by Otto Penzler
Without looking back, the old man raised a hand and waved. Then he put on his fedora and pushed open the door.
It was snowing furiously, the snow swirling, blinding him. He stepped back inside the warm casino. He would have to wait it out. He looked around the casino to see where he could rest awhile until the snow let up. There were only a few people in the brightly lighted coffee shop. Losers staring down into their cold cups of coffee. No, that would be too depressing. Then he saw the OTB room, off to his right, with its plush chairs facing the big TV screen relaying the horse races from California and Florida. He had never liked the ponies. Too many variables. He preferred to be in control. He only bet on things where he could find an edge. He remembered what an old-timer had told him once. You can never beat the race, you can only beat the price, and even that was risky. Better to past-post the bookie, at least that way you were sure of winning. If you didn’t get caught.
The old man went into the OTB room and sat down in a plush chair that faced the big-screen TV and the odds board beside it. There were only a few other bettors, looking bored, sitting around him, passing time like those lost souls who passed a Wednesday afternoon in a movie theater in a strange city. A movie theater was where you passed an afternoon if you were in a strange city on the hustle, or a bum who just wanted to sleep, or a degenerate looking for sex.
He took off his hat and coat and tried to relax. A girl in a skimpy hostess costume moved through the room, taking bets and drink orders. When she stopped beside him, she smiled down at him, and said, “Can I get you something, sir?”
“Just a scotch and water, honey,” he said. He watched her walk away. Her high-heeled, open-toed shoes were too big for her feet, so she had stuffed cotton in the back.
He sat there, sipping his drink, and watched the races coming from Hialeah. It was a sunny day in Florida. The horses walked between the towering Royal Palms onto the track, and then warmed up with a jog around the track. There was a small lake in the center of the track where a flock of pink flamingos, which didn’t look real, nested.
The horses were at the starting gate now for the Flamingo Stakes. A trumpet blew and the flamingos rose up in a whirl of pink wings and flew around the track from the starting line to the finish line and then they floated back down to earth in a cluster around the lake. Then a bell rang and the gates opened and the horses came thundering out…
The old man remembered when he was in his twenties he had gone to Hialeah not to bet on the ponies, but on the hustle, he didn’t know what hustle, it would come to him, he always did like to improvise, and as a sort of winter vacation where he could rub elbows with the swells from Palm Beach who came down to Hialeah in their own special train. The men wore top hats and cutaway waistcoats and striped pants and spats. Their women wore big, floppy-brimmed hats and pastel-colored chiffon dresses and white gloves to their elbows. They all sat in the reserved dining room at tables set with cut-glass crystal and heavy silverware and china so fine you could see through it. All the napkins were a flamingo pink and the tablecloths a pale green. The old man, in his twenties then, sat with them, after he had slipped the maitre d’ a C-note, a lot of money in those days. He was dressed in a creamy cashmere double-breasted suit and brown-and-white spectator shoes. He looked around at the swells, sizing them up for a hustle. He saw Joe Kennedy, with his big eyeglasses and buck teeth, sitting and laughing with Gloria Swanson.
A girl stopped by his table and smiled down at him drinking his scotch and water. She was a beautiful blonde in a pale pink dress, with her floppy-brimmed hat pulled over one eye.
“You shouldn’t drink alone,” she said, and sat down across from him. He was handsome then, with his slicked-back hair and pale blue eyes, and straight nose. But he had never been much of a ladies’ man. Or a drinker. He had a theory, even then, that a man has enough time in his life for only one vice. Booze, broads, gambling. If you’re going to do it right, he figured, you had to pick one and stick to it.
He sat with the girl, whose name he couldn’t remember now, almost sixty years later. He drank his scotch and she drank her pink lady and they talked. He had taught himself things he knew he would need on the hustle, things he had gotten mostly from books, The Great Gatsby, how to dress, the stock market, Ivy League schools, although he could never get over his habit of saying Darthmouth instead of Dartmouth, but they never caught on, although his cronies did, laughing at him, calling him Ivy League. Maybe that was his hustle on that day, just fitting in with the swells, that girl, with no one the wiser. She just assumed he was “one of our crowd,” so she chattered away about Palm Beach and how boring it was in-season, all the old fogies, but her mother insisted she spend her spring break from Wellesley with the family during High Season, especially since Daddy had a horse running in the Flamingo Derby.
