Underworld

  Mr. Imperato liked to joke about our famous forefathers. Abraham Linguin’ and George Washingmachine.

  In warmer weather Matty sat at the board in his beeveedees, how little he looked, so thin and pale, but his eyes were fixed on the pieces so hard and hot she could easily think there was someone else in there, sent to possess the boy.

  The trick was, the thing was he was not the center of the family when he was here. She was the center, the still center, the strength. Now that he was gone, she could no longer make herself feel still, or especially central. Jimmy was central now. That was the trick, the strange thing. Jimmy was the heartbeat, the missing heartbeat.

  It was a promise that was also a call to duty. Tell him I’m making gravy.

  They said, See what you’re gonna do.

  This was a threat to a son or daughter who was not behaving. Straighten out. Change your attitude. See what you’re gonna do.

  They said, Who’s better than me?

  This was a statement of the importance of small pleasures. A meal, a coat with a fake-fur collar, a chair in front of a fan on a hot day.

  It did not happen violent. It was the small thing of a weak man walking out the door. It was not big. It was not men with guns who tie paving stones to someone’s ankles and put a bullet in his head. It was small and weak.

  If you could feel the soul of an experience, then you earned the right to say, Who’s better than me?

  Jimmy knew some dialect. Abruzzese. He used to take the knives down and talk to the knife grinder and he found it satisfying to use the dialect. They talked while the man sharpened the knives and it was something Jimmy did not do with men he saw more often who came from the same region, or their people did. He talked to the knife grinder because he saw him only rarely and this was an arrangement he preferred.

  They called her Rose. They had assurance and force, most of them, they had nerve and personality and loud voices, not all but most.

  She did her beadwork, her piecework, working off the books just like Jimmy.

  He slept continuous. Never got up in the night. Drank coffee and slept right through. Didn’t seem to feel the cold. Walked barefoot on the cold floors, slept in his shorts on those winter nights when she’d finally hear the heat whistling in the pipes, her signal to get up for mass.

  Somebody put serious money on a horse called Terra Firma and he began to worry when it finished first.

  She listened to Matty analyze a position. They stopped the game occasionally and talked out the moves.

  He was not a braggadocio. He told sly quiet stories late at night.

  Conceal, conceal. But it was hard.

  The baseball man Charlie Dressen was a horseplayer. Jimmy took his bets. He took bets from Toots Shor. He left seven hundred dollars in a coat that she took to the dry cleaner. The coat was his private bank, only he never told her, and she took it to the dry cleaner and went back when she found out about the money and they said, What money, lady? There was an inside pocket she didn’t know was there. What money, lady?

  She applied the beads with a wood-handled needle, following the design printed on the fabric.

  But how is it we did so much laughing? How is it we went dancing the night of the seven hundred dollars and we laughed and drank?

  He was not a harum-scarum guy who took crazy chances but the long shot came in and he began to feel the pressure to pay off.

  Who’s better than me, they said.

  This was a statement she couldn’t make, partly out of personality but also because she could not feel the ordinary contentment of things the way she used to. She could not feel favored or charmed.

  He’d replaced her life with his leaving. The voice running through her head was not the voice she used to hear before he left.

  But how is it we ate a German meal on 86th Street and went dancing at the Corso down the block, seven hundred dollars poorer?

  There was less of her now and more of other people. She was becoming other people. Maybe that’s why they called her Rose.

  Nick was walking the halls at school. This close to Christmas the Catholic school kids were already off, Matty was off, the shopping area was decorated with lights and wreaths, the merchants were putting out trees at five in the morning, which you could smell from a distance, and there were eels on sale for Christmas Eve and spruce and balsam fir stacked against the walls, from upstate, and kids unloading crates of grapes from California for customers who made their own wine.

  Nick wandered the halls smoking and Remo came out of a classroom wearing tight pegged pants and the Eisenhower jacket he never took off.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Taking a walk,” Nick said.

  “You take walks indoors?”

  “You been out? Fucking freezing. What are you doing here?”

  “Hey. I go to school here. What are you doing here?”

  “Talking a walk,” Nick said.

  “I got a pass to see the doctor.”

  “The nurse. That’s who you want to see.”

  “Save me a drag,” Remo said.

  “Where’s home economics?”

  “I don’t know. The end of that hall maybe. I hear you’re working.”

  “Ice-cream plant.”

  “Pays decent?”

  “Forget about it.”

  “It’s steady then?”

  “You have to shape up. Like the docks,” Nick said, and he felt like a man, saying this. “A guy says, You, you, you, you. Everybody else goes home.”

  Remo seemed impressed.

  “You get to eat the merchandise?”

  “Actually, you want to know the truth.”

  “What?”

  “We steal it and sell it. But we have to work fast.”

  Remo didn’t know whether to believe this. He reached for the butt-end of Nick’s cigarette and Nick gave it to him and he took two hungry drags and then dropped it, stomped it, exhaled and went into the doctor’s office.

  After the bell rang and the classrooms emptied out Nick spotted Loretta and Gloria and they walked out onto Fordham Road together.

  “Allie’s father hit a number,” Gloria said.

  “I know. I heard.”

