“Hey,” the man said. “When I was young I was taught that whisky is better for you than jerking off, but you’re ridiculous.” Mario’s stomach was turning. He breathed out of his mouth so he wouldn’t gag.
“Now what do you want?” the guy said. He took a drink for himself. “You want Grant?” Mario said yes. “Then what the hell are you doing here? Don’t you know him?”
“Oh, yes, I know him very well,” Mario said.
“Well, then, you know that he’s never here. What the hell would he do here? There’s work here. He can’t do any of this. He doesn’t even know to pour tea. Use coffee if you don’t have tea, he says.” The little man looked up. “Say, what the hell is that outfit you got on?”
“It’s a—well, the clothes I wear, in the—ah—they are my clothes—ah—”
“It’s your game, not mine,” the little man said. “Jeez, I’m stewed. And I got to have this work done by tomorrow morning. An early work. Huh. Where is the thing now?” He leaned over and went through a pile of paper on a small table and pulled out a street scene that was obviously New York. “Here we are,” he said.
“It’s very nice work,” Mario said.
“Nice work? It’s great work. The guy broke his back doing things like this. But people are pigs. You know he never sold this? He never knew how to push himself, so he never sold this? That’s one thing you can say about Grant. For somebody who never drew a stroke in his life, he has taste. He knows where to get some obscure thing and sell it around. Hell, we’ll push ten of these things out. I can do one of these in a day. Just as long as we don’t get jammed. Jeez, I am stewed.” He picked up the bottle.
“He leaves me here with nobody. Christ, he wants nobody around to see. All right. But get me somebody to bring me tea. He forgets about me being in the chair here. You know what he said to me once? He said, ‘Meet me uptown right away.’ Me. How’m I going to get down the stairs here? I told him, if I could just leave here like that, I would be playing football and screwing young cheerleaders. When do I get out of here? He’s supposed to come around and he never does. He sends a cabbie to take me out. I go up to Harlem. The Glamour Inn. You get stewed and they let a broad wheel me into the back room. Beautiful. So what does the cabbie do? He takes a fare and he leaves me there. I’m trying to get a cab from the curb and all these bastards are pullin’ the money out of my pockets and I can’t stop them. Son-of-a-bitch. Then I ask him for an answering service and he won’t even get me that. So freak him. I got woken up two mornings in a row, freak him. I’m drunk.”
He stopped talking and looked at Mario. “If you go to the Plaza and see him, don’t start telling him Sidney is sitting here drunk. Sidney is good and drunk. Only don’t tell him.”
He frowned for a moment and looked cockeyed at Mario. “Say, how did you get in here? Did Grant give you a key?”
Mario smiled and decided not to tell him the door was just open. He said good-by and walked backward out of the room. He waved good-by at the door. “Don’t say I’m drinking,” Sidney called after him. Mario shut the door.
Mario went outside and walked the streets in his black sweatsuit, asking directions for his hotel every few blocks. In the lobby he asked where the Plaza was and what it was and the bellhop told him it was a very good hotel. Mario went upstairs, showered, and changed into his suit. At two, he went to the Plaza, with its horse-carriages and Rolls-Royces and hot-dog venders parked around a fountain, and the scrubbed steps, under an ornate heated marquee, leading to the lobby. Mario asked at the desk for Grant Monroe. He was not registered. Mario began to walk around the lobby.
Grant Monroe was sitting at a small table in the corner of the Palm Court. His long fingers, which had a couple of dusty orange paint streaks on them, were wrapped around a small china coffee cup. Grant Monroe was dressed in a shapeless tweed topcoat that was splattered with red and blue and gray paint. His hair was uncombed and it came down the back of his neck and stood out where the coat collar brushed up into the back of his neck. Underneath the coat he had on a gray turtleneck and an array of multicolored love beads. He sipped the coffee, put it down, and peered through his glasses. His left hand went into his topcoat pocket. It twisted around inside. It came out slowly, while Grant looked around to see who was watching him. The hand came up holding a tugged-off piece of salami sandwich on rye bread. He pushed the whole piece into his mouth, and his jaws worked violently to compress the salami and rye bread before they choked him.
The minute Mario saw Grant, he brushed through a row of potted palms and came up to the table. Mario was starting to introduce himself when the violins struck up and his words were lost.
