The Specialty of the House

by Stanley Ellin

  I was called back to the present by my wife’s voice. ‘Well,’ she said with good-natured annoyance, ‘considering that I’m right in the middle of Walter Winchell—’

  I returned the paper to her. ‘I’m sorry. I got a jolt when I saw that picture. I used to know him.’

  Her eyes lit up with the interest of one who – even at secondhand – finds herself in the presence of the notorious. ‘You did? When?’

  ‘Oh, when the folks still lived in Brooklyn. We were kids together. He was my best friend.’

  My wife was an inveterate tease. ‘Isn’t that something? I never knew you hung around with juvenile delinquents when you were a kid.’

  ‘He wasn’t a juvenile delinquent. Matter of fact—’

  ‘If you aren’t the serious one.’ She smiled at me in a kindly dismissal and went back to Winchell, who clearly offered fresher and more exciting tidings than mine. ‘Anyhow,’ she said, ‘I wouldn’t let it bother me too much, dear. That was a long time ago.’

  It was a long time ago. You could play ball in the middle of the street then; few automobiles were to be seen in the far reaches of Brooklyn in 1923. And Bath Beach, where I lived, was one of the farthest reaches. It fronted on Gravesend Bay with Coney Island to the east a few minutes away by trolley car, and Dyker Heights and its golf course to the west a few minutes away by foot. Each was an entity separated from Bath Beach by a wasteland of weedgrown lots which building contractors had not yet discovered.

  So, as I said, you could play ball in the streets without fear of traffic. Or you could watch the gaslighter turning up the street lamps at dusk. Or you could wait around the firehouse on Eighteenth Avenue until, if you were lucky enough, an alarm would send three big horses there slewing the pump-engine out into the street in a spray of sparks from iron-shod wheels. Or, miracle of miracles, you could stand gaping up at the sky to follow the flight of a biplane proudly racketing along overhead.

  Those were the things I did that summer, along with Iggy Kovac, who was my best friend, and who lived in the house next door. It was a two-story frame house painted in some sedate color, just as mine was. Most of the houses in Bath Beach were like that, each with a small garden in front and yard in back. The only example of ostentatious architecture on our block was the house on the corner owned by Mr Rose, a newcomer to the neighborhood. It was huge and stuccoed, almost a mansion, surrounded by an enormous lawn, and with a stuccoed two-car garage at the end of its driveway.

  That driveway held a fascination for Iggy and me. On it, now and then, would be parked Mr Rose’s automobile, a gray Packard, and it was the car that drew us like a magnet. It was not only beautiful to look at from the distance, but close up it loomed over us like a locomotive, giving off an aura of thunderous power even as it stood there quietly. And it had two running boards, one mounted over the other to make the climb into the tonneau easier. In fact, no one we knew had a car anywhere near as wonderful as that Packard.

  So we would sneak down the driveway when it was parked there, hoping for a chance to mount those running boards without being caught. We never managed to do it. It seemed that an endless vigil was being kept over that car, either by Mr Rose himself or by someone who lived in the rooms over the garage. As soon as we were no more than a few yards down the driveway a window would open in the house or the garage, and a hoarse voice would bellow threats at us. Then we would turn tail and race down the driveway and out of sight.

  We had not always done that. The first time we had seen the car we had sauntered up to it quite casually, all in the spirit of good neighbors, and had not even understood the nature of the threats. We only stood there and looked up in astonishment at Mr Rose, until he suddenly left the window and reappeared before us to grab Iggy’s arm.

  Iggy tried to pull away and couldn’t. ‘Leggo of me!’ he said in a high-pitched, frightened voice. ‘We weren’t doing anything to your ole car! Leggo of me, or I’ll tell my father on you. Then you’ll see what’ll happen!’

  This did not seem to impress Mr Rose. He shook Iggy back and forth – not hard to do because Iggy was small and skinny even for his age – while I stood there, rooted to the spot in horror.

