The Paper Dragon (8 page)

"I still think he was rushing us," Arthur said, and raised his hand to signal an empty cab.

"Let it go by," Brackman said. "I want to talk to you."

"I have to get to the theater."

"The theater can wait. Let it go by."

Arthur waved the taxi away and turned wearily to Brackman. "What is it?" he asked.

"Arthur, do you want to lose this case?"

"You know I don't."

"You can lose it if you're not careful."

"I thought you said…"

"Yes, that we had an airtight case. But believe me, Arthur, you can lose it. And one sure way of losing it is to antagonize the man who'll be making the decision. That's one sure way of slitting your own throat."

"I'm sorry."

"Tomorrow's going to be a rough day, Arthur. Willow—"

"I said I was sorry."

"Willow is
not
on our side, you know, and he'll do everything he can to rattle you and confuse you and make you lose your temper. I want your promise that under no circumstances will you again address the judge personally, not to ask him any questions, not to offer any explanations, not for any conceivable reason. I don't even want you to look at him, Arthur, I want your promise on that."

"I promise," Arthur said. "I have to get to the theater."

"Can you be here at nine-thirty tomorrow?"

"I guess so. Why?"

"There are a few matters I want to discuss when you're not in such a hurry."

"All right, I'll be here."

"Nine-thirty," Brackman said. "There's another empty one, grab him."

"Can I drop you off?"

"No, I'm going east."

The taxicab pulled to the curb. Arthur opened the door, and then said, "Judicious
is
fair."

"Look it up," Brackman said, and Arthur climbed in and closed the door behind him. "The Helen Hayes Theatre," he said to the cabbie, "Forty-sixth and Broadway."

It had turned into a bleak, forbidding day, the sun all but gone, dank heavy clouds hanging low in the sky and threatening snow. Through the taxi windows, he could see pedestrians rushing past on the sidewalks, hurrying to cross the streets, their heads ducked, their hands clutching coat collars. Behind them and beyond them, the store windows beckoned warmly with holiday tinsel and mistletoe, colored lights and ornaments, wreaths and sprigs of holly. This was only the twelfth of December, with Christmas still almost two weeks away, but the stores have begun preparing for the season long before Thanksgiving, and the city wore a festive look that unified it now as it did each year. He could remember the long walks to the library from his home on 217th Street, the store windows decorated as they were here but with a shabby Bronx look. They had moved to the Bronx when he was twelve years old, the decentralization, was beginning, the second generation was starting its exodus to what then passed for the suburbs. The trip to Grandpa's house each Sunday would be longer and more difficult to make, discouraging frequency, trickling away at last to family gatherings only on holidays or occasional Sundays, disappearing entirely when his grandfather died. The street they moved into was another ghetto, smaller, cleaner, with a rustic country look (or so it seemed after Harlem) trees planted in small rectangular plots of earth dug out of the sidewalk, mostly two-family brick houses, Olinville Junior High School across the street, its fence stretching halfway up the block from Barnes Avenue, they used to play handball in the schoolyard. He tried out for the handball team when he entered high school, but did not make it. He was a good student, though, his marks always up in the eighties and nineties, and an omnivorous reader. He would go to the library on 229th Street and Lowerre Place maybe two or three times a week, even before it got to be a gathering place for the high school crowd.

There was a feeling of prosperity to the new apartment (he recognized now that it was hardly less shabby than the four rooms they'd had in Harlem) with its new furniture and its new linoleum, the three-piece maple set his mother bought for him, with the dresser that had a hidden dropleaf desk full of cubbyholes, and the pink curtains in Julie's room. She was nine at the time, and had already begun to hang all kinds of crazy signs on her door, genius at work and BEWARE VICIOUS DOG, he got such a kick out of her, she was really a great kid. His father had become a "regular" by then, and was working out of the Williamsbridge Post Office on Gun Hill Road. He would set the alarm for four-thirty every morning, waking up the whole damn house, and clamoring for his breakfast, a real ginzo with ginzo ideas about the woman's place and so on. He could have let Mama sleep, instead of making such a big deal about breakfast, racing around the apartment in his long Johns. "There he goes," Julie would yell, "they're off and running at Jamaica," and Arthur would lie in his bed under the quilt Aunt Louise had made for him, and quietly snicker, he sure was a nut, that old man of his.

