Old Neighborhood (17 page)

We left the park and strolled until we reached Sam’s house.

“Listen, you were going to bring me a picture of your family.”

I had promised Sam that I would, and I removed a snapshot from my wallet, a picture taken at the anniversary party—Beverly, Sarah, Amy and I standing in front of a cake.

“Stevie, this is some beautiful family.”

“Yes,” I said, looking at the picture. “They’re only gorgeous.”

It began to rain after I left Sam and I went into the candy store and sat in the rear, reading a book. Chris was busy in the front with his figures. He was compulsive about bookkeeping, and now that the store had more traffic, he occupied himself projecting costs and profits.

“Steve, all the drinks of the summer—what happens in the cold weather?”

“There has to be a dropoff. You
do
have hot chocolates.”

“Hot chocolates.”

But Chris needed something else to compete with the other businesses in the area. I recalled that The Fishers had once used a “frozen malted” machine, which dispensed what was actually ice milk. Purist that I was, a machine seemed acceptable, it was in the original charter.

“Frozen yogurt,” I said to Chris. “It’s very big these days. Nobody around here is selling it—and you could put a machine in and have cones and cups, and different kinds of toppings.”

“Frozen yogurt! Steve, you’re a genius!”

The word certainly took on different meanings in different settings.

I ate dinner at Shannon’s Bar, bought a bottle of wine at a liquor store to bring to Jack Walsh’s party, and went to his apartment in a gray brick building on the Grand Concourse. Jack’s wife, Terry, a tall, pretty redhead in her twenties, far along in her pregnancy, met me at the door.

“Steve. I’m glad you could come.”

Jack came forward, gave me a warm greeting and led me to a bar in the living room. Several guests had already arrived—Jimmy and his wife, Cathy, and a few of the other ballplayers with their dates and wives. I exchanged greetings with them, and Jack introduced me to a young woman named Nancy Reilly. She was a slim brunette wearing a sweater and dungarees, pretty, with short hair and a pug nose. Jack stepped away to meet someone at the door, and we were standing at the bar together.

“So you’re Steve.”

“Have you ever heard of me?”

“No, I just thought I’d say that.”

“Nancy, I’m going to ask you something that’s going to make me feel ancient. How old are you?”

“How old do you think I am?”

“Please don’t embarrass us both.”

“I’m twenty-four.”

“Twenty-four. I see. Well, if you’re twenty-four, then I must be forty-five.”

“You look younger.”

“Thank you, I think.”

I turned to Jack and Terry who were standing nearby.

“When is the baby due?”

“Any time next month.”

I had revealed very little to these people about my personal life. “I have children,” I said, and I removed the snapshot from my wallet.

“This is my wife, Beverly—she has an art school for kids. My daughter, Sarah. She’s eighteen. She’ll be a freshman at Vassar. My daughter, Amy. She’s keeping the planet in ecological balance.”

“It’s a great-looking family, Steve,” Terry said.

“I didn’t even know you were married,” Jack remarked. “You could have brought your wife.”

“I don’t know if she would have come. We’re sort of non-marrieds at the moment.”

“What does non-married mean?” Nancy asked.

“That we’ve been separated for the summer, but we’re not officially separated—whatever
that
means.”

As the party progressed, I sat on the couch, other people were seated on chairs in a semicircle and we talked about children and schools and crime in the neighborhood. Street crime was not at the level of other neighborhoods in the Bronx, but Terry said there were enough incidents for her to be concerned. Jack felt she was building a case for moving to the suburbs. Terry suggested he did not want to move because he would miss his ballplaying. The conversation drifted to inflation, to movies—I had a standing as a movie expert, “Say, Steve, did you see … ?” It was a rambling discussion. Important to me was that I was part of this group, no special effort was being made to include me—I was included.

Cold cuts were served, in a back bedroom people were dancing to disco music. The evening became boozy, the disco room was heavy with marijuana smoke. Someone put slower music on the stereo, a few of the younger couples were necking in the corners of the apartment, a scene I had not witnessed in decades.

Nancy Reilly sat down next to me on the couch.

“Jack tells me you used to be in advertising.”

“Yes.”

