“It’s all right,” Martin assured her. “As long as it doesn’t get crazy. Sometimes they get crazy.”
He looked at her thoughtfully. It was the first time they had ever had any kind of conversation, and he welcomed the chance to speak his mind freely, unencumbered by the superstitious nature of others.
“How old are you, Martin?” she asked. Her eyes opened wide in anticipation of his answer.
“Oh, I’m old. I’m eighty-four years old. But it’s just a sickness. It’s not magic,” he said candidly.
Christina was unprepared for the answer. But then she thought that Martin must not realize the true extent of his situation. “Probably has the mind of a three-year-old,” she reasoned to herself.
“Just a sickness,” she repeated in sympathy. He looked so vulnerable, with the damp dishtowel still clasped in his hand, an apron tied around his waist to protect his baggy green pants. “Listen . . . I . . . I could help you. Would you like to see a doctor . . . or . . . ?”
“Oh, I’ve seen a lot of doctors. They don’t know what to do either. But at least they don’t believe in magic,” he stated openly.
“Well . . . maybe you shouldn’t be staying out with the family . . . Maybe you should be staying in a . . . well, in a hospital . . . or a home . . .” the words came rushing out before she could stop them. She saw the hurt look in his eyes and was sorry that she had let her sentiments slip out.
“No. That would be very hard for me.” Martin moved off the chair and stood by the window, looking out over the darkening backyard.
“Well, I think this is hard for you,” Christina went on, trying to atone for her poor choice of words. “And I think if the family really wanted to help you, that’s what they should do.” She got up from the chair suddenly and paced around the floor.
“They’re crazy . . . they’re the ones who . . .” she caught herself. She had gotten so comfortable with Martin that she had forgotten she was not discussing a typical problem with a normal relative. Besides, he was so fragile, so childlike, his brain might not be able to take such a large dose of reality.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I just . . . you see, I grew up with it, too. ‘Nosferatu.’ ‘Nosferatu.’ The family curse. It’s the Middle Ages! It’s . . . do you know that I actually had an engagement broken up by my mother because she was afraid that I might have children . . . that . . .”
A nervous laugh escaped her, but it was tinged with the bitterness of memory. She had buried the incident, but only a little below the surface, and it still bothered her like a sharp pain. She grimaced with the thought of her hatred for the stupid family myth that had pervaded her childhood and destroyed her womanhood.
“Oh, Martin,” she turned to him pleadingly. “Get out of it. Get away. Let me help you. Who cares about the family shame? It’s shameful to let this go on!”
She sought him beseechingly with her tear-filled eyes. Then her hand flew to her eyes to wipe away those tears of utter, heartfelt despair. It was shameful for her life to be ruled by a myth that shrouded her family in a cloud of doom. She was young, she was vibrant, and she was alive—she shouldn’t be surrounded by the aura of death as a constant reminder.
“I couldn’t go in a hospital,” Martin said calmly to her cries. “That would be very hard for me. I’ll be fine. I’m always fine.”
She looked at him uncomprehendingly. He seemed totally unaware of the seriousness of the situation. She threw her hands up in a gesture of abandonment. Her taut muscles relaxed, and then she remembered.
“Damn!” she shrieked, looking at her watch.
Martin moved toward the sink and picked up another dirty dish. Christina idly slung her sweater over her shoulder.
“I’d like to talk about it some more, OK?” she said to his back as he dipped the dish into the clean water sink, and pulled it out, shaking off the excess moisture and wiping it with the dishtowel.
“I’d really like to talk sometime,” she repeated. “And maybe we can even talk to Grandfather, OK?”
“I’ll talk to you. Not to him.”
“All right. That’s all right.”
He put the dish in the cabinet and picked up another dirty plate.
“Sure you don’t want me to help?” Christina asked once again, her voice more mellow.
Martin shook his head. Christina glanced at the kitchen clock. She seemed resigned to her fate.
