“Harry, old pal, I shall report you to the local constabulary for drunken walking,” Albert-Alberta said.
Not ready to leave unresolved a perplexing thought, Harry asked: “When the wind dies down, does that wind die forever?”
“This chap needs a hot chocolate to sober him up,” Albert-Alberta replied. “Look at you, you’re dressed for the Fourth of July.”
“Ach, is not cold,” Otto said. He wore a light windbreaker over a T-shirt. “Get muscles,” he instructed Harry, “muscles make you warm.”
Albert-Alberta gripped Harry under the arm and led him to a diner on Surf Avenue. Seated in a rear booth, Albert-Alberta ordered a hot chocolate for Harry and a black coffee for himself. Otto asked for a glass of milk, telling Harry:
“Drink milk. Make strong.”
Otto drained the glass in one gulp and went to the bathroom. Albert-Alberta smiled mischievously.
“Did you ever play secrets?” he asked.
“No.”
“Well, we’re about to.”
Otto returned.
“Ah, Otto,” Albert-Alberta said, “Harry and yours truly were discussing President Roosevelt and the disgusting trick he puts on.”
“Trick?”
“You know, the wheelchair and all that.”
“You mean, he not …”
“What better way to get sympathy?”
Otto thought.
“Ach,” he said.
“Ach, indeed.”
“How you know?” Otto challenged
“Think of the cigarette holder. Damn it man, it’s all there.”
Otto’s brow plunged into deep thought.
Albert-Alberta threw up his arms in exasperation, saying: “God, man, don’t you get it, the cigarette holder!”
Otto smiled, and said: “Ach, of course, the cigarette holder …”
He nodded and rose. “Have appointment, must go.”
“He’ll try and figure it out all night,” Albert-Alberta said. “I give Otto many sleepless nights. He’ll believe anything about Roosevelt. He hates him because of what he says about Hitler. He’ll tell all his pals at the German American Bund. They’ll believe him. Probably decipher something bizarre about the cigarette holder.”
Albert-Alberta shot up his arm to a Nazi heil Hitler, then bent his elbow for a smart British salute.
“Were you in the army?” Harry asked.
“In a manner of speaking, sir.”
“What does that mean?”
“I served, but did not serve.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I dasn’t explain until you are older,” he said, cocking his head and fluttering his eyes.
“Hey, I’m old enough,” Harry said, simulating shaving.
“Not for my army career, lovey.”
“Soldier told me his.”
“Soldier”—he sniffed derisively—“crawling on his belly in the mud. Some tale!”
“Were you in the war?”
“In a way. Yes, in a way. You could say that I was in the home guard.”
“What’s that?”
“It is men and women who …”
Albert-Alberta reached inside his sweater and pulled out a brassiere stuffed with rotting yellow sponges. He threw it to the ground. It bounced a bit. He swung his foot at it, like a football player attempting a drop kick.
“Damn it,” he said, “I won’t walk around like this anymore. I’m not a freak. I am not!”
His eyes became fixed, lifeless, as if painted. He spoke in a monotone without affect.
“My father was a general. He was a hero and he raised me to be a hero. I couldn’t wait to be brave and collect medals. I was always dreaming about battles. My house was full of generals. They were big men with big mustaches who smelled of tobacco and whiskey. They would tell me about their famous battles and I would tell them that I was going to be a hero. They would laugh and pat me on the head.
“MacLaren was my favorite. He would come to my room at bedtime and tell me tales of India and the dreaded Dervishes. He took my breath away. He gave me a swagger stick. I was never without it. He liked to touch me when he spoke. His hands were firm, commanding. He pinched my cheeks till they hurt. He crushed my shoulders.
“He told me I must stand at attention in the nude in front of a mirror to see that my entire body was responding to military discipline. I did. I liked the sight of me.
“Then MacLaren said I had to stand inspection from him. First he corrected my posture with those strong hands. Then he said it would be more helpful to me if I learned by example. If I copied him.