“And now you work in a candy store?”

“I do.”

“What’s that all about?”

“I’ve changed careers.”

“Jack?” she called out. “Is this guy okay?”

“Steve? Sure he is.”

“He says he’s in the candy store because he changed careers?”

“Guys are doing more of that. We had a whole meeting on it. That’s why we’re pushing major medical.”

“Not here, Jack,” I said.

“What did you do in advertising?” she said.

“A lot of things. My specialty, if you can call it that, was copy—ideas, words.”

“And now you’re in a candy store. You must be a very weird guy, or very interesting. Which is it—interesting?”

“God, I hope so.”

We sat there a few moments, watching the party, then Nancy asked me:

“Would you like to dance?”

“Sure. The Return of the Box Step.”

We went into the next room to dance. As we were dancing, Nancy told me that she hoped to leave the Bronx and move to an apartment downtown. She was a teller at a bank on Fordham Road, she and a girlfriend, her prospective roommate, were planning their escape. She pressed her body close to mine and placed her cheek against my face. I closed my eyes, and remembered all this from another time.

“When do their parents come home?” I said.

She drew nearer to me. I did not know how far to pursue the dance. I started thinking of Sam and Hinda and how I wanted Beverly and me to be that close. The way to get there was not with twenty-four-year-old Nancy Reilly, a pretty girl who pressed herself against me very tightly when we danced.

“Nancy, I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I have to go.”

I thanked Jack and Terry, said goodbye to the others and drove back to Long Island, wondering what Beverly would think of the essay I was going to hand in on My Summer Vacation.

O
N SUNDAY, TWO DAYS
before Beverly’s return, I was sitting alone in the house and I decided that what I needed was a dog. I had never owned a dog. We were never a dog family. Sarah had allergies. Nobody wanted the bother. I felt that what was called for me next was a dog, a dog who could wear two hats, as it were, and adjust to both suburban and neighborhood life. Jerry Rosen had a dog and I did not. Other people had dogs. If I were doing a revise of my life, then this was something I had never done before. I would own a dog. Beverly would return and I would get it all in—in one shot. She would be confronted by the entire new me.

I had dog standards. No pedigrees. It would have to be an authentic Bronx dog, a mutt. Since my need was for an immediate dog, I had limited resources, the ASPCA was closed for the Labor Day weekend. So I set out for the Bronx in the hope of making a canine score with my street contacts.

In a corner of St. James Park there usually congregated a tough-looking group of men in their twenties and thirties with radios and cassette players producing disco music loud enough to contact life on other planets. As a park regular and a dispenser of refreshments in the neighborhood, I had a passing “Whatdayasay?” relationship with several of them, and a few played basketball now and again in our games. At times I had been offered a drink out of a brown paper bag or a drag of marijuana as they milled around. I declined these offers, but I had the feeling that if I ever wanted to buy something, anything, these were the people to see. They were there when I arrived, one of the ballplayers I knew was leaning against a bench, drinking beer. He was an Hispanic in his early twenties named Joe, a small, wiry man who went through all kinds of weather shirtless, his shirt usually tied around his neck. “Whatdayasay?” I said, and “Whatdayasay?” he said.

“I’m looking to buy a dog,” I told him, and I was immediately concerned that “dog” might be some street code word for something else.

“A dog, huh?” He took a swig of his beer. “Guy want to buy a dog,” he said to his drinking companions. This was not the most important news they ever received. They barely looked up.

“I like to walk a dog,” I said, to make sure we were talking about the same item.

He was deep in thought. He took another swig of beer, then he nodded as though it all came into focus.

“How big?”

It was a question I had not considered, and I held out my hand and lowered it, trying to find a size.

“Guy I heard of—he can get you hot dogs,” he said.

“Hot dogs?”

“Guy I heard of—he steal dogs, fancy dogs, and he sells ’em.”

“Oh, hot dogs,” I said. At least we were talking about dogs.

“You want a fancy dog?” he asked.

“I want a not-hot dog.”

“A legal dog?” Joe said.

“Right.”

“Then maybe you should try Gomez,” Joe said to me. “He has dogs.”

“Legal?”

