Underworld

  He felt an odd belonging in the duck-and-cover. It was a community of look-alikes and do-alikes, heads down, elbows tucked, fannies in the air. The overbrained boy of the thirty-two pieces and the million trillion combinations liked to nestle in his designated slot, listening to Sister’s voice repeat all the cautions and commands like a siren lifting and dipping in the dopplered haze of another nondescript day.

  Keep calm.

  Do not touch things.

  Do not answer a ringing phone.

  Unplug your toaster.

  Do not drive a motor vehicle.

  Carry a handkerchief to place over your mouth.

  In their prayer posture they could have been anyone from anywhere. The faithful of old Samarkand bending to their hojatollah. The only thing that mattered was the abject entreaty, the adoration of the cloud of all-power—forty softly throbbing bodies arrayed along the walls.

  She ordered them back to their normal places. They got up, retrieved their fallen books and slid a little hangdog into their seats, watching Sister Edgar so they might ascertain how totally foolish they ought to feel.

  Never end a sentence with a preposition and never begin a sentence with an And.

  Sister was not pleased with their performance. She leaned over her desk, hands so tensed on the wood surface they could see the blood drain from her knuckles.

  They waited for her to tell them to do it again.

  5

  * * *

  “Hey Bobby.”

  “I’m busy over here.”

  “Hey Bobby.”

  “I’m busy over here.”

  “Hey Bobby. There’s something we want to tell you.”

  “I told you, okay, I’m busy.”

  “JuJu wants to tell you. Hey Bobby. Listen.”

  “Go way, all right?”

  “Hey Bobby.”

  “Fuck out of here.”

  “Hey Bobby.”

  “You see I’m working over here?”

  “Hey Bobby. JuJu wants to tell you this one thing.”

  “What.”

  “Hey Bobby.”

  “All right. What.”

  “This one thing.”

  “All right. What.”

  “Shit in your fist and squeeze it,” Nick said.

  She didn’t know what to call it, a lightness, a waft, something with change in it, treebloom or fragrant rain, and she stood on the stoop and watched a man across the street chip rust from his fire escape, up on the fourth floor.

  A truck pulled up in front of the grocery two doors down. The grocer’s son came out and unlocked the metal hatch in the sidewalk and lifted the two swing-back sections. The men unloaded crates of soda and took them on a handcart into the store, the older man, or carried them by the hand grips, the younger, down the hatchway into the storage cellar.

  Klara lit a cigarette and thought about going across the street to get the child, who was being minded by the tailor’s wife today, this was a Wednesday, because it was nearly time.

  The younger man wandered over to the stoop on the way to his third or fourth trip into the cellar.

  “You wouldn’t think of saving me a drag, would you, on that cigarette?”

  She looked at him, taking in the question.

  “Hate to ask,” he said.

  She looked at him, taking in the damp shirt and scuffed dungarees, the way he held the crate at belly level, forearms veined beneath the rolled sleeves.

  “One drag could mean the difference,” he said, “between life and death.”

  She said, “In which direction?”

  He smiled and looked away. Then he looked at her and said, “When you need a smoke, does it matter?”

  She reached out and offered the cigarette but he didn’t put down the soda crate and take it. Instead he climbed two steps in her direction and looked right at her and this meant she had to place the cigarette between his lips or withdraw the offer.

  At first she didn’t do either. She took a drag herself and said, “Aren’t you afraid it’ll stunt your growth?”

  Six days later, or seven, she came out of the flat and locked the door. There was someone on the stoop looking in through the vestibule. She knew exactly who it was and what he was here for and she made a gesture that was either a shrug or a come-on. Then she put the key back in the door she’d just locked, unlocking it.

  He followed her into the spare room and when she turned he was right there. He was pretty big and lifted her into the wall. She kicked out of her shoes and grabbed his hair, a fistful, and jerked his face away from hers so she could look at him.

