Cave Under the City (2 page)

I was all the way up by the Italian church with the stone grotto around the side. Bubber likes to stand there and look at the waterfall. I saw a gang I didn't recognize, so I crossed over and went home on the other side of the street, checking the Allerton Theater and the ice-cream parlor and Saperstein's Bakery.

By our house I crossed back over and looked up at our lighted windows. What was I going to tell my mother? I was sure my brother was gone. Lost. Someone had stolen him.

I dragged up the stairs, stopping at every floor. I was remembering all the good times I used to have with my brother, all the times I played with him or read the comics to him (
Krazy Kat
was his favorite. His second favorite was
Little Orphan Annie
). Sometimes we'd make believe the rubber tree in the corner of the living room was an apartment house, and the branches were different floors and the little pipe-cleaner people we made were the tenants. I didn't play like that in front of my friends, because it was baby stuff, but I still liked to do it with my brother.

“You're finally home?” my mother said when I came in.

“I went all the way to Boston Road.”

“What were you doing there?”

“I can't find Bubby.” I was close to tears.

“Bubby is in the toilet. He came home right after you left.”

I fell down on the floor. I went mad. I kicked the floor, pounded it with my fists.

“Stop it,” my mother said. “They'll hear you downstairs. Come here, come here. Let me take you around.” She pulled me up and put her arms around me. “Foolish boy, what are you so upset for? He's home. Your brother is home. Stop crying. What's wrong? Everything's all right.”

3

Something's wrong in my house. My father comes in and goes out. He doesn't stay home anymore. My mother is tired all the time and she yells a lot. My father doesn't yell that much. Mostly he just looks at you and shakes his head, and that's as bad as anything.

My mother is always tired. The place she works in is a sweatshop. All day my father hangs around at the union hall with his painter friends. Then my mother comes home and nothing's done and they fight.

I can't stand it when my parents fight. I don't want to hear it. I put my hands over my ears. I want to run out. I want to go to the toilet and lock the door. I look at the shades on the window. One's up, one's down. The closet door is open. It looks crazy to me. I hear their voices, on and on, like the bird house in the zoo. I want to run out.

I get between them. “Okay, cut it out, cut it out. Shut up! Don't fight, please.”

My mother is coughing, spitting into a napkin. Her face is white. There's black under her eyes. Her hair is black like wire. She sits there staring at the wall, she doesn't move. My father pats her shoulder. I want her to feel better, to get up and do things.

They never used to fight. My mother was always nervous, but not my father. When he worked, nothing bothered him. He was gone before I got up in the morning. At night when he came home, he smelled of turpentine and oil. My mother had supper waiting. Bubber and I would follow my father into the bathroom while he cleaned up. He liked company. My brother stood on the tub and I sat on the toilet. I liked to watch him at the sink in his shorts and undershirt. My father is big, with hair on his shoulders and arms, and bristly black hairs on the back of his hands. He has big, broad feet that look like hands, friendly feet, like a gorilla's feet. If my father grabs you, you know you've been grabbed.

After he soaped himself all over he rinsed, and then he scrubbed and cleaned his fingernails and rubbed his hands raw to get the paint off. “Take a sniff, Bubby. Do I smell?”

My brother would sniff and then I would sniff to see if the paint smell was gone. My father shaved and put on a shirt and a clean pair of pants. The last thing he did was comb his hair. He rubbed Vitalis into it, then combed it straight back, shiny and flat. Then he went into the other room and hugged my mother.

There are two rooms in our apartment, a main room and a bedroom. The bedroom is where my brother and I used to sleep in the same bed. We slept foot to foot, but we horsed around too much, so now I sleep on a cot in the hall. I can touch the bathroom door and hear the icebox dripping.

My mother worries that the noise we make will disturb the people downstairs. She wants us to sit like statues, not move, not make a sound. Bubber gets yelled at for running up and down too much and sliding on the hall runner, or staying in the toilet too long. “What are you doing in there?” Bubber likes to drop things in the toilet and flush them away. “Is the toilet plugged up?” She rushes in because she's so afraid that water will spill on the floor and get into the apartment downstairs.

