Little Casino (11 page)

Eddie reminds his chums that he prefers the term “film business.”

Did many of these basically regular folks have gals and fellas back home in, say, ah, Moline?

What is the joke which bears this punch line? “Well, how about ten dollars’ worth?”

Can one actually “fix” a cold beer?

An attractive woman

H
E ENTERS THE RESTAURANT WITH HIS
mother, into the wonderful smell of the bar, just opened on Sunday early afternoon, the serious, adult smell of whiskey and bitters, lemon peel, gin and vermouth and rum; the sweet and sharp cigarette smoke from the first patrons, sitting quietly with their griefs and their hangovers and their Sunday papers, waiting patiently for the liquor to make the slow afternoon sadly bearable. He orders a Gibson, his mother a Clover Club, or is it a Jack Rose? He waits for her comments on his news, given her, abruptly, two days earlier, regarding his plans to marry, suddenly, a girl whom his mother dislikes a good deal. Not only is she a Protestant, but she is much too young, not even out of high school, so his mother insists despite the facts. The cocktails arrive, his mother takes out a pack of Herbert Tareytons and lights one with her beautiful little jewel of a Dunhill lighter, inhales and blows smoke at an angle past the little brim of her small black velvet hat. She is an attractive woman, whose terror and loathing of men has been elegantly metamorphosed, over the years, into an aloof but sharp contempt. She puts the lighter squarely on top of the cigarette pack. So, she says. Have you given any thought to this, you lummox? He looks at her and shrugs, a gesture of love, intimacy, and respect. The trouble with this girl, she says, that is, one of the troubles that I can see, is. She stops, and takes a sip of her gorgeously blushing cocktail. Is, she says, simply that she is obviously a little tramp. Do you, dear God, want
another
little tramp to set next to the first one? At least she was Jewish.

The restaurant was on Montague Street in Brooklyn Heights. It may well have been Armando’s. It looks like Armando’s.

The young man once accidentally saw his mother, through a half-open door, as she was dressing, and spied on her, shamed and disturbed. He has trained himself, if “trained” is the word, to think of her, on that particular day, as a woman wholly different from the woman he sits across from in the restaurant. In this way, even a hint, a breath of the incestuous may be successfully proscribed. More or less.

The Gibson was made with Beefeater gin, one of the small glories of this humdrum life.

CLOVER CLUB

Juice ½ Lemon.
2 Tsps. Grenadine.
White of 1 Egg.
1½ oz. Dry Gin.

Shake well with cracked ice and
strain into a 4 oz. cocktail glass.

JACK ROSE

1½ oz. Applejack.
Juice ½ Lime.
1 tsp. Grenadine.

Shake well with cracked ice and
strain into a 3 oz. cocktail glass.

The dark and iron world

T
HE CLIPPER, BOWLING THROUGH HEAVY
glassy seas, all sails set, straining and singing in the wind, holds still, as always and ever, on the side of the laminated cardboard wastebasket. Just as still as the clipper is the woman, paralyzed drunk, athwart the hotel room bed. She is in her mid-fifties, and her face is attractive, though her blond hair is clearly too yellow to be natural. Her skirt, which has ridden up revealingly but not quite immodestly to mid-thigh, allows her legs to be seen as strong, straight, and well-made, with generous thighs, superbly shaped calves, and slender ankles. She is wearing a hat, cone-shaped, of shiny purple paper, which declares, in a sadly blatant red, HAPPY NEW YEAR. The hat is askew, and she snores, quietly, her mouth open. The young man, sitting at the little secretary on a hard straight chair in dim lamplight, finishes the whiskey in a thick bathroom glass, pours the last of a fifth of Ballantine’s scotch into it, and drinks that too.

He’ll maybe put her to bed, but he won’t, God, undress her. He is upset because he has allowed himself to think that she has very good legs. Maybe he’ll just put a blanket over her. Maybe he’ll go get another bottle, maybe he’ll leave and go to one of the bleakly frenzied parties he’s been invited to, or go to a crazed bar, or go for a walk, or go get laid. Maybe he’ll jump off the fucking pier or in front of the Fourth Avenue Local. Maybe he’ll just sit there until she wakes up and then ask her who she thinks she is, who she thinks he is to say what she said to him, and then to say it again. Love? she said, love? For Christ’s sweet sake, don’t make me laugh, I’m the one who said she was nothing but a tramp. Now you’re surprised?

