The Christmas Kid: And Other Brooklyn Stories

by Pete Hamill

  “How does it feel, going back to Brooklyn?” Charlie Rose had asked him the night before, in a small dark television studio on Park Avenue.

  “I don’t know,” Carmody said, and chuckled. “I just hope they don’t throw books at me. Particularly my own books.”

  And wanted to add: I’ve never really left. Or, to be more exact: those streets have never left me.

  The buildings themselves along the avenue were as Carmody remembered them. They were old-law tenements, with fire escapes on the facades, but they seemed oddly comforting to Carmody. This was not one of those New York neighborhoods desolated by time and arson and decay. He had seen photographs of the enrubbled lots of Brownsville and East New York. There were no lots here in the old neighborhood. If anything, the buildings looked better now, with fresh paint and clear glass instead of hammered tin on the street-level doors. He knew from reading the New York Times that the neighborhood had been gentrified, that most of the old families had moved away, to be replaced by younger people who paid much higher rents. There was some unhappiness to all of that, the paper said, but still, the place looked better. As a boy he had walked these streets many times on evenings like this, when most people retreated swiftly from the bitter cold to the uncertain warmth of the flats. Now he noticed lights coming on in many of those old apartments, and shadows moving like ghosts behind drawn shades and curtains. He peered down a street toward the harbor and saw a thin scarlet band where the sun was setting in New Jersey. That was the same, too. The day was dying. It would soon be night.

  If the buildings were the same, the shops along the avenue were all different. Fitzgerald’s bar was gone, where his father did most of his drinking, and so was Sussman’s hardware and Fischetti’s fruit and vegetable market and the Freedom meat store and the pharmacy. What was the name of that drugstore? Right there. On that corner. An art supply store now. An art supply store! Moloff’s. The drugstore was called Moloff’s, and next door was a bakery. Our Own, they called it. And now there was a computer store where a TV repair shop once stood. And a dry cleaner where men once stood at the bar of Rattigan’s, singing the old songs. All gone. Even the old clock factory had been converted into a condominium.

  None of this surprised Carmody. He knew they’d all be gone. Nothing lasts. Marriages don’t last. Ball clubs don’t last. Why should shops last? Wasn’t that the point of each one of his seventeen books? The critics never saw that point, but he didn’t care. Those novels were not literature, even to Carmody. He wasn’t Stendhal, or Hemingway, or Faulkner. He knew that from the beginning. Those novels were the work he did after turning forty, when he reached the age limit for screenwriting. He worked at the top of his talent, to be sure, and used his knowledge of movies to create plots that kept readers turning the pages. But he knew they were commercial products, novels about industries and how they worked, his characters woven from gossip and profiles in Fortune or Business Week. He had started with the automobile industry, and then moved to the television industry, and the sugar industry, and the weapons industry. In each of them the old was destroyed by the new, the old ruling families decayed and collapsed, the newer, more ruthless men and women taking their places. The new book was about the food industry, from the farms of California to the dinner plates of New York and Los Angeles. Like the others, it had no aspirations to be seen as art. That would be pretentious. But the books were good examples of craft, as honest as well-made chairs. In each of them, he knew, research served as a substitute for imagination and art and memory. Three different researchers had filed memos on this last one, the new one, the novel he would sign here tonight, in the Barnes & Noble five blocks behind him. He hoped nobody in the audience would ask why he had never once written about Brooklyn.

  To be sure, he had never denied his origins. There was a profile in People magazine in 1984, when his novel about the gambling industry went to number one on the New York Times bestseller list and stayed there for seventeen weeks. He was photographed on the terrace of the house in Malibu with the Pacific stretched out beyond him, and they used an old high school newspaper photograph showing him in pegged pants and a T-shirt, looking like an apprentice gangster or some variation on the persona of James Dean. The article mentioned his two ex-wives (there was now a third woman enjoying his alimony checks), but the reporter was also from Brooklyn and was more intrigued by the Brooklyn mug who had become a bestselling author.

  “You went west in 1957,” the reporter said. “Just like the Dodgers.”

  “When they left, I left, too, because that was the end of Brooklyn as I knew it,” Carmody said. “I figured I’d have my revenge on Los Angeles by forcing it to pay me a decent living.”