“He took off his uniform and stood beside me in front of the mirror. He was a hairy man. Black hair was tangled all over him. He walked behind me and rubbed against me. His penis parted my cheeks. It was hot.
“He lifted me like a baby being carried to his bath and laid me on my stomach on my bed. That hot penis hurt me so much I screamed. He put a strong hand over my mouth and said pain was part of being a hero. That it hurt him too. But there would be pleasure too. Later, he brought me women’s clothes and dressed and undressed me.
“One night my father couldn’t sleep. He heard noises in my room and thought I was having a nightmare.
“McLaren was a bigger general than my father. I was sent to a faraway boarding school. I spent my vacations at an aunt’s house. My father refused to come near me. He died in the war. I ran away to America and practiced the only trade I knew.”
Albert-Alberta closed his eyes tightly. When they opened, his face was once again animated, mischievous. He smacked his lips.
“How do you like that, Harry?”
Harry shuffled his feet and looked down..
“My dear,” he said, “you fell for secrets. You didn’t really believe me, did you? It’s such a made-up tale. A Canterbury Tale. Next time I’ll tell you about my mother the duchess, don’t you know, and my father, the … oh that’s too good to give away.”
He picked up the brassiere and whirled it over his head.
“Whee, whirling teats!”
They parted in front of the diner. Albert-Alberta squared his shoulders and marched away, sounding the cadence with a briskly whistled It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.
Harry watched him, seeing no sham in the precise rhythm of his step and the pride in the swinging shoulders. Or maybe it was just another layer of secrets? Truth, Aba said, was a lie you believe. Did that apply to his own version of secrets?
Hidden surveillance was the portal to Harry’s one unassailable truth. Observing scenes in which only he knew the full truth because only he was aware that there was a secret watcher, created truth.
On hot summer nights, invisible in the shadows beneath the boardwalk, he waited for couples to collapse on the sand, breathing like spent runners and crying out like white men under torture by Fu Man Chu.
His favorite every-season spy place was a spot on the boardwalk overlooking the entrance to the Half-Moon Hotel. The big shots who wore ribbons across their chests in Coney parades, like the beautiful baby contest or the season closer on Labor Day, had lunch or dinner there, staggering out drunk, arms draped around supposed enemies and singing Irish sea shanties. During conventions, the whores from Rosie’s marched into the hotel like soldiers in close order drill.
The entrance also hosted quick dramas: a man-woman screaming match, or a cop’s car arriving for a payoff smoothly delivered by the uniformed doorman.
A year ago he had seen his mother enter the hotel alone. Surmising that she was buying a pack of cigarettes, he had planned to sneak up behind her and surprise her as she walked home. Three hours later she had emerged with a tall, well-dressed man who had brushed her cheek with a kiss and put her in a taxi. He had witnessed repeat performances by tailing her when she announced a trip to the movies to calm her nerves.
He wondered if his father knew. Or if his mother knew about the women in Harlem his father and Aba talked about while Harry eavesdropped beneath an open win
dow. Both knew, he had decided, but didn’t know, as in Bama’s Yiddish dictum: If you don’t talk about it, and don’t admit you see it, it doesn’t exist.” Anyway, whatever the state of awareness, it seemed a fair arrangement.
Harry returned to the boardwalk. The oxidized green hands of the round clock, set like a cyclopean eye in the tin sign identifying Silver’s Baths, read nine-fifteen. His parents would not be home yet. He decided to wait until ten o’clock. If the house were still locked, he would sneak back into Bama’s. To kill time, he put the Half-Moon Hotel under scrutiny.
Five minutes into his vigil, his mother and the man walked out. He looked like George Raft. Maybe he was George Raft. Everyone said his mother looked like a movie star. The man put her in a taxi.
When Harry pressed the bell at his front door, he braced himself for his mother’s tirade for not having his keys, which would be delivered with an initial passion that would deflect his explanation.
“You mean,” his mother said, “she put you in his bed!”
“Yes.”
“A savage.”
