by Ned Beauman
‘In that case, with all due respect, aren’t there a lot of guys who’d do all the same stuff without taking it out of my taxes?’
‘Oh, yes, always those precious taxes that have to be protected like little babies,’ said Berg.
‘Who else will do it?’ said Siedelman. ‘We can’t leave it to the celebrated “free market”.’
‘No,’ said Pearl. ‘Mayor LaGuardia and I are very much in agreement on that.’
‘The Empire State Building’s so empty they have to pay a college graduate to go around flushing all the toilets every day so the porcelain won’t stain,’ said Siedelman, ‘and meanwhile in Arkansas they have families living in caves and eating weeds. When you put your faith in business, that’s what you get. Soon it will be here like it is in Germany. After they lost the war, they had the inflation, the get-rich-quick schemes, the American money coming in, and then the crash. … My friends who live there write me to say that by now it is as if nothing is real any more. Money is a lie, a fantasy, and so it seems like everything else is too. That is why you can make a fortune there selling miracle toothpaste to aristocrats and generals. All that is solid. … No offence meant, by the way, Balfour.’
‘None taken,’ said Pearl. ‘My grandfather’s toothpaste formula made no claim to miracles.’
‘So you think it’s City Hall’s job to fix things up?’ said Kölmel.
‘Not at all,’ said Pearl.
Siedelman looked surprised. ‘I don’t understand, Mr Pearl. I thought we were in agreement. If it’s not business, then. …’
‘Real change,’ said Pearl, ‘at any scale, is the responsibility of the strong individual. Certainly not of government. And certainly not of the market.’
‘The market has no morals,’ said Siedelman.
‘No, it does not,’ said Berg. ‘No values at all. And I must say that before that strong individual Herr Hitler made his entrance, I used to feel that a tyranny of values was better, at least, than a tyranny of no values. But today, it is not so clear to me.’
‘When you’ve seen what we can achieve, I think you may reconsider, Rabbi,’ said Pearl. ‘Of course, the Lower East Side is only the beginning. I’ve seen the Jews in New York and I’ve seen the Jews in London, and I don’t know who has it worse. Talented boys like Seth should not have to grow up in squalor.’
‘I like where I live,’ said Sinner. Everyone turned to him. He sat sprawled in his chair in such a way that, even though he was the smallest man in the room, he seemed, as usual, to take up the most space.
Pearl smiled thinly. ‘I meant no offence.’
‘I’m sure Seth ain’t offended,’ said Frink.
‘Don’t brush the boy off, Balfour,’ said Berg. ‘What exactly is wrong with slums?’
‘They are cramped, criminal, dirty and diseased,’ said Pearl. ‘They are full of whites and Negroes and Puerto Ricans intermingled.’
‘Lay off the Negroes,’ interjected Kölmel. ‘They’re the only people in New York who ain’t even a little embarrassed to say they like boxing.’
‘They are irrational and inhuman, these places,’ said Pearl. ‘They are empty of space and light and order. And those are the things that men need just as much as they need bread or a place to sleep.’
‘Where did you grow up, Mr Pearl?’ said Frink.
‘On East 46th Street. Not far from Grand Central Station.’
‘You’ve never lived in a slum,’ said Berg.
‘No. Nor have I ever lived in an opium den or a whorehouse, but I know enough not to wish them upon my city.’
‘This cunt hates us, Frink,’ said Sinner. Siedelman flinched.
‘Shut your bleeding mouth, boy,’ said Frink quickly.
‘He practically said so,’ said Sinner, glaring at Pearl across the table.
‘I’m sorry about the kid, Mr Pearl,’ said Kölmel.
‘Not at all,’ said Pearl, glaring back at Sinner.
‘But Seth makes a good point, I think, in his way,’ said Berg. ‘That all you wish to do is rescue these poor slum-dwellers, Balfour, we quite understand. But it is not always so easy to separate a contempt for the streets on which a man was born from a contempt for the man himself. You have heard that silly Christian expression: “Love the sinner, hate the sin.” But Jews know that a sin is not something that you can cut out of a man like a polyp. And nor is the memory of his home, filthy as it may be.’ Berg paused. ‘You do not hate Seth, but wish he had not grown up in a slum. There are other reformers like you, I dare say, who do not hate Seth, but wish he were taller and had all ten toes. And there are still others who do not hate Seth, but wish he were not a Jew.’
