The Amboy Dukes (2 page)

Frank pinched her cheek. “You like this, don’t you?”

“I never saw anything so wonderful. It’s like a real dream.”

“I’m glad you’re having such a good time.” Frank smiled.

Alice pressed his hand and then turned to look at the girl who strode along the Drive wearing pink whipcord riding breeches, brown boots that gleamed and were molded to her legs, a white blouse open at the throat, and a light tan camel’s-hair polo coat thrown loosely across her shoulders. Blond hair fell to the girl’s shoulders, and her mouth was a bright note in her lovely face.

“Look at her,” Alice whispered. “She’s so beautiful!”

“I’ve dated girls just as good-looking.” Frank hated the lack of conviction in his voice.

He looked at Alice’s thin rapt face, her large brown eyes catching every sight and motion on the Drive, her lips moving silently in admiration and wonder, and suddenly he hated everything about him. More than once he had taken this bus ride with a girl and had never noticed anything, for the bus ride was an inexpensive and convenient way of entertaining a girl on a Saturday night when he did not want to go to the movies. Now with Alice, for the first time he saw the wealth about him and he saw it through Alice’s eyes, in its grandeur and magnificence, its opulence and majesty. But while her appreciation was almost a religious rapture, his reaction was one of bitterness and venomous irritation. In the quiet assurance of the handsome people riding in the limousines, standing under the canopies of the apartment houses, strolling with sedate dignity along the Drive, he saw only an affront to him. Somewhere, indistinctly, so far removed from his understanding that it was like a dim, vague dream that he had never had, he remembered the harangues of the Communist and Socialist speakers on Pitkin and Hopkinson and Pitkin and Bristol. Somewhere in their talks to which he had never bothered to listen, he thought he remembered references to the joy and splendor which resided in certain streets of Manhattan and Brooklyn, and to the misery, poverty, and squalor that had rotted Brownsville, East New York, and Ocean Hill.

Why it was unfair, he did not know, but it was. Because his father had been unemployed and poor was no reason why they had had to live in a stinking, rotten tenement of carrion brick in a putrescent neighborhood, where he had known nothing but the despair that was attendant upon hopelessness and an enervating poverty. Now that they could get out there was no place to go, and the Drive stood clean, proud, and inviolate, an hour on the subway from Brownsville, a street upon which he was privileged to ride for a dime, but carefully guarded from him by doormen, massive draperies, and wealth. April was warm, and soon it would be June, July, and August. Soon the heat would make the oppressive rooms of their flat suffocating and stifling, and he would have to build once again a little makeshift fence around the open space on their fire escape so that Alice and he could sleep out of doors. In the morning he would awaken, stiff and cramped from sleeping in the small space, his back and hair damp. He would lie with his eyes shut to keep out the first rays of the sun which were welcomed as they entered the wide glass windows of penthouses and solariums but which meant to Frank another blistering day in Brownsville, another day of sitting in the movies or sweating it out on the crowded beaches of Coney Island, another day of drinking iced liquids that neither cooled him nor eased his thirst, another day of pushing back his plate at supper, unable to eat because of the small beads of perspiration that stood out on his forehead and the vile, evil cooking odors that seeped through the walls and entered the open windows of their flat.

Things were different on the Drive. There the sun and June, July, and August were no problem, for it seemed as if the sun were aware that this was residence of people who stood for no nonsense from their employees, the stores in which they shopped, and the elements. There were no odors of cooked cabbage, cauliflower, and onions, of garbage cans, of moldering trash in the cellars and dark recesses of halls.

Alice tugged at his sleeve. “You’re not listening to me, Frank. Look at the sailboat on the river.”

“I was thinking.” He obliged Alice by looking at the boat and nodding approvingly. “You sure would like to live here.”

“I’d rather live here and die at the end of a year than live to be a hundred on Amboy Street.”

“Don’t say that,” he said sharply. “These people ain’t no better than we are.”

“What does it cost to live here?” Alice stared at the river.

