“Maybe he does need a vacation,” Rhoda said.
Celia leaned against the stump of a poplar, an old one by the look and smell of it, which was decaying. She saw something move in the cracks, and she wanted to throw up: a host of moving white maggots, squirming and undulating, while a phalanx of red ants moved inexorably forward for the kill. Rhoda saw them also.
“Uch. Let’s move, Momma.”
They walked downhill through the dales and flickering streams that caught the last aureole gold of sunlight before night came.
The hospital, King’s County, was a complex of gray interweaving buildings that twisted like a snake through the King’s Highway section of Brooklyn. It shared with Rockland State the questionable distinction of synonymity with madness. Jay nervously sat on a bench in front of the hospital’s emergency wing; a hot, sultry morning, typical of Brooklyn’s summer. He had in his hand a small bunch of violets. He could have purchased a gross of roses but had thought them inappropriate. Eva came down the steps, carrying a small plaid suitcase. Her lips were a startling cherry red in contrast to the pallor of her skin; her cheeks had lost their healthy appearance. The bones had moved up and the face had shrunk somewhat, and she moved shakily with uncertain jerks in her walk, which had become the exaggerated gait peculiar to the old and infirm. He had been unable to see or speak to her for two weeks, and Herbie had been buried at Beth David Cemetery while she was still in the hospital. She walked past him without turning her head; he jumped to his feet and caught her by the arm.
“I tried to see you, but your mother . . .”
“She meant well, I guess.”
He took the suitcase from her and put his arm around her shoulder.
“Well, I survived. Why, I’ll never know.”
He kissed her on the cheek, and his mouth sank into her flesh and he hated to move away.
“Baby, I love you. Baby, baby, baby.”
“Funny word to use,” she said.
“You want to go home?”
“I don’t live there anymore. My mother’s got Lorna.”
“I took a suite at the Peter Hamilton . . . for you,” he added.
She sighed and looked into the glare of the sun.
“Well, if I’m going to be somebody’s kept whore, it may as well be there.”
She allowed him to lead her to the car and got in without speaking. He drove to the downtown section of Brooklyn through a stream of marauding traffic, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the road. A number of times he wanted to speak but when he caught her out of the corner of his eye, she was staring out of the window.
The Peter Hamilton was an ochre monolith that sprawled over most of a city block; it was off to the side of the Manhattan Bridge and had a well-earned reputation for specializing in matinees and one-night stands. Twelve resident call girls did shift duty; and the bar, a noisy, dim, green room, known as the Aquamarine Room, with French Provincial frames on the backs of the booths, was the invention of some goggle-eyed subaqueous creature who was obsessed with goldfish, guppies, and myriad varieties of sea moss and rock all brought at great expense from Sheepshead Bay. The oceanographical motif extended to dressing the waitresses as mermaids and the barmen as deep-sea divers. The centerpiece of the bar was a plaster of paris bathysphere designed after Jules Verne. Jay and Eva went in for a noonday cocktail. A Neanderthal in a diving outfit, with a face like a crushed flounder, sidled over to them. Jay ordered a couple of whiskey highballs and lit a cigarette. Toying with a dessicated olive, he waited for her to say something. Nervousness and anxiety made him reach out for her hand, and she let him hold it. Her face under the green light was drawn and tired, with small pouches of shadow under her eyes, which were strangely lifeless and drifted from one mounted swordfish to another and finally rested on a shark.
“What have you been doing?” Eva asked, without curiosity. It sounded to Jay like the end of something; two people, who had shared something that had become unmentionable, meeting awkwardly after a time gap in their lives.
“Worrying about you, and wondering . . . and dying.”
She gave him a sharp look.
“How’s Neal?” She sipped her drink hungrily, and he called for another.
“The mountain air agrees with him and my mother’s there too . . . out of the hot city.”
“You’re a good son, and a good father, aren’t you?”
“Not good, but I care.”
She swallowed her highball almost as soon as the barman had put it down.
“You want to get squiffed, don’t you?”
“You’re paying, aren’t you, Jay?”
“It isn’t a question of money. But you’ve only come out of the hospital . . . what did the doctor say?”
“That I’ll live.” She took a cigarette out of his pack and tamped it on the bar until it broke. She threw it away and took another, and he lit it. “Well, have you got any master plan for me today? Fredericks or somebody like him whose throat we can cut?”
“That isn’t fair.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”
“I may have got Fredericks in an unethical way, but the simple fact of the matter is that he’s going to make about fifty thousand a year more out of me than he would have from a prestige outfit. He didn’t cry his eyes out when he signed the contracts.”
“I guess you’re just a misunderstood good Samaritan.”
“Eva, please let up. The last thing I want us to do is argue.”
She took another pull from her highball and then laid her head on his shoulder, and started to cry silently with a kind of forlorn resignation that enveloped him in a web of despair.
