Part 8 (1/2)

But when I went upstairs to look in the old gym and see if I saw there anyone else I knew, a small black-haired girl acrobat, for example, I caused consternation, the rhythm of their games broke and that same silence came over them as when I walked into the block with my suitcase, the children, who now looked awfully young, stared at me in the sudden gymnastic hush, a volleyball rolled across the s.h.i.+ny wood floor, and a counselor I didn't recognize who was holding her whistle attached to a woven lanyard around her neck approached me and said this was not a public place and visitors were not allowed.

This was the first bulletin of the news that my a.s.sumptions were expired, that I could not reinsert myself, as if there were two kinds of travel and while I was moving upstate on roads over mountains, the people of my street were advancing in the cellular time of their being. I found out Becky was gone, she had been taken by a foster family in New Jersey, one of the girls on her floor told me this, how lucky Becky was because she had her own room now, and then she told me to leave, that I shouldn't come to the girls' floor, that it wasn't right, and I went to the roof where before I knew I loved her I had paid that dear little girl for her f.u.c.ks, and the super was up there painting green lines for a shuffleboard court, and he stood up and rubbed the back of his hand that was holding the brush across his face where the sweat was itching, and he told me I was street trash and that he'd give me three three to get off the property and that if he ever saw me here again he'd beat the s.h.i.+t out of me and then call the cops so that they could do it again. to get off the property and that if he ever saw me here again he'd beat the s.h.i.+t out of me and then call the cops so that they could do it again.

Well all this as you can imagine was indeed an interesting homecoming, but really what angered me was how vulnerable I was, and stupid, to expect something, I didn't know what, from this neighborhood I hadn't been able to leave fast enough. In the days following I realized that wherever I had been, whatever I had done, the people knew about it not in its detail but in its fulfillment of their myth-knowledge of the rackets. My reputation had advanced. In the candy store on the corner where I bought the papers every morning and evening, on the stoops of hot twilight, and all the way over to Bathgate, I was known by sight, and who I was and what I did made this light around me as I walked, I understood I was illuminated as one in their midst in their midst, it was a kind of infamy. I had known those neighborhood feelings myself, there had always been someone like me to know about from the other kids, to hear mentioned only after he had turned the corner, to be feared, to be told to stay away from. Under the circ.u.mstances it was pretentious for me to wear my old kid juggler's rags, I would go back to wearing the wardrobe of my success. Besides, I didn't want to disappoint anybody. Once you're in the rackets you can never get out, Mr. Schultz had told me, and he had said it not in any menacing way but with a voice of self-pity, so that I thought, as a proposition, it was suspect. But not now, not now.

Of course I am summarizing the rueful conclusions of some days, at first there was only bewilderment, the worst shock was my mother, whom I saw just a few hours after my arrival, she was coming down the street pus.h.i.+ng her brown wicker baby carriage and I knew immediately even from a distance her lovely distraction had gone awry. Her gray hair was uncombed and flowing, and the closer she got the more terribly sure I was that unless I stepped in front of her and spoke to her she would pa.s.s me by without a glimmer of recognition. Even at that it was touch-and-go, the first emotion that registered on her face was anger, because the carriage had met an impediment, then her eyes lifted and for a moment I felt as if I was out of focus in her mind, that she saw me and knew just enough to know it was important to make sense of me, and only then, after an unendurable stop in my heart's beat, did I live again in the recognition of stately, mad Mary Behan.

”Billy, is this you?”

”Yes, Ma.”

”You've grown out.”

”Yes, Ma.”

”He's a big lad,” she said to whoever it was who was listening. She was staring at me now with such intensity that I had to move toward her to get out of the glare, I hugged her and kissed her cheek, she was not fresh and clean as I'd always known her to be, but had about her the acrid, cindery redolence of the street. I looked down in the baby carriage and saw there browning leaves of lettuce flattened neatly and spread like lily pads over the inside, and corncobs, and the spilled insides of cantaloupe seeds still attached in their mucusy webs. I didn't want to know what she imagined she had there. She was unsmiling and not to be consoled.

