Forsaking All Others

by Jimmy Breslin

  “You’ll do it right,” her father had said to her on the day her husband went to jail. This meant remaining home, or being seen only with female friends whose husbands, too, were in jail. Under the rules of their upbringing, these prison wives were to spend their time shopping and going to the movies or, most often, sitting at home with a kitchenful of women in the same circumstances. She had been raised to marry only “one of the men,” as the women refer to hoodlums. An arrest is considered part of the business overhead. The job of the woman is to go to court, listen stoically as the man is sentenced and then visit him in prison, bringing along large amounts of carefully prepared food. On visits, it is important to take Polaroid shots of the husband and to ask a guard to take the standard picture of a young woman and young man together. The photo is taken in a prison waiting room, but it follows the traditional two-shot of school graduation day camera art: male and female with arms about each other’s backs, smiling, the male smiling much more broadly, as if he had just learned, under an elm tree on the great campus, that he was graduating cum laude. The prison version Polaroids are shown all the next week to girlfriends, who then dig into purses and produce new Polaroids of their own husbands, who are in other jails.

  After many stacks of Polaroids, the man returns and as a reward the wife is given diamonds, which she can admire as she sits through the nights while the husband is out resuming business. And somewhere, she knows, is a snub-nosed Irish precinct kid driving an old car, or an insurance-faced federal agent in an undented car, waiting to grab the husband again. While the poor may commit felonies and then evade jail, the Mafia does not embarrass the criminal justice system. They are convicted frequently, and they always serve.

  Now, standing alone in the kitchen, she thought bleakly of her trip to prison the next morning and, more depressing, of what the ride home would be like. Driving home to a house where she was supposed to find great satisfaction in helping her mother clean the entire house each Saturday. She had a song in her body and they wanted her to spend her life in a laundry room.

  She stared at the trays of food with the paper slips on them, then sat down and slowly took out a cigarette, lit it and immediately thought of the movie star outside in the car.

  “Can you imagine me being with a Spic?” she said.

  “Maximo!”

  Teenager finally walked out of Mariani’s house. “I kept you waiting a long time, Maximo.”

  “I was reading,” Maximo said.

  “I had to talk to him about his son-in-law,” Teenager said. He began driving.

  “That’s all right. Because I’m coming up with you again the next time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I said, I’ll be with you next time.”

  Teenager’s eyebrows bunched together. Then his eyes widened as he realized what Maximo was speaking about. “Your school turned you into a crazy man. You can never go near that female.”

  “There’s nothing crazy about wanting her,” Maximo said.

  “He would have to kill you if he knew you were even talking of his daughter,” Teenager said.

  “Who says he has to know?”

  “And she has a husband. To save his honor he would have to torture you.”

  “How could he torture me if I were already dead?”

  “They would take you into a freezer in the meat market and hang you on the hook like a lamb and then they would cut you up a piece at a time. They would make sure to keep you alive for a long time. They would torture you all week. Then on Sunday they would cut off your nuts and stuff them in your mouth.”

  They were going across the George Washington Bridge and Teenager was effusive, often letting the car drive itself while he used both hands for sweeping gestures to illustrate how horrible was the death that Maximo faced, and Maximo sat wordlessly and stared out the window at the flat gray river, spring sunshine splashing the edges, and thought about the lovely warm color that ran through Nicki’s face when he smiled at her.

  Maximo was surprised that he had the power to bring this into a white woman’s face. What does she smell like, he wondered. Certainly not like the women at Harvard. He remembered one named Cora, the skinny one with pale white skin and gray eyes, who had smelled like the shopping mall under Rockefeller Center where his father had once taken him to see people ice-skating.

  “The Italians cannot control themselves when it comes to their women,” Teenager said.

  Maximo nodded. As the car came off the bridge and onto the first singed blocks of the city, he was thinking of Nicki’s breasts and long legs. This one, he decided, had to smell good. She would not smell like a shopping mall. He smiled as he heard Teenager rambling. Perhaps for the first time in his life he would do something that Teenager would be afraid to do. He would stand in danger and guffaw at Teenager, who would remain outside.

  When they got to Ana’s Bar, Maximo walked right to the phone and called to Teenager, “Give me the phone number of that female’s house.”

  “You’re crazy,” Teenager said.

  “She is in love with me,” Maximo said. “I have to call her or she will kill herself tonight.”

  “Sit down here, I buy you beer,” Teenager said.

  Maximo remained at the phone. “What are you afraid of?” he said.

  Teenager called out the number and Maximo, with the calmness of a general starting a war, dropped coins into the phone.

  She answered on the third ring. Her voice became a fire alarm when she heard Maximo ask for her.

  “Who is this?”

  “I am Maximo. Teenager’s friend outside in the car.”

  “Are you insane calling me here?”

  “Your look lingers,” Maximo said.

  “What?”

  “All the way home across the bridge I could see your face on the surface of the water. That is how you have captured my thoughts. This has never happened to me before. Only a particular person, a very wonderful person, could do a thing like that to me.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I meant it,” Maximo said.

  “Maybe I have thoughts about you,” she said.

