New York Echoes (21 page)

“Freddie Fitzsimmons
was a pitcher for the Dodgers. He would wind up with his back to the batter,
turn and pitch. Never saw another pitcher do that.”

He told the tape
recorder that he was in World War II, which he called “WW2,” and was in the
infantry and won a purple heart. He still had shrapnel in his tush, he told
her, laughing after the session. “Only I won't show it.”

It surprised her that
he had never talked about that part of his life. He told too about all the cars
he had owned, including his first, a Hudson, which he bought after the war and
which looked like a tank. He showed her a picture of it advertised in the
New
York Times.

“Ugly, right?”

Not only did she spend
her after-school hours with her grandfather, she would arrive Saturday morning
and stay until nightfall. Usually they would watch a double feature of DVDs of
old black-and-white movies, sometimes an extra one for good measure. After
months of so-called moviegoing as they called it, she could also name many of
the actors and actresses of that era. She thought Tyrone Power, Gary Cooper,
and Clark Gable were the handsomest and no woman was more beautiful than Hedy
Lamarr and Greta Garbo.

Then, after a year, it
ended abruptly and tragically. Her grandfather had a massive coronary and was
rushed to the intensive care unit of Mt. Sinai Hospital. The prognosis was not
good. Allison was devastated.

Allison's mother, as
befitted her daughterly obligation, spent all day in the waiting room. Allison
sat beside her, unable to hold back her tears.

“No need for you to
cut school,” her mother said, when Allison refused to attend classes. She did
not know anything about her daughter's special relationship with her father and
appeared genuinely baffled by her grief.

“Life goes on,”
Allison's mother commented philosophically more than once as they sat together
in the waiting room. “He had a long life and he was lonely after my mother
died.”

Allison knew better.
For the past year he was not lonely. Allison's visits filled his life with
interest and joy, hers as well. It had been a special year, a fabulous journey
through her grandfather's memories, which were now part of her own. Still, it
remained their secret, Allison and her grandfather's secret life.

On the second night of
her grandfather's hospital stay, his doctor called them into his room. Her
mother and father were there as well as her aunt and uncle, who had flown in
from the west coast.

“He won't last the
night,” his doctor told them.

They stood around the
bedside, watching him slowly expire. He was still conscious, his breathing
difficult, his eyes barely open. Suddenly he moved his hand and beckoned with
his finger, but when his daughters moved forward, he moved his head negatively
and with finger signals beckoned Allison forward. She moved close to him and he
made her understand that she was to lower her head against his lips.

Allison heard his thin
wispy whisper, which went on for a few minutes. Then she put her lips close to
his ear and said something. A minute or so later, his eyes closed, and a
stethoscope check determined that he had died.

“What did he say to
you?” her mother asked when they were going back to their apartment in a taxi.
Her voice betrayed a slight irritation.

“What was that all
about, Allison?” her father asked, when she didn't reply to her mother.

“He had something to
tell me,” Allison said.

“What?” her mother
asked. “After all, it was his last words on earth.”

“You really want to
know?” Allison asked.

“Of course,” her
father said. “What was so important that he had to tell you, only for your
ears?”

She mused over the
request, then smiled. What could it possible mean to them?

“What he said was
Camilli on first, Coscaret on Second, Pee Wee Reese at short, Lavagetto on
third, Phelps behind the plate, Dixie Walker at left, Ducky Medwick at left and
Pete Reiser at right.”

“Does that have any
meaning?” her mother asked. “It sounds weird.”

“Yes it does.” Allison
said.

“This is not the time
to play games,” her father admonished.

“You asked what he
said. I told you.”

“Sounds like
baseball,” her father told her mother.

“You can't be serious,
Allison,” her mother said. She turned to her husband. “I can't believe this.
Baseball? Ridiculous.”

“And what did you tell
him when you whispered in his ear?” her father asked, wary with a sarcastic
edge in his tone.

“I told them that even
though Durocher was manager he shared shortstop with Pee Wee Reese.”

“This is not a time
for jokes,” her mother said. “My father has just died.”

“What the hell are you
talking about?” her father rebuked.