  When they were nearly naked they stood watching each other. There was no bed or sofa and they barely touched, his hand on her upper arm, which she pushed away. She kept waiting to feel crazy but didn’t. He put his hand on her upper arm and she knocked it off. He shrugged and laughed, like what’s going on. She put her hand to his chest. She could make him stop laughing by touching him.

  She said, “Are you a boy I ought to know? Who are you? Not that I give a damn.”

  He was darkish and well-built and he moved her into the wall again. She pushed her hair out of her face. She thought as long as she kept him in this one room, no one could say there was something crazy going on. This was the spare room, the paint room. She wasn’t supposed to be naked here but aside from that, her feet cold on the bare floor, there was nothing awfully strange happening here.

  He had his hands all over her. He smelled of cigarettes and something else, some odd body must mixed with sweat. They kissed for a time that seemed to be hours. It seemed to be taking hours, long sluicy kisses that she disappeared into, distant, empty, feeling his hand brusque on her tit, but also practical all of a sudden, yes, pushing him off and going into the closet down the hall and getting the spare mattress for the child’s bed, a Jewish heirloom of the generations.

  She went back to the room and gave him the mattress, rolled up and tied in a length of twine. He stood it on end and pretended to hump it, his tongue hanging out.

  She noticed the room. He unknotted the twine and flopped the small mattress down and lowered himself to his knees, waiting. The room was beautiful in this light, shadow-banded, all lines and gaps, claire-obscure, and she walked over to him, untrusting of course, and motioned for him to sit back on his haunches.

  She didn’t know what would come next, second to second, and kept resisting even as she moved into him, biting and stroking, the word stroke, the word cock, half resisting everything he did, smelling work and basement on his body, sour rooms webbed in dust.

  They were everywhere on each other, noisy and damp, taking in air the way you drink down water, deep and sort of smacking, in drawn portions. He was here to be explored a little. She liked stopping and watching, or looking away actually, or guiding his hand, or going into the kitchen for a glass of water and coming back and pouring it partly on his chest, a body disproportionate to the bedding, and then handing him the glass and watching him drink and thinking there was nothing crazy going on that she could clearly locate except that she was naked in her workroom.

  Then they were everywhere at once again, looped about each other, everything new for the second time, and she closed her eyes to see them together, which she could almost do, which she could do for the sheerest time, bodies turned and edged and sidled, one way and the other, this and that concurrent, here but also there, like back-fronted Picasso lovers.

  When he went to find the toilet she thought she’d feel strange and crazy and out of her mind, finally, but she just sat on the mattress smoking.

  “Thirteen inch we got.”

  “Thirteen inch.”

  “What-do-you-call. Admiral.”

  “Admiral. This is, what, better than Captain?”

  “Clear. No snow.”

  “Thirteen inch. What kind of thirteen inch? You want thirteen inch? Bend over.”

  “Hey. You and what army?”

  “Bend over. I’ll show you no snow.”

&n
bsp; “You and what army?”

  “You got an Admiral. I give you a Motorola.”

  “Your whole family couldn’t come up with thirteen inches. Including your grandfather and his monkey.”

  Bronzini stood before his class, forty-four stoical souls in general science. Most sixteen years old, a few older, even eighteen, the dopier ones, the discombobulates, left back at some point in the long alpine march to knowledge.

  He stood behind his platformed desk and spoke to the walls and the ceiling, to the windows at the far end of the room. He spoke to the busfumed air of Fordham Road and the university in the trees beyond, where seniors at the college wore bachelor robes and where the names of the alumni dead of World War I were engraved on capitals atop the stone posts that marked the south boundary of the campus.

  Universitas Fordhamensis.

