All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  Al amused himself by letting slip what appeared to be little confidences, especially amused if – like the Astaire story – these confidences were not true. He didn’t believe inquiring strangers like the apartment manager deserved the truth; he believed men and women did what they had to do and then faced the truth. “It’s like we said when we were kids: you show me yours and I’ll show you mine. You learn, pecker to pecker, that what you got is what I’ve got, no matter.” When he was asked by the manager how he had learned to play the piano, he said, “I was taught by myself to play by ear, like I play my life. Later, I was taught about music by an Irish choirmaster.”

  “A Catholic?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And where was this, may I ask?”

  “A church at Bloor and Bathurst, St. Peter’s, the one on the kitty-corner to Honest Ed’s Emporium and Bargain Store.”

  “Ed Mirvish I know. His wife collects glass eyes. From Catholic I know zilch.”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “What’s to worry? I’m too old anyway to worry. Catholics already they gave me grief.”

  “Me also,” Al said, “I got a little grief from them myself.”

  “And you were born where?”

  “Palmerston Avenue.”

  “Palmerston! So you were born here, so there you are. You play the piano. For me, this is enough.”

  “I don’t carry none of that camp baggage,” Al said.

  “You’re a Jew?”

  “I’m a Jew but I’m not Jewish.”

  “This I don’t understand,” the manager said.

  “Neither do I. That’s the point. I just do what I do, I play the piano, Jewish can look after itself.”

  The choirmaster at St. Peter’s church, Harry O’Grady, had taught Al how to read music and, as a gift, had given him The Songbook of Negro Spirituals, which Harry liked to sing, and standing together at the piano, arm in arm, they would shout out,

  Ezekiel saw a wheel a-rolling

  Way in the middle of the Lord

  A wheel within a wheel-a-rolling

  Way in the middle of the Lord

  And the little wheel run by faith

  And the big wheel run by the grace of God.

  Al and Harry had met because, as a youngster, Al had played floor hockey in the winter in St. Peter’s basement with his friends from the streets around the church. “Nobody plays floor hockey anymore. It was a great church basement game. You had a sawed-off broomstick and this heavy felt disc with a hole in it…and if you lost the game you could beat up the other team with your broomstick.”

  Al learned several spirituals from his songbook, but it was playing by ear that gave him looseness of spirit, even joy as he trusted his ear, trusted his intuitions – hearing all the melodies, the chords, emerge without calculation as he hit the keys. “It’s like walking downtown without knowing where I’m going. If it feels right to turn right I turn right, if it feels right to turn left I turn left. I trust myself. Even when I play only on the black notes it turns out okay.”

  Al had dropped out of Harbord Collegiate to drive a truck for Donnie Ryan, an Irish cross-border bootlegger and cigarette smuggler.

  Drinking Bushmill’s whisky at the Hibernia Social Club in the Clinton Hotel and learning songs like “Who Put the Overalls in Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder” he met a girl, Agnes Egan. She captivated him, telling him that her body was God’s sacred vessel and then giving her body to him with no remorse at all, only pleasure, saying, “It’s a sin between me and God, so I’ll look after that.” Because he made her pregnant, they married at City Hall and drove to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon – riding under the great falls on the Maid of the Mist, holding each other, soaking wet, seeing bits and pieces of rainbow light all around them in the mist – and Al decided he probably loved her, saying that he’d never seen such light. She clung to him and said she’d never seen such light either.

  “Hail the light,” he cried, happy.

  “Shush,” she said.

  When Al returned to work, Donnie the bootlegger took him aside and told him he was fired; first, for fucking a Catholic girl, and then for marrying a Catholic girl.

  “Regard me as old-fashioned,” the bootlegger said with an amiable wink of menace, “but you can’t be nailing Our Lord Jesus Christ to the cross and then be nailing our women, too.”

  Al, at a loss for words, a loss that made him feel as if the things, the faces around him had gone numb, started to grin, and grinning he knew that he was going to do something, though he didn’t know what he intended until he was in the midst of doing it.

  Al broke Donnie’s nose.

