Grand prize winner of the FirstNovelFest 2000 novel writing competition, a story set in the 1960s; a story for all time. Based on a true story, you are guaranteed laughter and tears following 12-year-old Jeremy's struggle to save his family during the year after his father dies.
The Widow's Son was selected as a FirstNovelFest Grand Prize Winner - Enjoy the music, politics, fashion, televison and movie fare of the 1960s. Did you know that 2 days before the blizzard of 1967 that brought the Midwest to a halt, it was a balmy 65 degrees? Or that Wild Thing by the Troggs kicked the Beatle's Paperback Writer off the top of the pop charts? Or that Gomer Pyle USMC replaced the Dick Van Dyke Show? These details unique to 1966 and 1967 also include the Apollo 1 disaster, what young men did to avoid the draft and Vietnam, and President Johnson's conclusion in 1966 that the Vietnam War had been as good as won. All of this incredible history, accurately researched and woven into this incredible story without a seam, presents a historic backdrop for a powerful tale of survival - and the detemination of a neighborhood filled with beloved nuts and bolts who go beyond the call to save a broken family. And it all begins with these words of a child's lament - When I hear the news I want to jump on the dining room clock and make time go backwards . . .
Based on the real life loss of the author's father, Bruce Steinberg brings his passionate tale home as told through the eyes of his oldest brother - a child on the cusp of manhood who does not easily take to wearing the crown of New Man of the House.
The moment 12-year-old Jeremy Rosenberg witnesses his father's death, Jeremy loses the world he assumed would last forever. With a young brother expecting their father to yet come home, a sister blaming herself, and a mother falling toward isolation, Jeremy is sent fatherless into the world just as he enters adolescence. Beautifully and memorably set in mid-1960s Chicago suburbia, The Widow's Son is launched on a devastating moment. But this tale of misguided efforts and accidental triumphs of children forced into adult emotions creates a humorous, poignant novel. The reader's laughter and tears are sure to flow together to the last page as Jeremy battles to make his family into a family once again.
Author Bruce Steinberg also writes under the name B.R. Robb, and is the author of River Ghosts, a critically acclaimed novel for your review under Amazon.com's Look Inside program
Excerpt
"I hear when you stop eating for more than a week, your stomach starts eating up your insides," Karl Grossman's saying.
For Halloween, the night's drizzling a thick mist that seems to evaporate off the ground, hovering around our feet in a cool fog, a crash-landed cloud. Goblins and ghosts and witches with black cats riding brooms watch us from every window and glass-panelled screen door, eyes carved in pumpkins with hot candles inside follow us as we walk. We see our own feet, and ourselves, and maybe ten feet ahead, before the darkness hides the sidewalk. Above us, tree branches without leaves reach down toward our faces with their broken-fingered pointing. Cars rushing by in the distance along Edens Expressway send their whoosh of wind to our ears, like bats flying, searching for boys walking without adults on Halloween night. My skin-tingling reduces me to a little boy, sends me back to memories of not too long ago when I believed in ghosts and ghost stories, and everything on The Outer Limits was true: Do not attempt to adjust your television sets. We are in control. I'd lie awake all night worrying about large cootie spiders and space alien invasions.
I wish Karl would shut up, but he doesn't. “I hear your stomach starts eating up your insides.”
Karl walks beneath his manly black umbrella. I follow him under my own ring of blue ruffles. That pointy Grossman chin of his sticks out below the shadow of the canvas as he turns to talk.
"There's a skeleton in the Yellen house. Dahveed Waxberg said so, and he heard it from his mother, overheard it when Izzy Yellen cried about it to his mother in the kitchen. Brian Yellen won't go to Vietnam so he's starving himself, and his body's chewing itself up. That's what happens when you don't eat. Yum yum, a liver. Yum yum, a heart. Yum yum."
"Shut up, Karl," David says inside his Bubble Umbrella, sounding like he's got a sock in his mouth.
Karl laughs, "Should've stayed home, little boy. Go home, little boy." But David doesn't go home. We keep going in the darkness toward the Yellen house. Boys have to see something gory and sickening, like a body eating itself up, 'cause that's what boys have to do. "Like bugs to light," Karl says. "We're going to see."