Oh Mama, Mama, but once the carriage was in the house she overturned it and dumped the detritus on newspaper and rolled it up in a paper bag and put it in the kitchen trash can, which waited as always for the super's buzzer to signal when it was to be loaded onto the dumbwaiter. So that was rea.s.suring. I was to learn that she went in and out of her states as if she suffered her own pa.s.sing weather conditions, and every time she cleared up I decided she would be all right for good now, that the problem was over. Then she would storm over again. On Sunday I showed her all the money I had, which seemed to please her, and then I went out and brought back the materials for a proper breakfast and she cooked everything up in the old way, remembering how we liked our sunny-sides up, and she had bathed and dressed herself nicely and combed and pinned her hair so that we were able to have a morning stroll to Claremont Avenue and up the steep stairs to Claremont Park and to sit in the park on the bench under a big tree and read the Sunday papers. But she would not ask me anything about the summer, where I had been or what I had done, not from any lack of curiosity, but from a knowledgeable silence, as if she had heard it all, as if there was nothing I could tell her that she didn't already know.

I felt by this time terribly guilty of neglect, she seemed so to enjoy being out of the immediate neighborhood, sitting in the peacefulness of the green park, and the possibility that she had been affected by my actions, that she had been made to feel estranged, as I was, in the general community misgiving of a bad family, a crazy woman who had of course raised a bad boy, was enough to make me want to weep.

”Ma,” I said. ”We have enough money to move. How would you like a new apartment somewhere around here, right near the park, maybe we could find a building with an elevator and we could look down into the park from every window. See, like those houses over there.”

She gazed in the direction I pointed and then shook her head no over and over, and then sat and stared at her hands folded on her pocketbook in her lap and shook her head again as if she had to rethink the question and answer it again as if it kept popping up again and again and wouldn't stay answered.

I was so blue, I insisted we have lunch out, I was ready to do anything, take her to the movies, the thought of going back to our street was insupportable, I was so lost I could only think of living in public places, where something was happening, where I might be able to reanimate my mother, get her to smile, get her to talk, get her to be my mother again. At the edge of the park I flagged a taxi and had him take us all the way up to Fordham Road, to the same Schrafft's where we had had our tea that day she had come with me to buy clothes. We had to wait for a table but when we sat down I could see it pleased her to be back there, and that she remembered it and enjoyed its dainty pretensions, its suggestion of the dignity given to people from their patronage, though now of course I found it a dull place with very bland food in mincy portions, and thought to myself with a laugh of those heavily taken meals with the gang at the Onondaga Hotel and how they would all look right now if they were eating here at Schrafft's with the churchgoers from East Fordham Road, the expression on Lulu Rosenkrantz's face when the waitress served him his little cuc.u.mber-and-b.u.t.ter sandwich with the crust removed and the tall ice-cream gla.s.s of iced tea without enough ice. And then I made the mistake of thinking about my steak dinner at the Brook Club with Drew Preston and the way she looked across the table leaning on her elbow and drinking me in with her smiling tipsy dreaminess of expression and I felt my ears grow hot and looked up and there was my mother smiling at me in just the same way, in terrifying resemblance, so that for an instant I didn't know where I was, or who I was with, and it seemed to me they knew each other, Drew and my mother, by some imposition of one on the other that made them old friends, and that their full mouths matched and their eyes pa.s.sed like rings through each other's eyes, and that I was cursed with an undifferentiated love that made them inseparable. This was all in the s.p.a.ce of an instant but I cannot remember now when I have felt as catastrophically self-informed, I had molted and muscled out, skin and mind and wit, molted and muscled out again and again, except in the heart, except in the heart. I was all at once enraged, at what, at whom, I didn't know, at G.o.d for not moving as quickly, as adeptly, as I could, at the food on my plate, I was bored by my mother, I loathed the pathetic existence to which she had consigned herself, it was not fair to be dragged back into the hopeless boredom of family life, to be taken down this way after all the hard work of my criminal intentions, I was doing it, didn't she realize? She'd better not try to stop me. Let anyone try to stop me.