There was, too, the same feeling of belonging in this new ghetto, though now there weren't aunts and uncles to meet on the street or to drop in on during the afternoon. But there were Italians all up and down he block, half of them barely able to speak English, and there was a funny kind of intimacy, a feeling of safety, an instant understanding that was not present out there in the White Protestant world, though at the time he was not aware such a world even existed. He knew only that he felt comfortable on his own block, with people who were easily recognizable, like the business with all the women named Anna, for example. His mother's name was Anna, but there were also four other women named Anna on the block. So instead of using their last names, which is what any decent New Canaan lady would have done, instead of referring to them as Anna Constantine or Anna Ruggiero or Anna Di Nobili, the women had a shorthand all their own, Naples-inspired he was sure, instant ginzo communication. His mother was Anna the Postman, and the other women were respectively Anna the Plumber, and Anna the Butcher, and Anna the Bricklayer, and also Anna From Wall Street, he smiled even now, thinking of it. But he was comfortable then, comfortable in his growing body, and comfortable in his new home, where in the silence of his bedroom (unless Julie was practicing her flute in her own room next door) he would take the little maple lamp from the dresser top, the lamp shaped like a candlestick with a little shade on it, and he would put the lamp on the floor and play with his soldiers in the circle of light it cast. The dining room table had been sold before they left Harlem, they now had a three-piece living room suite and a big floor radio that looked like a juke box, but there were worlds to discover on his bedroom floor and he searched them out with his faithful Magua and his intrepid Shorty, his imagination looser now, fed by the books he withdrew from the library each week.

Every now and then he would take Julie to the library with him, leaving her in the children's section while he roamed in his mature twelve-year-old masculinity through the adult section, taking a book from a shelf, scanning it, deciding whether or not he wanted to read it. He never bought any books then, and he did not know there was such a thing as the bestseller list of the
New York Times Book Review
. He had not ever, in fact, even
read
the
New York Times
, although kids used to come around to the classrooms selling the
Times
and also the
Trib
. He grew up with the
News
and the
Mirror
and the
Journal-American
(he later felt betrayed when even these friendly and well-known newspapers killed his play). He wondered now when he had last gone to see a play that had not received rave notices, when he had last read a book that was not on the bestseller list. It had been much simpler then, the long walk to the library along White Plains Avenue, the library snug and warm, the aroma of books, the feel of them in his hands. And at Christmas, the tree opposite the main desk, decorated with popcorn, the Dickens novels bound in burnished red leather, tooled in gold, spread on the floor beneath the tree, more appropriate at Christmas than at any other time. The librarian was a nice German lady named Miss Goldschmidt. "Merry Christmas, Arthur," she would say. "What are you reading
this
week?" — the cherished copy of
The Talisman
with the jacket picture of the knight on horseback, he slid the book across the desk and Miss Goldschmidt beamed approval.

"You sure that's on Forty-sixth?" the cabbie asked.

"I'm sure," Arthur said. There were not too many things he was sure of, but he was dead certain that the Helen Hayes was on Forty-sixth Street because
Catchpole
had opened at that identical theater when it was still known as the Fulton in 1947, to be mercilessly clobbered by all ten gentlemen of the press the next day — back then,
PM
, the
Mirror
, the
Sun
, and the
Brooklyn Eagle
also had a say about what would be permitted to survive. He thought it supremely ironic that his new play was holding readings at the same theater, but he fervently wished it would open someplace else,
anyplace
else, where he would be safe from the evil eye. Evil eye, my ass, he thought, but hadn't his grandfather come to America from an impoverished mountain village called Ruvo del Monte, and wasn't there still enough to this heritage in Arthur to cause suspicion and doubt? In fact, hadn't his Aunt Filomena been hit by the iceman's runaway horse on First Avenue the very night after his mother had dreamt it? Any place but the Fulton, he thought. You can change the name, but the jinx remains. And yet he knew his fears were idiotic, God, look at what the wind was doing out there, papers blowing in the gutter, hats skimming off heads, look at that woman trying to control her skirts, God this was a city, what a city this was.