The Yellen house is a square box of bricks, like every other house on Loblolly Avenue, but it has no Halloween decorations. Even Mom's taped a few to our windows, and she'll throw pennies from her purse into Halloween bags, and the little kids will love it while the older kids will stick their tongues out at our house when Mom closes the door.
A group of six little kids and Skyler Jenner, all close to Mrs. Jenner and her umbrella, comes toward us: little clowns, cowboys with six-shooters, one with an arrow through his head, and Skyler Jenner dressed as Dick Butkus in full football uniform. Mrs. Jenner wears cat whiskers painted on her face, and the flip of her hair's been hair-sprayed into cat ears. She smiles as we pass but says nothing. A little cowboy shouts back, "What kinda costumes are those? Those aren't any kinda costumes!"
"We're Mary Poppins!" booms Karl.
"You can't all be Mary Poppins!" the cowboy with the arrow through his head says.
"Who says we can't?" David cries.
"Mary Poppins don't look like that! She's not a boy, she don't wear jeans, she don't have a Bubble Umbrella! She couldn't fly with a Bubble Umbrella!"
Karl yells back, stepping a bit toward the cowboy, "Mary Poppins can send you flying with a Bubble Umbrella!"
Mrs. Jenner scoots the cowboy and the other trick-or-treaters along, saying, "That's not Mary Poppins, children. Move along now," and they disappear in the black behind us, their little voices saying, Taffy apples at the Kinders'! Snickers at the Waxbergs'! M & M's at the Lipshilts'! And Mrs. Jenner's voice answering, One to a customer, but hurry along, we'll make popcorn balls.
"Can't we go with them?" David says real whiny.
"We're not here for candy," Karl hisses. "Look at you. No candy bag for Halloween."
Karl points to the Yellen house, its brown-red face of bricks made black by the night. The front picture window watches us, like a Cyclops eye wide open. Shadows of moving people appear against the curtains, and then shrink away.
"You scared to see the skeleton?" Karl challenges David.
David shakes his head inside his plastic cocoon, his knuckles squeezing the umbrella handle.
"I'll take you home," I say, "if you want."
Karl hoarse-whispers at me, "That's just an excuse for you to go home, too, Jeremy."
"Let's go on," David says. "I'm not scared."
"Are you sure?" Karl says, stepping on the Yellens' lawn. "I thought I smelled something in your diapers."
"Shut up, Karl," David says, doing his best to sound tough.
We cut across the lawn and squeeze through lilac bushes growing tall against the corner of the house, finding our way to a bedroom window. Karl and I huddle down under the window, unlit and as black as a new chalkboard. We throw our umbrellas toward the bushes separating the Yellens' house from the Dapins' house. It's dark against the Yellen house, as dark as it ever could get, and I don't see David.
"Wait," his voice calls. I look to my right and hear David trying to get that Bubble Umbrella between the lilac bush and the house. One side is thumping through bare lilac branches, the other side scraping against brick.
"Close it," I say.
David keeps pushing until I hear a final thump, and he stumbles next to me. A panel of the umbrella's clear plastic is scratched and torn, and dead lilac bush leaves, like leeches, stick to it everywhere. He lowers the umbrella over his head and body, scratching the plastic against the brick behind us as he hunkers down.
"Shut up," Karl growls.
"What's so bad about Vietnam?" David says. "Aren't we winning?"
"We've been winning for years," Karl says. "I don't know what Brian Yellen's problem is."
"I'd like to go on a trip," David says. "Is Vietnam a good place to go?"
"I don't know," Karl says. "All I know is it's a free trip, and you get to win a war. Lots of people are going."
"They're shooting guns there," I say.
"So what? It takes twenty dead Viet Cong for every dead American. Haven't you been watching TV?"
"What's a Viet Cong?" David says.
"You don't know what a Viet Cong is?" Karl snorts. "I'd go to Vietnam. I wouldn't starve myself. I'd shoot 'em."
"Where's Vietnam?" David asks.
"On the other side of the world," Karl says. "By Africa."
"I thought the other side of the world was China," David says. "I thought when we dig holes, we dig to China. I've never heard anyone say, 'Dig to Africa.'"
"I think you should shut up," Karl says.
And David starts, "I think I hear . . . " then shuts up with a squeak as light flashes over our heads.
"Shut up! Shut up!" Karl orders.
