19 Purchase Street

by Gerald A. Browne

  One of the footlockers contained shoes, boots and handbags. The shoes were also small for Vicky, however Norma fitted them perfectly.

  Norma stayed up late altering a dress, a beige, light wool challis. She had to seam and hem it by hand, difficult because the fabric had such give to it. Gainer helped. When she had to do over a side seam, he pinned it as she told him to. He got down and squinted at the hemline to make sure it was straight. He also threaded the needles, licked the thread and was able to get it through the eye first time every try. While Norma stitched, they sang Rodgers and Hart songs, practically the entire score of The Boy Friend. Gainer didn’t miss many lyrics.

  Next day he went job hunting with Norma. He told her she looked beautiful at the perfectly timed moment, just before she entered the first employment agency. He waited down in the lobby.

  On the first application Norma only lied about her age and made up a social security number. She printed neatly that she had two years of high school, no special skills, no previous employment and that she desired a clerical position or whatever was available. The only space she left blank was where references were asked for.

  The employment agency lady behind a heaped desk assessed the application in an instant. She gave the favor of her appraisal to Norma from thigh to forehead and dismissed her with an automatic promise.

  Norma went to two other agencies and got similar reactions. What had started out as a hopeful attitude had been turned into a feeling that she was a bother to people.

  By then it was midafternoon. She and Gainer sat at a counter at Chock full o’ Nuts for grilled cheese sandwiches that weren’t grilled enough and milk shakes that were mostly milk. She tried to hide her disappointment but Gainer sensed it, so instead of asking if she was getting a job, he told her: “While I was waiting in the lobby of that last building this man came up to the newsstand. He was dressed better than the President. He slipped two cigars into his jacket and only paid for a newspaper.”

  “Probably it wasn’t like that,” Norma said for his sake.

  “If I had the money I’d take us to a movie,” Gainer said, and when she didn’t pick up on it he brightened and said, “Why don’t we go to a music store and play some Cole Porter or someone?”

  At that moment Norma was thinking of the father, wondering how he’d treated job applicants, those without all the qualifications trying for their first niche. Had he ever knowingly let one slip through? She wanted to believe he had, more than one.

  One more employment agency.

  At 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

  Norma smoothed the legs of her stockings and went in, chin up, with a faint smile. She asked for an application as though she were asking to pass the salt at her own dinner party, hesitating before adding a please. She didn’t print, she scribbled, gave her age as twenty-one. She was a Bachelor of Arts graduate of Bennington, had majored in both Visual Communication and English Literature. She had worked two summers, one at BBD&O, the other at Doubleday. She would accept an editorial position in publishing or, second choice, a programming assistant’s job at one of the major television networks. For references she gave two names she had memorized from the copy of Fortune magazine she’d purposely glanced through at the newsstand on the way up.

  The employment agency woman considered the application and smiled. She offered Norma a chair, a cigarette, a cup of coffee, another smile. Did Norma have time to go on an interview that day? Not today, Norma told her, or tomorrow either for that matter, because she had so many interviews. She used the glass that framed a Mondrian print to approve her hair and went out before the woman could ask another word.

  If nothing else, it put some altitude into Norma’s spirit. It was just good to know she could pull it off. In a way, she’d helped herself to a compliment, she thought, but from another side of it, didn’t she wish it hadn’t been an impersonation?

  She found Gainer outside on Fifth Avenue talking to a man about Saint Patrick’s Cathedral across the way, the possibility of its spires falling and killing a lot of shoppers on their way to Saks. Those high old stones appeared loose and when last had anyone climbed up to inspect them? The man did a straight face and said he’d take it up with the cardinal. He was a vendor of big pretzels and Norma felt obliged to buy one. She and Gainer shared it on the walk home. Up Park Avenue, past all the money, brass water hydrants polished for the better dogs, doormen wearing white gloves as though they might contaminate.

