Billy Bathgate

by E. L. Doctorow

  I noticed of the people examining the horses that they were very nattily got up in horse-theme sporting wear, the men with silk cravats, more than one with a long cigarette holder like President Roosevelt’s, and they all had a certain nose-in-the-air carriage that made me square my shoulders. No one was as beautiful as Drew but they were her long-necked people, all very straight and thin, with an assurance bred into them, and I thought it would be nice to have a program showing their lines and specifications. At any rate I began to relax somewhat. I calmed down. This was an impregnable kingdom of the privileged. If anyone from the rackets was here he would be highly visible. I felt from the one or two discreet glances given me that though I wore clothes of Drew’s rich good taste and had taken the trouble to put my studious fake eyeglasses on, I just about pushed them to the limits of their sniffing tolerance. The thought passed my mind that Drew knew what she was doing in her own way of making the world, just as Mr. Schultz did, without sufficient thought.

  After a turn or two around the ring, the horses were led out through a passageway into what appeared to be an amphitheater, as far as I could see from my angle of vision, with an audience in tiered seats and an announcer. Drew motioned to me and we went outside and around to the lighted front entrance, where the chauffeurs stood beside their cars, and came into the amphitheater and saw the same horses from a height under the stagey lights of the auction ring while the announcer or auctioneer proclaimed their virtues. And then they were held by the bridle in front of his podium while he directed the bidding, which came not as far as I could see from any of the people in their tiered seats but from employees like himself stationed here and there in the crowd who communicated the bids offered invisibly and in silence by the patrons on whose behalf they acted. It was all very mysterious and the sums were astonishing, going up in leaps and bounds to thirty, forty, fifty thousand dollars. These numbers frightened even the horses, many of whom saw fit to drop manure behind them as they were walked into the ring. When this happened a Negro man in a tuxedo appeared with a rake and shovel and quickly removed the offense from sight.

  That was the whole show. I saw as much as I wanted to see in about three minutes but Drew couldn’t get enough of it. Up behind the stands where we were, there was a constant traffic of people wandering around and looking each other over in a kind of unconscious imitation of the horses circling the ring below. Drew met a couple she knew. Then a man came over and soon she was in a small group of chatting friends and she made no reference to me whatsoever. This put me in the frame of mind of the shadow I was supposed to be. I was full of scorn, the women greeting one another appeared to kiss cheeks but in fact laid them together for a moment side by side and kissed the air beside each other’s ear. People were glad to see Drew. I had a sense of an adenoidal group resonance. There was some giggling I imagined was directed at me, an entirely unreasonable assumption, which I also realized, but it made me turn away and lean on a railing and look down at the horses. I didn’t know what I was doing here. I felt all alone. Mr. Schultz had held Drew for some weeks, clearly I was a strong enough novelty only for a couple of days or so. I had made a mistake to reveal my fears. Fears did not hold her interest. I had told her about Julie Martin’s death and it was as if I had said I had stubbed my toe.

  Then she appeared at my side and gave me a sideways hug and we looked together down at a new horse being led into the ring and in thirty seconds I was back in abject love. All my resentment dissolved and I reproached myself for questioning her constancy. She said we ought to have some supper and suggested we go to the Brook Club.

  “You think that’s smart?” I said.

  “We will be what we’re supposed to be,” she said. “The moll and her shadow. I’m starving, aren’t you?”

  So we took a cab to the Brook Club and it was really an elegant place, with an awning all the way to the curb and beveled-glass doors and leather-padded walls, a horsey kind of place in dark green with little shaded lamps on the tables and prints of famous racehorses on the walls. It was somewhat larger than the Embassy. The host looked at Drew and wasted no time in showing us to a table right up front near a small dance floor. This was the man I was supposed to contact if I had to but he looked right through me and Drew did all the ordering. We had shrimp cocktails and aged sirloin steaks and hash browns, and chopped salad with anchovies, I hadn’t realized how hungry I was. She ordered a bottle of red French wine, which I shared with her, though she had most of it. It was so dark in the club that even if friends of hers from her horsey set were there they couldn’t have seen far enough in that low and heavily shadowed light to recognize her. I began to feel good again. There she was across the table from me, we were cocooned in our own light, and I had to remind myself I had had intercourse with her, that I had had carnal knowledge of her, that I had made her come, because I wanted to do this all over again, but with the same yearning as if it had never happened, with the same questions about her, and wonderings and imaginings of her physical quality, as if I was looking at an actress in a movie. This was the moment I began to understand that you can’t remember sex. You can remember the fact of it, and recall the setting, and even the details, but the sex of the sex cannot be remembered, the substantive truth of it, it is by nature self-erasing, you can remember its anatomy and be left with a judgment as to the degree of your liking of it, but whatever it is as a splurge of being, as a loss, as a charge of the conviction of love stopping your heart like your execution, there is no memory of it in the brain, only the deduction that it happened and that time passed, leaving you with a silhouette that you want to fill in again.