Frank’s laugh was without mirth. “More’n we got. Stop knocking yourself out, baby. We haven’t got a chance.”

“Frank,” Alice appealed to him, “Why don’t we try to get into that housing project on Bergen Street? I know a girl who lives there. I was in her house once and it’s beautiful. I bet as nice as these houses here.”

Frank brushed a bit of white cotton from the shoulder of Alice’s jacket. “We can’t,” he said. “I went with Mom once to the relief office when they were first opened, and the lady said that they only took in a couple of people who were on relief and let them live there and that where we lived wasn’t so bad as other people’s. Now,” he sighed, “it’s all filled up and Mom ‘n’ Pop are making too much money, so they can’t live there even if there was an apartment.”

Alice attempted to understand what Frank had told her. “You mean,” she said, “that first we didn’t have enough money and now we have too much?”

“Something like that.”

“So what’re we supposed to do? I hate it!” she exclaimed. “I hate it like poison!”

“Stop it, baby.” Frank pressed her hand. “We’re supposed to have a good time. Look, it’s all the same the rest of the way up. So if we get off at the next stop I’ll take the bus back with you to Radio City, and then we’ll be riding nearer the water and we can watch the boats instead of these lousy houses. We have just as much fun as these people,” Frank bragged without conviction. “Most of them don’t have any fun, and they’re sissies who ride around in the backs of their automobiles, and what fun is that? It’s more fun to drive a car, and you watch,” he added, “as soon as I can get a license I’m going to get us a car and we’ll go out to the country and every place. You’ll see.”

Frank extended his hand to help Alice from the bus, and they waited for the light to change so that they might cross the Drive.

“Let me count the floors in this house.” Alice motioned to the apartment house on the corner. “Five”—she nodded and her lips moved as she counted—“twelve, fifteen, twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three. Twenty-three floors.” She turned triumphantly to Frank. “At last I was able to count to the top of a house. The light’s changed.”

Frank led her across the street, and they strolled to the bus stop. Alice was busy counting the floors of another apartment house, and her face was radiant as she informed him that this building was taller by five stories. But Frank stared moodily at his shoes and did not answer her.

“I said this is a taller house,” she repeated.

“Who cares?” he replied irritably.

The ride back was a silent one. For a few minutes Alice was dispirited, but this new world was too exciting for her to remain depressed, and soon her face shone again with excitement and joy. Frank’s right arm was draped casually across the back of the double seat, and to Alice’s exclamations he replied with a grunt.

The bus maneuvered into Fifty-seventh Street and lumbered toward Fifth Avenue. In the smart shop windows Alice saw the postured mannequins wearing furs and gowns with a grace that no girl or woman could ever hope to equal. In their inanimate yet superior faces were fixed for all time the expressions of women accustomed to the adulation of many men, and these slender inanimate dolls seemed to Alice to have partaken of more wonderful experiences than would ever befall her. For at least they were privileged to wear gowns, wraps, and furs whose soft luxury she could never hope to know.

Too quickly the bus was at Fiftieth Street, and again Frank extended his hand to her as she stepped from the bus to the sidewalk. Alice thanked him, and Frank nodded absently. She looked at her brother, only five years older than she and still so many more years apart in thought, action, deed, and experience. Frank had always been bitter, but that was because they had been poor; but even in his bitterness he had been her friend, and Alice still remembered the days when they had sat together on the fire escape and he had read stories to her and they had conjectured and argued as to how the hero was going to escape in the next episode of the serial they were following at the New Singer. He had looked after her and they had talked and wondered about many things. And then Frank had become fourteen and her mother and father had gone to work, and from then on he had no longer been the same brother. With haste and complete disregard for her baby worship of him, he had moved into the world of boys who seemed to live at a hysterical pitch of excitement. Suddenly Frank had begun to dress like a man, smoke, even drink, date girls who looked as if they thought, said, and did things which were to Alice little understood but nevertheless dirty; and now she saw him only in the morning before they went to school, and infrequently in the evening when he took her with him to one of the neighborhood restaurants for a supper which Frank would rush through in his impatience to leave.