Grant was up on his feet, pushing Mario away with one hand and waving with the other. “Oh, Mrs. Tyler! Here, Mrs. Tyler. Essie, right here!”
A tall slim woman in a white wool coat with black leather trim waved a gloved hand at Grant and walked toward his table. Grant began pushing Mario hard. “I’m quite busy at the moment; oh, you look stunning, Essie. Come sit.” Grant Monroe put his hand onto Mario’s chest and gave a shove.
The woman slipped into a seat at the table and opened her coat, and Grant helped her put it on the back of her chair. Grant then reached under the table and brought up a huge black leather folder and pulled a chair up next to the woman, and he sat down and held open the folder and spoke excitedly to her while he showed her the painting. It was the same street scene Sidney had just shown Mario. He could hear snatches of Grant talking.
“… You see, I am accepting a Guggenheim to work abroad and I just felt I could not simply leave and have this hanging nowhere. It was always my favorite and now that I have my Guggenheim I feel I must dispose of it…”
Mario stepped through the potted palms and onto the carpeted walkway which goes around the Palm Court. The walkway was empty. Mario bent over and snatched at his shoelaces. He pulled them open and out of the holes so they flopped loose. He reached into the breast pocket of the suit and took out his uncle’s eyeglasses. He pulled his tie half open and out of his jacket. Feet flopping, his eyes shut, Mario pushed back into the Palm Court.
He opened his eyes and looked over the top of the glasses once so he could aim himself at Grant Monroe’s table.
“Grant Monroe?” he said.
“Yes, I’m quite busy now if you’ll excuse me,” Monroe said. “Now, Essie, this is the perfect thing for your sitting room.”
“It is charming.”
“I saw Sidney and he told me where you were,” Mario said.
Grant Monroe’s eyes became large behind his glasses. His mouth became set.
“Grant,” the woman said, “now you must talk to me sensibly about price. I can see that it’s …”
Mario stumbled away from the table and went out into the lobby.
“Say there!” Grant Monroe rushed into the lobby behind him. Grant was breathing quickly. He took Mario by the arm and walked him to a row of telephone booths.
“Now where did you see Sidney?” he said.
“This morning.”
“This morning where?”
“At your place where he works. On Tenth Street.”
Grant Monroe’s lip was trembling. His eyes flashed. He ran a hand through his hair. He plunged into a phone booth. His paint-streaked, bony fingers fumbled a dime into the phone and stuttered through the dialing process.
“Come on, answer the phone, come on, come on, oh, hello, Sidney?…
“Sidney? Who do you think it is? Of course. Sidney? What’s the matter with you? Sidney, are you drinking?” Grant put a hand over the phone and looked at Mario. “Was he drinking?” Mario nodded yes. Grant went back to the phone. “Sidney, listen to me. Did a person come in this morning, a person from Italy? He did? Well, Sidney, how many times have you been told … Hey! Don’t you say that to me. Sidney! Sidney, don’t you ever talk like that to me. WHAT! What did you just say? Sidney, that goes for your mother too. Sidney?” He looked at the phone and hung it up.
Grant Mo
nroe slumped in the phone booth. His legs stuck out. He was wearing chino pants and white socks and loafers. His hand dug into the coat pocket and came up with the torn salami on rye. He took a bite of it.
“The first thing you do,” Monroe said, talking with his mouth full, “is to bring your own lunch. You order a sandwich in there, they charge you two-fifty for a piece of Kraft’s cheese on bread. The coffee is bad enough. A dollar.”
He looked at Mario. “Now I have to go back in and talk to that woman. What is it you have on your mind?”
“Nothing, I just wanted to meet you,” Mario said.
He who catches a thief at work and who wants to take part in the work must show patience or risk disturbing the entire operation. Mario did not have to be taught the basics of larceny. He nodded good-by and left. Back at the hotel, a note in his box said there would be a cocktail party at 5:30 the next night and all riders were asked to attend. Practice as usual in Central Park in the morning. Mario thought for a while. It was just as well. He’d need a couple of days to get an idea together and then he could take it to Grant Monroe for help. He went to a movie and to bed early and he woke up in the morning feeling very happy.