  Going crosstown between Third and Second avenues Norma’s nose led her eyes to a neighborhood bakery that had a penciled sign taped to its window.

  Help wanted.

  Norma went in and the baker-owner, a Mr. Larkin, said nicely that he doubted she’d want the job. It wasn’t just selling cookies, the hours were bad and the pay wasn’t even union scale.

  No matter to Norma.

  Almost as clearly as she’d seen the help wanted in his window, Larkin read the help needed in her eyes. He told her to wear white.

  She would have to wait until her first pay to get the required white outfit. However, next day when she showed up to work, Larkin let her wear one of his white shirts and a pair of trousers from a linen supply company.

  The trousers were overstarched, ironed with such pressure the fabric stuck to itself. Norma had to force her feet down into the legs of them and, of course, they were too large in every way. She cuffed them up four inches three times, used several turns of twine for a belt.

  Larkin also provided a white cotton hat with a puffy crown to contain her hair. She had to safety pin a large tuck in the band of it. Her shoes were from the mother’s trunk. The only comfortable enough pair. Medium high stacked heels in a navy suede from Bendel’s. The first smudge of flour that got on them Larkin made her take them off.

  The problem with going barefoot was that the floor around the sink was somewhat wet and by stepping there and around Norma’s under-feet picked up flour. It was like walking on paste. More and more of it accumulated, hardened and became a sort of sole.

  Larkin was a good, practical baker. Eclairs and Boston cream pies were about as fancy as he went. No flaky pastries, not even a strudel. He did everything in a hurry.

  Norma felt that she had to match him. Part of her job was to keep all the utensils clean and all the mixing vats, baking pans and trays. As fast as she scrubbed them, Larkin put them back to use. The air there always held motes of flour and fragrances. Loaves baking. Whenever Larkin removed them from the oven and turned them out of their tins, Norma stood close, all the more to enjoy breathing. Then there was the wonderful sweeter smell of layers for cakes cooking and sugar cookies getting their bottoms browned.

  Norma’s work hours were from four to midnight. Two-fifty an hour. That came to eighty a week after taxes and everything. On the W-2 forms she claimed one dependent.

  The first work night she walked home barefoot because she couldn’t get her shoes on.

  Gainer had been waiting for the sound of her on the stairs. He was standing in the open doorway. She climbed the six flights up to him. He had his best smile for her and tried not to look sleepy. He hugged her around the hips. She patted the back of his head, which was like kissing with her hand.

  Larkin had given her a couple of eclair mistakes and a lopsided loaf of rye to take home.

  Gainer exaggerated his delight and she loved him for that.

  She ran some water in the bathtub, sat on the edge and put her feet in to soak. The flour and water and now street dirt were like a hardened plaster. She could hardly flex her toes.

  When she told Gainer what it was, they laughed. He took off his clothes and kneeled in the water in the tub. She tried to stop him but he wouldn’t. He scraped and rubbed with his fingers until the flour became doughy and broke away and her feet were clean.

  “What did you do while I was at work?”

  “Read mostly. The television was too snowy.”

  “Just read?”

  “For a while I sat in the window and watched.
Saw a woman kick a man and then kiss him. Before that I saw a girl in a bathroom pull something out of herself.”

  “You promised to stay in. Did you?”

  The fib was in his mouth but he didn’t tell it. “I went around the block a couple of times. I talked with a guy who said he was a policeman. I don’t think he was because he had on a dirty T-shirt and an old leather vest. Another guy lying in a doorway asked me for a cigarette.”

  Norma couldn’t reprimand him. Not doing so, she realized, was permission. Serious, eyes to eyes, she made a rule for whenever he was out on the street and anyone got mean, started acting crazy or tried to touch him.

  “What should you do?” she asked, testing.

  “Run!”