  That was a lie, of course. He didn’t leave Brooklyn because of the Dodgers. He left because of Molly Mulrane.

  Now he was standing across the street from the building where both of them had lived. The sidewalk entrance then was between a meat market and a fruit store, converted now into a toy store and a cell phone shop. Molly lived on the first floor left. Carmody on the top floor right. She was three years younger than Carmody and he didn’t pay her much attention until he returned from the army in 1954. An old story: she had blossomed. And one thing had led to another.

  He remembered her father’s rough, unhappy, threatening face when Carmody first came calling to take her to the movies. Paddy Mulrane, the cop. And the way he looked when he went out in his police uniform for a four-to-twelve shift, his gun on his hip, his usual slouch shifting as he walked taller and assumed a kind of swagger. And how appalled Paddy Mulrane was when Carmody told him he was using the GI Bill to become a writer. “A writer? What the hell is that? I’m a writer, too. I write tickets. Ha-ha. A writer…how do you make a living with that? What about being a lawyer? A doctor? What about, what do they call it now, criminology? At least you’d have a shot at becoming a lieutenant.…” The father liked his Fleischmann’s and beer and used the Dodgers as a substitute for conversation. The mother was a dim, shadowy woman who did very little talking. That summer, Molly was the youngest of the three children, and the only one still at home. Her brother Frankie was a fireman and lived with his wife in Bay Ridge. There was another brother: what was his name? Sean. Seanie. Flat face, hooded eyes, a hard, tanklike body. Carmody didn’t remember much about him. There had been some kind of trouble, something about a robbery, and Seanie had moved to Florida, where he was said to be a fisherman in the Keys. Every Sunday morning, father, mother, and daughter went to Mass together.

  Now, on this frozen night, decades later, Carmody’s unease rushed back. Ah, Molly, my Molly-O…The fire escapes still climbed three stories to the top floor, where the Carmodys lived. But the building now looked better, like all the others on the avenue. On the top floor right on this frozen night, the shades were up and Carmody could see ocher-colored walls and a warm light cast by table lamps. This startled him. In memory, the Carmody flat was always cold, the windows rimed with frost in winter, he and his sisters making drawings with their fingernails in the cold bluish light cast from a fluorescent ceiling lamp. His father was cold, too, a withdrawn, bitter man who resented the world and the youth of his children. His mother was a drinker, and her own chilly remorse was relieved only by occasional bursts of rage. His parents nodded or grunted when Carmody told them about his ambitions, and his mother once said, in a slurred voice, “Who do you think you are, anyway?”

  One Saturday afternoon in the Mulrane flat, he and Molly were alone, her parents gone off to see Frankie and his small child. Molly proudly showed him her father’s winter police uniform, encased in plastic from the Kent dry cleaners, and the medals he had won, and the extra gun, a nickel-plated .38-caliber Smith & Wesson, oiled and ready in a felt-lined box. She talked to him about a book she was reading, by A. J. Cronin, and he told her she should read F. Scott Fitzgerald. She made him a ham-and-Swiss-cheese sandwich for lunch. They sipped sweet tea thick with sugar. And then for the first time, they went to bed together in her tiny room with
its window leading to the fire escape. She was in an agony, murmuring prayers, her hands and arms moving to cover breasts and hair, trembling with fear and desire. “Hold me tight,” she whispered. “Don’t ever leave me.”

  He had never written any of that, or how at the end of his first year of college, at the same time that she graduated from St. Joseph’s, he rented the room near New York University to get away from his parents and hers, and how she would come to him after work as a file clerk at Metropolitan Life and they would vanish into each other. He still went back to Brooklyn. He still visited the ice house of his parents. He still called formally at the Mulrane apartment to take Molly to the Sanders or the RKO Prospect. But the tiny room in Manhattan had become their true place, their gangster’s hideout, the secret place to which they went for sin.

