The Paper Dragon (4 page)

"How does your play end, Mr. Constantine?"

"It ends when the men in the squad, shaken by the turn of events, come to realize the idiocy of war, and gain a new respect for their lieutenant. The troublemaker, Corporal Janus, is exposed and court-martialed."

"And how does the book end?"

"The book ends when the men in the squad, touched by the lieutenant's sacrifice, come to realize the idiocy of war, and gain a new respect for him. The troublemaker, Private Colman, is exposed and court-martialed."

The courtroom was silent. Brackman looked up at the judge, and then turned away from him, nodding his head as though in silent agreement with an evident truth.

"Does that conclude your testimony concerning similarities of plot?" he asked Arthur.

"Yes, sir, it does."

"Would you tell us now—"

"Forgive me for interrupting, Mr. Brackman," McIntyre said, "but as I indicated earlier in chambers, I have an appointment this afternoon which necessitates my leaving at two-thirty. I was hoping we could take a very short recess now — aren't you tired, Mr. Constantine?"

"Thank you, your Honor, I'm fine," Arthur said.

"Well, I thought we might take a ten-minute recess now, and then perhaps continue without a lunch recess, adjourning at two, or a little after if we have to. Would anyone have any objection to that?"

"We would have no objection," Willow said. "But Mr. Constantine and his attorney may be exceedingly hungry."

"We would have no objection to continuing through the lunch recess," Brackman said dryly. "And we will try to conclude the direct by two o'clock, your Honor."

"I have no objection," Genitori said.

He had received what he supposed were stock words of encouragement from Brackman — You're doing fine, Arthur, you're coming across very well, I think the judge is considerably impressed — and then had left him in the courtroom with his partner. Now, standing near a door marked stairway at one end of the gray corridor, he lighted a second cigarette and glanced briefly at the closed courtroom doors. He honestly did not know how he was coming across, he had never been very sure of himself as a speaker. He felt that Willow was objecting too much and too energetically, and he suspected that Brackman was losing more points than he was winning, but he was completely ignorant of his own performance, grateful only that his earlier nervousness had miraculously dissipated.

Willow and his assistant came out of the courtroom and walked toward Arthur, heading for the men's room, he supposed. Willow was a tall ungainly man, and he moved with the uncertain awkwardness of a large water bird, neck craned forward, head bobbing, hair uncombed and hanging on his forehead, black-rimmed spectacles reflecting the pale light of the ceiling fixtures. Arthur supposed he was in his late thirties, but there was about him a boyish vitality that made him seem even younger. Neither he nor his assistant, a squat, very dark Negro wearing a gray tweed suit, even glanced at Arthur in passing. They were in animated discussion as they walked by, but all Arthur could hear was a reference to "the evidentiary question." He watched as they pushed open the door to the men's room, and then he looked at his watch.

It was twenty minutes past twelve.

He felt alone, utterly and completely alone, he had never felt so isolated in his entire life. He thought it odd that he should have come through thirty-nine years of family togetherness, surrounded by aunts and uncles and cousins and
compares
to find himself here and now, at what was possibly the most important juncture of his life, entirely alone. How do you come through it all, he wondered, and suddenly find yourself standing on the edge of the universe waiting for the waves to crash in, maybe to get washed out to sea, without Aunt Louise telling you every other week that you were "her baby," meaning she had served as midwife when you were delivered to your mother in a coldwater flat on East 118th Street? I could use Aunt Louise now, he thought, silly Aunt Louise who accompanied Italian immigrants when they went for their first papers, who was an active member of the Republican Club, who wrote songs in her spare time and claimed that they were all later stolen by the big band leaders — a family trait? — and who sent Queen Elizabeth a hand-tatted bonnet for young Prince Charles when he was born. "Look, Sonny," she had said, "I got a thank-you note from the Queen's secretary, a
personal
thank-you note," and Arthur had thought to himself it was probably a mimeographed note sent to all the Aunt Louises of the world who tatted bonnets for infant princes. And yet he could use Aunt Louise now, he could use her quiet strength and penetrating eye, God but that woman was a dynamo of energy, what the hell was it she concocted — Aunt Louise's Ointment, did she call it? And wasn't it really and truly sold in drugstores all over Harlem, the indefatigable Louise running around selling her product the way she plugged her terrible songs, she'd have made a great rumrunner, or in recent times an excellent dope pusher.

