola, who was the saint who had founded the Jesuit order, which we all knew about, being good Catholics.

"One of the wisest men in history," my mother nodded, "And you may just take after him, Inigo. You should be very proud that your parents gave you that name."

I thought it was weird that my mother was fawning over Inigo like this, but I could understand it, given that she thought he was responsible for saving my sister’s life. He wasn’t, of course, but I guess he did deserve our gratitude for everything he did in those minutes after the accident when we weren’t functioning very well.

I liked Inigo, I found, and through the rest of the summer and into the school year, he became my friend. Mom continued to welcome him enthusiastically, and soon made plans to invite his family over for dinner. There were just four da Costas in contrast to the six of us: Inigo, his parents, and his younger sister Jadia, who was eight and thus not really the right age to become a pal to either of my sisters. Not that Mom didn’t give it a try. She insisted that Elizabeth and Katherine, who hardly ever played together, call Jadia and invite her over after school. They got along, but at that age the gaps of two years were just too hard to surmount; after about an hour, Jadia asked to go home.

The da Costas came over for dinner for the first time in October, I think. I know we were wearing jackets but still playing outside. It hadn’t gotten really cold yet. The parents brought a bottle of port, which I didn’t know about at the time but which my parents informed me was sort of the national cocktail of Portugal. The adults drank small glasses of it after dinner, and I noticed that my mother left most of hers while Dad poured himself a second.

After that, the da Costas had us down to their house for a Sunday dinner, then one night Inigo and Jadia came over and Paul babysat all of us while the four adults went out to dinner at a "supper club", as Mom called it.

Through the winter the parents didn’t see that much of each other, but when they did, they always seemed to have a good time. They liked each other.

Inigo and I divided our time between the two households, and each of us was treated like family in the other’s home. Mrs. da Costa was shorter than my mother, and heavier. She had wavy black hair that cascaded down around her face, and I noticed that she always wore dresses, even when she was cleaning house. My mother, who had short, straight red hair, wore pants except when she wanted to look serious, like for church or a parents conference or to go out at night. Although I thought Mrs. da Costa was funny-looking at first – she was so different from my mom, who after all was my frame of reference – I decided after a while that she was actually beautiful in her own way. I was proud that I was able to recognize beauty in someone from an unfamiliar culture. It didn’t occur to me at the time that the reason I came to feel that she was beautiful was that she was always nice to me and her son was my best friend.

When the weather started to get warm again, my parents decided to have the first barbecue of the season and they invited four families, including of course the da Costas. Dad spent the morning cleaning up the grill and around noon started the charcoal fire. About two hours later, when the first guests started to arrive, he placed some new coals in among the white ones, to keep the fire going, and began to cook. He roasted chicken and sausages and hamburgers and put them on trays that Mom covered with foil and stuck in the oven.

Mom had been making big bowls of potato salad and macaroni salad and cole slaw, which, when enough meat was ready to get the crowd started, she brought out and placed on the folding tables that she and Dad had placed at the edge of the back yard, up against the fence. The bar occupied another folding table.

Out of the four families that had been invited, three had kids that were close to my age or some of my siblings’. So we spent the afternoon playing badminton and croquet and horseshoes and whatever other outdoor games we could dig out of the garage and set up. The only thing we weren’t allowed to play was a lawn darts game that Dad said was too dangerous when this many kids were running around.

It was still early enough in the year that by six-thirty it was close to dark and was getting chilly. The Flahertys and the Obersts left about then, but the da Costas began helping Mom and Dad clean up, hauling in empty glasses to the sink, filling trash bags with dirty paper plates and depositing them in the garage. Earlier in the afternoon, Dad had moved the record-player, a heavy fruitwood cabinet, up against the window and had put stack after stack of records – jazz mostly, with just a little rock and roll to show everybody that he and Mom had kept up with the times – on the player.

As my folks and the da Costas scurried around cleaning up, an album of samba music dropped onto the turntable and started playing, and all four adults began swaying to the music as they went about their chores.

By that time, they had all had quite a bit to drink, and even us kids noticed that they were getting pretty loud and laughing at things that weren’t all that funny. Inigo and I were refilling our soda glasses at the kitchen counter when I saw, out of the corner of my eye, Mrs. da Costa, whose laugh was low-pitched and growly, push herself back against my father and wiggle her hips. Then she reached back over her shoulder to stroke my father’s cheek for a second, before sauntering away.

My dad watched Mrs. da Costa dance away from him, gazing at her swinging hips. At that same time, I noticed my mom giving my dad a look that I could only describe as pure anger, a look I only remember her having on her face a few times in our lives. Later that night, I heard them arguing, my mom referring to Mrs. da Costa as "that hippo," and my dad countering, first pleadingly and then with a resigned tone of defeat, that Mom was reading too much into things. At one point, I heard Dad use the phrase "Old World charm," and although Mom lowered her voice, I’m pretty sure I heard her use the f-word, the only time to this day that I’ve ever heard her do that.

The next morning, it became clear that we were not the da Costas’ friends anymore. Mom cursed under her breath as she emptied the dishwasher, roughly shoving bowls and pots and flatware into the cabinets. "I should have had my head examined before I invited those people over here to ruin my house," I heard her mutter. "I should have known what would happen."