“Well,” she sighed. “I’m gonna sit outside for a while. If Arthur comes, I’ll just leave with him, OK?”
“I don’t like Arthur,” Martin said, his back to Christina. For a moment, she didn’t know what to do or how to react to his statement. The silence was unbearable and made her feel uneasy.
“Arthur makes you feel bad. I don’t like him.” His tone was even, his voice serious.
“Well . . . thank you for thinking about me,” she said quickly, trying to cover up her astonishment at his observation. “I don’t like it much when he makes me feel bad, either.”
She emitted a nervous giggle, but it fell on deaf ears. Martin turned toward her, drying his hands methodically on the towel, as if he were a surgeon preparing for an operation.
“Well,” she said, as she moved toward the front door to wait for Arthur on the porch. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
She turned, clutching her sweater before her like a shield against any further conversation.
“I’d like to have a phone,” Martin said eagerly.
Christina stopped in her tracks at his non sequitur.
She faced him.
“I decided,” he stated flatly. “I’d like to have a phone. I never had one of my own before. I could have it right in my room, couldn’t I?”
“Sure.”
“Well. I want it. Then I could call the radio man, couldn’t I?”
“If you wanted to,” Christina said, totally taken aback by his sudden interest in the telephone installation.
“I do. Will you tell me how much money it is?”
“Sure. I’ll take care of it tomorrow. They’re supposed to put the line in on Monday,” she told him, feeling a certain nervousness in his presence, as if he were an unknown quantity, ready to strike at any moment. She felt a sudden chill.
“Monday,” he said cheerfully, as he turned back to the sink and grabbed a dirty glass. “Monday . . .”
Christina watched him happily sudsing the glass and shrugged her shoulders in confusion. She swiveled on her heel and left the kitchen quickly.
Chapter Five
There are some institutions in American life which cut across the traditional values of religion, politics, and class. One of these institutions is the corner bar. And at Betty’s Corner Café, the local saloon on Braddock’s declining Commercial Street, there existed an amalgam of regulars who defied classification. Under the slow grind of the blades of the overhead fans, joined to the pressed tin ceiling by years of grime and dust, truck-drivers, office managers, Irish-Catholics, Protestant-Swedes, and a few European Jews mingled with the predominantly Catholic Italians, Poles, and Hungarians. Put a drink in their hands, and Republican versus Democrat, upper class versus lower, pro-pollution versus anti was reduced to a game of wits and a challenge to see who could keep on the subject longest while consuming the most alcohol. People who barely nodded to each other on the street clapped each other on the back here in great bear hugs and spilled tears of whiskey and commiseration when the going got rough.
In the dank, stale darkness friendships were made that never saw the light of day. Betty, the bluish-white-haired, buxom patroness for forty years, grumbled lovingly at her regulars as she mopped up their spilled drinks and occasional vomit from the black-and-white checkered tile floor.
Betty’s was a womb where they were safe from the world. They still fervently recalled the days when “What Braddock Makes, the World Takes” was a reality. And to their ale-soaked brains, the moral and economic collapse of civilization was near. Like corpses waiting for the mortician�
��s finishing touches, they posed on their bar stools, glasses in their hands, waiting for the final ossification of their bones. To them, Betty was the mother upon whose bosom they had finally come to rest. She was their only glimmer of beauty and truth in a town whose mills were boarded up and factories hushed.
At one end of the massive mahogany bar, worn smooth by years of wiping and polishing, sat two men who should never have met except for an occasional drink at Betty’s. Instead, fate brought them close together for a conspiratorial conversation about a person whom they both held dear.
“No. I gotta get out!” said Arthur Bolanis, chugging at a tall draft of beer.
