A Long Island Story

by Rick Gekoski

  And where in the name of God were the children? Maurice was busy in the garage and said he hadn’t seen the boy. She did a quick search of the available hangouts and hideouts, eventually locating Becca asleep in the cellar next to the washing machine – whatever was she doing there? She could have shaken her, though herself shaking with relief.

  ‘Where is Jake?’ she demanded. It sounded harsh, perhaps a little hysterical, and it frightened the girl.

  ‘I don’t know! I didn’t do anything! He went away!’

  She jerked Becca up with her arm, propelled her forcibly up the stairs.

  ‘Went away? Went away! What do you mean?’ She was shouting now, her voice brought Addie from the house, rubbing her eyes

  ‘What’s the matter? What is going on?’

  Perle didn’t answer. Went away! He went away!

  What were the last words he’d said to her? Did she answer?

  ‘When did he go? Where was he going?’

  Becca started to cry, hunched her shoulders, turned away sobbing.

  ‘I don’t know! I don’t know anything!’

  The more the child sobbed, and the more hysterical her grandmother became – why this crazy over-reaction? – the cooler Addie felt, the more in charge. What a fuss they were making!

  ‘Hold your horses,’ she said firmly. ‘Will someone tell me what’s going on?’

  Becca stuttered out the story, as Perle paced the grass, went to the rear, looked up into the trees in case he had climbed one, under the hydrangeas, round the boundary fences and into the neighbours’ yard.

  ‘Jake! Jake!’ She was shouting. Jake!

  ‘Mother! Come back here, listen to this . . .’

  Perle came back, wringing her apron in front of her.

  ‘Becca says that after lunch they split up, and she saw Jake walking down the lane . . .’

  ‘Where was he going? Did he say?’

  ‘No, he didn’t. Let’s walk together down the lane, and we can ask the neighbours. He might have popped down to see if David could play.’

  ‘I don’t think David is here, he’s . . .’

  ‘Let’s all calm down and go together, he’s probably there. I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.’

  Perle pretended to agree, if only to calm down Becca, who was still crying by her side. From the garage they could hear sounds of hammering, but it would have been unwise to enlist Maurice’s help. He wouldn’t have been worried at all. Boys were like that, always wandering off, should be like that, boys. And women? Always fussing, always like that, women.

  ‘After all, if he’s not there we can always call the police.’

  He wasn’t, no one answered the protracted knocking, banging really, at the front door. Perle found that it was unlocked, as was usual in Harbor Heights Park, so she stuck her head in and gave a few hearty but anxious yoo-hoos.

  As they were deciding where to look next, which neighbour to ask, and as Perle’s mind swirled round the obvious and terrible possibilities, a station wagon pulled into the driveway, and in a moment the boys, David and Jake, tumbled out, happy and brown, pictures of buoyant health and optimism.

  ‘Hi, everybody,’ the boy said, ‘what’re you doing here?’

  It was soon made clear to him that they had, as he put it to himself calmly, missed him, and strolled round to find him. Well, here he was. So why was Granny red-faced with fury, glaring at him, and Becca wiping her nose on her wrist? As for Addie, she just gave him a hug and said, ‘Never mind, here you are then.’

  ‘Never mind what?’

  It was enough to set Perle off.

  ‘How dare you!’ She grabbed hold of his shirt and pulled him towards her. ‘Going off without telling anyone, we were frantic with worry. Never do that again! Never!’

  She may have pinched him. Perhaps it was inadvertent. But he pulled his arm away with a screech of ‘Ow!’, rubbing at his shoulder, which did, to be fair, have a red mark on it.

  ‘You pinched me! You pinched me!’

  ‘You need more than a pinch, you wicked boy! Frightening us half to death. You need a spanking. If only your father was still here!’

  It was so absurd that the boy stopped rubbing and stared at the red-faced old woman. Addie could hardly suppress a smirk. Spanked? Theirs was the least spanky household in the universe, her children the offspring of Freud and Dr Spock, corporal punishment as unknown to them as fasting at Ramadan.