But you know, the waitress comes over and says will that be all and then you ask for the check and pay it.

On that first Monday morning after my return my mother went off to her laundry job as she always had, which suggested to me her madness was self-governed, which meant it was not madness at all but just a pa.s.sing version of the distraction I had always known. Then I happened to look into the wicker carriage and saw there arranged as in a nest the eggsh.e.l.ls from our Sunday breakfast. So for the first time but not the last, I went from confidence to despair in the s.p.a.ce of a second. I wondered, as I would wonder over and over as part of the whole irresolute cycle, if perhaps I should stop fooling myself and come to grips with the truth that something had to be done, that I had better get her to a doctor, have her examined and treated, before she got so bad she would need to be put in an asylum. I didn't exactly know how to go about this, or whom to consult, but it seemed to me Mr. Schultz had an old widowed mother he took care of, perhaps he could help, perhaps the gang even had its doctors the way it had its lawyers. Anyway, who else could I turn to? I didn't belong here anymore, I didn't belong with the orphans or the people in the neighborhood, all I had was the gang, whatever my ultimate intentions and pa.s.sing disloyalties, I was theirs and they were mine. Whatever desires I had-to abandon my mother, to save my mother-they all convened on Mr. Schultz.

But I wasn't hearing from him and I wasn't hearing from them and all I knew was what I got from the papers. I would not go out now except to get the papers or my packs of Wings, I read every paper I could get my hands on. I bought them all, all day and all night, it began late at night when I went up to the kiosk under the Third Avenue El and bought the early editions of the next morning's papers, and then in the morning I went to the candy store on the corner for the late editions, and then at noon I'd go over to the kiosk for the the early editions of the evening papers, and then in the evening I'd go to the corner and pick up the final editions. The government's case seemed to me inargu-able. They had evidence on paper, they had accountants from the Internal Revenue Bureau explaining the income tax law, they were really laying it out. I was very nervous. When Mr. Schultz took the stand it seemed to me he was not persuasive. He explained that he had been given the wrong advice by his lawyer, that his lawyer had simply made a mistake, and that once another lawyer had explained the mistake he, Mr. Schultz, had endeavored to pay every penny he owed as a patriotic citizen, but this was not good enough for the government, which decided it would rather prosecute him. I didn't know if even a farmer would believe that lame story.

As I waited for the news I tried to see the good in either verdict as it might be handed down so as to try to prepare myself whatever happened. If Mr. Schultz went to jail we would all be safe from him for as long as he was put away. That was an undeniable good. Oh to think of being freed of him! But at the same time my faith in the quietly working clockwork of my given destiny would be shattered. If something as ordinary and mundane as government justice could tilt my life awry, then my secret oiled connections to the real justice of a sanctified universe were nonexistent. If Mr. Schultz's crimes were only earthly crimes with earthly punishments, then there was nothing else in the world but what I could see, and whereas I had been humming in the conviction of invisible empowerments, it was my own mind only making them up. That was unendurable. But if he beat the rap, if he beat the rap, I was back in my lines of danger and trusting with a boy's pure and shaking trust I would get through to the just conclusion of my chosen perils. So which did I want? Which verdict, which future?

