* * *
In the morning he washed himself, wet his hair and combed it back, used her razor to shave his face. He left her naked and curled and sleeping, felt bad for her though he could not say why. He left her an extra hundred dollars, then went to the diner by the college next to the subway station and drank tea and waited.
He still had the professor’s brochures in his pocket, along with a map that he had torn from the whore’s telephone book. Around noon he walked onto campus, past the security booth and parking gate, through the roaming clusters of students. He headed into the building, up the stairs, knocked on the professor’s door.
The professor answered and said, “Hello.” An awkward smile. “I didn’t order.”
“I know.” His suitcase in one hand, brochures in the other, he said, “I had some questions about these classes. Could I ask you?”
The professor paused, looked at his watch. “Sure. I have a few minutes. Come in.”
* * *
The professor was bigger than he had thought. His pants fit him so loosely he needed to pull the belt in as tight as he could. The shoes were at least a size too big, as were his shirt and undershirt. The blazer was big enough to cover him so he did not look saggy and suspicious. All over he could smell the professor’s cologne, but there was nothing he could do about that right now.
He had left the empty suitcase in the office, had moved the money into the professor’s book bag and another bag he had found in his desk drawer. Close to the train station he found a barbershop where he pointed at a picture on the wall and the barber cut his hair down close, then closer, so when he was finished he looked like a teenager again. Inside the station he looked around and did not know where he would go. He looked at the professor’s watch on his wrist, then walked through the massive corridors of the station. With the professor’s glasses he saw things with a new clarity. He got his shoes shined, then stopped at a rack with postcards of New York’s wondrous sites: the big famous buildings, the pretty parks and rich museums, the baseball stadium with the crossed N and Y emblazoned in white over the field. He took a card out of the rack and gave the man at the counter a dollar.
A young Chinese couple helped him figure out the schedule. He paid for his ticket in cash, pulled the bills from the professor’s wallet. He would hold onto the IDs just in case he needed them, until he felt it was safe to be no one again.
On the train he kept both bags at his feet. There were mostly old white people around him, some in suits, some dressed for a day of leisure. No one looked at him or bothered him. The train car was air-conditioned and very cold. The conductor checked his ticket and nodded and then the train was rolling. He pulled the postcard from his blazer pocket and stared at the green field, trying to imagine the next mirage of his life, until they were out of the tunnel and barreling beyond the city.
HEY, GIRLIE
BY JOANNE DOBSON
Sedgwick Avenue
Hey, girlie,” the voice rasped down at me from the fourth-floor window. “I want you should get me a coconut cake over by Phillips the baker. Make sure it got a nice red cherry in the middle. And don’t smoosh it on the way home like you do the bread.”
A coconut cake? Holy crap—Mrs. Blaustein must be in the money. It was usually a nineteen-cent loaf of Wonder Bread with her. The quarter’d come spinning down from the fourth floor, and I’d catch it in my skirt before it hit the sidewalk. Magic: money out of thin air. All I’d have to do was run the bread from the grocer at the corner of Kingsbridge up to 4-C, two blocks round trip and four flights of stairs. I got a nickel, but she always wanted the penny back.
Everyone knew Mrs. Blaustein took care of a crazy lady who never came out of the apartment. Katy-Ann Cooper said she was a maniac killer, the crazy lady, and that’s why she wouldn’t show her face. But my mother said Katy-Ann was full of shit—excuse her Irish—Miss Cohen was just a poor unfortunate who had gotten in the way of history. My mother said things like that. She liked to read, and not just the racing forms like my father, but books from Kingsbridge library. Me too. The day I bought the coconut cake I’d just come back from the library with a stack of books up to my chin, and I knew I’d finish them all by Sunday night. I flopped right down on the green couch and started The Yearling, but my mother said, “Go out and play, for Christ’s sake—it’s such a nice day. You can read anytime.”
