Roy's World

by Barry Gifford

  I liked to stand next to the piano bench while my mother played and listen to “Satan Takes a Holiday,” a fox-trot it said on the sheet music. I was eight years old and could easily imagine foxes trotting in evening gowns.

  I was up to “The Scissors-Grinder” and “Swan on the Lake” in the second red Thompson book. That was pretty good for six weeks, but I had begun to stutter. I knew I had begun to stutter because I’d heard my mother say it to my father on the phone. They ought just to ignore it, she’d said, and it would stop.

  “Ready for your lesson today?” asked the teacher as she came up the walk.

  “I’ll be in in a minute,” I said, continuing to bounce the ball off the yellow bricks. The teacher smiled and went into the building.

  I kept hitting the ball against the wall. I knew she would be talking to my mother, then arranging the lesson books on the rack above the piano. I hit the ball once high above the first-floor windows, caught it, and ran.

  The Lost Tribe

  Roy looked for the tall black man whenever he walked past the yellow brick synagogue on his way to his friend Elmo’s house. The man always waved to Roy and Roy waved back but they had never spoken. The man was usually sweeping the synagogue steps with a broom or emptying small trash cans into bigger ones. Seeing a black man working as a janitor was not an unusual sight, but what was unusual, to Roy, was that the man always wore a yarmulke. Roy had never before seen a black person wearing a Jewish prayer cap. Elmo was Jewish, so Roy asked him if anybody could be a Jew, even a black man.

  “I don’t know,” said Elmo. “Maybe. Let’s ask my old man.”

  Elmo’s father, Big Sol, was a short but powerfully built man who owned a salvage business on the south side of Chicago. When Big Sol was home, he usually wore a Polish T-shirt, white boxer shorts, black socks and fuzzy house slippers. He was very hairy; large tufts of hair puffed out all over his body except for from the top of his head, which was bald. Big Sol was a kind, generous man who enjoyed joking around with the neighborhood kids, to whom he frequently offered a buck or two for soda pop or ice cream.

  Big Sol was sitting in his recliner watching television when Elmo and Roy approached him.

  “Hey, boys, how you doin’? Come on in, I’m watchin’ a movie.”

  Roy looked at the black and white picture. James Mason was being chased by several men on a dark, wet street.

  “This James Mason,” said Big Sol, “he talks like he’s got too many meatballs in his mouth.”

  Roy remembered Elmo having told him his father had been wounded at Guadalcanal. He’d recovered and was sent back into combat but later contracted malaria, which got him medically discharged from the Marines. Elmo was named after a war buddy of Big Sol’s who had not been as fortunate.

  “Hey, Pop,” Elmo said, “can anybody be a Jew?”

  “This is America,” said Big Sol. “A person can be anything he wants to be. “

  “How about Negroes?” said Elmo. “Can a Negro be Jewish?”

  “Sammy Davis, Junior, is a Jew,” Big Sol said.

  “Was he born a Jew?” Elmo asked.

  “What difference does it make? Sammy Davis, Junior, is the greatest entertainer in the world.”

  A few days later, Roy was walking past the synagogue thinking about how he had never been inside one, when he saw the black janitor wringing out a mop by the back door. The man waved and smiled. Roy went over to him.

  “What’s your name?” asked Roy.

  “Ezra. What’s yours?”

  “Roy.”

  Ezra offered his right hand and Roy offered his. As they shook, Roy was surprised at how rough Ezra’s skin was; almost abrasive, like a shark’s.

  “How old are you, Roy?”

  “Eight. How old are you?”

  “Sixty-one next Tuesday.”

  “How come you’re wearing a Jewish prayer hat?” Roy asked.

  “You got to wear one in the temple,” said Ezra. “It’s a holy place.”

  “Are you a Jew?”

  “I am now.”

  “You weren’t always?”

  “Son, that’s a good question. I was but I didn’t know it until late in my life.”

  “How come?”

  “Never really understood the Bible before, Roy. The original Jews were black, in Africa. I’m a descendant of the Lost Tribe of Israel.”

