Dreams (15 page)

They're all gone now, all dead. Both Jacks, and David, and Alice. David was the first to go, then one Jack, then Alice, and then the other Jack. He was the last. I'm still here, of course, but at my age you never know how much longer you're going to be around either.

And I want to tell you this now, because my memory isn't what it used to be and it isn't going to get any better. My wife tells me that I forget things that happened and remember things that didn't. Sometimes I tell the same story over and over, I know that. I guess it goes with the territory, along with the white hair and the stiff joints.

This happened a long time ago. I think it was 1949. I would have been twelve years old then, and I'm pretty sure that's when it happened because people were still talking about the big surprise of the Dewey-Truman election, how old Give-'em-Hell Harry had outsmarted all the poll-takers and pundits and even the fool who wrote that famous headline about DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN for the Chicago
Tribune
.

It was winter, the Christmas and New Year's holidays were over and it was damned slushy and icy and miserable in New York. I was just a kid of twelve. Did I say that already? I guess it goes with the territory along with the white hair and the stiff joints.

I was just a kid of twelve and I was crazy for books. I'd discovered Book Row in New York, Fourth Avenue below Fourteenth Street. You could find anything you wanted to read down there, and at bargain prices, too, if you weren't too picky about things like first editions in dust jackets. If you'd settle for a reading copy you could get anything you wanted to read, and plenty cheap at that.

Even so, I couldn't afford the books I wanted. Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs and Rafael Sabatini and E. Phillips Oppenheim and Octavus Roy Cohen. You could get a nice copy for a quarter and one that was messed up but still readable for a nickel if you prowled Book Row and knew how to look for books. But my father had come up from poverty and he always felt that the best way to teach me and my brother the value of money was to make sure that we never had any.

After a while, all the booksellers along Book Row knew me, and I got to be friends with most of them. Sometimes they'd pay me to do odd jobs, and of course every dime I made went right back into books. Well, I had to save a nickel for the subway ride home, it was too far to walk.

My favorite store was Biblo and Tannen. I remember the address, 63 Fourth Avenue. There were four people who worked there. The owners were Jack Biblo and Jack Tannen, born Jacob Biblowicz and Jacob Tannenbaum. I always thought of them simply as the two Jacks. They'd been in the book trade since the 1920s. They'd been partners for so long that they'd started to look alike and dress alike. Shrinking hairlines, dark fringes, heavy horn-rimmed glasses, bushy graying moustaches. They wore plaid shirts, solid-color knit ties, corduroy trousers. You could tell them apart because Tannen was a little stockier, a little more outgoing, a little more talkative. Biblo was slimmer, quieter, more on the introspective, intellectual side.

Like any couple who had been together for many years they completed each other's sentences. They fought like Tracy and Hepburn, Ameche and Langford, Lee and Dannay, Chevalier and Gingold, Durocher and any umpire who was handy.

They'd let me sweep out the store, re-shelve books that customers left out, bring in the bargain tables from the sidewalk at the end of the day. They paid me fifty cents an hour, that was a dime more than the legal minimum wage, and if I took it out in trade (I always did) I got an employee discount on any book I bought.

I went to public school, of course, and to synagogue when my parents made me, and sometimes to Ebbets Field to see the Dodgers play, especially when they played the Giants, whom my brother and I both hated, and out-of-town teams like the Boston Braves and the Cincinnati Reds. But I really lived for my days on Fourth Avenue.

On the subway, going, I would rehearse my want-list in my mind:
The Land of Mist, The Land That Time Forgot, The Man Who Changed His Plea, Scrambled Yeggs
. I'd get off at Astor Place and walk up toward Fourteenth Street, stopping at every store along the way—the Colonial Book Service, Stammer's Bookstore, Books 'n' Things, Louis Schucman, the Raven Bookshop. But I'd always wind up at Biblo and Tannen. They had a basement full of fiction, a huge room with all kinds of novels and short stories, and two smaller rooms, one full of mysteries and detective tales and one that was full of science fiction and fantasy and horror stories.