  *

  There was a man. In the summer he slept in the local park, in a hidey-hole under some bushes. He had a black garbage bag with stuff in it. The police would chase him away, but he always came back. The local children would giggle and peer into the bush, keeping a safe distance. Sometimes the man would come out, leafy and beardy, filthy with leaves and soil, uncoil himself, shaking his fist.

  ‘Little pishers, get the hell out of here!’ he would bellow, and they’d run away. There were grown-ups about, so they felt safe, really, just excited and just the right amount trembly. It was a game.

  On that first evening, Moshe reported missing only an hour ago, the police went round to the park, but the man wasn’t there. They knew him, but not his name. He wouldn’t tell them, looked puzzled and belligerent when asked, as if they had no right to know, or perhaps he couldn’t remember. Bushman! He was a local character of a sort and no one had yet established whether he was just grumpy, or dangerous. So far, merely the former to an extreme degree. There was something not right about him, wonky. Nobody could say for sure, but he had broken no laws, save for the habitual loitering. They’d grown used to him, he was part of the community, on the fringes, lurking.

  The next afternoon he showed up with his black bag and began to lay out his blankets when the three policemen moved in. He looked up with alarm, never more than one, never more. And they had never looked like this. One of them had his hand on the holstered gun at his side.

  ‘Hey, Bushman,’ he said loudly and firmly, ‘put your hands up and don’t make a move!’

  He moved backwards, slowly, and raised his hands.

  ‘Where were you last night?’

  He didn’t answer. His stock of words had diminished and he was terrified of the police. The police could mean jail, and jail meant you were locked in, he couldn’t bear that, would clutch the bars and wail to be let out.

  He didn’t answer, and was manhandled into a car and taken to the local station for questioning. Men in suits, that was an even worse sign. They showed him a picture of Moshe. He looked at it intently, and nodded his head up and down, back and forth.

  ‘You know him?’

  He looked away, shrugged. Looked up, frightened. ‘No.’

  ‘What do you mean, no? He comes to the park, he’s seen you! When did you last see him?’

  They got nothing out of him. Nothing connected him to the disappearance, there were no witnesses who could establish he’d been in the park the day before, no signs of Moshe under the bush. No blood, nothing.

  He was a wonderful suspect; it would have been so agreeable if they could have caught him out, some admission, some slip of the tongue, but as the hours passed the man retracted and withdrew until there were no responses save for tiny whispers of breath, hardly any signs of life. They held him in the cells for a couple of days; he screamed until he fell asleep, and on the third day they released him.

  No evidence, they said, shrugging their shoulders regretfully.

  The man was never seen in the park again, and no suspect as likely ever emerged. Moshe’s body had neither bruising nor signs of struggle. He surely hadn’t committed suicide. Could he have been playing by the river and perhaps fallen in? There was a slippery pavement, a low fence. He could have fallen over, and once in the water a high wall would have prohibited any escape.

  It was preposterous. Impossible. Unthinkable, but not as unthinkable as what might have happened.

  Either that – not that, surely not that – and if not, someone, perhaps someone from the community, someone they kne
w? Him? Or him? Or even, God forbid, him? It was impossible, it could have been one of them, and they could look no one in the face. A few months later Simon and Molly moved downtown where they knew no one, a morose childless couple. They returned to the office after a time, had to make a living, but dropped their old clients without even a shrug of apology, rebuilt their practice but never their lives.

  They should never have left him after school like that. It was their fault. Perle believed that it was hers, too.

  By now, Ben was in New Jersey, heading south less sedately than he had planned, surprisingly anxious not so much to get home as to put an increasing distance between himself and his family, the bungalow, Harbor Heights Park, Huntington, Long Island. All of it, all of them. It was only after the first hour that he felt he could breathe normally, after a few deep breathing exercises that he’d learned for swimming the crawl. Slowly in, hold, slowly out, and again, keeping the rhythm.

  You couldn’t get a decent martini on the flat and featureless roads south, with their occasional diners and infrequent bars. God knows what that might lead to, if he found the right bartender, and perhaps some congenial company. Should have pilfered a couple of Addie’s Miltowns, that would have done it.

