Mile High

  “What’s Shannon-Phillips?”

  “Shannon-Phillips?” He was having such difficulty breathing that he left her side and walked to the window, gripping the metal handles tightly with each hand. “The best art school in the entire world, that’s what Shannon-Phillips is.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well?” He turned to face her.

  “What would I say to what?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You just asked me, what would I say if you could get me a scholarship.”

  “Well! I meant would you like that? Would you be free to take it? Is your family financially secure enough to let you have two years of real art study?”

  “I thought the scholarships paid for that.”

  “They do! But I mean your family might want you to be out earning money or something.”

  “Or something?”

  “To bring in income. To help support!”

  “My family wants me to try for civil service. I mean, well, like if there was anybody who gave out scholarships to the Delehanty Institute, that would be more what my family thinks.”

  “That would be a tragedy! That would be real, stark tragedy!” Mr. Seligson said. He started toward her very slowly. “Mayra, sweetheart, listen to me. Call me Mort if you want to. Right now there are maybe a thousand young painters in Paris. some of them very talented, and let me tell you this”—he reached out for a front grab at her shoulders, but she began the awful smile and backed away—“there isn’t one of those talented young painters who wouldn’t give five years of his or her life to get a scholarship to Shannon-Phillips.” He inhaled and exhaled slowly. “You’re not just another schoolgirl to me, Mayra.” He shuddered. “You are a woman. Of great sensibilities. You can be a great painter. In my humble opinion.” He had her with her back to the blackboard. He got the fleshy parts of each upper arm and began to knead them absent-mindedly, and a dry smell, like steam, came away from him. She turned the whole force of the awful smile on him. His hands dropped away. He dug the back of his hand into his forehead. He turned away to the desk and picked up a large manila envelope. “Show this to your family. It has everything about Shannon-Phillips and an application. The holidays start tomorrow. We’ll be apart for nine days. You’ll have a chance to think about everything. Everything. And if you feel you need me—if you want to talk it all over much more thoroughly—my home address and phone number are in that envelope.” He stared at her solemnly, wheeled away, walked to the window and gripped the window handles again as he stared out at the cement tennis courts. Mayra left very quietly with the envelope.

  She was doing her French homework when Mama got home from work at seven-thirty, bubbling. Every customer had come through with Christmas loot and they had all paid up any back money that was due. She had a hundred and thirty-six dollars in cash and therefore a solid line of credit with Relleh’s. “And that ain’t all,” she said triumphantly. “Looka here.” She lifted a sky-blue nightgown with a lacy top out of the deep shopping bag. “Just happens to be your size.”

  “It’s beautiful!”

  “Now, this here is some kind of Filipino perfume that somebody give to Mrs. Gibson, but she never heard of it so she give it away. Unopened. She didn’t even smell it! It says ‘Made in Manila, P.I.,’ so she didn’t want it. I bet you it costs ten bucks.” Mayra was holding the nightgown up to herself in front of a mirror. “Looks real good,” Mama said. “And we got an electric juicer. This lady’s husband—the new people from Dover, New Jersey?—he won’t let nothing German in their house. I got a ten-pound turkey, and I say to hell with waiting two days til Christmas, let’s cook it now.”

  “My art teacher’s got big eyes and hands for me,” Mayra said.

  Mama began to unwrap the turkey. “What’d he do?”

  “He told me to come back after school. I think he locked the door—anyway, he pulled down the shade—then he said what would I say if he said he might be able to get me a scholarship to the best art school in the whole world, and I said what would I say about what?”

  “That was good.” Mama looked up at the wall at the painting of two somber Puerto Rican children crossing a field of golden wheat under a brilliant blue sky. She did a rough arm’s-length fitting of the large turkey and the tiny oven. “Never get that bird in there. I got to take it to the baker’s and get them to slide it in the oven.”

  “I’ll go. You read this.” Mayra gave her mother the manila envelope. “It’s all about the scholarship. He gave it to me complete with his home telephone number.”