  “I’ve never heard of the Lost Tribe.”

  “You heard of Hailie Selassie?”

  “No, who is he?”

  “Hailie Selassie is the Lion of Judah. He lives in Ethiopia. Used to be called Abyssinia.”

  “Have you ever been there?”

  Ezra shook his head. “Hope to go before I expire, though.”

  “How did your tribe get lost?”

  “Old Pharaoh forced us to wander in the desert for thousands of years. Didn’t want no Jews in Egypt. Drew down on us with six hundred chariots, but we got away when the angel of God put a pillar of cloud in front of ’em just long enough so Moses could herd us across the Red Sea, which the Lord divided then closed back up.”

  “Why didn’t Pharaoh want the Jews in Egypt?”

  Ezra bent down, looked Roy right in his eyes and said, “The Jews are the smartest people on the face of the earth. Always have been, always will be. Old Pharaoh got frightened. Hitler, too.”

  Roy noticed that the whites of Ezra’s eyes were not white; they were mostly yellow.

  “They were scared of the Jews?”

  Ezra straightened back up to his full height.

  “You bet they were scared,” he said. “People get scared, they commence to killin’. After awhile, they get used to it, same as eatin’.”

  Ezra picked up his mop and bucket.

  “Nice talkin’ to you, Roy. You stop by again.”

  Ezra turned and entered the synagogue.

  Walking to Elmo’s house, Roy thought about Ezra’s tribe wandering lost in the desert. They must have been smart, Roy decided, to have survived for so long.

  Big Sol was sitting in his easy chair in the living room, drinking a Falstaff and watching the White Sox play the Tigers on TV.

  “Hey, Big Roy!” he said. “How you doin’?”

  “Did the Lost Tribe of Israel really wander in the desert for thousands of years?” Roy asked.

  Big Sol nodded his head. “Yeah, but that was a long time ago. The Jews were tough in them days.”

  “Ezra, the janitor at the synagogue up the street, told me that Jews are the smartest people on the planet.”

  Big Sol stared seriously at the TV for several seconds. Pierce struck Kaline out on a change-up.

  “Yeah, well,” Big Sol said, turning to look at Roy, “he won’t get no argument from me.”

  The Lost Christmas

  In 1954, when I was eight years old, I lost Christmas. At about noon of Christmas Eve that year, I went with some kids to the Nortown Theater on Western Avenue in Chicago to see a movie, Demetrius and the Gladiators, starring Victor Mature and Susan Hayward. My mother and I had until earlier that month been living in Florida and Cuba, and were in Chicago, where I was born and where we sometimes stayed, to spend the Christmas holidays with Nanny, my grandmother, my mother’s mother, who was bed-ridden because of a chronic heart condition. In fact, Nanny would die due to heart failure the following May, at the age of fifty-nine.

  The ground was piled with fresh snow that Christmas Eve Day. The few cars that were moving snailed along the streets barely faster than we could walk. The first time I had come to Chicago as a human being old enough to be conscious of my surroundings was when I was five or six. Now that I was older, however, and was somewhat inured to the snow and ice—at least I knew what to expect—I could if not enjoy at least endure the weather, especially since I knew my situation was temporary.

  I thought Deme
trius and the Gladiators was a great movie, full of fighting with swords and shields and a sexy redhead, like my mother. I didn’t notice if Victor Mature’s breasts were larger than Susan Hayward’s—an earlier (1949) film, Samson and Delilah, had prompted the comment by a producer that Mature’s tits were bigger than co-star Hedy Lamarr’s—I was impressed only by the pageantry of goofy Hollywood ancient Rome. Walking home Christmas Eve afternoon, the leaden gray Chicago sky heading rapidly toward darkness, I suddenly was overcome by dizziness and very nearly collapsed to the now ice-hard sidewalk carapace. My companions had already turned off onto another street, so I was alone. I managed to steady myself against a brown brick wall and then slowly and carefully made my way the final block or two to my grandmother’s house.

