At the beginning of April, after the divorce settlement had been agreed upon, and the hearing in court announced, she was startled one morning to hear his voice on the telephone. It was like a voice disembodied and eerie, coming from the back of an empty theater, and she wanted to ask to whom it belonged.
“I thought I should call you . . .” he said in a halting, strained manner, “. . . my mother died yesterday. I thought you’d want to know.”
“Oh, Jay. I’m so sorry. It’s so sudden.”
“I loved her, you know.”
“I know you did. I did too, in my own way. She wanted us to be happy.”
“She loved you and Neal very much. It was a coronary . . . one, two, three. They couldn’t do a thing. Funeral’s today.”
“I’d like to go, if . . .”
“I’d appreciate it if you would. I mean you’re still my wife, and oh, God, Rhoda, I’m so unhappy I don’t know what to do. I’m falling apart.”
“It’s terrible, I know.”
He gave her the address of the chapel and then said: “I’d pick you up, but I’m not allowed to drive.”
“I’ll go to the cemetery. It’s maybe better that I don’t come to the chapel.”
There was a long silence, and she wondered if he had hung up, and she felt stupid and dazed because she had forgotten to ask the name of the cemetery.
“It’s Beth David,” he said. “Twelve o’clock . . . and thanks.”
The cemetery ground had not thawed, except in isolated spots, and made a crunching sound underfoot. The wind howled through the treeless open space, and Rhoda walked carefully across the frozen scrubs of crabgrass, trying to avoid the pasty red loam. She wondered how Jay had reacted when the lawyer had asked him to sign over his King’s Highway store to her, for she had been surprised when he had acceded to the demand without ever raising it with her. The cash settlement had been agreed to at once, but the store was like one of his limbs. She didn’t know why she had asked for it except perhaps to hurt him; then she remembered that the suggestion had come from Howard, who had insisted that she would be better off usefully occupied in business than moping around the house. She had told this to her lawyer, not caring how things turned out, and now she realized that the store would indeed give her something to do, and she was anxious to resume working again.
She stood behind a gray mausoleum, which was adjacent to an open hole which, the guide had said, was the plot that Celia Blackman would be buried in. She made an effort to reconstruct Celia’s face, but it would not take form. All that manifested itself was her angular figure, the thin reedy voice, the knotted veins on her hands, the halting walk as though she was perpetually carrying a burden, and the gold teeth like gates across her mouth.
A string of black cars followed an embowered hearse down the small road. The cars stopped, and a covey of black-veiled women extricated themselves from them. Some distance behind the others another car drew up, and a woman with red hair got out and stood by the front fender observing the procession. Rhoda recognized Eva and couldn’t understand how she had learned of the arrangements - unless she and Jay . . . She pondered the idea for a moment, concluding finally that Jay had gone back to her.
Behind a crowd of pallbearers tiptoeing like ravens after prey, she caught sight of Jay, trudging slowly forward over the hard muddy ground, his head lowered. At the graveside, the casket was set down, and Jay, white-faced and trembling, peered down at the hole and shuddered. A small, gray-bearded figure stepped out of the crowd and said a prayer in Hebrew, then the casket was lowered. She came out from behind the gray wall and walked towards Jay. Before she reached him she heard a terrible moan over the staccato of the prayer that made her flesh crawl, and she recognized that its point of origin was Jay. His mouth was open, and he was howling like some wild bereft animal. Dumbfounded, she halted about five feet from him, but the howl, the groan, the unutterable agony of the cry continued until his father leaped forward and slammed him across the mouth with the back of his hand.
“You dirty bestid,” he squalled. “You crying for why? You kilt her!”
He continued to lash out with his fists and Jay covered himself up with his elbows.
“Oh, Mommmmmmmmma . . . Aieeeeeeee,” he groaned, sinking to his knees.
Rhoda rushed up to him and seized the old man’s flailing arms.