  “Tell me about them.”

  She laughed. “Not now. Do you want to get us killed?”

  “Tell me about them tomorrow.”

  “I’m away tomorrow and Tuesday.”

  “Then Wednesday,” Maximo said.

  “Well …”

  “Wednesday.”

  “You could meet me by where I work,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “I work on Fifty-third Street,” she said.

  “And where?”

  “Third Avenue.”

  “So I go to a bar review course in the Statler. Over on Thirty-third Street. It’s right on the subway from you.”

  “I go to lunch at twelve-thirty,” she said.

  “After work,” Maximo said.

  “What time after work?”

  “There’s a bar review class I go to at seven,” Maximo said.

  “Then you could meet me at five.”

  “Wednesday night at five.”

  “There’s a place in the basement of the Citicorp Building. The European coffee shop.”

  “Where do I get you in case something happens and I have to call you?”

  “Continental Bank. I’ll give you the number direct to my department. Plaza 1-2592. I’ll see you at five.”

  “Thas lovely,” Maximo said.

  When she hung up, she told herself that if she had not taken charge of making the arrangements, this guy would have had her meeting him in a social club full of Puerto Ricans someplace. Some kind of law course he’s supposed to be taking, she thought. He and his friend must have some sort of a case together and they’re trying to read up on it behind the lawyer’s back. Oh, what does all that matter? A fucking movie star.

  Maximo was beaming when he hung up.

  “What did she say?” Teenager said.

  “That she loves me very much.”
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br />   Teenager laughed. Maximo said, “It’s nothing to fool with. She is in love with me. I am playing with this poor girl’s life.”

  “You are playing with your own,” Teenager said.

  All Maximo could think about was Wednesday.

  Upstairs, he stopped at the apartment at the other end of the hall, where his mother sat with neighbors and watched a Mexican movie with Marie Felix and Jorge Negrete on the Spanish-language channel. Maximo then went into his apartment, made a cup of tea and sat down at the kitchen table with his textbook. His eyes wandered for a moment, falling on his father’s old radio-record player which sat atop a chest. The wooden case had a furniture polish luster, which was wrong, Maximo felt, for it now was over a quarter of a century old and should have been covered with dust. In memory of his father, however, his mother kept it clean and prominent. Glancing at it now, Maximo immediately remembered his father, short and stocky, his chest swollen with anger, standing next to the machine and listening to the record that to him was the symbol of all that was against him and whose sound, over the many years, rang against his arteries so often that leaks began springing inside his head. The father became an invalid and then a memory. Which now drew Maximo from the kitchen and caused his hand to search through the cabinet at one end of the chest and take out the old record, a disc as hard as rock candy. He put it on the record player and turned the switch. After allowing the machine to warm up, he played the record, which produced whirring and static and then the clear voice of Peggy Lee:

  … the faucet, she is dripping,

  the fence, she’s falling down,

  My pocket needs some money,

  so I can’t go into town.

  My brother isn’t working,

  and my sister doesn’t care,

  The car, she needs a motor

  so I can’t go anywhere.

  Mañana, Mañana, Mañana is soon enough for me.

  Somewhere about this point in the song, Maximo remembered, his father would appear to be fighting off a seizure. His tense voice would call out, “You see what they think of us? This was a great big popular song. They still play it. They make fun of us right on the radio.” The voice’s volume would rise as Peggy Lee, in an attempted Hispanic accent, came to this part of the song Maximo now listened to closely:

  My mother, she is working,

  she is working very hard,

  but everytime she looks for me,

  I am sleeping in the yard …

  When Maximo was young, his father’s hand would start whipping the air as he shouted about the insult that the song represented, how his son would be ready to fight these insults for the rest of his life, for the insults would surely come, from a cop, a messenger, a radio, from anyplace that could make a sound. But as Maximo listened to the record now, he wasn’t as bothered by it as he once was, although the part about the mother working hard still caused his insides to sting. Give the father a job and the mother doesn’t have to work so hard, he said to himself. In the six years since his father died, however, Maximo had tried to look at life from a place a few steps away from where his father had stood. The view remained the same: Puerto Ricans on a cold street with nothing to do, looking up at the train whistling through East Harlem and the Bronx on the way to the suburbs, a train with windows made white by newspapers held by white suburban people who through their working lives, twice a day, five times a week, sat on this train and made certain to keep their papers as high as a fighter’s left hand to keep away the view of burned-out buildings and Puerto Ricans with nothing to do on the cold streets.

  The South Bronx was separated from Manhattan by an oily river, on the Bronx banks of which there rose a wall of highways and sullen factory buildings. Behind them was a forest of tenements. Once, the South Bronx had a half million Irish and Jews with one only having to glance at the street names to see who was on top; it was the only place since the creation where Jews lived on St. Mary’s Street. The area also had an institution that people felt made them important and different. The South Bronx had Joe DiMaggio, who was seven blocks to the West, on the other side of the Grand Concourse, running down a flyball in deep centerfield at Yankee Stadium. And each morning, for people in the South Bronx, the act of opening a newspaper and looking at the Yankee box score—DiMaggio, two for four again—was to allow them to pass over the unlived-out potential of their own lives.