  “We can’t see the world clearly until we understand how nature is organized. We need to count, measure and test. This is the scientific method. Science. The observation and description of phenomena. Phenomena. Things perceptible to the senses. The seasons make sense. At a certain time the cold diminishes, the days grow longer. It happens at the same time every year. We spoke last class about the difference between equinox and solstice and you remember this, I trust, Miss Innocenti. The planets move in an orderly manner. We can predict their passage across the skies. And we can admire the mathematics involved. The ellipsoid passage of the planets around the sun. Ellipse. A slightly flattened circle. Here we detect form and order, we see the laws of nature in their splendid harmony. Think of the rhythm of waves. The birth of babies. When a woman is due to give birth, Applebaum, eyes front, we say she is coming to term. The precision of nature becomes evident in the birth-giving process. The woman follows stages. The fetus grows and develops. We can predict, we can say roughly this week or next week is the time when the child will be born. Coming to term, Miss Innocenti, as you chew your gum a mile a minute. Carrying the fetus to term. Nine months. Seven pounds two ounces. We need numbers to make sense of the world. We think in numbers. We think in decades. Because we need organizing principles, Alfonse Catanzaro, yes, to make us less muddled.”

  A voice piped up at the back of the class.

  “Call him Alan.”

  A rush of amusement moved through the room like wind over dune grass. Bronzini did not have major problems of discipline. The students sensed his unwillingness to engage in confrontation and they read his museful mild delivery, sometimes far-wandering, as a kind of private escape, not unlike their own, from the assignment of the day.

  A second voice near the window, a girl’s, sissy-mimicking.

  “Don’t call me Alfonse. Call me Alan. I want to be an actor in the movies.”

  A deeper ripple of mirth this time and Bronzini was sad for the boy, skinny Alfonse, but did not rebuke them, kept talking, talked over the momentary rollick—skinny sorry Alfonse, grape-stained with tragic acne.

  “We need numbers, letters, maps, graphs. We need scientific formulas to understand the structure of matter. E equals MC squared.”

  He wrote the equation on the blackboard.

  “How is it that a few marks chalked on a blackboard, a few little squiggly signs can change the shape of human history? Energy, mass, speed of light. Protons, neutrons, electrons. How small is the atom? I will tell you. If people were the size of atoms—think about it, Gagliardi—the population of the earth would fit on the head of a pin. Never mind the vast amounts of energy stored in matter. Matter. Something that has mass—a solid, a liquid, a gas. Never mind what happens when we split the atom and release this energy. Energy. The capacity of a physical system to do work. I want to know how it is that a few marks on a slate or a piece of paper, a little black on white, or white on black, can carry so much information and contain such shattering implications. Never mind the energy packed in the atom. What about the energy contained in this equation? This is the real power. How the mind operates. How the mind identifies, analyzes and represents. What beauty and power. What marvels of imagination does it require to reduce the complex forces of nature, all those unseeable magical actions inside the atom—to express all this with a bing and a bang on a blackboard. The atom. The unit of matter regarded as the source of nuclear energy. The Greeks of the fifth century B.C. proposed the idea of the atom. B.C., Miss Innocenti. Before Chewing Gum. Small, small, small. Something inside something else inside something else. Down, down, down. Under, under, under. Next time, chapter seven. Be prepared for an oral quiz.”

  Barely an audible groan.

  “Maximum public embarrassment,” Bronzini said.

  They bundled out of the room and into the long halls, where four thousand others were beginning to mass in the vast hormonal clamor that marked the condition of release.

  It was still winter but there was something soft in the air today, that rhythmic fiction of early spring, so sweet to be deceived by, and Albert took his usual route into the shopping streets, poking into stores and social clubs.

  Here he ate a pignoli cookie and asked after the woman’s son, an artilleryman in Korea. There he thumbed his mustache and stood amused in the company of an eager complainant, a man loud with the measliest grievance, pink-eyed and spitting.

  In the pork store he talked to a couple of newcomers, Calabrian, a woman and her trail-along daughter, and it made him think of his mother and sister, down that memory tunnel, and how the girl fairly clung to her mother.

  Now the mother lay in a plot in Queens, in a great wide meadow of stones and crosses, thousands of souls outside the ordinary sprawl, a sovereign people uncomplaining.

