Free Just One Catch by Tracy Daugherty

them toward their goal. One day, one of the boys announced he was too tired to make it back to land. Joey and the others gathered around and got him safely to shore. Only afterward did it occur to Joey how powerful the tide was, and how close they had come to being washed away by it.
    What struck him most, out by the buoy, was the roaring quiet, the way it swamped Coney’s clamor. Everything that loomed so large on the beach—the roller coasters, carousels, and Ferris wheels—became, at this distance, thimbles, needles, pins. In these moments, bobbing on the waves, tugged by the tide, Joey began to think he had a “haunted imagination,” a contemplative streak with an undertow of sadness and resignation.
    On another “haunted” occasion, he observed a batch of kites break loose from its anchor on the beach. He ran up alleys and streets, keeping the kites in view; eventually, the string binding them snagged on a radio aerial on a rooftop next to his apartment. He scurried up the stairs to the top of his building, crawled onto the brick parapet, and reached for the nearest kite, which flopped just out of reach. He swayed, straightened, then leaned forward a little over a row of trash cans far below, until it occurred to him that any moment now he might plunge from the sky.
    He discovered a different kind of spiritual mystery—the aesthetic—in the early evenings, in the apartments of the families with whom the Hellers shared the building. The Provenzanos had a player piano, whose mechanical proficiency fascinated Joey. Tony Provenzano owned a collection of finely painted lead soldiers, less engaging for the fantasies of war they provoked than for their beauty when lined up symmetrically. The Kaisers, on the second floor, across the hall from the Provenzanos, owned a phonograph. They played Enrico Caruso over and over, as well as a comedy record called Cohen on the Telephone, delivered by a man with a thick Yiddish accent, and detailing, with painful hilarity, an immigrant’s inability to properly place a call. The Kaisers also owned a complete set of The Book of Knowledge, and Joey sat for hours in the apartment with his friend Irving, reading through entries on insects, ancient lands, and do-it-yourself projects.
    Also in the evenings, groups of boys, filthy with beach sand, went to the movies, walking to the RKO Tilyou or the Loew’s Coney Island. The Marx Brothers were Joey’s favorites. Harpo had first teamed up with Groucho and Gummo in 1907, at Henderson’s Music Hall in Coney Island. In their physical antics and verbal swiftness, the brothers seemed to embody the chaos of the place, and Coney Island served as a backdrop in several early film comedies, including those of Fatty Arbuckle, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton. One evening, a new movie theater opened up, the Surf, just a block away from the Hellers’ apartment, and Joey took his mother. The film was One Night of Love, which featured a Puccini aria and melodies that echoed his music. Joey fell for the lead actress, an opera singer named Grace Moore, who would die in a plane crash some years later.
    The movie was a pleasant shared moment with his mother. He didn’t have many like it. He fought with her as he got a little older, more independent, less inclined to stay home—though usually these were struggles of silence or tense avoidance. “You’ve got a twisted brain,” she told him one day when he frightened her by climbing a telephone pole just outside the kitchen window and asking nonchalantly as he peered at her, “Ma, can I have a glass of milk?”
    Another time, angry at her demands on him, he called her a bastard, believing she wouldn’t know the meaning of the word. “At once I saw with terror that I was mistaken,” he wrote in Now and Then. “She gasped with incredulity, and staggered back a step. And I knew in an instant … that I never wanted to see