“He told me the lineup
of the 1941 Brooklyn Dodgers Championship Team.”

“Have you lost your
mind, Allison?” her mother said.

“The Dodgers won the
pennant that year but lost the series to the Yankees,” Allison said.

Her mother and father
looked at her, exchanged glances, and shrugged.

“I don't believe this,
Allison,” her mother said. “I just don't understand.”

And they never would,
Allison thought, chuckling.

That spring James Pappas, nee
Papanopolis, had come home to New York after, as he told himself and others,
forty years of wandering in the desert. Like Moses and the Israelites. He would
chuckle at the reference. Others would shrug and look at him, perplexed.

His life, so far, had
been like a pinball, bouncing in a zigzag pattern from one accountant job to
another. He had spent ten years in Washington State, fifteen in LA, ten in
Vegas, and the last five in Phoenix, baking bronze in what was called semi-retirement
since he did a little stock speculation on the side and might kill a half day
on the lush green carpet of a Sunbelt golf course.

With Sally gone, his
world in Phoenix had considerably narrowed. She had been the social arranger.
Without her activism in that regard he slipped into a kind of nether world of
isolation. She was a good wife and he missed her.

He began to brood.
Time was running out. More and more, he began to think about his life in New York City five decades before. Nostalgia became longing. He grew increasingly homesick.
It was time to return.

Sally would have
balked at what to her was the worm-infested big bad rotten Big Apple. She
wouldn't go there and insisted that the children visit her in Phoenix. She was
from Iowa, a salt-of-the-earth Midwest girl. After having put up with their
many venue changes, she was happy to wind up in Phoenix. She was among her kind
of people. That's why he buried her there.

Even when the illness
came, Sally told him Phoenix was a good place to die. It was ridiculous to
argue the point. However, in his heart, he knew that New York City had to be a
better place to die and not because of the proximity to their children. With
its high energy, endless activity, noise and movement, it had the feel of
something worth losing, not like Phoenix, a sun-drenched waiting room for
people who were half dead already.

He was the son of
Greek immigrants, brought up above the family luncheonette in Manhattan's East
Nineties. As a kid, he had hated the luncheonette where his father and mother
slaved away their days and nights, and where all his time away from school was
spent as the son-helper in the time-honored immigrant tradition.

His nostrils still
twitched in memory of sizzling bacon fat and the ubiquitous effluvia of olive
oil that drenched every molecule of space in their tiny upstairs flat. Once he
had referred to it as a “stink.” These days the stink had become perfume.

In Manhattan, he had
found himself a one-bedroom rental apartment on the bustling West Side, two blocks
from Central Park. He was home, a city boy in his bones, and he quickly
adjusted to the environment and established a routine.

Weekdays, he read the
Times
on a bench in Central Park, then walked down to the Schwab office on Broadway
to spend an hour or two watching the ticker. Later, he might poke around the
books at Barnes & Noble, meander through the American Museum of Natural
History, view the exhibits at the New York Historical Society, and take long
walks down past Times Square, sometimes as far as Greenwich Village. Mostly, he
ate in coffee shops.

Weekends he would
visit the kids, an obligatory hegira into irrelevancy. Jan one week, Paul the
other, a ritual of kissy-poo with the grandchildren, disinterested conversation
with offspring and spouse, discovering how distance can, in the end, inhibit
intimacy. He blamed no one for this, annoyed at himself for being so bored and
disconnected on these bland and uninteresting weekends. After awhile, he
dismissed his guilt, acknowledging his parental failure, but taking some
comfort in the fact that he had been a devoted, caring father when the kids
were, well, still kids.

Manhattan's diversions helped
James cope with his grief, which went on longer than he had been told to
expect. Nearly fifty years of marriage had considerably reduced his sense of
singularity. It was tough enough in Manhattan. It would have been devastating
in Phoenix.

He forced himself to
consider his homecoming as a process of reconnection. As part of the process,
he followed the adventures of the New York home teams, the Knicks, the Mets,
the Rangers, and the Yankees, icons of his youth, although his enthusiasm had
waned over the years. Unfortunately, try as he did, he had difficulty
reclaiming the old rooting energy.