“It’s all so boring,” she said as she held up a cigarette in a long mother-of-pearl holder. He lighted her cigarette with a silver lighter he had won in a craps game. She held his hand, looked into his eyes, and blew out the lighter in a way she had seen in a moving picture once.
“Your father has a horse in the Derby?” he said. “Tell me about it.”
“Oh, he’s just some old horse Daddy bought that nobody wanted. I don’t understand any of it. The bloodlines and all that. It seems silly, Daddy keeping his horse out of races until now, like it’s some big secret. Who cares?”
But the old man, a young man then, cared, and after a few moments, he excused himself and went to the hundred-dollar window and placed a G-note on the nose of Daddy’s horse, which came in first by three lengths. The girl never knew. She was still sitting there, waiting for him to come back, when he collected his winnings, and then walked down the grandstand to the long dirt path that smelled of hay and horseshit, with the sun slanting across his path through the towering Royal Palms that lined the path that led through wrought-iron gates to his car.
The old man smiled to himself. The only time he’d ever scored off the ponies and he owed it to a woman. He checked his watch. It was getting late. He got up and left the OTB room and went outside. It was still snowing, but not so bad now. He hugged himself against the cold and walked carefully through the parking lot so he wouldn’t slip. When he got to his old Volkswagen beetle, it was covered with snow. He swept the snow from the roof, and the front and rear windows, with his bare hands that stung from the cold snow. It snapped him alert, heightened his senses after the long hours in the warm casino smelling of smoke and cheap perfume and sweat. It would be a long drive home. Two hours in nice weather. He checked his watch. Five p.m. He’d be lucky to make it home by nine in the snow. If he got home any later, his wife would be worried.
The old man drove slowly on the highway rutted with snow. He put on his windshield wipers to keep the snow from accumulating. He passed a few cars at first, and then none. Cars were pulled off onto the side of the highway, buried in snowdrifts. The old man hunched forward over the steering wheel. He rotated his neck to ease a cramp. It exhausted him to stand for hours at a craps table now that he was an old man. He still wasn’t used to it. Old man. When he was younger, in his fifties, he could shoot pool for twenty-four hours straight, pocket his winnings, throw cold water on his face, wash off the baby powder and blue chalk dust on his hands, straighten his rep tie, button his double-breasted navy blazer, and take all his cronies out for a big meal. He smiled to himself. Cronies. An old man’s word. Fellow card sharps and shills and past-posters like Tommy the Blonde and Freddie the Welch and Schiamo. Club fighters with scar tissue around their eyes like Billy Bones. Baggy pants vaudeville comics with leering eyes, and their girlfriends, strippers with yellow hair that smelled of peroxide. But they always acted like ladies when he took them out to dinner, especially in front of his wife. She was respectable in their eyes, if for no other reason than that she was his wife, now, of sixty years. He always paid for those big dinners. He liked paying. But there was no one to buy dinner for now.
He must have gunned the a
ccelerator in his reverie because the car was slipping sideways. He stabbed at the brake and the car made a full, spinning circle in the snow, disorienting him for a moment, before he managed to straighten it out and continue down the highway.
“For Crissakes!” he said out loud. “Pay attention!” He hunched over the steering wheel again and forced himself to concentrate. That was the thing about getting old. Everyone thought it was about memory, but it was about concentration. It just flew out of his head without warning. He knew he had lost much of his physical stamina, but at least he knew the limits of the stamina he had left. He could adjust to that. But his concentration was something else. He never knew when he’d lose it until it was gone. A hazard in his profession.
It was getting dark so he flipped on the headlights. The bright lights illuminated up ahead in the darkness the falling snow, the passing trees, the abandoned cars, and, in his mind’s eye, the faces from his past.