  There were some cranky people in the neighborhood who would chase us away when we made any noise in front of their houses, but nobody had ever handled either of us the way Mr Rose was doing. I remember having some vague idea that it was because he was new around here, he didn’t know yet how people around here were supposed to act, and when I look back now I think I may have been surprisingly close to the truth. But whatever the exact reasons for the storm he raised, it was enough of a storm to have Iggy blubbering out loud, and to make us approach the Packard warily after that. It was too much of a magnet to resist, but once we were on Mr Rose’s territory we were like a pair of rabbits crossing open ground during the hunting season. And with just about as much luck.

  I don’t want to give the impression by all this that we were bad kids. For myself, I was acutely aware of the letter of the law, and had early discovered that the best course for anyone who was good-natured, pacific, and slow afoot – all of which I was in extra measure – was to try and stay within bounds. And Iggy’s vices were plain high spirits and recklessness. He was like quicksilver and was always on the go and full of mischief.

  And smart. Those were the days when at the end of each school week your marks were appraised and you would be reseated according to your class standing – best students in the first row, next best in the second row, and so on. And I think the thing that best explains Iggy was the way his position in class would fluctuate between the first and sixth rows. Most of us never moved more than one row either way at the end of the week; Iggy would suddenly be shoved from the first row to the ignominy of the sixth, and then the Friday after would just as suddenly ascend the heights back to the first row. That was the sure sign that Mr Kovac had got wind of the bad tidings and had taken measures.

  Not physical measures, either. I once asked Iggy about that, and he said, ‘Nah, he don’t wallop me, but he kind of says don’t be so dumb, and, well – you know—’

  I did know, because I suspect that I shared a good deal of Iggy’s feeling for Mr Kovac, a fervent hero worship. For one thing, most of the fathers in the neighborhood ‘worked in the city’ – to use the Bath Beach phrase – meaning that six days a week they ascended the Eighteenth Avenue station of the BMT and were borne off to desks in Manhattan. Mr Kovac, on the other hand, was a conductor on the Bath Avenue trolleycar line, a powerful and imposing figure in his official cap and blue uniform with the brass buttons on it. The cars on the Bath Avenue line were without side walls, closely lined with benches from front to back, and were manned by conductors who had to swing along narrow platforms on the outside to collect fares. It was something to see Mr Kovac in action. The only thing comparable was the man who swung himself around a Coney Island merry-go-round to take your tickets.

  And for another thing, most of the fathers – at least when they had reached the age mine had – were not much on athletics, while Mr Kovac was a terrific baseball player. Every fair Sunday afternoon down at the little park by the bay there was a pick-up ball game where the young fellows of the neighborhood played a regulation nine innings on a marked-off diamond, and Mr Kovac was always the star. As far as Iggy and I were concerned, he could pitch like Vance and hit like Zack Wheat, and no more than that could be desired. It was something to watch Iggy when his father was at bat. He’d sit chewing his nails right through every windup of the pitcher, and if Mr Kovac came through with a hit, Iggy would be up and screaming so loud you’d think your head was coming off.

  Then after the game was over we’d hustle a case of pop over to the team, and they would sit around on the park benches and talk things over. Iggy was his father’s shadow then; he’d be hanging around that close to him, taking it all in and eating it up. I wasn’t so very far away myself, but since I couldn’t claim possession as Iggy could, I amiably kept at a proper distance.
And when I went home those afternoons it seemed to me that my father looked terribly stodgy, sitting there on the porch the way he did, with loose pages of the Sunday paper around him.

  When I first learned that I was going to have to leave all this, that my family was going to move from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I was completely dazed. Manhattan was a place where on occasional Saturday afternoons you went, all dressed up in your best suit, to shop with your mother at Wanamakers or Macy’s, or, with luck, went to the Hippodrome with your father, or maybe to the Museum of Natural History. It had never struck me as a place where people lived.

  But as the days went by my feelings changed, became a sort of apprehensive excitement. After all, I was doing something pretty heroic, pushing off into the Unknown this way, and the glamor of it was brought home to me by the way the kids on the block talked to me about it.