Frank walked with Alice through the Radio City promenade toward the Music Hall. For an impatient moment he permitted her to pause and stare at the tall Easter lilies that nodded gracefully in the breeze. Then he took her hand and led her away, but as they walked Alice kept looking back toward the flower beds that she could no longer see.

With reverent silence Alice walked through the thick-carpeted lobby of the Music Hall. Above her—how high she could not guess—was the ceiling, and from the ceiling were suspended giant crystal chandeliers whose prisms caught and disbursed the soft light that fell in a warm glow over everything. As she walked she had to look down to be certain that the nap of the carpeting was not above the tops of her slippers. She walked past statuary, heavy mirrors in intricate black-and-gold frames, needle-point chairs, deep luxurious sofas, and gleaming tables which mirrored the reflections of the chandeliers. She did not envy Frank’s calm and even bored acceptance of the marvels, for to her it was like stepping into an enchanted cave and suddenly coming upon wonders so startling, so breath-taking beyond description, so inconceivable, that she felt Aladdin would have had difficulty in duplicating them even though he owned a magic lamp.

Frank guided her to a seat in the balcony, and she experienced a quick spasm of fear as she saw the screen at so great a distance. But a quick glance about reassured Alice, and she gave herself up to the movie. Frank yawned in the darkness and wondered how Alice could sit on the edge of her seat, softly sighing and making sharp little exclamations of joy and sorrow as the motion picture plodded along. With a final burst of triumphant music the picture came to an end and the giant curtains closed over the screen.

Alice clapped her hands. “Wasn’t that wonderful?” Her joy was so genuine that Frank did not dare disagree.

The orchestra platform moved upward, and Frank leaned forward to see better as the Rockettes swung into line and moved in flawless precision, as if they were controlled by one impulse. In perfect synchronization they moved into squares, units, alternating lines, their costumes bright and exciting, their rhythm and flashing legs accentuating the beat of the music. Swiftly and without effort, with a grace that was flawless and free, they danced, and now they were in one line across the stage, extending from wing to wing, and they moved forward until they stood almost at the edge of the stage above the orchestra, arms locked behind one another’s backs, and kicking in a variety of steps to their right and left. Spontaneous bursts of applause started through the audience, and as the Rockettes gave one final kick, dipped, stood still, and bowed, the applause cascaded toward the stage, and Alice stood up, wildly clapping her hands, until Frank forced her back into her seat.

“They were so wonderful!” she exclaimed. “So wonderful! I could stay to see them again.”

Frank pushed a strand of hair back from Alice’s forehead as she adjusted her hat. “You could ride on the bus forever and look at the gardens forever and now you could stay to see them again. Where are you getting all this time?” he asked her.

Reluctantly she followed him into the aisle and waited for the crowd to move up the steps. “I could still stay,” she said defiantly.

“I believe you.” Frank nodded. “Now look”—he leaned over to speak to her—“we gotta eat. So we’ll go to the bathrooms here and wash. Wait till you see them. Nothing like what we got at home.” Amboy Street and Riverside Drive flashed before him and he was bitter.

Alice caught the change in his mood. “Don’t feel bad,” she said. “Someday we’ll move away.”

Next morning the alarm clock jarred into Frank Goldfarb’s troubled sleep at seven o’clock. Frank pushed the plunger on top of the clock, shut off the alarm, and went on sleeping. But his sister Alice, lying in the other bed, sat up, stretched, and rubbed her eyes. Alice’s bed was next to the window, and she looked out at a clean blue sky in which drifted a few wisps of white cloud. She leaned on the window for a moment, smiling, until she noticed that Crazy Sachs was staring at her from his window across the yard, and then as he caught her eye he made an obscene gesture, the meaning of which was evident to her even though she was only eleven. She clutched the cover to her and reached up to draw the shade to the lower sill.

“Frankie,” she called to her brother, “wake up.”

Frank rolled toward the wall. “Let me alone,” he said sleepily. “I’m sick.”

