The Ryer Avenue Story: A Novel

by Dorothy Uhnak

  “Well, there you are, Megan. Remember, now,” he called out the old joke, “if you can’t be good, for God’s sake don’t get caught. And if you do get caught, don’t give ’em your real name.”

  “I’ll just tell them, ‘clear it with Frankie Magee.’”

  “You are a fresh one,” he said, not the way her mother said it, but with a gladness that made her glad too.

  The building where the Wagners lived was something of an anomaly on the corner of the Grand Concourse, which was, of course, where the Jews lived. The five-story building was owned by the Steiglers, who had been friends and neighbors of the Wagners when they were all young together in Hamburg, in Germany. Somehow Mr. Steigler had made a great deal of money, and while he and his wife no longer lived in the immaculate building with its spotless tiled hallway floors, freshly painted stucco halls, shiny brass nameplates and mailboxes, the tenants were not only of German background, but most belonged to the same Lutheran church down the Grand Concourse, a few blocks below the Jews’ Reformed temple.

  Megan usually took the five flights soundlessly, two stairs at a time, arriving with her heart beating just a bit faster, her breath regulated. It was a game; she and Patsy would race up noiselessly, then turn and catapult down the short staircases, landing with double thuds, and be out the front door by the time the neighbors would rush to the hallway. They would ignore the opening of front windows, faces calling to them, “Shame! What sort of girls! I know who you are, Patsy Wagner, I’ll tell your mother.”

  Patsy would stop running, turn, plant her hands on her narrow hips, boldly face up toward the window, and shout back, “Tell my father, for all I care.”

  Megan was in awe of her daring. Confronting a neighbor, any grownup, was not something Megan could get away with. But Patsy’s father, Arnold Wagner, was a small man, with tiny neat features and gifted hands, who never raised his voice and seemed intimidated by his own active children. His tailor shop was around the corner on 181st Street, between the kosher butcher shop and the Chinese laundry. He rarely seemed to have anything to say for himself. He sat all day long hunched over his sewing machine, or kneeling down at the feet of customers, with a bunch of pins in his mouth, turning up hems or cuffs, altering long coats for the neighborhood’s younger sisters or brothers. Patsy said she and her brother, Carl, planned one day to sneak up behind their father when he had a mouthful of pins, and yell suddenly to see what would happen if he swallowed the whole works.

  She never told Megan exactly how it came about, but Carl had finally moved out of his parents’ home completely. It had happened in stages. In the beginning, before they made their fortune, the Steiglers had lived in the apartment next to the Wagners. They didn’t have much luck with babies: two had been stillborn, one died while still in the hospital, and then they gave up. Little Carl, charming, funny, lively, with his thick mop of yellow curls and bright blue eyes, would come next door to play with Auntie and Uncle Steigler until it became natural for him to spend as much waking time with them as with his parents. When he was nearly three years old, and Patsy was born, the Steiglers moved some of his toys and clothes into their place to make things easier for Arnold and Rose. The new baby had the colic and Lord knew how tiring that was and what a lively rascal was little Carl.

  By the time Carl was of school age, the Steiglers had somehow made a great deal of money, though Patsy didn’t know much about it. They bought a mansion in some fancy place on Long Island and began by taking Carl for the summer, out near the shore, away from the heat. Arnold, Rose, and little Patsy came for weekends, for a few days when they could.

  Carl would come home to his parents’ four-room apartment, to the narrow room he shared with his sister, to the quiet of the kitchen table where the clacking of his father’s false teeth drove him crazy, and his mother’s whispering made it intolerable. He would stare at his father, hunched over his plate as though over his sewing machine, shoveling the food in with small quick bites, wiping his chin quickly with the paper napkin; and he would long to be back at the Big House, as they called the Steiglers’ place. The Big House, with honest-to-God maids and caretakers and a chauffeur-gardener who all lived better than the Wagners.

  It was agreed, by the time Carl was to start the seventh grade, that he would live full-time out at the Big House, would attend the wonderful prep school, which would prepare him for the best college, which in turn would ready him to take over Uncle’s many business interests.

