Mile High (32 page)

“Nobody outta here in more'n a haffa hour.”

“They got to be downstairs still,” the little man said. They ran back into the building, and the street watcher walked rapidly toward Eighth Avenue.

The cab went two blocks uptown, when Mama suddenly told the cab driver to go around the block. The cab turned right to Eighth, went down a block, then turned west on the street just north of and parallel to the street where the men were searching for them, then doubled back up Manhattan Avenue, where Mama had the cab stop in front of Relleh's. She took off her apron, which had blood on it from where she had wiped her hands, and said, “Always pay off for The Credit.” She went into the store while Mayra waited in the cab. Two men in gray hats went speeding past the cab, heading north on Manhattan Avenue at fifty miles an hour, but Mayra wouldn't have known them if she had seen them. “I give Relleh an extra five,” Mama said as she came out and got into the cab. “I told him it was on account, but if we don't get back by winter then to lay out five dollars worth on somebody who needs it.” She told the driver to turn the cab around and take them west to the 103rd Street subway station, up the hill on Broadway.

As the cab made the turn Mama said, “That's a new specialty they have now, throwing their man off the roof. It started with Abe Reles and they found out it scares hell outta people, so they revive it like now and then for the advertising. A shooter walked right up behind a man on the Gunhill Road on a contract for Lepke and he put the gun right up to the man's head til it touched and shot it. Bullet went in the back and kept on til it come out between the man's nose and eye, and the man lived. I mean like he was back at work in a couple of weeks. I got that straight from a police captain who was a freebie on top of Miss Eloise. When they throw off the roof he don't make a sound coming down because they sap him before they toss him and he's sitting straight up like he was in a dentist's chair. I knew what it was before he hit, when I saw him coming down.”

They got out of the cab at 103rd Street and Mama only took three dollars change back out of the five. They walked along the side streets, primly, carrying their proper suitcase for room hunting. Once Mama didn't want what they had and once the landlady didn't want Mama. Then they saw the “Rooms” sign in the window of the brownstone on 95th between Columbus and Amsterdam. It was two nice light rooms—no rats, no bugs, no leaks—with a nice little kitchenette and a bath with an inside toilet. Mama paid the lady for three weeks in advance, then she locked the door.

“Wowee-wow,” she said. “It's come our turn to lead the band. Two more weeks and school is over til Labor Day and we got the whole summer to look for a nice place on the Island or maybe New Rochelle or Mount Vernon.” She sat down and lifted the suitcase up to her' lap. “Pull down the shades, honey. Then write down the numbers as I call them out.” She handed Mayra the schoolbag when the shades were down. She put the watch, the rings and the cat's-eye stickpin on the tabletop, then she began to wipe off and flatten out the paper money and sort it into denominational piles. When that was done she counted it slowly and carefully and had Mayra write down the amount after each ten bills. When she finished, Mayra added it up, Mama checked it out, and they found they had come into twenty-one thousand six hundred and eighteen dollars. They were stunned. They were quiet for some time, then Mama said, “Now figure this out. We're going to live right. Sixty a week. How long will the money last at sixty a week, not counting Iron's jewelry?” Mayra's pencil worked over the pad. Her eyes got bigger and bigger. “Just about seven years,” she told her mother.

“Then we got it made,” Mama said. “Seven years and you'll be in the civil service and safe for life. I go back to work after Labor Day at a dollar and a quarter an hour plus carfare and lunch. That's ten bucks a day, five days a week. Every week fifty, for forty weeks a year—just like in show business—so we only need to drag down ten from this kitty to make it sixty, then sixty out for the twelve summer weeks. How much time do we buy that way?”

Mayra calculated. “Close to forty years,” she said.

“That's too much. Makes me nervous. We got to adjust. Well, there's Christmas and doctors. There's birthdays and extra shoes and you'll soon be needing some sharp extra dresses, so let's cut the extra free time down to twenty-five years. I'll be fifty-nine when we run out. You'll be thirty-nine and close to getting your pension and have a husband with a good job, so how can we miss?”

“Thirty-nine?” Mayra said blankly, unable to conceive of such an age.