“You’re not sick,” she went on. “We’ve got to get up.”

“I’m not going to school today,” Frank said.

Alice shook him. “You’re not going to cut again. Get up.”

“Get away from me,” her brother warned her, “or I’ll kick you in the ass.”

“You’re a bum to talk that way to me.” Alice’s voice quivered. “I hate you almost as much as I hate your friends and that Crazy Sachs. Do you know what he done?”

“What?” Frank asked without interest.

“He was looking at me in my nightgown this morning and he made a dirty motion at me.”

Frank rolled over to look at her. “He couldn’t see anything,” he finally said. “So what’re you griping about?”

“He made a dirty motion at me.”

“So what?”

“Nothing, if that’s the way you feel about it. Are you getting up? I’ll go into the bathroom to get dressed.”

“If I gave you a half buck,” Frank asked her, “would you keep quiet about me not going to school?”

“No! You’re going to get left back in everything. I don’t want to listen to you. So you’d better get up!”

Frank propped his chin on his hands. “And suppose I don’t?” he teased her.

She hesitated before going from their bedroom into the kitchen. “You know”—she turned to him, her voice pinched and complaining—“I wish we didn’t have to live here. Why can’t Momma and Poppa find a better place for us to live? They’re both working and we could afford the rent.”

Frank swung his legs off the bed and stretched.

“Where the hell’s my cigarettes?” he said before answering her. “Because, dope”—he tapped a cigarette out of the pack and reached for his trousers which hung across the back of the chair near his bed—“you can’t find any place to live. We’re lucky to have what we got.”

“You shouldn’t smoke before you wash your teeth,” Alice went on.

“For chrissake”—Frank jammed the cigarette into the full ash tray that stood on the night table—“who the hell is asking you? Who the hell are you to tell me what to do, anyway? Remember, I’m older than you are. I’m sixteen.”

“So what?” Alice retorted before she entered the bathroom.

“So plenty,” he replied sullenly. “Oh, go on”—he gave her his spitting look—“get dressed.”

“I wish we were still on relief,” his sister said. “Then Momma would be home.”

“Get dressed!” he yelled at her.

Alice slammed the door of the bathroom and Frank went back to his bed. She didn’t know what she was saying. Just a kid who was always getting upset about not having her mother and father at home. But what the hell, they were both working and making good money, and once they completed forty hours and reached the overtime and the Sunday work, the pay checks were really something. So suppose they weren’t home for supper and he and Alice had to eat at the Chink’s or the delicatessen or at Davidson’s? He liked it better that way. He could order what he wanted without his mother yelling that he was mixing meat and dairy. And when he ate at Davidson’s he could go to the bar and order a manhattan or a martini or some other drink that he had never thought he would ever taste. He had started at the top of the list and gone from an alexander to a zombie. The zombie really had potted him, but the guys on the corner told him that he was funny as hell. Most of the guys who were members of the Amboy Dukes ate at Davidson’s and the Yat Chow Inn, and it was a lot of fun. But what Frank liked best was that he did not have to carry his lunch along to school. Now he was able to walk into the cafeteria and order anything he wanted, purchase what pleased him, and if he wanted to eat two or three desserts he was able to buy them.

“Hurry up in there,” he shouted to Alice. “If I’m going to go to school I don’t want to be late.”

“I’ll be out in a minute.” Her voice was muffled. “Are you going to make breakfast?”

“Sure, kid,” he said and went to the icebox, knelt down to draw out the large pan filled with water, and carefully spilled the water into the sink. Then he opened the upper door of the icebox and groaned. The ice had melted down until there was only a small cake left, and now he would have to go for ice. Even the iceman was working in a war plant. “What do you want for breakfast?” he shouted again. “We’ve got eggs and sour cream and some cottage cheese. You want to eat that?”

Alice opened the bathroom door and came into the kitchen. She wore a neat plaid skirt and was drying her face. “We’ve got milk?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll eat a scrambled egg and some cottage cheese and sour cream and milk and cookies.”