“Stop it, stop it,” she shouted.
“You, Rhoda?” the old man said softly. “What you doink?”
“It’s a cemetery . . . have respect for her,” she said.
“Respect? He kilt her. Filtee bestid. With his own Momma he slept. She couldn’t forget it, and it kilt her.”
Jay rose slowly from the ground, his trousers streaked with mud, and his fists clenched. In a quiet, mournful voice he said:
“Liar,” and walked through the throng of shocked faces to the road. Rhoda trailed after him and caught up with him. He turned to look at the crowd at the graveside. Only a few heads still watched him.
“Tell me,” she said. “It’s not true, what he says.”
“He’s a liar. Never, and I swear on her, did I ever . . .”
“And that’s the truth?”
“What’s ruined me is not what I did, but what I wanted to do one afternoon a long time ago, and I’ve never forgiven myself for it, but she did. She forgave me, thank God.”
She watched him get into the car with Eva. The car drove slowly down the rutted, muddy road, and she stared after it until it disappeared. He had needed her, for a moment, and now it was over.
The divorce relieved Neal’s tensions and simplified matters, for it settled the question of divided loyalties. What before had been a tyrannical struggle between two hostile factions, with his affection as the prize, degenerated into sporadic skirmishes between them over the years, and Neal felt neither loyalty nor disloyalty towards his parents: he tolerated them, and lived his life within the eye of a hurricane, so that they could not touch him. He had unconsciously slipped into the solipsist position, and at the age of twelve had developed the defenses of the practiced pessimist. What he wanted most was to be rid of Rhoda and Jay, as well as of Eva, whom he despised with an intensity that enraged him when he so much as thought of her. He accepted his mother’s frequent and casual affairs with strange men who from time to time showed up at the apartment, then vanished as though they had fallen off the earth. He forgot about them and so did Rhoda. He was dark and thin like Jay, with Rhoda’s green eyes, and the brooding manner of a man who has had a disastrous love affair, so that nothing could ever again be the same. In many ways, he had inherited Rhoda’s capacity and penchant for suffering, but this was tempered by an equal ability to inflict pain both on himself and others. Because he was clever and an astute judge of the weaknesses of other people, there was something menacing about him, which Rhoda recognized and feared. It wasn’t merely the way he said: “You can stay out all night if you like,” when she informed him that she was going out on a date, or playing cards with friends, but the detached manner in which he said it - never insisting, or pointing out that he had a prior claim on her time - and his total lack of involvement. They had a tacit understanding that neither of them transgressed. It amounted to laissez faire and made them companionable.
On a Friday, at about seven in the morning - Neal remembered the day clearly because it was the fourth weekend and he always spent it with Eva and his father - he was surprised to find a man sleeping on the sofa in the living room. He went into his mother’s room and discovered her in a deep sleep, then he returned to the living room where the man had shifted on his side so that Neal could get a good look at his face without standing over him. He saw a square face with lank mottled brown hair, a long hooked nose with hairs dancing in the nostrils from the snores, and skin that was sallow and pocked like a piece of pigskin. The man had a small jaw, and his beard was patchy. His clothes had been folded neatly across a chair in the dining room, and his socks were pushed into a pair of navy blue suede shoes.
Neal dressed quietly; for his mother always slept till ten, getting into the store at eleven, and they had an arrangement between them based on mutual respect for the sleeping - and apathy. Fully dressed, the scraped brown leather strap tied round his books, Neal prepared to leave. He studied the man who had now rolled over on his stomach, then went back into the dining room. He took all of the man’s clothes, except the shoes and socks, and left the apartment, shutting the front door with the stealth of a professional thief. He tiptoed down the stippled concrete hallway and decided to walk down the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. On the third floor, he stopped on the half-landing to see if he was being followed. Then he approached the incinerator and stuffed the clothing down it. He picked up a bag of garbage that had been left in the incinerator room and pushed it in to make certain that the clothes would not be trapped.