  However, none of that meant anything the day before we moved. The house looked strange with everything in it packed and crated and bundled together; my mother and father were in a harried state of mind; and the knowledge of impending change – it was the first time in my life I had ever moved from one house to another – now had me scared stiff.

  That was the mood I was in when after an early supper I pushed through the opening in the hedge between our back yard and the Kovacs’, and sat down on the steps before their kitchen door. Iggy came out and sat down beside me. He could see how I felt, and it must have made him uncomfortable.

  ‘Jeez, don’t be such a baby,’ he said. ‘It’ll be great, living in the city. Look at all the things you’ll have to see there.’

  I told him I didn’t want to see anything there.

  ‘All right, then don’t,’ he said. ‘You want to read something good? I got a new Tarzan, and I got The Boy Allies at Jutland. You can have your pick, and I’ll take the other one.’

  This was a more than generous offer, but I said I didn’t feel like reading, either.

  ‘Well, we can’t just sit here being mopey,’ Iggy said reasonably. ‘Let’s do something. What do you want to do?’

  This was the opening of the ritual where by rejecting various possibilities – it was too late to go swimming, too hot to play ball, to early to go into the house – we would arrive at a choice. We dutifully went through this process of elimination, and it was Iggy as usual who came up with the choice.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Let’s go over to Dyker Heights and fish for golf balls. It’s pretty near the best time now, anyhow.’

  He was right about that, because the best time to fish for balls that had been driven into the lone water hazard of the course and never recovered by their owners was at sunset when, chances were, the place would be deserted but there would still be enough light to see by. The way we did this kind of fishing was to pull off our sneakers and stockings, buckle our knickerbockers over our knees, then slowly and speculatively wade through the ooze of the pond, trying to feel out sunken golf balls with our bare feet. It was pleasant work, and occasionally profitable, because the next day any ball you found could be sold to a passing golfer for five cents. I don’t remember how we came to fix on the price of five cents as a fair one, but there it was. The golfers seemed to be satisfied with it, and we certainly were.

  In all our fishing that summer I don’t believe we found more than a total of half a dozen balls, but thirty cents was largesse in those days. My share went fast enough for anything that struck my fancy: Iggy, however, had a great dream. What he wanted more than anything else in the world was a golf club, and every cent he could scrape together was deposited in a tin can with a hole punched in its top and its seam bound with bicycle tape.

  He would never open the can, but would shake it now and then to estimate its contents. It was his theory that when the can was full to the top it would hold just about enough to pay for the putter he had picked out in the window of Leo’s Sporting Goods Store on 86th Street. Two or three times a week he would have me walk with him down to Leo’s, so that we could see the putter, and in between he would talk about it at length, and demonstrate the proper grip for holding it, and the way you have to line up a long putt on a rolling green. Iggy Kovac was the first person I knew – I have known many since – who was really golf crazy. But I think that his case was the most unique, considering that at the time he had never in his life even had his hands on a real club.

  So that evening, knowing how he felt about it, I said all right, if he wanted to go fish for golf balls I would go with him. It wasn’t much of a walk down Bath Avenue; the only hard part was when we entered the course at its far side where we had to climb over mountains of what was politely called ‘fill.’ It made hot and smoky going, then there was a swampy patch, and finally the course itself and the water hazard.

  I’ve never been back there since that day, but not long ago I happened to read an article about the Dyker Heights golf course in some magazine or other. According to the article, it was now the busiest public golf course in the world. Its eighteen well-kept greens were packed with players from dawn to dusk, and on weekends you had to get in line at the clubhouse at three or four o’clock in the morning if you wanted a chance to play a round.

  Well, each to his own taste, but it wasn’t like that when Iggy and I used to fish for golf balls there. For one thing, I don’t think it had eighteen holes; I seem to remember it as a nine-hole layout. For another thing, it was usually pretty empty, either because not many people in Brooklyn played golf in those days, or because it was not a very enticing spot at best.

