In the Night Café (5 page)

8

N
O MATTER WHERE
we shoved the furniture, my place was too small to paint in. We moved the bed anyhow and made a wall, clear all the way to the window. “You could do a really big canvas there,” I said. “You could roll it up when it's finished and start another.”

“Yeah,” he said, “I could always do that—roll 'em up like a rug. We'd be painted out of here in a month. Maybe I'll get me an easel and do
nice
little paintings. That's about what you could do in this place.”

“Would that be so bad for a while?”

He laughed and shook his head. “Oh kiddo, you don't know what I do. You haven't seen anything. Maybe you won't even like it.”

“Of course I'm going to like it.”

He stared at me thoughtfully for a moment. “Yeah, maybe you will. Because the work is me. You could even write me off—and there'd still be the work.”

“How could I write you off? What are you talking about?”

I don't remember what he answered.

Those early days were best, when we still lived on Seventh Street. I hardly remember anything but happiness. It's funny to think how we rushed to get through them, as if they didn't quite count, as if our real life wouldn't begin till we'd moved, found a studio, brought all Tom's paintings up from Florida in a truck,
then
we'd be happy. The future was like that wall we'd cleared, which we'd stare at from bed when our eyes opened, blank and not blank, nothing there but morning rippling across it or stripes of shadow. Soon we'd wake up somewhere else, see a different wall.

Leon said we should try to get a place on the Bowery. The Bowery was our best bet. Who would want to live there but an artist? We searched for the lucky sign everywhere we walked—Loft for Rent on some gray upstairs window, maybe
our
loft. We'd write down the addresses of vacancies, whitening their walls in our minds, filling them with paintings, talking about how great the dusty old glass would look after it was scrubbed down with newspapers—that was the best way to clean windows, Tom said. We'd walk east or west, turning corners at random, ending up in odd neighborhoods without possibilities—old red brick projects down by the river, a market on Ludlow Street with bins of used eyeglasses, forsaken parks where winos lay out on benches under dusty sycamores. I'd suddenly feel my arm being gripped and hear Tom say, very quietly, “You didn't see that—but you don't have to,” and I'd know he was steering us out of the way of something. He told me he'd learned to walk like that when he was a kid, to see everything. He said now that he was in New York, all his old alertness was coming back to him.

We didn't have nearly enough money to move. Tom had just started looking for work. I knew you had to buy large, expensive things for a loft—stoves, refrigerators, water heaters. How could we afford them? I had my Rome fund—three hundred dollars—and my various part-time typing jobs. Tom hocked his watch and his silver ring and got fifty-nine dollars. “Well, that's it,” he said, putting all the bills on the table. He was proud he'd come away from Florida with so little, left everything behind for his kids, all the money from his last show, where he'd sold a painting for seven hundred dollars. He said, “It'll happen again, you know, only better because it'll happen in New York.” It was always New York that made meaning.

Meanwhile he sometimes felt his life had been rolled back. He said it was like being in Mexico City after the GI Bill ran out and he'd no longer had pesos in his pockets. Still, back then he'd gotten by for a couple of years doing little water colors of churches and marketplaces; he'd sign them with a Spanish name and take them to a shop that sold them to American tourists. Caroline gave lessons in ballroom dancing at a girls' school. Then the tourist shop burned down and that was the beginning of the end. The end of Mexico, the end of the good times in the marriage. Caroline was pregnant with Tommy—she was so anemic the doctor told her she'd probably lose the baby. He borrowed money from everyone they knew and put her on a plane, sent her back to her family in Florida. For six years she hadn't spoken or written to her father. Tom had remained behind in the empty pink house, waiting for her to come back to him with the kid, wondering how they'd all survive.

Then a letter came from Caroline telling him they'd had a son. Mexico was just too hard, she wrote. “It isn't a life that makes sense for me with a baby. It doesn't even make sense for you anymore, and you know it.” “And I did know it,” he said, “but Palm Beach was no answer.” Caroline's father adored his grandson; he'd finally even forgiven her for running off to New York and Mexico and marrying an artist. He'd offered to pay for everything, to buy them a beautiful old house—there was a room on the second floor that had windows on three sides, perfect for a studio.

