Manhattan 62

by Nadelson, Reggie

  In his late 40s, Miller, a well-built guy, he makes drinks, taking care not to allow the ice cubes to fall against glass so his wife’s playing is not disturbed. In that living room, I get the impression of good taste, a sofa and chair covered in good pale green fabric, nice drapes that go with it, bookshelves, a fireplace with a fine old mantelpiece, the silver vase with yellow roses on it. There is art on the walls.

  I’m glad I put on a new slim lightweight gray summer suit with a narrow black silk knit tie. Miller is in advertising, and he’ll get the look, I figure.

  From a settee, where he is sitting quietly beside another man, Max unfolds himself and greets me, accepts a highball from Mr Miller. His wife finishes playing.

  “That was terrific,” I tell her, and she takes both of my hands. “I know you must be Pat Wynne. Thank you, dear. But I must get dinner. Stan, tell them how much you admired the Russian Army.”

  “The Russians were some fighters,” says Stan Miller. “They would fight in their bare feet if they had to. They fought until they died. You have to admire that.

  “In this picture, you see, this is me, quite young, and this fellow is General Curtis LeMay. He was something. He did what nobody else would do. You ever hear of how he mined the Jap waterways? Practically finished the war, he looked after his own. Troops loved him. I was with him in England early, 305 Bomber, taught his men right. I knew him in Japan, too, where he really stuck it to them, I flew for him, we strafed all the waterways over there, flew so low you could see women on the river banks washing their clothes.” A nostalgic smile crosses Miller’s face. He loved his war, and I knew other men who felt that way. His war; not mine.

  My war? It was shit. Korea was a dung heap. I keep my mouth shut except for drinking Mr Miller’s Scotch—a very nice bottle of Chivas Regal—and wonder why this gung ho officer is housing a Commie like Max Ostalsky, but maybe he was asked to do it by NYU, where he went to school. He’s a loyal sort of fellow, a follower, a little bit oafish but good-natured enough.

  “It’s nice to meet you, Pat,” says the friend Max introduces as Mike Bounine. Seems his real name is Vyascheslav, and who in America could pronounce that? “We decide on the flight over that we shall be Max and Mike,” he says, “you see my patronymic is Mikhailovich. My father’s name is Mikhail. Max gives me a name. He becomes, you might say, my godfather.”

  “What’s your work?”

  “I’m a medical doctor, but for the most part I do research, this means I look into a microscope a lot. How do you do?” He is tall, with a mop of yellow hair, but wearing a Brooks Brothers summer suit I could never afford, with a white shirt that was laundered professionally, and a red silk tie, Italian. I remark on them and he is polite and pleased, and comments on the excellence of American clothing.

  “That’s a fine watch you have there,” Mr Miller says to him, and Bounine holds up his wrist, very proud of the timepiece. “It is from Hamilton, and also self-winding, this is quite amazing, this new way to wind your watch,” he says. Miller nods, and they exchange some more words about the best watches. Like Bounine, Miller is a bit of a dandy; attired in Daks summer slacks, and an expensive silky cream-colored sports shirt with French cuffs. His sports coat has narrow lapels, and around his neck he wears a blue silk ascot with cream-colored polka dots. On his left pinky finger is a heavy embossed gold ring, the kind you might see on some Englishman, a family crest or something. I ask about it, but he just smiles, and continues his chat with Bounine.

  Mrs Miller has returned with a tray of canapés. “You know we had a very nice Russian family just across the street, 24 East 10th I think, or at least the father was Russian, two little boys, Paul and William. Such handsome little boys, it makes me furious to think of the way people regard Russians, what bad thing could these lovely people do? They left quite a few years ago and I wondered why. Now, drink up, and we’ll have dinner. Stan dear, put that lovely recording of “Sleeping Beauty” on the stereo.”

  The music plays. We sit down. At the table, Muriel Miller presides like a dope pusher, urging more and more food on us, lamb chops, with mint jelly or mustard, baked potatoes with sour cream and butter, seconds of everything. In and out of the kitchen she teeters, in her high heels, the heels going tap tap tap on the kitchen floor.

