The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats (7 page)

“It’s a condolence call, Mr. Cats,” the Irishman said. “I mean, technically we’re on call. I mean, if there was a shooting in the next block or something. But the NYPD isn’t that technical about these things. A wake, something like that, it’s okay. Ain’t that right, Stan?”

Cohen nodded. “The last thing we’d want you to think is this is a police matter. It’s personal, that’s all.”

I brought them a mid-level bottle of Scotch and a couple of tumblers with ice. They didn’t hesitate.

“This is my sister,” Shushan said. “Ira you know.” He skipped Myra entirely. “And this is my protégé, Russell.”

The cops examined me with renewed interest.

I looked at myself with renewed interest. Protégé? Uh, do I get to go to jail now or do we wait until after the mourning period? “I’m just helping out,” I said weakly. “For the
shiva
.” I turned to Kennedy. “The wake.”

“Yeah, well, don’t worry, kid,” Cohen said. “We don’t have an interest in you. That is, if we don’t have no call to. Anyway Mr. Shushan here is a kidder. He’s famous for a kidder. You know what he said when we arrested him?”

Kennedy picked it up. “He said, ‘What took you so long?’ Ain’t that something? I got to tell you, Mr. Shushan, if every hoodlum in this town was as much a gent as you it would be a pleasure to be a cop. As it is, we got them dagos they’ll spit in your eye as soon as say good morning. They’re surly bastards is what they are. I’d rather arrest a whorehouse full of niggers”—he looked over to Shushan’s sister—“cat-house I mean, than one of them wops, and their ladies is even worse. You go to search their house they wouldn’t offer you a cup of coffee or even a glass of water. It’s like they take it personal. Like their husbands ain’t what they are, what they know they are.”

“My mother, my late mother,” Shushan said. “She used to say you shouldn’t judge other people, because maybe they didn’t have the advantages you did.”

Terri shot me a look, and then a wink. She had caught it as well. The cops never would. Ira and Myra had probably never read a book in their lives. It was just Terri and me. She smiled in complicity. I kept quiet. What was I going to say: Shushan, your mother was F. Scott Fitzgerald? Your mother wrote
The Great Gatsby
, on whose opening page Nick Carraway, the narrator, speaks that line? Instead I coughed, hard.

“You okay, kid?” Shushan asked.

I stood, swallowed, and made my way to the kitchen. “It’s nothing. The rye bread. I got a caraway seed stuck in my throat.”

I’m sure Shushan got it. But I wasn’t aiming for Shushan. I was aiming for his sister. Maybe I had a chance after all. She was stifling laughter. If you can make a woman laugh, that’s a base hit.

When I returned with a glass of water and a grin the cops were growing expansive on the one interest they shared with their host.

“Well, you got a chance,” Cohen was saying. “The papers like you, Mr. Cats. That’s something. I don’t think the
Daily Mirror
would want to see you go away. Every morning you’re on the front page they sell more papers.”

“Unlike the dagos,” Kennedy said. “Take a guy like Sfangiullo, they put him on the front page and everybody hates him. He’s just another bloodsucking
mafio
, know what I mean? And one of them is pretty much like the next. Carbon copies. They don’t touch nobody’s heart strings because probably themselves they don’t got a heart. With you it’s like Robin Hood or something.”

“You’re saying I rob from the rich to give to the poor?” Shushan said.

“I’m not saying one way or the other, Mr. Shushan,” Kennedy said. “I’m saying how people react. Okay, maybe there’s an element of, you know, the man’s a hoodlum. But it’s like he’s
our
hoodlum. Them dagos, they don’t have the sympathy of the working man.”

“And the working man, Mr. Cats,” Cohen said. “That’s who is going to be your jury.”

“And there’s going to
be
a jury because you two working men arrested me, isn’t that right?”

“Aw, that is so unfair, Mr. Shushan,” Kennedy said. “We arrested you because it’s our job. It’s like saying a fisherman has something against an individual striped bass. Or a hunter against a particular deer.”

Terri cleared her throat so vigorously it was like a call to order, then stood. “If it’s all right with Bambi here, I’ve got patients to see. It was so nice meeting the men who arrested my brother.”

“She’s just kidding,” Shushan said. “She kids too. We kid each other. Nobody is holding any grudges or bad feelings. Isn’t that right, Esther?”