So, I was the only one of us kids who ever saw the crazy lady. It happened this way. Mrs. Blaustein made a toss over the window guard, and I made my usual brilliant catch. This time it was a dollar bill wrapped tight around a half-dollar and held together with a big fat paperclip. I bought the best cake at the baker. It cost the whole dollar-fifty. Lemon-filled. Spinkled all over with fluffy coconut. A perfect red circle of a cherry. I carried it careful in its white cardboard box like it was the coronation crown jewels, down Kingsbridge, past the Veteran’s Hospital, round the corner onto Sedgwick, my braids for once hanging nice and straight over my shoulders like the good Lord intended instead of slapping my face like when I run with the bread.
I was younger then. Ten. I thought I was tough, but I didn’t know nothing. Anything. That was two years ago, there was a new queen in England, Maxie Isaacs next door died of polio, and Mr. and Mrs. Rosenberg went to the electric chair. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, that is. Not the Rosenbergs from 5-F. My mother said the judge should burn in hell for that verdict. My father said, “Now, Tessie…”
We didn’t go to church anymore, not since Father O’Mally said little Maxie Isaacs was a baby Christ-killer and that he would burn in hell instead of going to heaven like a good little Catholic child. We’re big on hell in my neighborhood. So I went to P.S. 86 instead of Our Lady of Angels, and I didn’t have to wear a uniform, and Mrs. Marrs didn’t yank my braids when she caught me hiding a book on my lap during Math.
I walked that coconut cake into the courtyard, past the stoop, up the three steps. The lobby smelled like apple kugel, the second-floor landing like Mrs. Costigan’s cats, the third like sauerkraut with weird Jewish stuff in it, caraway seed, maybe. A radio was playing piano music, but suddenly it stopped with a crash that almost made me drop the cake, then started again from the beginning. Not the radio, then. A real piano. I had just rounded the fourth-floor stairs when Mr. Schmidt came out of 4-C, Mrs. Blaustein’s apartment, with his big toolbox. “Vot you doing here, girlie?”
Mr. Schmidt was our new super. German. My daddy said all supers in the Bronx were Krauts. I hoped they weren’t all the same kind of Kraut Mr. Schmidt was, with a voice that crunched like broken glass. Mr. Schmidt scared the hell out of me. Maybe it was how big he was, fat, with fists like Sunday hams. Or the way he was always chewing, jaws going from side to side like that hippopotamus at the Bronx Zoo. Or maybe it was his daughter Trudy, the only other not-Jewish kid in my fourth-grade class at P.S. 86. She gave the nastiest Indian burn of any kid on Sedgwick, Trudy did, then batted blue eyes like an angel at the poor kid’s parents. Even Lennie Foreman walked the other side of the street when Trudy Schmidt was on the sidewalk. But not me. Not even then. If anyone even tried it I would’ve bent their little pinkie back till it snapped. Nobody messed with me—not even Trudy Schmidt—not after my daddy taught me the cop moves. Did I say he was a cop? Well he is, and a good one.
“Vot you doing, girlie?” I never knew anyone before who shaved his whole head, but Mr. Schmidt did, and the red stubble made it look like it was coated with corroded rust. Corroded. I like that. It’s a good word. Corroded.
“Just around Mrs. Blaustein a coconut cake.” The super had eyes on the cake box, but I slipped past him without another word. My mother said you had to watch out when he came around—things would go missing. Cookies or muffins. The week before, when he was working on the pipes in our kitchen, a pork chop disappeared. A pork chop! Cooked! And her with five mouths to feed. So I held the cake box tight to my chest and got past Mr. Schmidt safe, and this was the first time I was ever in 4-C. Mrs. Blaustein came rushing to the door,
all out of breath, said to wait a minute and she’d get me a dime for a tip (a whole dime!), but she had to go talk to someone first. Then she went out of the apartment, fast. So I nosed around. It was a big place, two bedrooms. Nothing like our one-bedroom apartment with five people sleeping in shifts night and day. This living room was…classy. Pictures on the walls—actual paintings. A piano in one corner. Glass doors with sheer curtains leading into yet another room. Through the half-open door I could see into this second room—shelves and shelves of books, like a library. They were a magnet to me, those books. I couldn’t help myself.