Oh, I was telling you about Jack and Jack and David and Alice and I only told you about Jack and Jack. I'll back up.

David Garfinkel was a retired high school teacher. He was a huge man, he could crush you in one hand if he wanted to. He used to sit in a chair near the counter at the front of the store. He—oh, you want to know what he looked like?

He was balding with a gray fringe, dark-rimmed glasses, and a bushy gray moustache. He wore plaid shirts and solid-color knitted ties. He was a real old-timer. He loved to reminisce about dime novels. He'd talk about Old Sleuth and Young Sleuth, Nick Carter, Buffalo Bill, and Baseball Joe. He used to talk about a series of dime novels about a baseball team, the author helped you remember the players' names by giving them all the same initials as their positions. Pitcher Palmer, Catcher Carruthers, First Baseman Fillstrup, Second Sacker Simmons, like that. David considered pulp magazines a sign of the decay of modern civilization.

Alice Ryter ruled her own little domain from a battered wooden desk near the back of the store. She was the secretary, office manager, financial manager, and general manager of everything. She wore a stern expression, kept her hair pulled back severely, and used heavy, dark-rimmed glasses.

One Saturday I got to work late.

"Where were you?" asked Jack Tannen.

"
Shul
," I told him.

"
Shul
?" Jack was astonished. "Temple? You? Since when did you get religion?"

"My next birthday, I'll be thirteen. I have to be
bar mitzvah
. I have to go and study. I don't care but my brother was
bar mitzvah
and my parents say I have to be, too. So I'm late, I'm sorry. What work can I do today?"

David Garfinkel reached over and grabbed my right biceps between his fingers. He squeezed, I felt like my arm was a tube of Ipana toothpaste.

"He's a strong boy," David said. "I'll bet he can move those boxes upstairs."

"Think you can do it?" asked Jack Biblo.

"Sure I can, what do you think I am?" I knew the boxes he meant. They were heavy and I wasn't so sure at all that I could move them, but one thing I learned from my big brother is, Never say you can't do a thing, always say you can. That's how you get your chance in this world, and that's how you'll get ahead.

"Come on, then," one of the Jacks said. By now I don't even remember which one. It doesn't matter anyhow. I think it was Biblo, though.

We went upstairs. Biblo and Tannen was in an old building on Fourth Avenue, the store occupied the first floor and the basement, the second floor was office space and shipping and receiving and they kept overstock in boxes on the third floor.

When we got to the third floor, Jack pointed to a huge pile of corrugated boxes full of books. "The whole building is starting to settle and we have to even the load before we have a Leaning Tower of Pisa here. You need to climb up there, get a box off the top row, bring it down, and put it over there. Then go back and do another. Come downstairs when you're done."

I started moving boxes.

They were very heavy, and soon I was sweating up a storm, even in the middle of the winter in New York in, I think it was 1949. Could it have been 1948? Maybe November, December, after the election. DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN. After Christmas, after New Year's, it would be 1949. That's what I think.

The boxes were covered with dust that had accumulated on them for, I don't know, certainly years, maybe decades. What books were in them, anyhow? I didn't know, the boxes were sealed with brown paper tape and I couldn't look inside without cutting the tape and I was supposed to be moving boxes, not looking at books, so I just left them as they were and moved the boxes.

Soon the sweat was rolling down my face and getting into my eyes, and stinging like anything. I tried to wipe my eyes with my elbow but I was wearing my first pair of glasses, with heavy, dark rims. I couldn't do it, so I took off my glasses and wiped my face with my hands. Now I was mixing dust with sweat and making a nice coat of salty mud on my face.

I kept moving boxes.

After a while a manila envelope fell out from between a couple of boxes. It must have been put on top of a box, then overlooked when the next row of boxes was added. It had been lying there for, who knows how long?

The envelope was the size of a sheet of typing paper, flat not folded. It wasn't fat, wasn't skinny. It felt like it had maybe a dozen sheets of paper in it, maybe a few more. On the front it had a couple of cancelled two-cent stamps, and was addressed to somebody way up at the tip of Manhattan. That was where the Polo Grounds were, where the Giants played.

