New York Echoes

by Warren Adler

  “Did you?” she said. She didn’t ask what he meant by chapter and didn’t care.

  Glancing at him sideways, his color had risen, and he was quite excited about what he was seeing and how it registered on his memory. Okay, she told herself, I am making my grandfather happy and that is a good thing worthy of toleration, although his nostalgic musing were far removed from her life. Like ancient history, she decided, as the car moved slowly down the street.

  At the end of the street loomed the El, the subway extension that rolled out of the tunnel after Utica Avenue and followed the track outside all the way to East New York. He explained that he used to go to Rockaway, getting off at the last stop.

  “Which was New Lots Avenue. Then we took the bus to Rockaway, where we went summers. My parents and I slept in one room and Mom cooked in a community kitchen. Better than being in the city, which was hot as blazes in those days.”

  Still hot, she wanted to say, but she left it alone. She was certain he would tell her that winters were colder, food tasted better, movies and music were better, people were nicer. Ah the golden glow of yesteryear.

  “When I lived with my Gramma and Grampa,” he said, “because my old man was always losing his job and we were dispossessed from our apartment and had to move into their little house in Brownsville, the trains would roar past on the El. Their house was a few houses down from El you see and the sound of the trains made it impossible to hear the radio every ten minutes or so. In those days we listened to radio, especially serials like Billy and Betty, Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, Omar the Tentmaker and Little Orphan Annie, which was sponsored by Ovaltine.” There was no stopping him on the radio bit. “Sunday nights there was Edgar Beren and Charlie McCarthy, Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Fibber McGee and Molly. It was a ritual to listen Sunday nights.” He stopped after awhile and there was a sudden silence as if the memories had clogged in his brain.

  As they got closer to the El, a subway train that had stopped at the Saratoga station roared forward.

  “Listen. See what I mean. Anyway when I was a teenager I had odd jobs that took me into the city. We were packed in like sardines in those days.” He shook his head and his voice sounded funny as if he might be wrestling with tears of nostalgia. She did not look at him, even sideways, because he might be embarrassed if she saw tears moistening his eyes.

  She sensed he was looking around, searching for something outside.

  “There was a fish store around here. I’m sure of it. My Gramma used to take me shopping for fish, carp I think it was. A woman stood on a high platform on which was a pool for live fish. She wore an apron stained with fish blood. Gramma would point to a live fish. The woman would net it, then lay it on a board, chop off its head and split it open, taking out the bones. Gramma used the fish to make gefilte fish, which we ate every Friday night, along with . . .” He went on and on with the menu. She desperately needed to change the subject.

  “So where was the house you lived in, Grampa?” she asked pleasantly, hoping they would finally get to the place where she knew he was determined to go, and this was the heart of the favor her father had asked her to perform.

  “Make a left here on Livonia for one block then turn left again on Strauss Street where the old house was.”

  As they made the turn, which was under the El, he pointed out some stores on the left, one selling secondhand clothes and the other a dry cleaner.

  “See that corner store.” This was the one selling secondhand clothes. “You know who hung out there. Murder Incorporated. That was where Midnight Rose Gold held court. It was a candy store where they sold cigars and had one of those walk-in humidors. Phone call would come in. Kill Benny. Kill Mendy. That was murder incorporated. These guys would get paid to knock off people and bury them in Canarsie. Pittsburgh Phil, Bugsy Goldstein, Lepke Buchalter. They all got the chair in 1941, I think on the same day of Pearl Harbor. Poor bastards. Couldn’t even get their execution acknowledged because the Japs bombed Pearl. I remember that like yesterday.”

  She listened, unengaged, as if she were hearing some CD with a bad track that played over and over again.

  “Next to the candy store was a pickle store. A guy and his wife filled cardboard cartons with pickles and sauerkraut right from the barrels. Winter, the guy had snot running down his nose, which he wiped frequently with the back of his hand, but still stuck them into that pickle and sauerkraut barrel. Nobody cared. Funny.” He laughed again. She would care, she wanted to say, thinking of the pickle barrel and the snot on the man’s hands. Yuk.

