The Boy Who Granted Dreams

  The salesman laughed too. Again he stroked the dashboard. “All right then, Bill, where you headed?” he asked.

  “Detroit, Michigan,” said Bill.

  21

  Manhattan, 1923

  Christmas was shaking with rage. His hands, clenching the sheet of paper, shook too, with the tension he felt. He didn’t hear the shouts of the children playing all around them in a Central Park dusted with spring snow; and he didn’t feel the chill of the March day that couldn’t let go of winter. The only thing he could see was the letter, written on cheap ruled paper. He didn’t notice anything; he had been sucked under by the anger that had exploded inside him, overflowing. He stared at the clumsy handwriting, reading the message again.

  Hey jew bitch are U thinkin about me? I bet U are Well I Do more than that Im watchin U I folla U I keep an I on U. When I feel like it Im comin to get U again coz I no U rember all the Fun we had I still got yr blood on my Klippers

  Love Bill

  Ruth, sitting next to him on the bench where they’d met once a week all winter, looked lost. “I haven’t shown it to anyone,” she’d said, giving the letter to Christmas. “I haven’t shown it to anyone,” she repeated softly.

  Christmas turned his face towards her, forcing himself to look away from Bill’s letter. As he looked at her he felt a tremor of jealousy and rage. She’s his, he thought.

  Ruth’s eyes were those of a child. Huge green eyes, the pupils dilated with fear.

  “Why didn’t you tell anybody?”

  “Because then they’d never let me do anything at all.”

  “You’ve gotta tell your grandfather.”

  Ruth didn’t answer. She looked down at her own mutilated hand. Christmas put his arms around her, holding her close. Ruth shook him off, twisting away. She stood up, her face red.

  “Don’t ever try to touch me again,” she said in a cutting voice.

  Christmas stared at her. By now he was accustomed to that hard look, whenever he came too close to her.

  Ruth turned away and walked towards the sidewalk where Fred was waiting in uniform, next to the car that would take her home. Christmas followed her, with Bill’s letter still in his hand. He watched her walking ahead of him in her soft cashmere coat and thought again, She’s his. When she reached the car she got in without saying a word, and closed the door.

  “Keep your eyes peeled,” Christmas told Fred.

  Then he glanced at the window where Ruth was sitting like a statue carved out of ice. The engine started up and began to move slowly away. Christmas stood unmoving on the sidewalk. Ruth turned to look at him. Now that she was leaving, her eyes had lost their hardness. She rested her maimed hand against the glass, looking at him intensely, and then they disappeared into the traffic.

  Christmas was still clutching the letter that Ruth had forgotten to take back. Or had she left it so that he wouldn’t forget? A group of kids ran past him, tussling and throwing snowballs. One icy projectile landed at Christmas’ feet. He turned to look at them, his eyes still wild with the anger he felt all through his body. “Sorry, mister,” said one of the boys, frightened by that look. He might be four years younger than Christmas. But Christmas didn’t look like a kid anymore. He had suddenly turned into a man. Things weren’t the way he’d imagined they would be. And the thing that had made him grow up so quickly, that had ripped him out of adolescence, was love. Love was something that burned, burned you to ash, that made you beautiful but at the same time ugly. Love changed people, it wasn’t a fairy tale. Life was no fairy tale.

  For months he and Ruth had been seeing each other, once a week, always on Fridays. They would meet at the corner of Central Park West and Seventy-Second Street. Christmas would greet Fred and then, walking beside Ruth, they would come to their bench in the park and sit down and talk, looking at the lake from time to time. They talked about everything, joking and laughing, but there were also long moments when they were serious. And silent. As if words weren’t useful. Every time they separated, Christmas was a little bit older. Ruth got into her grandfather’s beautiful Rolls Royce; he searched through his pockets for enough change to take the BMT from Seventy-Second to the Lower East Side. She had warm coats that protected her from the stinging winter air; he hunched inside his worn wool jacket. She had leather gloves lined with soft rabbit fur; his hands were chapped from the cold. She came from a family of rich occidental Jews; he was a guappo, a wop — that’s what they called all Italians.

