Sergeant Salinger
Page 21
It was Doris who chipped in half the rent, as her own idea of a “housewarming,” and took him by the hand to the Downstairs Store. But he wouldn’t shop at one of her fashion islands underground. He bought shirts, sweaters, jackets, ties, and suits—all of them in charcoal or the blackest black—from the bargain tables. And that’s how he dressed for his butterscotch sundae at Schrafft’s.
But Doris didn’t scold or discourage her baby brother. He ranted about Western elitism, epitomized by Bloomingdale’s. “Doris, it’s a store that caters to the rich.”
“The rich,” she said, trilling those words on her tongue. “Like all the debonair damsels who come off the El, and illustrious writers who live above a garage.”
“Well,” Sonny said, relishing his sundae with one of Schrafft’s famously long spoons. “I’m not going to write for the slicks anymore. I’ve had it. They change my titles, and run amuck with my prose. I’m a piece of merchandise. Like one of your bargain bins.”
Doris was furious. “Don’t knock the basement, darling. You could be a mannequin who marched right out of the Downstairs Store.”
But she softened to Sonny after a few seconds, since she realized that writing had become his sole religion, his sacred quest. He’d returned from the war with a sadness that chiseled his features, until half his face was in shadow, except for his big ears. She would often find him meditating in his loft when she visited Tarrytown with bags of groceries. He’d first started to meditate in the Green Hell of the Hürtgen Forest, he said. But that’s not when the sadness—and the rage in him—began. It was long before Hürtgen and the war. Doris remembered that rage from the time of Sonny’s bar mitzvah, in 1932. They were living on West Eighty-second Street, in luxurious quarters, with Maja, their aristocrat of a maid, who was always a blabbermouth. Doris couldn’t abide Maja’s haughtiness, her Hungarian airs. But she was loyal and kept close to Miriam, who often brought her along to Schrafft’s as a sidekick. And it was Maja who prepared the menu for Sonny’s bar mitzvah, which wasn’t at the local synagogue, but in Sol Salinger’s enormous living room on West Eighty-second. It was Sol who had given Sonny Hebrew lessons, or so it seemed.
The bar mitzvah was a kind of showpiece, staged for Sol’s parents, Simon and Fannie Salinger, who had come all the way from Chicago, where Simon was a medical doctor with his own private practice in a neighborhood of the poorest Jews in the world on Chicago’s South Side—Simon had financed his medical studies by serving as a rabbi in Louisville, a town of goyim with its tiny ghetto. He was a hard man not to notice. His left eye had been torn out of its socket in a pogrom. It happened in 1880, while Simon was a member of the volunteer Jewish police in the Lithuanian town of Taurage; scuffling with the czar’s drunken soldiers outside the central synagogue, he was gouged with a bayonet. No one had to pity him. Simon gave much more than he got. He left two of the czar’s louts lying with smashed skulls on the clay road. A renegade now, on the czar’s death list, he had to run to America. But that gouged eye intrigued Sonny. Simon didn’t cover it with a velveteen patch. His empty socket looked like a sinister tunnel with a flap of skin….
Sol had hired an itinerant rabbi with a Torah in a silver case to please his father and mother, but Simon disapproved of this charlatan, and he knew that Sonny recited from the Torah without understanding a single line. Yet he loved the boy, felt a kinship with him. He could sense that zeal in Sonny’s dark eyes, the boy’s search for God. Grandpa Simon hadn’t lost his predilection for mayhem. He took the itinerant rabbi with his Torah and tossed him out of the apartment, and then he had a shouting war with Sol in one of the back bedrooms, while Sonny spied on them, like a secret agent wrapped in a prayer shawl.
“You had no right, Pa.”
“Faker,” Simon cackled, “I had every right in the world. I would break your bones if it weren’t for the boy. You never taught him the Haftarah. He doesn’t even know about the Prophets.”
“I did teach him—I tried. And I found the best rebbe I could.”
And that’s when Grandpa Simon discovered Sonny in the crack of the door. He had tears of anger and frustration in his eyes. He’d been a battler all his life. But he couldn’t slap Sol’s big ears back in front of Sonny. He welcomed the bar mitzvah boy into the room.
“It’s nothing,” he said. “Pay no attention. I never got along with your father. He loved to swindle, and I never could.”
He wiped his eyes with a handkerchief that was as long as a dish towel and walked Sonny out of the room….