Terri nodded. “I always find it odd how nice some people can be to those who hurt them. I see it every day in my practice. People come in and they’ve been maimed by the people they love. I guess it’s not so much of a stretch to love the people who maim you.”

The two cops went white, Kennedy especially, the color draining from his face almost perceptively, like wine out of a clear bottle. “That’s not it at all,” he said. “You got us wrong.”

“Maybe,” Terri said. “But all I know is that if my brother goes away it’s you two who sent him there.”

“Not at all, miss,” Cohen said. “That’s for the DA and the judge and jury. We’re just agents of the... of the...”

“The system,” Shushan said. “It’s okay. I never expected different. So you two guys, you have another drink. And you, Joe College, you make sure my sister gets to her place. This is a rough town. A person could get mugged on the street. Ain’t that right, officers? And with these two dicks up here with me the odds are even worse. So take a walk with my sister, kid.”

“Sure,” I said, standing. “If that’s what you—”

“I want what you want, kid,” Shushan said from his crate on the floor. “Just make sure you come back. You know what else my mother said?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“On n’est jamais si malheureux qu’on croit, ni si heureux qu’on espère.”

The accent was queer, but I got it.
One is never as unhappy as one thinks, nor as happy as one hopes.
To the cops it was Greek, or maybe Yiddish.

In the nineteen-sixties the Upper East Side of Manhattan was hardly a dangerous place. It was in fact the best neighborhood in the city, with leafy streets, museums, elegant shops, drugstores with real soda fountains—the amenities of a village with the resources of a major city. Your neighbor might be an Astor or Rockefeller—or a Feinberg, O’Rourke or D’Angelo. On Lexington Avenue you could eat
sole meunière
served by a waiter named Sol at a restaurant called El Sol and right next door get your shoes resoled. Bankers and brokers lived here, but also bartenders and shop-owners and floor-walkers in the midtown department stores. By all odds it was the safest neighborhood in the city, not least because it was the richest, with more cops per resident than anywhere in the five boroughs. It was also the least racially mixed. Germans lived in the eighties, Czechs in the nineties, but the number of resident non-whites was so low the student body of the Upper East Side’s public elementary schools—the neighborhood was sprinkled with private academies—had the racial profile of a segregated white grade school in Selma, Alabama. Suspicious doormen seemed to be everywhere, a kind of standing patrol against the disenfranchised. There was little street crime, though this was slowly changing because the nascent civil-rights movement kept pressure on New York’s mayor, whose official residence was in the neighborhood, to moderate the NYPD’s practice of stopping black male pedestrians and ordering them to pedest elsewhere. From the strictly parochial viewpoint of the police this made sense, because blacks—Negroes then—were unlikely to be residents, so aside from maids and colorfully-attired African diplomats—the United Nations complex anchored the south end of the neighborhood—anyone not white had to be up to mugging, rape, burglary, or just plain trouble. Over time, as restrictive rental laws fell away and wealthy blacks could find apartments in the area, the police gave up the practice entirely. This was a victory for civil rights, but also benefited the residents of Harlem, which began on the north side of Ninety-Sixth Street: instead of preying on their neighbors, Negro criminals drifted south to target the Upper East Side—why mug a black when a white might be carrying a lot more cash?

“Three colored kids tried to snatch my purse last week,” Terri said as we walked. She set a pretty pace. At this rate we might be at her place in ten minutes.

I had been hoping for a half hour, with maybe even a coffee-break on the way. Aside from Little Italy and the Village, this stretch of Lexington Avenue was then one of the few places in the city where you could get a cup of espresso. “They succeed?” I looked down at her purse, chocolate-brown alligator the size of several volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica.

She stopped momentarily to look me in the eye. “You really think I’d let those cocksuckers rip off an Hermès purse that cost me a hundred-fifty bucks?”

I whistled. In today’s prices that would be fifteen hundred, maybe more. “A high price for modesty,” I said. That was the way it was done. One of the gang would come up, pull a woman’s skirt up over her head, a second would knock her down while the third grabbed the purse. That year women were wearing long skirts, very full. It was like an invitation. In a short while New York women would all be in mini-skirts or pants—the incidence of this kind of purse-snatching dropped.

“Clocked the first one before he even got started,” she said, “Second one I kicked in the nuts.”

“And the third?”

