Doctors (7 page)

“None of your business,” Laura retorted.

“That means you are.”

“No, it just means it’s none of your business. How come you’re asking, anyway?”

“Well,” he replied sheepishly, “some of the guys on the team—”

“The basketball team? The closest those horny nerds have gotten to a naked woman is the statues in the Brooklyn Museum, which I’m sure they’d like to feel up.”

“Yeah.” Barney laughed. “They do exaggerate sometimes, don’t they?”

“Not just ‘they,’ Livingston. I hear you’ve been going around school claiming you’ve scored with three cheerleaders. Is that true?”

“Absolutely, Castellano, absolutely true.”

“You mean you’ve actually done it?”

“No, but I admit I’ve boasted about it.”

In truth, Barney had been making steady progress in his quest for ultimate sexual fulfillment. On his second date with Mandy Sherman she had permitted a goodnight kiss. On the third, as they were necking in the back row of the Savoy Theater, she had sanctioned a hand under her sweater.

Omigod, thought Barney, both excited and a little apprehensive, this is gonna be it. I’ve gotta be prepared next time.

But how? He just couldn’t walk into Mr. Lowenstein’s drugstore on Nostrand Avenue and ask for a “Trojan.” The druggist would probably tell his parents, or worse, make fun of him. No, he would have to do it more discreetly—and in foreign territory.

Thus, one Saturday afternoon when he and Warren had traveled to downtown Brooklyn to catch the movie and stage show at the Fabian Fox, he looked around for a suitably large and impersonal pharmacy. Warren was puzzled as his brother stalked up and down Fulton Street for no apparent reason. But he did not dare question anything his hero did.

Just as they reached a large glass door, Barney stopped.

“Oh, shit!”

“What’s the matter, Barn?”

“What a dope I am, I’m wearing my basketball jacket.”

“I don’t get it. So what?”

“So this,” Barney replied with nervous agitation, pointing to the left side of his chest where his first name was embroidered in blue script on the white satin. “It’s a dead giveaway. They’ll know who I am and where I’m from. Maybe you better do it.”

“Do what, do what?”

Barney led his brother to a place on the sidewalk where they could not be overheard. “Listen, Warren, I want you to do something for me, something very, very important.”

He then gave him explicit directions as to what to look for and, if it was not displayed, how to ask for it. He handed him a five-dollar bill, which was slightly moist from being clutched in his fist.

“But, Barney,” Warren protested, “I’m only twelve. They’d never let me buy a thing like that.”

“Hey, look, this is downtown. Thousands of people come in and out of that place every day. They’ll probably think you’re a midget. Now just go and do it.”

As his little brother grudgingly entered the pharmacy, Barney paced back and forth nervously, praying that none of his parents’ friends, who often shopped on Saturday afternoons at the nearby A&S Department Store, would catch him in flagrante delicto. After a few minutes, Warren emerged, carrying a small white paper bag.

“What the hell took so long?” Barney demanded irritably.

“Heck, Barn, they asked me all kinds of stuff like if I
wanted lubricated or unlubricated. I couldn’t figure out what to do.”

“So, what finally happened?”

“Since I didn’t know, I got a pack of each.”

“Great thinking,” Barney uttered with a sigh of relief, and put his arm around his younger brother. “I’m proud of you, kiddo.”

By now Laura was looked upon as such a paragon that many of the older co-eds would seek her advice on matters ranging from makeup to boyfriends to how to handle difficult parents. But Laura did not enjoy this role. She did not really want to soothe, advise, and console other troubled girls.

For how could she be a parent without ever having known the luxury of being a child?

That summer the Livingstons and the Castellanos again rented at the beach. But only Warren went with them.

Luis had arranged for his daughter to be a nurses’ aide at the hospital—to expose her to the harsh realities of the medical profession.

During the week, she and Luis commuted together from the house on Lincoln Place, and late on Friday afternoons they joined the stream of sweltering cars inching out of the suffocating city toward the resuscitating breezes of the seashore.

The moment they arrived, Laura would change into a bathing suit and dash into the waves in an attempt to cleanse herself of all the pain and suffering she had had to confront during the previous five days.