“Go. Like William Gurinskas, like Molenowskis,” slurred Tati Cuda, wobbling on his rickety wooden stool. He saluted to Betty for another shot of whiskey. The old woman shook her head discouragingly, noting that Cuda was on his fifth and that it was way past his traditional departure time. She pulled at the snowy frilled handkerchief in the breastpocket of her black nylon uniform. As she handed the old man his drink, she pursed her lips in disapproval. Through his blurred vision, the old man could hardly see his shot glass, let alone Betty’s frown.
“Even Corelli the priest . . .” he was saying to Arthur, “I say, ‘Go!’ to all of you! If you don’t want to be here, then we don’t need you!”
“I wanna be here,” Arthur insisted, clutching the tall beer glass in his huge, raw hand. “I been here since I was a kid . . . but I’m a good mechanic. I should be fixin’ cars instead of . . . pullin ’em apart and junkin’ ’em.”
“So go. All you, you go,” the old man wheezed, waving them away with his arms and nearly falling off the stool. “When they start the furnaces again, you’ll be sorry you left.”
The older men along the bar picked up Cuda’s comments and as if in an echo chamber, the words reverberated off the mirrored walls of the narrow room.
“God damn welfare state. Wait’ll we get working again. We’ll throw them bums out!” called out a burly workman.
“Braddock’ll be the big time again, and don’t let none of them politicians try to move back in. They deserted us when it got bad, don’t let none of ’em bloodsuckers into town again!” said a thinner, balding old man, his arthritis-gnarled fist pounding the bar.
After the chorus died down, Arthur continued, “I just want you to understand about Christina,” he said quietly to Cuda.
“But you think I want her to marry! She works. She costs me no money. She cooks my supper. To take her away is no favor to me, Bolanis,” Cuda said simply, as if outlining the benefits of one of his livestock.
“I just gotta get set up, you know,” the younger man said, running a hand through his thinning light hair. “Two or three years . . . place like Indianapolis . . . then I could send for her, you know.”
“Yes, and I’ll be buried,” Cuda said solemnly, raising his shot glass and throwing the contents down his throat in one swift movement. “And you won’t have to take care of me.”
“Come on, Cuda. That’s not what I mean,” Arthur protested.
“It’s good for Christina not to marry yet. She’s young for her years. Maybe it’s good for her never to marry.”
Arthur stared at the old man, whose face was flushed with the effects of drink. Cuda leaned closer to the younger man, nearly knocking him over with his powerful breath.
“You know, we have problems, Bolanis,” he said confidentially. “In the family. You’ve seen the boy Martin?”
Arthur blinked his watery blue eyes, and then squinted with the thought of the pale, ghostly boy.
“It’s a problem. It’s a problem,” the old man whined. “It’s the shame of us, Bolanis.” A tear trickled down his leathery skin, following the furrows of his face like a mountain stream searching for the sea.
When he was sure he had Arthur’s undivided attention and sympathy, he paused dramatically, and then hit him with the capper;
“You want children, don’t you?”
Arthur’s hand gripped his empty beer glass, and he signaled to Betty with a nod of his head for another.
• • •
After he had washed, dried, and stacked the clean dishes to his satisfaction, Martin decided to walk out on the front porch for a breath of fresh air—as fresh as possible in the soot-filled town. He gazed out into the night and could see the lights of Pittsburgh filtering through the clouds.
Suddenly, he heard a shuffling and a sniffle. He looked over to the railing near the side of the house and could make out the figure of Christina, sweater swathed around her like a shroud.
Her face was all red and tear-stained so she tried to hide in the shadows to conceal it from Martin.
“You’re still here,” he said.
“I guess . . . I guess he couldn’t come . . .” she explained, wiping her running nose on the sleeve of her sweater. “He had no way to phone . . . I . . .”
“I told you. I don’t like Arthur. He makes you feel bad.”
“Oh, Martin,” she crumbled, feeling the need to confess to the sympathetic boy. “It’s not just Arthur. I don’t expect any better from Arthur. It’s . . . it’s everything . . . it’s everything . . .”
