Underworld

by Don DeLillo

“The mother is Irish Catholic. And there’s another son. One of my former students. One semester only. Bright, I think, but lazy and unmotivated. He’s sixteen and can quit school any time he likes. And I’m speaking on behalf of the mother now. She wondered if you’d be willing to spend an hour with him. Tell him about Fordham. What college might offer such a boy. What the Jesuits offer. Our two schools, Andy, directly across the road from each other and completely remote. My students, some of them don’t know, they remain completely unaware of the fact that there’s a university lurking in the trees.”

  “Some of my students have the same problem.”

  Bronzini remembered to laugh.

  “But what a waste if a youngster like this were to end up in a stockroom or garage.”

  “You’ve made your plea. Consider your duty effectively discharged, Albert.”

  “Dip your biscotto. Don’t be bashful. Dip, dip, dip. These biscuits are direct descendants of honey and almond cakes that were baked in leaves and eaten at Roman fertility rites.”

  “I think the task of reproducing the species will have to devolve upon others. Not that I would mind the incidental contact.”

  Bronzini leaning in.

  “In all seriousness. Have you ever regretted?”

  “What, not marrying?”

  Bronzini nodding, eyes intent behind the lenses.

  “I don’t want to marry.” And now it was the priest’s turn to lean forward, shouldering down, sliding his chin near the tabletop. “I just want to screw,” he whispered electrically.

  Bronzini shocked and charmed.

  “The verb to screw is so amazingly, subversively apt. But conjugating the word is not sufficient pastime. I would like to screw a movie star, Albert. The greatest, blondest, biggest-titted goddess Hollywood is able to produce. I want to screw her in the worst way possible and I mean that in every sense.”

  The small toothy head hovered above the table in defiant self-delight. Bronzini felt rewarded. On a couple of past occasions he’d taken the priest into shops and watched him taste the autumnal pink Parma ham, sliced transparently thin, and he’d offered commentaries on pig’s blood pastry and sheets of salt cod. The visitor showed pleasure in the European texture of the street, things done the old slow faithful way, things carried over, suffused with rules of usage. This is the only art I’ve mastered, Father—walking these streets and letting the senses collect what is routinely here. And he walked the priest into the acid stink of the chicken market and pushed him toward the old scale hung from the ceiling with a lashed bird in the weighing pan, explaining how the poultryman gets twenty cents extra to kill and dress the bird—say something in Latin, Father—and he felt the priest’s own shudder when the deadpan Neapolitan snapped the chicken’s neck—a wiry man with feathers in his shirt.

  “If I were not so dull a husband we might sit here and tell stories into the night.”

  “Yours real, mine phantasmal.”

  The priest’s confession was funny and sad and assured Albert that he was a privileged companion if not yet a trusted friend. He enjoyed being a guide to the complex deposits around them, the little histories hidden in a gesture or word, but he was beginning to fear that Andy’s response would never exceed the level of appreciative interest.

  “And when you were young.”

  “Was I ever in love? Smitten at seven or eight, piercingly. The purest stuff, Albert. Before the heavy hormones. There was a girl named something or other.”

  “I know a walk we ought to take. There’s a play street very near. I think you’d enjoy a moment among the children. It’s a dying practice, kids playing in city streets. We’ll finish here and go. Another half cup.”

  He signaled the girl.

  “Do you know the famous old painting, Albert? Children playing games. Scores of children filling a market square. A painting that’s about four hundred years old and what a shock it is to recognize many games we played ourselves. Games still played today.”

  “I’m pessimistic, you think.”

  “Children find a way. They sidestep time, as it were, and the ravages of progress. I think they operate in another time scheme altogether. Imagine standing in a wooded area and throwing stones at the top of a horse chestnut tree to dislodge the sturdiest nuts. Said to be in the higher elevations. Throwing stones all day if necessary and taking the best chestnut home and soaking it in salt water.”

  “We used vinegar.”

  “Vinegar then.”