  “God, what ever happened to this place,” he said, as the car turned the corner on Strauss but then she discovered that it was a one way street, which required her to carefully back out and proceed down Livonia to the next street.

  “Make a left on Hopkinson, then a left on Blake, then a left on Strauss,” he said. “Imagine Helen, I never forgot these street names and it’s been, how long, pushing sixty years. Over. See that.” He pointed out the window. “That’s Betsy Head Park, where I played ball and swam during the summers. I played outfield, although I did pitch occasionally. We had a hell of a team and it was right across the street from the house. Occasionally a ball would be hit foul out of the park and blast into my grandparents’ house, sometimes breaking a window. Pull over. Right there. Let me get oriented.”

  She pulled over the Toyota and parked. Again she looked at her watch. Was this going to take all day? It would be at least an hour to get back to Manhattan, then she would have to drop him off at Penn Station so that he could take the next train to Huntington. She decided that she would definitely not have lunch with him. It was bad enough to listen to his old memories without having to recycle them again during lunch.

  She felt somewhat guilty thinking unkind thoughts like this, but frankly his memories bored her. Nevertheless, she forced herself to be respectful and look as if she were interested. He was, after all, her grandfather, her father’s father, and it simply would not do to leave a bad impression. She remembered being bored silly when her father and mother took her to visit them in West Palm Beach at the condo complex where everybody was old. What she remembered most was going to what they called a recreation center, which was as big as a football field and filled with people playing cards.

  Deliver me from that, she thought. The fact was that old people were boring, their memories boring, what they talked about was boring. Yet, she did commend herself for being respectful. Her grandfather looked out of the window.

  “Unbelievable,” he said. “This used to be a block of attached row houses with front porches and backyards. In nice summer days, the people sat on rockers on the porches. They also had back porches where my grandparents made a sooky during holidays.”

  She didn’t know what a sooky was, probably something connected with one of the Jewish holidays. She let it pass. She wasn’t religious although she had been bat mitzvahed.

  “They had three fruit trees in the backyard: a pear tree, a cherry tree, and a plum tree. They also had vines that grew on a wooden thing and my grandfather harvested grapes from them and made his own wine. I remember that they made stewed pears from the pears and did the same with the cherries. I used to eat those cherries straight from the trees. They were sour, but I can still taste them. Made your lips pucker. But they were good to eat right from the tree.”

  He looked up and down the street. Most of the row houses were gone but there were a few still standing, unattached from their neighbors’ now, although they formed the skeleton of new, undistinguished, flat facades that he did not recognize at all.

  “There,” he said suddenly, delighted by what appeared to be the discovery of his grandparents’ house, still standing but, as he acknowledged, totally different. The houses on each side of it were demolished and had become empty lots overgrown with weeds. He unlocked the door and got out of the car and for a while seemed to be still trying to orient himself. He moved closer to the house. There were numbers over the doorway, one of t
hem lopsided.

  “2108. That’s it.” He looked back at Helen and waved her forward. “This is it, Helen. This was my grandparents’ house. Come on.”

  He moved forward and perhaps out of a desire to be protective, she unlocked the door on the driver’s side and got out. Remembering her father’s admonition, she could not completely chase away her fear, but since the street was mostly deserted, although she could see people walking in her direction, she felt reasonably safe, although they would certainly be the only white people in view.

  The house that was 2108 did not have a porch, and was small, boxlike, and undistinguished. Her grandfather stood in front of it for a long moment, then moved to one of the empty lots next door.

  “There,” he said. “The trees are still there. I remember them like yesterday.”

  He moved further into the lot. She followed reluctantly.

  “Do you think it’s wise, Grampa?” she said, but he paid no attention and kept on moving. At the rear of the house was a short fence badly in need of repair. There was no back porch now, but as he had exclaimed, there were three trees, one of them bearing cherries.