Somebody on that clipper ship is probably looking at him from its shuddering deck, yo-ho! He knows this to be a fact, oh Christ, yes, he knows many things, he does, except why he’s here with his drunken mother in dark and sleety Brooklyn, in the dark and iron world.

There has been a great deal written on clipper ships, and “the Age” of the clipper ship, none of which information is of any interest to this young man.

At the time of this particular New Year’s Eve, disco had not yet been invented. One less thing for white, middle-class, suburban heroes of irony to mock.

Speaking of hotels: The chances that a meat-cutting-machine salesman, let’s call him Lester Peck, in, say, a Binghamton cocktail lounge, might strike up a conversation with a comely middle-aged businesswoman, take her to his room in the local Sheraton, and there discover her to be wearing nothing beneath her tailored business suit, are so small as to be virtually nonexistent. As we speak, there sits Lester, at the Sheraton bar, talking man-talk with the bartender about, oh yes!, the heroic NFL.

It’s love, love, love, all right, but not for lonely Lester, the football enthusiast.

That the woman lying athwart the hotel bed is a bleached blonde is, all right, a cliché of sorts, but what is one to do?

What One Is To Do: “
… her face is attractive, though her hair is gray”; “… her face is attractive, though her hair needs a shampoo”; “… her face is attractive, though she is no longer the crack sales representative for Pfister & Sons Restaurant Products, Inc., that she once was.”

“Bright Night, I obey thee, and am come at thy call.”

Come, though, to what?

Shuffle off to Buffalo

W
HEN HIS MOTHER DIED, HE WAS CIVIL
, even somewhat friendly toward the handsome and correctly serious priest who had come to the hospital to administer extreme unction, which sacrament, he learned, was now called “anointing of the sick.” He was grateful, in his apostate’s ignorance, to be so enlightened. He had, after all, won, at the age of twelve, a certificate for Excellence in Religious Studies, signed by Monsignor Patrick J. O’Hara.

She was waked out of the same funeral home that had waked his grandmother, grandfather, and aunt. The mother of his closest boyhood friend came on the second night of the wake, embraced him, then knelt at the casket and wept more bitterly than he thought it possible for anyone to weep. He realized, not for the first time, that his mother had lived a life of her own, a life other than the one he recognized, a life wholly hidden from him, but known to others. He arranged for a High Requiem mass, and she was buried next to her mother in Holy Cross cemetery. He ordered a stone for her from Iavoni and Sons, to carry her name and dates of birth and death. After the stone had been finished and put in place, he learned that she was four years older than she had always claimed. Well, she had been a vain woman, proud of her looks and figure, meticulous in her dress, stiffnecked and vindictive yet “full of fun,” as she might say, and oddly puritanical and bawdy at once. She was perfectly willing to terminate friendships of years’ standing in an instant, and her overt sentimentalism was but a mask for her absolute toughness and contempt for most of the people she had to do with. She would have liked the mass, the black-and-silver vestments, the properly gloomy church, the singing and the candles: the works. That’s what she’d wanted, that’s what she got.

A month or so later, he went to the parish church she’d been buried out of and lighted a candle for her, but said no prayers. He sat in a pew, inhaling the coolly thin odor of wax and lingering incense in the air. He had spent years and years going to mass in this church, wherein he had been baptized, received his First Holy Communion, been confirmed. That he’d done his duty by his mother, relied on the church as she would have wanted him to, made him feel himself more remote than ever from this complex religion, more excluded from its enigmas and paradoxes. The abyss is just that, so he thought, and his mother was nowhere at all, gone, gone into the gloom of oblivion. He walked out into the familiar streets on which he had grown up into doubt and weakness and error. World without end? Shuffle off to Buffalo.