  The fact is, it smelled bad. They were reclaiming the swampy land all around it by filling it with refuse, and the smoldering fires in the refuse laid a black pall over the place. No matter when you went there, there was that dirty haze in the air around you, and in a few minutes you’d find your eyes smarting and your nose full of a curious acrid smell.

  Not that we minded it, Iggy and I. We accepted it casually as part of the scenery, as much a part as the occasional Mack truck loaded with trash that would rumble along the dirt road to the swamp, its chain-drive chattering and whining as it went. The only thing we did mind sometimes was the heat of the refuse underfoot when we climbed over it. We never dared enter the course from the clubhouse side; the attendant there had once caught us in the pond trying to plunder his preserve, and we knew he had us marked. The back entrance may have been hotter, but it was the more practical way in.

  When we reached the pond there was no one else in sight. It was a hot, still evening with a flaming red sun now dipping toward the horizon, and once we had our sneakers and stockings off – long, black cotton stockings they were – we wasted no time wading into the water. It felt good, too, as did the slick texture of the mud oozing up between my toes when I pressed down. I suspect that I had the spirit of the true fisherman in me then. The pleasure lay in the activity, not in the catch.

  Still, the catch made a worthy objective, and the idea was to walk along with slow, probing steps, and to stop whenever you felt anything small and solid underfoot. I had just stopped short with the excited feeling that I had pinned down a golf ball in the muck when I heard the sound of a motor moving along the dirt track nearby. My first thought was that it was one of the dump trucks carrying another load to add to the mountain of fill, but then I knew that it didn’t sound like a Mack truck.

  I looked around to see what kind of car it was, still keeping my foot planted on my prize, but the row of bunkers between the pond and the road blocked my view. Then the sound of the motor suddenly stopped, and that was all I needed to send me splashing out of the water in a panic. All Iggy needed, too, for that matter. In one second we had grabbed up our shoes and stockings and headed around the corner of the nearest bunker where we would be out of sight. In about five more seconds we had our stockings and shoes on without even bothering to dry our legs, ready to take flight if anyone approached.

  The reason we moved so fast was simply that we weren’t too clear about our legal right to fish for golf balls. Iggy a
nd I had talked it over a couple of times, and while he vehemently maintained that we had every right to – there were the balls, with nobody but the dopey caretaker doing anything about it – he admitted that the smart thing was not to put the theory to the test, but to work at our trade unobserved. And I am sure that when the car stopped nearby he had the same idea I did: somebody had reported us, and now the long hand of authority was reaching out for us.

  So we waited, crouching in breathless silence against the grassy wall of the bunker, until Iggy could not contain himself any longer. He crawled on hands and knees to the corner of the bunker and peered around it toward the road. ‘Holy smoke, look at that!’ he whispered in an awed voice, and waggled his hand at me to come over.

  I looked over his shoulder, and with shocked disbelief I saw a gray Packard, a car with double running boards, one mounted over the other, the only car of its kind I had ever seen. There was no mistaking it, and there was no mistaking Mr Rose who stood with two men near it, talking to the smaller one of them, and making angry chopping motions of his hands as he talked.

  Looking back now, I think that what made the scene such a strange one was its setting. There was the deserted golf course all around us, and the piles of smoldering fill in the distance, everything seeming so raw and uncitylike and made crimson by the setting sun; and there in the middle of it was this sleek car and the three men with straw hats and jackets and neckties, all looking completely out of place.

  Even more fascinating was the smell of danger around them, because while I couldn’t hear what was being said I could see that Mr Rose was in the same mood he had been in when he caught Iggy and me in his driveway. The big man next to him said almost nothing, but the little man Mr Rose was talking to shook his head, tried to answer, and kept backing away slowly, so that Mr Rose had to follow him. Then suddenly the little man wheeled around and ran right toward the bunker where Iggy and I lay hidden. We ducked back, but he ran past the far side of it, and he was almost past the pond when the big man caught up with him and grabbed him, Mr Rose running up after them with his hat in his hand. That is when we could have got away without being seen, but we didn’t. We crouched there spellbound, watching something we would never have dreamed of seeing – grownups having it out right in front of us the way it happens in the movies.