Seventh Avenue (23 page)

“Oh, would you ask Lieutenant Collaro to get King’s County to send an ambulance over. I’ll stay with her till the ambulance comes.”

The next two weeks were among the most agonizing of Jay’s life. He walked around and went through his daily routine of checking the stores, buying, in a daze, like a somnambulist. No one remarked about the sudden change in his manner. The harshness, the vitriolic gibe, were absent, and a new, softer man emerged. The fire in him had died, and when he went up to Lieberman’s farm for the weekend, Rhoda was filled with new hope for their future. Something freakish had happened to change Jay - he had received a severe buffeting, of that she was certain, but she did not want to verify her surmise. It wasn’t that the balance of power had shifted, and she had gained a new and meteoric ascendancy, for she knew him too well to deceive herself. His attitude towards her had become more passive. The old arrogant manner had disappeared; the megalomania was not quite so pronounced. She wondered what had happened to alter the center of his universe, and she tried to confirm this impression by questioning Celia, after he had returned to the city.

They were walking along the road to Ferndale. It was still light, and the air was heavy with the fragrance of roses. The diffuse light lit a small section of firs on top of the mountain as though with a halo, and Rhoda had a sense of contentment that seemed to wipe away all the bitterness and agony of her life with Jay.

“He looks very tired,” Celia said. “I esk him to stay over, but he won’t. He works too hard.”

“I tell him the same thing, Momma. But he doesn’t listen to anything I say.”

“
Rhoda, you think Neal’ll be all right?”

“Mrs. Lieberman’s sitting right outside the room on the porch.”

“I shouldn’t worry, but I do. I worry all the time about Jakie. He looks so old all of a sudden . . . so much responsibility on a young man’s shoulders. I told him to take some time off, but he said he couldn’t.” She stopped in her tracks and looked out over a field of daisies and breathed deeply. “You know what he esked me the other night?”

Rhoda shrugged her shoulders.

“He wanted to know what would make me happy, and I said to have his father here with me. He hasn’t had a vacation in thirty years, and he’s sitting in that hot apartment all by himself even though he wouldn’t be mad on me or Jakie for not coming. I know a few days here would mean a lot to him. Jake said he would send him up on
Monday if that’s what I wanted. It’s time we
was
a family
and .
. .”
she faltered and resumed walking.

“Momma, tell me the truth. What happened to Jay to make him the way he is?”

The question surprised Celia, but she managed to conceal it.

“What should heve heppened? He had a hard time when he was young. Never any money, never enough to eat.”

The answer did not satisfy Rhoda.

“
Is that all?”

“What else?” She had avoided Rhoda’s question, and none too skillfully.

Rhoda did not press her, for she knew that Celia, who did have the answer, would never reveal it, and she was aware of Celia’s desire to help secure her marriage.

“
Then what’s bothering him? Did he tell you?”

Celia’s steel-blue eyes flickered as she cupped her hand to ward off a shaft of light that cut into her line of vision just after a clump of serried maples. She also had witnessed the abrupt and inexplicable metamorphosis Jay had undergone, and with sphinxlike wisdom, or at least the semblance of omniscience, she had turned her back on him, refusing to be drawn into a crosscurrent of conflict that she sensed was at the bottom of his change of heart. She had localized his affliction almost at once - something had stretched out to hurt him, but not in any normal, manageable way, the type of experience that assails all men every day of their lives. This was an event so devastating, so unnameable and terrifying in its impact that she dared not even allude to the possibility of its existence, for she had seen it once before on his face, a variation admittedly, but the essence, the quiddity, of the experience was substantially the same, and she had turned her back on it then - to survive.

