New York Echoes (9 page)

“Feel?” Al said,
contemplating a response. Instead of making him feel good, the effect of the
champagne was somewhat disorienting and depressive. He felt the heavy weight of
loneliness. He missed Milly. A wave of self-pity washed over him. He was sorry
he had chosen to celebrate his birthday with this nineteen-year-old whom he
barely knew. It seemed an act of desperation.

“I'm not sure,” he
answered, his eyes inspecting Marvin's face. It was a child's face. He tried to
imagine what the boy's eyes were seeing, his wattled, spotted skin, tufts of
gray hair thinning topside, a lined forehead, and patches of wrinkles around
the eyes. What was he thinking? Al wondered, watching this lonely old fart
springing for a fancy lunch.

“Life's like a movie,”
Al blurted, remembering his earlier thoughts about reading the movie section of
the
Times
. He watched the boy's expression look back at him with incomprehension.

“Yeah, a movie,”
Marvin said as if he understood the reference. “You mean like a dream. A dream
is like a movie.”

The waiter came with
their duck à l'orange and sides of brussels sprouts and carrots. They ate for a
while in silence.

“Good?” Al asked,
signaling the waiter and ordering two glasses of white wine.

“Awesome!”

“That good,” Al said,
noting the touch of sarcasm that had popped into his remark. The fatuous
comment was beginning to grate on him.

They ate quietly for a
few moments. Al's thoughts had once again turned to movies.

“I made it, Ma. Top of
the world,” Al suddenly blurted aloud in a Cagney imitation. People from
surrounding tables turned around and Marvin looked at him curiously, obviously
confused by the outburst. Al felt slightly embarrassed. He assumed the
champagne was having an odd effect on him.

“Jimmy Cagney, from
the movie
White Heat
.”

“Who?”

“Cagney, Jimmy Cagney.”

Marvin looked at him
blankly.

“You know,” Al pressed
making another try at the Cagney imitation. Marvin continued to look at him
with mounting confusion.

“Never heard of James
Cagney?” Al asked.

“Its sounds familiar,”
Marvin replied, although it was obvious to Al that the name was not in the
boy's field of comprehension.

“How about Gary
Cooper?”

Marvin shrugged.

“Who?”

“Okay then,” Al pressed, suddenly
feeling irritated and combative. “Mae West?”

“Vaguely familiar.”

Al knew he was faking now.

“Myrna Loy and William Powell,
The
Thin Man
.
”

Again Marvin offered a blank look. Al
felt increasingly irritated, not only at what he determined was Marvin's
ignorance but at his own aggressive attitude.

“Is this a game?” Marvin mumbled
avoiding any eye contact, keeping his head down and eating perfunctorily.

“A game?” Al said, troubled by the comment.
Where was the connection with this boy? Who was the alien here? He did not
answer the question. Instead he picked up his wine glass and quickly emptied
the contents, as if he were trying to quench his anger.

“Fact is, Al,” Marvin said. “Why should
I know who these people are?”

“Because,” Al said, drawing in a deep
breath, his anger and frustration palpable. “Because everybody does.”

“Does what?”

“Know who these people
are. They are famous goddammit. Everybody knows who James Cagney and Gary
Cooper are. Everybody knows for crying out loud. Are you a fucking ostrich with
your head in the sand?”

Again his voice rose
and people turned at other tables. Al raised his eyebrows and shrugged in
frustration. The maître d' who had shown them their table looked at them and
scowled.

A high flush developed
on Marvin's cheeks. He looked at Al with what seemed like total
incomprehension. 

“You're a college boy,” Al muttered,
trying unsuccessfully to mute his anger.

“I don't know what
this is all about Al,” Marvin said, his voice beginning to tremble. The people
dining at the nearby tables turned away.

“Knowledge,” Al said.

“This kind of
knowledge,” Marvin began. He had put his fork down, leaving his duck à l'orange
half finished. “Is it so important?”

“It's a question of
awareness. It underlines your ignorance.”

“My ignorance! You're
wacko, man.” 

Al felt a rising sense
of rage.

“You take my
hospitality and insult me on my seventy-fifth birthday,” Al fumed.

Marvin shook his head,
threw his napkin on the table and stood up. 
e H
[missing words here?]

“Seventy-five. You
lying old asshole.”

