The One-Star Jew: Stories
Page 22
We talk when he gets home evenings, quite sober, at two or three if I am up, our legs stretched across tables or chairs. We have a beer. “Remember that housing project we lived in at Lefrock Block?” I say. “No space, no privacy. That fucking bus ride from Manhattan, then the long icy walk up the hill against the slamming winds, and no taxis even willing to go up there. Waiting for hours for cabs just to get back to civilization, and sometimes they just never came—and your mother and I slipping and failing on the ice. And those dead faces on the express buses. All this to save money so I could write, and the express bus and the cabs cost more than our great West Side apartment. I thought that was it, that I’d really had it—that we’d die there.” Danny is silent. “Those paper-thin walls, hearing people screwing in the next apartment, those all-night parties upstairs with Latin music, the thieves next door coming home from their thieveries and staying up all night counting their money, playing jazz and plotting and saying: ‘Shit. Fuck. Piss. Motherfucker. Cock-sucker.’ And us unable to make a sound, afraid they’d hear us hearing them. But one night, Danny, I heard the little girl in the shower singing to herself, ‘Thank Heaven for Little Girls.’
“Your mother and I walked outside among the slivers of glass and the tons of dogshit and somebody called at me: ‘Goldberg.’ When I looked up a brick fell with a thud just behind us.”
XXII
“When mommy and I married,” my father recalls, “we had a bedroom in your grandparents’ house. Her mother did all the cooking. When I came home after work, mommy would put an apron on and serve the food as if she had cooked it. But her mother did all the cooking. We had a ball though, Bruce. When you were born, you slept in a crib in your grandparents’ room.”
“Why didn’t I sleep in your room?”
“Well …” My father smiles apologetically. “You see, mommy wanted me.”
XXIII
Summer, 1979. I love Danny. What has happened to me? Why did it take so long?
The rancid jobs by day, traveling to the Times Square studio at night, then Lefrock Block. Trying to keep going. I had thought it was a matter of Danny—with his great need, his tremulous emotions—or me. I would have nothing left, I thought.
The night before Danny will leave to return to Seattle, he is upset. His best friend, Joey, has taken over with the girl, Shelley, he has been dating.
“But it wouldn’t have worked anyhow. I kept trying to really talk to her all summer in a human way. She said she didn’t know how. And last night we tried for hours and hours. That’s really what it’s all about, anyway. Like the way you guys are,” he says to us. “Like a couple I know in Seattle. They’re older than you, but they keep growing and changing. They’re into yoga, stuff like that.”
After a while he says, “But he could have waited before he made his move.”
He is going to return Joey’s bicycle to him, and have it out. It is midnight, but we wait. When he gets back, he says things are okay. “We talked it out. I guess Shelley wanted some reassurance that she’d have somebody when I left. But anyway he’s still my buddy.”
As Danny packs, Susan is lying on the bed, silently crying, her shoulders heaving. I hold her, and kiss her. It is not enough.
I go into Danny’s room.
“Danny, your mother is just so miserable that you’re leaving. She really needs you.”
“Oh, sure.”
Danny goes into the bedroom and takes Susan in his arms. I stand at the door. He holds her and pats her tenderly. “That’s right, mom, let it out. That’s the best thing to do.”
Susan weeps and smiles and blinks and shakes her head. “Where did you get such a lovely way with people?”
It is 2 A.M. We are all still in the living room.
Suddenly Danny says, “Something happened that really made me think. I went back to our old neighborhood on the West Side. I liked that neighborhood, it’s alive. So many different kinds of people. But a guy on our old corner killed somebody who gave him bad dope. He killed him. Shelley saw it—so did some of the other kids. This was a guy who’d gotten me joints when we lived by Columbia. He’d taken me over to 104th Street and said to the others, ‘He’s okay.’”
Danny shakes his head.
We kiss each other good night.
XXIV
In the morning, Danny finishes packing. He is about to leave with Susan for the airport.
He sits down beside me at my desk. He is smiling. I try to begin.
“Danny, we had a real dialogue this time—”
“You mean a human relationship.”
“That’s what I mean.”
“You know,” he says, “I really understood you better when you talked about Lefrock Block. That place really sucked.”
We laugh, and then we are embracing. Danny’s face is very warm.
“I love you so much,” Danny says. He is weeping.
“I love you very much, Danny.”
Then Susan is there, and we are all holding each other and crying, and do not stop.
XXV
Beside the New York Post story about Jolson’s death is a picture of Jolson and his new wife nursing their baby. The caption title reads: “One Role: Jolson as Daddy,” and beneath the picture: “Taking time out from his comeback as an entertainer, Al Jolson looks the part of a perfect papa as he watches his wife, Erie, give month-old Asa his feeding. The Jolsons adopted the baby.”
XXVI
My mother hands me a bundle wrapped in cellophane: my baby clothes.
Susan cradling our cat in her arms: “He’s just like a baby when he looks at you and recognizes you for the first time.”
“When is that?” I ask.
“At about four months.”
I am jogging in Central Park behind a father and his two children: a boy and a girl. With his backhand he tosses a football to each of them in turn as they all run. What an effort that must be, I think: fatherhood.