  Then he threatened to kill a righteous young rebbe who said God would curse his iniquity, He would punish such a marriage.

  Al asked, “What kinda Jewish shit is that?”

  The young rebbe said, “Ezekiel 18.”

  At the birth, Agnes and her boy child died, the child born strangled on his own cord, and Agnes dead from peritonitis.

  Al said, “This is bullshit,” and went to find the young rebbe and beat him with a sawed-off broomstick, cracking his ribs and collapsing his lung. “You got to believe God is crazy if you believe He strangles a child. You gotta be a lunatic to believe that,” he told his father.

  “There’s a lotta lunatics,” his father said.

  “Count me out.”

  “In life, you gotta count for something somewhere,” his father said.

  “In life,” Al said, “if I’ve got a thing with God, then it’s me and God, it’s not rules made up by somebody else. I’ve got what I get, I do what’s to be done and I face up to it. That’s it. That’s all. Period. Punct.”

  To which his father said:“Gott bestraft die, die es verdient haben.”[8]

  And his mother said:“Es gibt niemanden, den Gott nicht bestraf.”[9]

  “I don’t believe any of this. I don’t believe God punishes anyone.”

  After Maxie Baker was attacked outside the Town Tavern by Johnnie “Pops” Papilia, who was working for the Magaddino family out of Buffalo, Al’s father – who knew Baker because he bought newspapers from Marvin at the kiosk after doing his banking at the Imperial Bank on Temperance Street – introduced Al to Maxie.

  Al said he liked Maxie’s hat.

  “It’s a Harry Sable,” he said, “one of my only indulgences. A man should wear a good hat.”

  “I’ll get such a hat,” Al said.

  Maxie took off his hat and looked into it, as if there were something to be learned by looking into his hat. But he put it back on his head and laid his hand on Al’s arm. “We’ll take a little sun. Here we are, three Jews down among the bankers. I’ll tell you something about the rich. The rich are rich because they play poor, they give nothing away. They leave it to the poor to be generous, to give away what they ain’t got.”

  “At big interest, too,” Al’s father said.

  “The vigorish,” Maxie said, “it’s the national treasure. You know The Treasure of the Sierra Madre?” he asked “I love it. I love Humphrey Bogart when he says, ‘Conscience. What a thing. If you believe you’ve got a conscience it will pester you to death. But if you don’t believe you’ve got one, what can it do to you?’”

  “Bogart was a great actor,” Al’s father said, “great playing tough guys.”

  “Your father tells me you know how to be tough,” Maxie said, putting his hand on Al’s shoulder. “You don’t brood. Brooding is the killer.”

  “If you happen to want to be a killer,” Al said.

  “You play a helluva piano,” the hunched old man said. “But I need to interrupt.” He had laid his hand on Al’s shoulder. At first, Al didn’t move. Then, as he turned slowly on his stool he could tell the old man was a little drunk. He laughed. But there was also something cruel to the curl of the old man’s lip. He looked, to Al, like a man who wanted to hurt someone, and if not someone, then he wanted to hurt himself. Al said, “This is supposed to be a happy time…” but
the old man had stepped onto the small dance floor and said to the seniors in the room, “Today is August 2nd, sixty years to the day of the liberation of the camp at which I was an inmate – and several in this room, too – the camp at Treblinka.”

  He straightened his body, drawing his heels together.

  “Every day, ten times a day sometimes,” the old man said, “when we were standing at attention on the Roll Call Square, thousands of us sang this song they’d drilled into us, singing till we were perfect, just like they wanted us to be, like a choir,” and he began to sing in a droning monotone, in German, which Al understood:

  This is why we are in Treblinka

  Whatever fate may send,

  This is why we are in Treblinka

  Always ready for the end.

  A man at the back of the room called out, “Nobody needs this, sit down,” and a woman yelled, “Shut up, sit down,” but the old man kept on singing, unforgiving in his insistence, unforgiving of the other old people in the room, unforgiving of himself and, at the same time, insistent on his own humiliation.

  “Stop,” a man screeched. “For heaven’s sake. You old fool.”

  Work is our existence

  We must obey or die.