To fill further gaps
in his time, there were movies and shows and lectures at the 92nd Street Y and, although he was in no mood to socialize, he did not feel totally isolated
and was only mildly depressed. There were occasional lunches or obligatory
dinners with people coming in from Phoenix, who had quickly faded out of his
orbit.

As he emerged from the
deep-freeze of his mourning, he began to note in himself an obsessive interest
in observing the faces, mostly older faces, of those who entered his field of
vision. He did not realize it at first, but it soon dawned on him that these
observations were more investigative than casual. More than once he felt the
sting of rebuke by the irritated gaze of those he had stared at longer than
might be considered polite.

Some of these faces
struck him as half-familiar, perhaps people he had known or seen years ago when
he lived in Manhattan. They might be people he had gone to school with, old
friends with whom he had lost contact in the decades of his “exile,” old
girlfriends, sweethearts, who had once stirred his romantic interest.

He was well aware that
fifty years had wrought dramatic changes in these aging faces. He tried, in his
mind's eye, to strip away the years and bring the faces back to some earlier
focus. More than once, he was tempted to stop a passerby or someone sitting at
another restaurant table to solicit their history based on a vague familiarity.
Did they go to the same elementary or high school, or to the Annunciation Greek
Orthodox Church on 91
^st
Street or come into his father's
luncheonette?

So far he had been
hesitant in accosting them, not wanting to seem like a fool. His mind would
wander frequently as he pushed himself in memory back to those times of his
youth when his life outside the ubiquitous luncheonette was taken up with
friends, sports, school, and, indelibly, girls.

Concentration and
focus brought names back, Jerry O'Haire, Tommy Stephopolus, Icarus Cotheo,
Chuck Gunther, Bobby Klein, boys in his classes, boys who played pickup games
of basketball in the schoolyard or softball in Central Park. Their voices,
sounds, even smells, rolled back in nostalgic flashbacks as that lost world,
dormant for years, resurfaced in his memory.

And the girls. Ginny
Demes, Vera Vasis, Florence Delaney. Those names and the images pictured in his
mind seemed especially vivid. After all, they had shared his sexual awakening
and gave him his first glimpse of fleshly pleasures. He chuckled when he
recalled his clumsy first efforts at his novice lovemaking, cringing more with
joy than embarrassment when he remembered his inability to unfasten a girl's
brassiere or fathom the mysteries of female genitalia.

With Vera Vasis, whose
parents owned a grocery store not far from the luncheonette, there had been
more than a hint of permanence. How old were they, fifteen, sixteen? Had they
exchanged cheap silver rings? He remembered giving her a slave bracelet and
they had made what passed for lovemaking on the darkened landing leading to her
parent's third floor walk-up.

In those days they called
it heavy petting since it would be dangerously unthinkable for a nice Greek
girl of good family to “go all the way.” In memory, he still saw their actions
on the steps as profoundly passionate, more passionate than if they had “gone
all the way.” Indeed, in the mindset of those years, to force himself on her
would have been an act of profound disrespect.

For a girl in that
time, a virgin who came to the marriage bed was a most valuable and expected
asset, a gift of great importance, a solemn pledge of purity. How long had his
relationship with Vera lasted? A few months at most. Yet the echo of its memory
persisted, growing stronger with his return to the city.

He wondered where Vera
was today. And the others. Surely they had married, had children and grandchildren,
moved elsewhere, eons away in time and geography.

It soon became
apparent to James that most of his thoughts these days were turned to that lost
era of his life, and the more nostalgia that insinuated itself into his memory,
the more he searched the faces of the people who seemed half familiar.

He supposed he could
have mounted an intensive search for his old school chums. Then what? If they
had stayed all their lives in New York, he would seem to them like an outsider,
dredging up memories that would not have the importance to them as it did for
him. After all, they hadn't lost their world.

Mustering his courage,
he did visit the old luncheonette. He sat at the Formica counter which might
have been the same one, ordered a cup of coffee and a tuna sandwich, and
watched the skilled Hispanic short-order cook deftly do his job. Faster than I
was, he thought, although the food quality seemed to have deteriorated. The
tuna looked watered down with far too much mayonnaise, and the bread seemed
thinner.