“The terrible part of it,” she said, “is that I’m to blame. I tried to reason with him, to be logical. We went to dinner at his brother’s house, and it was all very pleasant and harmless and we all had a few drinks after dinner and then we went home. Herb wasn’t much of a drinker. You’d never believe to look at him that he was an athlete when he was younger - the fastest sprinter on his high school track team. Oh, Christ. . . So, when we got home, he got a little romantic and I told him I couldn’t - he hasn’t been near me since the day . . . He started to plead with me, and then he said: ‘If I was that nigger-rich, East Side gangster, you wouldn’t hesitate.’ There it was, out in the open. We sat down in the living room, and I said: ‘Let’s see if we can straighten ourselves out . . . We’re both young enough to make new lives.’ I asked him for a divorce, and he shook his head stubbornly. Said something about Jewish people never divorcing, oh, I don’t know. I was very calm, and I told him that I had to have one - that I was having your baby, and we couldn’t live together - it wasn’t fair to him or you. He smiled at me, as though the whole thing was a joke that I had made up . . . he smoked a cigarette, then did a crazy thing for him, because he was so fussy and house proud in a childish sort of way. He took his cigarette and stubbed it out on a silk cushion. I just couldn’t believe my eyes. When I pulled the cushion away from him, it had a hole in it, and the feathers were smoking inside. He got to his feet and started to walk past me. Then he stopped and said: ‘Eva, you decide who loves you more: me or Blackman. Just you decide, and if it’s Blackman then put a sign on the door in big black letters so that everybody who walks in can see it, God is my enemy, that’s what you put on the sign.’ He pushed me out of his way and went into the bathroom and got into the bathtub. I didn’t know what to do. I heard him stomping in the bathtub and then there was a shot . . . and oh . . .”
Jay’s mind drifted away from the scene. He had a vision of Neal at thirteen on his bar mitzvah day wearing a blue serge suit about four sizes too large for him, and a rabbi with a long gray beard of gnarled and twisted hair, touching both his shoulders. But he couldn’t see Neal’s face. In the synagogue was a gaping hole in the side window that allowed a current of wind to blow the silken curtains that covered the Torah. It irritated him, and he could not lift his eyes from the curtain. Then someone said in Polish: “
Today you are a man.” He knew why he couldn’t see Neal’s face, nor imagine what it would be like thirteen years hence, for it was his own face that he was trying to piece together in the tangled strains of his memory. His own face . . . and he could not see it. He felt an awful chill cut through his bones.
“I . . .” He started to say something, but his tongue was thick and felt like a piece of cracked leather.
“We’re in it together,” Eva said, after a long silence. Her eyes darted nervously around the room. “Nobody’s said ‘to have and to hold . . .’ but it doesn’t much matter.”
He took hold of her hand and ran it along the side of his face as though it were the beginning of an enticement, cold and bloodless and without joy.
“Eva . . . Eva . . . you should have told me you were pregnant.” She pulled her hand away and picked up her drink.
“I had some crazy idea about telling Herb that it was his. But that would have meant, well . . . and I was in the third month, so it was too late. But you see, when he came close to me and touched me, like I was an old possession that he’d suddenly found again, I couldn’t . . . It was a case of you or him and maybe a question of character, of trying to do the decent thing. Of thinking to myself: ‘I’m cheating on both of them if I do it. And me, I’m lost somewhere in between in a kind of spittoon.’ I kept thinking of a spittoon I’d seen in a western where dirty old cowhands used to stand with a foot on the brass bar rail and aim at the spittoon. And God, it made me sick. Maybe I wanted to make up to him for all the times I’ve lied about where and who I was with and telling the truth to make up for lies is like forcing poison down someone’s throat. He only wanted to touch me, and I suppose I should have let him, but the thought nauseated me.” She pointed an accusing finger at Jay: “It’s what you’ve done to me” - he turned his face as though to avoid a slap - “the way you’ve made me feel. With Herb when we first got married I had to be the boss, do the leading, and I never much liked it and after I met you, well it was different, fantastic . . . I didn’t have to be the man. At first I hated the idea of letting you take over because there was something humiliating about being told to sit at the foot of the table and then I realized that I liked the idea - talk about knowing yourself, I didn’t know or understand the first thing about myself - that it had to be your way.”
She stood up, her eyes glassy and her face twitching, and he got up after a minute and dropped some money on the bar and followed her out.
The hotel apartment he had rented for her was expensive and well-furnished. There were two rooms, and a small kitchen in an alcove off the sitting room, which was a low-toned dove gray with a white ceiling and fussy wainscoting of embryonic swans and ducks. Three armchairs, a settee in gray velvet, and two end tables with lamps completed the room. A reproduction of an eighteenth-century pastoral scene somewhere in rural England hung over a defunct tiled fireplace; on the wall opposite there was a faded picture of the ruined façade of a classical building. What the room lacked was even the suggestion of character; in fact, it was this total lack of any distracting feature that in the end distracted the eye and forced it to search feverishly for a place to rest. Jay opened a closet and showed her about twenty expensive dresses he had bought her. Her eyes rested on a gray Persian lamb coat, also new. She put it on and looked at herself in the full-length mirror behind the bedroom door.
“My trophies. You get away with murder, and you get presents. Who says that crime doesn’t pay?”
“What’s the point of holding it against yourself? You wouldn’t have told him if you’d known . . .”