  But what had made him grow up quickly was not only the love he felt for Ruth but also the love he sometimes saw in her own eyes. A love that she fought against, day and night, because Bill had brought them together but at the same time separated them. Because Bill, with his brutal hands and his clippers and his violence, had made love dirty, so that now Ruth could only see the filth. Even in Christmas. She needed to keep him at a distance. The more Christmas’ love grew, the less he knew what to do with it. It stayed inside him, unexpressed but violent, and instead of making him flower it was poisoning him. His moods had become darker, more shadowy; his very eyes had deepened; his hopes, his dreams, his happy and carefree nature had become faded childhood recollections that couldn’t survive the hurricane of impending adulthood.

  As he walked home, still holding Bill’s letter tightly, Christmas was still shaking with rage. His thoughts chased themselves confusedly, unable either to take on coherent shape or to be still, like a howling mass of bodiless ghosts passing through the air without displacing it.

  He slipped quietly into the apartment. The door to Cetta’s room was closed. She was still sleeping. Christmas went into the front room and turned on the radio, keeping the volume low. “Buy a Ford, spend the difference,” cried an announcer. “And remember: Ever since 1909, you can have your Model T in the color of your choice — just as long as it’s black!” He heard the laughter of the audience, responding to Henry Ford’s famous joke, then a short jingle, and at the end, “Don’t you want a Tin Lizzie? Her prices start at just 267 dollars …”

  “Why you home?” asked Cetta. She was standing behind him, looking sleepy. “You not work today?”

  “What happened to your hair?” asked Christmas, wide-eyed.

  “You like? Latest fashion,” said Cetta, pirouetting to show him the drastically short smooth cut. Her hair was like a helmet, the sides ending at chin level; leaving her neck bare.

  “It makes you look like a guy,” said Christmas.

  “Latest style,” said Cetta, shrugging her shoulders.

  “It still makes you look like a guy.”

  “No, I’m a flapper.”

  “Flapper?”

  “Yes, flapper. What they call this style, how I look now.”

  “Why would you want to look like a man?”

  “We want be independent, free like men. Flappers, we daring.”

  “‘We’? Who’s this ‘we’?”

  “We. New women. Modern women.”

  “You look like a guy,” muttered Christmas, turning his back to her.

  “You no work today?” Cetta asked him again.

  “I don’t like puttin’ tar on roofs,” he answered.

  “Sal say they pay you ten dollar.”

  “So what? I don’t care.”

  “Christmas, ten dollar?”

  “I don’t like doin’ that starvation work that breaks your back and leaves your hands black for the rest o’ your life. I’m gonna be rich.”

  “But how?” Cetta came close to him and stroked the blond hair he’d inherited from his rapist father.

  “I dunno,” said Christmas, ducking away from her. “But I’m gonna find a way. It’s not gonna be moppin’ tar on roofs, though.”

  “Life different from what you think at your age …” Cetta gazed at him tenderly. She’d been noticing her son’s change in temperament for a while now. At the beginning he’d talked to her about the Jewish girl he’d saved. He’d told her about the sumptuous house in New Jersey, about the huge apartment n
ear Central Park, the cars, the clothes. And about how much he loved her. Cetta tried to tell him that they lived in different worlds, that things like that didn’t happen in real life; but then, at a certain point, Christmas stopped talking to her, keeping himself even more closed up. Cetta began to be afraid that her son wouldn’t learn to be content with what he had, as she had had to be, as everyone who lived on the Lower East Side had learned.

  “Is about that girl?” she asked him. “You love her?”

  “What do you know about love?” cried Christmas, his eyes blazing with rage. “What could you know? You’re a … somebody who does the work you do.”

  Cetta felt a pain in her chest where her heart should be. Her eyes clouded over with tears. “What happening to you, baby?” she said in a tiny voice.

  “I’m not a baby!” Christmas shouted as he stormed out, slamming the door.