When Jadia showed up at the door that afternoon with a plate of sweets, Mom accepted them with a cold "thank you" and didn’t invite her in. After Jadia walked away from the door, Mom took the sweets into the kitchen and dumped them into the garbage without a word. When Mrs. da Costa called a few days later to invite us over to dinner, to reciprocate, Mom said told her no in a way that clearly communicated, "never."

From that time on, I don’t think my mother ever used Inigo’s name. If she had to refer to him, she did so as "that Portuguese boy," as if she’d never been introduced to him. She stopped inviting him in for dinner, although at least she didn’t try to stop me from hanging out with him. If we were together in the afternoon, she’d simply call out through the door that dinner was ready and I needed to tell my friends to go on home.

Inigo and I never talked about what had happened between our parents, but it was obvious to me that he understood as well as I did that the rules of our friendship had changed. We adjusted fairly easily. Because it was getting warmer, we were playing outside more anyway, and we continued to go back and forth to each other’s place. Mrs. da Costa remained as friendly as ever to me, but the couple of times she invited me to stay for dinner, I mumbled that I couldn’t because my family had plans that night.

When the next school year began, I transferred into public school for the ninth grade, as Paul had done a year earlier, and Inigo went to Catholic high school. At that point we naturally went our own ways and made new friends in our new schools, although we still saw each other once in a while.

Dad tried to maintain a friendly face. He would wave to the da Costas when they drove past the house, and he asked me from time to time how Inigo was doing. But he knew better than to walk down the block to talk to them, or to speak about them in front of Mom.

A year or so later, the da Costas moved away. Inigo told me they had found a house closer to his father’s work. I didn’t think about him much after that – although when I did, it was with resentment toward his mom and mine for both of their parts in putting a damper on our friendship. It seemed to me they both had behaved in a way that was opposite to "grown up."

It was the first time I had ever seen someone wipe the slate clean of another person, and it’s still one of the most thorough instances I’ve ever experienced. Mrs. da Costa’s name was simply never spoken in our house again.

I’d read about people doing this sort of things in novels – disowning their children or sending away an errant spouse – but it was still a bit of a shock to know that it could happen in real life.

*****

Thoughts about kids and their friendships and the kinds of names their parents give them came pouring out of my mind a few months ago, when my daughters came home from school close to hysteria, talking about a boy in their high school who had disappeared, just vanished.

The boy was called Ant, and it wasn’t until a couple of days after I first heard about it that I came to realize that his name was actually Anthony, which was a somewhat acceptable name when I was growing up (it sounded a little bit Italian, but Italians were at least Catholic like my family so that was okay). But the short form for Anthony was always Tony when I was a kid. To be called Ant would have been unheard of.

Ant had been supposed to board a plane in Daytona Beach, where he had gone to visit his father. He was to change planes in Atlanta and end up in Boston, where his mom, with whom he lived most of the time, would pick him up. But he never got off the second plane in Boston, and evidently never got on the first plane in Daytona. His dad had dropped him off and watched him check in, but then left the airport.

The boy was sixteen and had been travelling back and forth between his parents’ homes for at least five years. This was just another normal trip. Except that now Ant was missing and the city was in a panic, fed by the media. Especially the twenty-four hour news channels on cable, which had picked up this story from the local station and blown it up into a national, if not international, hysteria.

As I watched a report on the story one night, the boy’s mother came on for an interview. Her first name was Jadia, and it didn’t take me long to realize that she had to be Inigo’s sister. She was the right age, thirty-eight, and when I watched her talk to the reporter, I recognized her dimples and the shy, charming way she batted her eyelids. They reminded me of both the child Jadia and her mother.

The next segment talked about how members of the boy’s family were combing the areas around the Daytona Beach airport, searching through woods, knocking on doors, showing snapshots at the mall in an effort to learn anything about what might have happened to Ant. I recognized Inigo in a couple of the shots, short and stout like his dad.

The saturation coverage went on for another few days, I guess until the reporters got tired of the same thing happening day after day: Pleas from the family, vows from police to find the boy safe and bring him home, promises of a reward, suggestions that Ant’s home life might not have been happy, guarded hints that Ant might be a victim of Florida’s underage porn industry.

After I realized that it was the da Costa family that was at the center of this story, I paid more attention to it, and told my daughters that I had known Jadia and Inigo when I was a kid. I didn’t mention the barbecue or how their grandmother had reacted to Mrs. da Costa’s flirtatious behavior.

One of the last TV segments I saw on Ant’s disappearance was an interview with the boy’s uncle, my old friend Inigo, conducted on the day the sheriff’s department called off the active search of the wooded areas around the airport. Glaring at the camera, his eyes red, his hair disheveled, Inigo promised to keep up the search until Ant was found.

"I don’t know what the authorities are thinking, calling off the search," he said. "This is my sister's boy. Of course I'm going to keep on looking for him. A boy can’t just disappear like that. That doesn’t happen. People don’t just vanish without a trace. You can’t erase people."