Billy Bathgate (7 page)

I’m afraid I stared at them. “I thought you were out for the evening!” the older man called out, looking at me but listening somewhere else. He released his hold, rose from the sofa, and straightened his bow tie. He was a tall handsome man, this Harvey, very well groomed in a tweed suit with a vest into the pocket of which he inserted his hand as if he had some sort of pain under the cloth, except that as he came toward me he didn’t appear to be in pain, and in fact looked quite healthy and like a man who took care of himself. Not only that but he commanded respect, because without thinking I stepped out of his way. As he went by me he said, “Are you all right?” loudly in my ear, and I noticed the tracks of the comb in his hair as it came back from his temples, this Harvey.

It made things so much easier, living on an explanationless planet. The air was somewhat rarefied, a bit thinner than I was used to, but then there didn’t seem to be any need for exertion. With thumb and forefinger the fellow on the couch removed an antimacassar from the sofa and dropped it over himself. He looked up and laughed in a way that suggested we were complicitors, and I realized he was working-class, like me. I had not at first glance understood this. He appeared to be wearing mascara on his eyes, they were certainly bold and black eyes, and his black hair was slicked down flat without a part, and his bony wide shoulders were draped with the tied sleeves of a collegiate sweater with an argyle pattern of light maroon and gray.

Mr. Schultz was responsible for all this stunning experience so I thought I’d better attend to his business. I wandered down the hall and around some corners and found Harvey in a big padded gray-and-white bedroom, bigger than three Bronx bedrooms put together, and a mirrored bathroom door was open on a field of white tile, and Drew was in there with bathwater running and this caused him to speak loudly over the sound of it while he sat on a corner of an enormous double bed with his legs crossed and held a cigarette in his hand.

“Darling?” he shouted. “Tell me what you’ve gone and done. You didn’t ditch him.”

“I didn’t, my dearest. But he’s no longer a presence in my life.”

“And what did he do! I mean you were so gaga about him,” Harvey said with a wry and rueful smile to himself.

“Well if you must know, he died.”

Harvey’s back straightened and he lifted his head as if wondering if he’d heard correctly. But he said nothing. And then he turned and looked at me sitting in the far corner on a side chair that had gray napped upholstery, a boy as out-of-place here as in the library, but now visible, in this new intelligence, and I sort of straightened my own back for his benefit and stared just as rudely at him.

He immediately rose and went into the bathroom and closed the door. I picked up the phone at the bedside table and listened
for a moment until the hotel operator came on the line and said Yes, please, and then I hung up. It was a white phone. I had never seen a white phone before. Even the cord was wound in white fabric. The big bed had a white upholstered headboard and big fluffy pillows, about a half dozen of them, with little lace skirts, and all the furniture was gray and the thick carpet was gray and the lights were hidden and shone out of a cornice onto the walls and ceiling. Two people used this room because there were books and magazines on both end tables, and two immense cabinets with white doors and curving white legs that were closets inside, his and hers, and two matching dressers with his shirts and her underwear, and until now I only knew about wealth what I read in the tabloids, and I had thought I could imagine, but the detailed wealth in this room was amazing, to think what people really needed when they were wealthy, like long sticks with shoehorns at the end of them, and sweaters of every color of the rainbow, and dozens of shoes of every style and purpose, and sets of combs and brushes, and carved boxes with handfuls of rings and bracelets, and gold table clocks with pendulum balls that spun one way, paused, and then spun the other way.

The bathroom door opened and Harvey came out holding Miss Drew’s dress and underwear and hose and shoes all in a bundle in his two hands out in front of him, and he dropped the whole shebang into a wastebasket and then brushed his hands off, you could see he was not happy. He went to some far corner of the room and opened another door and disappeared there and a light went on, it was a walk-in closet and he came out with a piece of luggage which he threw on the bed. And then he sat down beside it and crossed his legs again and then crossed his arms over his knee and waited. And I waited back in my chair. And then the lady came out of the bathroom with a big towel around her and tucked in under the clavicle, and another towel wrapped around her head like a turban.

The argument was about her behavior. He said it was becoming erratic and disruptive. She herself had insisted they accept that dinner invitation for tomorrow evening. To say nothing of the regatta weekend. Did she want to lose every friend they had?
He was entirely reasonable but he was losing me, because Miss Lola Miss Drew conducted her side of the argument while getting dressed. She stood at the armoire and let the big towel fall, and she was altogether taller and longer-waisted and maybe her ass was a little softer and flatter, but there was the prominent spinal column of tender girl bones of my dirty little Rebecca, and all the parts were as Rebecca’s parts and the sum was the familiar body of a woman, I don’t know what I’d been expecting but she was a mortal being with flesh pinkened by the hot bathwater, she hooked on her garter belt and stood on each thin white leg while she gently but efficiently raised the other to receive its sheer stocking, which she pulled and smoothed upward taking care to keep the seam straight till she could lower her toe-wiggling foot and sling her hip and attach the stocking to the metal clips hanging from the garter belt, and then she raised one foot and stepped in her white satin step-ins and then the other, and yanked them up and snapped the waistband, and it was the practiced efficiency of the race of women dressing, from that assumption they had always made that a G-string was their armor in the world, and that it would do against wars, riots, famines, floods, droughts, and the flames of the arctic night. As I watched, more and more of her was covered, a skirt was dropped over the hips and zipped along the side, two high-heeled shoes were wiggled into, and then, dressed only from the waist down and with the towel still on her head, she commenced to pack, going from drawers and armoire to valise and back, making her decisions quickly and acting on them energetically, all the while saying that she didn’t give a hoot in hell what her friends thought, what had that to do with anything, she was going to see whomever she damned pleased surely he knew that and so what was the point of making a fuss, all this whining of his was beginning to bore her. And then she brought the lid down on her leather valise and snapped shut the two brass locks. I had I thought heard just about everything that went on between Miss Lola and Mr. Schultz in the hold of that tugboat but clearly I hadn’t, there was some pact between them she was determined to honor.