  The next thing I knew I was waking up in bed dressed in my yellow flannel pajamas decorated with drawings of football players. The first image I saw was a large-jawed fullback cradling a ball in the crook of his left arm while stiff-arming a would-be tackler with his right. I was very thirsty and looked up to see my mother and Nanny, who, miraculously, was out of her sickbed, leaning over me. According to my mother, I asked two questions: “Can I have a glass of water?” and “Is it Christmas yet?”

  In fact, it was December 26th—I had lost consciousness almost as soon as I arrived home following the movie, and had been delirious with fever for most of the time since then. The fever broke and I woke up. My mother brought me a glass of water, which she cautioned me to sip slowly, as the doctor had ordered.

  “Was the doctor here?” I asked. Nanny and my mother told me how worried they had been. A doctor friend of Nanny’s had come twice to see me, even on Christmas Day; he would come again later. Nanny and my mother laughed—in fact, both of them were crying tears of relief.

  “This is the best gift of all,” said my mother, “getting my boy back.”

  I’ve often wondered what I missed during my delirium, as if those twenty-four or so hours had been stolen from me. Once someone asked me if I had access to a time machine and could go forward or back anywhere in time, where would I go? I told him without hesitation that I would set the machine for Christmas Day of 1954. To paraphrase William Faulkner, that Christmas past is not dead, it’s not even past.

  My Catechism

  It was during the winter I later referred to, in deference to the poet, as Out of the Clouds Endlessly Snowing, that I was dismissed once and forever from Sunday school. Mine was not a consistent presence at St. Tim’s, due to my mother’s predilection for travel and preference for tropical places, but the winter after I turned eight years old, she left me for several weeks with her mother, whom I called Nanny, in Chicago. Where exactly my mother chose to spend that period of time I’ve never been entirely certain, although I believe she was then keeping company—my mother and father were divorced—with a gunrunner of Syrian or Lebanese descent named Johnny Cacao, whose main residence seemed to be in the Dominican Republic.

  I recall receiving a soggy postcard postmarked Santo Domingo, on which my mother had written, “Big turtle bit off part of one of Johnny’s toes. Other than that, doing fine. Sea green and crystal clear. Love, Mom.” The picture side of the card showed a yellowish dirt street with a half-naked brown boy about my age sitting on the ground leaning against a darker brown wall. A pair of red chickens were pecking in the dust next to his bare feet. I wondered if the chickens down there went for toes the way the turtles did.

  On this blizzardy Sunday morning, I walked to St. Tim’s with two of the three McLaughlin brothers, Petie and Paulie, and their mother. My mother and grandmother were Catholics but they rarely attended church; Nanny because she was most often too ill—she died before my ninth birthday—and my mother because she was so frequently away, swimming in turtle-infested seas. Petie and I were the same age, Paulie a year younger. The eldest McLaughlin brother, Frank, was in the Army, stationed in Korea.

  After the church service, which was the first great theater I ever attended, and which I still rank as the best because the audience was always invited to participate by taking the wafer and the wine, symbolizing the body and the blood of Jesus Christ, Petie, Paulie and I went to catechism class. Ruled over by Sister Margaret Mary, a tall, sturdily built woman of indeterminate age—I could never figure out if she was twenty-five or fifty-five—the children sat ramrod straight in their chairs and did not speak unless invited to by her. Sister Margaret Mary wore a classic black habit, wire-rimmed spectacles, and her facial skin was as pale as one of Dracula’s wives. I had recently seen the Tod Browning film, Dracula, featuring Bela Lugosi, and I remember thinking that it was interesting that both God and Dracula had similar taste in women.

  During instruction, the class was given the standard mumbo jumbo, as my father—who was not a Catholic—called it, about how God created heaven and earth, then Adam and Eve, and so on. Kids asked how He had done this or that, and what He did next. I raised my hand and asked, “Sister, why did He do it?”

  “Why did He do what?” she said.

  “Any of this stuff.”

  “You wouldn’t exist, or Peter or Paul, or His only son, had He not made us,” answered Sister Margaret Mary.