“Yeah, Gomez. Marion Avenue. Twenty-six forty-two. He the super. Try him.”

“Thanks a lot, Joe.”

“Sure. Get a dog who don’t make,” he said, needling me. “They more money, but they the best kind.”

Gomez lived on the other side of the Grand Concourse in the next neighborhood. The building was an old walk-up. I asked an elderly woman sitting on the steps of the building if she knew where the super was, and she pointed to the side entrance. I walked through a dark alleyway to the back, cautiously. “Mr. Gomez?” I called out and suddenly there was a loud howling of dogs. Gomez appeared, a muscular man in his forties, wearing overalls and smoking a pipe.

“Joe sent me,” I said. “I want to buy a dog.”

“I have dogs.”

I followed him to the door of a carriage room, he opened it and a yelping and barking came from what must have been a dozen dogs of every size, and they all came toward me at once. I leaped outside and slammed the door.

“How can you buy a dog,” he said, coming out to talk to me, “if you afraid of a dog?”

“I’m not afraid of
a
dog. I’m not sure about twelve dogs.”

“Wait,” he said. “I tie ’em up,” and he went back inside. In a few minutes he returned and led me inside. The dogs were tied by ropes and leashes to radiators and plumbing pipes. The room was bare with a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling, dogs everywhere.

“All good dogs,” he said. “All healthy.”

“They have strong voices.”

I tried to get close in order to make the rounds of the personnel, but they started barking again.

“Maybe I should settle for a cat.”

“You want a cat. I have cats.”

“No, I’ll try to work this out.”

I approached one dog, a large mutt, and tried to pet him and he wagged his tail. More confident now, I worked my way around the room, patting heads. They were not killers, although they could have fooled me.

“You want more than one, I give good price.”

Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger. I saw him, my dog, a fox terrier, some kind of terrier. A more accurate description would be to call him a brown dog. He was smallish with a cute face, a tough little body, a bushy tail. If ever there was a prototypical mutt—this was it.

“You like him?”

I reached down and petted the dog and he got very excited and started moving his entire body while wagging his tail.

“This smart dog. Watch.
Siéntate! Dame la pata!
”

The dog followed his commands, sat, gave him a paw.

“Does he speak English?”

“You have to teach him.”

Gomez untied the dog and I walked outside with them.

“Does he have a name?”

“Ramón. He Puerto Rican dog.”

“How much, Mr. Gomez?”

“Thirty-seven fifty.”

“This is not a champion here.”

“Healthy dog. He has license. I give you the leash.”

“It’s a little high.”

“Okay, twenty-nine fifty.”

They had very strange prices at the Gomez Kennels.

“And I throw in a cat.”

“I don’t need a cat just now.”

I looked at the dog.

“For that kind of money,” I said, “he should be a dog who doesn’t make.”

“A dog who don’t make!” Gomez thought this was very funny. I was cross-pollinating park humor.

“It’s really Joe’s joke,” I said.

“For you, twenty-two fifty.”

“You’ve got a deal.”

“You got a dog.”

As I walked along the street, I kept bursting into laughter checking my appearance in the reflection of store windows. I was walking my dog. I drove home, stopping for dog food on the way. I was going to need a book on dogs, I presumed there was a Dr. Spock equivalent on the subject. I put an old blanket on the floor of the guest room, where he slept that night. The next day I gave him a bath, a “Pete Smith Specialty” right there—“Will the floor be flooded with
some
of the water from the tub?
Most
of the water from the tub? You’re wrong. He got
all
of the water from the tub onto the floor.” After the bath, the dog looked fluffy and clean, although still his muddy brown. “Nervous?” I said to the dog as we waited for Beverly. I had discovered the secret about dog owners—they talked to their dogs. “You could be my therapist,” I said to the dog. “Dr. Ramón, the eminent caninist.” He appraised me. “If it doesn’t work, we can always try group therapy. And get several dogs.”

The station wagon pulled into the driveway and I took the dog by the collar and we stood in the doorway. Beverly got out of the car, followed by the girls. She was wearing a denim work shirt and dungarees, deeply tanned, her blond hair bleached lighter by the sun. She was beautiful.