“What third?” she asked, showing a deadpan insouciance that could not be learned other than through growing up in the city. In Paris the women were elegant. Here they were matter-of-fact about a well-placed shoe to the genitals. “Son-of-a-bitch ran before the second piece of shit hit the ground. Do you know the crap I have to listen to all day to earn that purse? My mother didn’t love me. My mother loved me too much. I’m not comfortable with my body. Gimme a break.”

“Isn’t that what you wanted, when you got into being a shrink?”

“I wanted to help people with real problems, not fashionably middle-class pseudo-neuroses. You know who has real problems? People who can’t afford psychotherapy, who in fact don’t even know they have problems.” She smiled wryly as she walked.

I knew exactly how she smiled, because I had one eye on where I was going and the other on her tanned face—she must have been able regularly to get away to the sun, because even in a warmish November there were not enough rays in New York City for a tan like that. “People like who?”

“Whom,” she said. “I thought you were some sort of literary whiz-kid.”

“I try to disguise my brilliance when I’m talking to people from Brooklyn.”

“I’m
from
Brooklyn, Russell. No longer
of
.”

Just her saying my name sent a chill down my back, the hairs standing as though called to attention. “You don’t have to be ashamed of Brooklyn,” I said. “Walt Whitman was from Brooklyn.” I searched my mind. “Henry Miller. Norman Mailer.”

While I searched for more, she spoke. “Delusional faggot, talentless nut-job, pathetic self-promoter. In that order. You know what those three have in common? Mistaking noise for achievement. You know how a Brooklyn intellectual commits suicide?”

“Is this going to be personal?”

“He jumps from his ego to his IQ. You, child, are exactly the kind of person who could use a solid dose of psychotherapy. In a year you’d probably discover things about yourself that would make your hair stand on end.”

“It already is.” We had stopped at a corner waiting for the light to change. “You want to get a cup of joe? There’s an espresso place on the next—”

She looked at me with something between disdain and amusement. “The short answer is no.”

“What’s the unexpurgated?”

“No, thank you.”

“Very nice,” I said. “Did anyone ever tell you it’s not polite to be curt with people?”

“Many times,” she said, stepping into the street. Just at that moment a cab came hurtling around the corner from Lexington. I grabbed her arm. “I saw him,” she said coldly.

“Good,” I said even more so. “Then I’m sure you can find your way home safely without me. Terri, Esther, whatever, it’s been fun.”

Abruptly she took my arm and led me like a blind man across the street. “Don’t be such a pussy,” she said. “I only rag people I like.”

“Oh, I’m so fucking relieved.”

She continued holding onto my arm when we got to the other side. “Like who, like whom—it doesn’t really matter. I was trying to say, Like
you
. You’re fucked up.”

“I’m glad somebody noticed,” I said, so pleased to have the arm of this ravishing woman she could spit at me and I’d be happy. “Why am I fucked up?”

“How much time do we have?”

“Where do you live?”

“Seventy-third.”

“Then I guess we have four blocks. We could walk slower. Or stop for coffee.”

“Nice try,” she said. “But I wasn’t kidding. I have a patient.”

“I could wait. What is that, an hour?”

“Fifty minutes. Then I have three more. Besides, there’s only two ways a kid like you, a nice kid, Russell, but a kid, is going to see the light. The first is really intensive psychotherapy—”

“Because...”

“Because you’re fucked up. You don’t like responsibility because it means commitment, and you won’t do that. You give off all the scents and sounds of the critically abandoned. An orphan. It’s you against the world, and you don’t like either one, you or the world. You want women in your life but not one woman, because if you have only one you’re afraid she’ll walk out on you. Did your mother walk out on you, emotionally?”

“She died when I was a kid.”

“Bingo. Your father?”

“Passed when I was sixteen.”

“Were you close?”

I had never really considered the question. “We sort of lived in parallel worlds. We shared the space of a life, but there wasn’t a lot of contact.”

“In Nazi Germany, Vichy France, Soviet Russia, any autocracy, a guy like you would be easy pickings. You need a hero. You can’t get close to a woman except to fuck her, so you do that as a sport. You might as well be riding a horse. With a guy like you there’s an empty space where most people have a model for how they should live. Usual stuff: warm family, Thanksgiving dinner, playing catch with the old man, mom forgives your faults, even loves them. Or it could be the opposite. A real mess. Bad family, bad model. Or more usually a mix. Nobody gets the brass ring every time. Some people come out better, some worse. But a kid like you—”