In the kitchen his mother resumed drinking her tea strained through a sugar cube, which she removed to drag on a cigarette. Harry poured himself a glass of milk and sat across from her.
“So what have you been doing? Walking the streets and catching pneumonia?”
“No, Mom, I sneaked into the Mermaid Theater.”
She would not question the theater as refuge. When a thunderstorm threatened she ran there to escape the claps, which unnerved her. In Warsaw, a man walking in front of her had been shot and killed.
“What did you see?”
Luckily, he had noticed the marquee.
“ Test Pilot.”
“Any good?”
“I like Spencer Tracy.”
“His face is too fat.”
Her eyes wandered off. She looked sad, lost, helpless. He felt remorse for the displeasure she often stirred in him. She was an interloper, a barrier between him and his father. He stared at her face—his face—and thought: She is my mother, what does that mean?
He remembered his earliest memory. He lay in a straw basket watching her iron clothes. Suddenly he knew she would not always be with him. He had cried. The memory ended there. Too soon. It did not reveal what he meant to her. As that mysterious being known as mother, had she instinctively known what he was thinking? Had she picked him up to calm him?
He knew himself to be an embarrassment to her as a measure of her age. She told people: “He is my husband’s child by his first marriage,” which she triumphantly defended as the absolute truth.
He could not remember her praising him. Yet he had heard her boast to others that he brought home a straight A report card. And she worried about his health, demanding that he bundle up against pneumonia and barring him from swimming in Coney’s polluted waters. These dictums were ignored, unenforceable because of her habitual absence. Perhaps, he concluded, motherhood is to be forced to care about someone you do not care about. And being a son, did that impose the same task?
Is that why, he wondered, when I read sadness in her face, as now, I pity her, wish to help her, and want to cry for my helplessness?
“Did you love Zadeh a lot?” he asked.
She sighed.
“No. Yes. I don’t know. Love is a tricky word.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a word without meaning. Everyone supplies their own meaning—if they can.”
“Will you miss him a lot?
She smiled at his persistence.
“Again, no, yes, I don’t know. Will you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because he took my hand.”
She put her chin in her palm and turned away from him.
“Do I take your hand?”
“You used too.”
“When?”
“A long time ago. To cross the street.”
“That’s not exactly the same.”
“I guess not.”
“Would you like me to take your hand?
He shrugged.
“You answer like your father.”
“Is that bad?
“No. It just doesn’t fit. Like that coat Lazar sent to you.” She laughed. “That was my fault. I insisted you wear a coat for the funeral.”
“Why?”
“Because it seemed right. Death makes more of a man than Bar Mitzvah does.”
“I’ve had enough of death to last me.”
“I suppose you have. When my sister died in Warsaw, I wondered why it wasn’t me. I knew why: I was stronger. Esther was a mouse. But I still wondered. Maybe I still do.”
Their eyes met.
Pity, Harry thought. We pity each other. Is that something that ties us together? Is that love?
CHAPTER
18
AT SEVEN THE NEXT MORNING, HARRY ANGRILY THREW OFF HIS blankets and groped his way to the phone. It was Saturday. An Orthodox Jew who read The Morning Journal was desecrating the Sabbath. Harry vowed to put a stop to this abomination, which threatened to rob him of his day of rest.
“He doesn’t answer the phone on Shabbos,” he growled into the speaker.
“Who doesn’t?”
“The man you’re calling.”
“How do you know who I’m calling?” The pleasant voice seemed genuinely interested in an answer.
“Moshe Catzker, of course.”
“Sorry, I don’t know him. Do I? You know my memory is not what it used to be.”
“Then why did you call his home?”
“Did I? Wait let me put on my glasses … Is this Esplanade two-six-seven-five-four?”
“Yes.”
“Hmmm. Are you a boardinghouse?”
“No.”
“Do you know a man called Aba Stolz?”
“Yes.”
“Could you give me his phone number?”
“He lives here.”
“Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“Can I speak to Stolz?”
“He’s asleep.”