In the way I waited I realized my answer, I looked every morning in the back of the Times Times at the pa.s.senger s.h.i.+p sailings, I just wanted to know which s.h.i.+ps they were and where they were going and that there were lots of them to choose from. I trusted Harvey Preston had worked things out, I was beginning to like him, he'd certainly come through in Saratoga and I saw no reason why he wouldn't now. In my mind I watched her leaning on the railing with the moon out and staring at the silvery ocean and thinking of me. I imagined her in shorts and halter playing shuffleboard on the rear deck in the sun just the way the kids played it on the roof of the orphan home. If I had been wrong, if Mr. Berman and Irving and Mickey had only come to Saratoga to take her back or to talk to her on behalf of Mr. Schultz, well then what, after all, had been lost except Drew to me, except my Drew to me? at the pa.s.senger s.h.i.+p sailings, I just wanted to know which s.h.i.+ps they were and where they were going and that there were lots of them to choose from. I trusted Harvey Preston had worked things out, I was beginning to like him, he'd certainly come through in Saratoga and I saw no reason why he wouldn't now. In my mind I watched her leaning on the railing with the moon out and staring at the silvery ocean and thinking of me. I imagined her in shorts and halter playing shuffleboard on the rear deck in the sun just the way the kids played it on the roof of the orphan home. If I had been wrong, if Mr. Berman and Irving and Mickey had only come to Saratoga to take her back or to talk to her on behalf of Mr. Schultz, well then what, after all, had been lost except Drew to me, except my Drew to me?

In the Wednesday evening papers, the lawyers presented their summations, and on Thursday the judge gave his instructions to the jury, by Thursday evening the jury was still out and late Thursday night I went to Third Avenue and Mr. Schultz was the headline in Extras put out by both the evening and the morning papers: He was innocent of all charges.

I whooped and hollered and jumped up and down and danced around the kiosk while a train rumbled overhead. You wouldn't know from looking at me that I believed this was the man who just a week before had been intending to kill me. He was shown close up, broadly smiling at the camera in the Mirror Mirror, kissing his rosary in the Amencan Amencan, and holding Dixie Davis's head in the crook of his arm and planting a big kiss on the top of it in the Evening Post Evening Post. The News News and the and the Telegram Telegram showed him with his arm around the foreman of the jury, a man in overalls. And all of the papers carried the remarks of the judge on hearing the jury's verdict: ”Ladies and gentlemen, in all my years on the bench I have never witnessed such disdain of truth and evidence as you have manifested this day. That you could on hearing the meticulous case presented by the United States Government find the defendant not guilty on all charges so staggers my faith in the judicial process that I can only wonder about the future of this Republic. You are dismissed with no thanks from the court for your service. You are a disgrace.” showed him with his arm around the foreman of the jury, a man in overalls. And all of the papers carried the remarks of the judge on hearing the jury's verdict: ”Ladies and gentlemen, in all my years on the bench I have never witnessed such disdain of truth and evidence as you have manifested this day. That you could on hearing the meticulous case presented by the United States Government find the defendant not guilty on all charges so staggers my faith in the judicial process that I can only wonder about the future of this Republic. You are dismissed with no thanks from the court for your service. You are a disgrace.”

My mother saved the front page of the Mirror Mirror with Mr. Schultz's smiling face and folded it so that just the picture showed, she laid it down in the carriage and brought a threadbare blanket up to its chin. with Mr. Schultz's smiling face and folded it so that just the picture showed, she laid it down in the carriage and brought a threadbare blanket up to its chin.

And now I will tell of the revels that went on for three nights and two days in the brothel on West Seventy-sixth Street between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues. Not that I knew at any given time whether it was night or day because the red velour drapes were pulled across every window and the lights were always on, the lamps with their ta.s.seled shades, the cut-gla.s.s chandeliers, and the particular hour was not something very important after a while. It was a brownstone and one of the sights I remember is of a trembling slightly aged wh.o.r.e's puckered behind as she ran up the stairs shrieking in mock fear while this hood tried to catch her but fell on his face instead and slid down the flight of stairs face down and feet first and arms up. Most of the women were young and pretty and slender, and some of them got tired and left and were replaced by others. Also there were a lot of men I didn't recognize, this was supposed to be for the top gang members but word had gotten around and the unshaven faces kept changing, and on the second night or day I even saw a cop in his unders.h.i.+rt with his suspenders holding his blue pants up and a wh.o.r.e with his braid cap set awry on the back of her head kissing his bare feet, toe by toe.

