"Better keep back," I heard Claire warn him.
I had campaign ribbons on too, including a Bronze Star I'd won in France for knocking out a Tiger tank with a guy named David Craig. I think that officer was reading my mind and was smart enough to keep out of my way. I seemed official and talked tough as hell. My German threw all of them off, and I made sure to speak it loudly.
"Antworte!" I said. "Du verstehst was ich sage?"
"Ich verstehe nicht."
"Wir haben nicht gelacht."
"Keiner hat gelacht."
"Otto, you are a liar," I told him in German. "You do understand and you did laugh. "Gustav, sag mir, Gustav, was Du sagen"--I pointed to Claire-- "uber meine Frau hier? Beide lachen, was ist so komisch?" We weren't married yet, but I didn't mind throwing in that she was my wife, just to tighten the screws a little more. "She is my wife," I repeated, in English, for the officer to hear. "What nasty thing did you say about her?"
"Ich habe nichts gesagt. Keiner hat gelacht."
"Sag mir!" I commanded.
"Ich habe es vergessen. Ich weiss nicht."
"Gustav, Du bist auch ein Lugner, und Du wirst gehen zu Holle fur Deine Luge. To hell you will both go for your lie and for your dirty words about this young lady, if I have to put you there myself. Now. Schaufeln hinlegen!"
I pointed. They laid down their shovels tamely and waited. I waited too.
"Schaufeln aufheben!" I said, with no smile.
They looked about miserably. They picked up the shovels and stood without knowing what to do with them.
"Dein Name ist Gustav?" I said after another half a minute. "Dein Name ist Otto? Jawohl? Du bist von Munchen? Und Du bist von ... Ach wo!" I didn't really care where the hell he was from. "Mein Name ist Rabinowitz. Lewis Rabinowitz. Ich bin Lewis Rabinowitz, from Coney Island, on West Twenty-fifth Street, between Railroad Avenue and Mermaid Avenue, bei Karussell, the merry-go-round on the boardwalk." I could feel the pulses in my thumbs beating too when I took out my dog tags to make them look at that letter J, to make extra sure that they knew what I was saying when I told them next in Yiddish: "Und ich bin ein Yid." And then in German: "Ich bin Jude, judisch. Verstehst Du jetzt?" They weren't so bronze anymore, and didn't look so powerful. I felt peaceful as can be, and never more sure of myself as LR, Louie Rabinowitz from Coney Island. There was no more need to fight with them. I spoke with my hateful smile that Claire says looks worse than a skeleton's and like a deadly grimace. "Jetzt ... noch einmal." They put down the shovels when I told them to and picked them back up as though I had trained them perfectly. I indicated Claire. "Hast Du schlecht gesagt wie als er hat gesagt wie Du gesehen Dame hier?"
"Nein, mein Herr."
"Hast Du mitgelacht als er hat gesagt schlecht?"
"Nein, mein Herr."
"You are lying again, both of you, and it's lucky that you are, because I might break both your backs if you told me you did laugh at her or said something bad. Geh zur Arbeit." I turned away from them with disgust. "Corporal, they're yours again. Thanks for the chance."
"Lew, that wasn't nice," Claire said first.
Then the officer spoke. "Sergeant, you're not allowed that. You're not allowed to talk to them that way."
I saluted respectfully. "I know the rules of the Geneva Convention, Captain. I was a prisoner of war there, sir."
"What was it all about?"
"They looked at my fiancee, sir, and said something dirty. I'm only just back. I'm not right in the head yet."
"Lew, you're not right in the head." Claire started in the minute we were alone. "Suppose they didn't do what you told them to?"
"Calm down, little girl. They did do what I told them. They had to."
"Why? Suppose the guard made you stop? Or that officer?"
"They couldn't."
"How did you know?"
"Just understand."
"Why couldn't they?"
"I tell you and you must believe me. Certain things happen the way I say they will. Don't ask me why. To me it's simple. They insulted you, and they insulted me by doing that, and I had to let them know they couldn't do that. They're not allowed to do that." We were already engaged. "You're my fiancee, n'est-ce pas? My Fraulein. I would get mad at anyone who looked at you and made a smutty remark, and so would my father and my brothers, if they saw any other guy ever snicker at you like that, or at one of my sisters. Enough chitchat, my dear. Let's go back to the hospital now. Let's go say good-bye to Herman the German."