  They have a double act, she cooks too much food, plays the piano, hovers, chatty and wanting to please. He is the businessman who tells us about how the gears of business are greased by advertising. I help her take some dishes into the kitchen where she detains me. “Pat, ask Stan about his campaign, he is such a brilliant advertising man, but I want him to join that company, Doyle Dane Bernbach, you’ve seen those ads for Volkswagen, so witty, and they like Jews, some of them are Jews, I think, and I know Stan feels in a bit of a bind where he is, so anti-Semitic, he has to pretend. I know they talk behind his back. He’s so sensitive about it. Sometimes I think he loved his pals in the army so much because they just accepted him. Before that he felt he was a little Jewish boy, and he couldn’t belong, and then he goes into the military, expecting them to keep their distance, and they just make him one of them. His commanding officer was his biggest hero, still is. The only time he feels good is after those get togethers with his military buddies. He can’t shake it that people called him a dirty little kike when he was a boy. I say to him, Stan, but so many lovely people are Jewish, look at Tony Curtis, do you know his real name is Bernie Schwartz? But I do love a nice mass, Pat. You know, I sometimes go to Old St Patrick’s for the music.”

  We rejoin the others. Three kinds of cake follow, also apple strudel, and vanilla fudge ice cream.

  “Max, dear, take the boys and show them your little hideaway while I just put the food away. Stan, make the boys one of your Rusty Nails, such a delicious drink.”

  It’s the first time I see Max’s room, the way it’s connected to the Miller apartment by a door next to the kitchen; it has its own second door leading out to the back stairs.

  We troop into his room. Stan Miller brings a tray with Scotch and Drambuie and glasses, mixes the drinks. He’s eager to join us, be one of the boys. He takes the desk chair. Max sits on the bed. Bounine asks to use the bathroom, disappears behind a door that leads to it, then reappears and perches on the window sill, glancing out the window, down into the alley behind. He could have used the blue armchair.

  Now I was in that room, same furniture, bookshelves, a portable phonograph, a black and white TV set. I remembered how Bounine sat on the window. Was he watching the boy with the handball? Something else? There was bad feeling somehow between him and Ostalsky, and I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  “Why don’t you put a record on, Max, please?”

  With a grin in my direction, Max puts James Brown on the turntable. “Such noise,” says Bounine, and Max replaces it with folk songs by Paul Robeson. “Is that better for you, Mike?”

  “Much better,” Bounine says mildly. “Pat, I believe you’re Catholic, and I would like to visit a church. Max mentioned something about Old St Patrick’s Cathedral? Or Stan? Do you belong to a church, Stan? No, forgive me, that can’t be, your wife mentioned you are Jewish.

  “Did she? I didn’t hear her,” says Miller, and before Bounine answers he adds, “Well, yes, my wife is Jewish, I’m only half Jewish, in point of fact.”

  “Listen, you know what? I’ll take you to meet my aunt and uncle,” I tell Bounine. “They live opposite Old St Patrick’s Cathedral. My Auntie Clara, she’ll take you to her church and talk until your eyes bleed and probably talk you into converting. I’ll fix it. Next week, if you like.”

  “Good, fine, that’s helpful. Thank you,” Bounine says, in a way that suggests it was on his agenda from the moment we met.

  August

  Visit to the aunt and uncle of Pat, Mr and Mrs Jack and Clara Kelly at their house on Mott Street. To Old St Patrick’s Cathedral. Why is Bounine so interested? What does he care so much for what the young priest says?

  August 29

 
; Ice cream with Nancy Rudnick in the park. When Nancy Rudnick touches my hair, this is all I think of. My feelings are not proper.

  I am married. I want somebody to talk to, but you do not talk to other men. Cultured men do not engage in talk of women, not like peasants or workers. But all I think of is her hand in my hair, she says to me, “You know, Max, darling, there are some people who think Communists have horns” and I put my head down, and she strokes it, pretending to look for horns, and after that this is all I want, for her to touch me.

  Ditz. Going steady. Films: Dr No, Lawrence of Arabia.

  September 1

  Labor Day Party. The Rudnicks. Charlton Street. Nancy’s friend, a Cuban, Jorge is there and speaks eloquently about Castro. Nancy’s uncle Nathan escorts me into the garden, and he is quite tipsy, and he says to me, “I see the way you look at Nancy. You have no chance. She will eat you alive. You will never belong.” He holds out his arm to include the house, the people, all of it. He says “If you want to understand Nancy, you have to understand all this. This is much more than where she lives. This is who she is.”