  It was after he had been a student for nearly a year, when he was fourteen and his sister nearly twelve, that Carl Wagner began to teach his younger sister new games, which Patsy in turn described to Megan.

  Back at the apartment for a brief holiday, Carl knew his parents had raced around, gathering all those things Carl favored. Patsy would be sent up to a special bakery on Fordham Road for a pound of the most expensive cookies, warned not to sneak any of them on the way home; she and Megan were adept at sliding the paper-thin cookies from the sides of the box, and would both swear they’d been short-weighted. Father would work carefully, late into the night, custom-tailoring the expensive trousers and jackets his son’s school required, adding custom darts to the fine cotton shirts, hand-stitching button holes, securing buttons, everything the best for a boy who would arrive with an armload of clothes to be repaired. Steigler would laugh and tell Arnold Wagner not to bother, the boy was so rough-and-tumble on the playing fields, so popular and doing so well, the clothes would be replaced, don’t bother patching. But it wasn’t patching that Arnold Wagner did. It was custom tailoring, and he insisted on handling his son’s clothing. It was a small concession. It made the little man feel good, so what the hell.

  It was when they were alone in the apartment, just Carl and Patsy, that he would teach her things he said she had to know—secret, dark things she must never, ever reveal to anyone, on pain of death. His threats were backed up with samples of pain inflicted so quickly, so sharply, and invisibly that Patsy knew he meant what he said. He would double-lock the apartment door after first checking the hallway. Both parents were at the shop around the corner, his mother repairing and finishing off sewing projects for the neighborhood women, their father kneeling, always kneeling. To Carl and later to Patsy, the shame of the image was tinged with hatred and contempt.

  Alone in their narrow room with the twin beds, Carl taught Patsy lessons. On your stomach, he would order her, flipping her over roughly, holding her down. Bite on the pillow because it hurts at first, and if you make a sound I will kill you and throw your body out the window.

  And he taught her what he had learned at prep school. The boys practiced on each other, he said, so that they would be good at it with the girls. And what he was doing to her wasn’t the real thing. It didn’t count for anything. Christ, she was still a virgin, he just thought that as his little sister she had a right to know all the things boys did to girls.

  Patsy confided to Megan that it hurt a lot at first, and then, after a while, it changed. It didn’t exactly feel good, but she felt other feelings, in, you know, the other part of her body. Around the front.

  Megan bit her lip, eyes unblinking, trying to visualize the mounting, the moving, the terribleness. It was a mortal sin, she knew that instinctively. Even hearing about it made Megan fearful, as though she personally had been involved in something so dirty she wouldn’t know how to confess it. And should she confess this? Was it her sin? Just listening to this? The Protestants were lucky—they didn’t believe in sin.

  Megan felt confused, contaminated and excited by what Patsy told her. She knew boys had their thing—their dick, they called it, prick, and their balls. Girls weren’t supposed to know the names. Though of course she knew. Girls with brothers knew. But Megan had brothers, and none of them ever so much as showed her. And Carl had put it in his sister’s mouth. When Patsy told her that, Megan covered her own mouth, hunched forward as though to vomit, and then they both couldn’t stop laughing. They fell down on the grass in Echo Park, jus
t beyond their neighborhood, where they went to climb the monkey bars, play in pickup ball games, tease girls, challenge boys. They rolled around and laughed and punched each other, wrestled with each other, first one on top and then the other, like boys do, pinning each other down, arms and legs, fists flying, Patsy’s mouth coming close to her ear, she whispered, “Want to know what it felt like?”

  Megan filled with panic, fear, terror. She arched her body and flung Patsy off. Instead of following up, pursuing her for the rest of the fight, Megan turned and ran away, shaking her head, running all the way back home, not even aware of Patsy’s taunts, not wanting to see her face, hear her words. Afraid of something inside herself, some feeling, some warmth, something different that she dared not confront.

  Megan jabbed twice, waited, then twice again on the Wagner button in the downstairs hallway. Immediately there was a response: one-one-two-three. I’m on my way down.