"Lew, it's enough with Herman already. I'll wait downstairs and have a soda if you feel you have to go through that with him again. I don't find it funny."
"You still won't believe it, baby, but I don't find it funny either. That's not why I do it to him."
The problem with Claire then, as Sammy and Winkler saw and let me know, was that she did have big tits. And the trouble with me was that I got jealous fast and felt ready to just about kill any other guy who noticed them, Sammy and Winkler too.
So four of us went down to enlist that day and all four of us came back. But Irving Kaiser from the apartment house next door was killed by artillery fire in Italy and I never saw him again, and Sonny Ball was killed the same way there too. Freddy Rosenbaum lost a leg, and Manny Schwartz still walks around with hooks on an artificial hand and is not so good-humored about it anymore, and Solly Moss was shot in the head and hasn't been able to hear or see too clearly since, and as Sammy mentioned once when looking back, that seems to have been a lot of casualties for just a couple of blocks in a pretty small section of a pretty small neighborhood, so a lot of others everywhere must have been killed or wounded also. I thought so too. But the day the four of us went off we didn't think there'd really be danger or casualties.
We were going to war and we didn't know what it was.
Most of us married young. And none of us knew from divorce then. That was for the Gentiles, for the rich people we used to read about in the newspapers who went to Reno, Nevada, for six weeks because it was easier there. And for someone like Sammy's Glenda and her roving first husband who liked to play around a lot and just didn't seem to give a shit who knew it. Now even one of my own daughters has got her divorce. When I first heard about that marriage breaking up I wanted to set right out after my ex-son-in-law and work out the property settlement with my bare hands. Claire shut me up and took me back to the Caribbean to cool off instead. Sammy Singer was the only one I know of who waited, and then he married his shiksa with three children and the light-brown hair that was almost blonde. But Sammy Singer was always a little bit different, short and different, quiet, thinking a lot. He was strange and went to college. I was smart enough and also had the GI Bill of Rights to pay for it, but was already married, and I had better things to do than go to school some more, and I was in a bigger hurry to get somewhere. That's another reason I never liked John Kennedy or anyone around him when he jumped into the limelight and began to act like an actor having too good a time. I could recognize a man in a hurry. I blinked once when he was shot, said too bad, and went back to work the same day, and got ready to begin disliking Lyndon Johnson, when I wanted to take the time. I don't like bullshitters and people who talk a lot, and that's what Presidents do. I hardly read newspapers anymore. Even back then I couldn't figure out why a guy with brains like Sammy Singer would want to go to college just to study things like English literature, which he could read in his spare time.
When I was thirteen and ready for high school, I got into Brooklyn Technical High School, which was not so easy to do back then, and did well in things like math, mechanical drawing, and some of the science courses, as I did not doubt I would. And then I forgot just about everything but the arithmetic when I got out and went to work for my father in the junkshop with my brother and one of my brothers-in-law, who lived with my oldest sister in the basement flat of the four-family brick house with a porch the family already owned. I used the arithmetic most in pinochle, I guess, in the bidding and playing, where I could pretty mu
ch hold my own in the boardwalk and beach games with almost the best of the old-world Jews from Russia and Hungary and Poland and Romania, who talked and talked and talked even while they played, about cards and the Jewish newspapers, and about Hitler, whom I hated early, as early as they did, and Stalin, Trotsky, Mussolini, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom they liked, so I liked him too. In Coney Island I'll bet there was never a single Jewish voter for any Republican except maybe my brother-in-law Phil, who was always against everything everyone else around him was for, and still is.