"Nobody's talking but you telling us to shut up," I say.
David says, "Is there anyone in there?"
"Idiot," Karl says. "Somebody had to turn on the light."
"Now what?" I say.
Karl's eyes bulge as he turns to speak. "I'm here to see what Brian Yellen looks like after not eating forever. I'm gonna see." But Karl stays on the ground with us, breathing hard, his butt glued to the grass.
Skeletons don't cast shadows, I'm thinking, or if they did, the light would leak through the spaces between the bones and make a shadow like a xylophone. I hear children shouting Trick or Treat! from somewhere across the street, laughing, getting candy. Here I sit with my brother as he huddles inside his Bubble Umbrella, and Karl Grossman itches at the wet grass with his nervous fingers. We're cringing against the Yellen house, in the dark, with a streak of light above our heads, maybe carrying the shadow of Brian Yellen, or his skeleton, or maybe not.
"This is stupid," I say. I pop to my feet, and Karl's saying like a whisper that's too excited to be a whisper, "What're you doing? What're you doing?"
David stands beside me, his head moving up along with his Bubble Umbrella. I'm his older brother, and he's doing what I'm doing. I'm not surprised it's Karl staying on the ground.
I hear shrieking, little boy shrieking. David's shrieking to wake himself, to get away from some monster chasing him in a nightmare; it's like an explosion of fright and fear, and wanting to get away, but it's hard 'cause the nightmare sticks to him and won't let go.
Karl crawls away along the side of the house toward the front. He hasn't seen, he doesn't see. He just wants to get away. I shove David and yell, "Go home!" His little body's gone stiff and he stumbles a bit to the side when I push. "Let's go! Now!"
David's shouting something, I can't tell what for sure, and he squeezes his Bubble Umbrella between the lilac bush and house and falls through.
I turn to the window for another look before I go. I just have to.
Like the sudden pop from a jack-in-the-box, Izzy Yellen's face pressing near the bedroom window electrifies my skin. She's only a foot away from me, watching the light land on my face. Her eyes look black, with tiny drips of black streaks spilling into the whites and running down from the corners. She mouths, Go home, Jeremy. Go home, and raises her arm to point the way out.
Under her arm, I see Brian Yellen one more time, lying face up on his bed against the back wall. He's naked, and there's a chair by him and a plastic bucket, with towels and sponge on the floor. His hair is thick and wiry, like troll doll hair, piling up at the top of his pillow, his head half-buried, and eyes low in their sockets. His arms and legs seem lost in the bed sheets, showing here and there in the folds like sticks. He raises his hand to his forehead and it seems eerie, evil magic, to see how he moves his arm 'cause there's nothing there but bone covered in a thin layer of skin.
He's doing nothing but lying there with his hand at his forehead, staring up at the ceiling with those shrunken eyes. He breathes in deep, and his rib bones stretch under skin, skin so thin it's like lizard skin ready to be shed, and a skeleton, a real skeleton, is about to come out, empty of insides.
* * *
At home, everything seems normal. Normal for how we are now. The porch light is off. The TV in the living room is on with nobody watching. Books and papers and toys mess up the floor, and small bundles of dust collect under tables and beds and just about everywhere. Cheryl's in her bedroom, door closed, muttering things to herself or somebody. Only she knows. It's nine-thirty and Mom's asleep, I hear the TV in there going. Somebody needs to do the dishes 'cause they're filling the sink. I should do them, I guess, but I don't.
My bedroom is cluttered with comic books, magazines, and baseball cards. It's my habit to drop them on the floor beside my bed when I'm through with them, and let them pile up. David sits on his bed, his arms wrapped around his knees pulled to his chest. He's wet, his hair, his shirt, his jeans. He's tossed the Bubble Umbrella to the floor, still open and torn, looking like an empty half of an egg shell.
David loosens and lets his legs stretch forward. "That's what Dad looks like in the ground," he says.
He says it like he's answering a question on a test, his face serious and confident. He knows he's got it answered right. David goes to bed, falling to sleep without saying a word more.
Professional Reviews
Neil Chethik, Best-selling author of FatherLoss,Hyperion
"I loved Steinberg's 12-year-old narrator for his innocence and grandeur."
Sheldon Seigel, Best-selling author.
"Steinberg has put together a wonderful, moving story."
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