“I don’t quite make you out, Norman,” she said suspiciously. “Either you’re some kind of a sneak or else . . . I almost get the impression that you’re sleeping.”
He smiled, ignoring the odd scratching sensation that he sensed, rather than felt, in his chest.
“Okay, take your rent and go before you distract me. I have enough things already. . ..”
“I’ll give you a receipt.”
“You know what you can do with that receipt,” she said, escorting him to the door, her sweet smell just getting through to him. He looked at the wide white part in her coarse hair.
“So long, Leni,” he said.
“So long, Moonbloom,” she said in her breathless voice. It boomed profoundly and came through the deepness to his subterranean dwelling. He rolled restlessly and blood flowed warningly.
•
J. T. came to the door and made a tired, gentle gesture of welcome. “It’s Moonbloom,” he croaked, and then coughed a little; the phlegmy, shredding sound established his identity. He was tall and gaunt and bent, and the painter’s colic was drawing him into an ever more acute curve, like an invisible bowstring; you sensed what the release would be.
“Will you please sit down, J. T.,” his wife said, and then, to Norman, “That man just has to pop up every time the bell rings. Sure don’t have to worry about this fella, J. T.; he wouldn’t get discouraged and go away, would you?”
“No, Mrs. Leopold, you’re right about that,” Norman said.
“Well, come on in while I try to put together all my chicken feed.” She led him into the living room, which was papered in ancient brown stripes. There was a glass-shaded lamp, circa 1911. Norman vaguely recalled seeing such lamps used cleverly in pictures of modern rooms. But here, surrounded by massive, clubfooted tables and highboys, it was being played straight, and the reds and blues of the lamp shade were part of the consistent picture from a dusty, old, commonplace album.
She rummaged in a pocketbook as big as a small shopping bag and covered with some sort of coral oilcloth, talking as she squinted at what she was ostensibly doing.
“J. T. feels that the hallway ought to be swept out once in a while,” Milly Leopold said. Suddenly she made a silent “ah” and plucked out a wrinkled bill. “Isn’t that right, J. T., honey?” She smiled, pretending to be animated by the gaunt, blue-faced man with the heavy 1890 mustache.
J. T. did a little something with his face that might have been his smile.
“And another thing J. T. would like to know is when you’re going to take care of that busted burner on our stove. He’s getting mighty impatient, aren’t you, J. T.?”
J. T. wrinkled his face. Impatience?
“No, it doesn’t do to arouse J. T. He’s gentle and soft-spoken but you dasn’t push him too far.
Pushed too far, J. T. coughed cavernously. The sound of splintering wood came from his chest, vague, buried leakings. Milly was briefly frozen by the sound; her eyes stared, and her smile became somewhat dimmer. She watched her husband’s large, cracked-nailed hand grope over a book with numb, blind flexings. J. T. picked up the book and opened it at random; then he stared over the top of the book at the rug, as though convinced he had removed himself sufficiently by that act.
“The best thing would be to take care of those things,” she said somewhat distractedly. Her face was round and aged in the pretty, unbelievable way of grandmothers in children’s books. She wore septagonal, rimless glasses and had curly gray hair combed to account for each silvery strand. Everything about her appearance was naïve, except her eyes, which remembered everything despite her prettying effort.
“I’ll have to get after the super,” Norman said, decorously addressing the old painter. He eased the money from her hand and put the receipt into it. “The stove too.”
She barely nodded, though she maintained her smile. The coughing had smashed something in her; patiently, she fitted the shards together and swept up the pieces too small to be saved. She stood when Norman started for the door, looking to see what effect that had on her husband.
But J. T. merely stared at the diminishing light of afternoon with a quiet rage; handsome in an old barroom way, he was bluish and perplexed looking.
