A Long Island Story

by Rick Gekoski

When it got just past eleven, the cigarette packs and beer bottles empty, one or another of the pinochle players would suggest that enough was enough, they should settle up. Maurice always won, but the stakes were low, less than five dollars would change hands. He hated having to stop, loved the niceties of play, frequently pointing out the errors of his fellow players, to their intense annoyance. One more round, he’d insist.

  ‘Let’s wait till the enemy squawks!’ he’d say, shuffling the cards, starting to deal, the air still and blessedly cooler as the night wore on. ‘Last round up!’

  It had gone quiet in the car, the smoke yellowing and humid. Addie was resting her head against the window, a small floral cushion propping her up. Becca had gone back to sleep in the back seat. Though admonished to shut up, Ben was humming operatic arias, conducting with one hand and steering with the other. Jake was neither reading nor looking out the window, had jellybeans aplenty but was not eating them, had taken out a pad and pencil and was doing some figures. After a time he looked up to see if he could locate an audience.

  ‘Ben?’ he said, looking down at his pad.

  ‘What, honey?’

  ‘I am trying to figure it out. Today is July 6th, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘And Addie says we are going to the bungalow until after my birthday. That’s August 25th. So . . .’ He paused to count, dividing the number of days by seven. ‘So, that’s over seven weeks, isn’t it?’

  ‘Sure enough,’ said Ben lightly. ‘It is.’

  ‘How come? We usually only go for a month, right? In August. Why are we going so early this time?’

  There was a slight pause. Addie raised her head from her cushion.

  ‘I already explained this,’ she said. ‘I thought you would remember? This year we get the whole summer at the bungalow. That’s an extra treat, isn’t it? Who’d want to be in sweaty old Alexandria when they could be with Poppa and Granny and go to the beach?’

  He remembered, but he hadn’t done the sums. ‘A little longer this summer’, that was how she’d explained it. It wasn’t an entirely appealing prospect. He shared the fiction that he loved it at the bungalow, though he was bored there most of the time, particularly when Ben and Poppa were away. Too many girls! Becca, and cousins Jenny, Naomi and baby Charlotte, with their silly games, dolls and dressing-up outfits. Of course he lorded it over them, got to be conductor of the swinging seats, had first call on the hammock, was the only one allowed on the roof or near the septic tank. He needed boys to talk to about baseball, but even if he found some at the beach they would be stupid Yankee fans. Or maybe the Dodgers or Giants. That was pretty bad too. None of them had even heard of Mickey Vernon! And what was worse, no one to play baseball with. Not like in Alexandria, where he could play softball three mornings a week in the summer.

  But at least there was plenty of time to read, to nosh fruit and jellied candies and ice cream, to go swimming at the beach, or into Huntington for a hotdog at Wolfie’s, with sauerkraut and mustard, and a Dr Pepper straight out of the bottle.

  The more he thought about it, the better it sounded. But something was wrong, and he could sense the evasiveness in his parents’ immobile shoulders, their tones of voice, the inappropriate pauses and emphases. Nothing looked or sounded right.

  ‘Yeah, OK,’ he said, ‘but I don’t get it. Why extra this year . . . Nothing’s different, is it?’

  From the rear seat, Jake watched as Ben turned slightly to his right and nodded. Addie could do it, she was better at that sort of thing, had more of an anxious child in her, could respond to the uncertainty, get the tone right. He would be too matter of fact, too calm, too reasonable. There’s nothing more worrying than being reassured.

  It wasn’t clear what to tell the kids, or how, or when. They’d avoided the moment until plans were further advanced, to spare them the anxiety of knowing both too much and too little. But the boy was already on edge, and likely to get more so. Becca thankfully was asleep, though she would take the news and accommodate the changes more easily than Jake.

  ‘We’re moving, aren’t we? That’s it!’

  His voice was unsteady, and rising in volume. ‘I don’t want to! I won’t!’

  Addie didn’t want to either.

  Leaving Washington, renting an apartment in Huntington on Nathan Hale Drive (God forbid), where Frankie and Michelle lived, the loss of income and status, the dependency on Poppa’s random largesse. Removing the children from their happy, progressive school in the Virginia farmlands, enrolling them in the Long Island public-school system with the suburban dopes. How utterly dreadful for them, for all of them. She searched in vain for someone to blame. They’d done nothing wrong, done things well and rightly and justly, believed in what was good. Son of a bitch!