  After passing through the stinking conurbations of northern New Jersey and heading south, he might turn left and head for one of the surprisingly rural spots, with lakes and woods, even go a little further to a beach. Maybe have a swim? The water, though it flowed along the coast of the industrial shores, was less polluted than that of the Long Island Sound. He had a bathing suit, could change and have a proper swim for once, without the subliminal worry of a turd in the nose.

  He’d taught himself to swim when he was an undergraduate at Penn. He’d always liked the idea of the water, but no matter how hard he tried down at the university pool, no matter how he worked at controlling his breathing, he could never manage more than three lengths without panting and having to stop, side-stroke his way back to the shallow end, feeling defeated and rather stupid, as elderly faculty members made their slow way up and down, up and down, doing their interminable daily lengths.

  He was not a quitter. He’d learned Latin and French, though he had no facility for languages, had taught himself to play the piano, a bit, knew what results practice could bring. And then, one Thursday afternoon, nothing special about the day or his feelings or condition, nothing different at all, he got in the pool, swam his three lengths, felt just peachy, and exultantly swam fifteen more. It was no fluke. For the rest of his time at Penn he swam most afternoons, faster and more elegantly than the superannuated professors chuffing along behind him. He always did exactly eighteen lengths, a memorial to something rather wonderful, though he could not say quite what had happened. It was a lesson of a crucial sort, and he promised himself that he would abide by it: Keep swimming.

  But not today. It would take a couple of hours to get to the beach and back, and if there was something wonderfully free in the thought of doing it all by himself, just for himself, he was aware too that he’d be lonely, miss the kids and the camaraderie, feel . . . well, a bit sad. Best get home.

  He rejected Perle’s offering of sandwiches, and stopped for a quick late lunch at Howard Johnson’s, took his time, checked in the lobby to see if they had a public phone, and that he had enough change. Ordered his meal, then spent ten minutes on the phone. When he returned the food had just been placed on the table before him, and he slid into the booth hungrily, feeling calmer now, excited even, as if at the start of a new adventure. Of course it was the end of an old one, if you could call that an adventure.

  You’ve got a lot of decisions to make, don’t you? She’d said that again, been saying it for a while, but she was wrong. He’d made his decisions, it was now only a matter of timing. Not what or even how, only when.

  God knows he’d waited long enough. For years he had feared the dread knock on the door, the order to clear his desk, the questions, insinuations and accusations, a long paper trail that would render him unemployable for the foreseeable future. Card-carrying? How stupid, like being a member of the YMCA!

  Ben Grossman was insufficiently important to be made an example of, hauled before HUAC like the writers and Hollywood moguls, required to squirm and to betray friends. In his fantasies, he would have welcomed a chance sit upright in a chair surrounded by hostile interrogators, relished the opportunity to take a stand. In bed at night, unable to sleep, he composed speeches in defence of himself, of the freedom of the individual, that sounded to his half-conscious ears and mind as elegant as Lincoln, and as apposite.

  To his surprise and relief, it hadn’t happened. He had survived, but there was neither relief nor pleasure in it. He’d had enough. He was going to quit because it was insupportable working for, and within, a government that not merely tolerated the rise of Fascism but supported it institutionally, in the House and Senate, that had a president so frightened to stand up for what was right that it had begun to appear – could this be possible? – that the Beast himself was slouching to the White House to be born.

  It made Ben furious, the passivity and compliance at the highest levels. Eisenhower grandly announced that ‘nothing would probably please him – McCarthy – more than to get the publicity that would be generated by a public repudiation by the President’, proclaiming instead, ‘I will not get in the gutter with that guy.’

  ‘Oh, terrific,’ Ben spluttered, ‘how genteel! But if you want to kill a rat, where would you look except in the gutter?’

  No, he would no longer be part of that. It was immoral, ignoble, unsupportable to be implicated in the undermining of the state from above, from within. It made him feel a rat too. For the Beast was right: there was a tangible threat to democracy and the American way. He was it, and Ben near as damn it worked for him. It was time to go because his nostrils could no longer bear the ordure and pollution. Some part of that foul smell was coming from him. He was a G-Man, one of them.