Bernard Zimmerman was waiting for him at the candy store.
“You’re early,” Neal said. “I haven’t had any breakfast yet.”
“I had to see you, so I rushed out,” Bernard said, with a note of excitement. He was a short, plump boy with a square-shaped face, irregular teeth, kinky red hair, and an assortment of blackheads on the bridge of his nose.
Neal ordered his breakfast; it never varied: orange juice, a chocolate malted and toast with cream cheese. He had all his meals in the candy store because Rhoda never finished at the store till well after nine, and she had arranged for him to charge all his meals there. He hated the man who ran it, a balding, greasy individual with a mustache and watery gray eyes, by the name of Levy. Levy was a thief: everyone in the neighborhood knew Levy was a thief, except Rhoda, and Neal never bothered to tell her.
“My mother says she saw a man come up with your mother, and that the man didn’t leave,” Bernard said with sympathetic concern. “Did he sleep over?”
Neal bit into his toast and decided to tell Bernie what he had done: Bernie was his best friend, and Bea Zimmerman was the only pleasant adult woman he had ever met.
“I fixed his wagon,” Neal said.
Levy stared at the two boys and edged closer.
“Whadyuh do?” Bernie exclaimed.
“Shush, he’s listening. Levy, why don’t you jerk off?”
“Dirty-mouthed little bastard.”
“Don’t curse, or I’ll take my business across the street and you won’t be able to pad any more bills.”
Levy gave him a murderous stare, then commenced chopping the tuna fish salad.
“So? I’m busting to hear.”
“I never saw the guy before. Found him sleeping in the living room. He had one of those shiny suits . . . a silk job, and I stuffed it down the incinerator.”
Zimmerman inflated his cheeks, then slammed them with the palms of his hands and made a small exploding sound that indicated shock. A gob of saliva dribbled down his lower lip.
“Neal, you’re crazy! Your mother’ll kill you.”
“She won’t say a word . . . she’ll be shitting in her pants about me telling my father.”
“But the guy’ll beat your head in.”
“I fuck him where he breathes. If he sleeps in strange people’s houses, then he must be used to this sort of thing.”
“Jeez, you’ve got nerve. He could be a tough guy or somethin’ who ain’t afraid. Maybe your mother likes him and wants ta marry him.”
“She can marry a nigger for all I care. One shitheeler’s the same as the next.” He pushed his plate out of the way and said: “Levy, mark it up. Thirty-five cents, not sixty-five, gonif.”
“Awright, Neal,” he said with a snigger. “Pretty cute kid, aren’tcha?”
“Smarter than you. C’mon, Bernie, or we’ll be late. One more ‘late’ and my mother’ll have to come to see the teacher.”
“Were you warned?”
“Yeah, warned, but they won’t do anything ‘cause my marks are good.”
“The second highest in the school,” Zimmerman said admiringly.
At 3:30, the two of them returned to Zimmerman’s apartment, as they did every day for milk and chocolate Mallomars that Bea provided. She was a warm, friendly woman, incredibly obese, short-tempered, sloppy, with an obsessional passion for crossword puzzles, which she solved with an adeptness only a poorly educated person can develop. Neal liked her - her evil-smelling kitchen with its grease marks on the ceiling, her ragged dressing gowns, her slovenly habit of picking the wax out of her ears with a hairpin and then rolling it up into a ball and surreptitiously dropping it on the floor - and he respected her for never sentimentalizing and not treating him with the treacly emotionalism that most adults displayed and that he realized was not concern but the capacity for enjoying the troubles of others. He knew that Bea disapproved of his parents, but she never allowed it to cloud her judgment.
“We’re going to the schoolyard, Mom,” Bernie said.
“Be back at five on the dot ‘cause Neal’s got to pack his suitcase.”
“Oh, I forgot . . .”
“Fourth weekend of the month,” Neal said. “That’s the sentence the judge passed.”