At first I thought the gloomy room was empty. The drapes were closed, except for one little slit in the middle, and dust danced in the narrow light. Narrow light. Maybe I read that somewhere: narrow light. I tiptoed over to the nearest shelf. Mrs. Blaustein wouldn’t mind if I looked at just one book…
“Iss he gone yet?” It was a woman’s quivery voice.
I dropped the book and screamed.
A gasp came from right behind me, and a small woman hunched in a wheelchair spun around. “Mein Gott. I thought you vere Hilda.” Her accent was sort of like the Jewish mommas who schlepped their folding chairs in front of the building on sunny mornings and talked and talked and talked. Something like the mommas—but different. More like music. “Vere’d you come from, child?”
“From the baker.” This must be the crazy lady. She was scary, all right, one eye pulled down, a huge red puckered scar from her forehead to her chin, one shoulder higher than the other. Her eyes were open really, really wide, even the droopy one. Her head was shaking on her neck. I wanted to get out of there—bad. But I wasn’t leaving without my money. Where the hell was Mrs. Blaustein? “I’m the cake girl.”
“‘The cake girl’?” She laughed—and for a minute the air in the room got…not so heavy. At least I think it was a laugh, a wheeze and a dry chuckle in her throat, and her head stopped shaking. “The cake girl. Oh, it vould be a pity to vaste that.” She picked up a little notebook on her lap and scribbled in it with a gold pencil. Her hands were thin and very white. They looked more like they belonged to some younger woman than that horrible scarred face. “Now,” she said, “I vill write a poem about the cake girl.”
“A poem?”
“Yes. And someday vhen you’re in college maybe you vill read it and think of me.”
“College?” Me?
“That vas vun thing they couldn’t take away from me—my poetry. Do you like them?”
“Like what?”
“Poems?”
“Dunno,” I said. “They’re okay, I guess. By the shores of Gitche Gumee, / By the shining Big-Sea-Water, / Stood the wigwam of—”
“No. No. No,” she said. “Not that drivel. That book you just dropped on the floor? Pick it up, girl, open it and read me a real poem.” She had wheeled her chair to the window, and now she pulled the drapery cord. Light came streaming in, and I could see to read.
I could also see Mrs. Blaustein standing in the doorway with her arms crossed. I cringed, expecting her to yell. But she was looking at the wheelchair lady. “Rachel, I think you might be right.” I never heard her sound so quiet.
“Iss he gone?” The wheelchair lady’s voice was quivery again.
“For now. Just off the boat last year from Bremerhaven, Esther Meyer says.”
The head started shaking again, like this toy I used to have where you turned a key and the tin Chinaman nodded and nodded and nodded. It was like the springs in her neck were broken.
Mrs. Blaustein’s lips got white and thin. She turned to me. “Girlie, do like Miss Cohen says. Read a poem from the book.”
So I opened the book and read. “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—/ The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—” I looked up…Pain?…Tombs? But the sound of the words seemed to calm her—Miss Cohen—so I kept reading “…This is the Hour of Lead—/ Remembered, if outlived, / As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow—/ First—Chill—then Stupor—then the letting go—”
I was still there when Miss Cohen’s visitor came. The one I got the cake for, I guess. Not many men in suits around our neighborhood. Father O’Mally. Claire Heidenreich’s father. Insurance collectors. Fuller Brush men. But none of them wore suits like this one. It fit him like he was born in gray wool. No knee wrinkles or ass sags. Just shoulders and shirt cuffs, pleats at the belt and a sharp crease down the pant legs. I was old enough to know better, but I gaped at this handsome stranger like a two-year-old until Mrs. Blaustein pressed the dime into my hand. “Here’s your money, girlie. Go on home now. Miss Cohen has to talk to her publisher.”
* * *
“You know the crazy old lady in 4-C?” I said at supper that night. “She’s a famous poet. A publisher came to see her today. What’s a publisher?”
“She’s not crazy and she’s not old,” my father said. “It’s just that they experimented on her in the camps.” He took the bowl of boiled potatoes, ladled out three, spread them with margarine.
“They? Experimented?” The meatloaf looked good. Tomato soup on top and slices of bacon.
“What’re you now, ten, right?” He took two slices of meatloaf and reached for the ketchup bottle.