They called him Sonny when he lived in Harlem. I grew up in Harlem, he always told people, and they looked at him as if wondering whether or not he had traces of Negro blood flowing in his veins, whereupon he always felt compelled to explain that there were
three
Harlems. You see, there is Negro Harlem and there is Italian Harlem and there is Puerto Rican Harlem. They are all very different and they are all identical, they are all bug-ridden and rat-infested, those are the three Harlems. But that of course was a mature judgment, a qualified appraisal by a man who was now thirty-nine years old, and not the way he had seen it as a boy. There were no rats in Harlem for Sonny Constantine — he still did not know why they had called him Sonny, he supposed there was a Sonny in every Italian-American family that ever existed. Or perhaps Al Jolson was hot at the time of his boyhood, perhaps any kid became a Sonny Boy and then a Sonny all because of Al Jolson singing through his goddamn nose like a Harvard man, perhaps that was it. But there were no rats in Harlem — well, once a mouse was in the toilet bowl, but only a mouse. It scared hell out of his mother, she came running, out of the bathroom with her dress raised and her bloomers down, her behind showing, he wanted to look, but didn't dare, yelling to his father that there was a mouse in the bowl. So his father just flushed the toilet, naturally, goodbye mouse, out to sea where all good mice eventually go. His sister was terrified. He had called her a baby and a dope and a silly jerk, and then had listened to her crying in her room, really in his parents' bedroom because that was where she slept on a little cot against the wall near the window that looked down on 118th Street four stories below.

There were no rats in Harlem for him, there were no street gangs, there were no rumbles, there was only a placid ghetto — terrible word — a
neighborhood
, a haven surrounded by relatives, you could not throw a stone without hitting a relative. If your mother wasn't home, you dropped in on Aunt Tessie, and she gave you cookies and milk, or you went around to see Grandpa in the grocery store where he worked for a man he had known in Naples, or maybe you ran into Uncle Mike driving his truck for the furniture company. It was said that Uncle Mike knew gangsters, and that the time the social club was held up and they stole Uncle Danny's ring and Uncle Sal's watch, it was Mike who got on his Neapolitan high horse and went off some place into the mysterious underworld where they talked of Petie Red Shirt and Legs Diamond and got the goddamn jewelry back the very next morning; he was a tough guy Uncle Mike, he could break your head with a glance. His sister loved Uncle Mike, she would almost wet her pants every time he stopped by. There was an argument once, Arthur couldn't even remember what it was all about, Mike taking out some girl from the bakery, and Tessie getting all upset and coming to see her sister, Arthur's mother, and her having a big argument with Mike and calling him everything under the sun while his father stood by and listened patiently and Arthur remembered how simply he had flushed the mouse down the toilet, so very simply, pull, flush, and out to sea without a whimper.

Christmases, they all got together, Christmases
then
, but not anymore, blame it on urban renewal, blame it on the decentralization of the family, the speedier means of communication and transportation, there were no more Christmases once his grandparents died. The family died when they died, it shriveled outward from the center, everybody just disappeared, where the hell were they all now? Dead or living in California, which is the same as being dead. He had dropped in to see Aunt Tessie and Uncle Mike when he was out in Hollywood, and Mike who had known gangsters, Mike who had threatened to break heads unless his brothers'-in-law jewelry was returned at once, immediately if not sooner, Mike was a tired old man, bald, his muscles turned to flab, this was the man who used to move furniture and mountains and fearsome gangs. They sat in the living room of the Tarzana development house and had nothing much to say to each other, how is your mother, tell her to write, did you go to Aunt Louise's funeral, and Arthur had wanted to say, "Don't you remember Christmas at Grandpa's house, don't you remember?" But Uncle Mike was an old man, you see, and Aunt Tessie limped, and there was nothing to say to either of them, there was only strong Italian coffee to sip and Italian pastry to nibble, he had not remembered it as being so sweet. Boy, what his grandfather used to buy for Christmas, boy the way that house sang, that crumby apartment on First Avenue, it
must
have been a crumby apartment and there probably
were
rats in the walls. He certainly could remember cockroaches in his own house whenever they turned on the kitchen light, an army in hurried retreat. "Step on them, Sonny," his mother would yell, "get them, get them!" a game each night, the scurrying mob, and then they would all disappear into cracks and crannies, gone like the mouse flushed out to sea, except they would return again. "Where do they go?" he once asked his father, and his father replied, "Home."

Home.