  “He had five dollars on it if you can believe that.”

  “It’s true. I know it for a fact,” Nick said.

  An older guy named Jasper, a noted cuntman, sat in a Ford convertible, with the top down yet, in this weather, motor running, listening to the radio. The two girls were quiet walking by, quiet together, by mutual consent, exchanging unspoken thoughts about Jasper.

  “Who puts five dollars?” Loretta said. “They put fifty cents. They put a dollar if they’re feeling very, very lucky.”

  “He had a dream,” Nick said.

  “He had a dream. What kind of dream?”

  “What kind of dream. He dreamed the number. What else would he dream?”

  “For five dollars,” she said, “it must have been very convincing.”

  “It was in technicolor,” Gloria said.

  “If I dream a number I think I’m gonna die on that date,” Loretta said. “This man gives five dollars to a gangster.”

  “Gangster. What kind of gangster? He gave the money to Annette Esposito.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “She’s a Catholic school girl. She goes to my brother’s school,” Nick said. “She runs numbers for her father. Every day she makes the rounds.”

  “In her school uniform,” Gloria said.

  “The customers like a runner they can trust.”

  They walked past White Castle, where kids were eating sawdust hamburgers, and then Gloria crossed the street and went into her building.

  “Where’s your radio? You used to carry your radio all the time,” Loretta said.

  “I had a radio in my car. That’s the only radio I needed.”

  “It’s for the best,” she said.

  “You think it’s for the best.”

  “I’m relieved
,” she said. “That car, my god. What wasn’t wrong with it? Not to mention it was stolen property.”

  “We didn’t have nice times in that car?”

  “The drive-in was nice. Not the parking on dark streets. Like criminals.”

  “That’s what we were,” he said.

  She laughed. She had two teeth that didn’t exactly match, on either side of the incisors, and he thought it gave her a sexy smile.

  They turned east and he saw a garbage truck and saw JuJu’s father, who was a garbageman, jump down off the truck and stride across the sidewalk and flip the lid off a can and muscle the can over to the truck and then upend it into the grinder.

  “See that guy? That’s JuJu’s father,” he said with an edge of pride in his voice.

  He admired the graceful action, the long continuous body motion from the cellar entrance to the truck, the way the man wrestled the can across the sidewalk, all forearm action, and the freedom to make noise, skidding the can and running the grinder, and then the hoist and dump, a shoulder motion mainly, and the original pitch of the lid, a gesture of half contempt but also graceful, which he earned by the nature of the work he did.

  And flinging the can back toward the wrought iron fence that guarded the basement steps. Also a privilege of the job, Nicky thought.

  They reached her building and went inside.

  Loretta stood in the hallway and turned to be kissed and he kissed her, moving her up against the mailboxes with her books between their bodies sliding back and forth.

  “Who’s home?” he said.

  “They’re all home.”

  He pressed her into the mailboxes and could hear the friction of her skirt when she moved against the slits in the metal where you could see if you had mail.

  “You still think it’s for the best I don’t have my car?”

  “It’s broad daylight, car or no car.”

  “We could park in the parking lot at Orchard Beach. Just the seagulls and us.”

  She kissed him.

  “So steal another car,” she said slurringly.

  He opened his eyes while he was kissing her and she was looking at him with wide brown eyes that seemed to be thinking seven things at once. She knew he’d had sex with other girls, handjobs, blowjobs, whatever else, putting it in taking it out, putting it in keeping it in, bareback, rubber, whatnot, and she knew who the girls were, from Washington Avenue, from Valentine Avenue, one from Kingsbridge Road, because somebody told somebody who made sure it got back to her, and he knew that she knew, from Gloria passing a remark to JuJu, like one of the radio serials his mother listened to, doing her beadwork.

  “You’ll meet me tomorrow?” she said.

  “I work tomorrow.”

  “They’re all home. What can I say?”

  “I have to work. What can I say?”

  “When’s the last time you washed your hair?” she said.

  He walked a while and ended up going into the zoo, on an impulse, entering by the big bronze gate, and he went up past the sea lions in a cold stiff wind with the place just about empty of visible humans. He missed his shit-heap Chevy, no plates, no insurance, no license to drive it, transmission shot to hell, the door on the passenger side opening up unannounced every time he made a left turn, driving only at night in a skulking and shadowy manner, mostly alone, smoking, the radio frequently fading out.

  He was angry about something but it was something else, not the car or the girlfriend—the thing that ran through his mind even in his sleep.

  He walked for half an hour and then stood by the wildfowl pond. When he was in grade school he’d come to the zoo with a kid named Martin Mannion, and Martin Mannion had climbed a fence, it was a day like this, wintry and empty, and Martin Mannion climbed into the buffalo enclosure and stood there waving his jacket at the buffalo, the bison, and the huge nappy animal from off a five-cent piece just looked at him indifferent and Martin Mannion got so mad he took out his dick and peed.

  It was beginning to get dark now. He stood at the edge of the pond and lit another cigarette, turning his back to the wind.

  “Call me Alan, he says.”

  “Call me Alan.”

  “I says, What’s Alan? He says to me, That’s my name.”

  “That’s my name.”

