by Avery Corman
She turned and, without looking back, went into the elevator.
So Joanna Kramer had not come East to kidnap her child, or reconcile with Ted, or stay. She was passing through. She was there to see her parents and spend a day with Billy. Ted learned later from her parents that Joanna visited with them for a day in Boston and then, just as she said she was going to do, she went back to California. Apparently, Joanna could not imagine coming all that distance without seeing the boy, but the distance she would have had to travel to do anything more than that was too far.
The boy survived the day without a sign of disturbance, relying on a child’s facility to accept the world as it appears to him. Mommy was here. Mommy was gone. The sky is blue. People eat lobsters. Mommy was gone. Daddy was here. He got weebles. Weebles wobble and they don’t fall down.
“Did you have a nice time?” Ted asked, probing.
“Yes, it was nice.”
Do you miss Mommy, too? But this Ted did not ask.
TED KRAMER RESENTED HIS former wife’s intrusion into his organizational structure, and his emotions. Seeing her again was unnerving. Once, he was married to the prettiest girl at the party and somehow she got away, and now the party was dull. “Serial relationships” was Thelma’s term for the style of their social lives, one person after another, nothing, no one sustained. Ted’s two months with Phyllis, the lawyer, had exceeded any of his friends’ totals. Thelma said they were all bruised people, Charlie insisted it was the time of his life now, and Larry was still compacting entire relationships into a weekend.
Ted might find himself in the playground on a Saturday rocking Billy in a swing alongside Thelma rocking Kim, and on the following day alongside Charlie rocking Kim. Charlie and Thelma’s divorce was final, Ted having attended successive, joyless divorce celebration dinners at each of their apartments.
“Think you’ll ever get married again?” Charlie asked, as the two men shivered in a patch of sun in the playground, watching their children playing in the snow.
“Beats me. With a child already, I’m what they call in advertising, a hard sell.”
“I was thinking … what if I get married again and what if I have another kid, and get divorced again and have to pay child support twice?”
“Charlie, all those what-ifs. I don’t think you can set that up as a reason not to.”
“I know. But the money! That’s a lot of cavities.”
Thelma had her own perspective on remarriage. She aired it in a guerrilla conversation, a few adult remarks stolen from the children’s hour as, from the phonograph in Billy’s bedroom, Oscar the Grouch shouted how he loved trash, and the children played hide-and-seek through the house.
“The first time you marry for love, but of course, you get divorced. The second time, you know that love was invented by Hallmark. So you marry for other things.”
“Hold it,” he said. “Billy and Kim! Turn down Oscar or turn down yourselves!”
“So … the second marriage is really to confirm your own life style or your own views. You know, the first time, you marry your mother.”
“I didn’t know that, Thelma. I don’t think you should let that get around.”
“But the second time, you marry yourself.”
“You just saved me a lot of trouble. Then I’m already married.”
It was Larry who broke away from the pack after years of running. He was marrying Ellen Fried, a twenty-nine-year-old teacher in the city public schools system. Larry had met her on Fire Island and had been seeing her while dating other women, as was his style. Now he had decided to retire his girlmobile. Ted had met Ellen several times and noticed she was a calming influence on Larry. She was soft-spoken, thoughtful, plainer and more dignified than Larry’s usual women.
The wedding was held in a small suite at the Plaza Hotel, a few friends and the immediate families, which in this case included Larry’s children from his first marriage, a girl of fourteen and a boy of sixteen. Ted remembered them when they were babies. It all goes so fast, he thought.
In a park-bench conversation he had overheard a woman saying to Thelma, “None of it matters. They don’t remember much of anything from before the age of five.” Ted had disagreed, not wanting to think any of his caring would be nullified. The woman claimed she heard a discussion of it on television. “They have sense memories. Specifically, they don’t remember. Maybe nothing that happens to your child today will he remember.” It was a day Billy had been bopped on the head with a metal truck by another child. “He’s lucky, then,” Ted said. This was worth a chuckle, at the time. Now he wondered how much Billy would retain. And later on, when he was older, when he reached the age of Larry’s children, and moved beyond, what kind of impact would he have made on his son?