He saw an old Sicilian with elaborately curled and waxed mustaches. Mustache Pete, he called him. Pete sat on a milk crate, reading // Progresso and smoking a crooked Toscano cigar in front of the heavy, bolted door of the Venice Athletic Club. He watched out for the polizia while behind that door, the old man, younger then, forty, dealt hands of poker, from the bottom of the deck. His pink, soft fingers flicked cards around the table faster than a blink.
He saw the face of the French-Canadian logger he had just past-posted in a horse race in a small town outside of Montreal. The logger’s face was purple with rage, his features contorted, his breath smelling of whiskey only inches from the old man’s face. The old man was in his thirties then. He thought he was invincible. He looked into the Frenchman’s eyes and smiled, even as the Frenchman pressed the cold blade of his hunting knife against the old man’s throat. “Go ahead,” the old man said. “Let’s see if you got the moxie.”
The old man would never forget that look of open-mouthed disbelief on the Frenchman’s face when he realized that even with a hunting knife against his throat, the old man would not pay up.
He saw the faces of the mean, rednecked farmers in a small town pool hall in upstate New York when they finally realized they were being hustled by the old man, in his twenties then. One of the farmers moved toward the front door and another moved to the backdoor. The old man laid his cue stick on the table in the middle of a game, and excused himself. He went to the men’s room, hoisted himself up on the sink, pried open a painted-shut window high above his head, climbed out, and walked quickly to his car. That was one of the first lessons the old man learned about hustling in a strange pool hall. Always check the bathroom window before you begin to play.
He saw the faces of the bearded lady and her husband, the Geek, at the county fair, where he’d begun his life on the road at the age of fifteen. The old man was fresh out of the orphanage where he’d spent most of his early life. He got a job as a roustabout at the fair and then moved up to the shill in the pea-under-the-pod scam. The bearded lady felt sorry for him. She invited him to dinner one night. She roasted a chicken. Hours earlier, her husband, salivating insanely in a cage, had entertained the rubes by biting off the head of that chicken. The old man remembered how he struggled to keep a straight face after dinner when the Geek tossed a head fake toward his wife, washing dishes, and said, “Don’t get any ideas about my old lady, kid.”
He heard a harsh voice and opened his eyes to see the white, moonlike face of a nun, dressed in her black habit, looming over him in the darkness of the dormitory room where he slept, a child of six, with fifteen other boys in the orphanage. The nun leaned over, her face close to his and smelling of an astringent cleaner. She whispered harshly again, “Come on, Pasquale, time to get up, lazy bones. Get dressed.”
He rubbed sleep from his eyes and got out of bed. He did as he was told and dressed.
“Hurry, now,” she said. “We don’t have much time.”
“Where are we going, Sister?”
“To visit your mother.”
“But I don’t have a mother.”
“Don’t be silly, boy. Everyone has a mother.”
He followed her outside into the early morning darkness of a muggy, August day. The big yellow school bus was already parked in front of the Gothic stone orphanage, its motor running, its tailpipe spewing smoke. Sister opened the door, hiked up her skirt, revealing her black stockings and the stale smell of her sex, and climbed up and settled into the driver’s seat. He climbed up after her and sat behind her as she ground the gearshift into first and the bus lumbered down the long driveway, turned right onto the street, and began moving slowly through the Italian ghetto, past old, three-story houses with three floors of porches, and little gardens in back of tomato plants growing out of Medaglia D’Oro coffee cans. The bus stopped at a red traffic light across from Nanny Goat Park. Old men, smoking crooked Toscano cigars, sat on benches and watched their goats graze on the grass as the sun came up.
When they reached the hospital, the nun held his hand tightly, and hurried down the hallway past doctors and nurses in white, half dragging him behind her, her habit billowing up into his face. When she came to a door, she stopped. She opened the door and pushed him through it. He stopped and turned back to her. “Go on,” she said. “I’ll stay here.”
“But what do I do, Sister?” he said, tears welling up in his eyes.
“Go talk to your mother. She doesn’t have much time left. Go on, now.”
