The Dismantling by Brian Deleeuw Page B

chopping motion of his hands as he delineated the concept of square footage—combined to form a sort of ur-Michael figure, the concentration into one moment of everything that made Simon’s father his father.
    When Michael asked if there were any questions, it was all Simon could do to shake his head. Amelia, though—his younger sister, ten years old, fifty-five bony pounds swallowed up by a pink sweatshirt—said, “We’re poor now, aren’t we?”
    â€œShut up,” Simon said, but Michael just laughed as though he were choking.
    â€œNot yet,” he said. “Poor
er
—well, I can’t argue with that.”
    Yet when they moved into the house on Beach 113th Street, on the last weekend of July 1995, Simon and Amelia were too astounded by the amount of space they could now call their own to think about much else. Two floors! A crawl space! A porch! (Concrete, but still.) It was bounteous, an abundance. They could walk to the beach in five minutes: how could their move be understood as anything other than an improvement? (And, of course, when Simon was a bit older, he understood that they weren’t in fact poor at all; they’d merely slipped from the upper to the lower confines of that infinitely elastic American category, the middle class.) But then the school year began, and their days became bracketed by bleary-eyed, impossibly lengthy subway rides; they seemed forever in transit, the school day itself only one stop on some never-ending, laborious journey.
    On the night before school resumed, Michael had sat Simon down in the kitchen after Amelia had gone to bed. “I’m going to need your help, Simon,” he said. “I’ve always been able to trust you to be responsible for yourself. Now you’re old enough that I can ask you to share some responsibility for your little sister. Take her to school in the morning and bring her home in the afternoon. If I’m not back by dinnertime, order something to eat—pizza or whatever you like. I’ll leave some money by the phone. Help her with her homework. Keep an eye on her. Be there for her when she needs it. I’m going to have to stay on later at work for a while, and it’s going to take me longer to get home now too, so . . .” He regarded Simon very seriously, wreathed in blue smoke, the Parliament held loosely between two fingers. “Can I depend on you?” he asked.
    Simon nodded. “I won’t let you down.”
    â€œNot me,” Michael said. “Your sister. She’s your responsibility now too. Remember that.”
    â€œI will. I promise.”
    â€œGood,” his father said. “This is what it means to be a big brother.”
    And what about St. Edmund’s? A Jesuit education couldn’t have held too much meaning for their atheist father. Simon had always assumed it was instead in deference to the memory of their mother, the daughter of first-generation Italian Americans, nine years dead by then of pancreatic cancer, and while alive a passionate if inconsistent Catholic. It was also possible that Michael Worth harbored a stubborn European distrust of the New York City public school system, and yet private school was as beyond his newly diminished means as a private jet. Whatever the reason, off to the Upper East Side Jesuits Simon and Amelia had been sent, and once he’d managed to wedge his children into the school, Michael was not going to let a little thing like the family’s move to the hinterlands change his mind. The result for Simon had been a partitioned adolescence: school in Manhattan, home in farthest Queens. In each place he maintained the illusion that his real life—where you’d find his closest friends and his truest, most comfortable self—occurred in the other. For five years, the one thread that ran through it all was Amelia, and then she was dead and the whole thing—his doubly calibrated