Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood Street

by Peter Abrahams

  “Sure,” he said. “The imagination and memory. They bump up against each other, intersect, crisscross like…” He reached around for a pencil on the counter, made a quick note on one of Your Thai’s paper napkins.

  “Well, um, does your imagination play tricks on you?” I said.

  “In the sense of undermining the concept of objective reality, you mean?”

  Objective reality? That was what, again? “More, like, maybe making things happen.”

  Dad swirled the wine around some more, took another sip. “The imagination makes everything happen,” he said, “at least in my work.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But I mean, like, in the real world.”

  Dad’s eyebrows rose. “You don’t think writers operate in the real world?”

  “Of course they do, Dad.” Although it wasn’t actually something I’d ever thought about, and sounding so sure didn’t feel right. At the same time, going the other way, a way that led to my dad maybe not being part of the real world, didn’t feel right either.

  “And, Robbie?” he added. “Don’t take this personally, and it’s not a big deal, but you’re getting into that ‘like’ habit again.”

  I felt myself turning red, always hated when that happened. I rose and started cleaning up. The “like” habit—so what? “When’s Mom coming home?” I said, over at the sink, my back to Dad.

  Dad poured more wine, texting at the same time. A slight pause and then: “Not for an hour at least. She’s really getting slammed these days.”

  I went into the living room, a cool space with a highly polished hardwood floor and gleaming steel furniture that wasn’t as uncomfortable as you might think; and cooled down. I flicked on the TV and went back and forth through the channels. Friday night. After a while, I felt like calling a friend, but I was between friends at that point, as I mentioned earlier. One of my best friends at Joe Louis was Inez Marcos. I’d bumped into her on the F train over Thanksgiving, and she’d said to call her and maybe we’d do something, and I had, once or twice, leaving messages in her voice mail. Now I tried her again. Why not?

  Beep. “The number you have dialed is no longer in service.” I zipped through the channels one more time, suddenly feeling wiped out.

  “I’m going to bed.”

  “Night,” Dad called from the kitchen.

  “Night,” I called back.

  I fell asleep real quick, not like me at all. In my dreams (and maybe I should leave this out, on account of this old saying my dad told me about: describe a dream, lose a reader), I was soaring over Manhattan. I’d heard about soaring dreams—overheard about them, actually, from this conversation an older Thatcher girl was having with her friends, all about her shrink—but never had one before. Strange that I’d be conscious of that and dreaming the dream at the same time. Anything as powerful as dreams had to be important, right? So what was wrong with describing them?

  “Hey, sleepyhead.”

  I opened my eyes, and there was Mom, gazing down, full morning light streaming in from the window.

  “Hi, Mom.” Her face looked soft and tired. Mom was an associate at a big law firm in Manhattan. She’d billed 2,400 hours last year, but there was plenty of work time that didn’t get billed, so you probably had to add another 1,000 hours or so on top of that, making 3,400. Divide that by forty-nine, because Mom got three weeks off, although she’d only been able to take ten days last year, and you come up with a pretty tiring number. Also associate meant you were a real lawyer but not a partner. Partners were the big time, made way more money, but not all the associates got to be partners, in fact just a few every year. That was one of Mom’s main worries.

  “Are you feeling all right?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You look a little flushed.” She put her hand on my forehead. Mom had a real gentle touch. “You don’t feel hot. Everything okay?”

  “Yeah.” Which was when the strange events, or imaginings, of yesterday came back to me. Or could it all have been part of my dream? “I had one of those soaring dreams,” I said.

  “I used to have them all the time—I forget what they’re supposed to mean,” Mom said. “Chas will know. Remind me to ask him when he wakes up.” She checked her watch. “Time to go if we’re going. But if you don’t feel up to it—”

  “I’m fine.”

