Seventh Avenue (58 page)

Someone was running the water in the
bathroom
,
and there were voices coming from the living room. He tiptoed down the long dark corridor and peeked into the room. He saw about fifteen men on their knees chanting and whispering to each other as a man rubbed a pair of dice together and then flung them against the corner of the woodwork. The man who rolled the dice scooped up a pile of money
that
was placed in the center of the
floor
,
and another man was busy counting money, which he held tightly in his fist. Sports ambled around the circle dropping ash from his cigarette on the carpet, and Rhoda walked in carrying a tray of glasses and ice in a pitcher. The men called out “scotch” or “
rye
” and Sports, acting as bartender, poured out the drinks, Rhoda appeared to be dazed as she stood in a corner of the room watching the men skirmishing
round
the pile of money, Neal stifled a scream when somebody took his arm and shook him.

“
You lost or somethin’, sonny?”

It was
the man
who had been in the bathroom.

“
I wanted to go to the toilet.”

“
Yeah? Well, it’s free now. You can go
,
then
hit the sack.”

“
And if I do
n’t .
. . ?” he started to ask defiantly.

“
Just do as you’re told,” the man said, increasing his pressure on Neal’s
arm
so that his muscle began to throb.

“
It’s my house and if you don’t let me go I’ll call the cops,” Neal said.

He was shocked when the man released his pressure and then suddenly smacked him. The sound of the slap frightened him more than the actual
pain
,
and he bit his lip angrily, refusing to cry.

“
You better learn some manners, sonny. When you make threats, back them up.”

“
Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing?” Rhoda demanded as she came towards them. Neal was rubbing his face.

“
This your kid, lady?”

“
That’s right. What’ve you done to him?”

“
He threatened to call the cops. You better have a talk with him. I’m not gonna have a kid louse up the whole
setup
.”

“
Just leave him alone.”

Sports heard their voices over the din and switched on the light in
the corridor.

“
What’s up?”

“
A little trouble with the
brat
,” the man said.

“
Neal, you go back to bed,” Sports ordered.

Neal glared at him
angrily
,
and Sports turned away.

“
I’ll go back to bed, but not because you say I should.” He turned
to his mother who had the
flat
of her hand pressed against the wall
as though for support. “He’s a worm, Mom. A worm!” Neal
said
and
strode down the corridor back to his room.

“
He’ll tell Jay,” Rhoda whined as Neal closed his bedroom door.

“
Who’s Jay?” the man asked.

“
Never mind. I’ll straighten it all out,” Sports said soothingly.

Jay now never came up to the apartment when he had to meet Neal.
He pressed the house phone buzzer twice promptly at ten o’clock
every Sunday
morning
,
and Neal would shoot out of the apartment
and see him in the lobby five minutes later. This time Neal had not
answered Jay’s signal as he usually did, by pressing the buzzer back
twice, but had asked him over the phone to come up. Jay was disquieted by this change in their routine. Neal opened the door of the
elevator for him.

“
Hi, Neal, aren’t you ready yet?” he asked. He held his watch up
to the light. “I’m not early.”

“
I need you, Daddy.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
The suitcase is too heavy for me.”

“
Suitcase? What suitcase?”

“
I’m coming to live with you.”

Jay was taken aback and walked with Neal down the darkened
hallway to the apartment door, which was held open by a door stopper.

“
I don’t like to go inside,” he said. “Your mother’s still probably
sleeping.”

“
The valise is in the foyer. I dragged it in myself, but I can’t lift
it.”

“
What’s all this about, Neal? You know you just can’t come and
live with me without your mother’s permission.”

He studied Neal’s anxious face and grew increasingly distressed
when he switched on the light.

“
What’s happened to your face?”

Neal struggled to lift the case, but Jay pulled his hand away.

“
I asked what happened. Your eye’s bruised. Did
anybody .
. . ?” his voice rose on the tail of the unfinished question.

“
Please, please, Dad. I’ll tell you what happened in the car.”

They pulled into a diner on the East Side for breakfast. Although
Terry was waiting for them, Jay thought it would be better to get the
whole story from Neal first so that he could devise a plan by the time
he got back to the hotel.

“
We’ll just have orange juice and coffee now. Terry wants to take
you to a place in Westchester that specializes in pancakes.”

Neal sipped his
juice
,
and his face lost that long doleful expression
that
had alarmed Jay during the course of their drive.

“
I don’t
think
it’s a very good idea for you to live in a hotel. Maybe
we’ll go househunting when Terry’s feeling better.”

“
I’m not going back there,” Neal said with finality.