  They had a wonderful Christmas weekend. They kept eating turkey, went to two movies, watched TV and went to the Apollo. They were living in a top-floor apartment on Manhattan Avenue near the Monongahela Democratic Club, where Mama was a registered building captain, facing the cathedral, which Mayra could stare out at and sketch, not far from the highest point of the Ninth Avenue El, which was a very popular suicide leap. Mama worked hard for the Monongahela Democratic Club because she said that the leader, Jimmy Hines, by cooperating with Dutch Schultz, had brought prosperity to Harlem, because he was doing so great himself and he always paid off for loyalty. On Christmas Day at about four o’clock Mama turned off the TV and said that the time had come to talk about the scholarship. “Now, I got to tell you straight out. I hate a cockteaser, because that always makes trouble. But this here teacher has got to be handled without any problems, because you’re sixteen going on seventeen, you’re getting out of high school, and you’re too young for civil service. We got to play this art teacher by ear, baby. We got to get that scholarship, but we got to block him good.”

  Mr. Seligson seemed much less tense when school started after the holidays and she turned over to him her application to Shannon-Phillips. He was pleasant but impersonal. They got through January and most of February that way. At the end of February she asked him if there had been any news about the scholarship and he said he’d be happy to look into it for her. In the first week of March he said he had some news but that it wouldn’t be fair to discuss it on the class’s time, so they could meet after school to discuss it. Mayra needed advice from her coach first, so she said she had to go to the dentist’s that afternoon and they made it for the next day.

  She and Mama examined the options. First, he might be a harmlessly genuine admirer of her painting, but they skipped that possibility without discussion. Second, it didn’t seem likely that he would make his big move in the classroom, no matter how late he could persuade Mayra to stay, on whatever pretext. If he did make the move, then Mayra would have to work her smile or keep moving out of reach or deliver a kick in the seeds, but the kick could mean the end of the scholarship, although not necessarily. If he worked it all out with care and boxed her into a place where she had to leave the school with him to go somewhere, she should flatly refuse unless the excuse was built around art—which was what it was most likely to be, because they had nothing else in common—then she had to say her mother was an art bug and that her mother would have to go along too. “After all, you’re sixteen going on seventeen,” Mama said, “and you can get away with stuff like that.” They decided on two constants: She was not to be alone with him anywhere outside the classroom and she was never to laugh at him no matter how silly he might become. “Laugh and we lose him,” Mama told her. “Keep a straight face and we got a chance to wear him down, but the main thing is to keep pressing on him about the news on the scholarship, and we can work from there.”

  It was a bleak, dirty day. The tarnished winter city lay stiffly outside the windows of the classroom. Mr. Seligson kept his back to the wall on which had been tacked the work of Van Gogh, a sure anaphrodisiac. Directly over Mr. Seligson’s shoulder Vincent’s mean little red-stubbed face glared at her. “Ah, Mayra,” Mr. Seligson said, as though she had surprised him in a reverie on art. “Good afternoon. Come in. I have the application papers all prepared. Would you like to see them?”

  “Where are they?”

  “Righ
t here on my desk.”

  “Oh. Yes. Then I would like to see them.” But she didn’t move forward. She remained in her querencia, shuffling her feet, and Mr. Seligson sidled across her terrain as cautiously as though he were concealing a hole in the seat of his trousers. He moved to her left, while she sidled just as carefully, moving to her right, always facing him, and keeping her arms as stiff as horns so that she could hold him off if he should lunge. They made it to the desk at approximately the same time. “Here they are,” the art teacher said hoarsely. He reached out to lift the form, but his hands were trembling, so he withdrew slightly and nodded at the desk top instead. Mayra watched him peripherally. Curiosity gripped her and she leaned over the desk to read the forms and as she did she felt Mr. Seligson enclose her, pretending to lean over the desk to look with her in case the Board of Education should bust into the room, but his offside hand cupped her breast and she could feel the bulge of his trousers at her buttock. She stepped backward, felt her high heel touch his instep, then she shifted her weight to bear down fully. He stifled an outcry. She apologized, and as he fell back, picked up the application form and moved out of reach to stand in front of the window.