CHAPTER TWO

At the end of her last year in high school Mayra Ashant was a tall girl who gleamed at the world with skin that was between mulberry and acorn in translucent layers of warm color, soft and luminescent. Her mouth was pink cushions and white tombstone teeth; her eyes melted tar on oyster shells. The nose was too delicately proportioned for the chin and cheekbones—the nose of a Harari woman of Abyssinia, of the incredible beauties bred by crossing Galla, Somali and Arab—but the rest of her face insisted that the nose should have been formed like the noses of the Congo west of the Stanley Pool.

About three months before Iron Charley Jackson had been thrown off the roof Mayra had been having tactical trouble with her art teacher at high school. Mama's counsel had always been, “Smile when they start to press you. Make them know you admire them for being men and how it could have been a fairy tale of a lay if it wasn't that you had had your cooze cemented over.” The advice had always worked with the men she had to cope with just by walking along the street, until the middle of the third year of the high school art course, when a scholarship to the Shannon-Phillips Institute of Art somehow got itself involved with Mr. Seligson's feelings. Mayra wanted the scholarship. Mama wanted Mayra to get the scholarship. Mr. Seligson was in a position to see that she couldn't get it, and it was one of those things where if a fuss was made over the reasons why Mr. Seligson might stop her from getting it, then everything could get worse than ever.

Just before Christmas, at the end of the year, before graduation time in June, Mr. Seligson asked Mayra to stay after school. He was a light-framed, wiry man who wore glasses and who could speak rapid French with a strong Washington Heights accent. Mr. Seligson had lived and painted in Paris in his student days.

Mayra went to the art classroom at three-ten. Mr. Seligson closed the door carefully and pulled down the shade over its top glass panel. He stared at her and Mayra thought he got very pale. His breathing wasn't good either, and she knew all the signs. “You wanted to see me, Mr. Seligson?” she asked tentatively, smiling the awful smile she and Mama had worked out. He took both of her hands in his. “I think you have tremendous talent,” he said. “I want to be allowed to build on that talent.” (That night Mama said he meant he wanted to erect on that talent.) “I have a dream for you, Mayra Ashant,” he murmured. (“A wet dream,” Mama commented later.) Mr. Seligson slipped his long, slender arm lightly across Mayra's shoulders. “Hold your breath, Mayra, and listen.” He gripped her fiercely. “What would you say if I could get you a scholarship at Shannon-Phillips?”

“What's Shannon-Phillips?”

“Shannon-
Phillips?
” He was having such difficulty breathing that he left her side and walked to the window, gripping the metal handles tightly with each hand. “The best art school in the entire world, that's what Shannon-Phillips is.”

“Oh.”

“Well?” He turned to face her.

“What would I say to what?”

“What do you mean?”

“You just asked me, what would I say if you could get me a scholarship.”

“Well! I meant would you like that? Would you be free to take it? Is your family financially secure enough to let you have two years of real art study?”

“I thought the scholarships paid for that.”

“They do! But I mean your family might want you to be out earning money or something.”

“Or something?”

“To bring in income. To help support!”

“My family wants me to try for civil service. I mean, well, like if there was anybody who gave out scholarships to the Delehanty Institute, that would be more what my family thinks.”

“That would be a tragedy! That would be real, stark tragedy!” Mr. Seligson said. He started toward her very slowly. “Mayra, sweetheart, listen to me. Call me Mort if you want to. Right now there are maybe a thousand young painters in Paris. some of them very talented,
and let me tell you this
”—he reached out for a front grab at her shoulders, but she began the awful smile and backed away—“there isn't one of those talented young painters who wouldn't give five years of his or her life to get a scholarship to Shannon-Phillips.” He inhaled and exhaled slowly. “You're not just another schoolgirl to me, Mayra.” He shuddered. “You are a
woman
. Of great sensibilities. You can be a great painter. In my humble opinion.” He had her with her back to the blackboard. He got the fleshy parts of each upper arm and began to knead them absent-mindedly, and a dry smell, like steam, came away from him. She turned the whole force of the awful smile on him. His hands dropped away. He dug the back of his hand into his forehead. He turned away to the desk and picked up a large manila envelope. “Show this to your family. It has everything about Shannon-Phillips and an application. The holidays start tomorrow. We'll be apart for nine days. You'll have a chance to think about everything.
Everything
. And if you feel you need me—if you want to talk it all over much more thoroughly—my home address and phone number are in that envelope.” He stared at her solemnly, wheeled away, walked to the window and gripped the window handles again as he stared out at the cement tennis courts. Mayra left very quietly with the envelope.

