Roy's World

by Barry Gifford

  “He’s still inside,” a man said.

  “Go in and get him!” yelled another man.

  “There he is!” screamed a woman, pointing at the roof of the theater.

  Everyone looked up. A man was standing near the edge of the roof, directly over the marquee. He was bareheaded and was wearing a brown hunter’s vest over a red and black checkered shirt and dark green trousers. He looked to be about twenty-five or thirty years old.

  “Put your hands on your head!” a policeman ordered through a bullhorn.

  The man did not comply. He just stood there with his hands by his sides.

  “Place your hands over your head or you will be shot!” warned the cop with the horn.

  The man said something but Roy could not make out the words.

  “What did he say?” asked the woman who’d spotted him on the roof.

  The man spoke again and this time Roy heard him say “Mona.”

  “Mona?” the woman said. “Did he say Mona?”

  The riflemen fired, hitting him from sixteen directions. The man fell forward into the well of the marquee. A dozen pigeons fluttered out. All Roy could see now was the theater sign, black letters on a white background: tell him i’m dangerous plus cartoons.

  Roy elbowed his way out of the crowd and started walking. All that was missing, he thought, was snow falling on the thief’s lifeless body. Lingenberg’s Bakery was still open. Roy went inside.

  “Do you have any doughnuts left?” he asked a pink-faced, blonde woman behind the counter.

  “Yust one,” she said. “Chocolate.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “I hear many noises together. Something happen?”

  “The police shot and killed a man.”

  Roy gave the woman a dime. She took it and handed him the doughnut wrapped in wax paper.

  “What reason for?” she asked.

  Roy took a bite, chewed and swallowed it.

  “Mona,” he said.

  Mud

  When Leni Haakonen was eight and nine years old she liked playing war or cowboys and Indians with Roy, who was the same age. She was a Swedish girl who lived with her mother in a tenement apartment on the corner of the block, two buildings down from where Roy lived with his mother. Her father had been killed in the war and Roy’s parents were divorced. There was a vacant lot next to the building Leni lived in where she and Roy often played. Leni was as tough as any boy Roy knew, including himself, and she was very pretty. Most of the time she wore her honey-brown hair in two long braids; she had gray-blue eyes and a small red birthmark on her left cheek, and for as long as Roy knew her Leni never wore a dress.

  One afternoon in late August they were pretending to be soldiers, rolling in the dirt and weeds of the vacant lot, when Leni asked Roy to kiss her. She was lying on her back and her face was dusty and smudged.

  “I’m going to be nine tomorrow,” Leni said to Roy, “and I’ve never kissed a boy. I want you to be the first.”

  Roy had kissed girls before but he had not thought even once about kissing Leni. He hesitated and looked at her. She had a fierce expression on her face, the same as when the two of them wrestled.

  “Kiss me, Roy. On the lips.”

  There was mud on her mouth. Roy wiped it off with his right thumb and kissed her. Both of them kept their eyes open.

  “My mother wanted me to only invite girls to my birthday party,” she said. “That’s why you didn’t get an invitation.”

  The kiss had lasted two seconds. Leni rolled away from Roy and stood up. He stood up, too.

  “Which girls did you invite?”

  “None. It’s just going to be me and my mother and her sister, my Aunt Terry, and her daughter, my cousin Lucy. Lucy’s twelve. I don’t like her but my mother says she has to come because of Aunt Terry. I don’t like her, either. I’m getting a new winter coat, a white one with a red collar. I can save a piece of cake and give it to you the day after tomorrow. It’ll be a yellow cake with chocolate frosting.”

  Leni and her mother moved away before she and Roy were ten. Seventeen years later, a few months after Roy’s first novel was published, he received the following letter in care of his publisher in New York. The name on the return address on the envelope was Mrs. Robert Mitchell.