  Now on this frozen night he stared at the dark windows of the first floor left, wondering who lived there now, and whether Molly’s bones were lying in some frozen piece of the Brooklyn earth. He could still hear her voice, trembling and tentative: “We’re sinners, aren’t we?” He could hear her saying: “What’s to become of us?” He could hear the common sense in her words and the curl of Brooklyn in her accent. “Where are we going?” she said. “Please don’t ever leave me.” He could see the mole inside her left thigh. He could see the fine hair at the top of her neck.

  “Well, will ya lookit this,” a hoarse male voice said from behind him. “If it ain’t Buddy Carmody.”

  Carmody turned and saw a burly man smoking a cigarette in the doorway of a tenement. The face was not clear in the muted light but the voice told Carmody it was definitely someone from back then. Nobody had called him Buddy in forty-six years.

  “How are ya?” Carmody said, peering at the man as he stepped out of the doorway. The man’s face was puffy and seamed, and Carmody tried to peel away the flesh to see who had lived in it when they both were young.

  “Couldn’t stay away from the old neighborhood, could ya, Buddy?”

  The unease was seething now. Carmody felt a small stream of fear make its move in his stomach.

  “It’s been a long time,” Carmody said. “Remind me, what’s your name?”

  “You shittin’ me, Buddy? How could you fi’get my name?”

  “I told you, man, it’s been a long time.”

  “Yeah. It’s easy to fi’get, for some people.”

  “Advanced age, and all that,” Carmody said, faking a grin, glancing to his left, to the darkening shop windows, the empty street. Imagining himself running.

  “But not everybody fi’gets,” the man said.

  He flipped his cigarette under a parked car.

  “My sister didn’t fi’get.”

  Oh.

  Oh, God.

  “You must be Seanie,” Carmody said. “Am I right? Seanie Mulrane?”

  “Ah…you remembered.”

  “How are you, Seanie?”

  He could see Seanie’s hooded eyes now, so like the eyes of his policeman father: still, unimpressed. He moved close enough so that Carmody could smell the whiskey on his breath.

  “How am I? Huh. How am I…Not as good as you, Buddy boy. We keep up, ya know. The books, that miniseries, or whatever it was on NBC. Pretty good, you’re doing.”

  Carmody stepped back a foot, as subtly as possible, trying to decide how to leave. He wished a police car would turn the corner. He trembled, feeling a black wind of hostility pushing at him, backing him up, a wind that seemed to come from the furled brow of Seanie Mulrane. He tried to look casual, turned and glanced at the building where he was young, at the dark first floor left, the warm top floor right.

  “She never got over you, you prick.”

  “It’s a long time ago, Seanie,” Carmody said, trying to sound casual but not dismissive.

  “I remember that first month after you split,” Seanie said. “She cried all the time. She cried all day. She cried all night. She quit her job, ’cause she couldn’t do it and cry at the same time. She’d start to eat, then, oof, she’d break up again. I was there, just back from the Keys, and my father wanted to find you and put a bullet in your head. And Molly, poor Molly…You broke her fuckin’ heart, Buddy.”

  Carmody said nothing. Other emotions were flowing now. Regret. Remorse. Mistakes. His stomach seethed.

  “And that month? Hey, that was just the start. The end of the second month after you cut out, she tells my mother she’s knocked up.”

  “No.…”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Don’t lie, Buddy. My old man told your old man. He pulled a gun on him, for Chrissakes, tryin’ to find out where you was.”

  “I never heard any of this.”

  “Don’t lie, Buddy. You lie for a livin’, right? All those books, they’re lies, ain’t they? Don’t lie.”

  “I didn’t know, Seanie. I swear.”

  “Tell the truth: you ran because she was pregnant.”

  No: that wasn’t why. He truly didn’t know. He glanced at his watch. Almost time for the book signing.

  “She had the baby, some place in New Jersey,” Seanie said. “Catholic nuns or something. And gave it up. Then she came home and went in her room. She went to Mass every morning, I guess praying to God to forgive her. But she never went to another movie with a guy, never went on a date. She was in her room, like another goddamned nun. She saw my mother die, and buried her, and saw my father die, and buried him, and saw me get married and move here wit’ my Mary, right across the street, to live upstairs. I’d come see her every day, and try talkin’ to her, but it was like, ‘You want tea, Seanie, or coffee?’”