  ‘I’m not going!’ said Jake. ‘You can’t make me!’

  At the weekends Maurice worked on the bungalow, made it more comfortable, more attractive, more his own. Dug a flower bed along the southern hedge, planted two hydrangeas and some phlox, installed a double swing at the bottom of the yard, paved an area for a swinging seat for the children, made wooden planters for the side of the house and filled them with red geraniums. He spent most of his time in his workshop in the garage, emerging occasionally to measure this, adjust that or install the other.

  Put on the radio, listen to the news – though that was depressing enough – perhaps catch an afternoon Yankee game. Sometimes Jake would wander in and he could teach the boy, who was fidgety and had a short attention span but was greedy for the time the two of them spent together, could teach him how to use a lathe, a chisel, do simple joinery.

  Last year he’d taught the boy how to hammer in a nail: took a good piece of sawn-off two by four, fit it into the vise, turned the handle firmly, then told Jake to finish it off with the final twist. The boy tried to show how strong he was, heaved and grunted, got it to move a little, gave a satisfied little smile.

  ‘Good boy!’ He passed him the hammer – not the titchy ball peen, a proper hammer with a hefty wooden handle and large head – and a two-inch nail.

  ‘Here you go. Remember what I showed you?’

  The boy took the hammer, gripping it halfway up the handle, fearful concentration on his face.

  ‘Not like that, down at the bottom.’ He shifted the boy’s grip, the hammer sagged slightly from its own weight.

  ‘Now don’t just go tap, tap, that won’t drive the nail in. You have to hit it. Like Mickey Mantle!’

  ‘Mickey Vernon!’ said Jake. He was a Senators fan and loved their great first baseman, and though he was stuck with the Yankees for the summer, he didn’t like them. Big show-offs! Mickey Mantle! Yogi stupid Berra!

  Jake raised the hammer, holding the nail tense against the wood, his fingertips whitening. Poppa took it back from him.

  ‘Let me show you again.’ He held the nail just below the top, its point against the wood, raised the hammer, cocked his wrist, drove it three-quarters of the way into the board. He left the rest, handed the hammer back.

  ‘Now you. No need to hold the nail.’

  It took the boy three taps, but the head of the nail now rested against the wood.

  ‘Good!’

  Knowing he’d been spared, the boy felt patronised.

  ‘I want to do it myself! Let me do it!’ He gave a girlish pout that made his grandfather’s heart contract.

  Yet Maurice had adored him from the moment he was born; would have, indeed, once the pregnancy was announced, but it was unclear who exactly was in there. Might be anyone. Might even be a girl. So he waited, and when the announcement came – from a thousand miles away, for Jacob was born in St Louis – he was quite overcome. It rather surprised him, this genetic fundamentalism. A firstborn (grand) son! What was that old Hebrew word for it? Been a long time since he’d been a member of a shul; though he went on Yom Kippur, he could hardly be described as attentive, just attending. Like most of them, going through the ritual but indifferent to it. Atonement?
Yeah, yeah.

  Bekhor? Something like that. Firstborn: with extra rights to property, to respect. To love. The announcement of the arrival was complicated by the difficulty of using the telephone during the war; even telegrams were reserved for military and industrial purposes. Ben had got round this with lawyerly wit. The ensuing telegram announced the arrival of ‘new merchandise with hose attachment’. His following letter gave details, with surprisingly adept cartoonish images of himself, first smoking a large cigar and in the next picture bent over, turning green. It was the cigar, wasn’t it? He wouldn’t have meant to suggest that babies made him sick.

  It would be unfair to claim that it was the hose that Maurice fell in love with; though a no-hose addition to the family would have been celebrated, it would not have been a brocheh of the same order. Even before he’d seen the boy his heart had gone gooey at the very thought of him, and his was not a heart that gooed very frequently. And like most babies, Jakie (as he was first known) was rather more loveable in the idea than in the flesh. He was a colicky baby, crying most of the time, red-faced, insistent, what one of them would have called a perfect incarnation of original sin.