“Billy, do you know what Daddy does for a living?”
“You have a job.”
“Yes, but do you know what kind of job?”
“In an office.”
“That’s right. You’ve seen ads in magazines. Well, I get the companies to put the ads in the magazines.”
Suddenly, it had become very important to Ted to fix his place for his son.
“Would you like to see my office? Would you like to see where I work?”
“Sure.”
“I want you to.”
On a Saturday, Ted took Billy to his office building on Madison Avenue and 57th Street. A uniformed guard was in the lobby, and Billy seemed afraid until Ted showed a card and got them through. A few points for big Daddy who was not afraid. The company’s offices were locked, and Ted opened the outside door with a key and turned on the lights. The long corridors were cavernous to a child. Ted led him to his office.
“See? That’s my name.”
“That’s my name, too. Kramer.”
He unlocked the door and took Billy inside. The office was on the fourteenth floor, and from Ted’s window he had a view east and west on 57th Street.
“Oh, Daddy, it’s so high. It’s beautiful,” and he pressed his face against the window.
He sat down in his father’s chair and swung himself around.
“I like your office, Daddy.”
“Thank you, pal. My pal.”
Billy had run through all the right little-boy-looking-up-to-his-father reactions as far as Ted was concerned. Billy was his pal. He had been a constant for Ted throughout these months. So he might not remember everything about his father from these times. He might not even care, painful as that might be for Ted. But they had been living through a loss together. They were allies.
I will always be there for you, my Billy. Always.
“There’s something I don’t like here, Daddy. I don’t like the pictures.”
The office was decorated with magazine covers from the company’s early days.
“You should have zebras.”
“Why don’t you draw me some and I’ll put them up?”
The child drew some misshapen creatures with stripes and his father put them up.
JOANNA’S PARENTS ARRIVED FROM Boston. The tinge of anger toward Joanna he had detected their last time in New York seemed to have settled into sadness.
“This is really something,” Harriet said to him when Billy was out of the room. “The grandparents see more of the child than the mother.”
Ted guessed that they hoped Joanna would have stayed when she came through and not have returned so abruptly to California, as he now learned she had done.
“What does she do there? For a living, I mean?”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t know anything about her life, Harriet. Nothing at all.”
“She works for Hertz. She’s one of those girls who smiles and rents you a car.”
“Really?”
“She left her family, her child, to go to California to rent cars,” Harriet said.
Ted brushed quickly over the lack of status Harriet had assigned the position and stayed with the number of men Joanna probably met in her work.
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“She’s on her own is what she said. She’s also playing tennis,” Sam offered without enthusiasm, trying to defend his daughter against his own instincts.
“That figures,” Ted said.
“Yes. She placed third in a tournament.” Her father said this factually, third in a tournament, but he did not appear to have accepted it as a consolation prize for her leaving.
Ted suggested they all stay together for dinner that evening, his first such overture to them since the break-up, and they agreed. They went to a Chinese restaurant and Sam won the battle for the check, insisting on being the elder.
“I’ve got a good idea for a business,” Ted said over dessert, trying to enjoy the family unity, “Mis-fortune cookies. You open the cookie and it says something like ‘Don’t ask.’ ”
They did not think this was funny and lapsed into melancholy over the person missing from the table.
In saying good night, Harriet kissed Ted on the cheek awkwardly, not having done this for a while. Their plan was to come back the next morning and take Billy to the Statue of Liberty, an ambitious day for them, but they would not let Ted talk them out of it. This is why they had come—to be grandparents.
“Is he eating a lot of sweets?” Sam asked. “He shouldn’t have sugar.”
“I’ve got him on sugarless gum.”
“What about vitamins?”
“Every day, Sam.”