  DiMaggio was replaced in the South Bronx by buildings afire that were shown on the World Series telecasts at Yankee Stadium. The burning of the South Bronx was started by landlords looking for insurance, and at the end, the fire belonged to the children. In one year, while Maximo was in college, fire drove out twelve hundred people from the single block between 140th and 141st on St. Anselm’s Avenue. The people forced to flee were Puerto Ricans, and the ones setting the fires were Puerto Ricans working for landlords, and for mischief. Once, migrations caused statues to be erected and poems to be written in honor of the journey by sea to the new land. There is no monument, however, to the new immigrants, the blacks who came to the South Bronx from Jacksonville, Florida, and Americus, Georgia, and the Puerto Ricans from San Pedro and Santurce and Salinas and Ponce. There is not even official recognition that these new immigrants accomplished something that nobody else could do: turn the United States into two actual nations, one country of about one hundred ninety-five million whites and the other, the second America, of about sixty-five million, their skins running from faintest tan to ebony. The history of the first America can be found in any schoolbook; that of the second America in unemployment figures, aid-to-dependent children payments, and penitentiary records.

  Maximo was young, and while he wondered how much difficulty he would encounter with his own people, raised in poetry praising the white heart, and also how many traps were hidden in the murky established order of Bronx politics, of which he knew nothing, he still was certain that someday he would place his standard atop the rubble and the breeze would cause the colors to dance and the people would be attracted. He was certain that someday New York would be the first part of America to approach a European city, with almost all citizens speaking more than one language. In New York, it would be English and Spanish; the people who now resented most the bilingual signs and education in the city would be the ones who someday would have to sit across from their children at night and watch them learning Spanish as a grammar school requirement. Ask any hospital maternity ward. Always, Maximo remembered the night at Lenox Hill Hospital, with Park Avenue traffic just under the windows, when Eddie Hernandez, eighteen then, ran to the bank of phone booths, dialed nervously and then shouted, “Es macho! Sets libras, quatro onzas,” and the other people in the hallway looked surprised at the Spanish, but Maximo now knew that this was the way it would be more and more, a new father calling the grandmother and speaking in Spanish, until someday the heads in the hallway would turn only when they heard the strangest of sounds, a guy screaming into the phone, “It’s a boy! Six pounds, four ounces.” As Maximo sat down at the kitchen table with his tea and textbook, he thought about Nicki. That long happy body. Marvelous of me, Maximo thought. I start my life among my people by filling my mind with a white woman.

  4

  MAXIMO CALLED NICKI WEDNESDAY from the bar. He said he would be downtown in a half hour. Nicki told him it would be good to see him and Maximo said it would be wonderful to see her. Teenager, watching Maximo’s face, could see that he was not speaking to a relative.

  “Come with me and I’ll buy you a shirt and some other things at Eddie’s,” Teenager said.

  “I don’t have time,” Maximo said.

  “I want Eddie to get you all dressed for the last big time of your life,” Teenager said.

  Maximo smiled.

  “I told you they put you on a meathook,” Teenager said.

  “Courage before caution,” Maximo said. He swaggered past Teenager and went out the back door.

  Why should boundaries formed by color apply to h
im? He had just spent three years among the most favored—among? Striding far ahead of most of them—and he was therefore certain that he would continue in this position throughout his life. How, then, could some law of ignorance have anything to do with him? Particularly, when the woman involved, this Jersey Italian, had looked at him as if she were standing in a field of dust and saw suddenly the approach of heavy rain clouds?

  On a matter of simple experience, Maximo also could not understand Teenager’s warning about the danger of Italians because, between the Bronx and Harvard, he had never seen more than two or three Italians at a time in his life.

  Mostly, however, this cavorting exit in front of Teenager was caused by a need for vanity. The idea of going down to Eddie’s store, disturbed memories that Maximo would prefer remain hidden.

  Eddie Hernandez grew up two blocks from Maximo and was in the same class through grammar school and high school. After school one day, when both were in junior high school, Eddie was at Maximo’s house, having soda, when Teenager banged on the door. Maximo’s father, sitting alone and damaged in the dim living room, laughed as Maximo let Teenager in.

  “Aha!” Teenager shouted quickly.

  Eddie Hernandez quickly swallowed his soda and reached for his coat.

  “Where are you going?” Maximo asked him.

  “Home to my mother.”

  Maximo’s father and Teenager didn’t notice that Eddie walked out without even throwing his eyes toward them. In school the next morning, Eddie Hernandez seemed to have more nervous energy than usual, and when Maximo came up to talk to him in the back of their homeroom, Eddie pulled a gray sweater over his head and his arms became entangled while he was getting out of it and time for talk was lost. That afternoon, Maximo walked over to the basketball court in the projects and found Eddie taking shots with some other boys.

  “Why did you go home so quick yesterday?” Maximo asked him.

  “I wanted to,” Eddie said.

  “Is that all?” Maximo said.

  “No. My mother told me that I can’t be anyplace where Teenager is.”