He turned and saw a shape lying on a cot, a white sheet pulled up to its neck. The shape had thick, wild, black hair spread out on a pillow. He moved closer to see its face. It was a beautiful face, with dark eyebrows, a straight nose, and full lips, except that the face was gaunt, her skin the color of a storm cloud. Her eyes fluttered open. They were as blue as a summer’s sky. Her face turned toward him. She studied him with her blue eyes for a long moment and then her lips turned up into a faint smile.
“Pasquale, meo fillio” she said, and then gasped for breath. When her gasping subsided, she reached out her hand and touched his cheek with her cold fingers. She smiled and said, “Te amo.” Then her eyes opened wide in terror and her hand gripped his shoulder so tightly it hurt. He wanted to pull away, but he couldn’t. She said loudly, as if pleading, “Pasquale, me dispiacel! Me dispiace!” Then she began gasping for breath again, and her hand fell off his shoulder, dangling beside the cot, and her head fell back onto the pillow.
He heard the nun’s harsh voice from the doorway. “That’s enough, Pasquale, don’t tire the poor girl. Come.”
Riding back to the orphanage in the bus, he sat behind the nun and said, “Who was that, Sister?”
“Your mother. Who else?”
He was quiet for a while as the bus moved past Nanny Goat Park in the morning light, now. He saw the young mothers in their summer dresses, sitting on the benches in the park, talking to one another while they held their babies tight to their breasts so they could drink their milk.
Finally, he said, “But I thought I didn’t have a mother, Sister.”
“Don’t be foolish. I told you everyone has a mother.”
“Then if she’s my mother, why didn’t she want me?”
The nun glared at him through the little mirror that hung over the windshield. “Don’t you ever say that, understand? Understand? Of course she wanted you, but what could she do, a girl, a child, really, fifteen, with no husband. She had no choice but to give you to us so we could take care of you.”
He was quiet again as the bus turned the corner toward the orphanage. Then he said, “What’s my mother’s name, Sister?”
“Rose.”
He said his mother’s name out loud. “Rose.” He smiled to himself. “What did my mother say to me?”
“She said, she hoped you would forgive her. Then she said, she loved you very much because you were her son.”
He sat back in his seat as the bus moved up the long drive toward the orphanage. He remained in the orphanage for nine more years and every night of
those years he dreamed for the first time since he could remember. It was always the same dream. He dreamed about his mother, her wild, black hair and her blue eyes. Her name was Rose, he knew that now, and she had loved him, and that was all he would ever know.
• • •
The old man pulled the Volkswagen into a snowdrift in front of his apartment building. He heard the wheels crunch over the snow and then felt them sink deep into the snow. Tomorrow morning he’d have to dig out the car. The snow was still falling in darkness. It was ten. The light was on in their third-floor apartment window. He saw his wife’s face pressed to the window. He beeped the horn once. She waved and moved away from the window.
He stamped the snow off his shoes in the hallway. His feet were cold and wet. He held on to the stair rail as he climbed the three flights of stairs. He had to stop at each flight to catch his breath. He was breathing heavily when he reached the third floor. The gambling and the drive had exhausted him. He had never felt so numbingly tired before in his life.
His wife opened the door. “I was worried about you, honey,” she said.
He kissed her on the cheek. “It was nothing,” he said. “I took my time.” He took out the bills from his pocket. “I made almost two bills.”
She smiled. “Good,” she said. “I kept dinner warm.” She hobbled off in her aluminum walker toward their tiny kitchenette.
He brushed off the snow from his fedora and hung it and his overcoat on the coatrack behind the door. He sat down at the dining room table in their threadbare apartment that smelled of things old and worn. Plastic sheeting covered the Mediterranean sofa and easy chair they’d had for years. There were two large sepia-tinted photographs on the dining room wall. The old man in his twenties, balding even then, but handsome. His wife at sixteen, with luxuriant, wavy black hair and dark eyes. A pretty girl then. Now she was just an old woman in a worn housedress, hunched over, with swollen ankles, mottled skin, and a thin puff of white hair. The old man bent over and took off his wet shoes and socks. He looked at his slim, white feet.
