How to Drown
Creative non-fiction
The morning after Eddie died my mother called up to my room on the third floor, a ritual she did nearly every day to make sure I was getting ready for school, and I assured her I was up even though I was sitting on the bed wrapped in a blanket against the early March chill wishing I could just lie back down. She called me again, more softly, and asked me to come to the top of the stairs. The blanket behind me like a train, drowsy teenage royalty, I shuffled out of my room. She stood on the landing below, one hand on the newel. She looked serious and sad.
“Eddie Palumbo drowned yesterday,” she said.
It was on the radio. In those days Norristown had its own station, WNAR, broadcasting from an ugly little cement rectangle on a hill at the base of the antenna out on Route 202. The signal barely reached Philadelphia. It gave the local news, high school sports coverage, and ads for sales at Chatlin’s Department store on Main Street where my grandmother worked in billing. You listened to WNAR if you wanted to know what was going on in the county. That morning it told mothers across town about Eddie. I imagine them overwhelmed by existential dismay, struggling to get their kids up and out the door and into such a dangerous world. My mother still seemed a little in shock.
And now I was too. How to respond to such an impossible piece of news? I asked, “Is he okay?”
“He drowned, honey. He died.”
We often say someone died, rather than they are dead. Saying someone is dead is so final, an irreversible fact. Saying someone died places it in the past, a thing they did yesterday but won’t tomorrow, makes it transitory like a phase they’ll move beyond.
We looked at each other for a moment. I walked back to my room and got dressed.
Silently eating my breakfast, I didn’t dare tell her that the day before, in the hallway between classes, Eddie had asked, then pleaded, for me to go with him to play hockey. If I had it could have been me under the ice as well.
Eddie and I were sixteen years old when he drowned, juniors in high school, and we had known each other for half our lives. He was gangly with a large nose and a crooked, toothy smile. Like a lot of shy, lonely kids he compensated by being a clown. Some found him hard to take but he and I always got along.
“With a named like Eddie Palumbo he should be singing in an Atlantic City nightclub,” my father would occasionally joke, apparently having forgotten the other times he said that.
Eddie lived on Poplar, the street right behind Fornance, where I lived. For some reason they never cut all the way through on his block, so Poplar ascended to terminate on a hill, at that point having given up any pretense of being a genuine street and resigning itself to not much more than a glorified alley, with a staircase leading down to Astor Street. Eddie and his parents lived in an apartment on the second floor of a small, drab, brick building squatting on the hill by the stairs, with no back yard, just a paved area for cars.
A block down Astor to the south lived Barry Richmond in a row house, with his brassy sister and his father thin and silent in work overalls. Up a block from me on Fornance, across from the pizza shop, lived the Argentine transplant Jorge Gutierrez, whose name we couldn’t pronounce right so we called him Georgie. Around the corner from me, at the base of Poplar, down the hill from Eddie’s place, lived the Karsten brothers, Gary and Mike. The Karstens lived in a ranch with a large detached garage topped by a loft, so that was where we all liked to hang out. That was our core crew, for years. We lived in the center of our universe: the elementary school was four blocks away, the junior high school six blocks, and the high school just three. If we didn’t always get our timing right to walk to school together, some combination of us came home as a group in the afternoon.
Georgie once threw a football when I wasn’t looking and hit me in the face, knocking me out. We had a great time.
The park hugged the creek, from the zoo down to the old armory, and it was ours as far as we were concerned. We played baseball in the spring and touch football in the fall and basketball in the winter if it wasn’t too cold, and otherwise just hung out. Mike and Gary fought sometimes, like brothers do. Eddie made inappropriate jokes about sex and female body parts. We trick-or-treated together, and when we got older we went out on Mischief Night, until the Karstens started to slide into straight-up vandalism. Georgie once threw a football when I wasn’t looking and hit me in the face, knocking me out. We had a great time.
Eddie and I were the most serious athletes. We played Little League against each other, then in our teens we joined the same American Legion team. I was shortstop and Eddie played left field. He was a better ballplayer than people expected him to be. Awkward looking as he was, in his big strides he covered a lot of acreage out there, and he could hit the long ball. True to his nature he would sometimes showboat, making his fly ball catches look harder than they were, even tumbling into a somersault if there was no one on base to tag up. It drove the coaches nuts but our teammates thought he was the life of the party, and voted him most valuable player. This irked me because I thought I deserved it.
“I have the best glove of any shortstop in the league,” I complained to my dad. “I get on base. I’m in pitching rotation, and I even fill in at catcher when we don’t have anyone else who could do it.”
