Underworld (95 page)

“Miserable little cross-eyed.”

“I'm not them, he says.”

“He's king shit, that's who he is.”

“Call me Alan, he says.”

“I'm not them.”

“I could break his back.”

“I'm not them.”

“I says, Who are you?”

“He's king shit, that's who he is.”

“I says, Who are you,
stunat',
if you're not them?”

Giulio Belisario, JuJu, had never seen a dead body, including at a wake, and he was interested in the experience.

“Who's gonna die,” Nicky said, “just so you can satisfy your curiosity?”

“I missed my grandmother when I had the measles.”

“I'm looking around. I don't see any volunteers. You hear about Allie's father?”

“What?”

“You don't know this?”

“What? He died?”

“He hit a number.”

“I was gonna say.”

“He's buying a Buick. One day he's a fishmonger. The next day.”

“I was gonna say. I just saw him yesterday in the market. How could he be dead?”

“How long does it take?” Nicky said.

“I'm only saying.”

“One day he's selling scungilli. The next day, hey, kiss my ass.”

“Who's better than him?” JuJu said.

“I'm driving a big-ass Buick. Stand clear, you peasants.”

They were in the grocery that occupied a storefront in Nicky's building at 611. The grocer's wife, Donato's wife, the only name they knew her by, tolerated their presence because she liked Nicky's mother. Outside five older guys were gathered and one of them, Scarfo, was doing broad jumps at the instigation of the other four. Scarfo wanted to take the sanitation test and they'd convinced him he needed to broad-jump six feet from a standing start and he was out there in his good coat and creased pants jumping cracks in the sidewalk, to see if he could do it.

The two young men stood inside the store smoking and watching.

“I saw your father,” Nicky said.

“He's picking up in the neighborhood, temporary.”

“He ever find anything in the garbage?”

“What could he find? That he brings home? Forget about it.”

“He could find something valuable.”

“My mother would have a conniption fit. Forget about it.”

Donato's wife gave them each a piece of sliced salami and they watched Scarfo work on his jump.

Matty bit his shirt cuff, a slink of a kid with lively eyes, and he looked across the board at Mr. Bronzini, who was smiling twistedly.

“You killed me,” Albert said.

“I saw everything.”

“You came, you saw and so on. And you killed me.”

He knew that Matty loved hearing this. He loved winning at chess and he loved hearing the loser declare himself dead. Because that's what he was, kaput, and it was Matty who'd crushed him.

The boy's mother stood in the doorway watching.

“How many moves did it take? No, don't tell me,” Albert said. “I want to preserve some self-respect.”

Matty and his mother were delighted.

“He's beginning to think in systems,” Albert said to her. “I think this is a sign that good things will begin happening again.”

The adults had a cup of tea and Matt stayed at the board, a small floating
godhead above the pawns and rooks. The boy had taken some more losses lately, including a rout at the Manhattan Chess Club, and this was deeply disappointing all around because Father Paulus had appeared.

Came, saw, said little and left.

After a while Albert went over to Arthur Avenue, where he saw the chestnut man pushing his oven on wheels, a cartoon contraption, smoke coming out of the bent metal chimney. There was a peach basket appended to one end of the oven to hold the unroasted chestnuts and sweet potatoes.

He bought some chestnuts, which he more or less juggled in a piece of wrapping paper because they were damn hot, and he carried them down the side street into the barbershop.

George the Barber led him into the back room, where they sat at a small table eating the chestnuts and washing them down with wincing sips of Old Mr. Boston, a rye whiskey unknown to the Cabots and the Lodges.

Albert knew that George had a wife in a little house somewhere, and a married daughter somewhere else, but the man was otherwise unimaginable outside his barbership. Stout, bald, unblessed with excess personality, he belonged completely to the massive porcelain chairs, two of them, to the hot-towel steamer, the stamped tin ceiling, the marble shelf beneath the mirror, the tinted glass cabinets, the bone-handled razor and leather strop, the horn combs, the scissors and clippers, the cup, the brush, the shaving soap, the fragrance of witch hazels and brilliantines and talcums.