  We do not want to leave…

  Someone threw a cane. The cane clattered against the piano as the old singer slumped into the stooped old man that he had been. Al said Jesus Christ to himself as he saw, sitting in an easy chair in the front row, Jake Piorko, looking weary but bemused, his jowls hanging loosely. Al spun on his stool and to break the awkward silence, he played and sang,

  Embrace me, my sweet embraceable you,

  Embrace me, my irreplaceable you,

  Don’t be a naughty baby,

  Come to papa, come to papa, do…

  Al knocked, the door opened, and he stepped into Jake Piorko’s apartment. He took off his hat and brushed the nap of the pearl-grey crown with the forearm of his suitcoat. He said, “You need to know who I am.”

  “What’re you talking? You I know. I hired you, for God’s sake.”

  “But even so, you need to know who I am.”

  Hands on his hips, Jake leaned forward on his toes and looked into Al’s eyes. “I know you,” he said grimly. “You I seen a hundred times, it’s in your eyes. So what’s on your mind?”

  “A bird. A parrot.”

  “That fucking bird. You’re here because of that big-mouth bird? Dick Tracy would die laughing.”

  “Maybe you should be a little cautious.”

  “You’re telling me, a ninety-year-old alter kocker who has outlived Hitler and a bunch of other shitheels who’d like my fucking head, that I should be cautious. You gotta be kidding.”

  “I don’t kid.”

  “This, you’ll pardon the expression, is strictly for the birds.”

  “There’s a contract.”

  “So, you’ll break my ninety-year-old arm. This is pathetic. You gonna kill me?”

  “It seems.”

  “Likely story.”

  “That’s what I want to know. What’s the story?”

  “I got no story. Nobody who comes out of the camps has got a story. We got details. I got seventy years of details. You’re talking about I killed the bird. Sure, I killed the bird. This is an insult. You know how many thousands of men I seen killed.”

  “That’s part of it.”

  “And so?”

  “He says you were a Kapo.”

  “Big news. I’m supposed to worry, now, at this age, because back then, up to my nose in watery shit, I didn’t swallow? That I’m alive? Fuck. I smell that shit every day of my life. Men. Women. I smell it on you. How do you like that? And he thinks that that bird of his is some kind of joke on somebody. It’s no joke. And he thinks I should be sorry, for anything…”

  “Even so, we got a situation.”

  “Me, I’m all tired out. So you got a situation.”

  “That’s right. A contract is a contract. I got to do what’s got to be done. Otherwise it’s an embarrassment.”

  “An embarrassment?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I can’t believe this. I’m losing my mind.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “You’re fucking fermisshed. You want contract, I’ll give you contract. All my money, what am I gonna do with it? Whatever he offered, I’ll double it up. Turn it around, you want someone to kill, kill him! Put a parrot on his headstone.”

  Al put on his hat. “I can see I made a mistake,” he said.

  “The only mistake is if you don’t take my price.”

  “I come to you,” Al said, flushing with anger, “with a situation, to see if there could be some way to deal with this situation, and you make me a shmear, a cheap bribe that would make me a whore.”

  Jake sat down, crossed his legs, spread his arms, and looked around the room as if Al were not there, as if their confrontation was only a pause in a long weariness, and he turned back to Al and said, “Take off your hat, you’re in my house.”

  Al was so taken aback by Jake’s curtness that he took off his hat. Then he smiled indulgently at his quick compliance, but before he could say anything Jake said, “I tell you the kinda detail you don’t know nothing about. People talk about the camps, how all the deaths had no meaning, so God had to be dead, or maybe He never was. I got news for you. I said it then, I say it now. God was there. Auschwitz was as much His place as any other place, maybe more of His face was there than anywhere. I was no tzaddik,[10] I refused to quit. I wasn’t about to die, not in my own mind. I lived. I played the percentages. I stayed alive. The God of that place was with me, percentages that are a blessing, that’s what a rebbe told me.”

  “Talking to God is crazy,” Al said, uncertain of how to respond to the cold fury in Jake’s eyes.

  “So I tell you what I propose. Just like in the camp. Roulette.”