  Nathan is right in some ways. Wrong about this idea she will eat me alive. Moody, yes. But she has a huge appetite for life, for everything, something I have never seen. Tender with her father and her step-mother, adorable with little cousins. Beautiful.

  I am invited to the Rudnicks’ summer home on a place called Fire Island for ten days.

  Vacation. Swim in the sea, lie on the beach, dig clams with our feet, try out water-skiing. Being in the sea changes me. I feel I can never again live away from it. Nancy in her bikini, Saul, Virginia, we drink wine, eat, talk, argue all night, listen to music. I read and read.

  Lolita, this book keeps me awake for three nights, I gorge on it, I am excited and horrified, I have never read something like this, and I would like to take it home to my mother, but I cannot. Catch 22 makes me laugh. Dr Zhivago. I enjoy this, but why was there so much fuss? I cannot say this; to discuss it with Americans it would be a betrayal of my system.

  September

  On television, terrible scenes of violence and hatred. James Meredith, a courageous Negro, tries to go to the Univ of Mississippi, they forbid it. Riots afterwards. One French journalist is killed. President Kennedy must send the Army. We would not show such things. Thankful we have nothing like this in our country.

  My back is killing me. I get off the bathroom floor and move to a chair in the bedroom, then the desk. I begin to copy out what I will need. Hurry, I think. Hurry. I read as fast as I can. He went to the beach with Nancy. He lay on the beach with her. I was betting he did much more. Did Saul let his girl have boys in her bedroom in his house? Damn Commies. Free Love.

  Fall Semester begins. Very good class in the literature of the nineteenth century, though some ideas that shock me, that Huck Finn has what they call a homoerotic strain, an essay by Leslie Fiedler titled “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!”, I am confused. A classmate, Harry Amos, an Englishman, tries to explain. Is Harry a homosexual? I am perplexed and embarrassed.

  I receive my first grade, my first formal paper, on Mark Twain. I have received an A.

  All summer, friends are so hospitable, people invite me to concerts, films, dinners.

  Hootenanny Carnegie Hall. Nancy’s neighbor, Bob Dylan, makes his first big appearance. She says his real name is Robert Zimmerman. He plays a new song. “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall”. I have never heard anything like this. Haunting. Terrifying. Important.

  We hear the Weavers who sing of miners, railroad men, workers. Joyous audience, shining faces raised towards the stage. I sing, too, or hum because I do not know most of the words to these songs: “Midnight Special”. “Rock Island Line”. “Pay Me My Money Down”. Love songs, too, “Greensleeves”, the audience sings and sings “Good Night Irene”.

  Pete Seeger, the others, everyone believes peace and good will truly prevail. Many shake my hand and say they know the Soviet Union believes in peace, too.

  On the train downtown, Nancy holds my hand. I spend the night at her apartment. I must stop this.

  Harry Amos, that exchange fellow from Cambridge University I have a class with sees me in front of NYU. He makes me laugh, but he is the most frivolous man I met ever. English. Pointed shoes. He says: silly things, hipster, flipster, finger popping daddio. He has great wads of cash in his wallet, and happy to treat his fellow students. He invites me to the Peppermint Lounge. This is, what you could call, CRAZY. He instructs me to practice the Twist with a towel. Also asks me if I know another Russian. Name of Mike, he says. I tell him Mike is not a Russian name. I know he means Bounine. Where did they meet?

  Then a girl in a beehive—a high hairdo—and a short skirt pulls me onto the floor while the band plays. Joey Dee and the Starliters. Is that Mrs Kennedy? Is it possible?

  I imagine my tutor, Comrade Kunityna, who is known to report on unseemly students and I would grab her, and sing, “Come on, Comrade, let’s do the Twist, let’s twist again, like we did last summer.”

  Harry has so many beautiful suits, pairs of slacks, a fine leather jacket, pointy toe boots, and he walks, as if, what did Pat say, light in his loafers? Is Harry homosexual? Not a subject we discuss at home. In class, where we discuss blackmail, our instructor says we must beware of homosexuals. Of all sexual entrapment, but I have been entrapped, if that is the word, by Nancy.