  And then musicians came out on the bandstand and they were my friends from the Embassy Club, the same group, with the same skinny lackadaisical girl singer who pulled at the top of her strapless evening dress. She sat on a chair to the side and nodded in time to the first number, an instrumental, and I caught her eye and she smiled and gave me a little wave, bobbing her head in time to the music all the while, and I felt very proud to be recognized by her. Somehow she communicated my presence to the other members of the band, the saxophonist turned to me and dipped his horn and the drummer laughed to see the company I was keeping and he twirled his sticks at me and I felt right at home. “They’re old friends,” I said to Drew, over the music, I was happy to be able to reveal the dimension in me of Man About Town, I felt in my pocket to make sure I hadn’t lost Mr. Berman’s thousand dollars, I thought it would be appropriate to buy the band drinks when they finished the set.

  Drew toward the end of the dinner was a little bit looped, she sat with her elbow on the table and her chin propped in her hand and gazed at me with an aimless smiling affection. I was very comfortable now, the darkness of a nightclub is sustaining, it is a kind of shelter of controlled darkness as opposed to the open darkness of the real night with the weight of the whole sky of unfathomable possibilities, the music seemed so clear and figurative, they were playing standards, one after another, and every lyric seemed meaningful and appropriate and every melodic line of the solos had the clarity of a sweet truth. And as it happened one of the songs was “Me and My Shadow,” which made us laugh—Me and my shad-ow, strolling down the aven-ue was its sly lyric, and it came to me that a kind of message was being sent of the conspiracy we all made together, I half expected Abbadabba Berman to scuttledance into the room, it was the old thing, as usual I never felt safe from Mr. Schultz when I was separated from him, Drew’s idea to come here was a good one, if we were being watched we were doing the right thing having dinner in his club, getting the money back to him as loyalists would, this was his realm and because it made me feel closer to him to be here I wasn’t afraid anymore.

  I decided to worry no longer and make no decisions but trust our fate to Drew’s impulses, to put myself at her disposal like a real companion in Mr. Schultz’s interest, she knew more than I did, she had to, and what I perceived as her impracticality had the power of her nature. She really did know her way around, an
d for all her recklessness she was still alive. She was, in fact, quite safe in Saratoga. I was, in fact, looking after her for Mr. Schultz. I didn’t know whose idea it had been that she come here, but I felt now that she could as easily have initiated this trip by claiming not to want to leave Onondaga as Mr. Berman could have by insisting that she should.

  But then people began dancing on the little dance floor in front of our table and when she wanted to dance with me I strongly suggested that it was time to go home. I paid the bill but got her advice on the tips, and on the way out I left money with the bartender for the band’s drinks. We took a cab back to the Grand Union Hotel and went prominently to the separate doors of our adjoining rooms and, once inside, met giggling at the open door between them.

  But we slept in our own beds and when I woke in the morning I found a note on my pillow: She had gone to have breakfast with some friends. She said I should buy a clubhouse admission and meet her for lunch at the track. She gave me her box number. I loved her handwriting, she wrote a very even line with round letters that were almost like printing and she dotted her i’s with little circles.

  I showered and dressed and ran downstairs. The two men were not there. I found real morning papers in the lobby newsstand and took them with me to the front porch and sat and read them all in a big wicker chair. The jury had been chosen. The defense had used none of its peremptory challenges. The actual trial would begin today, and the prosecutor was quoted as saying he thought it would take a week at the most. The Daily News had a picture of Mr. Schultz and Dixie Davis conferring with their heads together in a corridor outside the courtroom. The Mirror showed Mr. Schultz coming down the courthouse steps with a big fake smile on his face.

  I left the hotel and went along Broadway till I found a drugstore with a phone booth. I got a handful of change and asked the operator for the number Mr. Berman had given me. To this day I don’t know how he was able to secure a number for a phone the phone company didn’t know anything about, but he answered on the first ring. I told him we had gotten into town as scheduled, gone to the yearling sales, and were going to have a day at the races. I told him Mrs. Preston had met some of her friends here, silly people with whom she had nothing but silly conversation. I said we had had dinner at the Brook Club but that I hadn’t felt the need to identify myself to the man there because everything was going fine. I told him the truth about these things, knowing that he would know it already.

  “Good for you, kid,” he said. “You want to parlay some of your expense money?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “There is a horse who will be the number-three position in the seventh race. That will be a good bet with handsome odds.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “How do I know, look at your program, just remember the number three, you can remember a three can’t you?” He sounded testy. “Whatever you earn you can keep. You take it with you to New York.”

  “New York?”

  “Yeah, get yourself on a train. We’ll need you to do some things. Go home and wait there.”

  “What about Mrs. Preston?” I said.

  At that moment the operator cut in and asked for another fifteen cents. Mr. Berman had me give him the phone number I was calling from and told me to hang up. I did and almost immediately the phone rang.

  I could hear a match striking and then the exhaling of a lungful of smoke. “That’s twice now you mentioned people by name.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But what do I do about her?”

  “Where is the tomato at this moment?” he said.

  “She’s at breakfast.”