  Seanie moved slightly, placing his bulk between Carmody and the path to Barnes & Noble.

  “Once I said to her, I said, ‘How about you come with me an’ Mary to Florida? You like it, we could all move there. It’s beautiful,’ I said to her. ‘You’d love it.’ Figuring I had to get her out of that room. She looked at me like I said, ‘Hey, let’s move to Mars.’” Seanie paused, trembling with anger and memory, and lit another cigarette. “Just once, she talked a blue streak, drinkin’ gin, I guess it was. And said to me, real mad, ‘I don’t want to see anyone, you understand me, Seanie? I don’t want to see people holdin’ hands. I don’t want to see boys playin’ ball. You understand me?’” He took a deep drag on the Camel. “‘I want to be here,’ she says to me, ‘when Buddy comes back.’”

  Carmody stared at the sidewalk, at Seanie’s scuffed black shoes, and heard her voice: When Buddy comes back. Saw the fine hair at the top of her neck.

  “So she waited for you, Buddy. Year after year in that dark goddamned flat. Everything was like it was when you split. My mother’s room, my father’s room, her room. All the same clothes. It wasn’t right what you done to her, Buddy. She was a beautiful girl.”

  “That she was.”

  “And a sweet girl.”

  “Yes.”

  “It wasn’t right. You had the sweet life and she shoulda had it with you.”

  Carmody turned. “And how did she…When did she…”

  “Die? She didn’t die, Buddy. She’s still there. Right across the street. Waiting for you, you prick.”

  Carmody turned then, lurching toward the corner, heading to the bookstore. Thinking: She’s alive? Molly Mulrane is alive? He was certain she had gone off, married someone, settled in the safety of Bay Ridge or some suburb. In a place without memory. Without ghosts. He was certain that she had lived a long while, had children, and then died. The way everybody did. And now he knew the only child she ever had was his, and he was in flight, afraid to look back, feeling as if some pack of feral dogs was behind him, chasing him across some vast abandoned tundra. He did not run. He walked quickly, deliberately, but he did not run and did not look back. And then he slowed: the signing itself filled him with another kind of fear. Who else might come there knowing the truth? Hauling up the ashes of the past? What other ancient sin would someone dredge up? Who else might come fo
r an accounting?

  He looked back then. Nobody was following. Not even Seanie. A taxi cruised along the avenue, its rooftop light on, looking for a fare to Manhattan. I could just get out of here. Just jump in this cab. Call the store. Plead sudden illness. Just go. But someone was sure to call Rush and Molloy at the Daily News or Page Six at the Post and report the no-show. BROOKLYN BOY CALLS IT IN. All that shit. No.

  And then a rosy-cheeked woman was smiling at him. The manager of the bookstore.

  “Oh, Mr. Carmody, we thought you got lost.”

  “Not in this neighborhood,” he said. And smiled.

  “You’ve got a great crowd waiting.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  “We have water on the lectern, and lots of pens, everything you need.”

  As they climbed to the second floor, Carmody took off his hat and gloves and overcoat and the manager handed them to an assistant. He glanced at himself in a mirror, at his tweed jacket and black crewneck sweater. He looked like a writer, all right. Not a cop or a fireman or even a professor. A writer. He saw an area with about a hundred people sitting on folding chairs, penned in by walls of books, and more people in the aisles beyond the shelves and another large group standing at the rear. Yes: a great crowd.

  He stood beside the lectern as he was introduced by the manager. He heard the words “one of Brooklyn’s own…” and they sounded strange. He didn’t often think of himself that way, and in signings all over the country that fact was seldom mentioned. This store itself was a sign of a different Brooklyn. Nothing stays the same. Everything changes. There were no bookstores in his Brooklyn. He found his first books in the branch of the public library near where he lived, or in the great main library at Grand Army Plaza. On rainy summer days he spent hours as a boy among their stacks. But the bookstores—where you could buy and own a book—they were down on Pearl Street under the El, or across the river on Fourth Avenue. His mind flashed on Bomba the Jungle Boy at the Giant Cataract. The first book he’d ever finished. How old was I? Eleven. Yes. Eleven. It cost a nickel on Pearl Street.