  “I know, Sister,” I said, “but what for? I mean, what was in it for Him?”

  Sister Margaret Mary glared at me for a long moment, and for the first and only time I could discern a trace of color in her face. She then turned her attention away from me and proceeded as if my question deserved no further response.

  Before we left the church that day, I saw Sister Margaret Mary talking to Mrs. McLaughlin and looking toward me as she spoke. Mrs. McLaughlin nodded, and looked over at me, too.

  The following Sunday morning, I was about to leave the house when Nanny asked me where I was going.

  “To the McLaughlins’,” I told her. “To Sunday School.”

  “Sister Margaret Mary told Mrs. McLaughlin she doesn’t want you coming to her class anymore,” said Nanny. “You can play in your room or watch television until Petie and Paulie come home. Besides, it’s snowing again.”

  Sunday Paper

  As he often did when I was about eight or nine and he still lived with us, Pops, my mother’s father, asked me to go for the Sunday paper. For some reason on this particular day I decided to go to the stand on Washtenaw instead of the one on Rockwell, taking the shortcut through the alley where the deep snow from the night before was still undisturbed, no cars having gone over it yet that morning. I was shuffling through the powder, kicking it up in the air so that the flakes floated about in the sunlight like rice snow in crystal balls, when I spotted the police cars.

  There were three of them, parked one behind the other on Washtenaw in front of Talon’s Butcher Shop. A few people stood bundled in coats outside Talon’s, trying to see inside the shop, which I knew was closed on Sunday. I stood on the opposite side of the street and watched. An ambulance came, without using its siren, and slid slowly to a stop alongside the police cars. Two attendants got out and went into Talon’s carrying a stretcher.

  A man came up beside me and asked what was going on. I looked at him and saw that he had on an overcoat over his pajamas and probably slippers on under his galoshes.

  “I was just going for a paper,” he said.

  When I told him I didn’t know, he crossed over and spoke to one of the women standing by the door of the butcher shop. The man looked in the doorway and then walked away. I waited, standing in a warm shaft of sunlight, and in a couple of minutes the man came up to me again. He had a rolled-up Tribune under his arm.

  “He hanged himself,” the man said. “Talon, the butcher. They found him hanging in his shop this morning.”

  The man looked across the street for a moment, then walked down Washtenaw.

  Nobody came out of the butcher shop. I went to the corner and bought a Sun-Times. I stopped for a few seconds on my way back to see if anything was happening but noth
ing was so I turned into the alley, carefully stepping in the tracks I’d made before.

  The Origin of Truth

  When Roy was in the fourth grade, his class was taken on a field trip to the Museum of Science and Industry. Aboard the school bus on the way to the museum, Bobby Kazmeier and Jimmy Portis both said they couldn’t wait to go down into the coal mine.

  “They got a real working coal mine there,” Portis told Roy and Big Art Tuth, Roy’s seatmate, “like in West Virginia, where my daddy’s family’s from.”

  “It ain’t real,” said Big Art, “it’s a reenactment.”

  “Not a reenactment,” Roy said, “a reproduction, or a replica. It’s to show what a coal mine is like.”

  “What’s the difference?” asked Kazmeier. I heard you go down a mine shaft in an elevator.”

  “An open air one, Kaz,” said Portis, “not like an elevator in the Wrigley Building.”

  “They’ve got open ones in the State and Lake Building,” Roy said, “to deliver furs. My grandfather works there. Also in the Merchandise Mart. They’re in the back; customers take the regular elevators.”

  “I hope we don’t have to squeeze through any narrow places in the caves,” said Big Art. “I don’t want to get stuck.”

  Delbert Swaim, the dumbest kid in the class, who was sitting behind Roy, said, “I bet it’s like in Flash Gordon, where the clay people blend into the walls and attack when nobody’s looking.”

  In the museum, the class looked at outer space exhibits and architectural displays, which were pretty interesting, but the boys were anxious to go down into the coal mine. This was left for last. The class teacher, Mrs. Rudinsky, instructed the students to keep together.