Meanwhile, Barney was off in the Adirondack Mountains, working as a counselor at Doug Nordlinger’s Camp Hiawatha—the enterprise that provided the real butter for the coach’s pedagogical bread.

It was also a unique opportunity for Doug to keep his best players together. Their pay was a meager $75 for the summer—plus any tips they could charm from the campers’ parents. (“If one of your kids tells his parents he’s having a good time, his father could easily lay a C-note in your hand.”)

Barney’s cabin consisted of an octet of nine-year-olds, seven of them normal, aggressive boys. The eighth was a painfully introverted kid named Marvin Amsterdam who, because he sometimes wet his bed, was kicked around like a football by his bunkmates.

Marvin was an only child who, when his parents divorced, endured the humiliation of overhearing that neither wanted to have custody of him. He was packed off to boarding school and only got to visit his mother or father during the long Christmas and Easter breaks. Almost the moment school ended, Marvin was again exiled, this time to Camp Hiawatha, where he increasingly dreamed of becoming invisible so the other kids could not see him.

To make matters worse, he was hopeless in every sport. At camp he was always the last chosen and at school he was simply left out.

Barney talked with Jay Axelrod about Marvin’s problems as they were having beers one evening in the camp HQ.

“Can’t we do something to help the kid?” Barney inquired.

“Hey, look, old pal,” Jay responded, “I’m head counselor, not head doctor. I’d really advise you not to get too involved with that kid, Barn. He’s doomed to be a weenie for the rest of his life.”

Barney walked back toward his bunk through the chirping of crickets and the glittering of fireflies and thought, Jay’s probably right, Marvin needs professional help. But I still wish there was
something
I could do for him.

Clearly, he told himself, the boy would never be a basketball player, and anyway that was not something he could learn in just a month and a half. But how about tennis? At least that would make him feel less ignored.

Thereafter, in the late afternoon period designated as “Free Play” for the campers (and unofficial practice sessions for the Midwood hoopsters), Barney took young Marvin Amsterdam and began to school him in the art of racket and ball.

At first astonished, then overwhelmed with gratitude, Marvin tried as hard as he could to live up to the attention suddenly being given him by this new heroic figure in his life. After two weeks he was rallying pretty decently. And by the final days of summer, Marvin Amsterdam was actually beating one or two of the guys in his group.

Barney wrote to Laura, “The coach is pretty ticked off that I’m cutting practice to work with this kid. But I think helping Marvin gain a little confidence has given me more satisfaction than anything I’ve ever done.”

But Mr. Nordlinger was not the only one ticked off at Barney’s disproportionate concentration on a single camper. During Parents’ Weekend, the other bunkmates told their visiting
families that their counselor played favorites. As a result, Barney received a mere forty dollars in tips.

And after he had had a heart-to-heart talk with Marvin’s mother and father (making a unique dual appearance), suggesting diplomatically that their son was in genuine need of professional counseling, for the first time in years the two agreed on something: namely, that Barney had a lot of nerve telling them how to raise their child.

It had not been the most glorious of summers. In fact, Barney could only console himself that he had found enough time to read Freud’s
Interpretation of Dreams.
As he wrote to Laura, it had evoked in him a feeling he could only liken to “opening a door hidden behind a Dali painting and finding a new world: The Unconscious.”

Otherwise, the only moderately bright spot for Barney had been Laura’s weekly letters. And even mail call was a bit disappointing, since there was always a letter on the same stationery for Jay Axelrod.

Barney was not unhappy when the last day came and he stepped out of the Greyhound bus outside Grand Central Station. Most of his charges rushed to the welcoming arms of their parents.

But there was only a temporary nanny to meet Marvin Amsterdam—who was in no hurry to go off with her. The little boy thought desperately of things to discuss with Barney to avoid the wrench of separation. Barney was patient.

“Now don’t lose my address, old buddy. I promise I’ll answer every letter.”

They were shaking hands and Marvin would not let go.

Finally the impatient nanny pried her young charge away. And Barney watched sadly as the boy went off in a chauffeured limousine.

Screw the forty dollars, he thought to himself. It was worth it just to feel that kid’s hand.