  “We Italians,” Albert said.

  “Soak it to make it hard and battle-worthy. And poke a hole through the nut with a skewer and slip a tough bootlace through the hole, a lace long enough to wind around the hand two or three times. It’s completely vivid in my mind. Tie a knot, of course, to keep the chestnut secured to the lace. A rawhide lace if possible.”

  “Then the game begins.”

  “Yes, you dangle your chestnut and I bash it by launching my own with a sort of dervishy twirl. But it’s finding the thing, soaking the thing, taking the time. Time as we know it now had not yet come into being.”

  “I tramped through the zoo every year at this time to gather fallen chestnuts,” Bronzini said.

  “Buckeyes.”

  “Buckeyes.”

  “Time,” the priest said.

  Across the room the girl filled the cups from a machine. Father Paulus waited for her to slide his cup across the table so he could let the aromatic smoke drift near his face.

  Then he said, “Time, Albert. Both of you must be willing, actually, to pay a much higher price. Hours and days. Whole days at chess. Days and weeks.”

  Bronzini had his opening, finally.

  “And if I’m not willing? Are you? Or not able. If I’m not able to do it. Not equal to the job. Are you, Andy?”

  The priest looked at the knot in Albert’s tie.

  “I thought you wanted advice.”

  “I do.”

  “Please. Do you think I’d even consider tutoring the boy? Albert, please. I have a life, such as it is.”

  “You’re far more advanced than I, Father. You’re a tournament player. You understand the psychology of the game.”

  Paulus sat upright in his chair, formally withdrawing, it seemed, to a more objective level of discourse.

  “Theories about the psychology of the game, frankly, leave me cold. The game is location, situation and memory. And a need to win. The psychology is in the player, not the game. He must enjoy the company of danger. He must have a killer instinct. He must be prideful, arrogant, aggressive, contemptuous and dominating. Willful in the extreme. All the sins, Albert, of the noncarnal type.”

  Chastened and deflated. But Albert felt he had it coming. The man’s remarks were directed at his own genial drift, of course, not the boy’s. His complacent and easy pace.

  “He shows master strength, potentially.”

  “Look, I’m willing to attend a match or two. Give you some guidance if I can. But I don’t want to be his teacher. No no no no.”

  Now the grandmother appeared with an opened bottle of anisette crusted at the rim. When Bronzini asked how she was feeling she let her head rock back and forth. The liqueur was a gesture reserved for select customers and took earning over time. She poured an ashy dram into each demitasse and the priest colored slightly as he seemed to do in the close company of people who were markedly different. Their unknown lives disconcerted him, making his smile go stiff and bringing to his cheeks a formal flush of deference.

  She left without a word. They watched her glide moon-slow into the dimmed inner room.

  “I don’t know what to tell you about the older brother,” Paulus said.

  “Never mind. I asked only because the mother asked. It will all straighten itself out.”

  “We have an idea, some of us, that’s taking shape. A new sort of collegium. Closer contact, minimal structure. We may teach Latin as a spoken language. We may teach mathematics as an art form like poetry or music. We will teach subjects tha
t people don’t realize they need to know. All of this will happen somewhere in the hinterland. We’ll want a special kind of boy. Special circumstances,” Paulus said. “Something he is. Something he’s done. But something.”

  When they stood to leave and the priest was gathering his books, Bronzini took his cup, the priest’s, and drained it of sediment, tipping his head quickly—espresso dregs steeped in anisette.

  They shook hands and made vague plans to stay in touch and Father Paulus started on the short walk back to the Fordham campus and Albert realized he’d forgotten his own suggestion about visiting the play street nearby. Too bad. They might have ended on a mellower note.

  But when he walked past the street it was nearly emptied out. A few boys still playing ringolievio, haphazard and half speed, the clumsy fatboy trapped in the den, always caught, always it, the slightly epicene butterfat bulk, the boy who’s always reaching down to lift a droopy sock and getting swift-kicked by the witlings and sadists.

