Sons and Princes by James Lepore Page B

weeks, but that the one on the right leg, where a steel plate and screws had been used to bring his shattered tibia together, would have to stay on until the spring or early summer. One or both of his parents came every day to see him. He was bitterly angry at his father, but out of a misguided sense of fairness, he did his best to shun them both.
    It was snowing on the day of his discharge. Joe Black, his face red and his dark overcoat and fedora still wet, appeared early in Chris’ room to take him home. His roommate of the last few days, a basketball player at NYU who had had knee surgery, had gone home the day before and his bed had not been filled. Chris, pushing his breakfast aside, had spent the fifteen minutes before his father arrived practicing with the walker, dragging himself from door to window and back again until he broke into a sweat and had to stop. He had just settled back into bed when Joe Black entered the room with his usual quiet step.
    “You have some color,” the senior Massi said, after drawing a chair near the bed and seating himself. “Your face looks good.” Chris’ broken nose, resulting when his face bounced off of the windshield on impact, had healed on its own, and the bruises around his eyes had subsided and disappeared after a couple of weeks.
    “You’re early,” Chris replied. “They told me nine sharp.”
    “I know. I wanted to talk.”
    Chris did not answer. In his moments of high fury over the past four weeks, he had assembled a series of diatribes against his father, some cold and deliberate, some hot and emotionally-charged, all meant to deliver stinging blows. But now that the moment of truth had come, these searing indictments faded from his head.
    “Talk?”
    “Yes, talk.”
    “About what?”
    “About me.”
    “I don’t want to.”
    “Yes, but the time has come.”
    “What about me,” Chris said, suddenly finding his voice. “Why can’t we talk about me? I’m the one who’s crippled.”
    “You’re not crippled. Your legs will mend.”
    “Go ahead, then, talk.”
    “I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your track meet. I could have taken you home.”
    “You were working.”
    “Yes.”
    Eying his father across the short distance between them, Chris knew with the instinctive certainty of the young, but nevertheless with a mix of despair and apprehension in his heart, that the revelations made by father and son this day would in all likelihood have to suffice for a lifetime.
    “You have heard that I killed your friend’s father,” Joe Black said, and then, gesturing toward his son’s legs, “you think that’s what’s brought this on your head.”
    “No, I don’t. It’s just bad fucking luck.”
    “You weren’t meant to run.”
    “I guess not.”
    “You were meant for other things.”
    “That’s for sure.”
    “Do you know what I do, Chris?”
    “No.”
    “Do you want to know?”
    Chris had been hoping for a month for a collision with his father, but not on this very issue. You asked for this, he said to himself. If he could, he would have run from the room, run from Joe Black’s soft voice and calm, implacable manner, run from the precipice beyond which gaped the rest of his life.
    “No,” he answered.
    “I will tell you. I kill people.”
    Chris gazed at Joe Black now as if seeing him for the first time in his life, and for a second, he thought he saw in his father’s coal-black eyes what it was that made him a killer. What he saw wasn’t frightening or repulsive. It was a coldness. He could kill. He had crossed a boundary that most people never come close to.
    “Why?”
    “If I told you of my life, Chris,” Joe Black said, “I would feel that I was begging for your approval. I will tell you this much. I first killed when I was seventeen, in order to eat. When I came to this country, I made a contract for life to follow the orders of don Velardo, which I have done and will continue to do.”
    “What happened with Ed’s