“You’ll get fat if you eat all that.” Frank laughed.

“I hate to eat out. That’s why I eat so much in the morning. I wish Mom were here to make me my lunch like she used to.”

“Shut up!” Frank brushed past her. “When she was home we didn’t have enough to eat. I’ll be through in a minute.”

Rapidly he washed his hands and arms and soaped his armpits. The room in which they slept was close and he wanted to be clean and fresh. Then he turned on the cold water and put his head under the faucet until the base of his neck was cold and tingling. Now he was wide awake. He plunged the comb through his long black hair and made a straight three-quarter part. Then he placed the towel on his head and pulled it back to flatten his hair, and with his hands he cupped his hair behind his ears until the duck tail was prominent.

The first and most lasting impression of Frank’s appearance was one of sullenness. His face was a bitter challenge, a pugnacious invitation to attempt to kick him, and in his slight, medium frame there was the hardness of bone and muscle which is the heritage of those persons who do not succumb to the threadbareness of poverty and the hunger of their watered meals. Frank had fought with the desperation of a small boy who hungered to stay alive, and as the chemistry and physiology of the body built up tissue and bone and blood to combat illness, so did it fortify Frank’s sullen spirit.

Frank looked at himself approvingly in the mirror. All right. No pimples or blemishes, and since he had shaved Saturday night, his face was still smooth and clean. He was lots luckier than Black Benny, who had to shave every day and had a faceful of blackheads.

“Get out of here,” he said to Alice as he entered their bedroom. “I want to get dressed.”

“Shall I turn on the radio for you?” she asked him.

“Sure,” he said. “And look. Get my books together. I don’t know which ones I have to take to school today. So get them all together and I’ll be able to pick out what I need. Hurry up. Then I’ll get breakfast started.”

He opened his bureau and took out a white undershirt with short sleeves. Across the chest of the shirt was printed a crown, and underneath the crown Amboy Dukes. They were nice shirts, and Frank had a dozen of them. All the boys who were in the gang wore them, and later on when it became warmer they’d wear them without regular shirts. Then he examined the blue button-down oxford that he had worn on Sunday and decided that he could wear it for another day. He put on his shirt and then picked out a pair of blue-and-yellow-plaid socks and his cordovan shoes. A few strokes of the shoe brush made the shoes gleam, and then Frank yanked his light brown herringbone tweed suit from the closet. He really was going to knock them over today. Since he was wearing his cordovan shoes he’d wear his cordovan belt. Then he snapped his key chain to a belt loop, gave the chain a couple of twirls, and winked at himself in the dresser mirror. He caressed his cheeks with his right hand and squinted at his tie rack before he chose a matching blue knit tie. Dexterously he made a loose knot that fitted neatly under his collar, smoothed a stray strand of hair into place, and went into the kitchen. He had to get Alice out of the house before he could continue dressing.

“Come on,” he said to her. “Get the tablecloth and let’s get started. And read me Pop’s note while I’m making the eggs. And get the cream and cottage cheese out of the icebox. But first read the note.”

Alice picked up the three dollar bills and the two quarters from the kitchen table and read the note which was lying under the money. “Poppa says that he and Mom’ll be working late tonight and that we should eat out. As if we don’t all the time.”

Frank moved the eggs around in the frying pan to keep them from sticking. “Shut up and read.”

“They said you should do your homework and not come home too late and that you should be sure to get some ice. And I should dust.”

“For crying out loud.” He scooped the scrambled eggs onto two plates. “Look, kid, there’s three and a half dollars there. I was going to take two dollars and give you the rest. But I’ve got some money. So you go to the ice dock, get one of the kids who has a wagon, and give him a dime for carrying it upstairs. So I’ll give you the two bucks and you’ll come out ahead of the deal. How about it?”

“Won’t you be coming home right after school?” she asked him.

“No.”

“Where’re you going?”

“None of your business!”

“I was only asking you.”

“So I’m only telling you. You want the two bucks?”

Alice held out her hand. “Give it to me.”