  Maybe it was the difficult birth, the difficult baby. Who knew? But after she tottered home from the days at the hospital, clutching Ben’s arm desperately, the baby in a pram gifted by his loving grandparents, Addie took to bed, silent and miserable, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, refusing to eat, wasting. Ben fell into the breach. They travelled cross-country by train, to the utter dismay of their fellow passengers, and inflicted the bekhor on his grandparents, soon after which Ben, a smile on his face, headed straight back to St Louis – needed immediately at work! Addie got herself up and dressed, and spent her days on the porch, gin and tonic in one hand, cigarettes in the other. ‘It’s a life,’ she observed wryly, disbelieving. The drinks made her feel better for a time, then worse.

  The indissoluble grandparent-bond with the new arrival was founded then, in spite of the fact that even Perle didn’t entirely warm to the bundle of screaming neediness. ‘A brocheh,’ she said repeatedly, often enough to convince herself, though Maurice was not so easily misled.

  But the baby became a boy and, though still restless and needy, developed charms of his own, of which the major one, in Maurice’s eyes, was that he adored his grandfather. Maurice played catch with him, invented games, taught him pinochle, watched baseball on TV, had twice taken him to Yankee Stadium. Poppa Mo adored being adored, as long as it didn’t take much time or effort. He was utterly compelling in half-hour bursts, amusing, engaged, delightful. But he soon tired of the very needs that he created.

  ‘First one to fall asleep gets a quarter,’ he’d say, resting his head on the sofa and closing his eyes. The children did the same, but never won the quarter. Occasionally he’d give them one anyway in order to be able to ask: ‘Friends to the finish?’

  They didn’t even bother to reply.

  ‘Lend me a quarter?’

  He paused for a moment.

  ‘That’s the finish!’

  His feelings for Jake were archetypally pure, but more ambivalent in fleshy incarnation. He was a spoiled little boy, Addie and Perle constantly giving in to him, all he had to do was insist and he could have anything he wanted, just to shut him up. Still red-faced and crying really, only more subtly.

  And so he let him have the hammer: let him, knowing that he was weak-wristed and the hammer too heavy; let him, knowing that it was dangerous; let him, knowing he might well hurt himself. Let him. It would be good for him. He was prone to crying over scratches and poison ivy, stubbed toes, bumps, bruises, frightened of wasps and jellyfish and sounds in the night. His fingers were covered with Band-Aids, his scuffed knees yellow from application of Mercurochrome – he was frightened of iodine. Ow! It hurts! No, it would do him no harm if harm it was to be.

  It was. The hammer came up, not very far up, and down, not very hard, but it was high enough and hard enough to give the boy’s thumb such a whack that, if it couldn’t have been heard in the kitchen, the resulting screams certainly were.

  Ten years old, making a fuss.

  Perle came rushing across the lawn in her apron, waving her hands in her ‘It’s a disaster’ motion, like a marionette operated by a spastic. Jake was lying on the floor holding his hand, screaming, face soaked, snot-ridden. Making a meal of it, Maurice thought unsympathetically.

  ‘Maurice! What have you done? How many times have I told you!’

  She leant down and lifted the crying boy, who was too big now to carry back to the house but seemed incapable of standing up. Unwilling, really.

  ‘Let me see, let me see!’ she said, unwrapping the one hand from the other to reveal the red swelling thumb.

  ‘Don’t touch it!’

  ‘Don’t worry, my darling,’ she said. ‘Come with me, we’ll put it in cold water and then put a lovely ice pack on it. That’ll make it all better.’

  She glared at Maurice, who was sheepishly putting his tools away, and propelled the boy gently back to the house, brushing past Becca, lurking to the side, making herself simultaneously invisible and available.

  ‘I’ll turn the cold water on!’ she said, running back to the house. ‘And wake Addie!’