  The air outside was thick with garlic, as it always was at lunchtime. The immigrants couldn’t break away from their origins, and the tomato sauce that bubbled in saucepans and spread its fragrance through the neighborhood was a liquid root that bound them to what they were. The same aroma coming from every one of the hundreds of dwellings. I’m not like you, thought Christmas, still possessed by the anger whirling inside him. He’d like to take it out on the whole world. “I’m an American,” he said, kicking a stone.

  “What’s eating you?” Santo asked him. He’d seen Christmas from his first floor window and had run down to the street, despite the protests of his mother who waved a large wooden spoon at him menacingly.

  Christmas pulled the letter out of his pocket and showed it to Santo. As Santo read it, his face grew paler and paler, and his pimples, in contrast, seemed even more red and shiny.

  “Well?” asked Christmas as Santo thrust the letter back at him.

  “Oh, shit,” said Santo.

  “We have to protect her,” said Christmas. “We’ve got to watch over her.”

  “Who? Us?” Santo turned a shade paler, his eyes alarmed. Instinctively, as if Christmas were carrying a dangerous virus, he took a step back.

  “Yeah, us. Who else?” Christmas went on with even more fervor.

  “And if we get the fucker, I’m gonna pull his heart out through his asshole.”

  Santo backed up another step. “That guy, he butcher his parents like a couple of pigs,” he said in a trembling voice. “And look what he did to Ruth. He’s crazy, dangerous …” He stepped back one more step. “Two guys like us, he fuck us up in one second.”

  “Aw, now you’re shittin’ y’self. Like always. Just fuck off, Santo.”

  “Christmas, wait–”

  “Get fucked," and Christmas stalked away, shoving anyone in his path. We live in a shithole, he thought, his anger growing. He looked out through that anger at the men and women of his neighborhood. They appeared to him as shorter, hairier, with such thick eyebrows that they met in a single band drawn above their eyes. Those servile eyes, those backs bent under poverty and resignation; those empty pockets that shouted out hunger, gaping like the needy mouths of their underfed children. And as he left them behind, it was as though he could still hear the usual things these losers like himself always said. He could hear them talking about the sky and the sun in the place where they’d been born, the place they’d escaped from without ever shaking it off. It still clung to their shoulders like a parasite or a curse. He heard them talking about mules, sheep, chickens and the land itself — the land they’d plowed with the sweat of their brows and enriched with the blood of their own hands. The only thing in this world worth having. And he could hear all the stuff they said about America, the amazing country that promised everything but didn’t give them a thing.

  As she pushed them aside, making a path through the street vendors selling shoestrings and suspenders and old women who wrapped paper around gigantic sausages that could feed four people, he felt the same condition of furious discomfort he’d always felt, because those people talked about America as if it was a mirage, something that existed only in stories, as if it wasn’t right there outside their houses. As if they couldn’t see it or take hold of it. As if they’d set out for it but never arrived.

  With his head down he strode through what everyone called the Bloody Angle, in Chinatown, between Dover, Mott Street, and Pell. The skin color changed, the undershirts stained with tomato sauce became collarless tunics, the smells in the street changed too — a mix of onion, opium, deep-frying oil and starch and steam from the laundries — but the looks, the expressions, were identical. It was just another ghetto. Another prison. It’s a world nobody can leave. A world with no windows or doors, thought Christmas. But me, I’m going to leave. And, still keeping his head down, as if he were leaning into the wind, he kept walking, so quickly that it was almost running, with no goal, as if he were only trying to get out of the labyrinth where all the others were lost. He kept going straight ahead, out to the edge of the poor neighborhoods.

  When he came to a stop he looked up and saw that he’d known where he was going from the beginning. On top of the stubby square red brick building there was a painted sign, faded from years of rain: “Saul Isaacson Clothing.” The hand that had never stopped gripping Bill’s menace to Ruth relaxed. He’d arrived. He knew what was best for Ruth. He knew who the only person with balls was.

  He saw Fred, smoking a cigarette and leaning against the Rolls’ shiny fender. “Hi Fred,” he said. “You left Ruth at home, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Never mind, Fred. Is the old guy inside?” Christmas lifted his chin towards the factory.