She rushed into the house, unable to stay the flood of tears that was threatening to cascade—tears of bitterness, frustration, and the deep abiding sadness that had come to signify her life.
Martin stood quietly at the door for a moment, absorbing the young woman’s misery. He felt her unhappiness as if it were his own.
“People make each other feel bad all the time,” he thought, looking out across the street again. “People are different. Everybody’s different. But people try to make other people the same as they are. Or make them believe the same things they believe. It’s crazy what people do to each other.” He looked down at his hand, as if it were part of the railing upon which it rested. It was twitching slightly.
He took one last look at the house and heard the low, lonely drone of the radio talk show. He hoped Christina was listening to a caller with worse problems than hers. Then he stepped off the front porch and started toward Commercial Street.
Martin listened to the lonely clicking of his heels on the pavement as he walked down the deserted Commercial Street, the gleam of the street lamps showing him the way. As he rounded the corner, a group of blue-jeaned young people, including the young man from the alley who owned the Harley, emerged from the door of a greasy-spoon diner and fanned out around the entrance, guarding their domain.
“Hey, big Martin,” they jeered playfully as he walked by. “What’s happenin’ man? Wanna score some dope, man?”
A tall girl with frizzy brown hair surrounding her face like a halo called out, “Oh, man, wouldn’t you like to get him toasted? Ever see a crazy person get stoned, man? It’s like gettin’ a dog drunk.”
The kids all howled with laughter, and one of them got on all fours and ran in circles like a drunk dog.
Martin cut through the group as if he were a knife cutting through water. “The thing I like least about living really long,” he concluded to himself, against the background of the group’s catcalls and war whoops, “is that there’s so much feeling bad all the time. Sometimes I wish I didn’t have to live really long. But that’s part of the sickness.”
At the stained-glass window of Betty’s Café, Martin paused to look inside. Just as he suspected, Cuda was sitting at the bar with Arthur, engaged in a furious argument. Martin rubbed a square of grime away from the window to get a better view. Some of the men at the bar were singing in drunken harmony.
“Sometimes I think I’d really like to hurt people,” Martin speculated, as he watched Arthur cheerfully joining in with the singing, waving his beer glass in time to the music.
“I mean . . . sometimes there are people who really deserve to be hurt. But I just let them go. Sometimes it makes me feel better to just let them go.”
He peered into the window again and saw Arthur put down his beer and join some of the men in an uneve
n polka.
“Or try to imagine that I’m hurting them, but they can’t really feel it ’cause I’ve already given them the needle. I don’t like when I get that way. I like the sexy times. But it makes me feel good.” He took one last look at the foolishly dancing Arthur and at the slumped figure of Tati Cuda at the bar and continued on his journey to the station. In the distance he could hear the whistle of the oncoming train, and he quickened his pace.
• • •
In the darkness, Martin adjusted the rheostat on the electronic device which he had been working on faithfully each evening since the plan formed in his mind. His hands shook with excitement and as a result of the sickness. He had taken cover by some neatly trimmed shrubbery at the side of the supermarket lady’s house, as he called her, although he knew her name. It was better for him that she remain anonymous as well as faceless.
He dialed the rheostat slowly and finally heard the loud creaking rumble of the rising garage door. Her husband’s red compact was gone.
Still crouching, Martin scrambled through the opening as the door rose, like a soldier scurrying under fire. He carried an army surplus knapsack, and stuffed the electronic device into it as he entered the garage.
He dodged around the parked station wagon, and avoided knocking over some gardening tools which were resting against the side of the car. Leaning against an empty wall, he paused to catch his breath. His heart was pounding so loudly that he could hear it, and he could feel the blood pulsating through his veins and arteries.
As the door reached its summit, it tripped a switch which caused the entire room to be bathed in light. Startled, Martin was transfixed like a cat by the brightness. Then, he heard the sound of a lock being opened on the door leading to the interior of the house, and he quickly ducked out of sight on the cement floor behind the big station wagon.
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