  Perle loved to be needed, to make sure the children had everything they wanted, and then to worry after they had it. She spoiled them, and then worried they’d spoil, or worse. Being alive was dangerous. In the meantime die kinder needed to be watched over and protected. They’d eat too much fruit and get a stomach ache, go into the water just after eating a hotdog and drown of cramps, fall out of the tree, get stung by a bee or bitten by a dog, get a poison ivy rash, prick themselves on the blackberry bushes. Or get sucked into the septic tank. This was a fiction of Jake’s that Perle, who knew nothing of such tanks save what they were full of, curiously colluded in. If you got too close to the septic tank area, behind the garage, the ground would give way and you could fall in! Jake said so, it was like quicksand. Perle never went near it, and Becca wouldn’t go into the garage at all – which was, of course, Jake’s aim – for fear that the quicksand would reach out and grab her by the ankles, and in she’d go to the most horrible death she could imagine, drowned in poo-poo. Worse than being eaten by the Great Danes up the hill, who howled all night and ate children. At least they were in their cage!

  Becca slept for almost an hour, and woke up irritable and thirsty, rubbing her eyes.

  ‘Are we almost there?’

  Jake knew she would say that – she was always asking, never satisfied.

  ‘No! It’s a long way still. You’ve got to learn to be patient!’

  It was what Addie kept telling her, but Becca had no need to defer to her brother.

  ‘You be patient! I’m hungry and I feel sick!’

  It was her trump card. Last year she’d been nauseous on the way to Huntington, vomited copiously in the car, almost missing Jake. Addie had insisted, before they set off, on making bacon and scrambled eggs for the children. Both resisted, but lots of ketchup and extra bacon had solved the immediate problem, and exacerbated the resulting one.

  The copious ejaculate, which emerged in a muddy rainbow arc, made the rear of the car uninhabitable, ready for an emergency United Nations task force. Rotten half-digested eggs and red slush with brown bits covered much of the surfaces, and some of Jake’s. Fallout was nothing compared to this, just some dusty powder, nothing to it, whatever the consequences . . .

  Ben had opened the window, put on the fan for fresh air and, gagging continuously, exited the highway five minutes later in search of a store where he could buy some cleaning materials, and a pharmacy to get something to settle Becca’s stomach, all of their stomachs. It took twenty minutes to find one, during which they had to pull over twice for Becca to empty her stomach, and for the rest of them to fill their lungs.

  They filled buckets with water, scrubbed and brushed and installed air fresheners, the result of which was that the car smelled l
ike a hospital on a humid day, the air falsified by cleaning odours, underlain by the stench of decay.

  Becca knew that none of them wanted that again.

  ‘I ate too many jellybeans. I think I might . . .’ She made a retching sound from the back of her throat and repeated it while clutching her stomach.

  Jake glared at her. He’d heard that sound before, not when she had actually vomited, which she’d done quickly and without any fuss, but some time afterwards, when she was ostensibly playing in the yard. The first time he’d rushed over to her, to ask if she was sick. She looked sheepish, cleared her throat, walked away. She’d been practising.

  Addie had brought a vomit bag from their plane trip to Bermuda the previous Easter and had it ready.

  ‘Here, darling, try to hold on, and if you need to vomit do it in this. It’s a special bag. You remember, from the plane?’

  ‘I’m not doing it in a bag! I’ll miss and get it all over me!’

  ‘Better than getting it on me!’ said Jake.

  ‘I need the bathroom! Hurry!’

  It was impossible not to stop, though Addie and Ben suspected, and Jake knew, that there was no danger of a barf.

  He looked at his sister suspiciously.

  ‘Becky,’ he said, ‘is drecky!’

  She glared right back.

  ‘Jakie,’ she hissed, ‘is snakey!’

  ‘Shut up! Now!’ said Addie.

  *

  Everything was a potential source of harm. Particularly Maurice. One day he threw a baseball when the boy had his head turned and hit him on the cheek, the next day he pushed Becca too high on the swing and she began to cry. He let them stay up too late, and the next day they’d be cranky and hurt themselves.

  He had no sense of having done wrong, the only wrong was in being there at all, or too often. He should have gone to the city for the day, though he supposedly had the month off. But there were always deals to be done, orders supervised: the rag trade was like that, quiet one moment, frantic the next. Even in the dog days. The sales force – grand name for the eight of them, five of them useless schleppers, God knows why Sol and Molly kept them on – all took a break in August, so if there was anything to be done, Sol would get on the phone, knowing Maurice wanted to say yes.