Relieved that he at last had parted company with Camp Hiawatha, Barney was disheartened to find Jay Axelrod sitting on the porch with Laura when he arrived.

“I guess you two must really be getting serious,” Barney remarked the day after Jay left for Freshman Week at Cornell.

“Yeah, maybe. He sort of wanted to get pinned.” She somewhat sheepishly showed him her beau’s fraternity pin, which she had been clutching in her hand.

“Wow—congratulations—‘engaged to be engaged.’ You two must be in love, huh?”

Laura merely shrugged and answered quietly, “I guess so.”

T
oward the end of the first month of her junior year, Laura received a letter from Jay Axelrod. It said, in effect, that being far off in the wilds of Upstate New York had been a kind of “Thoreauvian experience.” He had had time to take long, meditative walks and concluded that formalizing their relationship had been unfair to Laura. She was still very young and therefore she should be dating other people till she knew her own mind.
P.S.
, would she mind returning his pin.

“This is bullshit,” Barney sneered. “It’s just a coward’s way of telling you to drop dead.”

Laura nodded. “If only he’d been honest enough to admit he’d chickened out.” She sat for a minute and then slammed her fist on a pile of notebooks. “Dammit! I thought he was such a straight-arrow!”

“I guess most guys are selfish bastards when it comes to girls,” he said to console her.

“Are you, Barney?”

“Probably. I just haven’t had the chance to show it yet.”

Barney was really giving the Midwood fans something to cheer about.

From the opening whistle to the closing buzzer, he fought like a mad demon, blocking, passing, fast-breaking, and playing defense with a tenacity that inspired everyone else on court.

And his accomplishments did not go unnoticed. At the end of the season Barney was selected second-team All-City and voted captain for next year.

“Livingston, you’re made in the shade.” Laura beamed.
“Next year the stands’ll be packed with college scouts. You’ll probably get as many offers as that shithead Jay Axelrod.”

“No, Castellano—I’ll get more.”

Still sore and grieving from Jay’s rejection, Laura tried to commit political suicide.

She failed brilliantly.

She announced herself as candidate for the presidency of the school—a post no girl had ever held. She won, this time with only token assistance from Barney.

Yet, to her dismay, even being elected to Midwood’s highest office did not heal the wound inflicted on her self-esteem.

That night, the captain and the president met in the garden for a heart-to-heart talk.

As they sat on his back stoop watching the shadow of the oak tree against a backboard of stars, Barney finally summoned the courage to ask, “Why, Castellano?”

“Why what?”

“When we were little, the last thing I imagined you’d want to be was a politician. I mean, you haven’t got any crazy ideas of someday being a U.S. Senator or something like that, have you?”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Then why?”

“Promise you won’t hate me?”

“I could never hate you. Come on, spill.”

“Well,” she began self-consciously, “just between the two of us and that oak tree, I thought it was the surest way of getting into a good college.” She paused and then asked timidly, “Do you think I’m disgustingly selfish?”

“Hey, come on, ambition is a normal human feeling,” he answered. “I mean, if George Washington hadn’t been ambitious, we’d probably still be talking British. Dig?”

“I don’t know. Mama says men think ambition in a woman is unattractive.”

“No sweat, Laura. Nothing about you could ever be unattractive.”

To Barney’s amazement, the coach asked him to return to Camp Hiawatha—and as head counselor, at that. Then he learned that it was an honor that came with the basketball captaincy. (He was even able to wangle a job for Warren as a junior counselor at $25 for the summer.)

When he arrived to take occupancy of the camp HQ, Barney scanned the list of campers and found to his ambivalent relief that Marvin Amsterdam was not one of the returnees. Would he ever see the kid again? And if so, would it be at Wimbledon or Bellevue?

In any case, this summer he could not risk the wrath of Nordlinger; the coach’s letter would be crucial for his college application.

Like a devoted monk, Barney faithfully spent every day from four-thirty to six in the Rec Hall, working out with Leavitt, Craig Russo, and two new protégés on Nordlinger’s new five-man weave offense.

Late one evening in mid-August, his phone rang. It was Laura calling from the hospital.