  I got up, brushed my teeth, and splashed water on my face, the tiny silver heart flashing in the mirror. How quickly my wrist had adapted to the bracelet; I really didn’t even feel it. I threw on some clothes, put my hair in a ponytail, and five minutes later we were on the street, my mom, Pendleton, and I. Saturday mornings—if Mom wasn’t called in to work, in which case I went by myself—we volunteered at a soup kitchen called Bread not far from Joe Louis. Another sunny day, maybe colder than yesterday. I blew out a little puff of air, saw my breath. Mom held Pendleton’s leash, hooked her other arm through mine. She had her hair in a ponytail, too, and wore her Mets cap. I got in a very good mood.

  “We beat Welland yesterday.”

  “Did you? That’s great. How’s that coach, Ms.…”

  “Kleinberg. She’s got the sweetest shot you ever saw.”

  Mom glanced at me—we were almost eye-to-eye now, with the way I was growing—and laughed. “I’m guessing things are getting better at Thatcher?” she said. “You’re more comfortable now?”

  Not really, but I didn’t want to darken this nice morning in any way, so I said, “Yeah, some.”

  Mom gave my arm a squeeze. Pendleton raised his leg next to a parked motorcycle. Mom dragged him away. He looked kind of ridiculous—one leg up, trailing a yellow stream—but had a dignified expression on his face at the same time, and Mom and I both started laughing.

  “I’m loving this,” Mom said. “Out of the office! Yes!” She took a deep breath.

  “Did Nonna ever work, Mom?”

  Mom shook her head. “Things were different in those days,” she said. “My dad—your grandfather—did well. And then when he died, he left behind a very good insurance policy.”

  I’d never known my mom’s dad—he’d died years before I was born.

  We walked in silence for a while. Saturday mornings there were always lots of people on the street. They say real New Yorkers never make eye contact, and maybe that’s true, but most all of them are real good at snatching quick glances at the faces going by, including me. That’s one of the very best things about the city: all those different faces.

  Mom said, “I know what you’re thinking: do Dad and I have insurance policies?”

  “Actually, not,” I said.

  “No?”

  “I was thinking, What did he die of, your father?”

  “I’m sure I’ve told you.”

  “You just said he got very sick. What kind of sick?”

  “He had a brain tumor,” my mom said.

  “Oh,” I said. I looked at Mom. Her eyes were a little misty. She smiled at me. “He’d have been so—” Whatever that thought was, Mom didn’t finish it, because at that moment Pendleton spotted a cat in a window and backed up abruptly, almost knocking us down.

  “As for insurance,” Mom said, after we’d gotten untangled from the leash and were on our way again, “the answer is no. It’s hard to get your dad to talk about that kind of thing.”

  “Because he’s an artist, right, Mom?”

  “I guess,” Mom said.

  “What’s this memoir all about, anyway?”

  “Hard to say. He’s still in the mulling-it-over stage.” She was a big believer in Dad’s talent.

  Bread was halfway down the next block—I could already see people outside. Mom and I had been volunteering there for a year or so. She worked in the kitchen, and I helped serve food to the people in the line. There was always hot soup—chicken noodle went over best—plus a pasta dish like spaghetti or linguini or sometimes lasagna, plus sandwiches, chips, cookies, soda, coffee, and tea. Lots of the same people turned up every Saturday. Sometimes afte
r I’d filled their bowls or handed over a sandwich, they said “bless you, angel,” which bothered me, or just “thanks” or “gracias,” which were fine, or nothing at all, which was what I preferred, hard to say why. My favorite customer—that was what we were supposed to call them—was this old guy called Little Zane. He wasn’t little at all, but kind of huge, and always had a harmonica in his pocket, which he sometimes played after he’d finished eating. Little Zane was amazing on the harmonica; the word was that he’d played in the Village with Bob Dylan when Dylan was just starting out, but if he had, he never talked about it. He mostly just said the titles of the songs after he played, like “Black Snake Moan” or “You Got to Move.”

  “Big crowd today,” Mom said, and as we got closer, we saw they weren’t lined up but were sort of milling around. We moved through them to the front door. Bread was in a storefront in an old brick building and had big windows, which made it easy to see that it was dark and empty inside.

  A sign was pasted on the door. “Hey,” I said. “What’s going on?” The sign read SORRY—CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. “Mom?”