  Dear Roy, I hope you remember me. We used to play together when we were children and I lived in Chicago. My mother and I moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, when I was ten, or almost. Now I live in Detroit with my husband who is a dentist. I work as a receptionist in his office.

  I bought your book and wanted to tell you. I have not read all of it because there are too many parts I do not really understand but I like the photograph of you on the back cover. You look like I thought you would.

  Robert and I do not have children. I don’t want any but he does. My mother lives in Grand Rapids with her sister.

  I probably should not tell you this in writing but I want to. Sometimes I can still feel your thumb on my lips when you wiped off the mud that time. It was on the day before my ninth birthday. I don’t expect you to remember.

  If you ever come to Detroit look me up. On the book it says that you live in Paris, France, so I don’t really think I’ll see you here or ever. You probably get other letters like this.

  Sincerely,

  Leni (Haakonen) Mitchell

  The Phantom Father

  Roy’s father was born on August 13, 1910, in the village of Siret, in what following World War II became Romania, close to the border of Ukraine. Soon thereafter, he moved with his family to Vienna, the capital city of the Austro-Hungarian empire. They were Austrian citizens. In 1917, the family resided at number five Zirkusgasse in the neighborhood of Leopoldstadt, near the ferris wheel in Luna Park Roy would first glimpse in director Carol Reed’s film The Third Man. Roy’s grandfather’s profession as listed in the Vienna city directory of that year was printer. The Great War ended in December of 1918, at which point the family—father, two sons, one daughter, mother—made their way to Czernowitz, where they remained until April 1921, when they left for Antwerp, Belgium, from which port they took ship on the 14th of that month aboard the S.S. Finland bound for New York. From New York City they continued to Chicago, Illinois, where the family established residence for the remainder of their lives. They were Jews, fortunate to escape Europe before the Nazis perpetrated their murderous campaign to expunge the race from the continent.

  Roy’s father, who died at the age of forty-eight on December 5, 1958, not quite two months after Roy’s twelfth birthday, never spoke to him of his Austrian childhood, nor did Roy ever hear him speak either German or Yiddish, as his father did. (Roy’s grandmother died before he was born.) He became an American, a Chicagoan, and a criminal who was arrested several times for receiving stolen property and violations of the Volstead Act, known as Prohibition, during the years when the sale of liquor was illegal in the United States. His longest jail term was one year. Roy was, therefore, by birth a first-generation American, the son of a gangster who died young. Like his father, Roy eventually made his own way without much help. He wanted to know where his father came from, so he travelled first to Vienna, later to Romania, and found out. What Roy discovered did not surprise him; what did surprise him was that among those who had been closest to him, Roy was alone in his interest: neither his brother nor his mother particularly cared. Roy was not sure why he thought they would.

  For Roy, the question that remained was why, during the twelve years he knew him, his father chose never to share with him any information, let alone details, of his or his immediate family’s pre-American existence. As William Faulkner famously stated, “The past is not dead, it’s not even past.” This was a sentiment with which Roy agreed, and so he hated knowing that he would never know.

  For his seventh birthday, in 1953, on an unseasonably cold and snowy October afternoon in
Chicago, Roy’s mother took him and a few of his friends to see the movie Phantom from Space. It was in black and white and the title figure could appear and disappear at will; one moment visible to earthlings, invisible the next. This is how Roy’s father remained in his memory, a kind of phantom, there but not there, and no longer here; not enough for Roy.

