The Religious Experience
“I was in Brazil, with Antonio. When we flew into Rio the plane passed over the big statue of Christ on top of Corcovado and for the entire time I was there I couldn’t get that out of my head. The statue, I mean, the way it commanded everything below, in every direction. When I had an orgasm the image of Jesus on the mountaintop was in my mind, like I was coming with Him, not Antonio.”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty-five. Rudy and I were separated and when Antonio invited me to go with him to Brazil, I just said yes, without thinking. I left Roy with my mother in Miami and we flew from there.”
“And that was the first time?”
“Uh huh, and it didn’t happen again—not with Antonio, anyway. I only saw him two or three times after we got back to Chicago.”
Roy’s mother and her friend Kay were standing in the lobby of the Oriental Theater. Kay was smoking a cigarette. Her husband, Harvey, and Kitty’s son, Roy, who was eight years old, were inside the theater watching the last few minutes of The Proud Ones, a western starring Robert Ryan as a sheriff in a Kansas town who’s going blind.
“Do you think if I went to Brazil I could have an orgasm with Harvey?”
The two women laughed and Kitty said, “Maybe you should go with Antonio.”
“Is he my type?”
“He looks like Chico, the Mexican gunfighter in the movie, only taller. But Antonio was only an instrument of the Son of God.”
“You should do a commercial for the Catholic Church, Kitty, standing in a mink coat, saying, ‘Jesus made me come.’ Or, ‘I came for Christ.’ ”
“I’m sure the nuns believe it when they masturbate.”
“I thought they weren’t allowed to.”
People began coming out of the theater.
“Mom, you missed the best part. The sheriff can’t see but he uses his hearing to figure out where the bad guy is and shoots him down, anyway.”
Kay’s husband lit a cigarette and watched the crowd leaving.
“See anything you like?” Kay asked.
“The movie was okay. The kid liked it.”
“I mean the women in the lobby.”
“Lay off, Kay.”
“Kitty was just telling me about the time she went to Brazil.”
“I remember when you went there, Mom. You brought me back a little statue of Jesus Christ standing on the top of a mountain.”
“Did you have fun there, Kitty?” Harvey asked.
“She certainly did,” said Kay. “She even had a religious experience.”
“What kind of religious experience?”
“Kay’s just being silly.”
“No, really. She had an epiphany.”
“What’s that?” asked Roy.
“It’s when you see God,” said Kay, “or you feel Him inside you.”
“Do you have to be a Catholic to have one?”
“No, Roy,” Kay said, “but it probably helps.”
The Familiar Face of Darkness
“You’re a godsend, Rudy. Thanks for helping me out. I won’t forget it.”
“I’m the one doesn’t forget.”
“I know, I know. You didn’t have to do this.”
Rudy turned around and entered Lake Shore Liquors. His partners in the store, Earl LaDuke, who was Rudy’s uncle, and Dick Mooney, were waiting for him. Moe Herman, to whom Rudy had just handed a double sawbuck, went on his way. Rudy never loaned money to anyone; either he gave someone what he or she needed or refused without providing an explanation. All anyone in dire straits wants to hear is yes or no. If he was paid back, so much the better, but there never was a reason to count on it.
Earl and Dick were seated at a card table in the basement. Rudy’s uncle was smoking a cigar with his eyes closed, and Dick was scrutinizing the previous day’s results at Sportsman’s Park. Rudy sat down and poured himself a finger of Jameson’s from a bottle on the table.
“Good afternoon, Rudy. How’s Kitty?”
“Fine, Earl.”
“You’ll tell her I asked.”
Dick put down the paper and took off his glasses.
“Nothing yet,” he said.
“If it’s not here by tonight, I’ll call. Not before then.”
Earl LaDuke opened his eyes and stood up. He was a big, ungainly man. Rudy wondered how he could have outrun the hussars in the old country when his name was Sackgasse.
“I’ll be home. Your Aunt Sofia would like it if you and Kitty came for dinner.”
“We will, Uncle Earl. Not tonight, but soon. Kiss her for me.”
“I can still kiss her for myself, I want to. I can still do that.”
Earl walked slowly up the stairs.
“You’re not worried?” Dick asked.
“The roads are icy.”
“Emily wants to leave Chicago. Her sister’s in Atlanta.”
“Earl and I can cover your share.”
Dick was thirty-two, ten years younger than Rudy and twenty-seven years younger than Earl LaDuke. He had bought into Lake Shore five years before and his third was worth twice as much now.
“I could be your man down there.”
“Atlanta belongs to Lozano.”
There were footsteps on the stairs. The two men looked up and saw Lola Wilson, a dancer from the Club Alabam next door, coming down. She was wearing a fur coat over her rehearsal costume. When the front of the coat swung to either side, they could see her legs. Lola descended cautiously, placing her high heels delicately on each of the rickety wooden steps. She came over and stood behind the chair on which Rudy’s uncle had been sitting.