Behind the counter,
the battery of new-fangled machines had replaced the old ones, and various
owners had added a bank of pinkish, plastic-covered booths to the seating area.
The old oily smell remained, prevailed in fact, a powerful, emotionally charged
jog to memory.

The visit triggered a
mild hysteria complete with tears. Without finishing his sandwich and coffee,
he overpaid the check and quickly retreated to the street. His early hatred of
the place seemed inexplicable now to his older self. Veneration ruled his
memory as he discovered how profoundly he missed that old life with his loving,
hardworking, and sacrificing parents.

Such evocative recall
had a rejuvenating effect on him. Investigating his past gave him a sense of
purpose, a mission.

He began to intensely
observe the people who passed him on the street. At times, there was a flash of
recognition, an expression, a voice, some remembered characteristic that
awakened his memory, then quickly retreated into doubt. The aging process, he
decided, was too efficient at recasting once-familiar images. His face, too,
had certainly changed in forty-odd years. A casual glance was hardly sufficient
to register a positive identification. Time and study was needed for such
confirmation.

One warm day in late June,
he was confronted suddenly with a powerful twinge of recognition. He had been
walking uptown on Broadway, having just exited the Barnes & Noble bookstore
on 66th Street. The woman's face he had spotted in a brief peripheral glance
did not register until a minute or so after he had passed her by.

Could it be? There was
something so compelling in the recognition that he could not allow himself to
ignore it.

He quickly retraced
his steps to the exact spot where he had encountered the woman. His heart had begun
to pound like a bass drum. Sweat rolled down the sides of his chest. Was she
the Vera Vasis of his youth?

The delay in his
reaction left him at a loss as to which way she had gone. Her face, confirmed
by the quick memory snapshot, had been narrow with high cheekbones, her lips
full, teeth uncommonly white, eyes dark, hair long, black, shiny, curled. Was
there a shallow cleft in her chin? But there was more than just the visual
aspect. He could, he imagined, smell her scent. Wasn't there, after all, an
olfactory element to memory?

He couldn't be dead
certain, but he had the sense that she had briefly glanced his way, offered a
puzzled look, then passed on. Was it a look of recognition or the indifferent
glance of disinterested engagement?

He stayed for a moment
at the exact spot of their “encounter,” moving swiftly through the crowds ahead
of him. Then he doubled back, looked in every store along the way and searched
the diners at two sidewalk restaurants, which lined the path of her probable
movement.

For at least an hour
he went up and down the street where he had imagined seeing her. That had been
in the late afternoon. The streets had darkened. Still he looked in the faces
of the people who passed by, again searching those in the nearby restaurants and
in the stores. Anyone observing him might think he had lost his mind.

In fact, he was
beginning to lose faith in his observation. Perhaps it was a mirage, that faux
image that comes from a wish, not a reality. He was concentrating too much on
his past. How was it possible to recognize someone who was little more than a
child a half century ago.

Yet, forcing it out of
his mind proved impossible. Back at his apartment, James could not stop
thinking about this vague encounter. Was that brief glance of apparent
disinterest actually a flash of recognition on her part, a face recognized by
the eye, without the mind knowing it or visa versa?

Nevertheless, he was
in thrall to the idea, and the next day he planted himself at a sidewalk
restaurant table that gave him a clear view of that spot on the street where he
encountered her. He tipped the waiter with a twenty-dollar bill to let him sit
there and nurse a cup of coffee for most of the afternoon and early evening.

In the end, he felt
foolish, although he spent much of his time conjuring up opening gambits, but
rejected most of them. What could transpire between them after he asked the
basic question: “Are you Vera Vasis?”

Would he have to
endure a long tale of the ups and downs of a banal life and a catalogue of her
children and grandchildren and their imagined uniqueness complete with
photographs? On the other hand, could he expect a rush of regrets for not
seizing the moment and continuing their relationship into eventual wedded
bliss? And what of him? Aside from some modest financial security, had he made
a life that inspired pride? The reason for their breakup was always on the edge
of his memory, although it defied recall.