  Megan listened and could hear each thud, right from the top floor down to the first, and she turned and jumped down the steps to the outside door before Patsy could get there.

  Patsy Wagner was small-boned, athletic in a wire-tight way, her body always poised for action, ready to spin one way or the other, to leap, respond, dart, strike out. Her face was beautiful; in repose, which was rare, it had a distant look, as though the girl was dreaming. There was a delicacy to her cheekbones and jawline, a vulnerability about her light blue eyes. Her nose was small and straight, her lips full and turned up for quick laughter. But always there was a wariness and pent-up tension, a need to run, explode, attack before she needed to defend herself. She and Megan were constantly at war with each other. They argued over senseless differences, pushed, shoved, smacked; but when a target presented itself, they joined forces. They played perfect basketball, two parts of one single-minded entity, passing the ball back and forth, darting, twisting, skillfully jumping and making the shot. When just the two of them played, they argued constantly. When they teamed against boys, they felt invulnerable in their quickness and knowledge of each other.

  They hit the cold street running, hunching into the wind, collars turned up, scarves flying. They both wore hand-me-down corduroy pants, outgrown by older brothers. They had both argued long and hard against their parents’ protests: girls don’t wear boys’ pants. Well, Megan Magee and Patsy Wagner did.

  Megan whirled around suddenly and yanked Patsy’s woolen hat from her head and pointed at and taunted the mop of long yellow curls. The normally lank, straight hair had been curled and tortured into sausage curls.

  “My damn mother,” Patsy said, roughly grabbing back the hat, jamming the curls out of sight. “We gotta go out to the Big House tonight, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I thought tomorrow, Christmas Eve.”

  “So did I, but my mother said tonight.”

  Megan felt the sudden loss. The next two days, okay, there was going to be so much family at the Magees’ house, every damn cousin and aunt and uncle, all her older brothers and their wives and kids. But then, the whole long week, there’d be nobody.

  “Race ya to the corner,” Megan shouted, running before the challenge was issued. Patsy was faster, so Megan needed just the slight edge.

  Patsy caught up quickly. The cold air hurt, the pain hitting the chest hard, but pain never stopped Patsy, and Megan couldn’t give in.

  “Race you all the way to Krum’s,” Patsy called back, dancing in front of Megan.

  “Hey!” Megan waved her mittened hand. “Hold it. Look.”

  She dug the dollar bill out of her pocket, slipped it inside her mitten. “My father gave me an extra. What’ll we buy?”

  They jogged along together, making their plans. It was going to be a great day at the Loew’s Paradise. They would create havoc, drive people crazy, send ushers running, the manager would bang his head against the wall, all the emergency doors would go flying open, the matron would be grabbing kids left and right.

  At Krum’s they waited impatiently, the excitement building. They bought half a pound of red pistachio nuts each, carried the small boxes in paper bags, stuffed inside their jackets. The Loew’s Paradise was a movie palace with a high bright blue sky, with moving clouds revealing bright pinpoints of stars. Along the walls, reaching up to the high ceiling, were archways and grooves containing statues, God knew who they were supposed to be. Seen in the dark, they looked like Roman or Greek gods. The children’s section was along the right-hand side of the large theater, down front, cordoned off by velvet ropes and patrolled by a large woman in a stiff white uniform. She marched up and down, crashed into the rows of seats, grabbing at squirming children, hustled them along or yanked them out, her large hand catching hold of collars or arms or necks.

  She worked hard for her money, and she took her job seriously. When Megan and Patsy had tried the first time to sit in the adult section, she’d whirled around, found them with her flashlight, and ordered them out.

  “I’m sixteen,” Patsy had said indignantly. At the box office she’d claimed to be eleven to get the kids’ admission price. The matron was not to be fooled.

  The two girls waited, slumped down in their seats, watching the stupid cartoons and the Flash Gordon serial. Finally the main feature began—it was Naughty Marietta—and the kids began catcalling, the boys loudly kissing the air, the girls screaming, the smallest kids racing for the bathroom.