“It’s overwork, thet’s all,” Celia said, forcing herself to accept her own account at face value. The walk was tiring her now, and she felt the first chill of evening break through the buzzing air and she placed a black shawl on her shoulders, a present Jay had given her that weekend. He had said:”Momma, pray for me.” His face had been tense and strained, an ivory mask of lined skin, and pale blue protuberant veins, stretching the skin of his forehead, but he had forced himself to smile, as though aware of some subtle paradox in the request, and the effort had almost broken him into small bits. There was always Jay, Celia reflected, at the back of every meaningful event of her life - the
angst
and the awful febrile joy that he brought with him like a mule in a desert, riderless, with its panniers of pure gold . . . She remembered how he had come home that day, on that long-forgotten day in Lvov, drunk, and his clothes reeking of the sweat that accompanies the sick vomit of drunkenness, all control lost, with frantic gorgon eyes, his trousers sopping with his own urine, and how she had washed him, changed his clothes and eased him into a pair of his father’s long winter underwear, which were gray from washing. It had snowed for a week, a deathly blizzard with a Siberian impetus that froze the marrow, and when he walked away from the potbellied stove’s direct heat, he was overcome by chills. The gelid cheeselike mass of ice on the windowpanes. The cold that tore him apart so that he cried out in pain . . .

“
Maybe he does need a vacation,” Rhoda said.

Celia leaned against the stump of a poplar, an old one by the look and smell of it, which was decaying. She saw something move in the cracks, and she wanted to throw up: a host of moving white maggots, squirming and undulating, while a phalanx of red ants moved inexorably forward for the kill. Rhoda saw them also.

“
Uch. Let’s move, Momma.”

They walked downhill through the dales and flickering streams that caught the last aureole gold of sunlight before night came.

The hospital, King’s County, was a complex of gray interweaving buildings that twisted like a snake through the King’s Highway section of Brooklyn. It shared with Rockland State the questionable distinction of synonymity with madness. Jay nervously sat on a bench in front of the hospital’s emergency wing; a hot, sultry morning, typical of Brooklyn’s summer. He had in his hand a small bunch of violets. He could have purchased a gross of roses but had thought them inappropriate. Eva came down the steps, carrying a small plaid suitcase. Her lips were a startling cherry red in contrast to the pallor of her skin; her cheeks had lost their healthy appearance. The bones had moved up and the face had shrunk somewhat, and she moved shakily with uncertain jerks in her walk, which had become the exaggerated gait peculiar to the old and infirm. He had been unable to see or speak to her for two weeks, and Herbie had been buried at Beth David Cemetery while she was still in the hospital. She walked past him without turning her head; he jumped to his feet and caught her by the arm.

“
I tried to see you, but your
mother .
. .”

“
She meant
well
,
I guess.”

He took the suitcase from her and put his arm around her shoulder.

“
Well, I survived. Why, I’ll never know.”

He kissed her on the cheek, and his mouth sank into her flesh and he hated to move away.

“
Baby, I love you. Baby, baby, baby
.
”

“
Funny word to use,” she said.

“
You want to go home?”

“
I don’t live there
anymore
. My mother’s got Lorna.”

“
I took a suite at the Peter
Hamilton .
. . for you,” he added.

She sighed and looked into the glare of the sun.

“Well, if I’m going to be somebody’s kept whore, it may as well be there.”

She allowed him to lead her to the car and got in without speaking. He drove to the downtown section of Brooklyn through a stream of marauding traffic, keeping his eyes firmly fixed on the road. A number of times he wanted to speak but when he caught her out of the corner of his eye, she was staring out of the window.

The Peter Hamilton was an ochre monolith that sprawled over most of a city block; it was off to the side of the Manhattan Bridge and had a well-earned reputation for specializing in matinees and one-night stands. Twelve resident call girls did shift duty; and the bar, a noisy, dim, green room, known as the Aquamarine Room, with French Provincial frames on the backs of the booths, was the invention of some goggle-eyed subaqueous creature who was obsessed with goldfish, guppies, and myriad varieties of sea moss and rock all brought at great expense from Sheepshead Bay. The oceanographical motif extended to dressing the waitresses as mermaids and the barmen as deep-sea divers. The centerpiece of the bar was a plaster of paris bathysphere designed after Jules Verne. Jay and Eva went in for a noonday cocktail. A Neanderthal in a diving outfit, with a face like a crushed flounder, sidled over to them. Jay ordered a couple of whiskey highballs and lit a cigarette. Toying with a dessicated olive, he waited for her to say something. Nervousness and anxiety made him reach out for her hand, and she let him hold it. Her face under the green light was drawn and tired, with small pouches of shadow under her eyes, which were strangely lifeless and drifted from one mounted swordfish to another and finally rested on a shark.