Shaking his head, he
turned and walked out of the restaurant. Again, people nearby turned to look at
him. Al imagined they saw him as a ridiculous old crank or worse. He wanted to
make some caustic comment to the observing crowd, characterizing Marvin as a
freeloading, ungrateful young jackass, but he held off and turned away,
reaching for Marvin's half-filled wineglass, which he quickly upended.    

He was unable to quell
his feelings of loss and futility. He missed Milly, missed her presence across
the table. He felt abandoned and misplaced, and the world he had known seemed
to be crashing around him. He looked at his food, grown cold and unpalatable,
his mind groping in a haze to make some sense out of the incident. He was
deeply conscious of his own impotence and felt old and withered, a broken man
confronting the abyss.

He needed to leave
this place and swiveled around the restaurant to signal his waiter for the check.
Suddenly the waiter emerged from the kitchen with a wedge of chocolate cake
embedded with a lighted candle. He wished he could stop the ritual, but it was
obviously too late. The waiter placed the cake with the lighted candle in front
of him on the table and two additional waiters joined the group and began to
sing “Happy birthday to you.”

Some of the people in
the nearby tables joined in, eyeing the ceremony with humor and, Al suspected,
ridicule. He wanted the earth to open and swallow him up, hoping that what the
image portended would come soon, very soon.

He started to sob. His
shoulders shook and he could not muster the strength to blow out the candle.
All he could do was to look at the flame, reminding him again of that last
scene in
White Heat
when Cagney's character was shot dead.

“Made it, Ma. Top of
the world.”

He did not say the
words but he sensed that, like Cagney's demise in the movie, the end was on its
way.

“There, turn left,”
Howard, her grandfather, said, instructing his granddaughter, who was driving,
where to make the left. He was obviously remembering the names of the Brownsville streets, where he had grown up, whispering them as he viewed the signs. Saratoga, Herzl, Amboy. “Comes back.”

Helen could tell that his mind was
immersed in memory and she let it happen because it apparently meant so much to
him to go back to the scenes of his youth. She was unmoved, but felt the
obligation to be granddaughterly since she hardly ever saw him these days.

He had been an accountant, then retired
and moved to Florida in the nineties with her grandmother, who had died a few
years back. He had returned periodically to New York visiting his only son, her
father, who lived now in Huntington, Long Island. In her mid-twenties, Helen
was working on Wall Street for a hedge fund, living in Tribeca, considering
herself part of the New York scene, pretty, hip, cool, and, for her age, rich.

“Must I?” she asked her father, who had
called her to do him the favor. He had a golf date.

“Why not. Go early Saturday morning
while the muggers are still in bed.”

“Brownsville? In Brooklyn. Supposed to
be a sewer, full of gangs, drugs, and trouble. Shit.”

“Just don't get out of the car.”

The fact was she hardly knew her
grandfather. He was not in her radar range. Even when she was younger her
grandparents, although pleasant enough and, in their way, loving and
interested, were sort of in the outer circle of her life. There was, of course,
an obligatory affinity and respect and the necessity of exhibiting familial
affection, but beyond that, there was a kind of generational distance, an
unbridgeable gap.

Her grandfather, whom
she called Grampa, was in his early seventies and looked a lot younger, one of
those seventy types who looked fifty and acted maybe forty. He had told her
father he had lots of ladies banging down his door in his widowerhood. She
could not imagine going to bed with someone that old.

In the car he asked her what she
characterized as grandfatherly questions. “Do you like your job? Any serious
boyfriends? You like your apartment?” And the usual compliments. “We are all
very proud of your success. When will you come down to Florida to visit?” And
the familiar reminiscences. “You were the cutest little baby girl I ever saw.”
And on and on in that vein. Then there was a long silence. She was his only
grandchild.

He dozed and woke up
only when he reached what she supposed were the outer limits of Brownsville. In fact, he became instantly alert. Up until then he had paid no attention to
the female voice on the navigational system, but when the car hit familiar
streets he contradicted all her directions and became a nonstop travel guide.

“On every corner there
was a candy store where you could get a charlotte russe.” He explained what
that was. “A piece of cake, a glob of whipped cream topped by a cherry, all in
a white cardboard container shaped like a crown. And a cigarette was a penny
apiece and for three cents you could get an egg cream, which had in it neither
egg nor cream.” He laughed and shook his head. “There were delicatessens
everywhere. You could get stuffed derma for a nickel.” She didn't know what
that was and didn't enquire.