  Mr. Seligson fell into an approximation of Cheyne-Stokes breathing. His eyes jerked wildly, toward then away from each other in a deeply disturbed labyrinth. Each cycle became more intense and was followed by what seemed to Mayra to be total cessation for fifteen or twenty seconds until the rales would begin again, and through the labored gasping he tried to speak to maintain the illusion of normal composure. “As—you—can see—my dear. All—is—in—order. All. Complete. I shall pop it in—it shall be popped—into the mailbox—this—very—afternoon.” He groped to his right to find the chair, then sank into it slowly. Mayra said, “I’ll mail it, Mr. Seligson.” She jammed it into her purse. “I just can’t thank you enough.” She crossed the room, walking backward, and opened the door to the corridor behind her. He waved at her weakly as a captain from his bridge might salute the last departing lifeboat. The door closed. He put his arms across the desk and rested his head on them silently.

  Mama read the application very carefully, then she had Mayra make a copy of it. She studied Mr. Seligson’s signature and said that the open loops and high letters indicated a very artistic nature. They went out together that evening and mailed the letter at the post office slot, not just in a mailbox. Eight days later, on a Friday afternoon, Mr. Seligson invited Mayra to tea at his apartment on the following day. She asked if it was to show her his paintings. He said he had many of his paintings there and she was welcome to see them but that there had been some developments about Shannon-Phillips and they needed to have a long talk. She said she thought she’d better bring her mother if it was about Shannon-Phillips. “You are not to bring your mother,” Mr. Seligson said primly, “and that is final.”

  Mama said there was nothing to do but to follow through. They could do nothing on a Friday afternoon, tomorrow would be Saturday, Shannon-Phillips would be closed, so they couldn’t find out whether she was accepted or not—so she’d have to take her chances. If Seligson actually was legit, okay. If not, the first time he tried to put his hand down her dress or up her dress she was to kick him in the ankle if they were standing up or drive her elbow into his stomach if they were sitting down. Then while he recovered she was to run all over the apartment, leaving her fingerprints on every surface she could think of, all the unlikely places—such as the ceiling of the refrigerator—and remember where she left them.

  “You know, baby, there are all kinds of indirect ways of getting things done, but the kind way is the best way. You remember Miss Pupchen, the little blonde chick on Forty-eighth between Fifth and Madison? Well, this very, very, very rich john stashed her there. We won’t talk about him. I mean if we can work it out that way we won’t even talk about him. He had a lock on her with a chauffeur who was really like a stoolie and a bodyguard—she couldn’t do nothing. And a Chinee secretary who could watch her in the places where the chauffeur couldn’t go. The john dropped by whenever he felt like. All crazy hours or maybe not at all for like two weeks. Miss Pupchen was flipping her wig, except it was good money and lots of good sharp clothes, but she had this thing about herself that she was oversexed and she needed more than anybody else, but she couldn’t even score the chauffeur or the secretary because those two was being paid to cancel each other out. Like they didn’t even talk to each other. I was referee. The john knew me from when I was with Miss Baby, way back. I remember I had no connection at the moment and I was doing laundry at Four seventy-one Park and this very smooth, skinny guy came around and he offers me solid money to be maid for Miss Pupchen. She was no hustler, you understand. She just always had a rich john keeping her, so there was no tips in it for me, and besides being the maid and all like that my job is to keep an eye on the chauffeur and the Chinee chick and to call a certain number if either one of them chopped at Miss Pupchen.