The table where we eat and do our homework is in the main room, where my parents sleep. There's a stove against the wall and a sink and cupboards. The icebox is in the hall next to the dumbwaiter. Usually my father eats by himself. My brother and I are too hungry to wait. My mother never sits down to eat.

My father holds a piece of potato in one hand, a piece of bread in the other. While he eats I do my homework. He cracks the chicken bones with his teeth and sucks out the marrow. When I get my homework done I can go outside. Not my brother. They don't let him out at night by himself, so he never wants me to go.

He hangs on me and begs me to stay home and play with him. He hangs on my leg like a leech. “Let go of me. Let go, Bubber.” I whisper it at first, because I'm afraid my mother is going to get nervous. Then I forget and yell. Stupid! Because I give my mother a headache. I do a lot of stupid things, like going out and leaving the lights on in the house. They're always telling me “Electricity costs money.” Or when I'm on the street with Bubber, I forget about him or I tease him till he wants to kill me. But that's not the worst. Sometimes I'm really unconscious. Last Halloween I started a fire in the house.

I was having a party with my friends, and I put a paper pumpkin from the five-and-ten in the window with a candle inside. I thought I moved the curtains but I guess not far enough, because they caught fire. I didn't even know it. We were having a pillow fight on my parents' bed when my mother's friend Sylvia walked in. “Boys! Are you blind!” The curtains were burning. “Are you crazy! Don't you see?” She yanked down the curtains and threw them in the bathtub.

I really got it when my mother came home. I knew I was going to get it. My mother started in on me, and when my father came home, he finished it. Bubber dived under the covers. I was too old for that. My father slapped at me, and I kept ducking and trying to slip out of his reach.

“What do you think?” my father said. “You're going to burn the house down.”

“Not in the head,” my mother yelled. “In
tuchus
.” Meaning my behind.

“Say something,” my father said. “Talk. Defend yourself. Do you know how old you are? When I was your age I was working.”

It's bad to be hit by your father. It's the worst thing. It's worse when you're wrong. Worse because my father never used to hit.

4

I woke up in the night. My covers had slid to the floor. I felt around for them and pulled them back. There was a light in the bathroom. I heard the water in the sink, then the scrape of my father's razor. Why was he shaving in the middle of the night?

The light turned off and he came out quietly, tiptoeing past me. I caught his hand and he bent down. I smelled the witch hazel he used after he shaved. “You're awake,” he said. “Good. In a minute I'll come back to talk to you.”

I heard my parents talking, their voices like the buzzing of flies. I was drifting off into sleep again when my father sat down next to me. He was wearing his coat and a hat.

I sat up. “Where are you going?”

“Shh. Not far. To Baltimore. I was promised a job. Maybe I'll be in Washington, D.C. You want me to tell President Roosevelt something?”

I held his sleeve, then caught his fingers. My hands wanted to keep him there.

“I want you to help your mother and look after your brother. Don't fight. You're the oldest. You have to be responsible. You're the man in the house now. I'm counting on you, Tolley.” He rubbed my head. “You want a kiss good-bye, or do we shake hands like men?”

We shook hands. His suitcase was by the door with his paintbrushes wrapped in newspaper and tied together with string. The hat made him look like he was gone already. I dug my face into his coat, into the rough, familiar smell of paint and dust.

My father patted my back. I hung on him. It was dark and I was scared. What if he got hurt or lost and didn't come back. I didn't want to let go. “A good boy. A good boy.” My father squeezed me, then he pulled away and I had to let him go.

I closed my eyes. I didn't want to see him leave. I heard the door shut. Then his steps disappearing down the stairs. From the main room I heard my mother coughing.

In the morning my mother was fixing breakfast. I got the milk and the butter from the icebox in the hall. Only a sliver of ice remained. I emptied the tray underneath. “We need ice,” I said.

“You'll have to wait for the iceman. Squeeze some oranges.”