“Well,” she said with a deep breath at the door, “you look into those things, Mr. Moonbloom. We’re people of very limited means—as you may know, I go to business myself, and Mr. Leopold is only eligible for minimum Social Security. The rent is a serious problem for us, and we certainly expect to get all that’s coming to us. Now that burner has been broken since . . . well, my son, Carl, was here from Michigan in July—he’s in TV repair out there—and the burner went on the blink then. Now that’s, let’s see . . .” She counted on her fingers, her eyes strained in a ridiculous attempt at concentration. The rumbling cough sounded softly in the apartment, and her counted fingers turned arthritic. “That’s a good four months, and I’ve been after that colored fella a million times, and he just keeps telling me all the work he has with four houses, and I say well what about me and I’m a darn sight older than you and I manage to . . .” She talked to fill the brooding concavity behind her, and Norman slid away from her, nodding and moving his lips agreeably.
•
Ilse Moeller was an astringent termination to the Second Avenue tour of duty. Pretty, sourly smiling, she looked at Norman as she looked at everyone; she seemed to feel herself to be an ugly mold and saw all people as her castings.
“Here he iss,” she said with nasty humor. “Fire, famine, flood, nutting stops the rent. So constant, my, my.”
“Perhaps it’s reassuring?”
She ignored that, turning her back to him to get the money. She was shapely, but her arms were almost grotesquely too long and seemed to drag at her shoulders. “Do you not ever think beyond the rent? Does it not occur to you, little rent man, that the vorld is killing itself and that the bomb vill soon turn all money to ashes?”
“Sometimes it occurs to me,” he answered pleasantly, his face too small and battened down for her clumsy anger to damage. “But I keep working and you keep working and somehow things go on.”
“You evade like a coward. Or perhaps you don’t like talking to me?” Her smile was scornful and knowing and bored.
“What a thing to say,” he answered, holding out her receipt with an incorruptible smile. He approved of her immaculate apartment, which would have stood up to Kram’s standards. Only, the hunchback’s eyes were coldly serene, while hers were harsh and disorderly.
“You don’t like Chermans, do you?” she said, her smile bitten into her good-looking, rather blotchy face. She held on to one end of the money, so he was forced to remain face to face with her.
He raised his eyebrows, in a kind of surprise that his face expressed anything.
“I mean, you are a Jew . . .”
“Oh, that!” He chuckled at her misapprehension. “No, no, that’s silly. Why should I hold anything against you?”
“Are you perhaps a fool?”
“That possibility exists.”
“Agh.” She let go of the money and waved him off. “All right, go, go. You must excuse me. I have things to do. I must vash my hair,” she said with a little gesture of mock daintiness. “I have a date for this eefning. I must be a cute, pretty little doll baby, so female, so stupid. Then the man vill like me and perhaps buy me a dinner another time. Ve vill dance and drink and then wrestle for a while in the hallway here, and I vill cutely refuse him to come in, hinting that maybe next time . . . So, that iss vat iss between me and my sleep tonight.”
“Have a good time,” he called over his shoulder without thinking.
“Stupid fool!” she said, and slammed the door.
He shrugged and went out of the building with all the money.
Outside, Gaylord was studying the building like a man planning to redesign the façade.
“Got a lot to do in that place,” he said dolefully. “Don’t hardly know where to begin.” Orange s
unlight gave conviction to his strong figure and dignity to his broad, dissatisfied face.
“Just study the situation for a few days,” Norman said without stopping, wary of Gaylord’s trapping him into manual labor.
“Oh you go ahead and mock.”
“Don’t be so sensitive. I’m not mocking.”
“Nobody knows.”
“Bye, Gaylord.” He waved with a snapping motion of his wrist.
“Go on, go on. I’ll take care of it myself.”
“Good man, Gaylord,” he called back from too far away to be caught.
•
The early dark began blotting the color of things as he walked down Thirteenth Street. Small, fly-specked luncheonettes alternated with wholesalers who dealt in narrowly specialized items. Here were costumes dusty and dated, there a place that was established in 1907 and specialized in shoe trees; next to a cleaner’s was an outlet for doll’s eyes—Only to the Trade. The street seemed to be avoided by the Department of Sanitation in memory of a forgotten feud, but the dirt there was not particularly repugnant, seeming to consist mostly of paper. The buildings, above the tawdry shop fronts, were noble in their antique cornices and dark green, scaly paint, and yet, taken all together, the street presented the gritty complexity of a broken rock. Norman smiled slightly as he walked, wondering whether or not the street depressed him. His doubt recalled Ilse’s name-calling, and he tried to define to himself what, exactly, a fool was.