“What have you been doing?” Eva asked, without curiosity. It sounded to Jay like the end of something; two people, who had shared something that had become unmentionable, meeting awkwardly after a time gap in their lives.

“
Worrying about you, and
wondering .
. . and dying.”

She gave him a sharp look.

“How’s Neal?” She sipped her drink hungrily, and he called for another.

“The mountain air agrees with him and my mother’s there too . . . out of the hot city.”

“
You’re a good son, and a good father, aren’t you?”

“
Not good, but I care.”

She swallowed her highball almost as soon as the barman had put it down.

“
You want to get squiffed, don’t you?”

“
You’re paying, aren’t you, Jay?”

“It isn’t a question of money. But you’ve only come out of the hospital . . . what did the doctor say?”

“That I’ll live.” She took a cigarette out of his pack and tamped it on the bar until it broke. She threw it away and took another, and he lit it. “Well, have you got any master plan for me today? Fredericks or somebody like him whose throat we can cut?”

“
That isn’t fair.”

“
Sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

“I may have got Fredericks in an unethical way, but the simple fact of the matter is that he’s going to make about fifty thousand a year more out of me than he would have from a prestige outfit. He didn’t cry his eyes out when he signed the contracts.”

“
I guess you’re just a misunderstood good Samaritan.”

“
Eva, please let up. The last thing I want us to do is argue.”

She took another pull from her highball and then laid her head on his shoulder, and started to cry silently with a kind of forlorn resignation that enveloped him in a web of despair.

“The terrible part of it,” she said, “is that I’m to blame. I tried to reason with him, to be logical. We went to dinner at his brother’s house, and it was all very pleasant and harmless and we all had a few drinks after dinner and then we went home. Herb wasn’t much of a drinker. You’d never believe to look at him that he was an athlete when he was younger - the fastest sprinter on his high school track team. Oh, Christ. . . So, when we got home, he got a little romantic and I told him I couldn’t - he hasn’t been near me since the day . . . He started to plead with me, and then he said: ‘If I was that nigger-rich, East Side gangster, you wouldn’t hesitate.’ There it was, out in the open. We sat down in the living room, and I said: ‘Let’s see if we can straighten ourselves out . . . We’re both young enough to make new lives.’ I asked him for a divorce, and he shook his head stubbornly. Said something about Jewish people never divorcing, oh, I don’t know. I was very calm, and I told him that I had to have one - that I was having your baby, and we couldn’t live together - it wasn’t fair to him or you. He smiled at me, as though the whole thing was a joke that I had made up . . . he smoked a cigarette, then did a crazy thing for him, because he was so fussy and house proud in a childish sort of way. He took his cigarette and stubbed it out on a silk cushion. I just couldn’t believe my eyes. When I pulled the cushion away from him, it had a hole in it, and the feathers were smoking inside. He got to his feet and started to walk past me. Then he stopped and said: ‘Eva, you decide who loves you more: me or Blackman. Just you decide, and if it’s Blackman then put a sign on the door in big black letters so that everybody who walks in can see it,
God is my enemy,
that’s what you put on the sign.’ He pushed me out of his way and went into the bathroom and got into the bathtub. I didn’t know what to do. I heard him stomping in the bathtub and then there was a shot . . . and oh . . .”

Jay’s mind drifted away from the scene. He had a vision of Neal at thirteen on his bar mitzvah day wearing a blue serge suit about four sizes too large for him, and a rabbi with a long gray beard of gnarled and twisted hair, touching both his shoulders. But he couldn’t see Neal’s face. In the synagogue was a gaping hole in the side window that allowed a current of wind to blow the silken curtains that covered the Torah. It irritated him, and he could not lift his eyes from the curtain. Then someone said in Polish: “Today you are a man.” He knew why he couldn’t see Neal’s face, nor imagine what it would be like thirteen years hence, for it was his own face that he was trying to piece together in the tangled strains of his memory. His own face . . . and he could not see it. He felt an awful chill cut through his bones.