She was doing her French homework when Mama got home from work at seven-thirty, bubbling. Every customer had come through with Christmas loot and they had all paid up any back money that was due. She had a hundred and thirty-six dollars in cash and therefore a solid line of credit with Relleh's. “And that ain't all,” she said triumphantly. “Looka here.” She lifted a sky-blue nightgown with a lacy top out of the deep shopping bag. “Just happens to be your size.”

“It's beautiful!”

“Now, this here is some kind of Filipino perfume that somebody give to Mrs. Gibson, but she never heard of it so she give it away. Unopened. She didn't even smell it! It says ‘Made in Manila, P.I.,' so she didn't want it. I bet you it costs ten bucks.” Mayra was holding the nightgown up to herself in front of a mirror. “Looks real good,” Mama said. “And we got an electric juicer. This lady's husband—the new people from Dover, New Jersey?—he won't let nothing German in their house. I got a ten-pound turkey, and I say to hell with waiting two days til Christmas, let's cook it now.”

“My art teacher's got big eyes and hands for me,” Mayra said.

Mama began to unwrap the turkey. “What'd he do?”

“He told me to come back after school. I think he locked the door—anyway, he pulled down the shade—then he said what would I say if he said he might be able to get me a scholarship to the best art school in the whole world, and I said what would I say about what?”

“That was good.” Mama looked up at the wall at the painting of two somber Puerto Rican children crossing a field of golden wheat under a brilliant blue sky. She did a rough arm's-length fitting of the large turkey and the tiny oven. “Never get that bird in there. I got to take it to the baker's and get them to slide it in the oven.”

“I'll go. You read this.” Mayra gave her mother the manila envelope. “It's all about the scholarship. He gave it to me complete with his home telephone number.”

They had a wonderful Christmas weekend. They kept eating turkey, went to two movies, watched TV and went to the Apollo. They were living in a top-floor apartment on Manhattan Avenue near the Monongahela Democratic Club, where Mama was a registered building captain, facing the cathedral, which Mayra could stare out at and sketch, not far from the highest point of the Ninth Avenue El, which was a very popular suicide leap. Mama worked hard for the Monongahela Democratic Club because she said that the leader, Jimmy Hines, by cooperating with Dutch Schultz, had brought prosperity to Harlem, because he was doing so great himself and he always paid off for loyalty. On Christmas Day at about four o'clock Mama turned off the TV and said that the time had come to talk about the scholarship. “Now, I got to tell you straight out. I hate a cockteaser, because that always makes trouble. But this here teacher has got to be handled without any problems, because you're sixteen going on seventeen, you're getting out of high school, and you're too young for civil service. We got to play this art teacher by ear, baby. We got to get that scholarship, but we got to block him good.”

Mr. Seligson seemed much less tense when school started after the holidays and she turned over to him her application to Shannon-Phillips. He was pleasant but impersonal. They got through January and most of February that way. At the end of February she asked him if there had been any news about the scholarship and he said he'd be happy to look into it for her. In the first week of March he said he had some news but that it wouldn't be fair to discuss it on the class's time, so they could meet after school to discuss it. Mayra needed advice from her coach first, so she said she had to go to the dentist's that afternoon and they made it for the next day.

She and Mama examined the options. First, he might be a harmlessly genuine admirer of her painting, but they skipped that possibility without discussion. Second, it didn't seem likely that he would make his big move in the classroom, no matter how late he could persuade Mayra to stay, on whatever pretext. If he did make the move, then Mayra would have to work her smile or keep moving out of reach or deliver a kick in the seeds, but the kick could mean the end of the scholarship, although not necessarily. If he worked it all out with care and boxed her into a place where she had to leave the school with him to go somewhere, she should flatly refuse unless the excuse was built around art—which was what it was most likely to be, because they had nothing else in common—then she had to say her mother was an art bug and that her mother would have to go along too. “After all, you're sixteen going on seventeen,” Mama said, “and you can get away with stuff like that.” They decided on two constants: She was not to be alone with him anywhere outside the classroom and she was never to laugh at him no matter how silly he might become. “Laugh and we lose him,” Mama told her. “Keep a straight face and we got a chance to wear him down, but the main thing is to keep pressing on him about the news on the scholarship, and we can work from there.”