They rode the Fifth Avenue bus together, sat on the upper deck, where Simon took delight in the different streets and covered his empty eye socket with the flat of his hand in order not to embarrass the bar mitzvah boy in front of the other riders. While Sonny watched families parade in their finest winter hats and coats, Simon pointed to a fashionable department store, made of solid stone.
“Altman B., isn’t that where your sister works?”
“Grandpa, Doris works off Fifth Avenue, way uptown.”
“Too bad,” Simon said, brushing his lip with a gnarled finger. “Sonny, you can’t read Torah, can you?”
“No, Grandpa.”
“Then why didn’t your father have a ceremony of ham and cheese? I might have enjoyed that, rather than a rebbe who was no rebbe at all.”
“Grandpa, I disagree.”
The ceremony had excited him—it was, after all, a kind of bloodletting. On that afternoon in January, he was another King David, a molder of words, a warrior, and a master of art and song. He was surrounded by friends from summer camp and school, and some of Sol’s neighbors in the building, in this enclave of Upper West Side Jews. Sonny and his male companions were wearing skullcaps and prayer shawls made of pure silk. They drank cups of kosher wine and gobbled hunks of honey cake with almonds, then sat down to a walloping meal, while Simon frowned and argued at the table with his son.
“You could have invited us without this fake bar mitzvah.”
“Papa, what are you saying?” Sol cried out in despair. “A Jewish boy should have a Jewish service.” “Our little king,” Sonny’s friends yelled, their mouths sweetened with wine. And Sonny delivered a speech in his prayer shawl.
“We are the purveyors of justice, the conquerors of Goliath. I need little more than my lyre and my slingshot. We seek honor over wealth. We cherish the holiness of songs. We will sway the Lord with our own sweet wine.”
Even Grandpa Simon was touched, but the boy’s glory as little King David didn’t last.
A few months after Sonny’s bar mitzvah, the Salingers abandoned the Upper West Side and moved to 1133. They were now the Salingers of Park Avenue, and Sonny was ripped right out of public school and enrolled at McBurney, a private school affiliated with the local YMCA. But the sadness didn’t really start with that. One Saturday afternoon, during lunch at Schrafft’s, Sol announced that Miriam wasn’t Jewish.
“She’s Catholic,” Sol said. “Her name was Marie, and she called herself Miriam to please my parents. But she never converted.”
And the young King David peered at his father with a whole arsenal of slingshots. “Dad, what does that mean?”
“We’re not really a Jewish tribe. We never were. I import ham, for God’s sake.”
“But I sang from the Torah,” Sonny said. “I recited the Lord’s prayers.”
“To please my papa, who worked like a dog to put bread on the table,” Sol said with a cherubic smile.
Sonny clapped his hands over his ears. “I’m going mad. I studied for months—months. You yourself called me your ‘little Jewish king.’”
“You are, darling,” Miriam said.
“At McBurney, with a chapel for Christian prayers.”
“It’s a private school,” Sol insisted, “one of the best. You don’t have to attend chapel. That’s in my contract.”
It was Doris who intervened, Doris who shared a toothbrush and a bathroom with her brother. “But you didn’t have to trick us, Dad.”
“No,” Sonny said. “I’ll leave. It’s not Doris’ fault.”
And school became a deepening quagmire. He had to drop out of McBurney after a year—he just didn’t have the grades. He was an ordinary boy with an ordinary IQ—111, according to McBurney’s measurements. Sol decided that Sonny needed the discipline of a military boarding school, a kind of junior West Point. The Salingers selected the Valley Forge Military Academy, in Pennsylvania. Sol didn’t attend the interview—he looked too Jewish, despite his Park Avenue credentials, and Valley Forge had its quota of Jews, like most other academies.
It was Miriam who arrived at Valley Forge with her red hair, and Sonny was enrolled. Corporal Salinger seemed to thrive under the military rigor at Valley Forge, and would graduate as a sergeant major, Doris recalled. Valley Forge was the only school that would ever grant him a diploma. But he returned to Manhattan with the very same sadness etched deep into his eyes. And that was the sadness Doris saw at Sleepy Hollow Lane, as Sonny had decided upon his address in Tarrytown, since his loft had a separate little road, and Washington Irving, who had written “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” had lived in Tarrytown. Sonny adored Ichabod Crane, the acrimonious schoolteacher in that acrimonious tale. He called anyone he admired Ichabod or Ishmael, no matter what their names were—or Bartleby and Billy Budd. Often these names were transferable from one to another, and Doris could barely tell the person apart.