Dick got up, said, “Hello, Lola. See you later, Rudy,” and started up the stairs.
Lola sat down, took out a crumpled pack of Camels and a book of matches from a pocket of her coat, then changed her mind and replaced them in the pocket.
“You don’t like it that I smoke. Sometimes I forget. Kitty doesn’t smoke, does she?”
“No, she doesn’t.”
“I saw Roy down here with her the other day. He’s getting big. He must be about ten now.”
“Eight. What can I do for you, Lola?”
Lola had a sharply upturned nose, rose-colored full lips, dark brown swampy eyes and blonde hair translucent at the ends. Her face fascinated most men and women, especially women, very few of whom were gifted with such dramatically contrasting features that so exquisitely combined. Lola’s teeth were crooked and tobacco-stained; they embarrassed her so when she smiled she determinedly pressed her lips together. Before he married Kitty, when Lola was eighteen, fresh off the bus from West Virginia, Rudy had offered to pay to have her teeth straightened but she had demurred, and then it was too late.
“You’ll hate me,” she said.
“What is it?”
“I picked up a dose. Can you give me a shot?”
Rudy got up, walked to the rear of the room, opened the door of a small refrigerator and took out a little round bottle. He opened a drawer in a cabinet next to the refrigerator and removed a hypodermic syringe and a thin packet containing needles, one of which he shook out and fitted to the syringe, then drew fluid from the bottle before replacing it in the refrigerator. Rudy picked up a brown bottle, took a cotton ball from a box and walked back to the table.
Lola stood, turned her back to Rudy and held one side of the fur coat away from her body. Rudy sat down, daubed the exposed part of her left buttock with the piece of cotton he’d soaked in alcohol from the brown bottle, then inserted the needle into the sanitized spot and injected the penicillin, after which he again brushed the spot with the cotton ball before standing up and walking back to a sink next to the cabinet and placing the items he had employed into it.
“How long were you in medical school, Rudy?”
&nb
sp; “A year and a half. I’ve told you this. When they rolled the cadaver in, they rolled me out. After that I transferred to pharmacy school.”
“Do I need a band-aid?”
“You’ll be all right.”
Lola sat down again, as did Rudy. She balanced herself carefully on her right buttock.
“Really, I don’t know what I’d do if you weren’t in my life.”
“I thought you were going to marry Manny Shore.”
“I can’t go on dancing forever. I figured at least it would get me off my feet, but no. I realized it wasn’t going to work. I haven’t seen him in months. Weeks, anyway. Rudy, do you think I’m a trollop?”
“Where did you learn that word?”
“Monique said somebody called her one and I asked her what it meant. She didn’t know exactly, so I looked it up. Did you think I was a trollop when we met?”
“You’re not Monique. You have to take better care of yourself.”
Lola stood up.
“I have to get back to rehearsal.”
She leaned down and kissed Rudy behind his right ear.
“Am I still pretty? Not as pretty as your wife, I know, but tell me.”
Rudy stood and looked into her murky eyes.
“Yes,” he said, “you are.”
Lola turned and walked up the stairs. When she reached the top step she paused and said, loud enough for him to hear, “I’m twenty-nine.”
Las Vegas, 1949
“Mr. Randolph is very nice, Rudy. He offered to let us use his house in the Bahamas any time we want.”
“It’s all right for you to be polite to Mr. Ruggiano, Kitty. Or anyone else, for that matter. Just keep your distance.”
“Who’s Mr. Ruggiano?”
“Ralph Randolph is the name he uses when it suits his purpose.”
“What about Marshall Gottlieb?”
“What about him?”
“Is that his real name?”
“It was something else when his family came from Poland or Russia.”
“Like yours.”
Kitty stood up and put on her candy-striped terrycloth robe.
“I’m going to the room to call my mother and talk to Roy,” she said, and walked around the pool into the hotel.
Kitty and Rudy were staying at El Rancho Vegas. Their son, Roy, who was almost three years old, was being looked after by his grandmother in Chicago. Luchino Benedetti came over and sat down in the chair Kitty had been using.
“Your wife is a real doll, Rudy,” he said. “Everybody likes her, even the other wives.”
“Thanks, Lucky. She’s having a swell time. We both appreciate your hospitality. You keep a good house.”
“Kitty got a lot to show, but she don’t show it. She has class.”
“She was raised right.”
“Leave it to the sisters. How is your boy?”
“Growing up fast. He’s back home with Kitty’s mother.”
“My Rocco joined the Air Force. He wants to be a pilot.”
“I heard. I’m sure he’ll do well.”
“So, our thing with the Diamond brothers.”
“All I know is, the goods are always on time, and they’re always what Sam and Moses say they are.”
“They move.”
“If they didn’t, Rugs would know.”
“Did you hear about Sam’s wife?”
“Dolores. A nice woman.”
“She run off with Solly Banks’s son, Victor.”
“Run off? Where to?”
“New York. Sam’s there now, it’s why he ain’t here. Rugs is afraid this will interfere with our business, and that can’t happen.”