He wanted to own this city.

But more than that, or perhaps a part of it, an extension of it, he wanted to know that this was where he belonged, this city into which he had been born, this city whose streets and gutters he knew from the time he had felt for immies in deep puddles along the curb, this city whose rooftops held secret fluttering pigeons to watch, hot, sticky tar to mold into huge, strange shapes, chimney pots behind which you could pee, this city that had grown to include the Bronx and a two-family house opposite the junior high school, hide and seek behind hydrangea bushes, fig trees wrapped in tarpaper against the winter's cold, a two-cent Hooton with nuts every afternoon on the walk home from Evander, Bronx Park and the winding river path, Laura in the woods behind the Botanical Gardens, they'd been eaten alive by mosquitoes, this city, this.

He wanted to claim it, but more than that he wished to be claimed by it.

Those solitary walks to the library alone, when alone his thoughts would spiral and somersault, when alone he would build magic castles bright with minarets and floating golden banners, when alone he was master of a world in which he walked proud and unafraid and people knew his name and dreaded it, hands thrust deep into the pockets of his mackinaw, the library books dangling at the end of a long leather strap except when it was raining and his mother made him put them in a shopping bag from the A&P, those solitary walks when he knew without question who he was and what he would become.

He wanted the city to tell him who he was again.

He paid the driver and got out of the taxi, walking directly to the stage entrance and opening the door onto the long alley that led to the rear of the theater. Selig and Stern were standing at the end of the alley, in whispered consultation just outside the metal stage door. Selig was wearing a black overcoat with black velveteen collar and cuffs, puffing on a cigar and standing alongside the iron steps that ran to the upper stories of the theater. The alleyway was gray, capped by an ominous piece of gray sky that hung high above it like a canopy. Selig stood in black against the rusting iron steps, surrounded by gray walls and gray smoke. His face appeared gray, too, as though someone very close had passed away during the night.

Stern was wearing a blue plaid sports jacket with a navy blue sweater under it. He was rubbing his big hands together as though chiding himself for having anticipated spring in December, his shoulders hunched, shivering with every swirling gust of alley wind. He looked up in surprise as Arthur approached, and then said, "Is the trial finished already?"

"No, we broke early," Arthur replied. "Is Kent here?"

"Not yet," Selig said.

Kent Mercer was their director, a faggot whose nocturnal revels ("I'm a
night
person," he would protest, "that's why I'm
in
the theater, really") often terminated along about dawn when less talented citizens were rising and banging on the radiators for heat. No one expected him to be on time because he never was, and no one ever mentioned his tardy appearances — except Selig, who would invariably remark, each time Mercer arrived late and pantingly out of breath, "Have a good night's sleep, Kent?"

"Where is it?" Stern asked, shivering. "The trial, I mean."

"All the way downtown. Foley Square."

"Is that near the traffic court down there?" Stern asked.

"I think so."

"I was down there once on a speeding ticket," Stern said.

"Mmm," Arthur said, and wondered how Stern could possibly equate a traffic ticket with something as important as a plagiarism suit. Of the two men, he liked Stern least, which in itself was no recommendation for Selig. "Have you heard from Mitzi?" he asked.

"Not yet," Selig said.

"Well, what's happening with Hester's contract?"

"You know as much about it as we do," Selig said mildly, and then puffed on his cigar and looked at the wet end as though suddenly displeased with its taste.

"Last Wednesday—"

"That's right," Stern said. Stern had an annoying habit of agreeing with a statement before it was finished. Arthur was tempted to say, "Last Wednesday someone told me you were a son of a bitch." Instead, he glanced at Stern in brief anger, and then said, "Last Wednesday you told me Hester liked the play."