“How’s Bartleby?” he asked as she entered with her groceries. He had a tiny fridge and one gas burner. He lived like a monk in that loft with a low ceiling, a shower curtain that couldn’t even cover the shower stall, and one sink that delivered only hot water. The toilet seat sat in the open. Sonny called it “King David’s can.” She had to ask him to step outside onto the tiny porch whenever she wanted to pee, for God’s sake.
“Which Bartleby is that?”
“Ya know, the new doorman at Eleven thirty-three.”
She was living on Lexington now, a block from Bloomingdale’s, but Sonny kept his old address. It was Doris who had become his letter carrier, Doris who delivered his mail. If he had used Sleepy Hollow Lane, nothing at all would have ever arrived. Sleepy Hollow Lane didn’t exist in Tarrytown, except in her brother’s fancy, and perhaps it was there that he dwelled, a disused soldier who found little nourishment in civilian life.
“Oh, Frank. He’s fine. He guards your mail like an ogre. He’s your biggest fan, tells one and all that the eminent writer and war hero, Sergeant Jerry Salinger, once resided in the building, and that Frank himself has become your custodian. I hope he doesn’t get fired for blabbing so much. You know how prissy the management is.”
“What about Ishmael?” Sonny asked.
Doris had to reflect for a moment. And then she recalled that Ishmael had become Sonny’s name for Sol.
“Oh,” she said, “he still thinks you’ll return to the primeval roost. He’s betting that you’ll fail in your own craft and that you’ll be the next little King David of Hoffman ham and cheese…. You’re coming, aren’t you?”
Sonny seemed a bit muddled. “Coming where?”
“To our Bargain Basement Bazaar. You promised. It’s the grand opening.”
“Doris, the Downstairs Store reopened months ago. Didn’t we grab every bargain we could find? I have a brand-new designer wardrobe.”
“I know,” Doris said, as if he was still the booming bar mitzvah boy, “but it’s in my honor.”
“Will Ichabod be there?”
Doris didn’t have any doubt this time about the shifting personalities. Sonny meant her boss, Mr. Dellavedova.
“Of course,” she said with a blink. “Now step onto the verandah. I have to pee.”
2.
HE TOOK THE HUDSON LINE TO GRAND CENTRAL, wearing his charcoal gray topcoat and black argyle socks. He always loved to follow the slow roil of the river, the way it would sink out of sight and suddenly reappear again through a crush of trees or some builder’s dream of a cluster of cottages near the south shore. He stopped at the Automat, where he marveled at the cashier, who could deliver a fistful of nickels with a numbing, blind accuracy that didn’t allow for errors. He had coffee and a slice of apple pie, fresh out of the little window. The pie here, in this enormous womb of a cafeteria, was better than Miriam’s and Maja’s, or the pie maker’s delight at Schrafft’s. Its crust was crisp and flaky, and wouldn’t disappear inside a customer’s fork, and the warm chunks of apple were never overcooked….
Ichabod was waiting with other executives, buyers, and designers at the escalator that led to the bargain basement’s top tier. Doris was among them, wearing the latest fashions from Seventh Avenue—a mini cape, a flared blouse and skirt, and red leather pumps, while Sonny looked like a cadaver with big ears.
“Ah, Mr. Dellavedova,” she said, “you’ve met my brother, J. D., he’s moved to Tarrytown. He lives in a loft on Sleepy Hollow Lane—writing stories and a novel. He carried that novel right through Normandy, in a sack.”
“Ah, Sergeant Salinger, the war hero,” said Ichabod, alias Mr. Dellavedova. “You were with the OSS, like Cagney in 13 Rue Madeleine—all that cloak-and-dagger stuff. How many Krauts did you kill with your bare hands?”
“Very few,” Sonny said. “I was with the CIC.”
“Never heard of that outfit.” He prodded another exec. “Walt, did you ever hear of the CIC? They were also in the commando business, it seems.”
But none of the execs had the faintest notion of the CIC.
“We worked in the shadows,” Sonny said. “We didn’t have James Cagney on our side.”
“Well, Doris swears by you,” said Mr. Dellavedova. “You don’t have to hide in Tarrytown, son. You can work for us at Bloomingdale’s.”