  That first job of Norma’s as flunky to a kind baker helped them get the first place of their own. Like Vicky’s it was the highest to walk up to, situated at the rear of an older building. One long everything room that Norma and Gainer scrubbed down and rolled yellow paint onto. Yellow because it seemed the happiest of all the little sample chips, but when painted it was too much yellow and they couldn’t get used to it.

  They bought what they needed to cook and eat with. And a pair of twin size mattresses. Whatever else went into the apartment came from the streets, from the unwanted furniture and other things people put out at the curb on a specified night every month for the city sanitation department trucks to take away.

  Each month, on that night, the seven-year-old Gainer roamed the streets on the lookout for anything usable. From Fifth Avenue over to Lexington in the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties was the high yield district, where better quality unwanted things might be found. Gainer would make his way back and forth from block to block appraising the heaps of discards. Whenever he could manage alone, he lugged something home and then returned to continue looking where he’d left off.

  It got so Gainer could imagine people according to what they threw away. Books, for example. No one would throw out good books unless the books had belonged to someone no longer liked. The same went for nice souvenirs of places and perfume bottles that still contained more than just a little. Normally, when there were a lot of men’s shoes in a pile, there were also a lot of neckties and maybe eyeglasses and a hairbrush. Some man had died. A lot of women’s shoes didn’t mean that, nor did any amount of cosmetics. But a bunch of women’s hats could. From such hats Gainer collected unusual pretty feathers that he used as bookmarks.

  Whenever he came across something worthwhile that he couldn’t manage alone he’d meet Norma when she got through work at the bakery and they’d heft it home together. Often by the time they got back to where he’d spotted something, it was gone. They weren’t the only ones around after street stuff.

  They lost out on a lacquered table that was only slightly chipped and an armchair that was only very wobbly. But they didn’t lose a wicker love seat with its seat broken through and a desk with one fractured leg that needed a wall to stand against.

  Mirrors with their backs scratched, lamps wanting shades or shades wanting lamps, clocks that refused to run until Gainer vigorously shook a tick into them. Stacks and stacks of magazines and all kinds of professional journals. After Gainer went through them he carried them down to the street on that particular night of the month and left them to be picked up by the sanitation department. Pieces of furniture also went to the curb as Gainer and Norma upgraded their finds. As the cycle would have it, many of the things they discarded were wanted and taken away by someone before a city truck could get to them.

  After two years of such a life Gainer had learned more than if he had gone to school. He was supposed to be in the fourth grade but Norma didn’t enroll him. She feared trouble from the Bureau of Child Welfare. Those people would put Gainer back in a place like Mount Loretto, which would be a waste of everyone’s energy, because first opportunity Norma would steal him out. Still, Norma felt school was the best thing for him.

  She mentioned the problem to Vicky, who by then no longer had a regular job but was somehow living in a new highrise. Vicky thought she might have an answer. One of her boyfriends, whom she knew only as Arnie, had boasted that he could come up with any kind of document. Vicky called him on that. What did she want, Arnie asked, a diploma from UCLA or maybe a British passport?

  How about some school records from a small town? Vicky asked.

  A week later Arnie delivered.

  Andrew Gainer had attended the Pearson School in Winsted, Connecticut, for the last three years. He’d earned mostly Bs, but a few As, but never an F. A letter from the school principal on doubtless letterhead stationery commended Andrew’s learning ability and deportment. There was even a properly imprinted manila envelope to contain it all.

  Norma put on her much older look.

  Gainer dressed in his best and combed his hair a bit more forward for the part.

  Norma was Aunt Norma. She affected a tighter mouth that hardly moved as she spoke to the school’s admission clerk.

  Gainer blew his nose not to laugh.

  The story was his parents were divorced. His mother was not well, suddenly. An uncertain diagnosis. She was in Arizona for treatment.

  Gainer met the admission’s clerk’s eyes with the right measure of innocent despair.

  He was in.