‘I don’t quite understand what you’re trying to imply, Rabbi,’ said Pearl. ‘I merely wish the best for the boy, and for all boys like him.’
‘In the world you seek, there would be no boys like him.’ Berg held up his hand to stop Pearl from interrupting. ‘Let me return to Darwin. Without mutation, as I understand it, there could be no evolution. We would all still be bacteria in the soup. In our cells there are clerks charged with preventing any error in the paperwork. But it is lucky that these clerks have never done their jobs with too much diligence. If they did not open us to a sort of sin. …’
‘So we are to rejoice when a child is born with no eyes, in case he is to found a blessed new tribe of the blind.’
‘No. For human beings, I think, Hashem’s work is done. But your clockwork towers, immaculately replicated one by one until they cover the earth and the bed of the sea, so that nothing at all is unplanned – how can anything ever change for the better?’
‘That is a change for the better.’
‘But I wonder if it is not a shortsighted one. The slums are not like a blind child. Nor, I admit, are they like a healthy child. They are like a child with a bent spine, a cleft lip and angels’ wings.’
‘Yes, I’m sure the slums look very romantic from up here in your brownstone.’
‘I grew up in a tenement a few streets from here, Balfour, as you well know. Even there, we could never have predicted young Seth. And people are happier to live in a place where not everything can be predicted. Things arise, beautiful things, things that would not be understood, and so would not be allowed, in your spotless paradise, where they fear the angels’ wings even more than they fear the bent spine and the cleft lip. You are right that a man needs light like he needs bread, but a man needs a little darkness, too, if only so that he can sleep, and dream.’
‘If you could hear yourself, Rabbi,’ said Pearl.
‘Yes, yes, I know I am behind the times,’ said Berg. Although his irony was clear, it brought the exchange to a close. No one wanted a raging argument. But from time to time, for the rest of the meal, Sinner and Pearl would still stare sullenly at one another.
The evening ended with sweet pastries that Berg bought from the local bakery because they were beyond the capabilities of his cook, and then cigars. Forgetting about Sinner, who sat blowing prodigious smoke rings, the Rabbi got up to get a bottle of cognac, and Frink had to call him back to the table on a pretext. Dinner parties on Cherry Street tended to linger on late into the night, but at half past ten Pearl made his apologies, saying he had on his desk a pile of bills from the state legislature. Leaving, he shook hands with all five men. Sinner’s handshake was particularly vigorous.
‘So tell me more about this clown that Sinner is fighting next week,’ said Berg as the maid cleared the table for a second time. ‘Aloysius Somebody.’
‘Aloysius Fielding,’ said Kölmel. ‘Won’t be any trouble. Long as our kid shows a little bit of discipline. Right, Seth?’
‘You’ll make your name, Sinner,’ said Frink. ‘Straight into the big leagues.’
‘How much are the tickets?’ said Berg.
‘Two dollars, if you can’t get an Annie Oakley,’ said Kölmel.
‘I think I can stretch to that.’
‘Whose is this?’ said Sinner. He was holding up a Bulova
men’s wristwatch with a black strap. ‘It was on the floor.’
‘Oh, that’s Balfour’s,’ said Siedelman.
‘Why would he have taken off his watch?’ said Berg. ‘Oh dear. Can we catch him up?’
‘He’ll be on the subway by now.’
‘We’ll telephone. His wife may be at home.’
‘She’s at her mother’s house on Long Island.’
‘His maid, then,’ said Berg. He took down his huge leather-bound address book, which his friends sometimes referred to as The Book of Life (Lower East Side Edition) even though most of its hundreds of crinkled pages were long out of date. Sinner leaned over to watch as his finger slid down past Paliakov, Papirny, Pasternak, Patsuk and Pazy to Pearl.
But there was no one at home to answer Berg’s call. He shrugged. ‘I will try again tomorrow.’