  Roy’s Letter

  Dear Dad,

  It’s almost Christmas of 1962. You died four years ago, when I was twelve. We didn’t talk after you went into the hospital for the last time. Mom told me to call you there and I tried the night before you died but the nurse said you couldn’t talk. The next day Mom asked me why I hadn’t called you and I told her I did but she didn’t believe me. I don’t know why. She was acting crazy maybe because you were dead saying she was going to faint. She went out on a date that night and didn’t tell me you might die. She’s talking about getting married again which would make this her fourth marriage since you and she were divorced. I was five then and didn’t really understand what that meant. By the time I was eleven I understood that it was up to me to take care of myself. You had a new wife and the man my mother was married to and I did not like each other. Anyway, he didn’t last much longer with her. You remember I got a job delivering Chinese food on a bicycle for 25 cents an hour and a dime a delivery plus tips. I’ve been working ever since, mostly in hot dog and hamburger places. I give Mom money every month for her and my sister, who was born a few months after you died. Mom is working part time as a receptionist in a private hospital. I hope she doesn’t get married again until after I graduate from high school. I’ll be gone then and not have to deal with another guy who doesn’t want me around. I’m not sure what I want to be yet but I write stories and articles about sports. I’m a pretty good athlete, especially in baseball. I remember all of the times we spent together in Chicago and Key West and Miami and Havana. I wish we could still go to Cuba. I miss the people and the food there. I remember one morning when we were having breakfast on the terrace at the Nacional and there were some very beautiful girls sitting near us and you told me Cuban women didn’t usually have big breasts but their rear ends were exceptional. I liked the weather there even though it got so hot. I won’t live in Chicago after I finish high school. I don’t know if I’ll go to college even though Uncle Buck says I should. He wants me to be a civil engineer like him, or an architect, but I don’t think I will. I just want to go places, to travel everywhere that interests me and see what happens and write about it. You were only a few years younger than I am now when you came to America from the old country. Other than wishing you were still alive I wish I could have known you when you were a boy, that both of us could have been boys at the same time and that we could have been friends.

  Love, your son,

  Roy

  The World in the Afternoon

  ROY’S GREAT-GRANDFATHER BORIS, CONSTANTINOPLE, 1889

  The World in the Afternoon

  “Come on, Roy, I don’t want to be late.”

  “Why do you want me to go with you?”

  “For protection. Just in case Billy’s acting strange.”

  “Do you think he’s dangerous?”

  “I don’t really know what to think, baby. Get your coat, the blue parka.”

  “Where are we meeting him?”

  “In the lobby of the hotel he’s staying at. Then we’ll go somewhere, a public place where other people are around.”

  Roy’s mother was going to meet her soon to be ex-husband, her second, to have him sign papers declaring their marriage null and void, as if it never existed. Roy was eight years old and did not quite understand what was happening, only that Billy Cork, whom he liked, had for the past six months been his stepfather and now he wasn’t going to be and according to the law never was.

  “Are you getting a divorce, Ma?”

  “No, an annulment. It means we were never married.”

  “But you were married. I was at your wedding.”

  “The Catholic church doesn’t allow people to get divorced, Roy. Billy didn’t tell me before we were married that he wasn’t right in his head, so the church granted permission for me to have the agreement annulled. This means that in the eyes of God and the church Billy and I were never legally wed, and that’s all that matters. Take your gloves.”

  It was mid-November and already cold in Chicago. Roy’s mother drove toward downtown and parked a block away from Billy’s hotel.

  “Put up your hood, Roy, we’re near the lake so it’s very windy.”

  They walked to The Cass, a rundown, semi-residential hotel on the Near Northside. Before he and his mother entered, Roy saw Billy through the glass doors standing in the lobby. He was wearing a dirty beige trenchcoat.

  “He’s there, Ma.”

  “I see him. This won’t take long, I hope.”

  “Hello, Kitty,” Billy said when she and Roy were inside. “Hello, son,” he said to Roy.

  It appeared to Roy as if Billy were trying to smile but couldn’t make the corners of his mouth turn up. He was unshaven and needed a haircut. His right eye was bloodshot.

  “Hi, Billy,” Roy said, and smiled.

  Billy stuck out his right hand to shake and Roy put his own into it.

  “Too cold for you, hey, me bucko? I’ll bet you wish you were down in Havana with your father, or with Uncle Jack in Florida, fishing in the Gulf.”