  “Imagine that. Still bearing cherries after all those years. Do cherry trees last that long?”

  He stood by the side of the fence surveying the trees for a long time. His granddaughter stood beside him while he looked. Is he watching the tree grow or eating the cherries with his eyes? It was, after all, only a cherry tree.

  Then suddenly he stepped over the fence that had fallen in one spot, and it was easy for him to pass over it.

  “You shouldn’t, Grampa,” she said, feeling uncomfortable by his action. “This is private property.”

  “They shouldn’t mind,” he said as he moved into the little yard and placed himself under one of the low branches of the cherry tree. Reaching up, he bent the branch, picked a couple cherries, and put one in his mouth.

  “Sour as ever, but just as I remember,” he said, turning toward his granddaughter, who still stood behind the broken fence on the vacant lot. Then suddenly, a voice screeched with anger, and a large black woman in a housecoat rushed into the yard.

  “Get the fuck out of here,” the woman screamed. It took Sara a second to discover that the woman held a pistol in her hand and was pointing it straight at her grandfather.

  “I was just . . .” her grandfather began. “I used to live . . .” But he couldn’t go on. His complexion turned ashen.

  “This is private property you sumbitch. Get your white ass out of here.”

  “But I . . .”

  She could see her grandfather was too stunned to reply. Quickly she hopped over the fence and stood between the outraged woman and her grandfather, looking down into the barrel of the pistol. She had never in her life been that close to a firearm.

  “I got my rights. If I shot you both, I be within my rights. So get the fuck out of here before I blow both your heads off.”

  “Take it easy,” Sara said, hands outstretched. “He meant no harm. You see, he lived here once.”

  “I don’t give a shit. You have no business here. So git.”

  “There’s no need for that gun,” Sara said. The barrel of the pistol was no more than a foot from her head. “He is my grandfather.”

  “Who gives a fuck?”

  “I do lady. I do,” she shot back. Oddly she felt no fear, only rage. “We’re not here to do you any harm. All he wanted was to pick a cherry. Don’t be a fool.”

  “Who you callin' a fool?” the woman replied, her anger unabated. “Just get the fuck off my property.”

  “We’re going. We’re going,” Sara said, turning to her grandfather, who seemed on the verge of collapse, white as a sheet with fear and confusion. She put out her hand to her grandfather, who took it. It felt like grabbing the hand of a child. Then she led him to the edge of the property and across the fence to the vacant lot and led him to the car while the woman watched them depart, still holding the pistol, pointing it at them.

  “She could have killed us,” her grandfather said.

  “Well, we’re still here.”

  Her reaction had surprised her.

  “All I wanted was to taste one of those cherries,” her grandfather said, as she gunned the motor and headed under the El. As she drove, he opened his palm, which held a single cherry.

  “I picked one for you,” he said.

  “Thanks, Grampa,” she said, taking the cherry and popping it into her mouth.

  “Really sour,” she said, knowing then that she would never forget the taste of it.

  Subway Love Affair

  by Warren Adler

  Just my luck to fall in love with a girl that lived way up in the Bronx. I met her that summer in Rockaway when nearly every boy in our crowd had girlfriends. I picked her up on the beach, which was the way we boys met girls. They all wanted to be part of our crowd.

  Helen was sixteen and I was eighteen and going to summer school at City College in the years when they still called it CCNY. Even so, I always made it back to Rockaway by two in the afternoon, which bought me nearly three hours with our crowd on the beach.

  I loved the way Helen looked. She had a big face with big brown eyes and what they called in those days dirty blonde hair. Also she had a great big warm smile and a body that was described then as zoftig. I was proud as hell of Helen's looks. She thought I was good looking, too. I was tall and thin and tan and some people said I looked like Gregory Peck.

  We necked a lot in those days. It wasn't always easy finding enough dark corners to do it in, but when we were on the beach or walking on the boardwalk we always had our arms around each other. Necking was in those days a perfectly respectable way to make love. You soul kissed a lot, blew in your girl's ear, hugged and squeezed, sometimes for hours.