Sonny had an ache in his gut, a rawness he couldn’t get rid of, as he imagined writing copy about the latest sales at Dellavedova’s department store. He joined the others as they ambled down the escalator to the first tier. It had tidbits from Bloomingdale’s shelves and its soda shop near the Third Avenue exit. It had floorwalkers who carried around slivers of food on a silver tray. It had live mannequins who mingled with customers, and the Seventh Avenue stars who had designed their outfits and fretted over every inch of crêpe. It was bedlam to Sonny, a madhouse of merchandise and well-wishers, including his mom and dad, and Maja, the queen maid with her own quarry of other live-ins. Doris didn’t seem to have any friends, only accomplices and other buyers, who congratulated her. She’d devoted herself to one particular craft—Bloomingdale’s. Perhaps next year she would board the Queen Mary again and visit the place Vendôme, bring the parfum of Paris to Lexington Avenue. But this year she was in her own palace….
Sol was impressed, and told that to Mr. Dellavedova. “What traffic, what volume. The crowds never stop. There’s no lunch break at the Downstairs Store.”
“That’s right, Mr. Salinger,” said Ichabod. “Your daughter’s a classic. No salary in the world can tempt her to move back upstairs.”
“She’s stubborn,” Miriam said, “like our Sonny, in his garage on Sleepy Hollow Lane.”
“Mrs. S.,” Ichabod whispered, “he shouldn’t wear black on black. It gives the wrong impression. He’s a war hero, a rival to the OSS.”
“He stayed too long—in Nuremberg,” Sol said. “He brought back a German girl with a shady past.”
“Sol,” Miriam said, “you shouldn’t give out Sonny’s secrets, not to a stranger.”
“Mr. Dellavedova is Doris’ boss, for God’s sake. And didn’t we help Sonny get rid of Dracula’s Daughter?”
Doris stepped in and elbowed her mother and father away from Mr. Dellavedova.
“Shush, Papa, or I’ll strap you to the escalator.”
“Doris Salinger,” Miriam said, “you can’t talk to your father in that tone of voice.”
“Yes, I can,” Doris
said. “This is my Monopoly board—all of it.”
“Then we’re leaving,” Miriam said. “Maja, come—I won’t tolerate such rudeness from my own daughter.”
“But there are bargains—everywhere,” Maja said.
Miriam pierced Maja with a maddening gaze. “Come.”
Then she turned to Sonny. “You never call, you never write, Mr. Sleepy Hollow. You have your dog, and a sister who’s as good as a grocery clerk. Why would you need a mother?”
Sonny was the same bar mitzvah boy, with a black turtleneck instead of a silk prayer shawl. “Stay, Mama.” Miriam had nourished him through the war with her bundles of woolen socks, her letters, her clippings about the latest Hollywood gossip—the love tiffs between Bogart and Betty Bacall, Carole Lombard’s death in a plane crash while selling war bonds, and Gable’s grief over the crash….
“I’ll do it,” Miriam said, “for your father’s sake. But Doris must apologize. She’s grown wild in this basement, wild.”
Sonny signaled to his sister with a telltale wink, honed at the movies, during the silent era, when actors had no melodies to aggrandize themselves with and had to act with their eyes.
“Oh, Dad,” Doris said, “oh, Dad,” and went back to her minions, who stood in the middle of each fashion island, giving out free bars of soap and offering silk scarves at a ridiculous price. It troubled Sonny, this whole idea of a basement bazaar and its wonderland of goods, while all he could remember was desolation, from Normandy to Nuremberg.
He took walks with his schnauzer in the little park near Sleepy Hollow Lane. That was as much companionship as he could bear, except for Doris, his postmistress, and an occasional chat with his landlady. He was growing mute in America. He’d always be that bar mitzvah boy who fell from grace, the cadet from Valley Forge who began writing stories in the middle of the night with a flashlight under his blanket, an errant sergeant major with his lone degree. He was trained as an interrogator, the mysterious noncom who could chastise generals and had to hide his stripes, but the Nazis he’d unmasked were as broken as he was, men with frozen faces. The war itself was one great marshaling yard. In the end, the Allies were better marshalers than the Krauts. He’d gone to Paris, which had been the cultural capital of the Third Reich—Hermann Göring had ruled from the Ritz, with his morphine and his slippers studded with diamonds, and the German high command preferred the amenities of Le Sphinx to the battlefields of Normandy. And now Sonny had Manhattan with the rocking noises of the El. The basement bazaar was a little boomtown. He saw his own somber reflection in the mirror, black on black. And Doris watched him break into a cold sweat.