A mother with a baby in a carriage stands at the bottom of the subway steps. I offer to carry the carriage up the steps for her. She accepts, and I do so.
On the bus, a black mother sits, her baby carriage before her. With a lurch of the bus, it begins to roll. I put out my hand and stop it.
XXVII
My fortieth birthday. My mother calls: I hear a child’s voice, high and birdlike. She is chewing gum, snap, snap. “Happy birthday. How does it feel to be twenty-eight?”
“I’m forty.”
“I tell my friends you’re twenty-eight.”
“But I’m not.”
“Don’t you dare tell them,” she says sharply. “Are you crazy? Me with a forty-year-old son? Never!”
XXVIII
I was ten years old when Jolson died. I heard the news on the radio when I woke up. I lay in bed. I remember the morning, my father tiptoeing around the apartment, waiting sadly to tell me, my mother banging around as usual.
In 1950 in New York the trolleys were disappearing, and the Third Avenue El; Runyon and Winchell sat at Lindy’s; there were stage shows at the Paramount, the Roxy, the Strand, the Capitol, eight acts of vaudeville at the Palace and five acts at the Jefferson on Fourteenth Street. The songpluggers were in the Brill building, still writing the kinds of songs Jolson had sung.
I listen to them now: “Rosie, You Are My Posie,” “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “Let Me Sing and I’m Happy,” “When You Were Sweet Sixteen,” “Sonny Boy,” and “Back in Your Own Backyard,” and despite the schmaltz, they bring a smile and a chill: I am still a Broadway baby.
Her baptismal name is Rosie
but she puts the rose to shame
and every night you can hear me
call her name—Professor!
Let me sing about my Rosie …
These Jewish and Irish immigrants, infusing America with their joy at being here.
To be a Jolson, strutting across a stage before the footlights: every day I practiced, a magician, flying across the room, down on one knee, or singing on the roofto
p, my arms outstretched, stopping in midsong when someone appeared with a cart of clothes to hang on the lines. (They flapped on the lines, the flapping sound and the wind greeting me when I opened the roof door.)
In 1974, I bought a bottle at the corner liquor store on 110th Street and Broadway. The owner noticed that I had a copy of Variety and said, “Are you in show business?”
“No. I’ve been reading it since I was ten years old.”
“Then why?”
“I enjoy it. It has a feeling of fun—”
She interrupted, and nodded. “I understand. I understand. It helps you forget your troubles.”
XXIX
“Shhh. I’m on the phone with my father in New York—Hello— Hello—Bruce?”
It is Danny, his emotion surging across the wires from Seattle, his thanks for my letter (he answered it immediately in class, but in tearing it out of his notebook tore it in half, and had to recopy it), his voice strong, sober … his new girl … the part-time theater work he’s gotten in Seattle a success.
I think as he talks: here is my chance, my second chance. Hear my voice, vulnerable and soft now, without rehearsal, without preparation, trying, trying. Danny applauds my missed notes, my off-key, irresolute openings—ah, now I’m getting better pitch. He encourages me as I do a little soft shoe, a stumble or two.
I think I am getting through.
XXX
As I was at seventeen with Esther in the moonlight, I see Danny now. Esther: little body bursting with feeling, perched upon the upright piano singing Judy Garland as I played. Esther: beside the milk bottles at the door, on the stoop, the fire escape, comforting her small brothers when they cried. Doing my Jolson imitation for her the first time. Seated beside her, watching Danny Thomas and Danny Kaye on TV. Opening the door when I rang the first time, her eyes wide, signing my petition to protest the beating up of Barry Gray by hoods, asking me over brownies and milk: “Don’t you recognize me?” and I suddenly remember the girl sharing my seat in homeroom, pressing her body shyly against mine, my thinking it must be a mistake, but being afraid to glance at her. Her spicy, delicatessen smell, her mouth and breasts, black hair; her passion and Talmudic kindness and fairness.
This was before I stopped singing. And it would be a long while before I would try to sing again.
About the Author
David Evanier is the author of seven books. His work includes novels, story collections, and biographies of entertainment legends. Evanier’s work has been published in Best American Short Stories and has been honored with the Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and the McGinnis-Ritchie Award for short fiction. He is a former fiction editor of the Paris Review and a three-time MacDowell Colony fellow, as well as a fellow of Yaddo and of the Wurlitzer Foundation. He has taught creative writing at UCLA and Douglas College. He lives in Brooklyn and is currently writing a biography of Woody Allen.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
These are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Several of the stories in this collection have been previously published in slightly different forms in the following journals: Chelsea (The Creator of One-Fingered Lily), Commentary (The Man Who Refused to Watch the Academy Awards), Confrontation (The Princess), Croton Review (The Arrest), Midstream (The Jewish Buddha), Moment (My Rabbi, Ray Charles, and Singing Birds), National Jewish Monthly (The Lost Pigeon of East Broadway), Paris Review (Cancer of the Testicles, The One-Star Jew, Selective Service), Pequod (Jolson Sings Again, A Sense of Responsibilty), and Transatlantic Review (A Safe Route on Eighty-third Street).
Copyright © 1983 by David Evanier
Cover design by Kathleen Lynch
ISBN: 978-1-4976-4167-9
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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