“How do you know?”
“He’s always asleep at seven in the morning.”
“Well, he’ll want to get up and talk to me.”
“Who is me?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Who are you?”
“Oh, didn’t I tell you? You know, my memory is not what it used to be. Ben Druckman. Tell him Ben Druckman.”
Harry knocked on Aba’s door. Coughing signaled consciousness.
“Aba, there’s a madman on the phone who wants to talk to you. His name is Ben Druckman. Should I hang up?”
“No!”
Aba flung open the door and ran past him. Ah, Harry figured, Druckman was a poetry lover, a patron. Aba hopped around his room, wriggling into the first piece of clothing that came to hand. Unwashed and disheveled, he disappeared into the street. Harry yawned. Maybe it was a dream. Yes or no, some sleep might bring clarity.
Aba moved in a combination fast walk and trot toward the entrance to Sea Gate. He was composing a poem: a paean to Druckman. He could not trot and think, therefore he alternated speeds.
Ancient warrior full of mercy, was that banal enough? Jew, descendent from the house of David. Good, good, he complimented himself, before recalling a newspaper article about a team of baseball players with beards who called themselves The House of David. Druckman would deny being a baseball player. Then a thought sent him into a full trot: I’ll do it in Yiddish. He won’t understand. I’ll recite one of my favorite poems and he’ll listen. Compare it to Nick Kenney. If he asks for an explanation, I’ll tell him story of Bar Kockva or some other heroic nonsense.
At the gate, he was delayed. The guard asked for confirmation from the Druckman household, then, about to allow pass him, noted that Aba was wearing one black and one brown shoe, and called for reconfirmation.
The Negro opened the door.<
br />
“Thank you, Jerome,” Aba said, testing his luck on a fifty-fifty proposition.
The man’s puzzled expression signaled defeat.
“Sorry, James.”
The man’s eyes widened.
“Sorry, my memory is not what it used to be. What is your name?”
“Jesse, sir.”
“Ah, the father of David.”
“No, sir. I have a daughter named Franklina.”
All hail Roosevelt, Aba thought, Moses to the black tribe.
“I’ll remember, Jesse.”
“Please follow me, sir.”
Druckman, wrapped in a white terrycloth robe, blended into the white couch. He looked troubled. Why? On the phone he had intimated good news. Perhaps troubled to me is happy to him? Perhaps he can’t remember how to look happy but remembers that he needs an expression?
“Hello Ben, I wrote a poem for you.”
Druckman’s eyes darted around the room.
“Want to hear it.”
The eyes again. God, Aba thought, let him have destroyed the file already. He’s going gaga fast.
“Yes, let’s hear it?”
It was not Druckman’s voice. Through a side door the chauffeur wheeled in a smiling Menter.
“Well, what the fuck are you waiting for? Give out with the monkey talk.”
Aba recited the Kaddish, the Hebrew prayer for the dead.
“Now tell us what the fuck it means.”
“It sings the praises of Ben Druckman. A fine man. A noble man. A friend to those in need.”
Menter threw an Italian short-arm at Druckman.
“That ain’t the kike I know. The sheeny I know has left the tracks. He jumps in where he shouldn’t and if he doesn’t stop, maybe gets himself killed.”
Aba’s demons danced. Each a Nijinsky.
CHAPTER
19
HARRY, HAVING TRIED UNSUCCESSFULLY TO SLEEP AFTER ABA’S BIZARRE exit, was on his way to the bathroom when his father lurched through the front door. In one motion he extracted Dr. Freud from the bookshelf and fell forward onto the couch. Harry applauded the balletic movement, but his father, nose already flattened against the spine of the book, was elsewhere, sniffing up wisdom. His father closed the book, smiled, drew his lips down at the corners, and slowly shook his head up and down. The usual tribute to Dr. Freud. Harry suspected that the purpose of the morning driving expeditions was to inject himself with a disease so that Freud could offer a cure, the way Paul Muni did as Louis Pasteur.
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