“They probably have sugar in them.”
“Well, I think you’re doing a good job,” Harriet said.
“Yes, he is,” Sam added, still not up to referring to Ted in a personal sense.
“But—”
Ted waited for the disclaimer.
“—I think the child needs a mother.”
She said it with such pain over her daughter and despair in her voice, he could not possibly hear it as criticism of himself.
They arrived early the next day, ready to open the Statue of Liberty. Ted had not bothered to mention to them, as he had not mentioned it to anyone, that this day happened to be his fortieth birthday. He was not in the mood for a cake. They would be out with Billy until late afternoon. He had the time, but he could not decide on a suitable way to mark the day. Staying in bed was in first place.
This was a mild winter Sunday, however, and beginning to feel reflective about the event, he went out to stroll along the street, and on a whim—he went back. It was easy to do this, being a New Yorker, not having come here from another city. His childhood was a half-hour away by subway.
He took the train to Fordham Road and Jerome Avenue in the Bronx. He was standing near the elementary school he had first entered at age five, thirty-five years before. He walked home from school again.
The buildings, five-story walk-ups, looked squat and beaten, belonging to another architectural time. The little courtyards leading to the front entrances, a lost attempt at elegance, were now catchalls for litter. Graffiti were splattered across building walls. “Tony D” said “Up yours!”
Few people were on the street this Sunday morning. Three old women were on their way to church, and they scurried by two Spanish men in shirt-sleeves tinkering with a car motor. Ted walked past burnt-out stores, stepped around garbage and broken glass, the urban blight which had scarred much of the Bronx had reached into his old neighborhood.
He arrived at his house, a walk-up on Creston Avenue near 184th Street. He sat down on his childhood stoop. He was astonished by how small everything looked. A two-sewer blast from home plate in stickball, which he remembered as a decent hit, was just a few yards long. The street where dozens of children played was a short, narrow block. The big hill nearby where they bellywhopped and crashed into a snowdrift on the bottom was a little street with a slight downgrade. It was long ago and he must have been very little for it all to have seemed so large.
Across the street there had been a schoolyard where he played basketball. The basketball poles were gone, children did not play here now. A woman walked by, keeping a wary eye out for him, the stranger on the stoop, who might be there to mug her.
He sat, replaying stickball games in his mind, seeing ghosts on the corner, the guys, the girls. He hit a home run once in the schoolyard in pitching-in stickball off a fast ball from Stuie Mazlow, the best pitcher on the block, who watched in anger as the ball cleared the roof. He saw that home run all over again. These memories were vivid enough to still retain their shape thirty years later. And yet, in a few years, Billy, a baby, would have already reached the age the father had reached when he experienced these times. He pondered his perishability in second-generation home runs.
It was a decent time here, he decided, out of the house, anyway, in the street games. Billy was missing something, not having a stoop to sit on, and streets to play in which were not backed up with traffic, and an outfielder could actually hold a car in place with his hand, while the batter down the block took his swing, thirty years ago.
Billy was missing more than a neighborhood. The child needs a mother, she said. How long could he hold on this way, without a woman in his life for Billy, for himself?
Hey, Mr. Evans! An old man made his way along on the other side of the street. Remember me? I used to come to your candy store. I’m Teddy Kramer. Ralph’s brother. I loved your egg creams. I’m in advertising. My wife left me. I’m divorced now. I’ve got a little boy. He’s going to be five. I was five here once.
He had given himself a birthday present for suicides.
TED WALKED OVER TO the Grand Concourse and stopped in front of the Loew’s Paradise, his old movie heaven, with stars and moving clouds on the ceiling. It was now split into three theatres, Paradise 1, Paradise 2 and Paradise 3.
“How can anything be Paradise Two?” he asked a maintenance man who was sweeping in front of the theatre.
“I don’t know.”
“They should call it Paradise Lost.”
The man did not share Ted’s need for historical perspective. He kept sweeping.