Nobody I knew even cared about the Giants. You either were a Yankees fan (boo!) or a Dodgers fan (yay!), but nobody liked the Giants except for some show business people, for some reason I could never understand. People like Toots Shor went to Giants games. Go figure.

Right, I did say that I hated the Giants, didn't I? Well, I only hated them because I was a Dodgers fan and the Dodgers and the Giants were both in the National League, and Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds were only a subway ride apart, so if you loved one team it was kind of natural to hate the other one, but that isn't the same thing, really, as
caring
about them.

Does that make sense?

David Garfinkel, God rest his big oversized loving soul, would understand. We used to talk about baseball. He approved of my being a Dodgers fan because they had Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella. He said, "The
schvartzers
should get a chance just like anybody else, it's only right." But—

Oh, right, the envelope. The address on it was in Manhattan. The name it was addressed to had been scratched out. A few letters were visible but I really couldn't read it. I clambered down off the boxes and put the envelope over near the door so I wouldn't forget it and went back to work moving boxes.

I was just finishing up when I heard somebody coming up the stairs. The stairs were wooden and they were old. I don't know how old that building was, probably a hundred years or a couple of hundred years.

It's gone now. Book Row is all gone now.

So I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. I knew everybody in the company by then and I could tell them apart by their footsteps. When the door opened and Alice Ryter came into the room I knew who was coming before she even opened the door.

Alice took one look at me and burst into laughter. It was the first time I'd ever seen her even smile, much less laugh. I waited for her to say something.

"What happened to you?"

"What do you mean? Nothing. I've been working. Jack told me to move all these boxes. What time is it?" I didn't have a wristwatch, I was expecting one for my
bar mitzvah.
I knew I'd get a Schaeffer fountain pen or maybe a Parker 51, probably some cash that I hoped my parents would let me spend on things that I wanted and not make me buy new clothes or put the money into a college account. And I figured I'd get a wristwatch. I hoped so, anyhow.

Alice looked at her own watch and told me what time it was. Then she said, "Come with me."

She led me into the bathroom. There was a bathroom on each floor at Biblo and Tannen. She pulled the bead chain to turn on the light and made me look in the mirror. I was a mess, I'll have to admit it. My face looked as if I'd been trying out for a blackface part in a minstrel show. My hands were as filthy as my face. My shirt was sweat-stained and blotchy, too.

"Come on," Alice said. She turned on the water in the sink and made me take off my shirt and she made me wash off my face and my chest and arms and hands. When I was finished she made me start all over again. Then she made me bend over the sink and she picked up the soap and washed my hair and told me to rinse it. Then she took a towel and dried me off like a little kid. There was an old sweatshirt hanging on a wire hanger and she gave it to me to put on instead of my sweaty shirt.

She marched me downstairs and I didn't know whether I was going to get paid or get fired, even though I hadn't done anything except the job that Jack Tannen told me to do. I think it was Tannen, anyhow.

When we got back downstairs it was dark outside. There was a heavy snowfall coming down. I'd lost all track of time while I was moving those boxes. The bargain carts had already been moved inside, the last customer was gone, and the store was closed.

The Jacks and David and Alice had a little ritual that they performed every Saturday after closing. Other nights, they just locked up and went to their respective homes. Both Jacks were married men, as was David Garfinkel. None of them had any children, though, and the two Jacks seemed to regard me as a surrogate son, David Garfinkel thought of me as a grandson, and Alice, who was unmarried, seemed to treat me as a talented but mischievous nephew. This was all wonderful for me. My mother had died when I was a little kid and my father had remarried. I didn't get along with my stepmother and life at home was not exactly like
Andy Hardy's Double Life,
even if I did feel as if I was one kid in Brooklyn and another in Manhattan.

On Saturdays after closing, the Jacks and David and Alice would break out a bottle of
schnapps
and some sponge cake and have a little office party. They would talk over the events of the week, pass around any particular treasures that people had come in and sold them, damn the Republicans, talk about Lenin and Stalin and where Stalin had first gone wrong, and share the common gossip of Fourth Avenue.