  Is that what being it means? Neutered, sexless, impersonalized.

  Dark now. Another day of games all ended, or nearly all—he could hear the boys’ following voices as he made his way down the avenue. And when it ends completely we find ourselves abandoned to our sodden teens. What a wound to overcome, this passage out of childhood, but a beautiful injury too, he thought, pure and unrepeatable. Only the scab remains, barely seen, the exuded substance.

  Ringolievio coca-cola one two three.

  A faint whiff of knishes and hot dogs from the luncheonette under the bowling alley. Then Albert crossed the street to Mussolini park, as the kids called it, where a few old men still sat on benches with their folded copies of II Progresso, the fresh-air inspectors, retired, indifferent or otherwise idle, and they smoked and talked and blew their noses in the street, leaning over the curbstone with thumb and index finger clamped to old shnozzola, discharging the stringy stuff.

  Albert wanted to linger a while but didn’t see anyone he knew and so he joined the small army of returning workers coming around the bend from Third Avenue, from the buses and elevated train.

  Time, finally, to go home.

  She sat there, Rosemary Shay, doing her beadwork. She had the frame set on two small sawhorses. She had the four bolts screwed in that held the frame together, those bolts with wing nuts at one end. She had the material pinned to the edges of the frame. She had the wood-handled needle that she used to string the beads onto the material, following the printed design—greenish beads arrayed on a flossy thread.

  She heard Nick doing something at the kitchen table.

  She said, “You should go get the meat.”

  She did her beadwork and listened to him doing whatever he was doing. Writing something, it sounded like, but not for school, she didn’t think.

  She said, “It’s paid for. And they close soon. So you should think about going.”

  She did her beadwork, her piecework. Sweaters, dresses and blouses. She did whole trousseaus sometimes, working off the books just as Jimmy had.

  She did her work and listened to Nick, finally, go out the door. Then she went and looked at the piece of paper he’d left on the table. Made no sense to her at all. Arrows, scrawls, numbers, circled numbers, a phone number in the Merian exchange, letters with numbers next to them, some simple additions and divisions—all scribbled frantically on the page.

  She listened to the radio and did her work. She made an official salary, the money she reported, answering the phone for a local lawyer and typing wills and deeds and leases, mostly, and immigration forms, and listening to the lawyer’s funny stories. He told all the new jokes and had a backlog of a thousand old ones and he liked to sing “The Darktown Strutters’ Ball” in Italian, a thing he did more or less automatically, like breathing or chewing gum.

  The job was good for her because it put her in contact with other people and because it had the virtue of fairly flexible hours. And the money, of course, was life and death.

  Bronzini walked toward Tremont, past apartment buildings with front stoops and fire escapes, past a number of private homes, some with a rosebush or a shade tree, little frame houses beginning to show another kind of growth, spindly winged antennas.

  He was wondering about being it. This was one of those questions that he tortured himself deliciously with. Another player tags you and you’re it. What exactly does this mean? Beyond being neutered. You are nameless and bedeviled. It. The evil one whose name is too potent to be spoken. Or is the term just a cockney pronunciation of hit? When you tag someone, you hit her. You’re ’it, missy. Cockney or Scots or something.

  A woman rapped a penny on the window, calling her child in to dinner.

  A fearsome power in the term because it makes you separate from the others. You flee the tag, the telling touch. But once you’re it, name-shorn, neither boy nor girl, you’re the one who must be feared. You’re the dark power in the street. And you feel a kind of demonry, chasing the players, trying to put your skelly-bone hand on them, to spread your taint, your curse. Speak the syllable slowly if you can. A whisper of death perhaps.

  Half a block from his building, on a street where the Italians thinned out and the Jews began to appear. And approaching now to see his mother in the first-floor window, cranked up in her special bed, white hair shining in the soft light.

  Baseball’s oh so simple. You tag a man, he’s out. How different from being it. What spectral genius in the term, that curious part of childhood that sees through the rhymes and nonsense words, past the hidings and seekings and pretendings to something old and dank, some medieval awe, he thought, or earlier, even, that crawls beneath the midnight skin.