“Sometimes the popular one has the advantage,” said my dad. So, life lessons.
When the Philadelphia Flyers brought the National Hockey League to our part of the world in the late 1960s it set off a hockey fever across southeastern Pennsylvania. No one caught the fever more than Eddie Palumbo. He taught himself to ice skate, and dragged me along. He had his father drive us over to a rink where, after enough time, we brought our skating skills up to a barely passable level. We all bought sticks and played pick-up games on a section of the creek where a low dam provided an oblong pond that froze hard and thick in the middle of winter. We had no net, no helmets, no proper padding. Just kids slapping a puck around trying not to fall. No fights; our games were surprisingly civilized considering our inspiration was a team nicknamed the Broad Street Bullies.
Eddie extended his hockey obsessions to a tabletop game, building a league with stats and playoffs. It was better with two players, so I would be invited over to his apartment. I was struck by how small it was. All my other friends lived in houses; mine was a three-story duplex, gigantic in comparison.
He had the game on the dining table, and as we played his mother busied herself in the kitchen while his father was in a bedroom in the rear. Eddie’s father was dark, very Italian. His mother was a contrast, a petite blonde, waspy. I knew her name was Gloria because Eddie’s father would call out to her with some demand or another. She ignored him until the third or fourth time, then walked down the hallway to see what he wanted. As far as I could tell it was always something trivial, like changing the channel on the television that was ten feet from him, or something else that he could have done perfectly well on his own. She didn’t yell back, not when I was there anyway, but her manner made it clear she didn’t like the way he ordered her about and wasted her time. Even as young as I was, I could tell she was humiliated by him doing it in front of me. I wondered if he was being like that because I was there – showing off – which made me feel guilty and more embarrassed. I never heard him threaten her, and I saw no sign that he physically abused her, but it was painful to be there while that was going on.
Eddie paid no attention, as if it wasn’t happening. I never mentioned what I saw or asked him about it, and he never acknowledged what happened or offered an explanation. It was just the way things were in that tense, tiny, miserable little apartment.
Things had changed by March 1972. There was no more status quo with our crew. Eddie stayed committed to hockey and dreamed of becoming a pro, while the rest of us were following other interests. That fateful day I didn’t play hockey with him because I was going to play tennis. I was first singles, playing all year round, and needed to up my practices to get ready for the season. Barry Richmond had also become devoted to tennis, was my practice partner in fact, and he wasn’t one for hockey. Georgie Gutierrez had moved to a different town. The Karsten brothers, both big and not particularly coordinated, never learned to skate well.
Increasingly isolated, Eddie had taken up with Dennis Malek, a hulking, broody, inarticulate kid who would do what Eddie wanted to do. Dennis may have begun as a contingency option, but Eddie started leaning on him heavily. So heavily that they became inseparable, and sometimes it seemed that it wasn’t so much our crew had drifted from Eddie, but that Eddie and Dennis had drifted from us.
I’ve always regretted I was focused that afternoon only on whether I was going, rather than whether it was safe to be skating outdoors in the first place. Perhaps, if I had thought it through, I could have discouraged Eddie about it. Although the temperature dropped at night, the days were averaging in the upper thirties to low forties, and the ice had been melting for over a week. The reason Eddie and Dennis didn’t just go to the creek to play was because the area near the dam had seen so much melting that rocks were emerging through the ice, making it impossible to skate. So they foolishly opted for the reservoir off Johnson Highway. It was on private land and they had to climb a tall metal fence to access it, so getting in required effort and determination. Maybe someone as stubborn as Eddie wouldn’t have listened to me in any case.
There was something else I would think about later. Had I said yes to Eddie, had agreed to go play hockey at the reservoir, and my mother got wind of our plan, I doubt I would have been permitted because while she was no ice skater she knew when conditions were unsafe. I’m not sure Eddie had someone to intervene like that. I had the feeling that Eddie’s mother wasn’t around any longer. He never mentioned her, and the one time I was over to his place that winter there was no sign of her. With his father at work, there was no one to tell him what a bad idea it was, the way my mother would have told me.
From what I heard, it didn’t take long for the ice to give way and the boys to plunge into the dark, cold water. Dennis pulled himself out somehow and survived. Eddie did not.
We put on nice clothes and went the twenty-five minutes south to Ardmore for the wake: the Karsten brothers, me, Barry, and a kid named Ron that used to play hockey with us. Mike Karsten was a year older so he drove his dad’s Ford LTD station wagon.