“Mike!” my mother said. “She doesn’t need to know about such evil—”
“She’s a tough kid. She can handle it.” He gave me a straight look. “You’ve heard of the camps, right?” He poured himself more beer from the Pabst Blue Ribbon bottle.
“You mean, like in the Catskills, where Jessica goes?” “Jeez—what’da they teach you in that school? The concentration camps, I mean. Auschwitz. Dachau.”
He told me, but I didn’t want to believe it. “They really did those things?” That’s how dumb I was.
“Yeah, and worse.” He spooned canned peas next to the potatoes. “That’s what we fought for in the war, to beat those Nazi bastards. If they won, who’da been next? First the Jews and the Polacks and the qu—”
“Charlie!” My mother clamped a hand over his mouth.
He pushed it away and gave a short laugh. He drinks a lot of beer when he’s going on night shift. “Maybe the Irish were next, for all we know. Jews. Micks. This whole neighborhood woulda been wiped out.” He laughed again and took another drink.
I put my fork down. I’d lost my appetite.
* * *
That night there were Nazis in the closet by my bed. I didn’t know what they looked like, not exactly, but I could feel them there. Maybe my father was wrong. Maybe we didn’t win the war. Maybe…
* * *
Mrs. Blaustein called the next day. My mother frowned. “Rachel Cohen must be lonely. She seems to have taken a liking to you. You want to go have cake with her?”
“Okay,” I said. I don’t know why. I didn’t really want to.
Mrs. Blaustein had set the table with a lace cloth and some nice china dishes with gold rims. Very la-tee-dah, my father would have said.
“I don’t like cake,” Miss Cohen said. “But you go right ahead.” She drank cup after cup of the blackest coffee I ever saw from what looked like dolls’ cups, while I ate two slices of coconut cake. The filling was so sweet I almost couldn’t taste the lemon, so sweet it made my teeth ache. I loved it.
Miss Cohen talked almost the whole time. About knives and needles. About acid and electric shocks. About cattle cars full of Jews. About barbed wire. About ovens that weren’t for baking cakes in.
“The day they took us away, I put on my white linen dress with the eyelet embroidery. I thought if I looked nice, they’d know I was a nice girl,” she said. “Stupid. I was twenty when I went in…a pretty girl. When I came out seven years later I was a hundred and twenty. Can you imagine it?”
I could. All too well. It was time for me to go home.
“You come see me again,” she said, “and I’ll read you some of my poems.”
“Okay.” But I didn’t think I could stand it, to go back again.
There were two more slices
of cake left, on a yellow china plate. How could she not like cake? Poor Miss Cohen.
When I got home, I looked all over for my communion dress, white with eyelet embroidery, and then I buried it in the very back of the closet where nobody, not even the Nazis, would ever find it, behind my father’s old wedding suit that didn’t fit anymore. All night long something tried to drag me through thick, hot air into the dark depths of the closet.
* * *
“You been up to 4-C, ain’t you?” Katy-Ann Cooper skated around me in circles, her wheels rolling thumpeta-thumpeta over the sidewalk cracks.
“What’s it to you?”
“My daddy says just because that lady’s famous doesn’t mean she’s not a Jew and a Commie. He knows. He alla time used to listen to Father Coughlin. You should stay out of 4-C—she’s nutso.”
“Is not.”
“Is so.”
I wanted to grab that chain around Katy-Ann’s neck, the one that held her St. Christopher medal and her skate key. I wanted to grab it and twist. Katy-Ann’s big mouth was the one thing that made me decide to go back to 4-C.
Or maybe it was the two leftover pieces of coconut cake. Or maybe it was just because Miss Cohen said I should come, and I was a good girl who did what I was told.
* * *
They were horrible, Rachel Cohen’s poems, two books of them, and some in magazines. We sat in the library by a table covered with medicine bottles. Tall brown ones with skinny necks. Small fat green jars. But the poems were beautiful/horrible, if you know what I mean. Like—fascinating. That’s another good word, fascinating. Blood. Bone. Shoes and wedding rings and greasy smoke.
New York City Noir Page 56