  He bought meat here, fish there, and headed home. He thought about the saint’s day every summer when members of the church band walked through the streets playing heart-heavy pieces that brought women’s faces to the open windows of the tenements. It was the custom of the musicians to slow-step along a certain residential street and stop at a particular private house, a frame structure with a front porch and rose trellis, the home of the olive oil importer. When they stopped playing the family invited them in and they entered in their band uniforms of black pants and white shirt, carrying their instruments. Such an old and dignified custom, the elderly men, the obese trombonist, the young man hollowed out by the bass drum strapped to his torso, each shuffling into the shady house for a glass of red wine.

  JuJu didn’t want to follow him in but he had to. Once Nick went in, JuJu had to go in too.

  He’d wanted to see a person dead and Nick was going to show him. They stood in the anteroom of the funeral home near Third Avenue, where twenty or thirty men were smoking and talking.

  “Maybe this is not a good idea,” JuJu said.

  “Just be sure you don’t laugh.”

  “What am I gonna laugh?”

  “Show some respect,” Nick said. “We want them to think we’re family.”

  Nick shoved him and they went into the viewing room. Women sat in folding chairs saying their beads and there were sofas against the walls, younger women looking strange in black, sealed away from knowing, with several small girls placed among them, grave and pale.

  They went up to the casket and looked in. It was an old man with nostrils gaped wide and the hands of a carpenter or mason, copper fingers rough and notched.

  “Here’s your body. Soak it up.”

  They knelt at the casket.

  “He doesn’t look that bad,” JuJu said.

  “I think they plucked his eyebrows.”

  “I thought it would be different,” JuJu said.

  “Different how?”

  “I don’t know. White,” JuJu said. “The whole face chalk white.”

  “They put makeup and grooming.”

  “White and stiff, I thought.”

  “He’s not stiff, this man?”

  “He could almost be asleep. If he slept in a suit.”

  “So you’re disappointed then.”

  “I’m a little, yeah, disappointed.”

&nbs
p; “Why don’t you say it louder,” Nick said, “so they can drag us out to the street and beat us to death.”

  “This was a bad idea of yours.”

  “We’re supposed to have an envelope,” Nick said.

  “This was a bad idea. What kind of envelope?”

  “If we’re family,” Nick said. “A mass card or money.”

  “I thought an envelope is when you get married. Not when you die.”

  “An envelope is when you do anything. They’re always doing envelopes.”

  “This was a bad idea. I’m ready to leave.”

  “Too soon. Say a prayer. Show them you’re praying. Show them respect,” Nick said. “Women in black dresses. We don’t show respect, they tear us apart.”

  In a corner of the poolroom a guy named Stevie hawked up a wad of pearly phlegm, called an oyster, and spat it down the neck of his Coke bottle.

  JuJu said, “I ask you for a slug of soda, you do this?”

  “Hey. I didn’t say no.”

  “But you do this? You spit in it?”

  “You asked for a slug. I’m saying. Take two slugs.”

  Stevie cleared another oyster out of his throat and spat it into the bottle and handed the bottle to JuJu.

  “But you do this? You hack up this big thing, which you think nobody in his right mind’s gonna drink from a bottle that has this big thing floating in there.”

  “You want a slug. Hey. Take a slug. Take whatever.”

  “So you’re giving me your whole soda, you’re saying. Take whatever. If I’m crazy enough to drink it.”

  “What’s mines is yours,” Stevie said.

  JuJu smiled falsely, a look with a mocking quality. Then he drank the whole thing down in one long slug. He followed with a small gassy belch and tossed the bottle back to Stevie.

  Nick watched in admiration.

  Later that night he took Mike the Dog out for a walk. He walked along the hospital wall and then went east through the empty streets. He stood across the street from the building where the woman lived. There was a bed in the front room, stripped of sheets, an empty bed cranked up, easy enough to see just to the right of the stoop, the curtains half drawn, a lamp lit nearby, and he stood there a while smoking.