My father did not think much of my genius at cards. When I asked him what else I should do with my time when we weren't working, he didn't know. When he didn't know something, he didn't want to talk about it. In the army there was no real pinochle, so I made my money at blackjack, poker, and craps. I almost always won because I always knew I would. If I didn't feel I would win I hardly ever played. When I lost, it wasn't much. I could tell in a minute if there were players at work who were just as good as I was and on a streak, and I knew enough to wait. Now I use my math to calculate discounts, costs, tax breaks, and profit margins, and I can do my figuring without even feeling I'm thinking, like my bookkeeper or counter girls could with their computers, and just about as fast. I'm not always right, but I'm almost never wrong. With the idea for metered home heating oil for builders and developers, even after I found the meter that would do it, I never felt sure. With metered oil there'd be no need for a fuel tank for each house in a development, and the company that owned the meter would sell the oil there. But I had the feeling I'd have trouble getting the people at the big oil companies to take me seriously, and I did and they wouldn't. When we met I was not myself. I wore a suit with a vest and had a different personality, because I had the feeling they would not like mine. They didn't care much for the one I used either. I was out of my league and knew it the minute I tried to step into theirs. There were limits, and I had guessed from the start that the sky was not one of mine.
The war was a big help, even to me, with the building boom and the shortages of materials to build with. We made money on the demolitions and on the first Luna Park fire right after the war when my hernias were fixed and I was back in the junkshop and strong as a bull again. I found I still loved the hard and heavy work with my brothers and brother-in-law and the old man. Smokey Rubin and the black guy were gone, but we had others when we needed them, and two trucks and another one we rented by the week. But I hated the dirt, hated the grease and the filth, and the stink from the rot from the ocean in the newspapers from the trash cans on the beach the scavenging ragpickers brought in to sell on the carts they pushed and pulled. I was afraid of the dirt and the air we breathed. I'm afraid of bugs. The old newspapers sometimes came with dead crabs and clumps of mussels with sand and seaweed and with orange peel and other kinds of garbage, and we put those in the middle of the big bales of papers we still wired up with our hands with pliers. There were machines now to bale newspapers, Winkler let us know like the voice of experience on one of those days when he had nothing better to do and came by to watch us working our asses off and hang around until I finished up. Winkler could find machines for anything, secondhand ones too. State-of-the-art machines, he liked to call them. I wasn't sure what that meant.
Winkler had found his state-of-the-art machines to slice up surplus army aerial film into sizes for consumer cameras and planned to make his first millions doing that before Eastman Kodak caught wise and tooled up again for the whole population and took back the market. People were getting married and having babies, and they wanted baby pictures.
"Never mind the machines, I don't want your machines," the old man grumbled at Winkler, grinding his dental plates and speaking in the thick Polish-Jewish accent Claire had hardly ever heard before she started going out with me and sleeping over in my other sister's room. No one would let us get together under that roof. She was upstate Jewish, where things were different than in Coney Island, and both her parents had been born in this country, which was different also. We met when they rented in Sea Gate one summer, for the beach and the ocean--we had one of the best beaches and ocean for swimming when it wasn't filthy with condoms and other things from the toilets on the big ocean liners steaming past into the harbor almost every day, and from sewers. We called the condoms "Coney Island whitefish." We called the garbage and the other floating stuff "Watch-out!" We had another name for the condoms. We called them scumbags. Now we call those pricks in Washington that. Like Noodles Cook, and maybe that new one now in the White House too.
"I got my own machines, two right here," the old man said, and flexed his muscles and smiled. He meant his shoulders and arms. "And three more machines right there." He meant me and my brother and my brother-in-law. "And my machines are alive and don't cost so much. Pull, pull," he called out. "Don't stand there, don't listen to him. We got pipes to cut and boilers to get later."
And he and his three live machines went back to work with our baling claws and long pliers and thin steel baling rods to be pulled and twisted into knots, keeping our eyes and nuts out of the way in case a wire snapped. We tumbled one bale down on top of the other, where they both shook and quivered, in a way Claire thought was sexual, she told me, like a big guy like me tumbling himself down on top of a girl like her.