“
You won’t have to. If your mother wants to get tough, I’ll take
her to court. It could last a couple of years, and she hasn’t got the
kind of money to do that. I better ring my lawyer.”

“
Will I be able to stay with you?”

“
Of course you will,” he said, but he wasn’t at all certain that
he could keep his word. He telephoned Nathan Clay and arranged a
meeting at his hotel for two o’clock that afternoon.

When they got to Jay’s hotel, Terry was waiting for them in the
lobby. She wore a fully cut mink coat t
hat
concealed the fact that
she was in her eighth month. Neal rushed up to her and embraced
her
,
and she rubbed her hands through his hair. Her eyes were
bright
,
and she kissed Jay on the cheek.

“
I thought my two men were standing me up. Did you oversleep,
Neal?”

“
No, we stopped off for a quick
coffee
,
and I had to phone my lawyer,” Jay said.

“
Why, what’s wrong?”

“
Neal’s going to come and live with us .
.
. I hope.”

Her eyes opened wide with surprise and Jay’s mouth trembled.
As he stood between
them
,
he had a shrinking, constricting sensation in his throat, for he had not prepared her for the news, and he wondered how she would react. He closed his eyes for a
second
,
and when
he opened
them
,
he saw her holding Neal’s hands and dancing round
him in a circle.

“
That’s marvelous!” she exclaimed, and he sensed that her pleasure was as genuine as his. He didn’t know what he would have done
if she had shown any reluctance, but he could see from the expression of open joy on Neal’s face and her warm acceptance of
him
that
a real bond of affection existed between them.

“
Well, are you going to tell me all about it, or not?”

“
Let’s have some breakfast,” Neal said.

“
Sure, if we can persuade this elderly gentleman to drive us up
to Larchmont.”

Neal sat in the back of the car and stared out of the window at the
mountainous snowdrifts in Central Park. Sunday morning in New
York was quiet, and
the empty
park had a whiteness and peace
that
made him feel secure. Every now and then, Terry would turn around
to him, smile and squeeze his hand as she listened to Jay’s account
of the life Neal had been coerced into, and had submitted to, as a
consequence of Rhoda’s remarriage. When he had finished, she kissed
Neal on the forehead and said:

“
Don’t you worry, baby. Not
anymore
. It’s all going to be okay.”

After a large breakfast of Southern-style buckwheat pancakes and
sausages, during which Jay frequently left the table to make telephone calls, they started back to the city. Neal felt much more
confident
,
and he tried to remember bits of Terry’s letter, which he had
not understood entirely. He now realized that he
was seeing
for himself with his own two eyes what she meant. They had never discussed
the letter, since Neal had accepted her at their first meeting, which
took place at the hotel after he had debarked from the train. He had
grown three inches over the
summer,
his posture was better, and he
had acquired a firmer grip on his circumstances or so he thought.
After his initial period of rebellion, he submitted to the rigorous
training at the camp, and he learned an important lesson: in order
to combat a system you have to succeed within the system because
then you know its weaknesses. He won the award for the most outstanding camper in his age group, and when he got the medal back
to his bunk he had crumpled up the bit of soft copper in his fist and
flushed it down the toilet. He had a new strength, which he hoped
would carry him over the winter with his mother, but Sports was the
imponderable. He could not prevent Rhoda from pandering to his
sickness - and gambling was a sickness - because Sports was Rhoda’s
sickness, and her ministrations for him worked in reverse. She had
been trying to save herself, and Neal had been left stranded like an
alien at the border without a passport. He barely spoke to either of
them, for they were seldom around, and he preferred solitude to
their company. It occurred to him that despite Terry’s remark: “Morality isn’t a question of what other people think but what I do
myself,” that her situation was in a sense similar to his mother’s. And
yet there was a basic difference
that
he could not puzzle out.
There was something right about what she had done, and something
incontestably wrong about his mother’s relationship with Sports. Was
it in the quality of
the man
or was it the very nature of love?

“
Jay,
pull up
, will you?” Terry said.

“
I’ll drop you at Radio City.” He seemed surprised.

“
Neal and I’ll have a walk. A pregnant woman’s got to get her
quota of exercise. We can do some window shopping.”

He stopped at the corner of Fifty-Fifth
Street
,
and Fifth Avenue
and said:

“
I’ll see you when?” - he looked at his watch – “Four-thirty?”
She leaned over and kissed
him
,
and he rubbed his hand affectionately across her cheek. “It’s better if I see them on my own. Look
after her for me, Neal, will you?”

She took Neal’s gloved hand and interwove it with hers.

“
He’s my squire. I like them young.”

At two o’clock promptly the doorbell rang and Clay’s assistant, a
youngish man called Brewster, answered it.