  My mom squeezed in beside me—Pendleton whimpering, maybe because of all the people—and checked the sign. “I have no idea,” she said.

  Somewhere in the crowd a woman yelled, “Nothing changes, brothers and sisters, nothing changes.” After that came a short period of muttering and shuffling around and then all the customers sort of melted away. I spotted Little Zane headed toward the subway entrance, his head down. And wait! Who was that, just behind him, a jacketless kid with dreads, wearing just a long-sleeve tee? Tut-Tut? Sure looked like him. Had Tut-Tut been in the crowd at Bread? Was he hungry? He disappeared from view, either down into the subway or around the corner.

  Mom and I stood by the door, Pendleton panting beside us. I put my face to the glass. Way in the dimness at the back, I saw movement.

  “Someone’s in there,” I said.

  Mom gazed peered through the window. “It’s Claire.”

  Claire was a nun—but one of those nuns who didn’t wear the nun costume, so she didn’t seem scary—and also she was the main person in charge of Bread. Mom rapped on the glass. Claire emerged from the shadows, glanced up and down the street, then opened the door.

  “Hello, Jane,” she said. “Hi, Robbie.” Her eyes had dark patches under them, and her face looked ashy. “Sorry you came for nothing,” she said. “There was just no time to notify everybody, and right up until this morning, I thought we’d work something out.”

  “I don’t understand,” my mom said. “What’s going on?”

  “There’s a new landlord,” Claire said. “Some developer, apparently. He wants us out.”

  “He can’t just do that,” my mom said. “There’s a whole process—it can take a year or more.”

  “But he can raise the rent,” Claire said. “In fact, he doubled it. And with the funding cuts, there’s no way. He slapped a lien on us yesterday and somehow cut off all our suppliers.”

  “How did he do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s the new rent?”

  “Eight thousand a month.”

  “My God,” my mom said. That was the only part of the conversation I actually grasped: eight thousand dollars.

  “And our cash on hand at the moment is fifty-three hundred,” Claire said. She produced a clipboard. “We’re gathering a petition to send to the developer—with copies to City Hall and the governor’s office.”

  “We’ll sign,” said Mom.

  Claire handed me the clipboard. There were signatures almost to the bottom of the top page. I signed my name—R. M. Forester, which was how I’d been signing my name lately, the M standing for Matilda, a total blunder of a choice on my parents’ part—and handed the clipboard to my mom.

  She read the writing at the top of the page, what the petition actually said, I supposed, a step I’d skipped. All of a sudden, she paused and her mouth opened slightly. “I’m afraid I can’t sign this,” she said.

  “No?” said Claire, her eyebrows rising in surprise.

  “It’s a conflict of interest,” Mom said.

  “I don’t understand,” said Claire. Neither did I.

  “With my work,” Mom said.

  Claire stepped back, like she’d been shocked. “You worked on taking over this building and raising the rent?” she said.

  Mom shook her head, hard and quick, as if shaking off the very idea. “I know nothing about this specifically—debt is my area. But the name of the landlord”—Mom pointed with the pen—“NBRP? That stands for the New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project, meaning that what happened here is connected to what I do.”

  “The New Brooklyn Redevelopment Project,” said Claire. “Is that the one being pushed by the Sheldon Gunn Organization?”

  “He’s one of our biggest clients,” Mom said.

  There wasn’t much conversation after that, probably a good thing because it got kind of awkward. Soon Claire locked the door and went away. Mom took a deep breath. That was something she did deliberately from time to time. Sometimes she’d even speak out loud: “Deep breath, Janie.” No one called her Janie but her. This wasn’t one of those times; instead she said, “How about a muffin?”

  “Okay.”

  We crossed the street to one of those little hole-in-the-wall places that didn’t even have a name, but we knew from experience that the muffins were good. There were three rickety tables inside, all unoccupied. We sat at the least rickety and ordered muffins—cranberry for me, blueberry and acai for mom—and tea. Tea was Mom’s drink. She picked at her muffin, sipped her tea, gazing across the street at the darkened windows of Bread. Long walks, or even not-so-long ones, tended to tire Pendleton out; he fell asleep under the table right away.