“Why the hell Ardmore?” asked Ron after we set out. I didn’t know him well except that he had something of an abrasive personality.
“His dad’s from Ardmore, where he has family,” I said. “That’s why we would go to a skating rink there, when we were learning.”
That was the last time anyone mentioned Eddie during the drive.
I wondered if he was being like that because I was there – showing off – which made me feel guilty and more embarrassed.
I didn’t expect the open casket viewing, and was startled to see what looked like a wax approximation of Eddie lying there surrounded by flowers, his features smoothed out and not realistic at all. I had never seen him in a suit.
Dennis Malek sat off to the side, his head down. Eddie’s dad sat near the rear, inconsolably sad, but he did stand and thank us for coming. We stumbled through attempts at condolence, but what did we know, we were sixteen. We lingered enough to be polite, but there was only so long we could stand around, not looking at the strange thing in the casket. On our way out I swept the room one last time for his mother, I thought we should say something to her, too, but I didn’t see her.
The stress of the event over, we were a lot more chatty on the ride home.
“What was with Dennis?” asked Gary. “He didn’t look at us once.”
“Did you say hi to him?” asked Barry.
“No.”
“Maybe he feels guilty.”
“What does he have to feel guilty about?” said Mike, eyes on the road.
Ron snorted. “He let Eddie drown, didn’t he?”
“Was his mom there?” asked Barry.
“Who knows?” said Gary. “I’ve never seen her.”
“She wasn’t there,” I said.
“How would you know?” asked Mike.
“I’ve been to his apartment. Playing his hockey game.”
“I’ve lived down the street from him since third grade,” said Gary, “and I was never inside his place.”
“What was his mom like?” asked Barry.
I wanted to say she seemed like a woman who used to be pretty and fun, but now was just tired and unhappy. I wasn’t about to explain that to a car full of teenagers, though. Instead I said, “I don’t know, she seemed nice.”
All of us thought about our own moms not coming to our funeral.
“My dad read about it in the paper,” said Ron. “Mr. Palumbo told the police that Eddie didn’t know how to swim.”
This was new information for all of us.
Ron sighed and looked out the window. “Why would you go skating on a deep reservoir in March when all the ice is melting, if you don’t know how to swim? That’s how you drown.”
A bit insensitive, yes. But he wasn’t wrong.
The day of the funeral we were officially given off from school. Mike drove again, we were spruced up again, and off to Ardmore we went. Driving down Lancaster Avenue through Bryn Mawr it occurred to us that we hadn’t brought the address of the funeral home. That was okay, we thought, we had already been there once, we can find it again. But the wake was in the dark and it was now daylight, everything looked different. Most of us hadn’t paid any attention to where we were going that night. Therefore, of course, we couldn’t find the funeral home. In an era before smart phones and GPS, the only resource we had was the possibility of luck on our side.
Luck had somewhere else to be. We went from a little late to a lot late. The procession would have already begun. Then we saw it, lights on all the cars, cops holding up traffic. We slipped in at the end and we snaked through the Main Line to the cemetery. Except that it was in a different town, and the name of the cemetery wasn’t what we were told it would be. We realized we had followed the wrong procession. We slowly, sheepishly drove past the line of parked cars, avoiding the stares of the people who were careful enough to be at the right funeral. There was nothing to do other than head home. The Karstens had a pinball machine and a small billiard table on one side of the garage, and we hung out there until dinner time. The next day we returned to school.
Two years after Eddie died, his beloved Philadelphia Flyers became the first NHL expansion team to win the Stanley Cup. He would have wanted to see that.
Five years after Eddie died, his father, whose full name was Robert Edoardo Palumbo, also passed away. He mistreated his wife and failed to teach his son how to swim, and he died alone, only fifty-seven years old. He and Eddie are buried together in the same plot, the names on the headstone flanked by carved figures playing hockey and baseball.
Eight years after Eddie died, so did Dennis Malek, aged twenty-four.
Curious about the mystery of Eddie’s mother, Gloria Brandon Palumbo, I’ve done internet searches, wondering where she came from, and where she went. I’ve never found any trace of her.
This creative non-fiction piece was originally published in Smoky Blue Literary and Arts Magazine issue #23, Fall/Winter 2025, under the title ‘Thin Ice.’ Everything here is true, although names have been changed.
James Irwin is the author of the novels Nina’s Friends and Lucky Guy. Learn more at jrirwin.com