There was everybody there on Christmas and his grandfather welcomed one and all, not only the family but also everybody he knew from the grocery store, the nice old man who wore thick glasses, Alonzo, Alfonso, something like that, who had the idiot son who would come in alongside his father like a ghost and sit there quietly and perhaps sip a little red wine his grandfather poured. And the men would talk about the old country and about Mussolini and about how beautiful Rome was at Christmastime, and Arthur would listen, standing between his grandfather's knees, with his grandfather's strong hands on his shoulders, and the women would be bustling about in the kitchen, Grandma fretting and fussing, and the girls — her two daughters and later Danny's wife, and then Sal's wife — all would be busy with the preparations in the kitchen, and the Christmas gifts would be piled to the ceiling under the Christmas tree, and Grandpa would keep pouring wine for all the relatives and friends who kept dropping in from all over Harlem, all over the world it seemed,
Buon Natale, Buon Natale
, the wine being poured and the smell of tomato sauce in the kitchen. God, there were things to eat, things Grandpa used to get in the grocery store, all imported, great provolone and salami, and fresh macaroni and bread, and Aunt Louise would make the pimientos, she would roast the peppers over the gas jet until they turned black, he always thought she was burning them, but no then she would scrap off all the black part and reveal the sweet orange-red meat, and then she fixed them with oil and garlic, oh God. She sent him pimientos in a jar every month, once a month like clockwork, the last day of the month, until she finally died, always the pimientos in a jar because once he helped her with the grammar in one of her song lyrics, just helped her put it in order, that was all, pimientos for life, a great title.

The meal went on for hours, they would sit at the table and dip cling peaches in wine, allowing the thick golden fruit to soak there for a bit, and then bringing it dripping red to the mouth on a toothpick. His grandfather would say "Sonny, here, have some," and hold out the red-stained toothpick with the rich juicy slice of fruit on its end, tart, strong, sweet, everything. The kids would run through the length of the railroad flat, chasing each other, and his grandmother would yell for them to stop before the people downstairs banged on the ceiling with a broom handle, and they would stop for a little while, collapsing on the big bed in the front room, his head close to his sister's, all of them sweating, all the kids in the family, more kids all the time, all of them giggling and sweating on the bed with the picture of Jesus Christ over it holding his hand above his exposed heart and sunshine spikes radiating from his head. "That's God," his cousin Joey once said. "The Jews killed him," He asked his grandmother about it one time, and she said, "That's right, Sonny, the Jews killed him," and then she told a story about a Jew who went to church one day and received holy communion and then ran out of the church and took the wafer out of his mouth immediately and went home and nailed it to the wall. "And do you know what happened to that holy bread, Sonny? It began to bleed. And it never stopped bleeding. It just kept bleeding all over that Jew's floor."

"What did he do?" Arthur asked.

"What did
who
do?" his grandmother said.

"The Jew. What did he do about all that blood?"

His grandmother had shrugged and gone back to cooking something on the big wood stove in the kitchen, black and monstrous, always pouring heat and steam. "Wiped it up, I guess," she said. "How do 
I
know what he did?"

But every time he looked at that picture of Jesus with the heart stuck on his chest as if he had just had surgery and they were showing how easy it was to expose a human heart these days, the drops of blood dripping down from it, and Jesus' hand just a little above it, and his head tilted back with his eyes sort of rolled up in his head like a character in an Eisenstein movie, he always thought of the Jew who nailed the communion wafer to the wall, and he always wondered first why the Jew would want to nail the thing to the wall to begin with, and second what he had done about all the blood. In high school, after he had moved to the Bronx and met Rubin, he realized his grandmother was full of shit, and he never trusted her very much after that, her and her communion nailed to the wall.

His sister Julia broke his head one time, this was about the time he fell in love with Virginia Kelly. Irish girls after that were all premised on Virginia, the sixth grade Virginia with long black hair and green eyes fringed with black lashes and budding little breasts — he hadn't been too aware of those at the time — and a way of tilting her head back to laugh, at
him
most of the time, which was the unfortunate part of it all. But oh how he loved that girl! He would watch her and watch her and notice everything she did or said, and then come home and tell his sister about it, which is why she broke his head one day. She broke his head with a stupid little kid's pocketbook by swinging it at him on its chain and clobbering him with the clasp, and all because he told her she would never be as beautiful as Virginia Kelly, no one in the world would ever be as beautiful as Virginia Kelly, she had clobbered him, wham! Even then she had a lot of spunk, you had to have spunk to live in the same house with a man like his father, boy, what a battle
that
had turned out to be years later. Where the hell are you now, Julie, living with your engineer husband and your two Norwegian kids in where the hell, Minnesota? There's no such place as Minnesota, don't kid me, sis. Do you remember breaking my head, and then crying when Mama took me to the druggist, and he examined it — who went to doctors in those days? — and wiped the blood away and said, "You've broken his head, young lady," and then put a strip of plaster on it? It was okay in a week or so, but boy did you cry, I really loved you Julie. You were a really nice sister to have, I hope your Norwegian loves you half as much as I did.