As Ted headed toward the subway, he saw a bloated man walking in his direction. The outlines of the face were familiar—Frankie O’Neill from the next block. The man squinted, recognizing Ted slowly.
“Frankie!”
“Is that you, Teddy?”
“It’s me.”
“What are you doing around here?”
“Looking around.”
“I haven’t seen you in—”
“A long time.”
“Holy cow! Where do you live?”
“Downtown. Yourself?”
“Hundred-eighty-third and the Concourse.”
“No kidding. Do you ever see any of the old people?”
“No.”
“What are you up to, Frankie?”
“Tending bar. In Gilligan’s. It’s still there. One of the few things around here that’s still the same.”
“Gilligan’s. Terrific,” he said, not wanting to offend the man with the fact that he had never even been in Gilligan’s.
“Yourself?”
“I work in advertising.”
“What do you know? You married?”
“Divorced. I’ve got a boy. You?”
“Three kids. I married Dotty McCarthy. Remember her?”
“Oh, sure. Frankie—remember we had a fight once? And my jacket got caught up over my head and you were pounding the shit out of me?” Nine years old. A fight Ted would not forget. The aficionados of the block, brought up on Friday-night fights at the Garden, intervened, laughing at the ludicrousness of Ted flailing away, unable to see. He never forgot his embarrassment, a TKO, fight stopped for jacket over the head.
“A fight? You and me?”
“You don’t remember?”
“No. Who won?”
“You did.”
“Well, sorry about that.”
“Paradise Two and Three. Isn’t that a shame?”
“Yeah.”
And then they stood, awkwardly.
“Teddy, it’s really good to
see you. If you’re around, stop by the bar. I’m on at five.”
“Thanks, Frankie. See you around.”
A drink in Gilligan’s, where he had never been, in what remained of the old neighborhood was not what he wanted on his fortieth birthday. He went back downtown on the subway, and watched a basketball game at home on television. Later, after Billy had gone to sleep, he toasted himself with a glass of cognac. Happy birthday, forty years old. At a time like this, what Ted really would have liked would have been to listen to Gangbusters on the radio while he sipped his chocolate milk.
TWELVE
JIM O’CONNOR PHONED TED and asked him to come into his office, and he entered to find O’Connor at nine-thirty in the morning with a bottle of scotch on the desk and two shot glasses.
“The drinks are on the house.”
“What’s going on?”
“You’re finished here, Ted.”
“What?”
“You’re finished, I’m finished, we’re all finished. The old man sold the company. You get two weeks severance, and all of this week to use the office to find a job. Drink up.”
Ted poured himself a shot. He shuddered slightly, but it had little effect. He could have poured it into a blotter.
“He sold the company! Who’s the buyer?”
“A group in Houston. They figure down there is where the real leisure areas are going to be. They bought the names of the magazines from the old man, and they’re shifting everything down there. We’re expendable. We don’t know the territory.”
“But we know the business.”
“They want their own people. We’re on the street.”
EMPLOYMENT AGENCY PEOPLE WERE faintly encouraging to Ted, but this was a specialized field, and he knew there were not many jobs. Three possible jobs were open at the time, he learned, all at far less money than he had been earning. He did not even know how he could take any of them. He would be operating at a loss. He went on interviews anyway, just to get the rhythm of being interviewed. For someone who wanted to get a new job before he had to let his family and friends know that he had lost the old one, the employment process was demoralizing. Hours and days passed with little movement as he was shuttled from one person to another within a company. He registered for unemployment benefits. He carried a book to read wherever he went, so as not to stare at reception room walls. By his third week of unemployment, as the interviews tailed off, on a Friday afternoon when he found himself with no appointments to keep, no phone calls to make, nothing practical he could do but wait for the Sunday classified section, and rather than read any longer or go to the movies, he elected to join Etta in the playground with Billy just to be doing something, he knew that he was in deep difficulty.