They finished their breakfast, and Frank told her to leave and he would do the dishes. As soon as she left the apartment he rinsed the dishes and put them on the wash-tub to dry. The flat certainly was getting dirty. The windows hadn’t been washed in months, and the rooms were full of dust and fuzzy-wuzzies. No question about it, it was a dump. He looked at the alarm clock. Eight-twenty. He’d have to step on it. Frank made certain that the door to their apartment was locked, and then he opened the bottom drawer of his dresser, reached back under a pile of underwear, and removed a small metal box which he opened with one of the keys on his chain. He took out a packet of three Ramses and put them in his pocket, placed three reefers in his cigarette case, and removed his homemade pistol and five .22-caliber shells.

Frank hefted the gun in his hand. He had made the grip and stock in his manual-training class at New Lots Vocational, and he had sanded and stained the stock dark mahogany. The stock had been drilled through from end to end, and a five-and-a-half-inch piece of steel tubing with a three-eighth-inch bore had been inserted into the stock. Frank had removed the trigger and firing-pin assembly from a cap pistol, and he had filed the cap detonator to a sharp point, so that it now served as a firing pin. When he pulled the trigger a strong rubber band jerked the firing pin against the cartridge. The revolver was loaded through the muzzle, and there was no accuracy, but it could send a bullet a couple of city blocks. Frank’s gun was one of the best in the Amboy Dukes. He squinted along the barrel before he placed the gun in his right hip pocket. The cartridges he dropped into the pocket that held the Ramses.

For the last time he stood before the mirror and adjusted his hat. Alice had piled his books on the night table, and he took two of them at random because he wasn’t going to school. As he walked down the dark narrow steps of the tenement he felt as he always did. That he was in a prison and walking to his freedom, but instead of walking up to the light he was walking down. He passed the doors on the landings with their dirty opaque glass panels and ducked as he passed the electric-light fixture which hung awry and looked as if it might at any moment tear away from the ceiling. It was good to get out on the street, and he hurried up to the corner of Amboy and Pitkin because he saw two of the boys there. One was Black Benny, who went to Vocational with him, and the other was Moishe Perlman. Moishe worked in the Todd Shipyard in Red Hook and between being a calker, second class, and manipulating a hot pair of dice, he was making more than a hundred bucks a week. Frank envied him.

“Walkin’ to the station with us?” Moishe asked Frank.

Frank looked at Black Benny. “Not going to school?”

“Want to go to the Paramount?” Benny replied. “They’ve got a good picture.”

“Sure.” Frank laughed. “We haven’t cut school for a couple of days.”

“I don’t know why the hell you guys are wasting your time in school,” Moishe said as they walked along Pitkin Avenue to Saratoga. “Why don’t you get your working papers and make yourselves some real dough before the Army gets you?”

“I’d like to,” Frank said, “but my old man won’t let me. He wants me to get my diploma, and now he’s even talking about my going to college.”

“College!” Benny punched him in the ribs. “He must be nuts!”

Frank hit him over the head with his books. “Shut your hole about my old man. He’s a hell of a lot smarter than you.”

“I didn’ mean nothin’.”

“All right. Just watch your mouth.”

Moishe began to run. “The bus is coming. Hurry up.”

They pushed onto the bus, and Frank watched Black Benny and Moishe get a nice-looking broad between them and give her a rub. Moishe and Benny hemmed the girl between them, skillfully pocketing her and preventing her escape. In her eyes there was loathing and fear of the two hoodlums, who did not look at her but nevertheless pressed against her lasciviously, pinioning her against their rigid hot bodies. Moishe pushed against the girl’s buttocks, thighs, and legs while Benny pressed against her stomach and breasts. The girl wanted to scream, to cry out, but she did not dare, for innocence shone in the eyes of Black Benny and Moishe, between whom no sign of recognition had passed, and she feared to create a scene. Frank watched them, the snicker of a dirty smile playing about his lips. As the bus lurched to a stop at Livonia Avenue, Benny fell forward against the girl, and his free hand, seemingly by accident, passed across her breasts.