  The driver sighed, tiredly, prepared to once again reprove him for his vocabulary.

  “Yes or no, Fred? This is something important.”

  “Yes,” said Fred. “In his office. Second floor.” He turned towards a stout man stationed in front of the entrance. There were two heavy iron sliding doors, lacquered in red. “He can go in,” Fred shouted at the man, who gave a slight answering nod. “Strikes,” said Fred.

  “You’re a pal,” said Christmas, heading for the entrance.

  “Are you in any trouble, Mister Luminita?” asked Fred.

  Christmas looked back at Fred and winked. The man guarding the entrance had a billy club on his belt. Christmas lifted his chin at him in greeting, and went into the building.

  The noise was not deafening. It was like the amplified buzzing of a mechanical hive. A few men, but mostly women, were sitting next to one another, dozens of them, each one bent over a sewing machine and — like an army — making the same gestures, quick, efficient, almost in unison. Again, the hair color, the shapes of faces, the cut of the clothes were different. They were all Jews. And as with the Italians and the Chinese, Christmas saw that there wasn’t a single American among them. “But I’m going to get out,” he told himself again, and then he opened the office door without knocking.

  Saul Isaacson was sitting behind a handsome desk, a long pale cigar in his mouth and his cane lying across the shiny wooden surface. Next to it was a glass of whiskey. The old man ignored Prohibition. In the middle of the dark-carpeted room, a tiny man, bald and with a long beard that appeared to be hanging from his hooked nose, was kneeling at the feet of a tall, thin girl. His mouth was full of pins.

  “Longer than this?” he was asking skeptically.

  Saul Isaacson glanced up at Christmas. The girl, whose hair was short and sleek like Cetta’s, smiled at the visitor. She was wearing a dress that bound her small breasts almost flat, then hung straight down to the middle of her calf.

  “I need to talk to you,” said Christmas gravely.

  The old man looked at him in silence; as always, he was weighing the situation without any need of words. Finally he nodded and turned to the tailor. “Yes, Asher, make it two fingers longer.”

  “But Coco Chanel says that–” the tailor protested through his mouth full of pins
.

  “I should care what Coco Chanel says?” his boss interrupted. “What they do in Europe, I’m not interested. This is America. Two fingers, Asher.”

  The tailor unfolded the hem and repinned the girl’s skirt.

  “Who’s Coco Chanel?” asked Christmas as the tailor and the girl went out of the office.

  “A great woman. Also a great nose. Perfumes. I just gave Ruth her Number 5. Brilliant. But too European for my clients.” He stared at him for an instant. “So? I don’t think you came here to learn about Madame Chanel. Tell me I’m wrong?”

  Christmas came over to the desk, pulled out Bill’s letter, and handed it to him. The old man’s face was impenetrable as he read it. When he’d finished, he whacked the cane against the desk, stood up, opened the door and shouted “Greenie! Greenie!” He sat down again, frowning.

  After a minute Greenie, a man with a flashy green silk suit and a shirt with violet stripes that matched his suspenders came into the room. Christmas watched him. He recognized something in Greenie’s eyes that he’d seen in the streets of his Lower East Side neighborhood. A kind of glacial calm. Like a flash of something cold you might glimpse at the bottom of a pond.

  Saul Isaacson held out the letter to Greenie. Greenie read it, not moving a muscle of his face. Then he laid the letter on the desk, without any change in his expression, and waited for the old man to speak.

  He’s done it, thought Christmas admiringly. He’s an American.

  “I don’t want anything to happen to my granddaughter.”

  Greenie moved his head ever so slightly. He had pomaded hair, cut very short at the back, where his thick and muscular neck made folds.

  “And if you find the son of a bitch,” the old man continued, “bring me his head.”

  “William Hofflund,” said Christmas. “Bill.”

  Greenie didn’t bother to look at him.

  “I don’t care what it costs,” said old Isaacson.

  Again Greenie gave that almost imperceptible nod, then he turned away. His patent leather shoes squeaked.

  “I’m coming with you,” said Christmas.