They talked about boxing for a little longer, and then Sinner said, ‘’Scuse me,’ and got up. Kölmel looked at Frink. When Sinner had gone for a piss earlier on Kölmel had waited outside the door of the lavatory, having already checked that it had no window big enough to climb out of. But now both men were sated and sluggish, so it wasn’t until four or five minutes had passed that Frink got up to check on Sinner. And by that time, the boy was almost on East Broadway.
On his way out he’d snatched Kölmel’s wallet from his coat, which had been hung up in Berg’s hall. In the wallet was twelve dollars. And he still had the watch, although he didn’t think he had much chance of pawning it at this time of night.
Before long he found a liquor store. They had real imported London dry gin but it was too expensive, so he bought a bottle of bourbon and some boiled sweets. Outside, he saw three chaffinches pecking at some cigarette butts. Did American birds eat ash? He hailed a cab.
‘Where to?’ said the driver.
‘259 West 70 Street,’ said his passenger.
Sinner was not the sort of drunk who made a sighing, squinting, groaning, chuckling performance out of how much he enjoyed his first pint of beer after a long day, and he was certainly not the sort of drunk who got shakes or sweats if he went without – and he had a lot of contempt for either of those failings. But there was still half a smile on his face as he sipped his bourbon.
‘West 70th.’
‘Yeah. Is Times Square on the way?’
‘If you want.’
‘Go through Times Square.’
The light in Times Square seemed like the light that would bleed out of any solid object in this world if you could somehow scourge away its surface. Sinner was astonished by the light, and also by the number of men promenading around outside the bars and restaurants and theatres whose dress and gestures would have fitted in perfectly well at the Caravan. A gaunt old man was out walking his rabbit, which he picked up and held under his arm as he crossed the street, its leather leash over his wrist. Sinner had heard that now during the day they ran soup kitchens here out of the back of old army trucks, but even that temporary dreariness couldn’t dim this place. The taxi got caught in a clot of traffic, and spaced along the nearby pavement Sinner noticed three blokes in smart suits greeting everyone who walked past like an old friend.
‘What’s their game?’ said Sinner. ‘Pimps or something?’
‘Travel agents,’ the cab driver corrected him. ‘You want to go to Los Angeles, they find three other guys who want to go too, and then they find a guy who’s driving there anyway and they take a commission. Won’t cost you more than thirty dollars. Course, that’s if the guy driving don’t sneak off with everybody’s money and everybody’s baggage while you’re still eating lunch in a cafeteria in Newark. Or worse! I heard about one old lady—’
‘Los Angeles?’ Sinner interrupted.
‘Huh?’
‘Los Angeles for thirty dollars? Hollywood?’
‘Sure.’
‘Anywhere I can pawn a watch around here?’
‘Sure.’
‘Now?’
‘Sure.’
Sinner thought about that for a while.
‘What’s the matter?’ the cab driver eventually said. ‘You still want to go uptown or not?’
‘Yeah. Uptown.’ He could go to Los Angeles tomorrow.
They dodged between the trams at Columbus Circle and within ten minutes Sinner was paying the driver on West 70th Street. He smoked a cigarette, drank some more bourbon, and then knocked on Balfour Pearl’s door.
Pearl opened it in shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows. He smelt of sweat, being one of those rare men who could truly exert themselves alone at a desk.
‘You forgot your watch,’ said Sinner.
‘You stole it.’
Sinner shrugged.
‘I grew up in Manhattan,’ said Pearl. ‘Do you think I don’t know when a boy slips off my watch as he shakes my hand? Do you think I don’t have friends who could steal your underpants as they wave to you from across the street?’
‘Do you want it back?’
‘Yes, I want it back. Are you expecting a reward?’
‘I want some ice with my drink.’
‘I share this house with my wife and daughter.’
‘They’re on the long island,’ said Sinner. Pearl let him push past.
Most of the house was dark, but there was some weak light from up the stairs, so Sinner found his way up to the study, where typewritten papers were strewn across the desk beneath a green-shaded banker’s lamp as if exhausted by their struggles with the city planner.
‘You won’t find ice in there,’ said Pearl, behind him.
‘Get me some, then.’