Tom knew it was the wrong move, but he joined her. He figured he owed his kid a good start in life—a childhood better than the one he'd had. He'd packed up all the paintings he'd done—the early figurative stuff influenced by Marsh and Rivera and the work he'd done since he'd broken away, all the abstractions. They owned so little there was hardly anything else to take. “I think I had two pairs of socks, but who needed socks?”

He used to tell me it was Mexico that taught him black, white and red. “Mexico taught me that.”

Tom said Caroline's father was a man who always got what he wanted. None of his children ever got away from him. Caroline had been the only one who'd tried. “The old man crushed them with his money.” I couldn't imagine what it would be like to be crushed by money. Caroline's father had bought half a county of worthless swampland in southern Florida, sold it all off acre by acre, got taken to court by some investors and paid off the judge. To a man like that, seven hundred dollars for a painting was laughable, it was nothing.

Harry Theodore Vincent. Harry T., you called him. He'd wanted to set you up in the construction business. Then he'd offered to buy you a partnership in an architectural firm, something more artistic. He was going to confer on you a future of designing lobbies for hotels. I heard his voice once on the phone, rough and not so aristocratic—“Listen, Miss Whoeveryouare. I'd like to speak to my daughter's husband.”

You made me think of him in sinister pastels. A large, pinkskinned man with pure white hair who always carried a fresh, green five-hundred-dollar bill folded up small in his watch pocket—“For life's little emergencies, Tommy.” Harry T. was from Alabama, from some tobacco farm, as I recall it—but he wore his pale blue suits like a senator, had them custom-made by Tripler's in New York. He liked to go into restaurants and order oysters, and when the oysters came, he'd put on his pink-rimmed glasses and bring the plate almost up to his eyeballs while his wife and daughters watched breathlessly. “They all right, Mr. Vincent?” the waiter would ask. “They don't look fresh to me,” Harry T. would be apt to say sternly and send them back.

“I never eat oysters,” you told me.

Strawberries—that was the other thing you would never eat because of years of Sunday dinners at Harry T.'s. When strawberries were in season, there was always shortcake, Harry T.'s boyhood favorite, and Harry T. would make a production of smacking his lips over the berries, and you'd see the sweet red juice on his lips and ask the maid to bring you another drink. “Watch out for that booze, boy,” Harry T. would say, his eyes twinkling. He'd made his first killing back in the twenties running rum from the Bahamas. He was a man who knew a thing or two about thirst.

You told him once you thought your father might have been involved in New York in that line of work. He'd put his arm around you—“You and me, Tom, we're both upstarts.” And you'd had tears in your eyes. You were taken in, at that moment, totally. Family was what you always craved and never got.

I'd leave you each Sunday and take the F train to Forest Hills. I had sad little Sunday dinners of my own. I'd walk along Queens Boulevard from the station and when I could afford it, I'd buy my mother lilacs from Spyros the Greek because she was crazy about flowers but never bought them for herself unless company was coming and company never came. Even when my father was alive, she'd never had people over.

When I was little I'd picked bouquets for her—dandelions and clover—she'd never told me they were weeds. Everything I did then was wonderful. If I wrote a patriotic poem about the war effort, I was going to be another Emma Lazarus. If I whirled on the red oriental rug to the music from the radio, I was going to be Pavlova. Daddy's heart kept him home from the war—he'd tiptoe in and take a picture. My aunts kept scrapbooks of my achievements. They typed up my clever sayings and showed them to their friends. It was a cult of The Child, and if I'd died at the age of twelve, it never would have ended.

My mother felt my wonderfulness should be offered to the world. So Daddy took lots of pictures of me in his store in front of the same velvet curtains where little boys sat for blue-suit barmitzvah portraits or war brides corsaged with gardenias posed with their soldier grooms. I'd lean upon an imitation alabaster column and Daddy would bring a braid of hair forward and brush at my bangs and arrange my hand so that it supported my cheek. “Look wistful,” he'd say. Or “Look as if someone just gave you a wonderful present.” He'd fuss with his lights and I'd work on my wistfulness or my joy, telling myself, Don't blink, don't blink, so I wouldn't at the wrong moment. I knew the whole future of the family depended on getting the right shots—on me, though I couldn't have said why.