  “You work for the guy who closed us down, Mom?” I said. “Is that what happened?”

  She put down her mug, a tiny wavelet of tea spilling over the edge. “I work for Jaggers and Tulkinghorn.” That was the name of Mom’s firm. From the boardwalk on the Heights, where we sometimes took Pendleton on an outing, you could look across the river and see her building in Lower Manhattan, one of those enormous towers. Mom’s office was on the second floor from the top, and she would have had a view of the Statue of Liberty, but a taller building stood in between. “The Sheldon Gunn Organization is a client. One of many.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Who?”

  “Sheldon Gunn.”

  Mom laughed, not a happy kind of laugh, more sharp and quickly cut off. “I’ve never met him. It doesn’t work that way.”

  “He calls you on the phone?”

  Mom shook her head. “I don’t deal with him at all. My contact is an in-house lawyer, and it’s mostly done through e-mails.”

  “What’s ‘it’?”

  “My work? Structuring debt—haven’t we been through this?”

  “Let’s go through it again,” I said.

  Mom went through it again. There were oceans of debt out there, which was just the flip side of lending… or something like that, and then I lost the thread. “The pressure,” she said, reaching the end, “comes from the deadlines and the fact that you just can’t make a mistake.” I was sure of only one thing: Dad’s job was better than Mom’s.

  “So, uh, why does Sheldon Gunn want to wreck Bread?” I asked.

  “It’s not really a question of that,” Mom said. “He’s probably never heard of Bread.”

  “But he must know about all these people who come to get a meal.”

  “Maybe,” Mom said. “In general.”

  “Then couldn’t you could call him and, you know, fill him in?”

  Mom gave me a long look, like she was sizing me up, kind of strange, since we were mother and daughter.

  “That would certainly clear up any doubt about whether I’m on the partner track or not,” she said, which blew by me, but there was no time for a follow-up because at that moment Mom got a text. She c
hecked it and sighed.

  “You have to go in today?”

  She nodded, downed the rest of her tea.

  “To work for Sheldon Gunn?”

  My mom isn’t one of those people who gets annoyed very often, so when she does, it’s always a surprise. “I told you—” She stopped herself, took a deep breath, and her voice went back to normal. “No,” she said, “this is something else.” Mom rose. I wrapped the rest of my muffin in my napkin and stuck it in my pocket for later. We woke Pendleton and went outside. At the same time, two big black cars drove up and parked in front of Bread.

  A man got out of each one. They were both rich looking in that well-dressed Manhattan way, the collars of their dark topcoats turned up.

  “Oh, my God,” Mom said, and just as she said it, the shorter of the men glanced across the street and saw her.

  “Jane?” he called. His gaze went to me, then to Pendleton, then back to my mom. “Did you get called on this?”

  “No, I—” Mom began, but then the short man—bald with a round face and small features kind of lost in it—waved her over in an impatient sort of way. Mom hesitated. I thought maybe she was thinking of handing me the leash and telling me to wait where I was, but that didn’t happen and the next thing I knew, we were crossing the street, Pendleton hanging back the way he did if meeting new people was a possibility, but not actually digging in his heels.

  “Mom? What—”

  “Jane?” the short man said. “Did Mark send you? I don’t understand.”

  “No,” Mom said. “I—”

  “Andrew?” the taller man interrupted. “What’s going on?”

  Andrew, the shorter man—he also had a thick neck and very broad shoulders—said, “I’m finding that out. This is one of our associates, but she works in debt, not real estate, so I’m a little puzzled—”

  The taller man held his hand out to Mom. “Sheldon Gunn,” he said. “Pleased to meet you.”

  Sheldon Gunn! I thought of that phrase “speak of the devil,” but Sheldon Gunn didn’t look at all like a devil. He had swept-back silvery hair, smooth skin, and a handsome face, reminding me of one of those top-hatted actors in old black-and-white movies.