  The young man struck the match with one hand. He’d learned this when he first started smoking, about a year ago, although it seemed to him that he’d been smoking forever, Old Golds, isolating the match by closing the cover behind it and then bending the match back against the striking surface below and driving the head with his thumb. Then he brought the flared match up to his cigarette, his hand cupping the whole book with the match still secured. He lit up, shook out the flame and conceded use of the other hand to pluck the spent match from the book and send it to match hell.

  You need these useless skills to make an impression on the street.

  The science teacher fading into the evening, southbound, and his former student Shay, a mopey C-plus in introductory chemistry, walking the other way on the same street, into the shopping district, taking deep drags on his cigarette, with numbers running in his head.

  Ever since the game yesterday, Nick’s been seeing the number thirteen. The game, the mass hurrah, the way he crouched over his radio, ready to puke his guts all over the roof. All day today, thirteens coming out of the woodwork. He had to get a pencil to list them all.

  Branca wears number thirteen.

  Branca won thirteen games this year.

  The Giants started their pennant drive thirteen and a half games behind the Dodgers.

  The month and day of yesterday’s game. Ten three. Add the digits, you get thirteen.

  The Giants won ninety-eight games this year and lost fifty-nine, including the play-offs. Nine eight five nine. Add the digits, reverse the result, see what you get, shitface.

  The time of the home run. Three fifty-eight. Add the digits of the minutes. Thirteen.

  The phone number people called for inning-by-inning scores. ME 7-1212. M is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet. Add the five digits, old thirteen.

  Take the name Branca—this is where he started going crazy. Take the name Branca and assign a number to each letter based on its position in the alphabet. This is where he started thinking he was as crazy as his brother doing chess positions or probabilities or whatever the kid does. Take the name Branca. The B is two. The r is eighteen. And so on and so on. You end up with thirty-nine. What is thirty-nine? It is the number which, when you divide it by the day of the month of the game, gives you thirteen.

  Thomson wears number twen
ty-three. Subtract the month of the year, you know what you get.

  Two guys were pushing a car to get it started. Nick nearly went over to help but then didn’t. He was done with baseball now, he thought, the last thin thread connecting him to another life. He saw the old man who dressed as a priest, more or less, wearing a cassock sometimes with house slippers, or one of those ridged black hats a priest wears, blessing the fucking multitudes, and ordinary shabby street clothes.

  He walked into the butcher shop. The bell over the door rattled and the butcher stood above the block, Cousin Joe, hacking at a pork loin.

  The other butcher said, “Hey. Look who’s here.”

  He said it the way you say something in passing, to no one in particular.

  Cousin Joe looked up.

  “Look who’s here,” he said. “Nicky, what’s the word?” The other butcher said, “Hey. He wants to be called Nick. You don’t know this?”

  “Hey. I know this guy since he’s four years old. A little skinny malink. How long you been coming in here, Nicky?”

  Nick smiled. He knew he was only a stationary object, a surface for their carom shots.

  “I seen him with that girl he goes with. Loretta,” the second butcher said.

  “You think he’s getting some?”

  “I know he is. Because I look at his face when they walk by.”

  “Nicky, tell me about it. Make me feel good,” the butcher said. “Because I’m reaching the point I have to hear other people’s, you know, whatever it is they’re doing that I’m not doing no more.”

  “I think he’s a cuntman. Up and coming.”

  “This is true, Nicky?”

  Nick’s mood was improving.

  “I think he’s getting so much there’s not enough left over for the rest of us,” the second butcher said, Antone, barely visible behind the display case.

  “Make me feel good, Nicky. I stand here all day, I look at them go by. Big women, short women, girls from Roosevelt, girls from Aquinas. You know what I say to myself. Where’s mine?”

  “Nicky’s got yours. He’s got mines too.”

  “Him, I could believe it.”