Daddy made shiny prints of me in four different poses, and Ma and I began taking the subway to Forty-second Street and Broadway all the time and sitting around in office after office because show business mostly had to do with sitting around, like waiting to see the doctor. Now and then you'd finally get a minute with a jaded producer—some old man in a striped suit. “Too tall… too short… too young … too old,” the producers used to tell us, hardly looking.

“Not Swedish enough, sweetheart.”

“What do you mean, not Swedish enough?” my mother demanded indignantly, mortifying me by holding up one of my blond braids.

“I don't see Swedish. Okay?”

“Ma, let's go!” I whispered.

But Ma had iron in her that day. The part called for a blond eight-year-old girl. Well, her daughter was blond and eight, she said—shocking me because I was really nine. My mother said Fair was fair. That was how little she knew about show business. She said nothing would make her walk out of there until the man had seen for himself what a beautiful talent I had. And she straightened the red Woolworth's bows at the ends of my braids and said, “Don't let anyone scare you. Show him what you can do.”

Someone finally put a script in my hands, all typed up on onionskin. It was about a Minnesota farm family whose entire wheat crop had been eaten by locusts and I had to be a little girl dying of scarlet fever in fifteen lines. The first words came out with a squeak, but then my mother's will got into me, and I read, hardly hearing what I was reading. Maybe it was fear that carried me out of myself, fear of revealing myself as just a nine-year-old little Jewish girl and not being as wonderful as my mother said. I was all mixed up about the lies you had to tell the men in offices, whether such lies counted as real ones or not. I never knew whether it was me who'd landed that part or Ma.

I met a great actress once, and I asked her, “Did you always know you could do it?” And she said, “I just knew I could execute an intention.” But all the years I was acting or making the rounds trying to get parts, I never had that feeling, not even the eighteen months I played that little Swedish Minnesota girl on Broadway. It was the lights I liked that bathed you and got inside you somehow, and the stage was a clearing in the forest at night and the audience, dark, rustling like trees. And I liked staying up long past my bedtime and eating dinners in the Automat with all my matinee makeup on and the Great White Way that wasn't white but brown because of the war and the theaters jammed with young servicemen on furlough who'd been given free seats, so even acting was patriotic. I used to tell my mother I was going to marry a sailor.

You and I once figured out that at least a night or two you were on furlough somewhere in those crowds around Times Square. You'd have been looking for a girl, a grown-up girl of course, not one in pigtails. We used to speculate on the chances we'd actually walked right by each other. “I'd have noticed
you
, babe,” you said. You said there should have been a voice that said, “Stop right here,” so we could have promised to wait for each other another seventeen years.

I think I might have been ready even then for a promise like that. It was me my mom and dad both seemed crazy about instead of each other. Maybe that made me lonely from the start.

Daddy always rinsed out his own coffee cup in the sink and came and went in our house like a shadow. He'd smoke one cigarette, put the ashes quickly in the garbage, then he'd be gone leaving no traces. He wasn't supposed to smoke at all because of his heart. He spent half his life in his darkroom and his hands were always peeling from the chemicals. I loved to run down-stairs to his store. I'd say, “Let me see the negatives, Daddy.” Because it seemed quite wonderful to me that dark could be light and light could be dark, as if a world of night existed where everything was in reverse.

Daddy could turn old brown-and-white photos of dead people into pale, almost flesh-toned ones by tinting them with a fine brush, but he never let me watch him do that because it made him too nervous. Every now and then he'd put a Closed sign on his door and disappear for most of an afternoon, and if we'd ask him where he'd been, he'd say, irritatedly, “Just experimenting, just experimenting.” Once he called my mother and me downstairs to the store and showed us his latest “experiments”—photos of the most ordinary things, the Italian vegetable stand around the corner, old ladies gabbing on a stoop, a boarded-up doorway with a colored boy leaning against it. “But Jules, these are so
ugly
!” my mother exclaimed.