Seventh Avenue (38 page)

The cemetery ground had not thawed, except in isolated spots, and made a crunching sound underfoot. The wind howled through the treeless open space, and Rhoda walked carefully across the frozen scrubs of crabgrass, trying to avoid the pasty red loam. She wondered how Jay had reacted when the lawyer had asked him to sign over his King’s Highway store to her, for she had been surprised when he had acceded to the demand without ever raising it with her. The cash settlement had been agreed to at once, but the store was like one of his limbs. She didn’t know why she had asked for it except perhaps to hurt him; then she remembered that the suggestion had come from Howard, who had insisted that she would be better off usefully occupied in business than moping around the house. She had told this to her lawyer, not caring how things turned out, and now she realized that the store would indeed give her something to do, and she was anxious to resume working again.

She stood behind a gray mausoleum, which was adjacent to an open hole which, the guide had said, was the plot that Celia Blackman would be buried in. She made an effort to reconstruct Celia’s face, but it would not take form. All that manifested itself was her angular figure, the thin reedy voice, the knotted veins on her
hands, the halting walk as though she was perpetually carrying a
burden, and the gold teeth like gates across her mouth.

A string of black cars followed an
embowered
hearse down the
small road. The cars stopped, and a covey of black-veiled women
extricated themselves from them. Some distance behind the others
another car drew up, and a woman with red hair got out and stood
by the front fender observing the procession. Rhoda recognized
Eva
and couldn’t understand how she had learned of the arrangements - unless
she
and
Jay .
. . She pondered the idea for a moment,
concluding finally that Jay had gone back to her.

Behind
a crowd
of pallbearers tiptoeing like ravens after prey,
she caught sight of Jay, trudging slowly forward over the hard
muddy ground, his head lowered. At the
graveside,
the casket was
set down, and Jay, white-faced and trembling, peered down at the
hole and shuddered. A small, gray-bearded figure stepped out of the
crowd and said a prayer in
Hebrew,
then the casket was lowered.
She came out from behind the gray wall and walked towards Jay. Before she reached him she heard a terrible moan over the staccato of
the prayer
that
made her flesh crawl, and she recognized that its
point of origin was Jay. His mouth was
open,
and he was howling like
some wild bereft animal. Dumbfounded, she halted about five feet
from him, but the howl, the groan, the unutterable agony of the cry
continued until his father leaped forward and slammed him across
the mouth with the back of his hand.

“
You dirty
bestid
,” he squalled. “You crying for why? You
kilt
her!”

He continued to lash out with his fists and Jay covered himself
up with his elbows.

“
Oh,
Mommmmmmmmma .
. . Aieeeeeeee,” he groaned, sinking to his knees.

Rhoda rushed up to him and seized the old man’s flailing arms.

“
Stop it, stop it,” she shouted.

“
You, Rhoda?” the old man said softly. “What you
doink
?”

“
It’s a
cemetery .
. . have respect for her,” she said.

“
Respect? He kilt her.
Filtee
bestid
. With his own
Momma
he
slept. She couldn’t forget
it,
and it
kilt
her.”

Jay rose slowly from the
ground,
his trousers streaked with mud,
and his fists clenched. In a
quiet,
mournful voice he said:

“Liar,” and walked through the throng of shocked faces to the road. Rhoda trailed after him and caught up with him. He turned to look at the crowd at the graveside. Only a few heads still watched him.

“Tell me,” she said. “It’s not true, what he says.”

“He’s a liar. Never, and I swear on her, did I ever . . .”

“And that’s the truth?”

“What’s ruined me is not what I did, but what I wanted to do one afternoon a long time ago, and I’ve never forgiven myself for it, but she did. She forgave me, thank God.”

She watched him get into the car with Eva. The car drove slowly down the rutted, muddy road, and she stared after it until it disappeared. He had needed her, for a moment, and now it was over.