The old man took to Claire right off, from the time she started showing up at the junkshop to watch and help so I could finish up earlier when we had a date, and because she spent good time talking to my mother, who was not always easy to talk to anymore. And she gift-wrapped the small presents she brought for birthdays and holidays. Gift-wrapped? Claire was the first we knew of to gift-wrap. Before Claire showed up, who in the whole large family, in the whole world of Coney Island, knew about gift-wrapping? Or "stemware"? None in the family was sure what stemware was, but I knew I wanted it once Claire did, and I talked about our "stemware" to a higher-level Italian guy named Rocky I bought things from. Rocky liked me and liked Claire's way of talking straight with him, and after we both moved away and went separately into buying lots and building houses, we sometimes did things for each other. Rocky liked girls, blondes and redheads with lots of makeup and high heels and big bosoms, and was very respectful of wives, like Claire and his own.
Her father was dead, and my father put his foot down at the beginning about me ever sleeping over at her house, even with her mother home.
"Listen, Louie," my father, Morris, told me, "listen to me good. The girl is an orphan. She has no father. Marry her or leave her alone. I'm not making a joke."
I decided to marry her, and I found out, when I thought about it, that I wanted my wife to be a virgin. I was surprised, but that was the kind of a guy I turned out to be. I had to admit that every time I talked a girl into coming across, I thought at least a little bit less of her afterward, even though I usually wanted to do it with them again. And even six years later, when Sammy got married to Glenda with her three children, I still could not make myself understand how any man like him or me could get married to a girl who'd been fucked by someone else, especially by someone who was still alive, and more than once, and by more than one guy. I know it's funny, but that's the kind of a guy I turned out to be.
And still am, because there are things about my two daughters that Claire and I no longer even try to argue about. They wouldn't believe me when I let them know their mother was a virgin until we got married. And Claire made me swear I would never tell that to anyone again.
I usually backed away from Claire's temper, but never from fear. I was not afraid in the army or the prison camps, not even in the firefights and scattered artillery barrages when we were pushing forward through the rest of France and Luxembourg and in toward the German border, not even when I looked up from the snow after the big December surprise and saw those German soldiers with clean guns and nice new white uniforms and the bunch of us were captured.
But I was afraid of the rats in our junkshop. And I hated the filth, especially when I was ba
ck after the war. Even a mouse at a baseboard would be enough to make me nauseous and set me shivering for a whole minute, like I do now when I get the taste of my mother's green apples or even remember it. And when I finally set up in business for myself in the town over two and half hours from our place in Brooklyn, the best location I could find was the building of a bankrupt mousetrap factory near the freight siding of the railroad station, and now there were plenty of mice there too.
One day after another I was disgusted by the dirt under my fingernails, and I was ashamed. All of us were. We scrubbed ourselves clean when we finished up, with cold water from the hose, which was all we had there. It took maybe an hour. Even in the winter we soaped and hosed ourselves down with stiff industrial brushes and lye soap. We didn't want to walk out and come home with all that muck on us. I hated the black beneath the fingernails. In Atlanta in the army I discovered the manicure--along with the shrimp cocktail and the filet mignon beefsteak--and in England I found the manicure again, and in France, moving through, I had my manicure whenever I could. And back in Coney Island I never wanted to be without it. And I never have been. Even in the hospital, at times when I'm feeling the lousiest, I still care about my cleanliness, and a manicure is one of the things I always make sure of getting. Claire already knew about manicures. After our marriage it was part of our foreplay. She liked pedicures too, and having her back scratched and her feet massaged, and I liked holding her toes.
I drove a good car as soon as I had money for one and bought another good one for Claire when I had money for that, and we didn't have to go out on dates in the company pickup anymore, and once I discovered hand-tailored suits I never wanted to dress myself up in anything else. When Kennedy became President it turned out we both had our suits made by the same shop in New York, but I had to admit I never looked as good in mine as he did in his. Sammy always said I didn't know how to dress, and Claire used to say so too, and maybe they're right, because I never did pay much attention to things like colors and style and left that to the tailors to choose for me. But I knew enough to know I always felt just grand walking around in a handmade suit that cost over three hundred dollars with the sales tax and might have cost as much as five hundred. Now they're over fifteen hundred and go up to two thousand, but I still don't care, and I have more of them now than I'll ever have time to wear out, because my weight keeps changing a lot between remissions, and I always like to look my tidiest in a suit and manicure whenever I dress up and go out.