  I want things from her that are not proper, not even possible.

  At the end of this entry he had scribbled something in Russian. Something he didn’t want me to read?

  What sort of class did they discuss sexual entrapment in? Wasn’t Max an English teacher studying Mark Twain? My heart was beginning to race. I read as fast as I could, smoking, lighting one cigarette with the other.

  I put the first notebook down, and picked up the second one. It was labeled October, 1962.

  Parched, I got some water from the bathroom sink, and sat down again. Above me, pinned to the wall, was a photograph of a pretty young woman: Max’s wife, Nina. I had not looked hard at it before. She was beautiful but sad.

  October 1

  Another new month. Autumn. I will miss my mother’s mushroom soup, or so I say to people, for I do not miss anything, what I want is here. Nancy is here. Every night I sit up late, writing and writing. I feel tired, but I cannot sleep. I am confused. I believe as deeply as ever in my country, and my work. If I were a Roman Catholic like Pat’s family, I would confess to a priest. To understand why I question my beliefs, to redeem myself. It is a crime?

  Now I understood why Ostalsky wrote in English. He intended for me to find this diary. Instinctively I knew this. He wanted me for his priest. He was isolated, unsure, scared. He had nobody else.

  Was it true? My fantasy?

  October 2

  This comes now, in October, like some whisper, like it is a feather on my skin, like fall blowing away the summer, this sense I have of New York as a wonderful place. But if this is true, they lied to me. They lied to us. They said America is evil, imperialist aggressor, pushing a capitalist propaganda for the rich.

  New York is not evil. Americans are not evil. My country lied.

  All systems have flaws.

  October 3

  Bounine is in trouble. He drinks too much.

  I ask what’s eating him. He asks, can he trust me? I say, sure.

  He says he has to tell me something. He tells me he loves America. He loves that he can travel anywhere without permission. Loves jokes about politicians in public. Food. Clothes. Material things. He says, “They lied to us. They lied. The fuckers lied.” He begins to cry. He says our country lied about America. He stinks of whisky and cigarettes, and says he loves our country, but not the lies. He says to me, “Isn’t that what you feel? I can see you feel it, too. Don’t you? Those fuckers just lied. I can tell you because you are my friend.”

  Is Bounine a true friend? Is this an effort to provoke me? I listen, but say nothing.

  October 4 />
  Muriel Miller gave me Ship of Fools, a popular novel when I arrived, a bestseller about passengers adrift on a great ship. Sometimes I walk near the Hudson River, and I like to walk along the piers and gaze at the great ocean-going liners. I think I am on my own ship, the ship Manhattan, so many people, strange, new, interesting.

  I have boarded this ship for a long journey, these passengers are my friends now. Everyone has been kind. I do not want to think about future uses for Mrs Pugliese, or Nancy Rudnick, or Pat Wynne, though, unlike the others, I do not think he can ever be convinced of the value of socialism.

  Things upset me more. I cannot tell if somebody has been in my room. Is it just Gladys, the maid. She wants to clean my room, change my sheets. There are things I must put away so she doesn’t read them. I keep her waiting. I feel uneasy with servants, this making of the Negro race an underclass, but it is her job.

  Do other agents have their plans threatened by laundry? Does it all come down to clean sheets, and buying hot dogs and girls who tempt you? Is there no grander agenda? What am I? Only a naive agent who worries that the maid will find me out, as if my secret job left stains on the sheets?

  I re-read the last paragraph. Agents. Secret job? What did he mean? Was Max Ostalsky an agent? Was he KGB? Jesus. Of course he was. He had written about sexual entrapment. He had taken an interest in the names of Nancy’s friends on the Woolworth’s picket line.

  I was sweating. I opened the window. The handball player had gone. I examined the notebook again.

  Max Ostalsky was a trained KGB agent. Christ. Sweet Mother of God. He had lied, and lied again, even when I asked him if he was an agent, he said he was too clumsy, too inclined to tell jokes, wasn’t that it? Something like that, the night on the High Line?

  Before, when I had wondered if he was a spy, it was the kind of idle assumption you just make about a Russian. I had him figured for possibly small potatoes, a casual spy, the kind who passed on a little information; maybe he slipped titbits from US newspapers into his letters home.