  “A couple of friends of yours are on the way. You’ll probably see them at the track. Maybe one of them will even give you a lift to the train station you ask him nicely.”

  This is what I thought as I strode the streets of Saratoga, around the block and then around again, as if I was going somewhere, as if I had a purposeful destination: They had given me all that money, clearly more than I could use up in a day or even two, it was a week’s big-time spending, hotel bills, restaurants, and paying for the play bets Drew Preston might want to make. Something was different. Either they really did need me in New York, a kind of advance man of the return to town, or they wanted me where I would not be in the way, but something had changed. Perhaps with Drew out of sight, Mr. Schultz had been persuaded of the danger she represented, perhaps his alienation was merely a reflection of hers, Mr. Berman seemed to think Mr. Schultz was perilously in love, but as I thought about it, after the first week or so when they were together in my company, Mr. Schultz ignored Drew more often than not, she became more like his display, an embellishment that added to his presence rather than someone he doted upon or squeezed the hand of, or seemed to deeply care about in the fond and foolish way people in love comport themselves. Whatever decision had been made, it seemed to me only expedient to assume it was of the nature of nightmare. I am proud of this boy I was, thinking through his cold dread, and you know the quickest thinking is the thinking of the body, and the body thinks surely, errorlessly, because it is not soaked in character as the brain is, and my best guess was of the worst that could happen, because I didn’t remember coming in from the street or going through the lobby, but I found myself becoming aware that I was in my room and I was holding my loaded Automatic in my hand, I was holding my gun. So that was what I thought. The worst was he had turned against her, he needed more death, he was using up his deaths so quickly now he needed them faster and faster. What would she say, what would she do to him, if he wasn’t able to protect himself, pinned down by the law, with the gang flying apart like a bomb had hit, and he abandoned and alone like one of those bombed screaming children of China, with the rubble falling down around him?

  It was peculiar that Mr. Schultz knew everything about betrayal but the way it worked, in the freedom of the joyfully voracious spirit of all of us, or else why would his Abbadabba take the trouble to give me a horse? Mr. Schultz lacked imagination, he had a conventional mind, Drew was right, he was ordinary. Nevertheless I now faced enormous executive responsibilities, I had to bring things to pass, I had to engage people to do things I thought they ought to do and from a position of no authority whatsoever. As I thought about it, men in movies who got things done had assistants and secretaries. On a card right in front of me was the Grand Union Hotel’s list of services, including a masseur, a barber, a florist, a Western Union office, and so on. I had an entire hotel at my disposal. I steeled myself and picked up the phone and in my lowest, softest voice, affecting the kind of nasality of speech of Drew Preston’s friends, I informed the hotel operator that I wanted to reach Mr. Harvey Preston at the Savoy-Plaza in New York, and if he was not in residence to find out from the operator there his forwarding number, which might, perhaps, be Newport. When I hung up my hand was shaking, I, the juggler extraordinaire. I assumed it would take some time to locate Harvey, undoubtedly in bed somewhere with the company of his taste, so I called Room Service and they very respectfully took my order, which was honeydew melon and corn flakes and cream, scrambled eggs and bacon and sausages and toast and jelly and danish pastry and milk and coffee, I just went right down the menu. I sat in a wing chair by the open windows and tucked my Automatic behind the cushion and waited for my breakfast. It seemed to me very important to remain quite still, as one does in a very hot bath, so as to be able to endure it. Mickey would be driving and probably it was Irving with him because whatever they wanted to do would require precision in Saratoga, and perhaps patience, and something deft and sad in its effect rather than outrageous. I liked them both. They were quiet men and bore no ill will toward anyone. They didn’t like to complain. They might inwardly demur but they would do their job.

  I thought of what I would say to the elegant Harvey. I hoped he would be near a phone. It could even be white. He would hear me out having had the most perfunctory concern for Drew’s safety over the summer because of the steady flow of charge account bills or
canceled bank checks that had undoubtedly come to him in the mail. I would represent myself as transmitting his wife’s wishes. I would be very businesslike. In my mind at the moment I had no personal interest at all in Mrs. Preston, certainly nothing that would tinge my voice with love or guilt. Not that I could ever feel guilty toward Harvey. But apart from that, I had lost in this situation any capacity at all for the eroticized affection, it wanes pathetically in terror, I not only could not remember making love with Drew, I could not even imagine it. She didn’t interest me. There was a knock on the door and my breakfast was wheeled in and the very cart it came on was gatelegged out under its white linen cloth into a dining table. All the food was served in or under heavy silver. The melon was set in a silver bowl of ice. I had learned last night from Drew not to overtip and got the bellboy out of the room with aplomb. I sat feeling my gun in the small of my back and stared at this enormous breakfast as if I carried Bathgate Avenue where I went, with all the sweet fruits of the earth spilled on my plate. I missed my mother. I wanted to be wearing my black-and-white Shadows jacket. I wanted to steal from the pushcarts and hang around the beer drops and catch a glimpse of the great Dutch Schultz.