The divorce relieved Neal’s tensions and simplified matters, for
it settled the question of divided loyalties. What before had been
a tyrannical struggle between two hostile factions, with his affection as the prize, degenerated into sporadic skirmishes between them
over the years, and Neal felt neither loyalty nor disloyalty towards
his parents: he tolerated them, and lived his life within the eye of a
hurricane, so that they could not touch him. He had unconsciously
slipped into the solipsist position, and at the age of twelve had developed the defenses of the
practiced
pessimist. What he wanted most
was to be rid of Rhoda and Jay, as well as of Eva, whom he despised
with an intensity
that
enraged him when he so much as thought
of her. He accepted his mother’s frequent and casual affairs with
strange men who from time to time showed up at the apartment,
then vanished as though they
had
fallen off the earth. He forgot about
them and so did Rhoda. He was dark and thin like Jay, with Rhoda’s
green eyes, and the brooding manner of a man who has had a disastrous love affair, so that nothing could ever again be the same. In
many
ways,
he had inherited Rhoda’s capacity and penchant for suffering, but this was tempered by an equal ability to inflict pain both
on himself and others. Because he was clever and an astute judge of
the weaknesses of other people, there was something menacing about
him, which Rhoda recognized and feared. It wasn’t merely the way
he said: “You can stay out all night if you like,” when she informed
him that she was going out on a date, or playing cards with friends,
but the detached manner in which he said it - never insisting, or
pointing out that he had a prior claim on her time - and his total
lack of involvement. They had a tacit understanding
that
neither
of them transgressed. It amounted to
laissez faire
and made them
companionable.

On a Friday, at about seven in the morning - Neal remembered
the day clearly because it was the fourth weekend and he always spent it with Eva and his father - he was surprised to find a man
sleeping on the sofa in the living room. He went into his mother’s
room and discovered her in a deep sleep, then he returned to the
living room where the man had shifted on his side so that Neal could
get a good look at his face without standing over him. He saw a square
face with
lank
mottled brown hair, a long hooked nose with hairs
dancing in the nostrils from the
snores
, and skin that was sallow and
pocked
like a piece of pigskin. The man had a small
jaw,
and his
beard was patchy. His clothes had been folded neatly across a chair
in the dining
room,
and his socks were pushed into a pair of navy
blue suede shoes. Neal dressed quietly; for his mother always slept
till ten, getting into the store at eleven, and they had an arrangement
between them based on mutual respect for the sleeping - and apathy.
Fully dressed, the scraped brown leather strap tied
round
his
books,
Neal prepared to leave. He studied the man who had now rolled over
on his stomach, then went back into the dining room. He took all of
the man’s clothes, except the shoes and socks, and left the apartment,
shutting the front door with the stealth of a professional thief. He tiptoed down the stippled concrete
hallway
and decided to walk
down the stairs instead of waiting for the elevator. On the third
floor,
he stopped
on the half-landing
to see if he was being followed. Then
he approached the incinerator and stuffed the clothing down it. He
picked up a bag of garbage that had been left in the incinerator room
and pushed it in to make certain that the clothes would not be
trapped.

Bernard Zimmerman was waiting for him at the candy store.

“
You’re early,” Neal said. “I haven’t had any breakfast yet.”

“
I had to see you, so I rushed out,” Bernard said, with a note of
excitement. He was a
short,
plump boy with a square-shaped face,
irregular teeth, kinky red hair, and an assortment of blackheads on
the bridge of his nose.

Neal ordered his breakfast; it never varied: orange juice, a chocolate malted and toast with cream cheese. He had all his meals in the
candy store because Rhoda never finished at the store till well after
nine, and she had arranged for him to charge all his meals there. He
hated the man who ran it, a balding, greasy individual with a mustache and watery gray eyes, by the name of Levy. Levy was a thief:
everyone in the neighborhood knew Levy was a thief, except Rhoda,
and Neal never bothered to tell her.

“
My mother says she saw a man come up with your mother, and
that the man didn’t leave,” Bernard said with sympathetic concern.
“Did he sleep over?”

Neal bit into his toast and decided to tell Bernie what he had
done: Bernie was his best friend, and Bea Zimmerman was the only
pleasant adult woman he had ever met.

“
I fixed his wagon,” Neal said.

Levy stared at the two
boys
and edged closer.

“
Whadyuh do?” Bernie exclaimed.

“
Shush, he’s listening. Levy, why don’t you jerk off?”

“
Dirty-mouthed little bastard.”

“
Don’t curse, or I’ll take my business across the street and you
won’t be able to pad any more bills.”

Levy gave him a murderous stare, then commenced chopping the
tuna fish salad.

“
So? I’m busting to hear.”