Women were laughing and getting playfully pinched and tickled by fearsome men, but showing no fear and in fact going off with them up the stairs, like multiples of Drew in their fearlessness of taking killers into themselves. I was stunned by this transformation of the value of feeling into numbers, in a corner of a room I saw Mr. Berman's sly laughing face appearing through his cigarette smoke, and in the big downstairs parlor three or four women were draped all over Mr. Schultz, on the arms of his chair, in his lap, nibbling on his ears, begging him to dance, he laughed and fondled them and pinched them and handled them, there was a profusion of flesh and as I looked it didn't seem to be organized according to individual persons but was all jumbled together, profusions of b.r.e.a.s.t.s and constellations of nipples, cornucopie bellies and a.s.ses and tangles of long legs. Mr. Schultz saw me looking and appointed a woman to take me to bed, she reluctantly disentangled herself and led me upstairs, and there was a good deal of attendant merriment on the part of my colleagues, which turned the occasion into something unpleasant for me and for the woman too, who was seething with anger because she felt demeaned by my age and unimportance. Both of us could hardly wait to be finished, this was not the party, the party was elsewhere, it was appalling to me how uns.e.xy s.e.x could be humped up with such scorn and impatiently delivered, I had an actual Manhattan to drink afterward, it at least was sweet with a crunchy cherry at the bottom of it.

The madam who ran things stayed in the kitchen on the ground floor in the back, a very nervous woman whom I sat with and talked to for a while, I felt sorry for her because Mr. Schultz when drunk had slugged her for some imagined offense and had given her a black eye. Then he'd apologized and given her a new hundred-dollar bill. She was a tiny woman he called Mugsy maybe because she so resembled the little Pekingese she held in her lap, she had a little pug-nosed b.u.t.ton-eyed face with highly curled but very thin red hair and a small skinny body dressed in a black dress and stockings which drooped a little at the knees. She had a low voice, like a man's. I talked to her while she held a slice of raw steak over her eye. In the oven of the stove were all the guns people had to turn over when they arrived. She would not leave the kitchen I think because she didn't want anyone to come in and get a gun and start shooting up her house, although what she could have done to prevent it, this little tiny lady, I can't say. She had a staff of Negro maids who kept things going, changing linens, emptying ashtrays, collecting empty bottles, and she had delivery boys, also colored, coming in the back door with cases of mixer and beer and booze, and cartons of cigarettes and hot dinners in metal containers from steakhouses and hot breakfasts in cardboard cartons from neighborhood diners, she was tense but had things very well organized, like a general who had planned well and deployed all his troops and had only to hear them report from time to time how the battle was going. I juggled some hard-boiled eggs in their sh.e.l.l and she was so sure I was going to drop them that she laughed with appreciation when I didn't, she took a liking to me, she wanted to know all about me, what my name was, where I lived, and I said yes, and how had a nice boy like me come to this sordid profession, which made her laugh again. She pinched my cheek and offered me chocolates from a fancy painted metal box which she kept by her side, it showed scenes of men in knee britches and white wigs bowing to ladies in big hoop skirts.

But this Madam Mugsy understood my inclination to linger in the kitchen for what it was, and with great delicacy and tact she suggested that she had something special for me, that most desirable item, a fresh girl, by which she meant a young one fairly new to the trade, and she made a phone call and within an hour I was up in a small quiet bedroom on the top floor with what indeed was a young girl, light-haired round-faced highwaisted and somewhat shy and rubbery to the touch, who lay with me through the night, or the quiet hours that pa.s.sed for night, and fortunately needed as much sleep in her youth as I needed in mine.

I was too self-conscious and unsure of myself and sad to really enjoy these revels. Up in the Bronx as I'd waited for the trial to end I had the avid desire to reconnect with the gang, I felt love for every one of them, there was a kind of consistency to their behavior that made me feel grateful for their existence, but now that I was reunited with them the other side of that grat.i.tude was guilt, I looked to the faces of Mr. Schultz and the others to see how I fared there, in a smile of gold teeth I read exoneration one moment, retribution the next.

But then, I suppose it was by the second night, I realized I wasn't the only one in a less than ecstatic state, Mr. Berman had entrenched himself in the front parlor and sat reading the papers and smoking and sipping brandy, he went out a lot to use public pay phones, and while Lulu was still exercising his uncouth being upon a selection of ladies not one of whom failed to complain to the management, Irving absented himself rarely, and only gave way to the joy of the occasion by taking off his jacket, loosening his tie, and rolling up his sleeves and serving as bartender to all the close and casual freeloaders of the criminal trades. I finally realized that Mr. Schultz's chief lieutenants were waiting, that is all they were doing, and that the celebration was by the second day not a joyful party of men who had been through something together but a sort of statement to the profession, a business announcement that the Dutchman had returned, and all the true merriment and joy and relief of victory had given way to the hollow gaiety of a public-relations event.

Even Mr. Schultz sought now the places in the house for the quieter pleasures of reflection, and I happened to pa.s.s one of the bathrooms where he was sitting in a hot soapy tub puffing a cigar into the steamy air and enjoying a back wash from the madam, Mugsy, who sat on a wooden stool beside the tub and talked and joked with him as if he hadn't slugged her the day before.

He glanced up and saw me. ”Come in, kid, don't be shy,” he said. I sat down on the lid of the toilet bowl. ”Mugsy this here is my pro-to-jay, Billy, you two met yet?” We said we bad. ”You know who Mugsy is, kid? You know how far we go back? I'll tell you,” he said, ”when Vince Coll was on the rampage, gunning for me all over the Bronx, and going crazy looking for me where do you think I was all the time?”

”Here?”

”Except then I had my house on Riverside Drive,” the madam said.

”Coll was so dumb,” Mr. Schultz said, ”he wouldn't know about the finer things of life, he didn't know what a high-cla.s.s wh.o.r.ehouse looked like, and while he's going around shooting everything that moves, hitting bars and drops and clubhouses, the dumb f.u.c.k, I am snug like a bug in a rug at my Mugsy's taking pleasure and biding my time. Sitting in the bathtub and getting my back washed.”

”That's right,” the woman said.

”Mugsy's as square as they come.”

”I better be,” she said.

”Get me a beer, would you, doll?” Mr. Schultz said lying back in the tub.

”I'll be back,” she said and dried her hands on a towel and left the room, closing the door.

”You having a good time, kid?”

”Yes, sir.”

”It's important to get that clean country air out of your lungs,” he said grinning. He closed his eyes. ”Also to get your heart back in your b.a.l.l.s, where it belongs. Where it's safe. Did she say anything?”

”Who?”

”Who, who,” he said.

”Mrs. Preston?”

”I think that was the lady's name.”

”Well she did tell me she liked you very much.”

”She said that?”

”That you have cla.s.s.”

”Yeah? Comin' from her,” he said and a pleased smile came over his face. He kept his eyes closed. ”In a better world,” he said. ”If this were a better world.” He paused. ”I like the idea of women, I like that you can pick them up like sh.e.l.ls on the beach, they are all over the place, little pink ones and ones with whorls you can hear the ocean. The trouble is, the trouble is ...” He shook his head.

The steamy water and the tile did something to his voice, so that even as he spoke softly it hollowed out as if we were in a cavern. He was now staring at the ceiling. ”I think you only fall for someone, what I mean is the only time it's possible is when you're a kid, like you, when you don't know the world is a wh.o.r.ehouse. You get the idea in your mind and that's it. And for the rest of your life you're stuck on her, and you think every time you turn around she's this one or that one who comes along and smiles like her and fills her in. We have that first one when we're stupid and don't know any better. And we walk away, and she becomes the one we look for for the rest of your life, you know?”