“I’ll talk to Moses.”
“Do it now.”
Kitty came back and Lucky jumped up.
“Hello, Kitty. I was just telling Rudy what a hit you are with everyone.”
“Thank you, Lucky,” she said, and sat down in the chair.
“See you at dinner,” said Lucky, and walked away.
“Did you speak to Roy?”
“Yes, he’s fine. The janitor found a dead rat in his fire truck and showed it to him. The tail was as long as Roy’s arm.”
“Did they bury the rat in the yard?”
“No, the janitor burned it in the furnace. Roy was about to take his nap. He told me to kiss his daddy for him.”
Kitty kissed her husband on the cheek.
“And Rose?”
“I’m worried about her heart condition. She doesn’t have the energy she used to.”
“Has she seen Dr. Martell?”
“Unless he’s operating, he comes to the house every evening to have a glass of wine.”
“Your mother will be all right. Martell would leave his wife for her in a minute if Rose gave him some encouragement.”
“My mother says he has a tax problem. He could lose his hospital.”
Marshall Gottlieb and his wife, Sarah, came over.
“Come with me, Kitty,” Sarah said. “We’re going to have our fingernails and toenails done.”
Kitty got up and went with her. Marshall sat down.
“Lucky told you?”
“About Sam Diamond? I told him I’ll talk to Moses.”
“Moses just called Mr. Randolph two minutes ago. His brother shot and killed Dolores and Victor Banks in their room at the Waldorf, then he phoned Moses to tell him what he’d done and that he was going to kill himself. Next thing, Moses hears a shot.”
Arlene Silverman, Art and Edith Silverman’s seventeen year old daughter, dove into the pool. Rudy and Marshall Gottlieb watched her swim.
“Arlene’s a lovely girl, isn’t she?” said Marshall. “How is it she has gorgeous blonde hair when neither of her parents do?”
“She’s adopted,” said Rudy.
“Oh yeah? I didn’t know.”
Arlene Silverman swam the length of the pool twice before Ralph Randolph helped her climb out.
“Lotsa times,” Marshall said, “after you get what you want, you don’t want it. That ever happen to you?”
In Dreams
Roy’s grandfather was watching a baseball game on television when his grandson came home from school.
“What’s on, Pops?” Roy asked.
“The White Sox are playing the Senators. Two outs in the ninth. Billy Pierce is pitching a perfect game.”
Roy sat down on the floor next to his grandfather’s chair. Ed Fitzgerald, Washington’s catcher, was the last chance for them to break up the no-hitter.
“Fitzgerald bats left-handed,” Roy said. “Since Pierce is a southpaw, shouldn’t he just throw breaking balls?”
“He might hang one, Roy, but Pierce is crafty. He’d probably do better to start him off with a fastball high and outside, then go to the curve.”
Fitzgerald lined one off the right field fence for a double.
“Pierce went with the fast ball, Pops.”
“It caught too much of the plate. He should have gone away with it.”
The game ended when the next batter made an out. Roy’s grandfather turned off the set.
“Too bad,” said Roy. “A pitcher doesn’t get many chances to throw a perfect game.”
“There have only been about twenty perfect games in the history of major league baseball. How was school, boy? What grade are you in now?”
“Fourth. I don’t know, Pops. I think I learn more important things talking to you and some other people. I like it when you tell me stories about your life.”
“Don’t ignore dreams, Roy. You can learn a lot from them.”
“I don’t always remember what I dream.”
“Write them down as soon as you wake up, even if you’re groggy and only half awake. For me, the most interesti
ng dreams are the ones in which people who have died appear.”
“Like who?”
“I recently had a dream about a very old, close friend of mine who died about twelve or thirteen years ago, before you were born. His name was Warren Winslow. In my dream someone told me he heard that Warren was living in Chicago in the house of a person I didn’t know. He gave me the address so I went there and found Warren, looking much as he had when both of us were younger. He was calm, sitting on a couch with a blanket across his legs. I asked him how this could have happened, how he had recovered, why he hadn’t told me and let me know he was here in Chicago.”
“What did he say?”
“He said that he had died but come back to life and was rather embarrassed to have done so. He asked the doctors in the hospital where he had been treated not to tell anyone, and he left everything he owned and came to stay with a fellow he did not know very well who was willing to keep his existence and whereabouts a secret.”
“Why?”
“Warren himself was not entirely certain other than he felt satisfied that at the time of his death he was not displeased by the state of his affairs and his relations with those closest to him. I told him I had missed him and Warren said he had always valued our friendship highly. Now that I knew where he was, Warren told me, I could visit him if I chose to, but warned me that he didn’t know how much longer he would be there. It wasn’t so much that his attitude was one of indifference—at least I didn’t take it that way—so much as his having moved on from the past.”
“What did you do?”
“I left the house, then I woke up. This is the way the dead visit us, Roy, in dreams. It’s the only way we can be with them again.”
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