  “I look at him. I says to him, How could that be your name? You already got a name.”

  “What happened to Alfonse?”

  “I says, What happened to Alfonse? You were Alfonse for sixteen years. Your grandfather was Alfonse.”

  “The both of them.”

  “Two grandfathers Alfonse. What happened? He says, I’m not them.”

  “Miserable little cross-eyed.”

  “I’m not them, he says.”

  “He’s king shit, that’s who he is.”

  “Call me Alan, he says.”

  “I’m not them.”

  “I could break his back.”

  “I’m not them.”

  “I says, Who are you?”

  “He’s king shit, that’s who he is.”

  “I says, Who are you, stunat’, if you’re not them?”

  Giulio Belisario, JuJu, had never seen a dead body, including at a wake, and he was interested in the experience.

  “Who’s gonna die,” Nicky said, “just so you can satisfy your curiosity?”

  “I missed my grandmother when I had the measles.”

  “I’m looking around. I don’t see any volunteers. You hear about Allie’s father?”

  “What?”

  “You don’t know this?”

  “What? He died?”

  “He hit a number.”

  “I was gonna say.”

  “He’s buying a Buick. One day he’s a fishmonger. The next day.”

  “I was gonna say. I just saw him yesterday in the market. How could he be dead?”

  “How long does it take?” Nicky said.

  “I’m only saying.”

  “One day he’s selling scungilli. The next day, hey, kiss my ass.”

  “Who’s better than him?” JuJu said.

  “I’m driving a big-ass Buick. Stand clear, you peasants.”

  They were in the grocery that occupied a storefront in Nicky’s building at 611. The grocer’s wife, Donato’s wife, the only name they knew her by, tolerated their presence because she liked Nicky’s mother. Outside five older guys were gathered and one of them, Scarfo, was doing broad jumps at the instigation of the other four. Scarfo wanted to take the sanitation test and they’d convinced him he needed to broad-jump six feet from a standing start and he was out there in his good coat and creased pants jumping cracks in the sidewalk, to see if he could do it.

  The two young men stood inside the store smoking and watching.

  “I saw your father,” Nicky said.

  “He’s picking up in the neighborhood, temporary.”

  “He ever find anything in the garbage?”

  “What could he find? That he brings home? Forget about it.”

  “He could find something valuable.”

  “My mother would have a conniption fit. Forget about it.”

  Donato’s wife gave them each a piece of sliced salami and they watched Scarfo work on his jump.

  Matty bit his shirt cuff, a slink of a kid with lively eyes, and he looked across the board at Mr. Bronzini, who was smiling twistedly.

  “You killed me,” Albert said.

  “I saw everything.”

  “You came, you saw and so on. And you killed me.”

  He knew that Matty loved hearing this. He loved winning at chess and he loved hearing the loser declare himself dead. Because that’s what he was, kaput, and it was Matty who’d crushed him.

  The boy’s mother stood in the doorway watching.

  “How many moves did it take? No, don’t tell me,” Albert said. “I want to preserve some self-respect.”

  Matty and his mother were delighted.

  “He’s beginning to think in systems,” Albert sa
id to her. “I think this is a sign that good things will begin happening again.”

  The adults had a cup of tea and Matt stayed at the board, a small floating godhead above the pawns and rooks. The boy had taken some more losses lately, including a rout at the Manhattan Chess Club, and this was deeply disappointing all around because Father Paulus had appeared.

  Came, saw, said little and left.

  After a while Albert went over to Arthur Avenue, where he saw the chestnut man pushing his oven on wheels, a cartoon contraption, smoke coming out of the bent metal chimney. There was a peach basket appended to one end of the oven to hold the unroasted chestnuts and sweet potatoes.

  He bought some chestnuts, which he more or less juggled in a piece of wrapping paper because they were damn hot, and he carried them down the side street into the barbershop.

  George the Barber led him into the back room, where they sat at a small table eating the chestnuts and washing them down with wincing sips of Old Mr. Boston, a rye whiskey unknown to the Cabots and the Lodges.

  Albert knew that George had a wife in a little house somewhere, and a married daughter somewhere else, but the man was otherwise unimaginable outside his barbership. Stout, bald, unblessed with excess personality, he belonged completely to the massive porcelain chairs, two of them, to the hot-towel steamer, the stamped tin ceiling, the marble shelf beneath the mirror, the tinted glass cabinets, the bone-handled razor and leather strop, the horn combs, the scissors and clippers, the cup, the brush, the shaving soap, the fragrance of witch hazels and brilliantines and talcums.

  George the Barber knew who he was.

  “Biaggio hit a number,” he said.

  “Who, Biaggio?”

  “He hit a number. Six hundred to one.”

  “From the fish market Biaggio?”

  “He hit a number,” George said.

  When the chestnuts were gone he refilled their glasses and they sat there sipping quietly, thinking about someone hitting a number.

  “And how is the woman?” he said to Albert.

  “The woman.”

  “Yes, how is the marriage?” he said.

  The radio was tuned to the Italian station and an announcer was signing off with repeated cries of baci a tutti, which was fine with Albert, absolutely, the way he felt in the bracing wake of the whiskey.