  Megan and Patsy slid out of their seats, walked up the aisle against the wall, out into the main lobby. They walked through the vastness of the lobby, watched the huge goldfish swimming around in the large marble pool while smaller kids tossed bits of candy to them. With the timing of burglars, they raced silently up the thickly carpeted staircase to the balcony. They slipped into the darkness, watched for the usher, then slipped quietly along the half-empty row, slumped down in their seats, and began to work on their pistachio nuts. They ate the salty meat and dropped the shells in the paper bags. Staring at the screen, considering themselves invisible, not really following or caring about the movie—they only liked gangster movies or stories about French Foreign Legion—but intent on their shell collection, neither noticed the figure of a man as he sat next to Patsy. She felt his presence, glanced down at the pressure against her thigh. Her hand over her mouth, she poked Megan.

  “Huh?” Megan leaned forward, looking across Patsy. “Oh, shit. Let’s go.”

  Damn it, it happened every time. That’s why they made you sit in the kids’ section. What they ought to do was make these pervos sit in the pervosection and then they could all sit with handkerchiefs on their laps and do their dirty stuff sitting next to each other.

  “Wait. Megan, gimme your shells. C’mon, hand them over.”

  Patsy pulled back slightly, not allowing the man’s contact. He, masturbating intently, didn’t notice. Patsy leaned over and whispered to Megan, then, ready, ordered, “Now.”

  Both girls stood up suddenly. Patsy far more daring than Megan, grabbed the handkerchief from the man and dumped the shells on his lap, and both girls stepped on his feet as hard as they could. Before he could react, they were gone, running lightly, soundlessly, invisibly against the darkened walls.

  Megan knew she could never talk to anyone about what men did in dark, hidden places. Certainly not to her mother. It was one of those things that men did, but it made her feel dirty. If they stayed put in the children’s section, they wouldn’t have a pervo next to them. If they would just follow the rules, these things wouldn’t happen. But it seemed to happen, no matter what or where. She and Patsy could take off to explore an unfamiliar vacant lot, or hike through Van Cortland Park or maybe duck down the subway station entrance at 182nd Street and cross through the tunnel to the other side of the Grand Concourse. So many times, there was a man. Was it something about herself, or about Patsy, some signal they gave off, some curiosity—did they really, maybe, want these men to do these things? Megan shuddered. She felt unable to laugh it off as Patsy could, to comment on what the man was doing. Did you s
ee the size of that thing? Patsy could take action, call out from a safe distance like a player in a game. But it was a game that left Megan feeling uncomfortable, contaminated.

  Back in the children’s section, she glanced at Patsy, who sat on her lower spine, attention focused on the screen, munching nuts methodically. Didn’t anything bother Protestants?

  They waited until the show was over and the next audience had settled in for the third show of the day. The News of the World came on with loud, dramatic music, and Patsy poked her with a sharp, bony elbow.

  They went quickly, quietly, back to the balcony level, stood unmoving, their eyes getting used to the darkness again. The ushers were busy flashing light along the carpeted stairs, helping couples into their seats.

  The loges, the most expensive ten rows in the theater, were empty. The two girls crouched low, moved carefully to the center aisle, and waited. The coming attractions were over and the feature film began. They glanced around and chose their moment. A completely coordinated team, they flung their bagfuls of pistachio shells in wide, sweeping arcs and were halfway down the carpeted stairway before the first cries came from the orchestra.

  An usher appeared, running, calling out, but they were on the street before anyone could touch them. They ran into a steadily falling snow as the evening turned darker and a feeling of exhilaration and joy filled them.

  They pretended to be in great jeopardy. Squads of men, armed and ruthless, were pursuing them, but they were too fast, too smart, they could outwit, outrun, and, if it came to that, outfight anyone. They raced across the Grand Concourse, slick and wet, dodging oncoming cars as though they were part of the conspiracy against them.

  Finally they stopped in the doorway of a bakery, letting the game wind down.

  Megan stared at Patsy’s face, flushed and wet. “Jeez, you got red pistachio stains all over your mouth.”