“
I never saw the guy before. Found him sleeping in the living
room. He had one of those shiny
suits .
. . a silk
job,
and I stuffed
it down the incinerator.”

Zimmerman inflated his cheeks, then slammed them with the
palms of his hands and made a small exploding sound
that
indicated shock. A gob of saliva dribbled down his lower lip.

“
Neal, you’re crazy! Your
mother’ll
kill you.”

“
She won’t say a
word .
. . she’ll be shitting in her pants about
me telling my father.”

“
But the
guy’ll
beat your head in.”

“
I fuck him where he breathes. If he sleeps in strange people’s
houses,
then he must be used to this sort of thing.”

“
Jeez, you’ve got
nerve
. He could be a tough guy or somethin’
who ain’t afraid. Maybe your mother likes him and wants ta marry
him.”

“
She can marry a nigger for all I care. One
shitheeler
’s the same
as the next.” He pushed his plate out of the way and said: “Levy,
mark it up. Thirty-five cents, not sixty-five,
gonif.”

“
Awright, Neal,” he said with a snigger. “Pretty cute kid,
are
n’tcha
?”

“
Smarter than you. C’mon, Bernie, or we’ll be late. One more
‘late’ and my
mother’ll
have to come to see the teacher.”

“
Were you warned?”

“
Yeah, warned, but they won’t do anything ‘cause my marks are
good.”

“
The second highest in the school,” Zimmerman said admiringly.

At
3:30,
the two of them returned to Zimmerman’s apartment, as
they did every day for milk and chocolate
Mallomars
that
Bea
provided. She was a
warm,
friendly woman, incredibly obese, short-tempered, sloppy, with an obsessional passion for crossword puzzles,
which she solved with an adeptness only a poorly educated person
can develop. Neal liked her - her evil-smelling kitchen with its grease
marks on the ceiling, her ragged dressing gowns, her slovenly habit
of picking the wax out of her ears with a hairpin and then rolling it
up into a ball and surreptitiously dropping it on the floor - and he
respected her for never sentimentalizing and not treating
him
with
the treacly emotionalism
that
most adults displayed and
that
he
realized was not concern but the capacity for enjoying the troubles of
others. He knew that Bea disapproved of his parents, but she never
allowed it to cloud her judgment.

“
We’re going to the schoolyard, Mom,” Bernie said.

“
Be back at five on the dot ‘cause Neal’s got to pack his suitcase.”

“
Oh, I
forgot .
. .”

“
Fourth weekend of the month,” Neal said. “That’s the sentence
the judge passed.”

“
Oh, it’s not so bad, Neal.
Wahme
to help you pack?”

“
No, I can manage, but can Bernie wait with me till my father
comes?”

“
Sure.” As they were about to leave, she called out: “Bernie,
don’t forget to bring me the three evening papers.” They also had
crossword puzzles. Twice before, Bernie had not brought them, and
she had beaten him.

“
We only got an hour,” said Bernie. “You
wanta
play stickball or
should we go on the roof for
a smoke
?”

“
The roof. I got three Camels left.” He winked at Bernie. “Bit
early for Lady Farberman.”

“
You never know,” he said hopefully. “Remember, last Thursday
when we cut assembly we caught her tickling her titties in the bathtub?”

They took the elevator up to the sixth floor and stealthily crept up the side flight of stairs
that
led to the roof. Bernie peeked
through the door.

He whispered: “Mrs. Klein’s hanging her washing.”

“
Can we sneak past?”

“
Yeah, I think maybe. Clock this, Neal. She’s got her ass to the
wind,
and her bloomers are waving hello.”

“
She’s got varicose veins, ugh.”

“
Not in her ass.”

“
Oh, Bernie, she’s awful. An old douchebag.”

“
What’s a douchebag?”

“
Dunno. I heard my father call some woman it.”

“
C’mon, tipsy-toe past.”

They turned sharply around when they were outside and climbed
up the metal ladder
that
brought them to a smallish house with an
apex-shaped roof t
hat
had an enormous angular skylight. This
was the top of the elevator shaft, and they could hide behind the jutting skylight if anyone came. Neal took out two crumpled cigarettes,
cupped his hands to light a match, and on the third try managed to
light his own. Bernie got
a light
from his cigarette, and Neal’s almost went out. He puffed hard on Neal’s cigarette to save the light,
and Neal said testily: