Saint Mazie: A Novel (2 page)

I can run faster than any of those boys from the block. I told them I would prove it and I did. I raced them all tonight on the roof and won. I beat Abe and Gussy and Jacob and Hyman and not a one of them were even close. They were all spitting in my dust. Even in my dress I can beat those boys. Gussy said I cheated but how could I cheat? He’s a cheater for even saying that. He’s a crummy lying jerk. After, Rosie yelled at me for getting dirty but I told her I didn’t care. It was only a dress.

Louis told her to leave me alone, it’s what kids do, they get dirty. Rosie told him not to say another word about children, not one more word. That clammed him up. Then she started crying. Jeanie was hugging her, begging her not to cry. I started yelling that it was just a stinking dress. I ran outside, they couldn’t catch me. I ran a block, I ran another. I ran as fast as I could. It was just a dress. Why did she have to cry?

Gussy got a piece of my fist tonight. Call me a cheater one more time, I told him. Just one more time. Well he did and now he’s sorry.

She drew blood more than once. This scared us, and it impressed us. She was beyond being a boy or a girl.

You’re where the secrets go. I mean to write in you all this time. I mean to tell you everything. I mean to tell someone everything about my life but I forgot until now. I got all these secrets inside me. Only I just forget to let them out.

I wouldn’t let Rosie throw you away. She’s got nothing better to do than go through my personal private things all day. But you’re mine.

I turned sixteen today, and I’ve already fought with Rosie twice. I can’t listen to her another minute. She’s always yelling and screaming when I come home late. Treating me like I’m a brat. I’m not a brat! She’s an old cow. And I’ve been good for weeks. I’ve been doing everything she’s asked for days and days and weeks and weeks and years and years. One night I go out, and it’s my birthday. One night I come home late. One night!

Of course then she grew those bosoms of hers and everything changed.

I dug you out of my closet so I could scream at the top of my lungs without anyone hearing.

Rosie doesn’t understand what it’s like to love the streets. She doesn’t see the shimmering cobblestones in the moonlight, she just wonders why the city won’t put in another street lamp already. She doesn’t see floozies trying to sweet-talk their customers, earning every nickel they get, working as hard as the rest of us. She just sees crime. She doesn’t see the nuns and the Chinamen and the sailors and barkeeps—the whole world full of such different people. It’s just crowds to her, blocking her way. She sees a taxi whisking by and she thinks, what’s the hurry? And I think, where’s the party?

This is what I want to tell her! There’s a party.

All the girls I know have a fella except for me. But why would I want just one person loving me when I can have three?

Was she any wilder than the rest of us? She was wilder than me, I can tell you that much. But that wasn’t hard. I was a good boy, and she was a good-time girl. You see the difference. She was very…touchy-feely. What does that mean? You seem like a smart person. You know what it means.

She was still a brunette then, and she wore her hair in waves. Sometimes she pinned it up, but most of the time it was loose, though still tidy. Her eyebrows were plucked thin, and she powdered her cheeks white. She wore bright pink and red dresses, the brighter the better—she’d have liked to burn your eyes when you looked at her, I think. New dresses all the time. She was always swirling them around, flirting with her body. Day or night you couldn’t miss her. She wouldn’t let you.

She did a little of this, a little of that. Once in a while she worked in this candy shop Louis owned during the day, but not anything you could count on if you were trying to find her.

But mostly you’d see her on the streets, looking for fun. She went to all the bars on the Bowery, even the bars where the girls weren’t allowed. My mother used to say she had no sense of propriety, but I’ve always thought propriety’s for people who need rules. And Mazie had been making her own rules for too long.

Lots of times she’d come home right when my father was leaving for work in the morning. I should explain that my other uncle, my uncle Barney, had a terrible back and he’d get laid up from time to time, so eventually my father had to take on a second job, this one at a pickle factory. I didn’t get to see him that much after that, so I’d started watching him leave from the window. I wanted to see him every last possible second. Isn’t that crazy? All of us were packed together in that apartment, one bed next to another, no privacy, no quiet. Half the time you’d wake up in the morning under someone else’s covers. And still the minute he left I was missing him. But he was a good man, of course I missed him. He liked his pipes, he had a nice set, and I would watch him pack the tobacco in there. He’d let me pack it too, and then my fingers would smell like tobacco. I loved that smell. I smoked a pipe well into my eighties. I thought about him every time I smoked. He was a workingman—life was work to him—but he had his small joys.

Anyway, he’d be walking down the steps when Mazie’d be walking up hers. She’d wave, he’d nod. Now she was an adult, so all the grown men were scared of her too. No men in the neighborhood would be caught dead talking to her while she roamed the streets like she did. The mothers didn’t like her, the fathers didn’t want to talk to her. But once upon a time she used to be a little girl they all loved. It was not hypocrisy, but it felt something like it.

I sat on the front stairs before I went home. I knew what was coming. Oh boy did I know. I could be standing across the East River and know when that woman opens her mouth. So I waited for a minute. I wanted to see the daylight hit the stairs. I like watching it spread across the street and then the sidewalk. I smoked. I closed my eyes. I let the sun hit me. The sun’s some kind of gift. Another day we’re all alive. I wish she could understand. I’m just happy to be alive.

She was asleep on the couch when I came in, tucked into a quilt. When she’s quiet, she looks like a girl again, with that pudge around her chin. Louis was in the kitchen like always. He had a plate of hot eggs and leftover steak in front of him. He was peppering the steak. He just gave me a nod. He wants nothing to do with the arguing. Poor Louis. He’d give us every cent he has just to keep the peace.

I stumbled into my room. I knocked into a wall. All right I was drunk I guess. So it was my fault I woke her up. My fault, my fault. Everything’s my fault. A minute passed, then there’s Rosie in my room. Didn’t even knock! Just walked right in. Started talking about the neighbors knowing too much, worrying about them being in Louis’s business. Nobody wants anybody’s nose in anything. I couldn’t argue so I didn’t. I just shushed her for Jeanie’s sake.

But then Jeanie was up. She had slept in one of her ballerina outfits again. No one could sleep then so it was into the kitchen with all of us. Rosie got back on the couch, stuffed in her quilt. I braided Jeanie’s hair while Louis made us eggs. Jeanie told us jokes and made us laugh. Louis went to work and I did the dishes while Rosie stared at me from the couch. She looked mean.

Rosie said: One day that door won’t be open.

I told her I’d crawl through the window. I told her she’d never ever get rid of me.

Jeanie danced in circles around the room. Fast, spinning. Jeanie’s braids came out. Rosie was wishing ill on me. I wasn’t going to change a thing.

Rosie said: Enough, Jeanie.

But you can’t stop that girl from dancing.

First of all, obviously this is all secondhand information. I’m certainly fine with speaking on the record, but most of this was told to me by my mother and by my grandmother, and a lot of this information came, I believe, from my great-grandmother, whom in fact I never met, or if I did I don’t recall it. There’s a chance she held me when I was just a baby. I vaguely recall having heard that she did once from my mother.

But anyway, essentially, this is all rumor and gossip, family lore, I suppose you could call it, although I don’t know how interesting any of it is. I guess we take what we can get for family lore. And Mazie was the closest thing to a celebrity any of them knew. She was a celebrity because she was written about, and was sort of known about town as this downtown fixture, but beyond that she was a celebrity in my family because she was charismatic and generous, and led a very big life for someone who barely left a twenty-block radius.

One little thing I can tell you for a fact is that Louis Gordon bought the Venice Theater in 1915, and my great-grandfather became the manager of it the following year. For the first few years Louis’s wife, Rosie, worked the ticket booth. There were some other employees here and there, but Rosie was the one who ran the show.

After Louis bought the movie theater, the girls really started running around on the streets. Rosie was too busy working the ticket booth to keep an eye on them. Always Jeanie had been a good girl. But then she became a handful too, in her own way. Sometimes you’d see her dancing on the streets, hustling for change. Bella Barker sang, Jeanie danced. We all clapped and threw a penny or two at them.

And what a pair they were. Jeanie had a smile as long as Broadway. And Bella, even when she was a little girl, had these dark, heavy, sexy eyes that made her look older than she was, and of course that wise woman’s voice. She was born ready for something big. Her voice made everyone stop and listen to her.

Of course Bella was always more of a solo act. She left the neighborhood for a while when she was a teenager. She was off to Pennsylvania for a year or two, working the vaudeville circuit out there. When she came back she was married to a man named Lew, her manager, who seemed like an old man next to her. And she has a new name, a grown-up name. So she’s Belle Baker now, and that’s when she started to get famous. But Jeanie was still just playing at dancing. Nobody believed for a second she had the same hunger in her as Belle did.

On the way home from work who did I see but our little Jeanie twirling around on a street corner. I stood off to the side and watched her for a while in her candy-colored tutu. Our little sweetheart. Her cheeks were flushed pink from the sun. Our father loved to dance, is what I was thinking. You can’t dance on the street forever, is also what I was thinking. But I want her to anyway.

Tonight I met two sailors from California. San Francisco seems so far away, how can it even be real? One was tall and one was short and that’s all I can remember. Names, I don’t know. I got so many names in my head all the time.

They said New York reminded them of home, it being so close to the water. But in San Francisco the mist and the fog come off the ocean so thick you can’t see one foot in front of you, that’s what they told me.

I said they were lying, and they laughed.

I said: What’s so funny?

But then they never answered.

I danced with the tall one while the short one watched us, smiling hard. He looked like he was burning up. When the tall one dipped me, the tie from his uniform tickled my face. I love a man in uniform. Any kind. I think they walk taller when they got something formal to wear. When they got a place to go. The tall one asked me how old I was.

I said: Old enough.

He said: Old enough for what?

Then they both laughed at me some more. But I’m old enough for anything. They don’t know but I know.

The tall one tasted salty when I kissed him but later I saw him holding hands with the short one. They were so slim and pretty in their uniforms. Sometimes I just want a uniform of my own.

She was unapologetic about who she was and haughty to those who questioned her, even if they didn’t say anything out loud. Like my mother for example. The two of them did not like each other at all. People sometimes think “chutzpah” is a compliment but not the way my mother said it. Sometimes she would cross to the other side of the street when she saw Mazie coming, and she did not do it quietly. She coughed and she stomped. My mother was a tremendous noisemaker. If Mazie cared she didn’t show it. Once I heard her shout, “More room for me,” after my mother had sashayed her way across the street.

Jeanie bought me a birthday present, a pretty dark purple bow, nearly the color of the night sky. I asked her where she got the money, and she told me she saved every penny from dancing next to Bella.

She said: She lets me keep a penny for every ten we make.

I said: That doesn’t seem fair.

She said: It was her idea to have the show in the first place. Bella says people with the brains make the money.

I said: You got brains.

She said: I just love to dance.

I asked her how much change she had and she told me it was a lot. I told her I’d show her where I hid you if she’d show me where she hid her change.

I said: We could trade secrets.

Jeanie showed me all the change she had, a few bills at least. Hidden in her suitcase in the closet, the same suitcase we used when we came to town from Boston. I asked her if she was saving for anything. She didn’t say anything. I told her she could tell me anything, that she was my sweetheart, my little girl. Finally she got very close to my ear.

She said: I wouldn’t want to go forever, but I’d like to join the circus.

I told her I’d come with. I’d ride on top of a horse with a crown on my head and she’d be an acrobat and fly high up above me. The Phillips Sisters, the stars of the show. All the men would swoon at our feet. That part I liked the best but I didn’t tell her that.

Jeanie said: But what would Rosie say?

I said: She wouldn’t say anything. She’d just be in the audience clapping like everyone else.

Jeanie said: Do you think that’s true? Wouldn’t she miss us?

I said: We’re just daydreaming here, Jeanie. Don’t ruin it.

Jeanie said: All right. I guess she’d be in the front row then.

I said: She’d be our biggest fan.