“I speak of order, of the need for some order,” the fellow Harvey said, although clearly without hope of prevailing. “You’re going to destroy us all,” he muttered. “I mean a bit of scandal is not the point, is it? You’re a very clever, very naughty little hellion, but there are limits, my darling, there really are. You’re going to get in over your head and then what will you do? Wait for me to come to the rescue?”

“That is a laugh and a half.”

And then she sat nude to the waist at her dressing-table mirror and unwrapped the towel on her head and ran a comb a few times through her short helmet of hair, and painted on some lipstick, then found a camisole and shrugged it over her torso and pulled a blouse on over that, and tucked it in, and then a jacket over the blouse, and a bracelet or two, a necklace, and she stood and looked at me for the first time, a new woman, Miss Lola Miss Drew, a formidable intention in her eyes, and when had I seen a woman dress herself so, all in cream and aqua, to run away with the killer of her dreams?

So there we are, three o’clock in the morning and tearing up Route 22 out of the city, miles into the mountains where I have never been before, I am sitting up front next to Mickey the driver, and Mr. Schultz and the lady are in the back with glasses of champagne in their hands. He is telling her the story of his life. A steady hundred yards behind is a car with Irving and Lulu Rosenkrantz, and Mr. Abbadabba Berman. It has been a long night in my education, but there is more to come, I am going into mountains, Mr. Schultz is showing me the world, he is like a subscription to the
National Geographic Magazine
except the only tits I’ve seen are white, I’ve seen the contours of the ocean bed and the contours of the white Miss Drew and now I see the contours of the black mountains. I understand for the first time the place of the city in the world, it should have been obvious but I had never realized it, I had never been out of it before, never had the distance, it is a station on the amphibian journey, it is where we come out sliming, it is where we bask and feed and make our tracks and do our dances and leave our coprolitic
spires, before moving on into the black mountains of high winds and no rain. And what I hear as my eyes begin to droop is the soft whistle of the wind in the half window I’ve left open a crack with a turn of the knob, not a whistle entirely but the kind of almost-whistle a person makes who is whistling to himself; and the soundplow of the eight-cylinder car in its bassoing, and the resonant rasp of Mr. Schultz telling how he robbed crap games as a lad, and the tires’ humslick on the damp highway, all of it really the protesting circuitry of my brain as I wrap my arms around myself and let my chin drop to my chest, I hear one last laugh but I can’t help it, it is three o’clock in the morning of the awesome morning of my life and I haven’t even been to sleep yet.

FOUR

I
knew from Walter Winchell’s column Mr. Schultz was a lammister: the federal government was looking for him because he had not paid taxes on all the money he had earned. The police one day had raided his headquarters on East 149th Street with axes and found there incriminating records from his beer business. Yet I had seen him with my own eyes and felt his hand on my face. It is spectacular enough to see someone in the flesh whom you’ve only known in the newspapers, but to see someone the newspapers have said is on the lam definitely has a touch of magic to it. If the papers said Mr. Schultz was on the lam then it was true; but “the lam” suggested to most people someone running by night and hiding by day when really what it is is the state of being invisible; if you don’t run and you don’t hide and you are on the lam then you are there all the time, you are simply controlling people’s ability to see you and that is a very potent magic. Of course you do it by waving dollars over the air, you wave a dollar and you are invisible. But it is still a difficult and dangerous trick that may not always work when you want it to. It would not work in Manhattan, I decided, because that’s where the federal attorneys were who were planning to try Mr. Schultz for tax evasion. It would work better in the Bronx, as for instance in the Bronx neighborhood of a beer drop. It might work
best of all, I decided, in the very gang headquarters that had been raided and cleaned out by the police at the insistence of the federal attorneys.

And that is how it happened one summer day the boy Billy came to be clinging to the back of a Webster Avenue trolley as it hummed its way south toward 149th Street. It was not easy traveling this way, your fingers had only the narrowest purchase on the outer sill of the rear window, which was of course the front window when the trolley was going in the other direction, which meant it was a big window and that therefore you had to crouch while you clung so that your head didn’t appear in it: when the motorman spotted you in his rearview mirror he could make the car buck, throw it into some sort of electrical braking stutter so that you had to drop off, whether there was traffic behind you or not, which was a real son of a bitch. Not only that, but your feet had only the narrowest fender to toe, so that really you attached yourself for passage more by whole-body adhesion than anything else. And therefore when the trolley made a stop the correct procedure was to drop off until it started up again, not only because you were really vulnerable clinging to a trolley car at rest when any cop could come along and whap you across the ass with his billy club, but so that you would have the strength to hang there till the next stop. You didn’t want to fall off while the damn thing was moving along at a clip, especially on Webster which is an industrial street of warehouses and garages and machine shops and lumberyards all of which make for long blocks and a fast-moving trolley enjoying its run between distant stops, going fast enough to rock along side to side on its wheel carriages, banging the hell out of them and sending up sparks up there where the pole scrapes the power from the wire. It is a fact that more than one boy has died riding the back of a streetcar. Nevertheless this was my preferred mode of travel even when, as now, I had two dollars in my pocket and could easily afford the nickel fare.