“A shtikl for a
nickel. And hot dogs you could die for and probably did.” He laughed again.
“The man behind the counter would say mustard, sauerkraut, and relish as if it
was a knee-jerk reaction. Like you would say, ‘How are you, Jake?' and he would
say, ‘Mustard, sauerkraut, and relish.'” He laughed again. The best she could
muster was a thin smile.

Helen was being tolerant. The drive in
from Manhattan, where she had met him at Penn Station, was long and difficult. Brooklyn streets were impossible to navigate. There was no rhyme or reason to them.

“Make a right here on Saratoga, but go
slow,” he said, and she obeyed while he pointed out the sights that were no
longer his sights.

“I was bar mitzvahed somewhere around
here. One of those little houses that was converted to a synagogue. It was a
Monday, which was allowed. I did my haftorah in a place that was less than half
filled with smelly old men who used snuff and spat into spittoons. Where the
hell was it? Dammit, everything is changed, but then I'm going back sixty
years.”

“A long time,” Helen said, half
listening. It was too remote from her world. She was thinking about Jack, who
was dating her that night. Jack worked for a mutual fund and was witty and
really good looking. They'd go to one of the clubs and shake all night, then
pop back to her place, hopefully still energized for sex. Getting up this early
to take Grampa on his trip through memory lane would have its impact. On
Saturdays she usually slept until noon.

She looked at her
watch. It was barely eight, but at least it was a bright, early summer's day
and the streets were pretty empty. Everybody she saw was black. She checked the
door locks to make sure the buttons were down.

This was no place for
white people, especially a white person driving a new car. Thankfully it was a
Toyota Corolla in need of a good washing. For the moment, she was happy it
wasn't a Jag, which she very nearly bought, but was talked out of by one of her
boyfriends. Uncool, he had told her. Conspicuous-consumption cars are déclassé.
Don't look too polished. Make believe you were born with it and didn't need to
flaunt it, especially in Brownsville.

Not that she was
prejudiced against black people. She had many black friends who wouldn't be
caught dead in Brownsville. She was surprised that it didn't seem dangerous,
not on this sun-dappled morning. What people she saw were going about their
business quite peacefully. Perhaps the media had exaggerated.

“There was a little
grocery store there,” Grampa was saying, pointing. Her own thoughts had
disrupted her attention and she had missed some of his commentary. “My mother
used to send me out daily to get groceries. Usually bagels, cream cheese,
butter, and lox. The bagels were real, not like the lousy imitations you get
nowadays. There were two kinds, regular and egg bagels. They sliced the cream
cheese with a wire cutter, which came out of a long wooden box, and the butter
came in big tubs. The grocer totaled up the cost on the side of a brown bag
with a much-used short pencil, which he wet with his tongue before making the
additions. He was never wrong. In those days they taught people to add in their
head.” He looked at his granddaughter. “Can you add in your head?”

It was as if he was
challenging her whole generation. She didn't bite.

“Suppose so,” she
said, although most of her additions were done by machine.

“Over there,” he said,
paying little attention to her answer, “were two movie houses: The Ambassador
and the People's Cinema.” He chuckled. “For ten cents on a Saturday you could
see three movies, three comedies, a chapter, but then you don't know what a chapter
is, and they would have drawings for prizes based on your ticket number. I once
won a pair of roller skates.”

“Did you?” she said.
She didn't ask what he meant by chapter and didn't care.

Glancing at him
sideways, his color had risen, and he was quite excited about what he was
seeing and how it registered on his memory. Okay, she told herself, I am making
my grandfather happy and that is a good thing worthy of toleration, although
his nostalgic musing were far removed from her life. Like ancient history, she
decided, as the car moved slowly down the street.

At the end of the
street loomed the El, the subway extension that rolled out of the tunnel after Utica Avenue and followed the track outside all the way to East New York. He explained that
he used to go to Rockaway, getting off at the last stop.

“Which was New Lots
Avenue. Then we took the bus to Rockaway, where we went summers. My parents and
I slept in one room and Mom cooked in a community kitchen. Better than being in
the city, which was hot as blazes in those days.”

Still hot, she wanted
to say, but she left it alone. She was certain he would tell her that winters
were colder, food tasted better, movies and music were better, people were
nicer. Ah the golden glow of yesteryear.