Chapter 7
THE POLICE DOG HAD the garbage bucket overturned on the sidewalk and he had his head flattened and his nose was rooting at the garbage when Big Mama came out on the stoop with a broom to start the morning. Big Mama pulled the black shawl around her and came clumping down the steps with the broom held out. “Shooooo!” she was saying. The dog’s head stopped twisting inside the bucket. He watched Big Mama out of the sides of his eyes. “Shoooo!” she said again. The dog’s lips parted and long yellow teeth showed. A growl came through the teeth. Big Mama stamped her foot on the pavement. “Shooo!” The dog’s head came up and he growled loudly and his teeth reached for Big Mama. Big Mama let out one yelp in outrage. She swung the broomstick with her right arm. She swung it so hard the broomstick whirred in the air, and when it caught the dog in the mouth the dog’s head turned and the growl became a whine. Big Mama swung the broomstick backhanded and caught the dog in the face again. The dog was trying to get away when Big Mama got both hands on the broom and hit the dog across the back with a full-armed shot. The police dog howled and scrambled away. “Shoooo, sonomabeetch!” Big Mama said.
Big Mama, muttering to herself, swept the garbage back into the can. She righted the can, covered it, put the broom up against the building, and began carrying the can out to the curb. She had to arch her back against the heaviness of the can. Other women were out in the street, dressed in the black uniform of old Italian women. They came up cellar stairs or down stoops or out of doorways, and they all carried garbage cans in hands that had deep wrinkles over the knuckles. After this they walked slowly up to the corner and turned onto Columbia Avenue to buy bread for breakfast.
The avenue runs parallel to the river for the entire length of the South Brooklyn waterfront. It is made up of stores set into the bottom floors of five-story brownstone walkup buildings which have flat tar roofs, and jutting out from the roofs are cornices of cement swirled into faces of kings and lions, or scrolls and tablets. The buildings were put up at a time when design was as important to a workingman as wash-up time is today. In the summer Columbia Avenue has pushcarts set up on the curbs and crates set up under the awnings in front of the stores. People walk on the narrow aisle in the sidewalks between the pushcarts and the crates. They walk with bright fruit piled up to form a wall on each side of them, with cheap dresses at their fingertips and cheeses and bright pink pork hanging from the awnings and the merchants talking in Italian into their ears. In the winter the sidewalks are empty and newspapers blow in the wind which always comes off the river. The shop doors are closed and the windows are steamy. When you reach the corner of Marshall Street you turn right and walk halfway down the block to the bakery, Cafiero’s bakery. The neighborhood stops at the building line which ends at Cafiero’s.
The next store after Cafiero’s was empty, and beaverboard covered the broken windows. Once it was Bisceglia’s jewelry store. The big clock which had been put into the curb in front of the store, a clock that goes high into the air and can be seen for blocks, was plastered with ripped political campaign posters. The store next to Bisceglia’s had a green bread-delivery box on the sidewalk, and a sign in the window read: BODEGA. Across the avenue, directly across from Cafiero’s, was Pagano’s shoe store. Next to Pagano’s was a store with a shabbily painted sign which said, TV REPAIR, and a poster in the window advertised Chu Chu Perez singing on WHOM, a foreign-language radio station.
In the reghettoization of New York, a knife comes down the middle of a block and leaves the last of the old minorities on one side of the blade and the new minorities on the other side of the blade. And both sides live together and apart and they hate each other in a way which only people who are the same and will not admit it always hate each other. On one side of the knife cutting through the building lines, and stretching for blocks, are Italians: Italians in stores and in the linoleum-floored apartments over the stores, Italians in the tenements on the blocks running off the avenue. On the other side of the knife, and running for many blocks, are Puerto Ricans: Puerto Ricans in stores and over the stores in the broken, community-bathroom apartments. Puerto Ricans living in the tenements on the blocks running off the avenue. Puerto Ricans with dented, ripped, used convertibles parked at the curbs, the willowy radio antennas they like so much sticking out of the rear fenders. Puerto Ricans standing in garbage in the doorways and on the sidewalks and in the gutters. Drinking from beer cans in brown paper bags and throwing the cans in the bags out into the middle of the street. In San Juan you get a ticket if you do not throw garbage into the middle of the street, because the trucks pick up garbage by moving down the middle of a street with a cowcatcher and a brush. In Brooklyn you are called a pig if you do this. And the Puerto Ricans do not understand, and the sanitation workers, mainly Italians, do not understand and they will collect garbage on Columbia Avenue past Cafiero’s building line only when inspectors come around and force them.