George the Barber knew who he was.

“Biaggio hit a number,” he said.

“Who, Biaggio?”

“He hit a number. Six hundred to one.”

“From the fish market Biaggio?”

“He hit a number,” George said.

When the chestnuts were gone he refilled their glasses and they sat there sipping quietly, thinking about someone hitting a number.

“And how is the woman?” he said to Albert.

“The woman.”

“Yes, how is the marriage?” he said.

The radio was tuned to the Italian station and an announcer was signing off with repeated cries of
baci a tutti,
which was fine with Albert, absolutely, the way he felt in the bracing wake of the whiskey.

“This is a subject so immense.”

“Of course. What else?”

“Big, big, big, big.”

“Too much, too much,” the barber said.

“I can only say one thing.”

“There's only one thing to say.”

“Every marriage, every marriage. Not just mine or yours.”

“Exactly.”

“How can I put it, George?
Un po' complicato.”

“Of course. What else can we say?”

“What else is new?”

“What else is new?” the barber said.

Albert licked at a dusting of chestnut on his fingers. A woman and child came in and George moved into the front of the shop and Albert drained his glass and followed because he did not want to presume on the man's hospitality.

He spoke to the woman while George arranged the boy's special seat. Then he put on his hat and coat and left. He stopped in Mussolini park and spent a few minutes talking with the old men. The fake priest went past, Benedetti, wearing a lumber jacket and a black biretta and carrying a breviary. He moved his lips as if in prayer but held the book unopened to his chest.

Albert had to sit. He realized he was slightly woozy, Umbriago the mayor of New York or of Chicago, and he sat on a bench and waited for the feeling to pass.

The other men drifted off. The sun was edging behind the extended mass of the hospital for the incurable and it was colder now, with flurries in the air, and the men drifted off to a storefront social club, or a candy store, or home.

A tow truck went by at a crazy speed, rushing to get to the wreck before the competition.

Albert sat on the bench and waited for his head to clear. The important thing is to sit and wait, to be patient. The other important thing
is not to vomit. You see a man every so often standing over a curbstone vomiting. He did not want to think of himself as that kind of man.

He sat there feeling all right, feeling slightly less dizzy now and generally all right.
Bad a tutti,
he thought. To everyone on the street, yes, kisses, and the faces went muddling through his mind, the bread makers, grandmothers, street sweepers, to the priests who are and those who aren't.

The kids called it heave. I think I'm gonna heave, Johnny.

A car pulled up and he heard the hoarse voice of the butcher calling across to him.

“Albert,
che succese?”

“Hello, Joe. Merry Christmas.”

“It's snowing. Go home.”

“I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine.”

“You want a ride?”

“Go, go, go, go. Merry Christmas, I'm fine, goodbye.”

He heard the train pull into the station about a block away. He heard it shriek around the bend and rumble into the station and he sat in the wind's high howl waiting for his head to clear completely.

There were a thousand sameshit nights when he played knock rummy with a guy named Fontana in Fontana's father's plumbing supply store, a nominal nickel a point, or shot a game of pool and had a slice of pizza at Half Moon with JuJu and Patsy, nights that always ended down, disappointed someway, and once he phoned Loretta from the candy store and told her he had his dick in his hand and studied the pause at the other end, knowing she was in a room with her mother, her brothers, her grandfather and who knows who else, and he went downstairs sometimes and stood smoking alone, late, in the doorway of Donato's grocery, spitting occasional grains of tobacco into the wind.

He had a little money now. He gave most of what he earned to his mother but at least he had something in his pocket, approaching age seventeen, and he went to the show and sat in the balcony with Allie and Ray, two guys who talked back to the screen, but after a while what could you say to a movie that wasn't the sameshit thing you'd said a thousand times before?