“When I lived with my
Gramma and Grampa,” he said, “because my old man was always losing his job and
we were dispossessed from our apartment and had to move into their little house
in Brownsville, the trains would roar past on the El. Their house was a few
houses down from El you see and the sound of the trains made it impossible to
hear the radio every ten minutes or so. In those days we listened to radio,
especially serials like Billy and Betty, Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy,
Omar the Tentmaker and Little Orphan Annie, which was sponsored by Ovaltine.”
There was no stopping him on the radio bit. “Sunday nights there was Edgar
Beren and Charlie McCarthy, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Fibber McGee and Molly. It
was a ritual to listen Sunday nights.” He stopped after awhile and there was a
sudden silence as if the memories had clogged in his brain.

As they got closer to
the El, a subway train that had stopped at the Saratoga station roared forward.

“Listen. See what I
mean. Anyway when I was a teenager I had odd jobs that took me into the city.
We were packed in like sardines in those days.” He shook his head and his voice
sounded funny as if he might be wrestling with tears of nostalgia. She did not
look at him, even sideways, because he might be embarrassed if she saw tears moistening
his eyes.

She sensed he was
looking around, searching for something outside.

“There was a fish
store around here. I'm sure of it. My Gramma used to take me shopping for fish,
carp I think it was. A woman stood on a high platform on which was a pool for
live fish. She wore an apron stained with fish blood. Gramma would point to a
live fish. The woman would net it, then lay it on a board, chop off its head
and split it open, taking out the bones. Gramma used the fish to make gefilte
fish, which we ate every Friday night, along with . . .” He went on and on with
the menu. She desperately needed to change the subject.

“So where was the
house you lived in, Grampa?” she asked pleasantly, hoping they would finally
get to the place where she knew he was determined to go, and this was the heart
of the favor her father had asked her to perform.

“Make a left here on Livonia for one block then turn left again on Strauss Street where the old house was.”

As they made the turn,
which was under the El, he pointed out some stores on the left, one selling
secondhand clothes and the other a dry cleaner.

“See that corner
store.” This was the one selling secondhand clothes. “You know who hung out
there. Murder Incorporated. That was where Midnight Rose Gold held court. It
was a candy store where they sold cigars and had one of those walk-in humidors.
Phone call would come in. Kill Benny. Kill Mendy. That was murder incorporated.
These guys would get paid to knock off people and bury them in Canarsie. Pittsburgh Phil, Bugsy Goldstein, Lepke Buchalter. They all got the chair in 1941, I think
on the same day of Pearl Harbor. Poor bastards. Couldn't even get their
execution acknowledged because the Japs bombed Pearl. I remember that like
yesterday.”

She listened,
unengaged, as if she were hearing some CD with a bad track that played over and
over again.

“Next to the candy
store was a pickle store. A guy and his wife filled cardboard cartons with
pickles and sauerkraut right from the barrels. Winter, the guy had snot running
down his nose, which he wiped frequently with the back of his hand, but still
stuck them into that pickle and sauerkraut barrel. Nobody cared. Funny.” He
laughed again. She would care, she wanted to say, thinking of the pickle barrel
and the snot on the man's hands. Yuk.

“God, what ever
happened to this place,” he said, as the car turned the corner on Strauss but
then she discovered that it was a one way street, which required her to
carefully back out and proceed down Livonia to the next street.

“Make a left on
Hopkinson, then a left on Blake, then a left on Strauss,” he said. “Imagine
Helen, I never forgot these street names and it's been, how long, pushing sixty
years. Over. See that.” He pointed out the window. “That's Betsy Head Park, where I played ball and swam during the summers. I played outfield, although I
did pitch occasionally. We had a hell of a team and it was right across the
street from the house. Occasionally a ball would be hit foul out of the park
and blast into my grandparents' house, sometimes breaking a window. Pull over.
Right there. Let me get oriented.”

She pulled over the Toyota and parked. Again she looked at her watch. Was this going to take all day? It would
be at least an hour to get back to Manhattan, then she would have to drop him
off at Penn Station so that he could take the next train to Huntington. She
decided that she would definitely not have lunch with him. It was bad enough to
listen to his old memories without having to recycle them again during lunch.

She felt somewhat guilty
thinking unkind thoughts like this, but frankly his memories bored her.
Nevertheless, she forced herself to be respectful and look as if she were
interested. He was, after all, her grandfather, her father's father, and it
simply would not do to leave a bad impression. She remembered being bored silly
when her father and mother took her to visit them in West Palm Beach at the
condo complex where everybody was old. What she remembered most was going to
what they called a recreation center, which was as big as a football field and
filled with people playing cards.