  “Well, it’s a living. And that Miss Pupchen was a little doll. She used to cry so hard. She says she’s so oversexed that it hurts her when she don’t get it and that I have to help her get a little relief for which she is willing to pay well. I see what she’s after, and it makes me sad to say it but I tell her I only know how to pitch righty but thanks anyway, and why don’t we just play gin to get her mind off it? Well, we played gin. I’d win a couple hundred, then she’d win a couple hundred—mostly we broke even. But she keeps talking about her troubles, and I tell her it would be nice if she was to call up her mama and just breeze. Just talk. Because, I mean, I know that’s a good thing for anybody. So she did. She says why didn’t she think of that? We were on East Forty-eighth in New York and her mother lived in Vienna, Austria, that’s in Europe, and Miss Pupchen kept an open line going right around the clock. And Miss Pupchen had her mother hire the neighborhood drunk or somebody like that, because it was all in German, and that man sat there Sats, Suns and Hols to call the mother to the phone, and she kept that open call going for five and a half months. She’d come bare-ass out of her shower in her itty-bitty mules with the big pom-poms and she’d pass the phone laying there and yell ‘Loodvig!’ into it and he’d answer. If it wasn’t late at night there the mother would get on and they’d breeze about the weather or whatever, and the idea that she was oversexed went right out of her head because she was not only always talking to her mother but she figured she was getting even with this rich john.

  Well, we waited. Five weeks went by and the phone bill had to be sent to The Man. Nothing. Nobody says anything. We waited four months, but nothing. Finally, one night when the john is laying on top of her she starts to yell at him right in the middle of it. She tells him he’s a big chump and how she’s been taking him for his roll with the telephone and how she kept that open line going all those weeks, and you know what he said?”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said he was proud of her that she thought that much of her mother and that it was one of the nicest things he ever heard. I mean, that’s what he said.”

  “What’d she do?”

  “She had a nervous breakdown right after that. I don’t suppose she sent her mama even a post card ever again. And that’s the whole point, baby. Hustling johns is a loser’s racket. You can’t win in it. But what I mean is, it was a nice way to handle her differences with that john, and you got to figure out the same approach with this horny art teacher.”

  Mr. Seligson’s apartment was on Washington Heights between Broadway and Audubon Avenue. He was so nervous waiting for her all day that he couldn’t stay in the apartment and went to a Jack Holt double feature in a revival house, and what with the pressures on him he broke out in pimples all over the backs of his hands, so he bought a pair of white cotton gloves to give the rash a chance to go away by five o’clock. He wished he had gone to a Turkish bath instead of the movie. He worried about making love to Mayra with gloves on. It could give her a fixation and he’d be responsible. And worse, he ought to be thi
nking about what he’d be missing with gloves on. Never had there been such skin. His legs turned to water when he thought about it.

  Mayra was precisely on time. He led her to a chair, then went to the kitchen for the tea and the cookies that he had bought in the Hungarian bakery where they also sold bean soup to take out. Mayra started talking the moment she arrived. She kept talking when he left the room, she merely spoke more loudly. “Surely Giorgione represents the finest High Renaissance painting of the Venetian school, don’t you think, Mr. Seligson? He outgrew Bellini, no matter what anybody says about the ‘Virgin of Castelfranco,’ and no one could spiritualize a landscape the way Giorgione could do it.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” he yelled from the kitchen. He took down the English cookbook to check that he was making the tea the right way. He could hardly concentrate on the printing the way she was demanding his attention.

  “And as for those rebellious Pre-Raphaelites,” she yelled as though being drawn into his English polarization, “it seems quite clear now, doesn’t it, that they simply were not the rejected outcasts they pretended to be. When have painters ever been such darlings of the speculators? I mean, aside from right now, can you think of a more marketable period for art, plain supermarket art?”

  “No. No, I can’t,” he shouted back at her. He peeked under his white glove while he waited for the tea to finish steeping. The hands had definitely improved! It was going to be all right! He stripped the gloves off. He wished he had the talcum powder in the kitchen. No matter. He’d use flour.