  Billy liked to call Roy bucko. His family were Irish, from Donegal. Billy had come with his mother and father and sister to Chicago when he was about the age Roy was now. Roy had never met any members of Billy’s family. He knew only that Billy’s sister, Marjorie Anne, was married and living in West Virginia, where her husband, Billy said, was a foreman in a coal mine.

  “My dad is in Las Vegas right now,” Roy said. “He’ll be back in Chicago next week for Thanksgiving.”

  “You’re looking fine, Kitty. Where would you like to go?”

  “I don’t want to go anywhere, Billy. I just want to get this over with.”

  “We’ll take a walk, then. I’d like to get out in the air.”

  The three of them left the hotel lobby and headed in the direction of Lake Michigan, which was a few blocks away.

  “There’s a cozy park on the next street,” said Billy. “We can sit on a bench there and talk.”

  As they walked, Billy put an arm around Roy’s shoulders. Kitty kept her distance from Billy and looked straight ahead, not saying anything. The last time Roy had seen Billy was when he refused to get out of bed and just sat up staring at nothing without speaking or moving. Roy’s mother had shouted at him for a while, then run screaming out of the house. She called a doctor from the McLaughlins’ house next door and did not come back until the doctor was with her.

  Roy had gone into his mother’s bedroom and stood at the foot of the bed. Billy sat still. He didn’t blink. Roy had only known him for a few months but he and Billy had gotten along well. Billy was tall and handsome and a good athlete. They had played catch with baseballs and footballs and gone swimming with his mother in lakes in Northern Illinois and Wisconsin. Billy smiled a lot and seemed happy to have a family of his own, which he told Kitty and Roy he’d not had before. This turned out to be a lie. Kitty found out later from Billy’s sister that he had been married to a woman in Minneapolis with whom he had two children, a boy and a girl. Billy had abandoned them without warning, just walked out of their house one morning two years before and not contacted them since.

  Roy heard the doctor say that Billy was catatonic, a word Roy had never heard before. The doctor called for an ambulance to come and take Billy to a hospital. Roy’s mother told him to go to the McLaughlins and stay with them until she came to get him.

  Roy sat on a bench separate from the one his mother and Billy sat on in a small park from which they had a view of the lake. Roy watched the gray-black waves gnash
at the sand and die there. He thought about bait fishing with nets in Tampa Bay with his Uncle Jack. To do this you had to hold one end of the net with small weights attached in you mouth and throw the other weighted end into the water and make sure to open your mouth when you threw the net so that your front teeth didn’t go with it. Roy did not like the extreme heat there any more than he disliked the freezing cold winters in Chicago but when he was on the water in Jack’s boat or in a skiff off Varadero with his dad and a guide he felt good. Snow flurries began falling and blowing around.

  “Let’s go, Roy,” his mother said.

  She was standing in front of him, shivering in her thin calico coat. Neither she nor Billy wore a hat.

  “Kitty, wait,” said Billy, who remained seated on his bench. “Can’t we just talk?”

  Roy’s mother brushed snowflakes from her face with a few folded up pieces of paper, then put them into her purse. She didn’t reply to Billy, just took Roy by one hand and led him out of the park without looking back. Roy did, though, and saw Billy still sitting, letting the snow pelt his head and the shoulders of his trenchcoat.

  Once Roy and his mother were back in her car, he asked her if Billy had signed the papers.

  “Yes, Roy. Now we’ll never have anything to do with him again.”

  “He didn’t act crazy,” Roy said. “If he had attacked you I couldn’t have stopped him, he’s too big and strong.”

  “You would have run and gotten help, maybe found a policeman.”

  “I was a little afraid he would hit you.”

  Kitty drove home without saying anything more to Roy. She walked into the house and into her bedroom and closed the door behind her. Roy stood in the hallway until he heard her talking to someone on the phone. He went back outside and sat down on the front steps. There were a couple of inches of snow on the ground and the sky was darker than it should have been at two o’clock in the afternoon, even in November.