  If something is inevitable, choose it, make it your own. No one and nobody was going to destroy him, or his family. It was time to hunker together in their wagon while the Indians circled, see them off, regroup, move on. To the new frontier? Huntington!

  Why not? But it seemed absurd to Addie, and sterile: she was a city girl, talking already of New York, or Philadelphia (talk about regressive!) or even staying in DC. Refusing to see what was in front of her eyes. If he was going to build a private practice – the thought of joining a big law firm was unappetising, too much like what he already knew – it would have to be where they had contacts. Too many desperate lawyers in New York, too few clients. No, Huntington would do nicely, would have to do. They knew people there and would know more soon enough. Move in, move on.

  He finished his fried clams, ate the last of the coleslaw, topped the final french fry with ketchup: he managed his meals so that he took a bite at a time of each of the constituents, ending up, satisfyingly, with a final mouthful of each. Addie teased him about being so obsessional at the table, but it puzzled him that others did not do the same. It was the best way.

  When he got home, the apartment felt abandoned. He turned on the lights, opened the windows and drapes, the air looked stale and yellow, dust motes floated. He walked round rubbing his hands, as if to say, Well, well, what do we have here, which only elicited the answer, Not a lot, nobody, nothing. He was surprised to feel so, for he had often spent time in Alexandria on his own, the family off to the bungalow, he more or less commuting between DC and Huntington. He’d always looked forward to the weeks of peaceful self- determination, the quiet, the opportunity just to be . . . himself. Perhaps to write? Yet this time it was different, and the desolation that he sensed was a projection, not out there, but in himself, his chest and lungs, heart, mind.

  He fiddled in his pocket for his cigarettes, lit one and sat down in his Eames chair under the window, put his feet up, took a deep drag, felt better, got up in a few minutes to make himself a martini. He kept the bottl
e of Gordon’s in the freezer, so as not to have to dilute his cocktail with ice. Swirled vermouth in his glass, just to make it a bit smoother, emptied it out, added the gin with a double twist of squeezed lemon peel, sat down, lit another cigarette.

  Nothing to decide. Just a matter of making plans.

  And writing a letter, it would make him feel better, and show Addie (and the kids) that he was still with them in spirit, still there, really.

  Dear Addie,

  I got back just fine, the traffic was light, and I stopped in that new Howard Johnson’s just outside Wilmington. Can’t get enough of those fried clams! I thought of the kids, sitting there reading my newspaper, how much they like the HoJo burgers. And thought, too, of our ride up to the bungalow, the fun and songs and teasing, how jolly it was, and how much I will miss that, and all of you for the coming weeks!

  I thought the visit to Michelle and Frankie went just fine, and hope so much that the new (almost new) apartment is sufficiently enticing to reconcile you to the move.

  Try to keep calm and to enjoy the summer. The bungalow is lovely really, and the beach, and Heckscher Park, maybe even an occasional trip into the city to the Natural History Museum or the zoo? They’d love that. And if Michelle or your mother get on your nerves – by which I mean, when they do – do try to withdraw, define some impenetrable space, breathe deeply, count to ten. Or a hundred.

  Anyhow, I think I can get away in three weeks or so, and am looking forward to it already!

  Love to the kids, tell them I will write a special letter just for them – for each of them – and love to you of course, and as ever,

  Ben

  He read it over to himself, not quite satisfied, but it was fit for purpose, so he folded it, fetched an envelope and three cent stamp from the secretaire desk, addressed it and headed out the door to put it in the mailbox. It should be there on Tuesday, they’d all be so pleased that he was thinking of them.

  Returning home after the short walk, the air in the apartment seemed refreshed, less yellow and dusty, almost welcoming. He’d have almost three weeks. It was worth another martini, to celebrate. Feeling mellow and sleepy, he had a quick shower and was in bed just before nine, on top of the covers in the heat, naked. He considered jerking off, but none of his usual images appeared and he hadn’t the energy or wit to summon new ones. He was a bit dull like that. Anyway it was time to sleep, best be fresh for the morning.