“Oh, it’s not so bad, Neal. Wahme to help you pack?”
“No, I can manage, but can Bernie wait with me till my father comes?”
“Sure.” As they were about to leave, she called out: “Bernie, don’t forget to bring me the three evening papers.” They also had crossword puzzles. Twice before, Bernie had not brought them, and she had beaten him.
“We only got an hour,” said Bernie. “You wanta play stickball or should we go on the roof for a smoke?”
“The roof. I got three Camels left.” He winked at Bernie. “Bit early for Lady Farberman.”
“You never know,” he said hopefully. “Remember, last Thursday when we cut assembly we caught her tickling her titties in the bathtub?”
They took the elevator up to the sixth floor and stealthily crept up the side flight of stairs that led to the roof. Bernie peeked through the door.
He whispered: “Mrs. Klein’s hanging her washing.”
“Can we sneak past?”
“Yeah, I think maybe. Clock this, Neal. She’s got her ass to the wind, and her bloomers are waving hello.”
“She’s got varicose veins, ugh.”
“Not in her ass.”
“Oh, Bernie, she’s awful. An old douchebag.”
“What’s a douchebag?”
“Dunno. I heard my father call some woman it.”
“C’mon, tipsy-toe past.”
They turned sharply around when they were outside and climbed up the metal ladder that brought them to a smallish house with an apex-shaped roof that had an enormous angular skylight. This was the top of the elevator shaft, and they could hide behind the jutting skylight if anyone came. Neal took out two crumpled cigarettes, cupped his hands to light a match, and on the third try managed to light his own. Bernie got a light from his cigarette, and Neal’s almost went out. He puffed hard on Neal’s cigarette to save the light, and Neal said testily:
“Don’t niggerlip it for shit’s sake.”
“Sorry. Here, I didn’t wet it.”
The view of Brooklyn was panoramic, and they could see as far as King’s Highway, the cars and people like ants under a rock.
“My father says Brooklyn’s the asshole of the world.”
“Funny thing to say.”
“He wants me to move out to Great Neck with him and Eva.”
“Ahhh, Neal, you won’t, willya?” Bernie asked him with desperation. “We’re best friends and we’d never see each other.”
“I tell him I’d like to, so that when I want something he gets it for me. Can’t do any harm.”
“But he could tell your mother that you want to go, and then you’d be up shit’s creek.”
“The judge gave her custody of me . . . my father’s only got visiting rights, so he can’t have me even if I wanted to go. I just string him along, like he strings me along. Hey, Kleinhorse’s picking up her clothespins and going,
” Neal said.
“Should we have some fun?”
“Like what?”
“Throw ink on her clothes?”
“Don’t be a schmuck! They’d send the super up to find out who did it, and the first stop he’d make would be my house.”
“I hate him . . . the Nazi bastard,” Bernie said, spitting at the skylight.
“Just ‘cause he’s German doesn’t make him a Nazi.”
“I hate his guts,” Bernie said bitterly.
“So, he pushed you once. But he was right, wasn’t he? After all, you did stop the elevator between the floors for an hour.”
Bernie screwed up his face and did his imitation of the Hunchback of Notre Dame - his tongue twisted to the side, his nose tilted up, the pink of his eye hanging open like a gash.
“That’s what I’d like to do to him, and if he ever touches me again, he’ll get his good and proper. I’ll get him fired,” he threatened.
“What’re you talking about?”
“I got something on him, don’t you worry!”
“The truth?”
Bernie nodded.
“What is it?”
“I don’t know if I should say.”
“But we’re best friends. Aw, c’mon, I tell you everything, don’t be a rat.”
“Tuesday night I came up to the roof.”
“Without me!” Neal was incredulous.
“You were playing basketball at the community center. I brought my father’s binoculars up with me - the ones he uses when he goes to the track. And I saw him with Lady Farberman.”
Seventh Avenue Page 34