‘Perhaps I’ll call the Rabbi and let him know you’re here. He must be concerned. Would you like me to do that?’
‘You can do what you like after you get me some ice.’
‘Once again, you seem to think your insolence will impress me, and once again, I remind you that I grew up in Manhattan. Talking of which, I remember your trainer said you were desperate to see Times Square – did you take the opportunity on your way?’
‘It was all right,’ admitted Sinner.
‘Better than Piccadilly Circus?’
‘Yeah, maybe.’
‘It’s best appreciated with a map to hand – the way it slashes through the grid. Have you heard of Oscar Gude?’
‘He the bloke who stole your underpants?’
‘Oscar Gude is Times Square. In 1879 Thomas Edison had the idea for the electric light bulb and in 1892 Oscar Gude had the idea for selling things with it: firstly property on Long Island – I’m sorry, “the long island” – and then Heinz pickles. By the end of the war there must have been ten or twenty thousand billboards in America with Gude’s name on them, including a hell of a lot in Times Square. They called him “the Botticelli of Broadway”. I met him once. He thought what he did was beautiful. Did you think it was beautiful?’
Sinner shrugged and sat down on top of the desk, his feet dangling off.
‘By the way, I’m sure you’re enjoying that brand of whiskey just as much as the average Appalachian hobo, but if you’d like to try something a touch more refined there’s a bottle in the bottom drawer. Yes, on the left. And glasses on the shelf. Now, to Gude, you must realise, art and advertising were two names for the same beast. I can’t imagine he’ll be the last person in New York to get rich off that thuggish notion, or the last person to think he was the first. Except he also understood that you can’t force people to look at art but you can force people to look at advertising if you put a hundred thousand light bulbs right there in the street. He liked that. He liked claiming his piece of the city. A form of conquest, really. I remember when he put up that Wrigley’s sign on Broadway. Huge. Hundreds of feet long. I came back from my first semester at Yale and no one was talking about anything else. To make people excited about the fact that you’re selling them chewing gum – that’s a hell of a thing. If there was even one man in the mayor’s office with that kind of genius there’d be no slums left in New York.’
As Pearl pontificated about lights, he still hadn’t switched on any more in the room itself. Losing interest, Sinner got down off the desk and wandered over to the open window of the study, outside which a black iron fire escape crawled like an insect up the rear wall of the house, dustbins clustered like eggs at its base. Beside Pearl’s desk he nearly stubbed his toe on a big cardboard box full of yellow printed forms. He bent down to look. They were all identical and blank. ‘What are these?’ he said.
‘A project of mine, from when I was working at the Civil Services Commission,’ said Pearl. ‘A failure. I offered them a true hierarchy of merit but of course no one wanted it. Do you understand that expression?’
Sinner shrugged.
‘Those forms were to grade the men,’ Pearl went on. ‘I spent a year cataloguing the functions and responsibilities of every job in New York government. And then I gave each function and responsibility a mathematical weight according to its relative importance. And then I gave out those forms so that every man could be precisely assessed according to how well he performed those functions and responsibilities, and according to his personality and morals and potential and so on. And once we had all those numbers we could have said exactly who was needed and who wasn’t, who was being paid too little and who too much, with no need for any “human factor”. But it never passed the Board of Aldermen. They weren’t interested in change. Now they use those forms to pass around racing tips.’
As Pearl continued to speak – and he clearly liked to hear himself speak – he reminded Sinner more and more of somebody he’d once met, and, after a minute of thinking, he remembered who it was: that posh cunt who’d followed him from Premierland to the Caravan, the one who wouldn’t shut up about how ‘unusual’ Sinner was. And at that moment of recollection Sinner was struck by an inexplicable rage, and he began to gather up the yellow forms in his hands and fling them out of the open window. They fluttered away like dead leaves. ‘Cunts!’ he shouted. ‘You’re all cunts!’
‘What the hell are you doing?’ Pearl said, grabbing his shoulders. Sinner turned, cuffed Pearl’s face, bit his shoulder, bit his neck and bit his mouth. Pearl pulled Sinner away from the window and they both fell to their knees. Pearl, already panting, started to undo Sinner’s belt. Then someone was hammering at the door downstairs.