The house was squeezed breathless by two huge warehouses, and some of the windows showed the strain in quite apparent warping. As Second Avenue could be described as the “best” house of the four, so this one was obviously the “worst.”
Today, the ground floor smelled of bananas. “Karloff,” he said, wrinkling his nose. He knocked at the door from which the smell seemed to come.
“Vas vilst du?” The roar had a startling echo.
“Moonbloom, the rent.” No echo at all.
“Gay in draird!” The door was flung open to reveal the mountainous ancient.
“Now, now, Mr. Karloff.”
The man, still over six feet tall, was being tugged downward in a thousand places. It was as though a multitude of hooks tied to weights were snagged in the outer corners of his eyelids, in the flesh of his cheeks and the corners of his mouth, at his shoulders, his ear lobes, his temples. It gave him the look of a gigantic, extinct creature thrusting upward from the frozen mud. His skin was almost black with age and crumpled into so many short, intersecting lines that squinting slightly one would not see them at all.
“Vas vilst du mit mir? Ich hut nit kein gelt. Ich hut gornisht, gornisht!” His carnivorous breath was bearable only because of the accompanying whisky odor.
“Come on now, Mr. Karloff, you tell me that all the time. But I know better. You have money. Why, you eat enough for a whole family. You spend four dollars a day for schnapps. You’re richer than I am.”
“Ich nit vershtayen,” Karloff rasped in feigned bewilderment.
“You understand fine.” Norman slipped past the great hulk and went to the table, upon which were strewn pieces of bread and scraps of meat. A torn loaf stood beside a half-empty bottle of whisky. Roaches took their time on the walls, and the curtains were in tatters. The walls were so filthy and old and of such indescribable color that they seemed like recesses of murky air and made credible the echoing bellow Norman had heard from the hallway. On the hamstrung bed and the crippled, leaning buffet, there were broken-spined books with Yiddish type, and pieces of a Jewish newspaper were stained by fish heads. Under a cracked, filthy bowl of cold soup, Norman was surprised to see a copy of Moby Dick. His fingers pincered fastidiously, he removed the bowl and opened the book; it, too, was printed in Yiddish. He looked up at Karloff, visualizing an Ahab condemned by fate to live too long.
“How’s the book?”
“Ah, zayer goot,” Karloff said, smiling to show the black stumps in his ravenous mouth. Disarmed, he fell into English. “It is story fuhn a fish, a graysa, big . . .”
“A whale,” Norman said helpfully, rubbing his fingers together in request for the money.
“Yah, yah, a vale. And the menchen, the kepten . . . he has a dybbuk, ehr gehven mashuga fuhn duh vale. And the sea . . .” He waved his long, heavy arms, and his dark, rotting face shone with great excitement. He was one hundred and four years old, and his remaining strength was in his rage. His children were dead, and Norman had seen his youngest grandchild, a silvery-haired man already troubled by hardening of the arteries who paid rare, disgusted duty calls. Karloff consumed vast quantities of food and drink, had a vile temper, and claimed to be the oldest atheist in the world.
“The rent,” Norman prodded.
“Such a meissen,” the old man mused, stuffing a ragged chunk of bread into his mouth.
“And Mr. Karloff . . .”
The black face looked at him blandly.
“For the dozenth time, I’m going to have to ask you to keep the place a little cleaner. We keep having the exterminator, but it’s a losing battle. You must not leave garbage around. People complain.”
“Ah shwartz cholerya offen zie—ahlamun!”
“No need to curse. I’ll have to insist.”
“Yah, yah,” Karloff said scornfully. “Go already.”
“The money, Mr. K.”
“Nah!” He pushed the crumpled money at Norman, obviously having had it in his hand all the time. “Take, take. Du vilst mir tsu shtaben, I should die, hah! Not me, not Karloff! I am strong, Ich hut kayach, Karloff hut graysa kayach! I don’t die, I don’t die!” He beat his huge, collapsed rib cage; standing in the filth of his room, he was like a gigantic, tattered plant grown from a compost heap. “GOWAN, GO!” He howled.