Big Mama bought three loaves of bread and some rolls in Cafiero’s. When she came back to the apartment, Angela had the refrigerator open and she was looking into it. She yawned and clasped her hands and stretched them high over her head. The skirt of her short blue woolen dress came up to her thighs and left a bit of white girdle gartered to white net stockings showing.
“Hiya,” Angela said.
“You go to school like that?” Big Mama said.
“Uhuh.” She brought her arms down. “It’s only when I stretch.”
“What do you do, tempt?”
“Mama, nobody even cares any more. The whole world is short skirts.”
“I fan you behind.”
Angela laughed and sat down to a cup of coffee. “Did brother bring home a paper?”
“No,” Big Mama said.
Kid Sally Palumbo always falls asleep with the Daily News over his face or on the covers next to him. The paper always carries its share of headlines saying such things as: RAID “KID SALLY” HANGOUT. And particularly now, with Sally doing exactly what Big Mama wanted him to do, pushing to get into the real money, she didn’t want Angela seeing any newspapers until she had checked them, and there was no time for checking them this morning. And over the years Angela knew enough never to buy a paper unless it had been read through. It was one of the silent understandings by which she lived.
Angela drank her coffee quickly. She went into her room and came out in a dark blue coat and with a brown briefcase, thick with books, crooked in her arm.
“I go to the corner with you,” Mama said.
Angela came onto the sidewalk waving at two kids looking out the windows from across the street and a fat woman who opened her window and waved a bare arm out into the cold air. A college student on the block is still an adventure on Marshall Street. Toregressa stood guard duty halfway up the block. Toregressa leaned on a cane. He had a
cap pulled down over his ears and a plaid scarf covering his chin. It was his third day out of bed after the flu. Yesterday he had spent an hour telling people on the block how he had resisted death. When he saw Angela he let his mouth sag and he began blinking his eyes to show pain. He shuffled his feet and inched the cane along the sidewalk.
“Oh, you look good today,” Angela said to him. “By tomorrow you’ll be as good as new.” She was smiling and walking quickly and she and Big Mama moved past Toregressa while he was trying to make himself cry so Angela would stop and pet him.
Up at the corner, Beppo, eyes roughed up from sleeping on his face on a couch in the back of the office, was standing in his shirtsleeves.
“Learn the lessons,” he said.
Big Mama waved a hand. “Shut up-a you, I teach you.”
“I’d tell you to be a good boy,” Angela said.
“Tell me then,” Beppo said.
“I don’t think you’d know how.”
Beppo giggled. Angela laughed. She came onto the avenue laughing and waved a hand at Mama and began walking toward the subway four blocks down. Big Mama stood on the corner and watched her granddaughter and shook her head at the amount of legs a girl shows today.
“Saint Anthony protect,” she mumbled.
New York University is in reclaimed office buildings that face the grimy frost-yellowed grass of Washington Square. It is an impersonal place to go to school. Thousands of students come out of the subways, cram the hallways from morning until late at night, and then go back into the subways. The campus hero is the job they get when they graduate. For Angela, the impersonalness was important.
In grammar school, in the fourth grade, when she was ten, there was an afternoon when one of the boys in the class walked around filling the inkwells with a large smeared bottle of ink and the ether smell of ink was all over the room, and the nun looked around when the front door to the classroom opened. Big Mama looked into the room. When Angela saw her, she became afraid, the way all kids do when their world is suddenly disturbed. The nun went over to the door and Big Mama whispered to her and the nun turned around and told Angela to get her coat and go with her grandmother. Big Mama kept Angela home, in the house, until the next Monday, when the stories about Kid Sally Palumbo being sentenced to thirteen months were gone from the newspapers. When Angela got to school at twenty of nine on Monday, the girls clustered around two eighth-graders who were twisting a rope all turned and looked at Angela as if she had polio. The ether smell of ink came into Angela’s nose, as it was to come into her nose for years when she was frightened.
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