  I really loved her. I said so lots of times and she told me she loved me, too. We were both happy being in love. I wrote her love notes, and since I was an English major I read her poems from Sonnets from the Portuguese and sonnets from Shakespeare. I was never certain that Helen truly understood the words of these great poets, but she never let on that she didn't and, after each reading, she would hug and squeeze me and tell me how much she truly loved me. Of course, I believed her and I truly believed in my own undying infinite love for her.

  I thought of her from the moment I awoke in the morning to the moment I shut my eyes. I'm sure I dreamed of her. My heartbeat always accelerated when I saw her for the first time each day. I could not wait to touch her, hold her in my arms, and kiss her. God I was in love. We were in love.

  Of course the necking led to what they then called petting, which meant I felt her tits and she occasionally let her hand brush against my erection. You've got to understand how it was in those days. Girls were deathly afraid of pregnancy and disgrace. They were equally afraid of getting a "reputation," which would spoil their chances of finding husbands, which was their number-one ambition and the preoccupation of their mothers and fathers.

  Boys were supposed to show respect to nice girls by not being "fresh." Virginity was really a prized possession. Boys did not want to marry what they secretly felt was "soiled goods." The fact was that the whole damned value system was different. Sometimes, though, you were so much in love that you both made a deep commitment to each other, deep enough to go a bit further when you made love.

  That summer I loved Helen so much and she loved me so much that she proved her love to me by letting me finally make love to her naked. It came in stages, though, and we were both pretty clumsy at it. Also we were too shy to give each other instructions. She used to jerk me off until I hurt and I was no better at masturbating her.

  It was a foregone conclusion between us, a solemn pledge that one day we would finally marry. We were certain, of course, that our love would last forever and ever. Not that both of us weren't in love before. But that was considered "puppy love." This was the real thing. Boys and girls of our age truly wanted to find someone to love and to love them. That
was the point of existence. Of course, boys worried about their careers and their future and making a living, but when it came down to what they truly wanted most was to be in love with a girl who loved them and would always be true and loyal and loving.

  As the summer wore on and we contemplated going back to our respective neighborhoods in the city, our lovemaking got more and more intense. You see, we had a problem. Helen lived in the Bronx and I lived in Brooklyn. To understand what that meant, one has to know something of the urban geography of New York City in the early forties. This was, remember, before everybody moved to the suburbs.

  I lived in Crown Heights in Brooklyn. For me to get to Helen's parents’ apartment on University Avenue in the Bronx I had to walk ten blocks to the subway station, the one on Sterling Street or Kingston Avenue. Then I would have to change at Franklin and rattle up through Manhattan and Harlem to the elevated section of the IRT in the Bronx to Burnside Avenue. That took a good hour and ten minutes. Then I would have to walk five more blocks up Burnside to Helen's parents’ apartment. Her father was a cab driver and they lived on the top floor of a four-story walk-up.

  Let's face it, it was one big schlep. Then if we were to have a date in the city, which was what downtown Manhattan was called in those days, that would be another good forty minutes to get there and another forty to get back to Helen’s, after which I would have to spend another hour and a half, sometimes two, getting back to my parents’ apartment in Brooklyn.

  That was the reality of courtship if you happened to fall in love with a girl from the Bronx. Which was why our lovemaking got very intense as the summer drew to a close. But I tell you, I was madly in love, my heart bursting with feeling, and I was sure that Helen's heart was bursting as well.

  I think it was about a week before the end of summer that we both felt compelled to seal our love irrevocably, to prove to each other that we had made a lifetime commitment to loving. My friend Harold's parents were going to the city for a funeral and planned to stay overnight and he lent us his bedroom. We were very resourceful in those days and always managed to find places to make love. Don't forget, few, if any of us had cars in those days. But there were porches and occasional empty bedrooms and blankets on the beach.