She threw her head back and laughed.
“But that’s exactly what I would have done. I couldn’t save the man’s life even if I wanted to.”
She brushed past him and walked into the sitting room. Two bottles of whiskey, like sentinels, stood on the mantelpiece, and there was a bucket of ice on a table and a bottle of soda. She poured them drinks and swallowed hers before he took his from her.
“Well, what’s it to be?”
“What? I don’t understand.”
“Do you want to make love or don’t you? It’s your money, honey.”
“Just what the hell are you talking about?”
He started for the door angrily and had his foot in the corridor before she rushed to stop him.
“Jay, please don’t walk out on me. Please don’t . . . I can’t help myself.”
His face was ashen and his eyes cloudy and he bit his lip to control himself.
“Honestly, Eva, I can’t bear to listen to you. Do you think I don’t know it’s my fault . . . It’s on my conscience. I love you.”
She pushed the door closed and led him to the settee.
“I’ve got you in my bones and when you say . . . I feel like my stomach’s been cut open, and my guts are hanging out.” He sighed fitfully. “I’ve made a wreck of everything. What I’m trying to say is that I’m not sorry for myself or for you . . . It’s just that you’re my life and . . .”
She kissed him lightly on the mouth and then there was the sound of a rattle deep in his throat as though a machine had broken, and he began to moan with a destructive force that nearly crippled him.
“Sorry,” he said. “Only once before . . . and that was a long time ago and for a different reason. Or maybe it was the same reason. When somebody else’s life was ruined.”
“It’s okay.” She rubbed his back affectionately. “You do have some guts and character. People live through tragedies, I guess. It changes them, but they go on when they’ve got a reason to go on . . .”
“It’s summer and we should be happy, having some fun. Crazy the way things work out. When you haven’t got a penny, money is the big problem, and the obstacle to get over - and, when you do make some, all sorts of other things take its place.”
“Couldn’t we go away for a while?”
“I only wish I could, but I’ve got to keep on top of the business and to see how the new sites are taking shape. It’s full time.”
“A few days?”
“I’ll try.”
She hugged him, and his body relaxed. They were together and she knew that whatever he was, whatever he stood for, if he was anyone, if he had any scruples, that she would be pulled along by him and that there was no way one could swim out of a maelstrom, one simply had to accept the fact that one would be drawn into the eye, and the hideous acceptance of this fact, whether one protested or submitted, had no bearing on the final and inevitable outcome. For good or ill, Jay had become her family, the center of her universe. Without him her life would be unendurable, a misshapen and warped controversy with time, a divorce from reality so deadly in its consequences that she might as well never have been born.
When Jay had had a few days to consider the situation he came to the conclusion that his brother’s betrayal - and he was convinced that it was a betrayal - of his secret had somehow arranged destiny, or rearranged it, and had been the direct cause of Eva’s confrontation with her husband. His first impulse was to beat Al’s head in, but by the time he saw Harry Lee, he managed to simulate a degree of calm.
Harry’s office was a study in muted stripped pine - a small desk overlooked the frantic commerce of Thirty-Ninth Street, and if you stretched your head, you could see the wide junction it made with Seventh Avenue.
Harry poured him a drink and put his feet on the desk.
“Frankly, I’m puzzled,” he said. “Haven’t you got enough on your plate, without looking for trouble?”
“I want to be my own supplier. I’ve got my own retail outlets . . . what do i need a middleman to get twenty percent?”
“It’s an entirely different kind of operation . . . manufacturing. You don’t know a thing about it. And I don’t like partners.”
“You’ve got a factory in Syracuse that isn’t paying.”
Harry sucked an ice cube until it melted in his mouth.
“How do you know it’s not paying? Everything i do pays.”
> “This one don’t. You’ve got two hundred people sitting on their behinds because they haven’t got enough work. They make for Marty . . .”
“Did he say . . . ?”
“Not a word . . .”
“I’ll cut his balls off if he’s opened his mouth.”
“You’ve got a lot of faith in him.”
“He’s my son-in-law, isn’t he?”
“But the fact is he’s a great salesman. He could sell glasses to a blind man. The trouble is, he makes a shitty dress, and he doesn’t know how to run a business, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t valuable.”
“So what happens? He makes for you exclusively . . . is that what you’re suggesting?”
“No, he makes for me and the trade as well, but the stuff he makes for me is exclusive . . . originals, no knock-offs.”
“You ought to write for the Marx Brothers, Jay. Who ever heard of a five-dollar exclusive?”
“Eva’ll design them. But what she designs for me she doesn’t sell to the chains. They’ll have to buy the knock-offs, and you can make them in a better-priced dress.”
“But that’s turning everything upside down.”
“That’s the gimmick. If you get a runner in a cheap dress, you can do it for the higher-priced stores. The whole point is that you’ve got to give the public what it wants - cheap or expensive, so long as it’s what they want.”
“Don’t quote my own words at me. I’ll say one thing for you, Jay: you may be a nut case, but you’ve got some good ideas.” He picked up the telephone and said: “Lemme have the Syracuse factory records.”
Seventh Avenue Page 22