Norman went.
•
Sugarman paid him in small bills and a multitude of change taken from his previous night’s candy sales. He was a candy butcher on trains going out of Grand Central, quite widely remembered by passengers for his entertaining manner of hawking his goods. Yet, like most clowns, he was at heart a dolorous person, resigned to predetermined fate. With no humor discernible, he had told Norman that his name had doomed him to his trade.
“Come in and get it, Moonbloom,” he said. He was in his late forties and had a curly, florid face and a strong, thick body. “This money has character, so don’t make a face at the small change. This half-dollar, for example. It changed trains at Peoria and again at Chicago. It took the milk run downstate to Cairo and was carried back up to Sandusky, Ohio, in a whore’s garter belt. Quickly it lost the brief warmth of that intimate purse when she put it into a collection basket in a Catholic church there. A kindly felon in the audience took it in change for a zinc slug and transported it across two state lines to Utica, New York, where it changed hands in a game of jacks-or-better, draw poker, one-eyed jacks wild. The bean salesman who won it brought it home to Albany, where it went into his wife’s pin money. She bought her boy friend a hand-painted tie with it, and the store rolled it with others of its kind and deposited it in the Third National and Mineral Savings Bank. The following day it was in a teller’s eighty-dollar-fifty-seven-cent pay envelope. This man, a sufferer from Reynaud’s disease—profuse sweating of the palms—took it on his visit to his father in New London, Connecticut, where he paid for a tankful of Esso premium gas with it. The service-station owner then took the New Haven Railroad to New York, leaving New London at seven oh three Eastern standard time. At precisely eight forty-eight, same time zone, he paid for a bar of Hershey’s chocolate (nutless). I know the time because an air hose broke and we were stalled near Cos Cob.” He sat down on his bed and looked at the patient little man with the receipt book. “And still it doesn’t come to rest. It goes to Moonbloom, and I will not know its destiny hereinafter.”
“I’ll take good care of it, Sugarman,” Norman said, writing out the fictitious receipt.
“No, no, you won’t,” Sugarman said sadly, the Pagliacci grief and self-disrespect coating
his eyes. “You have something innately unwholesome about you, Moonbloom. In spite of all your busy handling of money and receipts, I sense a heedlessness that extends to a basic disregard even for money. Like me, you are essentially humorless and unalive.”
“How can you call yourself humorless, Sugarman? You’re known as the wit of the rails.”
“I only cry out in the darkness as we rush through the countryside,” Sugarman said, laying himself on his bed. “My jokes are merely wails; my sounds of humor are cumulatively a dirge. Hey, don’t I know—humor is tragic; it sinks the knife far deeper than solemnity. The laugh is as elemental as a baby’s gas smile, a reflex of pain.”
“You’re very eloquent, Sugarman,” Norman said, as willing to kill time one way as another. He was near the end of his collections, and the evening ahead was just a long, embryonic period of time. As far as he could tell, he derived the same pleasure, or sensation, from this as he did from the coin-induced foot vibrator he had used the week before. “Is it possible you’ve missed your calling out of excess concern about your name?”
“No, absolutely not. My shoulders, my spirit even, are shaped to the strap of my candy tray as my father’s arm and spirit were shaped to the phylacteries. I was born with my spiel and at an early age shocked my father out of his morning devotions with my heretic and profane cries. ‘Last call for candy, ice-cold awrange drrink, peanuts, ham and cheese sandwiches, chocolate bars—male and female, chewing gum, delectable cookies. This train does not have a diner, ladies and gents. There will be no refreshments between here and Boston. You will be famished, parched, and debilitated. This is your last chance to nourish your bodies, to replenish the vital juices lost to sweat. These awrange drrinks remain cold for extraordinary lengths of time due to a special ingredient. There is positively no dining car on this train. I am your last hope for sustenance. Hersheys, Almond Joys, Milky Ways, ice-cold awrange drrink!”
“You’ll sacrifice your professional standing, giving me that performance. I definitely will not buy.”
The Tenants of Moonbloom Page 6