I sliced the oranges, then squeezed the juice. Bubber's juice had to be strained. He was standing by the window in the other room, playing with a shoe. “Get dressed,” I told him. Then I went to the toilet.

He was still playing when I came back. I pulled him away from the window. He started to fight me, so I took the shoe away and hit him in the head a couple of times. “Get dressed.” He kicked me in the shin. I was going to really crown him; then I remembered what my father had said.

My mother left me a quarter for the iceman. She took my brother with her when she left for work. Bubber was dropped off at a neighbor's who took him to school every morning with her daughter, then brought them back to her house for lunch.

I looked out in the street. A car passed. Model A. Then a '32 Dodge. A LaSalle. I couldn't guess the year. People were going to the train. How was my father going to Baltimore? By train? Was he driving with someone? Was he out of the city already?

A milk wagon stopped across the street. The milkman jumped out, put a feed bag on the horse, then disappeared into a building with a tray of bottles. I saw my friend George and opened the window. “Hey, George, come on up.”

“I can't. I have to bring my mother bread so she can make my father's lunch.”

I stuck my head farther out the window and watched George disappear around the corner. Across the street I saw a kid standing guard over a pile of stuff—clothes, furniture, a couple of mattresses. “You moving?” I yelled.

He looked up. “Whaaat?”

“Is it your stuff?”

“No, it's my mother's.”

I knew what it was. It was an eviction. If you didn't pay your rent you got an eviction notice. Then the marshal came and they carried all your stuff out to the street. I never saw an eviction on our street before. “You're lucky,” I yelled. “No school today.”

The dumbwaiter buzzer sounded. The iceman was in the cellar. I opened the dumbwaiter door, stuck my head in the shaft, and called down my order. I heard the ice drop on the platform, then the box came up. I unloaded the cake of ice and put it in the icebox. I put the quarter in the box. “Okay,” I said, and tugged the rope and the box went down. Then I went to school.

5

After school I waited outside P.S. 96 for my brother. I went across the street and stood on top of the hill. I liked being up on the tops of things and looking way off. Which way was my father? He'd been gone ten days and we'd only received one postcard with his address in Baltimore. The job, he said, wasn't going to last, but he was going to look around. He'd heard there was work in Washington, D.C.

I looked toward downtown. Baltimore was that way, south, past Philadelphia. I looked it up in my geography book, put one finger on New York, my thumb on Baltimore.
Lights out, Pop.
If I had wings and a propeller I'd fly down there like Lindbergh.

Hey, Pop, look up, it's Tolley. How're things going? You get a good job? When are you coming home? You got some good news, I'll tell Momma. She needs something to cheer her up. Pop, you hear me? She's tired all the time and coughing a lot
.

“Hey, Irv!” He was down below me in the street. “Piano lesson, today? Do re mi fa …” Except for Irv's mother, everyone in his family played an instrument. Me, I played the radio. If I could play something, though, it wouldn't be the violin or the piano. It would be something big like a trombone or a tuba. Some afternoons in the Coops there was music coming out of every single window. It sounded like an orchestra, like the whole house was practicing, everyone trying to drown everyone else out. If I played the tuba, I'd drown them all out.

“Hey, Irv, meet you at the first candy store, later.”

Isabelle Arnow looked up. I didn't see her till it was too late. She was going by with one of her friends. Was I screeching? What did I sound like? I thought I sounded like a bird. Not too smart, not too suave. Isabelle! Oh, Isabelle's nice. I don't talk to her, but I look at her a lot. When I'm behind her I look at her neck and the backs of her arms. She has dimples in both elbows. I haven't gotten up the nerve to talk to her yet, but I will one of these days.

I waved to her. Suave, like a movie star, Ronald Colman or Errol Flynn. Isabelle nudged her friend and whispered in her ear. She might have smiled, but she was too far away to tell.

Later, I met my friends at the first candy store. Irv was reading the paper and Chick was shadow-boxing with George. Irv's father was on the corner talking to another man. Mr. Horowitz was short, like Irv, with glasses and the same round face. “Hello, Holtz. Where's your father these days?”