•    •    •

Klara was in the room, the spare room, the room she was painting inch by inch, and she stood at the easel working.

Yes, Albert thought painting relaxed her. It was a break, he thought, from the other things she did.

She stopped when it was time to pick up the child. For a moment she forgot where she'd parked the child. Upstairs with the regular girl or across the street with the woman whose husband made coats for rabbis.

Painters are supposed to have a line. Klara thought she had a scribble.

She went upstairs and got the child and came down saying something like, Naptime for little girls. But Teresa wasn't ready for her nap. Sleepy creepy time. But Teresa let her mother know this was not going to happen right now. She did not soften her yeses and noes. She was an open wound of need and want and powerful refusal.

Klara sat by the bed talking to her. After a while she went into the spare room and stood by the easel and looked at what she'd done. What had she done? She decided she didn't want to know.

She looked in on the child, who was sleeping now. Then she looked in on Albert's mother. Mrs. Ketchel, the woman who sat with her, was putting on her coat. Mrs. Ketchel seemed to be putting on her coat a little earlier every day. The days were getting longer now, technically, so maybe Mrs. Ketchel had so many other things to do, to fill the longer days, that she couldn't sit with Albert's mother for extended periods anymore.

Klara thought the child resembled her grandmother. A mournfulness about the eyes, she thought. But that can't be true, can it, in a child so young? A darkness, a brooding sense of misfortune. But she was making it up, wasn't she, looking for signs and omens.

She sat in the room with Albert's mother. The woman was awake and turned her head to look at Klara, an incomplete movement that brought her to the point of exhaustion, but then exhaustion was all that remained, although that's not true either. Her gestures had force, still. They were halting but strong. They showed a willful woman who could dismiss entire populations with a singsong waggle of the hand.

The gestures did not refer to practical things. They had a range that
extended to another level. The hand that sweeps under the chin. The pushed-out mouth. The way the eyes close and the head tilts up.

To Albert. When it's time to die, I'll die.

To friends who sat with her. God doesn't know everything. Only the things he has to know.

To Albert. Why do you want to talk about your father when all I see when I hear his name is lost opportunity?

To Albert. Be careful. That's all I'm saying.

To Klara. Go live your life. I'm not worth your time or attention.

This last is a gesture of hand and eye that both women know to be insincere.

Klara did not tell Albert that she found it an odd comfort, at times, to sit with his mother. They had one parent left between them, dying. She played Perry Como records for the woman. She brought the child in so the grandmother could touch her hands and face. The woman did not see well, or saw two things where one occurred, and her hand on the child's face seemed to work a marvel of retrospection.

Her skin was getting browner, her hair whiter, hands spotted and blotched, but there was still something strong about her, something Albert seemed to fear, a judgment, a withering conviction of some kind.

She had a gesture that seemed to mark a state of hopelessness too deep to be approached with words.

Klara sat there and talked to her a little. She kept the window open slightly to let the mustiness escape, the slow waste. She heard fire engines some distance off and watched the light fade.

Albert's sister came to visit sometimes, Laura, unable to accept the impending death, scared, dependent, betrayed, and Klara could imagine she'd try to climb into the gravehole when the time came.

How strange it was to find herself here, listening to Perry Como with a woman she didn't know, who was dying, and with everything else as well, this chair, that lamp, this house and street, and to wonder how it happened.

When Albert came home she was in the kitchen.

“How is she?”

“Sleeping.”

“Did she eat anything?”

“I made a little soup.”

“Did she eat it?”

“Ate some, spilled some. Your daughter caught a cold from the baby-sitter.”

“I'll make it go away,” he said.

She heard him telling stories to Teresa, nonsense tales he'd been told as a boy, characters with funny rhyming names, and he overpronounced certain words for effect, his voice rounded and melodic, but she shut the kitchen door because she didn't want to hear it anymore.