  Eventually twelve New York City schools would try more or less to educate Gainer. Twelve because of the moves he and Norma made. From Yorkville, better known as Germantown, to Morningside Park, where Columbia University integrated with Harlem, from the fringe of Chinatown and Little Italy to Woodside, not far from LaGuardia Airport, where Irish cops and their families were the neighbors above and below.

  Gainer didn’t seem to be the worse for so many changes. As far as he was concerned another school was only another school, a place where he had to spend time and appear attentive. Early on he developed a way of assuming an interested expression, fixing his gaze on the teacher while his mind turned over extraneous, usually more complex subjects. His acute mental reflexes allowed him to get away with it. When asked a question, he could snap his thinking back to the classroom and give a reasonable answer.

  The books he was required to read were so dry he had to splash his eyes with water to get through them. And what the hell use was it ever going to be for him to know, line for line, the map of Europe before World War II?

  The subject he enjoyed was mathematics. That was spoiled for him later on when it became trigonometry and calculus. At that point he branched out on his own into the area of mathematical probability and chance.

  He went to school only because that was what Norma expected. He went as seldom as he could. His absence record was flagrant, would have been unacceptable had he not done so well on examinations and deserved his high grades. Whenever called to account for his truancy, he never offered an excuse. Told how much better he’d do if he tried, he doubted it.

  Norma wasn’t unaware of his attitude toward school. Her talks with him about it reassured her that he was doing fine even if he wasn’t staying in line as everyone wanted him to. As time passed, the more Norma learned of what Gainer did when he wasn’t in school, the less she worried about him.

  “What did you do today?”

  He wouldn’t lie, not to her. “I was at the Pierre Hotel.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Watching.”

  He’d sit in one of the plush silk chairs in the lobby of the Pierre as though he had every reason to be there. For hours. Comparing those who checked in or out, overhearing, remembering. Other times it was the Regency or the Saint Regis.

  On a sixth grade school day he might go for a swim at the East Twenty-third Street municipal pool or be somewhere midtown observing a monte game or some other scam. He was even more likely to be at Dunhill’s or Cartier’s, roaming around, keeping his hands off the glass display cases.

  “May I help you?” Meaning, he knew, what the hell are you doing here.

  “I’m waiting for my mother. She’s coming i
n to buy something.”

  He had a way of getting into special places, all the way in. For that purpose, his air was detachment, as if being there was the last thing he wanted. He’d enter the most direct way and just keep going. Being alone helped. Being alone he was taken for the kid of someone, perhaps someone important.

  It got him into a closed rehearsal of the New York Philharmonic. The conductor, Gainer noticed, scratched himself with the baton several times, his back and bottom, and swore at the various instruments categorically, as though musicians weren’t playing them.

  It got him into the upper corridor of a fast-trick hotel off Times Square. Watching the comings and goings, not altogether innocent about it.

  Into the executive offices of Universal Pictures on Park Avenue, through a reception area and down the hall past offices where practically everyone he saw was on the phone. He wound up sitting softly in the projection room to see a movie that wasn’t yet finished, but already, from what he heard, had too many mistakes in it.

  Another time, into a leather chair in the reading room of the Harvard Club, only because it was raining for a couple of hours. And, same day, a hard city chair at the Nineteenth Precinct police station in view of the holding pen that had in it a man who had killed two people just that morning. The man seemed more relaxed than anyone there, including the policemen.

  It also got him into the kitchen of “21,” the cellar of the Metropolitan Museum, a better dresses try-on room at Lord and Taylor, where he was made to feel invisible. Yankee Stadium and Shea and Madison Square Garden were all regular easy places to slip into without a ticket.

  So were Broadway shows.

  Gainer, with any old rolled up Playbill in hand, would simply step into the thick of those out of the theater at intermission for the air or a smoke. When intermission was over he’d flow back into the theater with them. Nearly always there was an unclaimed or vacated seat for him, but if not, he’d stand in the back with a lost look and watch from there. Seeing only the final act of plays and musicals had its drawbacks, but he enjoyed them.