  He went to a side-table drawer and took out a gun. “Obviously I never lost…and so the deal is, I’ll play and the stakes are this. If I win, I get whatever Harry put up for this job, plus the twenty that I offered you, which you now pay to me, but you don’t have to do nothing.”

  “But if you lose…?”

  “I lose what I could’ve lost seventy years ago.” He turned and opened the door to one of the empty rooms in the apartment. “In here,” he said. “Here I got everything going for me.”

  Al, following him and seeing only an entirely empty white room, said, “There’s nothing here.”

  “You sure?”

  “Nothing is nothing.”

  “Maybe God’s here.”

  “There’s no God.”

  “Say hello to Hashem,”[11] Jake said. “We got a deal?”

  “I make you the contract.”

  Jake cracked open the gun, dropped six bullets into the palm of his hand, set one back into a chamber, and gave the cylinder a hard spin.

  He put the barrel of the gun in his mouth and stood watching Al watch him. Jake took the barrel out of his mouth and with a contemptuous knowing smile said, “I think you’re really gonna let me do it.”

  Al started to grin. He was playing the situation by ear, feeling sure of himself, that whatever was going to happen, it was going to happen as it should. Jake said, “Goddam, the way you’re watching me, you’re no different than the fucking SS,” and he shoved the barrel in his mouth, pulled the trigger, and blew out the back of his head.

  Harry and Al met in Switzer’s Delicatessen. Harry was wearing a beautiful broad-brimmed black hat with a grey band, Al a caramel-brown felt fedora.

  They ordered their usual chicken soup and matzo balls, smoked meat sandwiches, a side of young dills, and cheesecake.

  They said very little as they ate.

  They ate, as did several orthodox men in the restaurant, while wearing their hats.

  After coffee, Harry handed Al an envelope, ten thousand dollars in cash.

  “Maybe this is how life ends,” Harry said. “Two alter kocker
s sitting together with lots to say about nothing. Mind you, if we were wops we’d have nothing to say about a lot.”

  Al handed the envelope back to Harry.

  “There’s no contract. What I did was nothing. It’s got to be null. I was there, but I wasn’t responsible.”

  “You sure about this?”

  “Sure I’m sure. He loses, I lose, you win. As it should be.”

  “Except I got no Humbo, Humbo is dead. That fucking Kapo, he was no different than a Nazi…”

  “He told me I was no different than the SS…”

  “Out of his mind. Have a Rémy Martin on me?”

  “The drink of princes.”

  “Believe me, Al, you’re a prince.”

  “Sure,” Al said, “but wipe your lip, Harry. You got mustard on your lip. A guy with such a beautiful hat does not look good with mustard on his lip.”

  [1]A man makes plans, and God laughs.

  [2]For I desire not the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord God, return ye and live.

  [3]A criminal.

  [4]A spiv, a con man.

  [5]It rains, God blesses.

  [6]Noodle

  [7]Unclean. “Every animal that has a split hoof not completely divided or that does not chew the cud is unclean for you; whoever touches the carcass of any of them will be unclean.” LEVITICUS 11:26.

  [8]God punishes those who deserve it.

  [9]There is no one God doesn’t punish.

  [10]Confused.

  [11]A Righteous One, who calibrates justice correctly.

  THIRD PEW TO THE LEFT

  A man of about seventy came into a downtown bar every late afternoon, a small man who wore slacks and a sports shirt in the summer and a cardigan sweater over his shirt in the winter. His hair was white. There was a feeling of wry beneficence in his smile. He seemed to wish people well and to wish himself well. This had something to do with his being an old priest who drank, and sometimes he drank a lot if people at the bar bought him drinks.

  The woman who was the bartender always called out cheerfully when he came in, “Hello, Father Joe.” He smiled, pleased to be welcomed, but perhaps not wanting everyone to know that he was a priest. He took a chair by a small table in a corner, a table almost no one ever sat at unless the bar was crowded and usually it was crowded late at night, long after he had gone home to St. Basil’s, a residence close to the bar and close to the university, a home for young seminarians and old retired priests.